In “Flourishing Horror: Gender, Capitalism, and the Body in Fool Night,” Cynthia Wing Nga Lam examines Fool Night: an ecological dystopian manga where humans voluntarily undergo “transfloration” — a state-sanctioned process of turning into plants to produce oxygen. Transfloration is encouraged, legally protected, and framed as a personal choice, yet those who undergo it are often the most economically vulnerable, sacrificing themselves for the survival of society. This paper asserts that Fool Night reconfigures body horror by rendering bodily sacrifice not as aberration, but as an expected, even noble, act. While transfloration recalls feminist critiques of gendered labour and reproductive sacrifice, Fool Night departs from conventional body horror by making transformed bodies socially necessary. Unlike other classic body horror manga, where bodily change marks exclusion, transflored bodies coexist with those who find them unsettling. Lam argues that horror lies not in bodily transformation itself, but in the quiet assimilation of bodies into a capitalist ecosystem that demands their dissolution for collective survival.

“Mad in a Mad World: Examining Madness in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy,” by Heather O’Leary begins from Lee Zimmerman’s proposal that we think of climate change as a cultural trauma. Along with Zimmerman, Amitav Ghosh asserts that we suffer from a “great derangement” with regards to climate change, while Timothy Morton refers to climate change as a “hyperobject,” something so large we cannot quite grasp it, even as it brings our own destruction. In this paper, O’Leary asks: what does it mean to face trauma on this scale? Using Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series as an example, this paper investigates climate fiction that dismantles literary norms to break through climate denialism. The first book of VanderMeer’s series, Annihilation, depicts many characters becoming doubled after they are presumed dead or otherwise transformed in a mysterious Area X. In the uncanny human eye of a passing dolphin or an unidentifiable moaning creature, characters and the reader are left unsettled. VanderMeer invites readers to accept this unsettlement as a way through the trauma response to a devastated environment and a means to claim a radical future.

Danielle K. Nelson’s paper “Todd Haynes’ Safe and the Metaphor of Illness” examines how the illness narrative in Haynes’ film emerges as an invisible disability whose flare-ups ebb and flow with the genre conventions of a slow burn psychological thriller. Set in a wealthy suburban Los Angeles in the late 80s, Safe tells the story of Carol White: a bored, sad homemaker with a breathy voice and a mysterious illness. Even as her illness is hypervisible through physical symptoms that mark her as unwell, her malady is dismissed by others, particularly men and healthcare professionals who simultaneously erase and heighten her worsening health. By collapsing the terms of her symptoms as both literal – she really is sick – alongside the metaphorical – the ills of capitalism, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy – the film’s depiction of illness proliferates meaning by sliding in and out of metaphor as the viewer scrambles to make sense of the porous boundaries of her sickness. Though there are plausible and literal explanations for what is making Carol sick that speak to the disabling impact of environmental illness and the difficulty of diagnosing chronic autoimmune conditions, Hayne infuses doubt at every turn that makes these accounts seem illogical and insufficient. By drawing on critical disability studies, feminist and queer criticisms, film studies, and cultural studies, this talk questions what metaphor does for Haynes by tracing how metaphor blurs the edges of the duality between health and unwellness.