Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine

‘Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine offers a welcome, far-reaching and

much-overdue re-appraisal of one of the most influential pieces of scholarship on
women, horror, and psychoanalytic film theory.’
—Erin Harrington, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

‘It is long past time for an extended appraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-break-
ing conception of the “monstrous-feminine,” and this ­collection makes clear the
continued relevance of Creed’s theory to a proliferating array of bodies and texts.’
—Dawn Keetley, Lehigh University, USA

This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s groundbreaking work of femi-
nist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-­Feminine, which was first published
in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis
in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to
the study of women in horror films, with their narrow ­emphasis on woman’s victimhood.
This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine,
brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who
take up Creed’s ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, ­explore possible
futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art ­history and film theory.

Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies
at the Université de Montréal, Canada. He is the author of After Francis Bacon (2012) and
Sportswomen in Cinema (2015) and the co-editor with Liz Watkins of Gesture and Film
(2017) and with Katharina Bonzel of Representations of Sports Coaches in Film (2017).

Jeanette Hoorn is Honorary Professorial Fellow and a former Director of Gender Studies
and Associate- Dean EO in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
In 2014 she designed Sexing the Canvas, filmed and taught at National Gallery of Victoria,
Museum of Modern Art New York, and Huntington Library in Pasadena on the Coursera
platform https://www.coursera.org/course/sexingthecanvas. Her books include Australian
Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape, 2007; Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art
in Australia, 2009; Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific,
2001; Idylle Marocaine, Hilda Rix Nicholas et Elsie Rix en Maroc, due October 2019
with Afrique Orient. Her essays have appeared in Art and Australia, Screen, Third Text,
Continuum, Transnational Cinemas, Hecate, Australian Historical Studies; Photofile.

Audrey Yue is Professor in Media, Culture and Critical Theory, Head of Communications
and New Media, and Convenor of the Cultural ­Studies in Asia PhD Programme at the
National University of Singapore. She is author, co-author and co-editor of Sinophone
Cinemas (2014), Transnational Australian Cinema (2013), Queer Singapore (2012), Ann
Hui’s Song of the Exile (2010), AsiaPacifiQueer (2008) and Mobile ­C ultures: New Me-
dia in Queer Asia (2003). Her recent essays appear in Media and Communication; In-
ternational Journal of Communication; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Urban Studies.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies

Emotion in Animated Films

Edited by Meike Uhrig

Post-Production and the Invisible Revolution of Filmmaking

From the Silent Era to Synchronized Sound
George Larkin

New Approaches to Cinematic Space

Edited by Filipa Rosário and Iván Villarmea Álvarez

Melancholy in Contemporary Cinema

A Spinozian Analysis of Film Experience
Francesco Sticchi

Found Footage Horror Films

A Cognitive Approach
Peter Turner

Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation

Becoming-Animated
Sylvie Bissonnette

Classical Hollywood Film Cycles

Zoë Wallin

Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine

Art, Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis
Edited by Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue

Ethics of Cinematic Experience

Screens of Alterity
Orna Raviv

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Re-reading the
Monstrous-Feminine
Art, Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Edited by
Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn
and Audrey Yue
First edition published 2020
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
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© 2020 Taylor & Francis
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to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Re-reading The Monstrous-Feminine: New Approaches

to Psychoanalytic Theory, Affect, Film, and Art 1
N I C H O L A S C H A R E , J E A N E T T E H O O R N , A N D AU D R E Y Y U E

PART I
Introduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis 35
N I C H O L A S C H A R E , J E A N E T T E H O O R N , A N D AU D R E Y Y U E

2 Symmetry and Incident: Laura Mulvey in Conversation

with Nicholas Chare 43
L AU R A M U LV E Y

3 A Dream of Bare Arms: ‘Womanliness’, Dirt, and a

Quest for Knowledge 53
ANNETTE KUHN

4 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 66

E L I Z A B E T H C OW I E

PART II
Introduction: Expanding the Monstrous-Feminine 89
N I C H O L A S C H A R E , J E A N E T T E H O O R N , A N D AU D R E Y Y U E

5 The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now: Barbara

Creed in Conversation with Nicholas Chare 95
BARBAR A CR EED
vi Contents
6 Abjection beyond Tears: Ellyn Burstyn as Liminal
(On Set) Mother in The Exorcist 106
M A R K N ICHOLL S

7 Carrie’s Sisters: New Blood in Contemporary Female

Horror Cinema 121
PAT R I C I A P I S T E R S

PART III
Introduction: Reproductive and Post-Reproductive
Bodies and the Monstrous-Feminine 139
N I C H O L A S C H A R E , J E A N E T T E H O O R N , A N D AU D R E Y Y U E

8 ‘I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box’: The Handmaid’s

Tale, Monstrous Wombs and Trump’s America 146
TA R A B R A B A Z O N

9 ‘From a Speculative Point of View I Wondered Which of

Us I Was’: Re-reading Old Women 161
S N EJ A G U N E W

10 The ‘Monstrous-Feminine’: Dementia, Psychoanalysis,

and Mother-Daughter Relations in Dana Walrath’s
Aliceheimer’s 173
E . A N N K A PL A N

PART IV
Introduction: Rethinking the Monstrous-Feminine
through a Transnational Frame 187
N I C H O L A S C H A R E , J E A N E T T E H O O R N , A N D AU D R E Y Y U E

11 Polluted Water: Demotic Thai Cinema and Queer

Abjection in the Films of Poj Arnon 193
B R E T T FA R M E R

12 The Monstrous-Feminine in the Millennial Japanese

Horror Film: Problematic M(O)thers and Their
Monstrous Children in Ringu, Honogurai mizo no soko
kara and, Ju-On 209
VA L E R I E W E E
 Contents vii
13 Women in the Way? Re-reading The Monstrous-
Feminine in Contemporary Slovenian Cinema 230
POLONA PET EK

14 In-Your-Face: The Monstrous-Feminine in Photography,

Performance Art, Multimedia, and Painting 241
J EA N ET T E HOOR N

List of Contributors 255

Index 259
Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Michelle Gewurtz, Wilson Koh and Silvestra

Mariniello for their help and practical support at various stages of the
preparation of this manuscript. We are also indebted to Jane Brown
at the Visual Cultures Resource Centre in the School of Culture and
Communications at the University of Melbourne for her help in sourcing
­images and permissions.
Additionally we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments and insights regarding an earlier draft of the
­volume. We are also grateful to Suzanne Richardson, Karthikeyan
­Subramaniam, Felisa ­Salvago-Keyes, Richa Kohli, Eleanor Catchpole
Simmons and Isabella Vitti at Routledge who have been a pleasure to
work with throughout.
1 Re-reading The
Monstrous-Feminine
New Approaches to
Psychoanalytic Theory,
Affect, Film, and Art
Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn,
and Audrey Yue

The argument that women’s genitals terrify because they might castrate
challenges the Freudian and Lacanian view and its association of the
symbolic order with the masculine.
(Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine)

In 2008, the comedy horror film Teeth (Dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein, USA,
2007) was released in cinemas. The film centres upon a high school
student, Dawn O’Keefe, who has a vagina with hidden teeth. Early in
the narrative, Dawn is forced to have sex by a young man, Tobey, and
the teeth emerge cutting of his penis. Researching her condition, Dawn
learns about the legend of the vagina dentata or toothed vagina. She
seems literally to embody a physical condition previously taken for myth.
Teeth is a film that exploits anxieties about female sexuality as a means
to shock and amuse its audience. The fear of castration that undergirds
the plot resonates with some of the themes that Barbara Creed (1993)
examines in her groundbreaking analysis of the horror film genre, The
Monstrous-Feminine. Creed devotes an entire chapter to the vagina
dentata as it appears in myth and as it relates to Freudian theory. She
suggests that the vagina dentata is ‘particularly relevant to the iconog-
raphy of the horror film, which abounds with images that play on the
fear of castration and dismemberment’ (1993, p. 107). Teeth manifests
imagery of this kind. Dawn’s actions are akin to those of the femme cas-
tratrice, of woman as a castrator (although her vagina practises penec-
tomy). Creed analyses the figure of the femme castratrice in the context
of rape revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave (Dir. Meir Zarchi,
USA, 1978). Teeth does not begin as a rape revenge film – in that Dawn’s
initial acts of dismembering seem instinctive rather than intended – but
she does later consciously exploit her toothed vagina to seek vengeance
on those who wrong her or those close to her. In the final scene, she is
held hostage by an old man who appears willing to trade her freedom for
2 Nicholas Chare et al.
sexual favours. She looks at him, giving a tight-lipped smile, concealing
her teeth. In imprisoning Dawn, the sexual predator is clearly shown to
have bitten off more than he can chew.
Teeth was released 14 years after the publication of The Monstrous-­
Feminine, and demonstrates that the kinds of anxieties regarding gen-
ders and sexualities that Creed examines in her book are remarkably
enduring in horror films. It is now over 25 years since Creed’s land-
mark feminist contribution to scholarship on the horror genre. A new,
expanded edition of The Monstrous-Feminine is currently in prepara-
tion to mark the occasion. As the essays in this volume demonstrate,
many of the themes and issues examined in The Monstrous-Feminine
­continue to manifest in contemporary art and cinema. Creed’s book de-
veloped and elaborated upon ideas first considered in her 1986 Screen
article ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine’. The Monstrous-Feminine
takes representations of ‘woman-as-monster’ as its subject, analysing
case studies including Alien (Dir. Ridley Scott, UK, 1979), Carrie (Dir.
Brian de Palma, USA, 1976), The Brood (Dir. David Cronenberg, Can-
ada, 1979), The Exorcist (Dir. William Friedkin, USA, 1973), and The
Hunger (Dir. Tony Scott, USA, 1983). The examples Creed focusses on
mainly derive from ­A merican and British cinema yet other scholars such
as Brown (2018), Meraj Ahmed Mubarki (2014) and Audrey Yue (2000)
have taken up the idea of the monstrous-feminine in relation to differ-
ent geographical and cinematic contexts. Creed’s approach is psychoan-
alytic throughout, building on earlier pioneer texts such as Raymond
Bellour’s (1979) L’analyse du film, Christian Metz’s (1975) ‘Le signifiant
imaginaire’, and Laura ­Mulvey’s (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’. Bellour, Metz, and Mulvey are all heavily influenced, in their
different ways, by the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Spec-
ularity plays an important role in the emergence of subjectivity in La-
canian thought, and as Annette Kuhn (1982, p. 47) has suggested, its
pertinence to the study of cinema is therefore easy to comprehend.
Creed critically engages with ideas from both Sigmund Freud and
­Lacan. Her close readings of Freud’s research, including the case history
of ‘Little Hans’, and of excerpts from The Interpretation of Dreams,
tease out how the analyst’s own repressions and displacements influence
the kinds of interpretations he provides (Harrington 2016, p. 4). Karen
Horney (1967) explains in her 1926 essay ‘The Flight from Woman-
hood’, that psychoanalysis was created by a man and predominantly
developed by men such that they evolved ‘more easily a masculine psy-
chology and [understood] more of the development of men than of
women’ (p. 54). She goes on to suggest that the psychic development
of women as represented within psychoanalysis has ‘been measured by
masculine standards’ (p. 57). Creed’s attentive readings of Freud enable
the influence of these standards to be recognised and overcome.1 She
notes, for instance, that Freud’s justification for identifying the phallus
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 3
as the primary signifier is not his clinical material but rather social ob-
servation (Creed 1993, p. 160). His understanding of sexual difference
is influenced by the social norms of Vienna at the time he was writing.
Creed repeatedly demonstrates how Freud neglects feminine agency,
privileging, for instance, the role of the father as a potential source of
castration in his discussion of the Oedipus complex. As Creed (1993,
p. 103) observes of both ‘Little Hans’ and ‘The Wolf Man’, ‘[a]t no point
in either case study did Freud consider that the child might also fear the
mother’s genitals as an agent of castration’.2
In The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed draws not solely on Freud’s ideas
but also on those of Lacan, particularly as they have been taken up
and developed by Julia Kristeva in her work on abjection, most nota-
bly through her 1980 essay, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, published in English
translation as Powers of Horror in 1982. Kristeva’s potential impor-
tance for the study of film had been remarked since the late 1970s and
her work was regularly debated in journals such as m/f, Screen, and
Wide Angle. The Monstrous-Feminine, however, provides what is still
one of the most sustained and inspiring engagements with Kristeva in
the context of film analysis. Other film theorists have made reference
to Kristeva’s thinking yet very few have placed her work at the heart of
their interpretive framework.3 The centrality of Powers of Horror to The
Monstrous-Feminine cannot be underestimated. Kristeva’s exploration
of the nascent subject’s establishment of its fragile borders through a
rejection of the Mother as psychic figure is coupled with a consideration
of how these archaic events continue to influence behaviour in adult-
hood, particularly through anxieties about the breaching of borders.
This makes Kristeva an important thinker of the border as a structur-
ing force in society and culture.4 To best understand the innovativeness
of Creed’s uptake of Kristeva’s thinking, a brief overview of Powers of
Horror is useful.

