emerald PUBLISHING Gender and Contemporary Horror in Comics, Games and Transmedia (Emerald Studies in Popular Culture and Gender)

Contemporary popular media has been marked by its startling ability to morph into a wide variety of formats, fed by the ongoing revolution in digital technology. Despite these significant changes, the horror genre has retained its attraction for audiences, and the representation of gender has been crucial to that appeal. Gender and Contemporary Horror in Comic, Games and Transmedia examines the impact of media convergence on the horror genre, focusing on comic books and graphic novels, video games, audio broadcasts, and transmedia adaptations, as well as considering the increasingly proactive role of audiences in making media themselves. A wide range of scholars consider the effect of this new hybridity on established debates regarding the role of gender in the horror genre, offering vital new interpretations of identity and representation.This book is an illuminating, exciting read for academics and students interested in the effect of changing media, and an evolving cultural landscape, on the established debates surrounding gender in the horror genre. The responses of the authors reflect both the possible limitations and the groundbreaking possibilities of this new era in horror. Review This book brings together 15 essays on gender and horror in comics, games, and transmedia. Film, English, and other researchers from Europe, North America, Brazil, and South Africa explore horror in comics and graphic novels, particularly female stereotypes in Carrie and the "Dark Phoenix Saga" franchise and anxieties about gendered bodies and nuclear war or environmental damage in Black Hole and Uzumaki; horror in video games, including female protagonists in Tomb Raider and The Last of Us, Alien Isolation and moving beyond binaries of gender identification in gaming, masculinity in the Silent Hill franchise, and male stereotypes in survival horror games; transmedia examples of gender and horror, including gender in adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, representations of the author Mary Shelley, Audition in the context of femininity and Japanese culture, and masculinity, hierarchy, and American exceptionalism in the narrative worlds of the World War Z franchise; audiences, fandom, and reception in terms of the Alien film franchise, female participation and gender identities at the San Sebastian Horror and Film Festival, and female fan-made slash fiction and art created in response to the Hannibal franchise; and audio examples, particularly queer masculinities in the Welcome to Night Vale podcasts and disembodied voices and sonic immersion in contemporary horror audio. -- Annotation ©2019 ― (protoview.com) About the Author Robert Shail is Professor of Film and Director of Research in the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is widely published on postwar British cinema, masculinity, and stardom.Samantha Holland is Senior Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her research interests are broadly gender, leisure, subcultures and popular culture, utilising feminist, ethnographic qualitative methods, and including fashion history, vintage and second-hand, home and daily routines, and embodiment and body practices.Steven Gerrard is Reader in Film at the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts, Leeds Beckett University, UK. A firm fan of all things low culture, Steven has written two monographs entitled The Carry On Films and The Modern British Horror Film.