Haunted Bodies, Uncanny Medicine: The <em>Medical Gothic </em>across Media and Genres

Touzos, Amina Antonia; Touzos, Amina Antonia

The Gothic intensively deals with the unknown, the unspeakable, and the tabooed. It branches into different genres and media, ranging from early American literature to modern approaches in TV shows and digital games. Its primary focus on the body and mind, deviating between sanity and madness, ableism and disability, uncanny and the familiar, in turn, questions how bodies (and minds) continue to be perceived as stable entities in society while their unraveling is often marked as anomalous, and horrific even. As the history of medicine and contemporary medical experiences illustrate, medicine, too, is deeply wrought with experiences of uncanny bodies and minds. Here, power relations, epistemic uncertainty, vulnerability, and taboos evoke feelings of existential threat, thus challenging conceptions of normativity. Perspectives from the Gothic on the dark sides of medicine consequently offer a valuable framework for addressing phenomena of precarious medical experiences. In this regard, the liminal spaces of a distinct Medical Gothic, as an intersection between Gothic and medicine, have been addressed by a plethora of literary, visual, and digital texts throughout the centuries, from both within medical practice as well as from the arts and humanities. Reading texts through a Medical Gothic lens thus involves examining Gothic themes in both medical content and contexts and vice versa, which encompasses, among other explorations, family resemblances between literary analyses of 19th-century pandemic texts (Höll 2021), transplantation studies in literature and film (Wasson 2020), or the use of contemporary medical discourses in Wilkie Collins’ Gothic novels (Talairach-Vielmas 2009).

At the same time, Medical Gothic as a distinct term is relatively new and has, thus far, not been discussed comprehensively as an emerging field of study. For this MLA special session, we propose building on existing scholarship in Gothic studies while addressing new advances in the field through Medical Gothic specifically.

Dr. Patricia A. Gwozdz examines the Medical Gothic in film through the body horror genre, focusing on David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022). The film envisions a dystopian future where surgery becomes performance art, exploring themes of accelerated evolution, bodily transformation, and the merging of medicine with artistic expression. Through the character of Saul Tenser, Gwozdz analyzes how subversive medical practices reflect anxieties around addiction, eroticism, and the commodification of the body. Her study positions body horror as a critique of institutional medicine, highlighting its role in challenging dominant structures and reimagining science as both rebellion and art.

Dr. Laura Kremmel examines Charlotte Dacre’s Gothic engagement with Romantic-era medical treatments across works such as Zofloya, Hours of Solitude, The Fatal Secret, and Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer. Building on scholarship linking Dacre to contemporary concepts like nymphomania and mental illness, Kremmel argues that Dacre’s use of medicalized body horror, sexual transgression, and physical suffering reflects broader anxieties about health, embodiment, and the unstable medical market. By exploring how gothic fiction intersects with popular medical discourse, this study highlights the genre’s potential to illuminate evolving ideas of illness, individualism, and bodily experience.

Amina A. Touzos, M.Ed., explores how video games function as performative texts and digital spaces engaging with Medical Gothic themes. Drawing on Krzywinska’s Gothic “coordinates,” Touzos analyzes how games represent and challenge taboos around illness, mental health, disability, and death through narrative, visuals, mechanics, and player interaction. Her study highlights the unique potential of video games to actualize Gothic concerns through embodied play, examining titles such as Baldur’s Gate 3, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and The Last of Us: Part I to trace representations of psychosis, the decaying female body, and contagion in contemporary gaming.

Together, these three papers will shed light on potential family resemblances of intersectional Medical Gothic (lived) experiences throughout different genres and media, hereby revealing how representations and performances of the body, illness, and medical practice both reflect and challenge cultural anxieties, power structures, and evolving notions of health across literature, film, and video games.

132 Haunted Bodies, Uncanny Medicine: The Medical Gothic across Media and Genres: Calls for Papers