Approaching Abjection
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva draws on anthropology and psychoanaly-
sis to examine the role of abjection in subject-formation and subjectivity.
Abjection, for Kristeva, describes the process by which an infant is able
to forge provisional, transitory boundaries between itself and the fig-
ure of the Mother. Once these fragile, tentative boundaries are in place,
the infant can progress to the mirror-stage of psychic development.
Kristeva (1982, p. 13) notes: ‘Even before being like, “I” am not but do
separate, reject, ab-ject’.5 Prior to being capable of recognising its like-
ness in the mirror, the child must first split from the all-encompassing
Mother. These early beginnings of subjectivity, in which the boundary
between the nascent subject and the mother are uncertain, are repressed
in adulthood but continue to haunt the subject through encounters with
4 Nicholas Chare et al.
abject phenomena. Kristeva (1982, p. 2) lists ‘filth, waste and dung’ as
examples of such phenomena, substances that remind the subject of their
precarious origins. Bodily excreta, materials the traverse the body from
inside to outside, that cross its putative boundaries, call to mind the
fragile boundary that came into being between Mother and infant in
early psychic life. For Kristeva (1982, p. 4), the corpse, ‘seen without
God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection’.
Kristeva explains that in Jewish and Christian cultures, religion has
functioned to protect subjects from encounters with the abject. In an
increasingly secular and rationalist society, however, religion no lon-
ger performs this task. For Kristeva, this means that art and literature
now have an important role to play in policing and processing contem-
porary encounters with the abject. Her preferred example for unpack-
ing how artistic forms can fulfil the role of religion in modern society,
providing controlled encounters with the abject or impure, is the nov-
elist ­Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose writings she analyses at length in
­Powers of Horror.6 In an interview with Charles Penwarden, ‘Of Word
and Flesh’, which discusses Kristeva’s (1995) responses to the 1995 Tate
Gallery exhibition Rites of Passage, she also views contemporary art
as offering catharsis in the face of the abject. Kristeva describes ‘ob-
jects that purify abjection in the work of certain artists’ (Kristeva 1995,
p. 24). For Kristeva, works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Mona
Hatoum, and Jana Sterbak embody a language that ‘attempts to come
as close as possible, almost to accompany [the] state of abjection, [the]
permanent oscillation between subject and object’ (pp. 22–23). This
lends the works a cathartic value. Artworks, in Kristeva’s terms, are not
passive objects of contemplation. They rouse those who encounter them
and act upon them.
Kristeva’s emphasis on avant-garde art and literature as media in which
sanctioned transgressions of notions of purity are made possible seems
to render catharsis through cultural forms the reserve of a relatively
small audience. Creed counters this tendency, providing a compelling
demonstration of how Kristeva’s ideas about abjection can also be illu-
minating in the context of popular culture. In The Monstrous-Feminine,
she demonstrates how media such as the horror film also potentially
have a therapeutic role.7 For Creed (1986, p. 53), the horror film can
operate as ‘a form of modern defilement rite’ that ‘works to separate out
the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the
mother and all that her universe signifies’. She suggests that the central
project of the popular horror film is ‘purification of the abject’ (Creed
1993, p. 14). Cinema then provides another means by which to speak
and thereby assuage individual malaise (and, by extension, social mal-
aise) regarding psychic identity. Creed’s reading of horror films as modes
of encounter with the abject provides a crucial extension of Kristeva’s
aesthetics, revealing their pertinence for analyses of popular culture.8
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 5
Her Body, Himself
In The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed acknowledges the important work
performed by Carol J. Clover (1987) in relation to depictions of women
in horror films. Clover’s notion of the Final Girl, the last woman stand-
ing who confronts the villain/monster, has become highly influential for
the study of slasher films. Creed particularly appreciates Clover’s recog-
nition of the different ways in which the deaths of men and women are
treated in the horror genre. Clover (1987, p. 212) suggests that women
are permitted a greater emotional range in extreme situations, a range
that is fully exploited in horror films: ‘crying, cowering, screaming,
fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female’. This means
that ‘[a]bject terror […] is gendered feminine’ (ibid.). Creed’s and ­Clover’s
differing outlooks on horror films, which are both informed by psycho-
analysis, have been paired in edited collections such as Fantasy and the
Cinema (1989) and The Dread of Difference (1996). Comparing the two
approaches is illuminating in terms of significant differences regarding
their conception of sex and gender.
Clover provides a complex reading of the processes of identification
that potentially occur when viewing slasher films, the horror genre that
forms her primary focus. For Clover, identification in the male audience
(which she focusses on as forming the main consumers of the slasher
genre) shifts from the often male (or seemingly male) villain to the fe-
male victim-hero. For Clover (1987, p. 208), these shifting identifications
show that ‘gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane’. She does
not believe a seamless relation exists between point of view shot (hence-
forth POV shot) and viewer identification. She does, however, believe it
is important that in slasher films, as the narrative unfolds, the POV shot
shifts from being predominantly that of the villain to being increasingly
that of the Final Girl. There is a complex waxing and waning in opera-
tion that ostensibly crosses gender divides (Clover 1987, p. 208). Clover’s
nuanced reading of processes of identification, however, is somewhat
undercut by the seeming essentialism of her arguments. Clover (1987,
p. 215), for example, asks that the Final Girl not be simply viewed as
a figurative male yet shortly afterwards in a discussion of uncertainty
about gender cultivated by the use of POV shot in slasher films her argu-
ment relies heavily on taking the anatomical sex of the protagonist as the
yardstick against which perceived gender deviations can be measured.
The body is thus rendered the truth of the sex of a person. In Psycho, for
example, ‘the dame we glimpse holding the knife […] is later revealed,
after additional gender teasing, to be Norman in his mother’s clothes’
(Clover 1987, p. 216). In this reading, Norman masquerades as female
(through clothing and voice) but is ultimately shown to be male.
For Clover, sex and gender are categorically distinct. This perceived
split between sex and gender enables her to observe of slasher films that
6 Nicholas Chare et al.
‘[i]t is not that these show us gender and sex in free variation; it is that
they fix on the irregular combinations, of which the combination mascu-
line female prevails over the combination feminine male’ (Clover 1987,
p. 221). Gender is communicated through appearance and/or behaviour
and forms a kind of theatre (p. 217). In this context, she reads the ges-
ture of the character Stretch in the denouement to Texas Chainsaw Mas-
sacre 2 as ‘a moment of high drag’ (p. 217). The film ends with Stretch
wielding a chainsaw above her head, triumphant, after despatching her
last aggressor, Chop Top. For Clover, the chainsaw figures what Stretch
seems to be (masculine) rather than what she is (feminine). The chainsaw
as phallic signifier grants Stretch a measure of masculinity, but her ‘“tits
and scream”’ signal her biological sex (p. 217). The male audience is able
to identify with characters such as Stretch because of Stretch’s ability to
proffer simultaneous signifiers of masculinity and femininity. Clover’s
reading has understandably met with resistance. Judith Jack Halberstam
(1995, p. 157), for example, argues compellingly that the notion of audi-
ence reception underpinning this logic is one that ‘avoids the possibility
of a more radical and possible queer gaze’.
Clover hears Stretch’s scream over-simplistically as signalling her
‘Scream Queen’ credentials, positioning her as another in a long line
of women giving voice to their terror. Michel Chion (1999) has exam-
ined how many films go to extreme lengths to reach what he calls the
‘screaming point’, the moment of a woman’s scream. He suggests that
the motivation for cultivating this scream is both sadistic and symptom-
atic of male anxieties about female sexuality and orgasm (Chion 1999,
pp. 77–78). Chion gives examples such as Psycho and King Kong. He
usefully contrasts the scream with the cry or shout. For Chion (1999,
p. 79), women in cinema are often portrayed screaming, whereas men
are shown shouting, the latter vocalisation understood as ‘[delimiting] a
territory’. For us, Stretch’s scream is of this kind. As Halberstam (1995,
p. 158) remarks, it is closer to a ‘rebel yell’ than an expression of terror,
forming an aggressively triumphant vocalisation. The clifftop cry marks
Stretch’s territory, audibly affirming that now Crop Top has been seen
off Stretch is ‘king’ of the hill. As the yell demonstrates, their success is
not solely or simply communicated through possessing the chainsaw (as
phallic substitute). It manifests by way of the voice, a voice which refuses
to scream in terror any longer.
We agree with Clover that Stretch cannot be securely gendered in
the masculine yet place less emphasis on the role of screaming in this
troubling of gender binaries. For us, it is the twirling Stretch enacts,
while brandishing the chainsaw that invites making links with woman
as spectacle. This action is visually reminiscent of Diana Prince spinning
to transform into Wonder Woman in Lynda Carter’s portrayal of the
superhero. Wonder Woman, as T.J. Demos (2010, pp. 54–55) notes, dis-
plays a complex identity, ‘on the one hand the embodiment of physical
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 7
strength, mental agility and superhero stature – all attributes normally
belonging to the male superhero – and on the other hand an object of
sexual desire constructed to-be-looked-at’. In Wonder Woman, the spin
at once indexes a transformation from average Jane to superhero and
from plain Jane to glamorous princess. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
the spin embodies the transformation from Final Girl to a figure refusing
any finality, resisting the ready imposition of gender categories. Halber-
stam (1995, pp. 157–158) is clearly attuned to this queer potential in the
closing scene, viewing Stretch as resisting coding as ‘tits and ass’ and be-
coming instead ‘tits and chainsaw’, with the saw standing for ‘the chain
of signifiers that has become scrambled’ in the film.
Creed’s interpretative framework, contra Clover’s, is able to open
valuable spaces for the recognition of identities within horror cinema
that are gender variant. This openness is rendered possible by Creed’s
employment of a psychoanalytic framework that resists essentialising.
As Jacqueline Rose (1985, p. 41) explains, for Lacan ‘sexual difference
is a legislative divide which creates and reproduces its categories’. Sexual
difference is therefore not descriptive of a pre-existing biological reality
but rather operates prescriptively. Rose suggests that in Lacan’s schema:

Sexual difference is […] assigned according to whether individual

subjects do or do not possess the phallus, which means not that
anatomical difference is sexual difference (the one as strictly deduc-
ible from the other), but that anatomical difference comes to figure
sexual difference, that is, it becomes the sole representative of what
that difference is allowed to be. It thus covers over the complexity
of the child’s early sexual life with a crude oppression in which that
very complexity is refused or repressed. The phallus thus indicates
the reduction of difference to an instance of visible perception, a
seeming value.
(Rose 1985, p. 42)

