Maritime Musings — Reflections from IGA 2024: Halifax

Revisitations

This is the second International Gothic Association conference I have had the honour of attending in my career. It is also the second time the conference has saved me from a creative slump that threatened my disengagement with the topics I truly love to write on: anything creepy, Gothic, or ghoulish.

This is one of my favourite conferences to attend. The Global Goths are brilliant, funny, friendly, and focused on generative collaboration in ways that can be hard to find in other organizations. The competition is stripped away, and we focus – collectively – on the future of the discipline we have devoted ourselves to and the scholarship that supports its continued development.

Unsurprising to me, my presentation was one of the least interesting contributions to the conference. Every scholar there brought their A-game, and I left the conference with more ideas than I can reasonably address in a short article. In acknowledgement of the phenomenal work brought forward by everyone during this year’s conference, I’m going to touch on some of the most memorable points raised over the course of the conference. If you attended, I would love to hear what stood out for you and which ideas have impacted the way you will approach your research going forward.

Please enjoy these highlights from my conference notes.

1. The State of Canadian Literature: Extractivist Dystopia or Nostalgic Nature Stories? 

Although I have published on the Gothic in Canadian Literature, CanLit is not a field I tend to work in unless it overlaps with one of my main research interests (19thC lit, Victorian Aesthetics, queer theory, or monsters and monstrosity). My lack of engagement with the field has little to do with the literature itself, and more to do with its marketing – at the very least the public perception of its marketing.

I’ve always felt that the understanding of CanLit outside the academy is stuck in a kind of stereotypical feedback loop in the public eye. The tropes of the “Great White North”, Burke’s sublime, and the traditionally colonial lens that is applied to the genre by high school teachers and ‘local author’ displays often make my eyes glaze over.

The stunning, thought-provoking, and seat-gripping CanLit novels I’ve read in the last few years have all been by Indigenous authors.  Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach are stunning works of fiction. The focus on the land in these novels isn’t to do with the overwhelming power of the Canadian wilderness, or the creatures that lurk in the forest. The horror stems from the brutal exploitation of Indigenous bodies and the relentless extraction of the land’s lifeforce, power, and resources to feed a greedy and cruel settler-colonial population that further threatens people and place.

This was foregrounded for me during Jason Haslam’s plenary presentation on Cape Breton mining gothic in Nova Scotia (stemming from the mid/late 1700s) and further amplified by Jonathan Newell’s brilliant presentation on Andrew Sullivan’s The Marigold – a fungal horror novel on a mycelial monster allowed to strengthen and mutate in an under-maintained luxury condo building in downtown Toronto.

 CanLit is still, it seems, connected to the land and its histories of ownership and occupation. It is, however, less concerned with its original themes of landscape as threat and is evolving to centre our anxieties about what happens to us if we continue to exploit the land. The landscape isn’t a threat to us: we are a threat to the landscape, and if we do not change our ways, we will face the consequences of our own disruptive actions.

I do wonder if contemporary CanLit will continue to evolve into a tradition of climate-centred dystopias (just as early American literature featured so many social-centred utopias). I wonder, too, if enough support can be garnered by the Powers That Be to recognize a tradition of CanLit that does not necessarily paint the country in a rosy light but instead acknowledges the messy reality of our primary economic engines.

The reality of CanLit is splattered with blood, tar, and coal dust. How much longer until we stop trying to wipe off the grease and instead utilize the stains of our history, present, and probable future?

 2. Haunted Houses and Empty Wombs

What happens to the house when there is no one home to clean it? This was a question raised during a panel the domestic entitled “Haunting, Corporeality and the Feminine.” Presentations here were fabulous led by Diane Andrews (UBC) and Amanda Cruz (Independent). I will touch on Andrews’s presentation shortly, and first, I’ll address the points raised by Cruz and the discussion on Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey.  

I have not yet read Gailey’s novel, but the idea raised in Cruz’s presentation was that the house in the narrative is not only a site of horror, it is a site of filth – and it produces much of that filth itself.

Of course, Shirley Jackson’s domestic fiction was a must-mention for a panel on domestic horror. Jackson’s horror writing proved stark contrast to the propaganda-esque happy domestic stories she was known for writing in her own time. She turned the home – the supposed site of bliss, rest, and peace – into a place capable of twisting even the kindest of intentions into a sinister, life-altering trap.

This aligns well with most of American haunted house fiction. The house is a sterile place where horror happens, and, if infected (or haunted, or possessed) can ostensibly be cleansed, cleaned, and brought back to a domestic equilibrium – a proper private sanctuary.

This narrative, however, and other narratives like it being currently published, examine the house as the horror itself. It is the house itself that is malevolent. The house that breeds disease and infection. The house that is irredeemable, filthy, sick, and violent. The house is the source of decay – or decay itself – and no amount of cleaning, cleansing, or exorcising can save it.

