Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is Senior Lecturer of English in the Department of English and German at the University of Córdoba (Spain) and a founding member of the Challenging Precarity network. She has recently co-edited Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2023).Miriam Fernández-Santiago is Senior Lecturer of English and Head of the English Department at the University of Granada (Spain), where she teaches courses on Literatures and Cultures in English at graduate and undergraduate levels. Her current research interests focus on contemporary literature in English, critical posthumanism, vulnerability, and disability studies.

• List of ContributorsPreface: Framing Vulnerable Embodiments as Precarity’s ProductDavid T. MitchellIntroduction: An Ecology of Embodied VulnerAbility—Literary and Filmic Representations across the GlobeCristina M. Gámez-Fernández and Miriam Fernández-SantiagoChapter 1Vulnerable Masculinity: Emotional Transcendence and the Re-Framing of the Bushidô in Takarazuka Revue’s Performance StrategyMaria GrajdianChapter 2Norma Desmond and Fedora Performing Vulnerability: Masking Age, Gendering Bodies, Transforming SelvesMarta Miquel-BaldellouChapter 3Vulnerable Motherhood: The Precarious Mother in Unlikely Angel (2005) and Captive (2015)Miriam Borham-PuyalChapter 4Vulnerable Children: Collective Resistance in Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)Andrés BuesaChapter 5Vulnerability on Contemporary Stage: Embodying Gendered Precarity in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015) and In the Pipeline (2010)Susana Nicolás RománChapter 6Poetics of Vulnerability: Stéphane Bouquet and Marie-Claire Bancquart Writing as Exploration of the Limits of Collective and Singular BodiesNicholas HauckChapter 7Vulnerable Encounters: Family Wounds, Illness, and Pain in Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (2020)Paula Barba GuerreroChapter 8Vulnerability through the Invulnerable Transhuman Lens: Ethics and Disruption of Emotional Connections and Mental Affections in Maniac (2018)Ana ChapmanChapter 9In Praise of Small Things: Vulnerable (Yet Resilient) Bodies in Madeline Bassnett’s Under the Gamma Camera (2019)Leonor María Martínez SerranoChapter 10Recognizing Vulnerabilities in Rural Spain: Political and Literary Forms of ResistanceMcKew DevittChapter 11Vulnerability, (In)Hospitable Politics, and Ethical Encounters in The Visitor (2007)Luisa María González RodríguezChapter 12Recording One’s Vulnerability: Refugees’ Experiences in the Auto-Documentaries #MyEscape (2016), Chauka Please Tells Us the Time (2017), and Midnight Traveler (2019)Beatriz Pérez Zapata and Víctor Navarro-RemesalIndex

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film is a mind-expanding voyage into vulnerability, the many-sided keyword of our times.-Dr Elisabetta Marino, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Rome, ItalyEmbodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film is a highly significant collection of essays that reassess conceptualizations of vulnerability, linking it with material aspects of the body and addressing the challenges that representing vulnerabilities posit for artists, audiences and readers.Dr. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Full Professor of English, University of Bonn, GermanyThis exciting collection contributes vitally to the emerging field of vulnerability studies. By examining diverse representations in literature and visual culture, it argues that ambiguous experiences of embodied vulnerability can be resignified to enable agency. Culturally interventionist, these essays advocate a vulnerability ethics involving care and relationality and so challenge entrenched conditions of precarity. Janet M. Wilson, Emerita Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, University of Northampton UK