In this conception of sexual difference, as against Clover’s investment

in the sexed body, anatomy is very much not destiny. Many of Creed’s
readings of horror films demonstrate the radical potential of the genre
as a means of exposing the value accorded the phallus as a seeming.
Creed teases out how Woman as a psychic category not only figures as
castrated, as not in possession of the phallus, but also as castrating. In
this sense, Creed foregrounds the body as signifier of a sex, of sexual
difference, as a contested site of meaning. The vagina is open to being
figured not only as a signifier of lack but also as a substantial force, a
castrating entity.
Creed’s analyses enable a more complex understanding of feminin-
ity within psychoanalysis to emerge. For Creed (1993, pp. 126–127), in
contrast to Clover, characters such as Stretch (who Creed namechecks)
8 Nicholas Chare et al.
are not phallicised and pseudo men. They are rather manifestations of a
dimension to femininity that is disavowed by Freud and, by extension,
Lacan. Stretch’s appropriation of the chainsaw is, in this sense, not a
symptom of penis envy but an affirmation of vaginal pride, the teeth
of the saw figuring the toothed vagina rather than substituting for the
absent phallus.9 Lacan foreclosed the idea of a symbolic equivalent or
alternative to the phallus. For him, hysteria was symptomatic of (failed)
efforts to ‘symbolize the female organ’ (Lacan 1993, p. 178). Creed,
however, identifies another sexual signifier, the monstrous-feminine, as
in operation within the Symbolic.
Creed does more than simply reveal the monstrous-feminine as an al-
ternative to the feminine as lack. Through building on a Kristevan frame-
work, she is able to gesture towards moments in horror films – encounters
with the abject – in which the ways in which anatomical difference has
come to figure within patriarchy are troubled and potentially undone. The
drive-invested memories of early psychic life that are triggered through
encounters with the abject draw the subject back to a period pre-seeming,
prior to the valorisation of anatomical difference as a figure for sexual
difference. Abjection as a psychic process, as already discussed, unfolds
in advance of the mirror-phase. It is therefore also prior to the Oedipus
complex and the imposition of paternal law. For Lacan, the father as
a third term is not absent from the pre-oedipal in that the phallus as
an imaginary object registers for the Mother but it is only through the
Oedipus complex that the Father becomes a locus of symbolic identifica-
tion for the child. It is through the Oedipus complex that a child comes
to assume a sex and make a sexual object choice: ‘[i]t is insofar as the
function of man and woman is symbolized, it is insofar as it’s literally
uprooted from the domain of the imaginary and situated in the domain
of the symbolic, that any normal, completed sexual position is realized’
(Lacan 1993, p. 177). Abjection as psychic experience serves to remind
the child of a time prior to this sexing and finding of sexuality, there-
fore potentially signalling the contingency of these processes. For Creed,
as Shohini Chaudhuri (2006, p. 95) discusses, the mother associated
with abjection is ‘the primeval mother of everything – a ­parthenogenetic
mother, creating all by herself, without the need for a father; she is a
pre-phallic mother, existing prior to knowledge of the phallus’. Creed
reveals that encounters with abjection such as those that occur in horror
films hold the potential to enable the subject to revisit sexual difference,
conceivably returning to the Symbolic on changed terms.

The Monstrous Flesh

Halberstam’s (1995) critique of Clover is, in part, a critique of her con-
ception of reception, one in which the audience is straightforwardly
gendered as masculine (with masculinity singularised). Clover (1987,
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 9
p. 205) does, however, productively foreground the importance of ex-
pressions of disgust and revulsion by audiences during the viewing of
slasher films. She writes of instances of ‘uproarious disgust’ in audience
members, of complex combining of amusement and aversion condensed
in the utterance ‘Gross!’ She also emphasises the intricate vocalisations,
or lack thereof, of audiences, the moments of silence, the screams, the
‘loud noises of revulsion’ (p. 205). Creed is similarly attuned to such phe-
nomena. She draws attention not only to the perverse pleasure audiences
take in horror films but also to how that pleasure combines with a desire
to reject the horrific spectacle being played out on screen, a desire ‘to
throw up, throw out, eject the abject’ (Creed 1993, p. 10). In both these
readings, the body of the spectator becomes an important measure of the
impact of horror films. Such films are not simply viewed and reflected
upon; they are also keenly felt registered in the pit of the stomach.
As part of her sustained critique of psychoanalytic approaches to the
horror genre in Deleuze and the Horror Film, Anna Powell (2005, p. 2)
foregrounds the incapacity of psychoanalytic frameworks to account
for certain phenomena in viewing experiences. For her, psychoanalytic
readings focus on narrative and representation at the expense of cor-
poreal affect, reducing films to allegories for pre-existing ideas.10 Her
notion of psychoanalysis is essentially Lacanian. She argues Lacanian-­
inspired approaches leave no space for ‘visual and aural experience
or other sensory stimuli that an aesthetics of sensation might afford’
(p. 17). Her critique of psychoanalysis is indebted to the ideas of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari, clinical psycho-
analysis forms a highly socially repressive activity. Their understanding
of psychoanalysis is also primarily influenced by Lacanian approaches.
This is unsurprising, given that Guattari attended Lacan’s seminars for
a period of time and was also Lacan’s patient (Roudinesco and Plon
1997, p. 412). Deleuze (2006a, p. 80) described psychoanalysis as lead-
ing to ‘the reduction and abolition of desire’. In the analytic setting,
‘[i]t is impossible to produce an utterance without having it reduced to a
prefabricated and predetermined grid of interpretation’ (Deleuze 2006b,
p. 89). Powell transposes this interpretation of the analytic process to
the study of cinema, believing a similarly reductive grid operates when
psychoanalytic readings of film are undertaken.
The negative perception Deleuze and Guattari possess of psychoanal-
ysis requires historical contextualisation. It is, to a large extent, influ-
enced by and also addressed at the dominant forms of psychoanalysis
practised in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Powell takes the
critique out of context and applies it in blanket form to all psychoanal-
ysis and also to most film theory that is psychoanalytically informed
(what she refers to as ‘cinepsychoanalysis’). Creed’s work as it is dis-
cussed in Deleuze and Horror Film is aligned with Lacanian theory
by Powell despite an acknowledgment of its indebtedness to Kristeva.
10 Nicholas Chare et al.
For Powell, it seems Kristeva is a rigid Lacanian and her work can be
readily subject to the same critiques that Deleuze and Guattari levelled
at ­Lacan. At the time Deleuze and Guattari (1972) were writing Capital-
isme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe, however, Kristeva was working on
her doctoral thesis which would subsequently be published as La Révo-
lution du langage poétique [Revolution in Poetic Language] (Kristeva
1974). Her work in Powers of Horror, which inspired Creed, is of a
different time and although broadly Lacanian in outlook is also clearly
implicitly critical of dimensions of Lacan’s thinking. Like other psycho-
analytic thinkers such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (with their
embrace of deconstruction) and Bracha Ettinger (who is partly influenced
by the anti-Oedipal stance of Deleuze and Guattari), Kristeva is expand-
ing psychoanalysis in ways that cannot and should not be conflated with
Lacanian analysis as it is critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari.11
Powell (2005, p. 16) does recognise potential in Kristeva’s ‘sugges-
tive exploration of the fluid nature of abjection’ yet does not engage in
a meaningful way with Powers of Horror or how Creed takes up the
idea of abjection. Had she done so, she would have had to revisit her
claim that Lacanian-inspired analyses of film leave no space for ‘visual
and aural experience or other sensory stimuli’ in contrast with an ‘aes-
thetics of sensation’ inspired by Deleuze (p. 17). Powell’s conceptuali-
sation of psychoanalysis is overly reductive, ignoring the importance of
recognising non-narrative-based and non-representational phenomena
within clinical settings. In this context, Melanie Klein’s (1997) notion of
‘memories in feelings’ as they manifest in analysis is particularly note-
worthy.12 Powell’s (2005, p. 5) idea of becoming infected by a film bears
some affinities with transference as it occurs in the analytic situation.
Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic, the drive-invested underside to language,
is also noteworthy here as is André Green’s theorising of the drives and
affect as Kristeva (2010, pp. 178–179) interprets it. Throughout The
Monstrous-Feminine Creed pays careful heed to moments of semiotic
intensity in horror films as they manifest by way of, for example, sound,
gesture, and chromatics. The richness of a Kristevan approach of the
kind adopted by Creed is precisely that it does permit sensation – the
drives as the semiotic underside to signification – to be appreciated and
described.
Creed is highly attentive to what might now be referred to as the affec-
tive dimension to the horror film experience. Her groundbreaking idea
of the fifth look, the look that is not, the moment of looking away or of
covering the eyes, a look that occurs sometimes when watching horror
films, describes experiences that register foremost as feeling rather than
sign (Creed 1986, p. 64; 1993, p. 29). In conceiving the fifth look, Creed
is striving to find a vocabulary capable of describing encounters with
film that will subsequently be explained in Anglophone film scholarship
through recourse to the ideas of, for example, Gilles Deleuze. In a section
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 11
of her book The Matrix of Visual Culture entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and
the Monstrous Flesh’, Patricia Pisters (2003) provides a thoughtful, if
critical, reading of The Monstrous-Feminine as part of a general re-
proach of psychoanalysis. For Pisters (2003, p. 52), psychoanalysis fails
to address multiplicity and affect as important dimensions of subjectiv-
ity. The fifth look, however, can be understood to index reactions to up-
surges of affect, of intensity, within a given film. During such upsurges,
matter independent of form makes itself manifest, matter freed from
any fashioning into objects or entities, presenting anew its ductility, its
complexity, and it multiplicity. Creed’s framework of understanding is
psychoanalytic yet her readings are nonetheless seeking to account for
affective experiences that share some of the qualities of the asignifier as
it is understood by Deleuze and Guattari (1986, p. 22), a force that strips
signification of its capacity for enunciation, transforming it instead into
a manifestation of intensity.13
Here Kristeva’s notion of the abject as that which shows itself to those
who encounter it is crucial. She clearly accords abject materials a kind of
agency, an intensity, which is not dependent upon decoding, upon being
read. The corpse, she is at pains to point out, does not signify death, it
is not a representation, a thing transformed into sign. It is registered as a
message without a code, an intense troubling of the separation of subject
and object, of the mediating gap required for a sign system or a system
of representation to operate. Brought to the brink of psychosis by this
boundary troubling, Kristeva (1982, p. 4) describes the subject as falling
in faint. This physical response causes the subject, in turn, to become
a kind of cadaver (from cadere, to fall), a kind of living-dead. In The
Monstrous-Feminine, Creed examines the corpse as abject abomination
as it features in films such as The Evil Dead (Dir. Sam Raimi, USA,
1981) and Zombie Flesh Eaters (Dir. Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1979). For her
the visceral reaction to abject materials in horror film registers abjection
at work ‘almost in a literal sense’ (Creed 1993, p. 10). This seeming
literalness, what Kristeva (2010, p. 178) refers to in relation to affect
as the ‘degree zero of symbolism’, forms a symptom of the collapsing of
signification that characterises audience responses to horror films at cer-
tain moments, a psychic regression. During such moments, difference,
including sexual difference, is prospectively rendered abeyant.
In this sense, the violence reduction of sexual potential that Deleuze
associates with the imposition of sexual difference is, at least tempo-
rarily, undone. Deleuze (2006b, p. 92) suggests that ‘[t]here are not
two sexes, there are n sexes; there are as many sexes as there are as-
semblages’. For him, reducing sexuality ‘to the difference between the
sexes’ is ‘a fatal error whether this difference is interpreted organi-
cally or structurally, in relation to the penis-organ or in relation to
the phallus-­signifier’ (p. 93). The best way to misunderstand sexuality
is to reduce ‘everything to the difference between the sexes’ (p. 93).
12 Nicholas Chare et al.
Moments of abjection, however, enact a de-differentiation at the level
of sex. In this sense, they open a space for sidestepping existing signi-
fying regimes and embracing sexual creativity. It is this potential in
horror cinema that Halberstam, operating within a different theoretical
framework, clearly identifies in Skin Shows. Through her engagement
with abjection in horror films, Creed offers a crucial vocabulary for
identifying and describing that potential at work. It is a potential that
also registers through abject art practices.

