Call for Papers: Starring Tom Cruise

By Sean Redmond

Call for Papers, Edited Collection: Starring Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise is one of the most successful Hollywood film stars of the last 35 years, with a cumulative worldwide box office of nearly $8 billion dollars. His star image moves across genres and forms, is product and franchise, and is also connected to ‘serious’ cinema through his work with auteurs. His private life has warranted a great deal of attention whether it be through his connection to scientology, his numerous failed marriages, or the ‘queer space’ he is placed within through fan work and gossip mongering. Cruise is an action hero and romantic lead and yet finds himself in homoerotic and homosocial relationships which unsettle and undermine these heterosexual scripts.  Cruise is also an authentic star, who does his own stunts even as his aging body wanes, and who brings this embodied verisimilitude to the roles he takes on. When a film stars Tom Cruise a series of unruly forces are set in train, which this edited collection intends to assess.

Starring Tom Cruise is looking for chapters of 6,000 to 8,000 words in length to consider the following themes and issues:

• The Cruise star vehicle
• The Cruise franchise
• Gender and sexuality
• Cruise and masculinity
• Queer space
• Desire
• The Cruise performance
• Cruise against ‘type’
• Fandom
• The Cruise monomyth
• American exceptionalism
• Age and masculinity
• Whiteness
• Marketing and promotions
• Specific film textual analysis
• Religion and faith
• Postmodern Cruise
• Cruise and parody
• The Cruise confession
• The Cruise interview
• The Cruise Marriage
• Authenticity and simulacra
• Hollywood and Cruise
• Star, genre, authorship
• Action
• Style
• Transnational Cruise

The edited collection will contain 12-16 chapters, and a publisher has shown provisional interest in publishing the volume.

In the first instance could you forward 150-200 word abstracts plus short bibliography to Sean Redmond for Friday 3^rd August 2018: s.redmond@deakin.edu.au

Subsequent writing deadlines will be for 2019.