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 Contributors

Preface: Framing Vulnerable Embodiments as Precarity’s Product

David T. Mitchell

Introduction: An Ecology of Embodied VulnerAbility—Literary and Filmic Representations across the GlobeCristina M. Gámez-Fernández and Miriam Fernández-Santiago

Chapter 1

Vulnerable Masculinity: Emotional Transcendence and the Re-Framing of the Bushidô in Takarazuka Revue’s Performance Strategy

Maria Grajdian

Chapter 2

Norma Desmond and Fedora Performing Vulnerability: Masking Age, Gendering Bodies, Transforming Selves

Marta Miquel-Baldellou

Chapter 3

Vulnerable Motherhood: The Precarious Mother in Unlikely Angel (2005) and Captive (2015)

Miriam Borham-Puyal

Chapter 4

Vulnerable Children: Collective Resistance in Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)

Andrés Buesa

Chapter 5

Vulnerability on Contemporary Stage: Embodying Gendered Precarity in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015) and In the Pipeline (2010)

Susana Nicolás Román

Chapter 6

Poetics of Vulnerability: Stéphane Bouquet and Marie-Claire Bancquart Writing as Exploration of the Limits of Collective and Singular Bodies

Nicholas Hauck

Chapter 7

Vulnerable Encounters: Family Wounds, Illness, and Pain in Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (2020)

Paula Barba Guerrero

Chapter 8

Vulnerability through the Invulnerable Transhuman Lens: Ethics and Disruption of Emotional Connections and Mental Affections in Maniac (2018)

Ana Chapman

Chapter 9

In Praise of Small Things: Vulnerable (Yet Resilient) Bodies in Madeline Bassnett’s Under the Gamma Camera (2019)

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Chapter 10

Recognizing Vulnerabilities in Rural Spain: Political and Literary Forms of Resistance

McKew Devitt

Chapter 11

Vulnerability, (In)Hospitable Politics, and Ethical Encounters in The Visitor (2007)

Luisa María González Rodríguez

Chapter 12

Recording 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-Remesal

Index