The Art of Abjection

In The Monstrous-Feminine although Creed’s main focus is the hor-
ror film, she also briefly discusses the importance of depictions of the
­vagina dentata in Surrealist art, signalling the potential significance of
the monstrous-­feminine for art history. In The Monstrous-Feminine,
there are reproductions of a photograph of Salvador Dali peering out
from behind a nude woman who has a lobster covering her genitals and
of René Magritte’s The Rape (1934) in which a woman’s torso is trans-
posed on her face such that her eyes are her breasts, her nose is her
navel and her mouth is her vulva. The Dali photograph, which is by
George Platt Lynes, featured in ‘The Dream of Venus’ show for the 1939
New York World’s Fair.14 In it, Dali’s right hand emerges from a gaping
wound in the woman’s right thigh. The show included semi-nude mod-
els who were adorned with various kinds of seafood including lobsters.
Horst P. Horst photographed one of these models seated with a lobster
on her crotch. She is holding aloft what appear to be oysters and wears
a pearl necklace from which dangle hooks threaded with what seem to
be shelled mussels. In another photograph by Horst, the lobster has been
transposed to the woman’s head.
For Creed, the lobster with its claws figures the vagina dentata. This
connection is lent credence by the name given to a sexual technique prac-
tised by Wallis Simpson on King Edward VIII, later known as the Duke
of Windsor. Called the ‘lobster grip’, the technique involved tightening
the vaginal muscles to constrict blood flow to the erect penis.15 In 1937,
Wallis Simpson famously wore a ‘lobster dress’ that had been designed
by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Dali. The artist painted a large
lobster on the sheer A-line skirt of the dress. In Cecil Beaton’s photo-
graphs for Vogue of Wallis Simpson wearing the dress, the tail is posi-
tioned roughly above her groin. This positioning encourages linking the
lobster with the vulva, intimating some kind of equivalence between the
two. The sexual connotations of the lobster would have been enhanced
yet further if Wallis Simpson had followed Dali’s request to smear it with
mayonnaise (Thurman 2012, p. 28).
The lobster as a visual reference has also been identified in a film,
Alien, which forms a major case study in The Monstrous-Feminine.
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 13
Creed’s reading of Alien is much celebrated and has been highly influen-
tial. The film narrative is about the crew of a space-freighter, the Nos-
tromo, who investigate a derelict alien spacecraft. During their survey
of the vessel, one of the crewmembers, Kane, finds a cargo hold filled
with giant, leathery eggs. Peering into one of the eggs, he is attacked
by an alien creature which attaches itself to his face and, unbeknownst
to the other crew members, impregnates him. The alien, referred to in
commentary as a facehugger, possesses a bony carapace and what David
Thomson (2000, p. 41) calls ‘lobster legs’. The stricken Kane is trans-
ported back to the Nostromo where he remains comatose for a period
of time, the alien fixed to his face. Eventually the creature falls off, ap-
pearing to die. In the scene in Alien during which the science officer Ash
autopsies the facehugger, the special effects team fabricated the alien’s
fleshy insides from out of shellfish and a sheep’s kidney. In an abject
scene, the insides of organisms were brought outside, exposed to view.
Kane seems to recover from his ordeal yet at a group meal he begins to
retch and convulse. An alien that was growing inside him bursts out of
his chest, killing him.
This creature, known in commentary as the ‘chestburster’, like the
others in Alien, was designed by the Swiss artist H.R. (Hans Rudolph)
Giger. Giger’s works have been described as surrealist in nature. Stan-
islav Grof (2002, pp. 15–16), for example, links Giger with Surrealism
and has suggested Dali as a key influence. Dali is identified by David
Lomas (2000) as an artist for whom abjection is a key theme. Both Dali
and Giger seem to have derived artistic inspiration from anxieties about
female sexualities and reproductive capacities. Artworks by Giger such
as Birthmachine (1967), Mother with child (1962) and Mother with
child (1968) make reference to reproduction and motherhood in their ti-
tles. These anxieties, Creed demonstrates, also pervade Alien at multiple
levels. Although never appearing directly, the film revolves around the
figure of the archaic mother, ‘the parthenogenetic mother, the mother
as primordial abyss’ (Creed 1993, p. 17). For Creed, the archaic mother
forms ‘a vast backdrop for the enactment of all the events’ of the film
(p. 19). This includes the birth of the alien. It is a birth which ‘recalls
Freud’s description of a common misunderstanding that many children
have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow “impregnated”
through the mouth […] and the baby grows in her stomach, from which
it is also born’ (p. 19).
The ‘chestburster’ was designed by Giger but with input from the di-
rector Ridley Scott who wanted the creature to resemble Francis Bacon’s
depictions of the Eumenides or Furies in Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion (Giger 1989, p. 56). Bacon is another artist who has
been linked with Surrealism, particularly by Dawn Ades who perceives
him to be a dissident surrealist, kindred in spirit to Georges Bataille. For
Ades, Bacon’s surrealism manifests not through technique (such as the
14 Nicholas Chare et al.
painter’s use of accident and chance), but by way of his repeated fixa-
tion on the mouth and use of it as a motif. Bataille also had an interest
in the mouth. He wrote a short text that accompanied Jacques-Andre
Boiffard’s photograph Bouche which was published in Documents in
1929. The text, Ades (1985, p. 13) explains, ‘focuses on the fact that it is
through the mouth that our most concentrated expressions of agony or
ecstasy are physiologically expressed, and also that in this expression the
human draws particularly close to the animal’. Bataille’s ‘violent pulling
together of man/beast [sic] in such a way that the traditional distinction
between them is brought into question was part of Bataille’s continual
attack on the “idealist deception” that man practices on himself’ (Ades
1985, p. 14). The theme of human and non-human animal relations is
one Ades (1985, p. 13) sees as shared by Bacon in works such as Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a painting in which
the figures ‘have no eyes, but only mouths’. Barbara Creed and Jeanette
Hoorn (2016, p. 201) have explored the links between Kristeva’s con-
ception of abjection and the figure of the animal in their essay ‘Animals,
Art, Abjection’. Creed also explores Kristeva’s linking of abjection with
animality in Stray (2017, pp. 21–27).
For Ades, however, the impetus for Bacon’s repeated portrayals of
mouths is overdetermined and not solely linked to a desire to trouble
human-animal differentiation. She also turns to Freudian psychoanal-
ysis to explain the artist’s fascination with mouths, discussing ‘explicit
sexual symbolism connected with the mouth’ (Ades 1985, p. 15). Ades
recalls Freud’s recognition in The Interpretation of Dreams that dreams
often transpose from a lower to an upper part of the body (such as from
genitals to mouth) (p. 16). This is a phenomenon Creed (1993, p. 118)
also examines, drawing on Freud’s transposition hypothesis to show
how teeth dreams represent the vagina dentata. Expanding on Creed’s
interpretation, the Eumenides as they are interpreted by Bacon become
incarnations of femmes castratrices, toothed vaginas seeking vengeance
(although in the paintings why this vengeance is being sought and
against whom is unclear). Ades disavows psychoanalytically motivated
links between Bacon and the Surrealist movement in which anxieties
about female sexualities manifest through vaginal iconography of a par-
ticular kind. Building on Creed’s discussion of teeth dreams it becomes
possible, however, to trace a shared psychic undercurrent across artists
such as Bacon and Dali. If the gaping maw in Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of a Crucifixion is read, on one level, as a vagina dentata,
then its influence upon the chestburster in Alien forms yet another exam-
ple of the strength of Creed’s interpretation of the film.
Art is an inspiration for the physical appearance of the extraterres-
trials in Alien yet no artworks are shown in the film. The only im-
ages the crew seem to be in possession of are pornographic. In Alien:
Covenant, however, art plays a significant role within the narrative.16
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 15
Covenant is the second prequel to Alien directed by Scott, forming the
sequel to Prometheus. In Covenant, which we will go on to discuss
in more depth, a synthetic human, David, who has been marooned on
an alien planet for a decade, is shown to have built a ‘cabinet of curi-
osities’ and to have made a number of drawings. The drawings are in
the style of eighteenth-century anatomical, botanical, and zoological
works.17 Many of them appear to portray marine life, molluscs, and
crustaceans. As contributions to David’s broader project of conceiving
the perfect organism, the origins of the lobster-like facehugger are to
be found here. Through a gradual, selective revealing of the corpus of
drawings in different scenes and settings, the artworks are employed
as a means by which to reveal David’s perturbed state of mind. The
drawings are clearly linked with David’s scientific work. He seems to
have been engaged in cataloguing new species on the alien planet and
producing biological illustrations. Later it becomes clear that the draw-
ings are also a means for David to record the results of his genetic ex-
periments. The drawings of the results of experimentation frequently
leave less blank paper or negative space around the specimens. There
is black or grey smudge or an abundance of tuberous forms serving as
the ground against which David’s nightmarish figures are crafted. Here
science as it is practised by David is shown to be an activity that also
betrays fascination with ‘the mysterious black hole that signifies female
genitalia’ (Creed 1993, p. 27). The monstrous-feminine manifests in
these exquisitely detailed records of experiments in genetic engineering
gone drastically awry.

In Femmage to the Monstrous-Feminine18

The psychic underpinnings of Covenant and its earlier companion film
Prometheus unsurprisingly resonate strongly with those of Alien. For
that reason, it is enlightening to bring Creed’s ideas about Alien in The
Monstrous-Feminine into dialogue with these more recent films. A ­ nnette
Kuhn (1990, p. 94) has foregrounded the political importance of Creed’s
work on Alien, seeing it as a vital contribution to a tradition of feminist
psychoanalytically informed film theory that provides ‘readings of films
[which] may be regarded as oppositional in the degree that, in excavating
patriarchal meanings, they constitute a resistive practice of reading pop-
ular films “against the grain” of hegemonic meanings’. Through such
readings, Kuhn suggests that the operations of capitalism and patriarchy
can be laid bare. In this spirit, we here take up Creed’s ideas to examine
the values and beliefs subtending Prometheus and Covenant and also
their repressions. Ridley Scott has endeavoured to present these films
as comprising a significant departure from Alien but as our analyses
demonstrate, at the level of a fascination with the monstrous-feminine,
this is not the case in any simple sense.
16 Nicholas Chare et al.
Scott has framed Prometheus and Covenant as a new departure in-
tended to reinvigorate the Alien franchise, leaving behind what he per-
ceived to be the B-movie heritage of the 1979 film (Ward 2017, p. 9). For
Scott, Covenant explores the ‘a future of interplanetary colonization’ and
the ‘morality of creating life forms’ (Scott 2017, p. 7). He has described it
as resurrecting Alien after too many tiresome sequels (Ward 2017, p. 9).
The reference to resurrection suggests that the franchise was dead on its
feet and casts the director as akin to Victor Frankenstein, bringing the
dead back to life. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was subtitled
‘The Modern Prometheus’ and, in some ways, the two prequels to Alien
can be read as transplanting Frankenstein to space. Men who attempt
to create new life forms occupy a special place in the pantheon of male
monsters of horror.
In The Monstrous-Feminine Creed explores questions of spectator-
ship and the nature of the male monster in relation to woman:

The male spectator is frequently asked to identify with a male mon-

ster that is feminized. He is feminized via the body: he bleeds, gives
birth, is penetrated, and generally undergoes abject bodily changes
associated with the feminine.
(p. 156)

Expanding on this proposition in Phallic Panic, Creed (2005) explores

six ‘faces’ of the male monster, in the context of male monstrosity, which
are highly pertinent to this analysis of the Alien prequels. Creed argues
that: ‘The male monster is made monstrous when he enters the domain
of woman, animal and nature’ (p. 17). He is aligned to the monstrous-­
feminine because the male symbolic defines his monstrosity in relation
to the wider context of female monstrosity. Upright, moral men are not
monstrous in and of themselves; they do not oppose the male symbolic
order from which they derive their authority and power. When patri-
archal ideology depicts men as monsters, in the form of mad scientists,
ape-men, werewolves, and vampires, it does so by aligning them with
woman, death, and the animal. Creed defines this realm as the primal
uncanny. The primal uncanny represents a state of extreme ‘otherness’
(p. 26). It is a kind of inevitable ‘beneath’ of the patriarchal order – it
is the state of being related to the monstrous-feminine, a state of being
where borders collapse and where in Kristeva’s terms identity, system
and order are undermined. As with the monstrous-feminine, the male
monster is therefore also an ‘other’, one who does not ‘respect, borders,
positions, rules’ (Creed 1993, p. 8). The male monster, figures such as
Frankenstein’s creature, King Kong and the wolf man, is also a sympa-
thetic figure. In contrast to the monstrous-feminine, the male monster
is not a parental figure, caught up in a dyadic relationship with its off-
spring. His monstrousness does not spring from his male reproductive or
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 17
paternal functions, but rather from his alignment with the sexual and re-
productive nature of the monstrous-feminine – hence he is hairy, bleeds,
gives birth, creates life forms and changes shape as he metamorphoses
from human to animal.

He transforms into a menstrual monster or blood monster (­vampire),

a womb monster (male doctor), a cannibalistic monster (werewolf),
a blood beast (slasher) or a woman (transgendered monster).
(Creed 2005, p. 17)

The exception is the ripper or slasher, the ‘human’ male monster who is
not aligned closely enough with woman and animal, who is not ‘other’
enough’ (p. 40) who in his savage assault on women expresses the ex-
tremes of misogyny, which underpin the symbolic order.
Creed’s argument that the male scientist, who tries to create new life
forms, is a womb monster, is illuminating in relation to our discussion of
Prometheus and Covenant. For what is possibly most interesting about
these uncanny male mothers is that their ultimate goal appears to be
to replace the primeval mother herself. She writes of the 1931 film ad-
aptation of Frankenstein, that it ‘explores the primal uncanny through
the illicit activities of its male mothers, presenting a disturbing picture
of couvade practices’ (p. 51). Male mothers also figure prominently in
the two prequels to Alien. The films seek to provide the backstory to the
earlier effort. In Alien, the origins of the eggs being transported on the
crashed spacecraft are left unexplained, enigmatic. Prometheus and
Covenant resolve much that was hitherto left mysterious.
The plot of Prometheus involves billionaire Peter Weyland funding a
deep space venture to the moon LV-223 in search of alien beings. These
beings, dubbed the Engineers, have been found by archaeologists to fea-
ture in ancient pictograms produced across the visual cultures of diverse
civilisations on Earth including those of Babylonia, Egypt, Mesopota-
mia, Prehistoric Northern Europe, and Sumeria.19 In each pictogram,
the same constellation of stars is depicted. The scientific exploratory
vessel Prometheus is despatched to this constellation. It has a crew
of 17, including Meredith Vickers who is the overseer, a pilot, Janek,
two archaeologists, Charlie Holloway and Elizabeth Shaw, a biologist,
­M illburn, a geologist, Fifield, a synthetic human, David, and, unknown
to most of the others, the ageing Weyland. He hopes the Engineers will
give him the key to more life. On LV-223, the team find an alien con-
struction which they investigate.
The archaeologists expect the Engineers to be benevolent but it tran-
spires they are hostile. The team learns that humankind was a genetic
experiment which the aliens were set to terminate. They were prevented
from destroying humanity by a fatal bioweapons accident that left all
but one of them dead. The bioweapons comprise organisms that gestate
18 Nicholas Chare et al.
in their hosts before hatching, fatally killing them. David intentionally
surreptitiously infects Holloway with the organism. Shaw is, in turn,
unwittingly infected through intercourse with Holloway. Holloway
becomes ill while exploring the alien ruins and is killed by Vickers to
prevent the Prometheus becoming contaminated. Shaw learns she has
an alien organism inside her and has it surgically removed using an au-
tomated procedure. The surviving Engineer, a giant pale-skinned biped
who has been in stasis, is revived and kills Weyland and beheads David.
It then powers up a spacecraft with the intention of completing the mis-
sion to destroy humankind. Shaw, however, persuades Janek to crash the
Prometheus into the alien vessel, crippling it. The Engineer survives the
collision but is incapacitated shortly afterwards by the organism Shaw
had incubated. Shaw then rescues David from the wreck of the alien
spacecraft and departs the planet on another such craft, her intention to
travel to the Engineers’ home-world.
Covenant is set roughly a decade after Prometheus. It tells the story of
what happened to David and Shaw after their exploits in Prometheus. The
film begins aboard the Covenant, a colonisation ship carrying roughly
2,000 colonists and 1,000 embryos to the planet Origae-6. When the
ship is damaged while recharging its power banks, the synthetic human
Walter (an almost identical replica of David) who has been overseeing
it seeks to rouse the crew of 14, comprising seven couples, although one
member, the ship’s captain Branson, dies because of a faulty sleep-pod.
The crew include Daniels, who is in command of terraforming, Oram,
the ship’s first mate who now assumes command, two pilots, Tennessee
and Maggie, a navigator, Ricks, a communications officer, Upworth,
a biologist, Karine, and a security team composed of Ankor, Cole,
Hallett, Ledward, Lope, and Rosenthal. While repairing the ship, the
crew intercept a transmission of seemingly human origin (a few ­distorted
bars from John Denver’s Country Roads) from a nearby planet, known
simply as Planet Number 4, which they decide to investigate. All but
three of the crew descend to the planet in a lander. Planet Number 4
initially seems prelapsarian, a veritable paradise, verdant with an abun-
dance of freshwater. Soon, however, two crewmembers become infected
by fungal spores and rapidly gestate alien creatures which burst from
their bodies, killing them. A number of fatalities occur before the re-
maining crew of the expedition are rescued by David who leads them to
what appears to be a vast necropolis, filled with blackened, contorted
corpses. He has made his home in a massive, temple-like complex. David
gives a version of his arrival on the planet in which the ship he travelled
in accidentally transmitted a fatal pathogen that caused the deaths of the
Engineers whose city the crew are now in.
The complex proves unsafe. Rosenthal is killed by an alien shortly
after their arrival. The survivors seek to make contact with the three
remaining crew on the Covenant but their efforts are hampered by an
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 19
ion storm that disrupts communications. Oram is then lured by David
to a cave filled with giant eggs where he is impregnated by a facehugger.
He dies when the alien that has been growing inside him bursts from his
chest. This alien, designed by David, is qualitatively different from the
others that had attacked the crew. Walter learns that David deliberately
annihilated the Engineers with a biological weapon. He also discovers
that David killed Shaw through experimenting on her. David has spent
his time on the alien planet perfecting highly hostile organisms designed
to destroy humanity, he has become intent on genocide. Now the Cov-
enant has arrived, he sees a way to continue his research using the col-
onists as human guinea-pigs. David realises Walter is suspicious of him
and attacks him, believing he has killed him. He then pursues Daniels.
Meanwhile, Cole and Lope have been searching for Oram. Lope is at-
tacked by a facehugger but Cole is able to rescue him. Cole is then killed
by the alien that slew Oram. Walter saves Daniels from David and she
leaves the two androids fighting each other, finding Lope. They make
their way to a lander that Tennessee has piloted from the Covenant.
Someone they take to be Walter joins them and it is inferred that David
is dead. Daniels does battle with an alien as the lander takes off and is
able to despatch it. The lander then returns to the Covenant and Lope is
placed in the medical unit. The next day, Daniels and Tennessee discover
Lope dead, killed by an alien that he had unknowingly nurtured. The
alien goes on to kill Ricks and Upworth but Daniels and Tennessee are
able to defeat it. As Daniels and Tennessee return to their sleep-pods
to continue the journey to Origae-6, Daniels realises too late that it is
David who they have brought back to the Covenant. As the others sleep,
he regurgitates two facehugger embryos he has smuggled on board and
carefully places them in cryopreservation.
Prometheus and Covenant explore themes that link not solely to
Alien but also to another of Scott’s early films, Blade Runner. Wey-
land’s quest for longevity, for instance, echoes that of the bio-­engineered
synthetic human Roy Batty in Blade Runner who also sets out to find
his creator and secure more life (Mulhall 2015, p. 226). In that film,
synthetic humans known as replicants are marketed as being ‘more
human than human’. As the plot of Blade Runner unfolds, this human-
ness is shown not simply to manifest in terms of physical resemblance
but also in terms of humanity, by way of emerging compassion and
tenderness and a capacity for artistic creativity. The exploration of the
nature of humanness that is prominent in Blade Runner is also key to
­Prometheus and Covenant in which the android David, like the repli-
cants, is shown to be capable of developing emotions. Although sup-
posedly incapable of feeling, it is clear David possesses an emotional
palette. In Covenant, he claims to have been in love with ­Elizabeth
Shaw. He shows pleasure and disappointment, frustration and loss.
He is also vain and arrogant.
20 Nicholas Chare et al.
One of David’s favourite films is Lawrence of Arabia (Dir. David Lean,
UK, 1962) in which Lawrence, as played by Peter O’Toole, is shown to
be highly egotistical. The android’s vanity, which manifests through him
repeatedly slicking his coif, seems influenced by O’Toole’s portrayal of
Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia also gives indications that Lawrence is
gay and possesses masochistic tendencies. 20 Lawrence’s sexuality as pre-
sented by O’Toole in the film is not inconsequential when explaining
David’s identification with him. There are a number of instances that
encourage a queer reading of the android.21 Covenant, for example, be-
gins with David meeting his creator, his self-professed father, Weyland,
for the first time. As the android is admiring Michelangelo’s David, he
is asked what his name is by Weyland and responds “David!” The sculp-
ture of David has often served as shorthand for homosexuality (Butt
2005, p. 61). 22 Later in Covenant, David will advise another android
Walter, his mirror-image, that ‘no one will ever love you like I do’ be-
fore tenderly kissing him. This kiss could be read as further evidence
of David’s narcissism yet the suggestive role of flute-playing in David’s
relationship with Walter indicates otherwise. 23
Shortly after kissing Walter, a kiss that formed the precursor to stab-
bing him in the neck, David will assault Daniels, seemingly set on raping
her, kissing her, and asking ‘Is that how it’s done?’ He is uncertain about
sexuality. Watching the bloody birth of an alien from Oram’s quivering
body, David smiles, a proud father, as the alien extricates itself from the
biologist’s chest. The smile, emerging as it does against the backdrop of
Oram’s death spasms, also implies a sadistic streak in the android. 24 In
this, his sadism, David is the inverse of O’Toole’s masochistic Lawrence.
David’s sadism carries through to his progeny which also seem to take
pleasure in the pain and fear of others. Creed (1993, p. 16) has previ-
ously emphasised the sadism of the monster in Alien (p. 16). The ori-
gins of this sadism are signalled in these earlier versions of the creature,
­David’s prototypes, which sometimes appear to pause before killing
their victims. In the scene in which the security team member Rosenthal
is killed, the alien watches her bathe before creeping up behind her and
attacking and killing her. It seems capable of taking voyeuristic pleasure.
David’s voyeurism was indicated in Prometheus when he was shown
spying on the unconscious of Shaw, on her dreams, as she was in hyper-
sleep. Voyeurism and sadism are connected (Mulvey 1975). 25 Charles
Socarides (1974) links voyeurism as a defence against sadism with fear
of fusion with the Mother, with fear of a loss of boundaries. He suggests
that the ‘paramount desire’ of the sadist is to have a woman be power-
less so that he [sic] can fulfil his basic aim which is ‘to gain control of
the fearful demonic mother’ (p. 194). 26 The monsters mimic David’s
voyeuristic comportment. In a sense, the android is their precursor. He
is the Ur-monster. Through David, as an embodiment of the male mon-
ster, Prometheus and Covenant can be read as speaking to us ‘about the
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 21
nature of masculinity and man’s ambiguous relationship with the realms
of woman, the animal and death, and the symbolic order of law, civilisa-
tion and language’ (Creed 2005, p. xix).
The vision of the future offered by Prometheus and Covenant appears
stubbornly patriarchal. The gender of the Engineers is never explored
but they seem to be masculine and their moniker may also imply that
they are men (engineering along with science, technology, and math-
ematics has traditionally, stereotypically been cast as a male profes-
sion). 27 Towards the end of Prometheus, David refers to the Engineer
that seeks to kill Shaw using a masculine pronoun. The feminist message
of Alien as embodied by the character of Ellen Ripley is also absent from
the prequels. Shaw and Daniels as Final Girls end up being manipulated
by David and therefore do not triumph over their adversaries in the way
Ripley does. In this context, a third woman also merits mention as being
offered as a possible successor to Ripley, Vickers. She is shown as tough
and uncompromising, killing Holloway to protect Prometheus from con-
tamination. Prometheus contrives a race between Shaw and Vickers for
the role of Final Girl. Both struggle to outrun the crash wreckage of a
spacecraft but Vickers is ultimately crushed by it. Shaw, who is left the
last woman standing, provides a softer vision of femininity than Vickers.
Like Ripley, she is tough but also tender. Vickers, as an embodiment
of female masculinity, is ultimately too hard to survive.28 In this way,
Scott rewrites the narrative of Alien so Ripley no longer comes out on
top. Vickers is punished for her masculinity by death, Daniels and Shaw
enjoy only hollow victories. Shaw will be subject to genetic experimen-
tation and, using a ruse, David will put Daniels to sleep. Through the
fates of these three women, Scott seems to be rewriting Ripley’s success
as failure, intent on reining in and containing the positive role model he
helped create.
The patriarchal ideology underpinning Prometheus and Covenant
manifests not solely through narrative and dialogue, but also by way of
mise-en-scène. The giant sculpted heads in Prometheus and Covenant,
for instance, appear to be of male countenances. In this, the culture of
the Engineers is seen to mirror that of Earth as it is presented in the film
in that it is a celebration of the masculine. In the opening to Covenant,
David is shown identifying various cultural artefacts visible in Weyland’s
countryside retreat, which are all produced by men. He recognises Piero
della Francesca’s The Nativity (c1470), which shows the Virgin Mary
kneeling in adoration before a newly born Christ, the child’s immaculate
conception prefiguring that of his own. He also notes a Carlo Bugatti
throne chair (c1900) and a Steinway piano. Additionally, as already
mentioned, he sees and names Michelangelo’s David (1501–1504), si-
multaneously styling himself after a sculpture that has been celebrated
as the epitome of male physical perfection. He fails to identify the Eileen
Grey E1027 side table that is beside the Bugatti chair. Female creativity is
22 Nicholas Chare et al.
clearly not, at that point, part of the knowledge gifted to David through
his programming or gleaned by way of his learning.
The objects on display in Weyland’s residence reflect what he val-
ues, providing a selective cultural history that privileges American and
­European achievements. The blond David, fashioned by Weyland, is
superficially figured as part of this cultural lineage. In fact, however,
David circulates as a complex Other in the film. This is, in part, because
he is uncanny. In Phallic Panic, Creed (2005, p. 11) foregrounds how
artificial life signifies ‘the fragility of the boundary between animate
and inanimate’. Freud lists dolls and automata as potentially frightening,
as familiar objects that come to unnerve become uncanny (ibid., p. 3).
David, in his not being android enough, in his being too similar to his
non-synthetic companions, causes anxiety. Jessica Balanzategui (2018,
p. 23), writing in the context of the child as uncanny, suggests that the
cognitive dissonance caused by oscillations between the familiar and
unfamiliar can cause a horror film’s spectators to become profound
unnerved. David is similarly at once a familiar (seen to be human in
appearance albeit known not to be) and a discomfiting stranger. This
strangeness manifests through his being frequently alienated, presented
at different times as Mother and othered through his class and, possibly,
by racial references.
Because of her focus on the feminine in her reading of Alien, Creed
does not engage with its problematic racial politics which coalesce in the
figure of the full-grown alien that terrorises the Nostromo. The alien
was not produced using Computer-generated imagery (CGI) but was a
man, Bolaji Badejo, in a latex suit. H.R. Giger suggest that the inspi-
ration for casting a tall, thin man as the monster was a photograph
by Leni Riefenstahl of her standing next to a Nuba man from North-
ern Africa. 29 In Giger’s (1989, p. 60) account, the photograph of the
‘huge Nubian’ only indicated that Scott wanted ‘a man of that size for
the Alien’. The decision to cast Badejo, a Nigerian, another man from
Africa, albeit Western Africa, as the monster cannot, however, be ig-
nored. In Prometheus and Covenant, the aliens are often the product of
CGI yet these digital xenomorphs are strangely familiar, intertextually
indissociable from Badejo’s earlier incarnation of the alien.30 David’s ra-
cial alterity is referred to in terms which imply ethnic difference. In Pro-
metheus, the archaeologist Holloway says to David at one point: ‘You,
boy, you’re coming with us!’ Referring to David as ‘boy’ echoes the kind
of derogatory language adopted by slave owners in the US to address
black adult males.
Casting David as a slave reinforces links with Scott’s Blade Runner
in which the replicant Roy Batty uses the term slave to describe those,
such as himself, who live in fear. Synthetic humans are cast in both
films as chattels. They form an underclass regarded as sub-human. Al-
though Weyland identifies David as his son, he treats him as his servant.
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 23
Weyland’s sadism manifests when he is invited by David to confront his
own mortality, and responds by ordering the android to pour him tea,
to perform the role of manservant, menial. Weyland asserts difference
and thereby distance from his purported kin.31 David is othered in this
moment in terms of class and, possibly, ethnicity. Like the alien in Alien,
as Other he serves as cover for the archaic Mother. The theme of moth-
erhood is explicitly referred to in relation to David when he leads Oram
into the egg cave he has built. As David stands to one side in the cave,
Oram asks the android what he is waiting for, to which he responds
“Mother!” Mother in this context is, on one level, Oram as it is he who
will ingest an alien organism and incubate it to term. In a sense, how-
ever, David is also waiting to fulfil the role of Mother himself, the eggs
are his, produced by him. David represents at once the male monster
and the monstrous-feminine, he is both castrated (he is decapitated by
an Engineer in Prometheus) and castrating (he cuts off his own arm in
Covenant).
The Engineers, giant pale-skinned bipeds, also serve as displaced ref-
erences to the archaic mother. They are the mysterious point of genesis,
a portrayal of the primordial abyss. Their castrating potential is evident
through one decapitating David. The biological weapons they create also
seem to embody ‘the fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body’
(Kristeva 1982, p. 54; cited in Creed 1993, p. 51). In Prometheus, Fifield
and Millburn are confronted by a snake-like creature which emerges
from some black ooze. The biologist identifies the entity as female. It
is a monstrous femme fatale. Enchanted by the organism, Millburn ap-
proaches it with mortal consequences. It attacks him, eventually breach-
ing his spacesuit and forcing its way down his throat. Here, like Kane
in Alien, Milburn becomes part of the primal scene, taking the place of
the mother, becoming the one who is penetrated (Creed 1993, p. 19).
Although serpents are traditionally phallic symbols, the head of this
creature bears some resemblance to a vulva. Covenant also includes a
womb-like chamber filled with eggs reminiscent of the one that appears
in Alien. There is therefore crossover between the three films in terms of
the archaic mother functioning as backdrop.
This dimension is, however, unconscious. Scott largely wants to erase
the Mother, to render the alien patrilineal, providing a backstory in
which the creature is designed by an android, David, who was engi-
neered by a man, Weyland. There are also important textural difference
between Alien and the prequels. Something of the vapourousness and
viscidity of the alien craft in Alien is absent from the tunnels and cham-
bers of the alien structure the crew explore in Prometheus. The alien
biological weapons are stored not in leathery eggs but in black canisters,
inorganic-looking cylinders. The alien universe is more ordered here,
more reasoned, even if it is still subject to seepage, to leaking. Similarly
on Planet Number 4, the alien civilisation builds its monuments out of
24 Nicholas Chare et al.
stone. The temple interior is rocky rather than slimy. The industrial pa-
tina of parts of the Nostromo, its dirt and grime, has also been replaced
by the clean, clinical-looking decks of the Prometheus and the Covenant.
We would suggest these differences are not insignificant. They are symp-
tomatic of efforts by Scott to gradually sanitise the universe he helped to
manufacture. He is paring the semiotic (in Kristeva’s sense of the term)
register of meaning, muffling affect and drive, excising the rhythms of
glisten and gloom at play in Alien (Chare 2012). If our reading here
focusses primarily on narrative and symbolism, this is because much of
semiotic richness of Alien is absent in the two prequels. It is as if the psy-
chic forces unintentionally revealed and released by Scott in Alien, the
monstrous power of the feminine so eloquently teased out by Creed in
her reading of the film, must now be suppressed. Scott opened Pandora’s
Box with Alien and seeks to close it with Prometheus and its sequel. As
Creed discusses in the interview she gives for this volume, the origin of
life narrative offered by Scott through the films is dull in its insistence on
creation as a masculine prerogative.
Scott’s efforts to disavow the monstrous-feminine, however, carry
considerable risk. The hazards of not confronting anxieties towards the
feminine manifest through the underlying theme of genocide in both
Prometheus and Covenant. In Prometheus when Fifield is confronted
by a pile of corpses of dead Engineers he remarks: ‘It’s like a scene out
of some sort of Holocaust painting!’ The sight is reminiscent of doc-
umentary film and photographs taken at liberation of piles of corpses
at concentration camps or of descriptions (Chare and Williams 2019,
pp. 151–152) of the interior of the gas chambers at Birkenau immedi-
ately after a gassing. Association with the Shoah is therefore encouraged
in the audience. One of the characters in Covenant, Rosenthal, is also
revealed to be Jewish. When she removes her shirt to bathe her face and
tend her injured arm, a gold Star of David on a neck chain that she has
been wearing becomes visible. In a part of this scene that was subse-
quently deleted, she was also portrayed reciting the Shema Yisrael. The
Shema is sometimes recited by Jews who believe they are about to die.
It was pronounced by Jews on occasion on the way to their deaths in
the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. David literally exterminates all
Indigenous animal life on Planet Number 4, his genocidal project com-
mencing with the carpet-bombing with bioweapons of the city complex
of the Engineers. This destructivity is symptomatic of fear of the Other,
of the psychic figure of the Mother and also all Others that this fear is
mapped onto.32
David not only enacts violence against the Other, he also functions as
a manifestation of Otherness in the film, forming its central monster. In
this, he is somewhat like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart
of Darkness. The character of Kurtz, as Hannah Arendt (1968, p. 189)
notes, may have been inspired by Carl Peters, the brutal Reichkommisar
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 25
of East Africa (others have suggested Léon Rom as a template). Arendt
observes that Peters engaged in ‘wild murdering’ (p. 185). She (p. 189)
also draws attention to Peters’ stated wish to cease being a pariah and
instead join a master race. David seems comparably motivated, seeking
to leave behind his pariah status as android by exterminating all hu-
mans, replacing them with a master race of aliens of his own creation.
For Arendt (p. 206), through the actions of men like Peters, ‘African
colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of
what was later to become the Nazi elite’. In Covenant, Scott transposes
colonialism to outer space revisiting the engagement with the psychic
underpinnings of Heart of Darkness he began in Alien.
Jacqueline Rose’s (1986) remarks on Kristeva’s discussion of Céline
are pertinent here. For Kristeva, through his writings, Céline (who com-
posed his own Heart of Darkness, Voyage au bout de la nuit [Journey
to the End of the Night] (1932)) exposes a psychic drama of pain and
violence that occurs between Mother and child in their early interac-
tions. In The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed demonstrates that Alien also
performs this function. The risk of not exposing this violence is, Rose
(1986, p. 155) explains, that it becomes ‘projected onto the other, and
then played out by culture at large’. For Rose, Céline’s writing ‘reveals
horror as a matter of power – the power of fascination when we are con-
fronted with the traces of our own psychic violence, the horror when that
same violence calls on social institutions for legitimation, and receives
it’ (p. 155). In contemporary politics, Donald Trump is exploiting such
horror, stoking fear of the Other, the ‘illegal alien’, to justify his border
wall. In the past, Hitler took advantage of this horror to support his ex-
termination of the Jews, figuring them as sub-human. Through art, film,
and literature, something of this horror can be shown and, perhaps,
purged. These cultural forms can therefore embody a political aesthetics
crafted to work against paranoid hatred of the Other through exposing
the psychic motivations undergirding such hatred and, possibly, purg-
ing them. Alien gestures towards such a catharsis but Prometheus and
Covenant refuse it. In the prequels, an arrested catharsis is manifest, the
films point towards psychic drama but on steadfastly symbolic terms.
The semiotic (in Kristeva’s sense of the term) as it registers in Alien by
way of the rhythms of the shadowy mise-en-scènes (the tone of the film)
and the noisy soundtrack is minimised in the later prequels.33 Creed’s
analysis of Alien in The Monstrous-Feminine cannot be duplicated in
the context of Prometheus and Covenant because both films seem de-
signed to neuter monstrosity. David masquerades as the archaic mother
but his engagement with the abject is neither compelling nor horrifying.
Further, and more tellingly, the film deprives the monstrous-feminine of
its subversive force, purging the abject of its boundary-troubling poten-
tial. Through their frustrated engagement with the feminine, the films
betray their hyper-conservative credentials.
26 Nicholas Chare et al.
Masquerade and the Monstrous-Feminine
Throughout The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed draws on the psychoana-
lytic concept of masquerade or disguise in order to explore the nature of
monstrosity. Joan Riviere, was the first to propose that because feminin-
ity, particularly excessive displays of femininity, is a construct it can be
viewed as a form of masquerade. ‘Womanliness therefore could be as-
sumed and worn as a mask’ (1929, p. 306). Mary Ann Doane extended
Riviere’s theory to propose that masquerade is particularly significant in
relation to the female spectator:

