Title: Galatea Unchained. Imagery of Artificial and Metamorphic Female Bodies in Contemporary Cinema

Acceptance of submissions for the Notebook section: November 1st to November 30th, 2026

Date of publication: July, 2026

Coordinators: Teresa Sorolla-Romero, Maria Medina-Vicent, Leire Azkunaga, Víctor Iturregui

In The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), when the unfortunate creature assembled by Victor Frankenstein places his hand upon that of the woman with tousled hair, a pointed chin and long eyelashes—newly created to be his companion—she screams in terror. The creature who gives the film its title, played by Elsa Lanchester, appears for barely the final few minutes of the film, yet makes clear her resistance to the physical contact for which she was conceived. The Bride! (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2026), released nine decades later, explores the subjectivity of the female corpse resurrected for the sole purpose of being the creature’s bride.

 

Becoming receptacles for the delusional and narcissistic love of their creators has long been the fate of numerous artificial women: dolls, sculptures, automata, doppelgängers or gynoids that have been thoroughly studied by authors such as Pilar Pedraza (1998), Joanna Ebenstein (2014), Julie Wosk (2015, 2024), Teresa López-Pellisa (2018, 2021), Rebecca Jones (2025) and Donna Haraway (2023). The disobedience of the artificial woman did not begin with contemporary cinema. It is already present in Pygmalion and Galatea (Pygmalion et Galathée, Méliès, 1898), The Drawing Lesson (La statue animée, Méliès, 1903) and The Mechanical Doll (Edison, 1901). However, contemporary cinema seems to pay particular attention to the evolution of metamorphic and artificial female bodies as subjects of enunciation.

 

Whilst the dolls and replicants in No es bueno que el hombre esté solo (Pedro Olea, 1973), Life size (Grandeur nature, Luis García Berlanga, 1974) and The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) represent shells that mirror the desires and obsessions of their creators or owners, Air Doll (Kûki ningyô, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2009), Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), The Trouble with Being Born (Sandra Wollner, 2020), The Artifice Girl (Franklin Ritch, 2022) and Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023) delve into the development of their protagonists’ subjectivity, self-awareness or rebelliousness.

 

Metamorphic bodies have been a feature of Western culture since classical mythology: punishments, escapes, deceptions, romantic encounters, rapes and deaths are depicted through a wide variety of bodily transformations. From different perspectives, films such as The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren, Emile Blichfeldt, 2025), Titane (Julia Ducornau, 2021), Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017), Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024), Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2017), Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018), Shelley (Ali Abbasi) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) present female metamorphosis not as a cathartic conclusion, but as a narrative development in its own right. Recent studies on body horror (Aldana Reyes, 2014, 2024), gynaehorror (Harrington, 2016), female monstrosities (Creed, 2022; Gómez Gabriel and Guardiola, 2026; Del Castillo Aira, 2024; Sánchez, 2025), and the intersections between the technological body, the cyborg, biology and biotechnology (Balsamo, 1996; Melzer, 2006; Vint, 2007; Aguilar García, 2008; Aldana Reyes, 2026) engage in dialogue with Kristeva (1982), Creed (1982) or Clover (1993) and demonstrate how these bodies function as a privileged space for reflecting on the relationships between creation, freedom, desire, control and otherness (Levy, 2009; Kakoudaki 2014; Urraco and Martínez 2019; Wosk 2015; Jones 2025). In the face of the rise of artificial intelligence and simulation technologies, these representations take on new layers of meaning linked to posthuman subjectivity and the crisis of traditional models of identity (Wajcman 2006; Kakoudaki 2014; Federici, 2022).

This special issue aims to explore cinematic narratives and imaginaries relating to artificial and metamorphic female bodies, using the following research topics as potential guiding principles:

• The representation of artificial, metamorphic or monstrous female bodies in film and television fiction.
• The subjectivity and narrative agency of these creatures.
• The rebellion of dolls, mannequins, sculptures, AIs or self-aware gynoids.
• Gothic legacies and intertexts: reinterpretations of artificial, resurrected, vampiric female creatures, doppelgängers, mad doctors, etc.
• LGBTIQ+ interpretations of artificial, metamorphic and monstrous female bodies.
• Hybridity with horror subgenres: body horror, gynaehorror, hag horror, etc.
• Body transformations driven by aesthetic ideals: from technological interventions to metamorphoses.
• Motherhood in relation to artificial or metamorphic women.
• Technofeminist genealogies, xenofeminism and the technological reappropriation of the feminine in contemporary audiovisual media.

 

References

Aguilar García, Teresa (2008). Cyborg Ontology: The Body in the New Technological Society. Gedisa Editorial.

Aldana Reyes, Xavier (2026). Body Horror. Biology, Biopower, Biotechnology. Wallflower Press.

Aldana Reyes, Xavier (2024). Contemporary Body Horror. Cambridge University Press.

Aldana Reyes, Xavier (2014). Body Gothic. Body Horror. University of Wales Press.

Balsamo, Anne Marie (1996). Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Duke University Press.

Broncano, Fernando and Hernández de la Fuente, David (2010) (eds.). From Galatea to Barbie: automata, robots and other figures in the construction of femininity. Lengua de trapo.

Clover, Carol J. (1992). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror. Princeton University Press.

Creed, Barbara (2022). The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine. New Feminist Wave. Routledge.

Creed, Barbara (1993). The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Del Castillo Aira, Itxaso (2024) Furious Women. The Monstrous Feminine in Horror Film and Television. University of the Basque Country.

Ebenstein, Joanna (2014). The Anatomical Venus. Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Federici, Silvia (2022). Beyond the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños.

Gómez Gabriel, Núria and Guardiola, Ingrid (2026). Gothic Feminism. The Cultural Creation of the Monster. H&O Editorial.

Haraway, Donna (2023). Women, Apes and Cyborgs. Alianza Editorial.

Harrington, Erin (2016). Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Routledge.

Jones, Rebecca (2025). Female Robots and AI in Science Fiction Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kakoudaki, Despina (2014). Anatomy of a Robot. Rutgers University Press.

Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.

Levy, David. (2009). Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. Harper.

López-Pellisa, Teresa (2021). “Imagined futures for possible realities: New scenarios with a focus on feminisms and reproductive technology”. Telos: Journal of Communication and Innovation, 118, 1–16.

López-Pellisa, Teresa (2018) (ed.) The Others: An Anthology of Artificial Women. Eolas Ediciones.

Melzer, Patricia (2006). Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. University of Texas Press.

Pedraza, Pilar. Machines of Love. Valdemar, 1998.

Sánchez, Sergi (2025). “The Body Without Limits: The Monstrous-Feminine in Spanish Cinema”. Comparative Cinema XIII, 25, 6–11. DOI: 10.31009/cc.2025.v13.i25.02

Urraco Solanilla, Mariano, and José Martínez Mesa (2019) (eds.). Of Slaves, Robots and Female Slaves. Los Libros de la Catarata.

Wajcman, Judith (2006). Technofeminism. Cátedra.

Wosk, Julie (2015). My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves. Rutgers University Press.

Wosk, Julie (2024). Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females. Indiana University Press.