‘“To water a mandrake”: Corrupted conversions of the body of Christ in the necrobotany of John Webster’s The White Devil’ By Aiden Tait

From the profane transformation of the body of the hanged man at the gallows into the body of the crucified Christ to the tainting of the Eucharist in the consumption of the body and blood of the dead, this paper intends to explore how examining the use of necrobotanicals through this lens of corrupted conversion offers a new perspective into Webster’s complex relationship with religious rituals in The White Devil […]

“Failed legacies of feeling: Racial melancholia and fragile subjects of queer intimacy in Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night (2016)” By Amanda Wan

In Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, queerness circulates through the aesthetics of failure and fragility within the Cho family, and the losses that they desire and grieve as racialized and classed subjects. Racial melancholia, as formulated by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, circulates between members of the family as traces of emotional maps […]

“When Tongues Replace Swords: Somatic Transgression and Its Shifting Performance in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy” By Ana Maria Fernandez

The early modern tragic stage added to its cast of players the unruly member of the tongue. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy all dramatize the tongue’s power to transgress the boundaries of the body and interfere with bodily integrity […]