The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manu-

facture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within
which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the
woman.
(1982, p. 87)

More recently queer theorists have argued that forms of masquerade

exist, such as cross dressing, which potentially undermine essentialist
notions of gender. We believe that masquerade offers an important the-
oretical perspective with which to think through the enduring power of
the monstrous-feminine in films and works of art, past and present. It is
even more relevant to contemporary horror films and artworks in an era
in which gender is constantly being questioned. Creed argues that in hor-
ror masquerade undermines essentialist notions of gender in that wom-
an’s gender identity is never stable; rather it oscillates from one troubling
signifier to another. The ‘visually horrifying aspects’ of the monstrous-­
feminine ‘are offset through the display of woman as a reassuring and
pleasurable sign’ (Creed 1993, pp. 23–24). In her analysis of the different
faces of the monstrous-feminine, she draws attention to the way in which
the female protagonists disguise their monstrous identities. Feminine
masquerade is generally viewed in two main ways: as the adoption of a
feminine appearance signifying a capitulation to patriarchal dictates or
as an empowering disguise, perhaps the assumption of masculine dress
and codes of behaviour to permit greater freedom. As various theorists
have noted, masquerade offers, as proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, the op-
portunity for freedom. In the horror film, masquerade is aligned with ab-
jection. Given that the abject emerges through the erosion of boundaries,
the horror film plays on this erosion in relation to gender identity.
The monstrous-feminine disguises her abject identity with a display
of acceptable femininity, as in Carrie, where during the Prom sequence
Carrie attempts to cover over her monstrous powers and what she sees
as her abject femininity with a display of appealing femininity befit-
ting the newly crowned Prom Queen. Once the masquerade is broken,
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 27
Carrie tests her new freedom and lashes out, destroying all before her
in an apocalyptic scenario of death and destruction. In The Exorcist,
Regan dispels all illusions regarding her seemingly sweet feminine na-
ture, performing a display of hyper aggressive ‘masculinity’, particularly
when she speaks in the so-called ‘devil’s voice’. Teeth offers a fascinat-
ing display of feminine masquerade in that the heroine’s public purity
(she leads a chastity group) masks the threat of castration posed by her
deadly vagina dentata of which she herself is unaware. The horror film
also plays with male masquerade as in Silence of the Lambs (1991) and
Dressed to Kill (1980). In Psycho (1960), extreme horror is evoked when
‘Norman, masquerading as Mother’, previously seen through the up-
stairs window as a frail invalid, bursts into the bathroom in a scenario
filled with ‘shrill bird-like sounds signalling the presence of the beaked
mother’ (pp. 146–147).
A male monster such as Norman Bates enacts his masquerade not so
much in relation to the abject but more in the context of the uncanny.
In Phallic Panic, Creed draws on Terry Castle’s argument concerning
masquerade. ‘Castle argues that one of the hallmarks of the uncanny
is “masquerade and sexual impersonation”’ (Creed 2005, p. 19). For
Creed, it is the male monster’s feminine aspects which render him both
familiar and unfamiliar.

In particular, the ambivalence underlies the male monster’s un-

canny alignment with death, the animal and the maternal body-
­uncanny because the male symbolic order designates these areas as
‘other’, a being outside the realm of what constitutes proper phallic
masculinity.
(Creed 2005, p. viii)

Norman is both himself and his mother, man and woman, castrated and
castrating, human and animal. In this way the male monster is aligned
with the monstrous-feminine – and the primal uncanny. Both threaten
the fragile nature of the symbolic order.
Masquerade, we argue, is central to an understanding of the appeal
of the monstrous-feminine. This is particularly true of contemporary
films. Whereas in the actual world, as Joan Riviere argues women may
adopt a masquerade of ultra-femininity to hide their masculine desires,
and win male approval, in the horror film Creed argues masquerade
becomes a means of covering over those abject things that the male psy-
che fears most about woman: her power to incorporate, castrate, and
destroy and her alignment with the animal. Masquerade is an import-
ant feature of contemporary horror. It is this oscillation between proper
and monstrous femininity that Teeth, with which we opened this essay,
explores. Creed uses theories of masquerade to undermine essentialist
28 Nicholas Chare et al.
notions of castration, notions which have haunted psychoanalysis from
its inception. She asks:

Is woman castrated or does she castrate? Does she use one persona
to disguise her hidden and deadly face? What lies behind the veil?
(135)

In another contemporary film that explores the power of masquerade,

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, USA,
2014), directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, the monstrous-feminine is a vigi-
lante vampire who disguises her identity behind a hijab veil as she stalks
those she deem to be evil. She adopts a masquerade of piety to allay the
fears of her potential victims. Her persona moves into a terrifying state of
disguise, an indeterminacy which is irresolvable. As ‘woman’s nature is
represented as deceptive and unknowable’ in patriarchal ideology (Creed
1993, p. 136), she must constantly reassure through masquerade and de-
ception. ‘She may appear pure and beautiful on the outside but evil may,
nevertheless, reside within’ – a dominant misogynistic fear (Creed 1993,
p. 42). It is when she tears the veil and drops her disguise, Creed argues,
that abjection exerts its ambiguous appeal. The monstrous-­feminine is
compelling yet terrifying. Amirpour’s film is also significant to any dis-
cussion of the continuing appeal of the monstrous-feminine as more and
more women are directing horror films, as well as creating artworks,
that explore her significance – as confirmed by many of the essays in this
volume.

The Monstrous-Feminine: Past and Present

The chapters that follow either engage directly with ideas articulated
in The Monstrous-Feminine or with the feminist intellectual ferment
out of which they emerged. Many can be seen as adding to recent im-
portant scholarship regarding gender and/or motherhood in horror films
(­A rnold 2013; Grant 2015; Harrington 2016; Schneider 2004). This
book is divided into four sections, each with a short introduction that
provides an overview of the section as a whole and also of the individual
essays it contains. The first section, ‘Feminism and Psychoanalysis’, of-
fers insight into the socio-historical and political context underpinning
The Monstrous-Feminine, including the Women’s Liberation Movement
of the 1960s and 1970s and developments in film studies in the late
1970s and early 1980s. The second section, ‘Expanding the Monstrous-­
Feminine’, includes essays that take interpretations Creed develops in
The Monstrous-Feminine as the starting point for new readings of clas-
sic horror films. The third section, ‘Reproductive and Post-Reproductive
Bodies and the Monstrous-Feminine’ explores themes including ageing,
dementia, and reproductive bodies as they are depicted in contemporary
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 29
visual cultures and also considers the role of art, film, and television as
modes of resistance to restrictive ideologies. The final section, ‘Rethink-
ing the Monstrous-Feminine through a Transnational Frame’, examines
artworks and films from different cultural and geographic contexts that
take up the theme of the monstrous-feminine.

