Bodies in Transformation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Fictional Representations of the Body on Screen

Creative media products have always presented a valuable insight into the cultural attitudes and anxieties of their times. This is particularly true of contemporary screen-based media forms such as film and television. This one-day symposium at the University of Hertfordshire aims to explore the ways in which screen culture contributes to ongoing debates on our changing relationship with our bodies and what it means to be human in our so called (post)postmodern world. While recent advancements in genetics, robotics and cybernetics offer a rich field of exploration, issues of the body are not just reduced to human/machine relations; they also reflect increasingly blurred boundaries between gender, race, sexuality and other forms of subjectivity.


The symposium features three key areas in relation:

Transforming Gender(s), Violent Transformations and Moving Beyond Bodies.