We announce a call for papers for the Notebook section for volume 43 under the title Subjectivity, Vulnerability and Care in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Acceptance of submissions: July 1st to September 1st, 2026

Date of publication: January 2027

Coordinators: Jéssica Izquierdo Castillo and Lledó Morales Roig

 

A series of new voices emerged in Spanish cinema during the first decade of the 21st century, bringing about notable shifts in how bodies are understood as signifiers. From their debut films, Isaki Lacuesta, Mar Coll, Carla Subirana and Albert Serra began to explicitly explore care, companionship, mourning and the re-signification of non-normative bodies.

The issue of the relationship between the body and care has unfolded in parallel within theoretical and political fields across a wide range of contexts: from a reformulation of the “technologies of the self”in the approach to self-care (Groys, 2022) to the proposal to dissolve normative labels (B. Preciado, 2022), a reflection has emerged on how to accompany, think about, film, write about and respect the complexity of the body. The movement in cinema runs in parallel, particularly since the emergence of so-called “metamodern cinema”(Rodríguez Serrano, 2025), with its particular focus on the depiction of emotions. Works as diverse as The Room Next Door (La habitación de al lado, Pedro Almodóvar, 2024), Los destellos (Pilar Palomero, 2024), La consagración de la primavera (Fernando Franco, 2022) and Los pequeños amores (Celia Rico, 2024) point to the complexity—not always free from controversy and rough edges—with which the debate is currently being approached. From an academic perspective, it is reasonable to assume that questions concerning the biopolitics of digital images (Checa Bañuz, 2018) are becoming increasingly prevalent each year, encouraging the integration of methodologies, efforts, and approaches across seemingly distant disciplines such as gender studies (Herrera Sánchez, Pujol Ozonas, 2025), iconography (Pintor Iranzo, 2025), film sociology (Rey-Galloso, Vivero-Saavedra, 2024), and psychoanalysis (González Hortigüela, García Catalán, 2026). The question of bodies moves us away from methodological and biological essentialism, re-centring us within an unavoidable social debate.

The debate surrounding vulnerability also takes place within the industry itself. The meta-reflections found in works such as Selftape (Joana and Mireia Vilapuig, Filmin, 2023) where the actresses reflect on the precarious nature of acting, or Mira lo que has hecho (Berto Romero, Movistar+, 2018–2020) where Romero grapples with the uncertainty surrounding his fatherhood whilst filming the series in an exercise in self-fiction, reflect a concern for the context beyond the text. The film and television industry has been—and still is—a place of limited safeguards. Its structures exhibit weaknesses regarding issues such as concentration—now centred on streaming platforms—precariousness, lack of resources and technological advances. In recent years, artificial intelligence has posed a threat to screenwriters, actors and actresses on set (Willis, 2023; Degli-Esposti, 2023) as well as voice actors in dubbing (Robles, 2024). The production bubble is generating content saturation, the algorithms of a globalised system are homogenising the content on offer, and media industries are becoming increasingly concentrated (Izquierdo-Castillo, Miguel-De-Bustos, Adanero-García, 2024). The increase in production following Covid-19 for subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms has also, paradoxically, contributed to precariousness, as in a context of high labour activity, workers’ conditions have worsened, thereby increasing their vulnerability (Fontaine, 2024). In this context, women are disproportionately affected by gender inequality within the industry, including the pay gap, underrepresentation in leadership positions, the resistance of “velvet ghettos”, and the difficulty of accessing large budgets or achieving work-life balance.

Along these lines, our call for papers is intended as an invitation to consider how contemporary Spanish cinema and audiovisual works address questions of vulnerability, care, and the body in relation to social reality. In light of the role of ageism and aporaphobia in the hate speech of various populist movements and the growing generational and class divide, we invite submissions discussing films, schools, styles and modes of body representation, in all their social and significant complexity. We also invite contributions that explore the layers of vulnerability affecting the structures of the audiovisual industry and the groups involved, taking into account factors such as gender, age, race, sexual orientation, origin and background. Reflection on the following themes, or any others that fall within this discursive framework, is therefore invited:

• Ageism, the generation gap and legacy in the uses of the body
• Illness and caring
• Memories of the body and (re)constructions of identity
• Relationships between narrative and non-normative bodies
• Childcare and new family and social models
• The effects of neoliberalism on bodies in front of and behind the screen
• Biopolitics of care
• Care policies on film sets
• Support networks and peripheral modes of production
• Gender gap, ageism and body discrimination in the film industry

References

Preciado, P. (2022). Dysphoria Mundi. Barcelona: Anagrama.

Checa Bañuz, C. (2018). No Trespassing. De los cuerpos del cine a la conspiración contemporánea. Santander: Shangrila.

Fontaine, G. (2024). Writers and directors of filmand TV/SVOD fiction 2015-2022 figures. European Audiovisual Observatory. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/film-and-tv-fiction-writers-and-directors-2015-2022-figures-feb-2024-g/1680aeb768

González Hortigüela, T.; García Catalán, S. (2026). Los fantasmas luminosos de 'La habitación de al lado' (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024). Fotocinema: Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía, 32, 195–220.

Groys, B. (2022). Filosofía del cuidado. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.

Herrera Sánchez, S.; Pujol Ozonas, C. (2025). Salida de emergencia. Feminismos y subversiones en la comunicación y la cultura. Barcelona: UOC.

Izquierdo-Castillo, J.; Miguel-de-Bustos, J.C.; Adanero-García, R. (2024). Media and Internet Concentration in Spain, 2019–2022. Global Media and Internet Concentration Project. https://doi.org/10.22215/gmicp/2024.12.724.

Pintor Iranzo, I. (2025). A oscuras y en celada. Los cuidados y la escucha del cuerpo enfermo. En C. Martínez López; I. Saz Tejero y O. Tarravilla Baquero (Eds.), Representación y performatividad de la enfermedad como síntoma de la vida contemporánea (pp. 102-188). Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.

Rey-Galloso, R.; Vivero-Saavedra, C. (2024). Las residencias en el cine. Imaginarios y representaciones cinematográficas de la vida en residencias para personas mayores. Arbor, 200(812), 1–13.

Robles, D. (2024, 21 de julio). La inteligencia artificial (IA) hunde a los actores de doblaje: contratos abusivos, sueldos precarios y un vacío legal. El confidencial. Retrieved from https://www.elconfidencial.com/television/series-tv/2024-07-21/doblaje-inteligencia-artificial-voces-robadas-sueldos-abusivos_3927917/

Rodríguez Serrano, A. (2025). Hacia un cine metamoderno: Elementos críticos para el debate entre metamodernismo y escritura fílmica. L’ Atalante. Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos, 165–179. https://doi.org/10.63700/1179

Willis, H. (2023, 16 de agosto). Cómo la IA está cambiando el negocio del cine y la televisión. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/como-la-ia-esta-cambiando-el-negocio-del-cine-y-la-television-211562

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L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos accepts submissions of unpublished essays on topics related to film theory and/or praxis that stand out for their innovative nature. Articles should focus on approaches to the cinematographic fact made preferably from the perspectives of historiography or audiovisual analysis. Those texts that approach novel objects of study with rigorous and well-evidenced methodologies will be appreciated. Articles that take as their main reference the processes of signification through the analysis of the audiovisual form and/or the narratological elements specific to our field, focusing on methodologies specifically related to the treatment of the image will be favoured in the selection process. Although we accept works with other methodologies that approach the filmic fact from transversal perspectives (Cultural Studies, philological approaches, etc.) we consider that the main interest of the journal is located on the studies that take the specifically cinematographic expressive tools as the main elements of discourse. Likewise, texts that are not limited to describing, enumerating or summarizing details of the plot, but that rigorously apply a specific and well-evidenced analysis methodology, reaching particular and novel results, will be given priority.

Below are a few aspects to keep in mind:

• Submissions must be original and must conform to the submission guidelines of the journal and to the standards and scientific rigour expected of an academic publication.
• Submissions will be evaluated for the originality of the topic explored, especially if it relates to an issue not previously addressed in the publication. Submissions dealing with topics previously addressed in the journal may be rejected. The content of the issues published to date can be consulted on the journal's website.
• All submissions will undergo an external peer review process that will respect the anonymity of both authors and reviewers (double blind peer review) in an effort to prevent any possibility of bias. In the event of a very high number of submissions, the Editorial Board will make a prior selection of the articles to be peer reviewed, choosing the articles deemed the most appropriate for the issue. Failure to observe the submission guidelines and/or standards of originality and academic rigour will result in rejection of the submission by the Editorial Board without external review.
• Articles (which should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words including all sections) must be submitted via the website of the journal as .odt or .docx files, using the template provided for this purpose. A blind version of the article will be provided. A complete version of the article and any images (.jpg, .png) must be uploaded to the website as complementary files. A detailed version of the submission guidelines can be found at the following link. Any articles that fail to meet these requirements will be rejected automatically.
• The selected articles will be published in a bilingual edition (Spanish and English). The authors of the texts accepted for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation or revision - in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version - of their article.
• If the original manuscript is in English, the authors of the accepted papers must provide a professional translation to Spanish. The Executive Editorial Board may also require a revision by the translator recommended by the journal for Non-English speaking authors.
• If the original manuscript is in Spanish, the authors of the accepted papers for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation to English or revision—in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version—of their article. In all cases, and in order to guarantee the quality of the translations and the unity of linguistic criteria, the text must be translated or proofread by the translator recommended by the journal, a freelance professional specialised in Film Studies. His work will be paid in advance and via credit card, bank transfer or Paypal by the authors.
• L'Atalante does not offer any compensation for published articles. For more information: info@revistaatalante.com