This panel considers the Gothic’s persistent engagement with concepts of reproduction and human embodiment when confronted with technological innovations that threaten and transgress the ontological boundaries between the self and the collective, the human and the nonhuman. Gothic fiction’s preoccupation with mirror images, resemblances, and fiction itself marks the genre as a particularly meta mode of fiction-making. The integration of technology into modernity has generated other mediums of Gothic representation that require critical attention. This panel discusses how the Gothic mediates human-technology interactions by drawing attention to its own textual and cinematic production as well as the dominant sociocultural ideologies that underpin them.

Early gothic novels are steeped in familial metaphors—dead mothers and missing fathers are common elements amidst the political upheaval of the late 18^th century. Likewise, monsters haunt Gothic narratives, exploring innate fears of doubleness and self-fragmentation against Enlightenment philosophy that posits humans as composed of mechanical parts. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) envisions an unnatural creature of bits and pieces—born through technological intervention and scientific hubris. Each generation finds its version of Frankenstein as the technologically created Other repeatedly threatens to cross the boundary between human and non-human. The presentations in this panel examine how Gothic fiction and film have interrogated our instinctive fears about technological development, biological essentialism, and the nature of labour under capitalism.

This panel finds its theoretical framework in studies such as Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), Anne Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body (1996), Rosi Braidotti’s Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Being (2002). Works that provide a technological perspective to the Gothic, such as Fred Botting’s Limits of Horror (2008), David J. Jone’s Gothic Machine (2011), Peter Otto’s Multiplying Worlds (2011), and Lester D. Friedman’s Monstrous Progeny (2016), further underpin our discussion. More recent publications, such as Bridget M. Marshall’s Industrial Gothic (2021) and Capitalism and the Gothic (forthcoming 2025), exemplify growing attentiveness to the intersection between Gothic fiction and its depiction of labour—a consistent thread interlinking the 15-minute papers of this panel.

Amory Zhao begins with “Techno-Vampirism and the Cinematic Monster”, tracing how the vampire figure moves through different mediums of representation, transfiguring from the text to the silver screen. In 1819, the misattribution of John William Polidori’s The Vampyre foreshadows growing anxieties about authorial disembodiment, print reproduction, and textual authenticity that would come to underpin vampire narratives in the later centuries. Tracing the interactions between Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Robert Eggers’ most recent adaption Nosferatu (2024), Zhao argues that the Gothic mediates contemporaneous fears about the impact of technology upon human identity, authorship and creative labour in the digital age where machines threaten to subsume the human author. This paper sets the stage for the panel’s broader discussion of (re)production as a site of Gothic anxiety.

Dr. Henna Messina follows with “Technologies of the Bifurcated Self: Gothic Doubling in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Severance”. This paper links Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella with the recent Apple TV show, taking up the question of labour and capital more explicitly. Severance imagines a world where the human subject has the choice to ‘sever’ themselves into two to satisfy the demands of modern work. Dr. Messina links the split self in Severance with the bifurcated protagonist(s) of The Strange Case, interrogating how the moral dilemma of the Gothic double in the 19^th century has transformed into questions about self-compartmentalization under the pressure of labour in a capitalist society. This interrogation of human and social identity paves the way for the panel’s final discussion on biological reproduction and genetic inheritance.

Dr. Amanda Paxton will conclude with “Mitochondrial Eves and Male Superfluity in Gothic Fiction”, which situates Gothic depictions of female-centered reproduction alongside scientific discoveries destabilizing traditional ideas of patrilineal inheritance. Paxton focuses on Hideaki Sena’s Parasite Eve (1995), a science horror novel in which the titular monster achieves self-proliferation through genetic fusion. This process, like the real-life technique of transgenesis, parallels social anxieties surrounding the 1987 Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis that put forth the possibility of a matrilineal path of human descent. Paxton concludes by historicising Sena’s novel within a longer Gothic tradition that interacts with and reacts to scientific discoveries concerning reproduction in the natural world.

Collectively, these papers identify and challenge the Gothic’s preoccupation with representation, simulation, and reproduction across cultural mediums. Addressing the 2026 Presidential Theme of Family Resemblances, this panel examines how technologies and scientific discoveries continue to disrupt notions of reality, embodiment, and human lineage.