Where is this trend coming from, and how do we examine it? These questions remain unanswered for the time being, but we did create some hypotheses as a group:

• Why has the domestic itself become corrupted? The current consensus, at least in American fiction, is the socio-cultural response to the overturning of Roe V. Wade. In response to the ruling, voluntary sterilizations in the country went from appx. 7 patients per week to just over 12 per week – a statistically significant increase. The stronger the institutional push to cage women in the domestic (either by coercion or by force), the stronger the rebellion against it.
  
  This is where the haunted house comes in. I’ve always argued that horror is where we, as a society, hash out what we are scared of but don’t yet understand. We cannot dramatize something or laugh at it until we understand it enough to treat it plainly. When things are new and amorphous, we must approach it through the safety of indirection: we tackle our fear of the real through the fear of the monster.  
  
  Instead of quietly moving back into the domestic, women have rejected it vehemently and with gusto, choosing permanent birth control, dating strikes, and long-term delay (or a foregoing altogether) of marriage and parenthood. This has left the conservative zeitgeist reeling at the rotting remains of the “ideal” domestic space. The country’s politics could very well be a factor in how this kind of horror trope is evolving.

• There is a wealth of Gothic scholarship on monstrous femininity. Much of it has historically focused on the monstrous feminine as a sight of corrupted motherhood, violent seduction, or vengeance. The monstrous feminine hunts with sex, she births monsters, or she rejects reproduction and endangers the domestic through a violent revolt at being harmed sexually, romantically, or parentally.

In the new narratives discussed at the conference, we’re seeing a shift to female monsters who are just monsters. They hunt due to physical (not sexual) hunger; they are overcome by (blood) lust; if they do reproduce, its mycelial and asexual – it is not birth; and when they kill it is a primal pleasure of power, not sex.

This we have less of an answer for, but it is a trend worth watching to see if it continues and grows. Have we finally, fully divorced women from the default of motherhood to such an extent that we are altering the core of these stories? Is that, perhaps, why we see such a desperate plea to reconnect ‘womanhood’ to ‘motherhood’ through a faux traditionality in mainstream media? I’m looking forward to seeing this conversation revisited at the next IGA in 2026.

3. Second Thoughts on Mexican Gothic

Long-term readers of The Coroner’s Report will know that I read Garcia’s Mexican Gothic shortly after its release. These readers will also know that I didn’t love the book as much as I hoped I would. I didn’t dislike the book, nor did I think it was unsuccessful in what it set out to do. I did feel that there were some elements that did not work quite as well as I think they could have in the context of the story as a whole. I am wondering, after this conference, if I need to re-examine this initial position.

Diane Andrews’s presentation on the novel was excellent, tying Kristeva’s abject into the mycelial mother that replicates and reproduces the fungal horror in the narrative. This insight is salient, and the foregrounding of monstrous reproduction sparked a wonderful discussion in the Q&A after the panel – especially around the use of the abject for objects instead of subjects.

“How comfortable are we using this theory – which is fundamentally based on subjectivity – to refer to an object?” asked one scholar. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, because I would use the abject here too, but I am asking how comfortable we are using a theory to analyze something that the theory itself states is out of its scope.”*

 The conclusions here are twofold: one, that there is a growing need to fill the gap in horror scholarship that addresses the abject** (or something like it) when related to or caused by inanimate objects, spaces, and places; and two, that I may have to re-examine my initial response to Mexican Gothic. Although I don’t doubt its literary merit, I didn’t personally get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. I will re-read it in the fall and am planning on writing a follow up piece on it after I have digested these conversations from the IGA.

4. Gothic Hope

The concept of “Gothic hope” was raised in both the presentation and discussion of Jason Haslam’s plenary. It serves, I think, a poignant endnote to these thoughts, as it introduces a possibility for us to contemplate as time goes on and our world battles increasingly polarizing politics and volatile climate disruptions.  

“Gothic hope is resolution. It is the knowledge that the future will not save us, and the past cannot be returned to. It is the moment that we roll up our sleeves and dive into the muck, not because we think it will turn the tide, but because it is the only thing to be done when the alternative is to give up.”  

I have fallen in love with this idea of Gothic hope. Hope as practice – hope as inevitability – offers, I think, a tool that helps us move through increasingly turbulent experiences at a social and a personal level. I hope it resonates with you.

 Down in the Muck: Closing Thoughts

I have left this conference a better scholar than I was when I arrived to it. I am refreshed, connected, and once again in love with the work that I do and the importance it holds (even if that importance is not always recognized outside the academy).

I have met new colleagues and friends, connected with old ones, and gathered to remember those that have passed on. It is always a privilege to attend this conference, and I absolutely cannot wait for the next one.

Thank you, Global Goths.

See you all in Hull.

 - L

*Paraphrasing

**Abjection: “In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts.” See Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror.