Mutation in Media and Popular Culture
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The concept of mutation has transcended its scientific origins to become a powerful metaphor in media and popular culture for transformation, adaptation, and fear of the unknown. From the genetic mutations of Marvel’s X-Men superheroes to the biological horror of the infected in The Last of Us, representations of mutation in popular culture often serve as a means to challenge our understanding of the boundaries of the human condition and what it means to be ‘human’. Mutation is of course not limited to its manifestation in media as embodied physical or biological change and the ethical implications of such experimentation; it can also signify shifts in our understandings of reality and identity, technology and society. In all of these contexts, mutation is the catalyst for change. For instance, the recent evolution of our engagement with generative artificial intelligence, immersive virtual and augmented realities, digital personas and afterlives, and the future of cybernetic implants asks where the ‘original’ and the ‘mutated’ hybrid-self begins and ends. While some may consider such changes to be an inevitable evolution of the self, others may argue they are a monstrous mutation, and with the complexity of these developments our very understanding of personhood is itself brought into question. Likewise, anxieties about viral mutation and ecological collapse in our post-pandemic era of climate crisis speak to the ongoing relevance of the concept of mutation for the way we seek to understand ourselves and our relationship with the world. The smallest of mutations can have profound consequences for ourselves, for our societies, and for all life on our planet. The articles in this issue explore ‘mutation’ across the diversity of its representation in media and popular culture, exploring the ways in which it too has ‘mutated’ over the years in multifaceted ways across many and varied modalities. Many of the articles foreground the importance of the visual in thematising and exploring mutation and its related entanglements with – and challenges to – seemingly stable, ‘whole’ and often binary categories such as gender, sexuality, identity, the body, and particularly the boundaries of the human as set against its ecological and technological contexts. Of particular interest are the ways in which mutation as a concept has the power to transform traditional expectations of popular media and culture by transcending artistic boundaries or thematic expectations of certain genres, forms, styles, and modalities. Our feature article, Megan Catherine Rose and Patrick W. Galbraith’s “Mutating Hyperfemininity in Bishōjo Art: On Sugary Symbiote” examines a form of mutation that places the visual front and centre in its political mission and meaning. This article examines “the queer and transformative potential” of mutation in the context of bishōjo, which are manga or anime-style “cute girls”. Arguing that this art form has traditionally been interpreted as objects produced by and for men, Rose and Galbraith explore the reinterpretation – or mutation – of bishōjo by women and gender-diverse people, taking as their case study the work of Sugary Symbiote, a Black, disabled, and sapphic artist in the United States. Sugary Symbiote’s illustrations, several examples of which are generously reproduced within this article, evidence a broad movement by global fans of bishōjo to “reclaim and reimagine Japanese popular culture”, but more particularly reconfigure this through a Black queer lens, underscoring a central interplay between the “fem(me)” and “hyperfemininity” that quickly breaks its heteronormative and patriarchal bounds to become monstrous – and monstrously powerful in the defiance these ‘mutations’ afford. While Sugary Symbiote enacts defiant monstrousness and mutation in the digital world, Huw Nolan and Jo Coghlan's article “Mutating a Better Man: Robbie Williams, Simian Semiotics, Spectacle, and the Posthuman Celebrity” takes this theme of digital transformation into the realm of contemporary film practices. Nolan and Coghlan argue that Michael Gracey's biographical film Better Man (2024), in which Robbie Williams is represented not in his human form, but rather as a CGI primate, can be read through a posthumanist lens that blurs the boundaries of human identity, oscillating “between authentic human subjectivity and hyperreal digital construct”. Williams, in this article, is interpreted as a “technologically mediated spectacle” which speaks to the “epistemological instability” inherent in contemporary celebrity culture and its dehumanising reliance on constant mutation and transformation. In particular, Nolan and Coghlan argue, the film can be read as “a critical commentary on the increasingly blurred boundaries between human authenticity and technological artifice in our hypermediated era, underscoring celebrity as an ever-evolving, culturally constructed mutation.” Continuing the theme of both technological mutation and the aesthetic choices that represent mutation in film and television, Angelique Nairn’s article “Crafting the Grotesque: Mutation and Imagination in Face Off” examines the reality television series Face Off (2011–2018), in which contestants compete in the design, artistry, and application of special effects (SFX) makeup. The article posits that contestants and – by extension – audiences equate notions of transformation and mutation with deviance, horror, and the grotesque, monstrous, and abject. At the same time as it critiques the implications of such associations and representations of mutation, this article explores the creative freedoms bound up in concepts of monstrosity and biological transformation. All of the previously mentioned articles draw on ideas of mutation as linked to concepts of the body and challenges to its stability as a form or construct, and this theme forms the backbone of Padraic Killeen’s article “Ecology, Materialism, and Transfiguration: An Autopsy of ‘Body Noir’ in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future”. Exploring the body horror of this 2022 film, Killeen identifies a “body noir” aesthetic guiding the representations of physiological mutations in the film’s post-apocalyptic environment. Killeen describes Cronenberg’s film as a “narrative of transhumanist and evolutionary mutation”, linking these ideas to “post-humanist paranoia, ecological horror, and noir aesthetics”. Such ecological mutations, linked with eco-horror and eco-Gothic, are central to Rhiannon Rumble’s article “Mycological Mutations: What We Can Learn from Mutant Fungi and Fungal Mutants”. This article takes as its focus the proliferation of representations of fungi in popular culture, focussing on fungal mutations in The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) and Cold Storage (2019). It argues that these fictions, in which fungi have mutated to threaten, transform, and take over human bodies, “raise questions about our intersection with, and response to, the nonhuman world”, and particularly its stability as a separate category from the mycological and ecological. Such fungal mutations are easily suggestive of similarly threatening viral mutations. Bruna Emanuela Vaz Quincó and André Vasques Vital’s article “Law, Viral Mutations, and Spectral Tropicality in Tender Is the Flesh (2017) by Agustina Bazterrica” examines Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh (2017), which imagines human society impacted upon by the emergence of a lethal, infectious agent that contaminates animals. It argues that this virus, which is resistant to human attempts to manage it through vaccines and medicines, represents “spectral tropicality”. It analyses the novel’s representations and implied critique of the breakdown of human rights – particularly those of marginalised people – in the face of the horror generated by pandemic mutations that fundamentally challenge established ways of life. Viral mutation, ecological threat, and the porosity and mutability of human bodies also underscore our final article, Rachael Robertson’s “‘In Death, Sacrifice’: The Gothic Mutation of the Blight in the Dragon Age Videogames”. In this fantasy role-playing videogame series, argues Robertson, the Blight is an eco-Gothic threat that infects both land and people. Examining the games’ multiple representations of bodily mutation and category collapse, from the “darkspawn” to the Broodmother and antagonist Ghilan’nain, which are both grotesque, “monstrously mutated” representations of the maternal, Robertson explores how questions of identity, femininity, monstrosity, and the abject are entangled in these games to position the Grey Wardens, who are under threat from the Blight, as in an inexorable state of mutation towards monstrosity. Read together, these articles underscore the eerie relevance of mutation for our world today, whether in its challenges to the stability of identity and bodily autonomy in the face of rapid digital, medical, and technological advancements, or in the viral and fungal mutations of ecological decay and the human collision with the non-human world. Thus what is portrayed as a ‘mutation’ in contemporary popular culture and its media remains a fascinating area for further scholarly pursuits, one that we hope will continue to ‘mutate’ across disciplines well into the future. The editors of this issue would like to sincerely thank M/C Journal, the contributors, and our peer reviewers, for all the time and energy they gave to support the production of this issue.
Source: M/C Journal
DOI: 10.5204/mcj.3182
Institutions: Murdoch University, Macquarie University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411442528