Current PhD Student

Laura Wildgoose

Thesis Title:

The ‘Good Medicine’ of Horror: Othered Bodies in Contemporary North American Indigenous Fiction

Supervisor:

Professor David Stirrup

Description:

My project is an intersectional comparison of the portrayals of disability and the othered body by North American Indigenous authors published in short stories within Never Whistle at Night (2023), Taaqtumi: An Anthology or Arctic Horror Stories (2019), and in Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare (2023). And in novels and novellas such as The Whistler by Nick Medina (2025) and Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris (2023). I will be comparing these authors using close analysis in conjunction with broader historical and political considerations. Many of these authors from Turtle Island also lie within other intersecting minorities, such as queer and non-male authors. Thus, my work connects disability and Indigeneity, as well as considering multiple identity categories and the ways these can further ‘other’ bodies.

I will be asking: how does the body, in both its internal sensory perceptions and in external bodily difference, alter the lives of those who are Indigenous or disabled? How can we interpret mental, political and emotional states from how the body reacts and transforms? How does the body respond to American and Canadian colonial hegemonies? What purpose does the disintegrating or ‘imperfect’ body serve in minority literature, and is it merely continuing the problematic trope of using disabled or Indigenous characters merely as social metaphor? Why does the presentation of physically disabled people occur frequently in contemporary texts by other marginalised groups (here Indigenous?) And how does the increasing use of the contemporary horror genre intersect with perceptions of the marginalised body?

Publications:

‘Nez Perce Bodies, Language, and Ecology in Crisis: Beth Piatote’s ‘Falling Crows’, in The Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities, 9 (2024), pp. 22-38.