Notes
1 Creed continues her critical engagement with Freud in Phallic Panic where
she offers a highly insightful reading of the case history of ‘The Wolf Man’,
which he published in 1918 as ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’.
2 Our emphasis.
3 A notable exception is Katherine Goodnow. See Goodnow’s (2010) Kristeva
in Focus. Kaja Silverman (1988) also makes extensive and sophisticated use
of Kristeva’s ideas in The Acoustic Mirror, see Chapter 4 in particular. See
also Nicholas Chare and Elizabeth Watkins (2013).
4 For a discussion of the importance of the border in contemporary theory
and pedagogy, see Audrey Yue (2010, pp. 115–117). Creed (2003) explores
the role of boundaries or markers in contemporary media cultures in Media
Matrix.
5 Emphases in the original. All emphases in the original unless otherwise
stated.
6 The choice of Céline as the main exemplar of abjection in literature has not
been without controversy because of the writer’s notorious antisemitism. For
a discussion of this issue, see Chapter 1 ‘Execrable Speech’ in Chare’s (2011)
Auschwitz and Afterimages. See also Kristeva (2010, pp. 160–161).
7 Elsewhere, in an essay co-authored with Jeanette Hoorn, Creed explores
how avant-garde art can fulfil this cathartic function (Creed and Hoorn
2016, pp. 90–104).
8 Kristeva (1979, p. 44) signposted such a possibility in her essay ‘Ellipsis on
Dread and the Specular Seduction’ when she suggested that The Birds (Dir.
Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1963) and Psycho (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA,
1960) now offer catharsis instead of Oedipus, Electra or Orestes.
9 The vagina here, of course, like the phallus, is a symbol and not be confused
with the anatomical vagina.
10 Powell’s own Deleuzian-inspired readings bring a critical vocabulary to bear
on film experience and therefore, arguably, also allegorise it. Visceral re-
sponses becoming, for example, emblematic of intensity or of affect.
11 For efforts to link Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic ideas to the study of
film, see Chare’s (2013) essay ‘Encountering Blue Steel’ and Chare’s (2015,
pp. 157–182) Sportswomen in Cinema.
12 For a film analysis inspired by Klein’s idea of ‘memories in feelings’ and by
Ruth Riesenberg Malcolm’s understanding of transference, see Chare (2017)
‘Once More with Feeling: Re-investigating the Smuttynose Island Murders’.
13 For further discussion of asignification, see Simon O’ Sullivan’s (2006,
pp. 70–71) Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari.
14 The lobster has been read by Fèlix Fanés as evoking ‘the goddess born
from the foam when the genitals of the castrated Uranus fell on the waves’
(­Venturi 2019, p. 270).
15 Simon Carr, ‘Wallis Simpson: The Agony and the Ecstasy’, The Indepen-
dent, Monday 1 July 2002.
16 Alien: Covenant will henceforth simply be referred to as Covenant.
30 Nicholas Chare et al.
17 The drawings in the film were created by Dane Hallett and Matt Hatton. They
were purportedly influenced by Giger’s earlier creations for the Alien franchise
and by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (Ward 2017,
p. 138). Rembrandt produced few works that have survived of fauna although
there are three versions of a shell, Het schelpje, produced in 1650. Rembrandt’s
shell is depicted side-on. David frequently favours sketching specimens from
above. This may be symptomatic of a will to mastery on his part.
18 In the spirit of the monstrous-feminine, we offer femmage rather than hom-
age here. Femmage here meaning an act of honouring. Miriam Schapiro
coined this term in the context of the history of art to acknowledge neglected
traditions of women’s art making (Broude 1982).
19 Early in the film in an archaeological dig on the Isle of Skye, parietal art
dated to 35,000 BCE or earlier is discovered. Around 40,000 years ago
Neanderthals may have inhabited what is now known as Scotland and this
would have to be an example of their visual culture. For much of the Up-
per Paleolithic period, the region was uninhabitable due to the Last Gla-
cial Maximum. Currently the only known parietal art in the UK, engraved
rather than painted, is located at Creswell Crags (Bahn and Pettitt 2009).
20 Lawrence of Arabia’s sexuality has been the subject of much historical spec-
ulation. He was clearly open-minded about homosexuality, if not gay him-
self, this at a time when sexual acts between men were illegal in the UK.
Sexual acts between two consenting men in private were only legalised in
England and Wales in 1967. Christian Destremau (2014, p. 454) has recently
argued that Lawrence of Arabia was not a sexual person.
21 Queer here is understood as referring to a mode of being that unsettles het-
eronormativity. For a discussion of queer as a term, see Yue (2012, p. 4).
22 Here Weyland’s possession of the statue may, of course, equally hint at his
own sexuality.
23 The phallic symbolism of flutes is commonly remarked. David makes refer-
ence to the Montague Rhodes James ghost story ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come
to You, My Lad’ when he says to Walter ‘Whistle and I’ll come’. The story
which centres on a mysterious, ancient whistle has been interpreted as artic-
ulating fear of homosexuality (Fielding 2000; Richardson 1959).
24 In this, he shares affinities with Weyland, yet Weyland’s sadism did not seem
to be tinged with erotic pleasure.
25 For a discussion of sadism as it intersects with the gaze, see Chare and
­Williams (2019, pp. 51–57).
26 Socarides does not countenance the existence of female sadists.
27 Stephen Mulhall (2015, p. 232) suggests that, in Prometheus, ‘every En-
gineer we see (alive or dead, in the flesh, fossilized or depicted) looks not
only humanoid but male’. For Mulhall, sexual difference is unknown to the
Engineers. The varied anatomies of the Engineer corpses in Alien Covenant,
however, do imply the potential for sexual difference. For a discussion of
engineering as a male dominated profession, see Hacker (1990).
28 Vickers is openly dismissive of the paternal. Shaw is shown to mourn her
father, an anthropologist killed by Ebola, whereas Vickers’ response to the
death of her father, Weyland, is indifference.
29 For a discussion of Riefenstahl’s fascist politics as they manifest in her
films and photography, see Chapter 4 of Chare’s (2015) Sportswomen in
Cinema.
30 Sometimes the alien is still a person in a suit as occurs, at times, in Covenant.
31 For a succinct analysis of distancing and Otherness, see Burke (2001,
p. 126).
 Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine 31
32 As part of his lengthy meditation on histories of genocide and motivations
for genocide, Adam Jones (2017, p. 120) discusses how ‘solidarity may co-
alesce around a dominant ethnicity within [a] society, prompting the anath-
ematizing of Other-identified minorities’. This anathematising sometimes
contributes to the emergence of genocidal policies and actions.
33 Kristeva (1979, p. 45) discusses colour, ‘malleable mass’ and sound as semi-
otic materials in cinema.

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Part I

Introduction
Feminism and Psychoanalysis
Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn,
and Audrey Yue

In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Elizabeth Cowie (2011, p. 159)

observes that ‘[t]o remember is to bring back to the present something
of the past, but it is also to engage the pastness of the event and its
meanings and emotions’. The three essays in this section display both
these aspects of remembrance, reviving something of the excitement
and originality of intellectual enquiry that characterised the historical
and political moment from which The Monstrous-Feminine emerged
while also acknowledging today’s changed times and linked but specific
challenges. The three essays, by some of the pioneers of feminist film
theory, Elizabeth Cowie, Annette Kuhn, and Laura Mulvey, each look
back appreciatively to critical approaches to the study of culture fostered
and honed during second-wave feminism. As is clear from all the essays,
second-wave feminism as it was taken up within film-making and film
studies provided an invaluable means of identifying and reflecting on
structures of sexual difference, power, and representation.
The section begins with an interview with Laura Mulvey, ‘Symme-
try and Incident’, in which she reflects on themes including her style
of writing, her film-making, and the importance of The Monstrous-­
Feminine to her own thinking. The interview’s title is taken from the
title of an essay by one of Mulvey’s ancestors, Alice Meynell. Meynell’s
(1897, p. 82) essay is a meditation on European and Japanese aesthetics,
a thoughtful exploration of difference, one that is judgemental yet also
knowing of its limitations: ‘[Japanese] beauty is remote from our sym-
pathy and admiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in
pictorial presentation’. Meynell ultimately celebrates Greek ‘symmetry’
over Japanese ‘incident’, yet it is possible to find inspiration in her will-
ingness to acknowledge another culture’s perspective. She is attentive to
how ways of seeing are varied, embodying cultural specificities. Mulvey
perceives no direct legacy between her writing and Meynell’s but rather
an affinity in terms of both women favouring the essay format to ex-
press their ideas. For Mulvey, the essay provides an important space for
women to articulate their thoughts from within a patriarchal culture.
Judy Maloof (2000, p. 247) has noted in the context of Latin American
36 Nicholas Chare et al.
women writers, that ‘[c]ertain characteristics of the essay as a form – its
flexibility, exploratory nature and subjective tone – have made it partic-
ularly attractive to women’. For Mulvey, similarly, the less rigid conven-
tions of the essay render it a powerful medium of intellectual expression.
Mulvey (2007) herself briefly discusses Japanese art as part of an es-
say exploring works by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. The essay centres
upon Wall’s 1993 artwork A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)
which was inspired by Katshusika Hokusai’s woodcut Travellers caught
in a Sudden Breeze at Ejiri (c1832). In both these works, a sudden inci-
dent is rendered by way of a process of composition that is its antithesis:
gradual, carefully deliberated, and studious. As part of her discussion
of Hokusai, Mulvey (2007, p. 36) draws attention to the influence of
modernity upon the artist, not solely in terms of his subject matter but
also in relation to the process of production of his artworks. Techno-
logical changes in the nineteenth century transformed Japanese artists
such as Hokusai into purveyors of mass-marketable commodities. Wall’s
work is also made possible by technological change, the advent of digital
imaging processes that enable him to collage images and create a com-
position which, as Mulvey puts it, ‘fuses the old and the new through a
conjuring up of a collective memory of the photographic aesthetic, not
by a means of indexical inscription, but by its representation’ (p. 33). For
Mulvey, Wall’s works also speaks to her of the impact of technological
change on cinema. She observes that the arrival of the digital era led to a
‘blurring of boundaries between a collective, historic experience of film
as movement and its new, improbable mutation into stillness’ (p. 33).
Mulvey (2006) analyses the ways in which digital technology has trans-
formed the reception of film in Death 24x a Second. The transforma-
tion, however, as she makes clear in the interview, has also registered in
her film-making. One of her remixes, one of her films that use footage
from earlier films in novel ways, influenced her thinking on new modes
of spectatorship in Death 24x a Second. A short film, here, forming a
crucial mode of analysis in its own right rather than merely something
to be subject to analysis.
Mulvey moves on from a discussion of film-making to offer an ex-
tended consideration of the importance of Creed’s work for her own
thinking. The essay ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine’ (Creed 1986)
introduced Mulvey to Kristeva’s thinking on abjection and was a touch-
stone for her renewed interest in psychoanalytically informed readings
of images of women in art and film. Mulvey describes how she devel-
oped a fresh understanding of the female body in which Woman func-
tions in the patriarchal imagination not solely as spectacle but also as a
figure ‘divided between exterior and interior’. This new understanding
features prominently in Part 2, ‘Dialectics of Division’, of Fetishism and
Curiosity (Mulvey 1996). It is there that Mulvey offers her inspirational
reading of Pandora as a prototype for the ‘exquisite female android’ and
 Feminism and Psychoanalysis 37
the ‘femme fatale’, both iconographies that ‘depend on an inside/out-
side topography’ (p. 55). Pandora’s story installs her ‘as a mythic origin
of the surface/secret and interior/exterior topography’ (p. 55). As she
explain in the interview, Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine led
Mulvey to reflect on the split in the depiction of some women ‘between
an alluring, cosmetic surface and an abject, concealed but threatening,
interior’. In Fetishism and Curiosity, this split is explored most notably
in Mulvey’s reading of the art of Cindy Sherman where she suggests
that ‘Creed’s argument that abjection is central to the recurring image
of the “monstrous feminine” in horror movies is also applicable to the
monstrous in Sherman’ (p. 74). Mulvey concludes the interview with a
consideration of Phallic Panic (Creed 2005) and its exploration of devi-
ant masculinity.
In Fetishism and Curiosity, Mulvey also discusses the importance of
Joan Riviere’s conception of ‘womanliness as masquerade’ for the study
of cinema. She notes of ‘films which acknowledge, self-consciously, an
awareness of femininity as masquerade [that they] create “a distancia-
tion effect” so that different facets of performance (the social, the spec-
tacular and the narrative) are made visible’ (p. 30). The next essay in
this section, Annette Kuhn’s ‘A Dream of Bare Arms’, takes Riviere’s
essay ‘Womanliness as masquerade’ as its starting point. ‘Womanliness
as masquerade’ was first published in 1929 yet would become the sub-
ject of important feminist debates in the 1970s and 1980s. As Kuhn
explains,

with the rise of second-wave feminism, the idea of femininity as a

masquerade or performance was enthusiastically taken up within
an emergent strand of feminist film criticism interested in mining
psychoanalytic thinking on sexual difference for insights on the re-
lationship between women, femininity, films and cinema.

In ‘A Dream of Bare Arms’, Kuhn revisits Riviere’s essay from a fresh

perspective, beginning with a consideration of the figure of Riviere her-
self and her own potential acts of masquerade. Through exquisite close
readings, Kuhn attends to descriptions of Riviere by men and women
who knew her in a way comparable to that of an analyst listening to
their patient. She is careful to register the potential psychic significance
of particular emphases and details, on the lookout for screen memories,
for apparently insignificant content that conceals unconscious phanta-
sies. Processes of screening are explored through writings, paintings,
and photography. Kuhn moves on from writings referring to Riviere to
analyses of Édouard Manet’s painting Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)
and the photographic collaborations and literary outputs of Hannah
Cullwick and Arthur Joseph Munby. In Manet’s Bar, Kuhn discusses the
significance of the barmaid’s uncovered arms, initially depicted folded
38 Nicholas Chare et al.
then overpainted in their current position leaning against the bar’s mar-
ble counter. The arms would have been registered as sexual by a bour-
geois spectator in nineteenth-century Paris, serving as a metonym for
nakedness, but this sexual charge passes unremarked today (Pollock
1996). Comparably, in the eighteenth century, as Carolyn Steedman
(2007, p. 45) remarks, ‘[t]he hand mattered in ways that have now dis-
appeared from our own erotic registers’ and the display of a well-toned
arm and a heaving bosom during labours such as spinning may well
have held allure. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bourgeois
culture, women were expected to wear gloves. The exposed forearms
and tell-tale hands of the barmaid in Manet’s Bar therefore betray her
class, this despite the bourgeois veneer she perfects by way of her dress,
jewellery, and coiffure. Manet has painted a gold bangle on the wom-
an’s right forearm, the auriferous ornament rhyming with the foil of
the champagne bottles, encouraging a sense of equivalence between the
woman and the other wares on display yet also, crucially, drawing the
eye of any customer (and, by extension, any spectator) to the fleshy sub-
stantiality of the arm, its circumference and colour.
The barmaid’s bangle serves a function akin to that of the leather
strap around Hannah Cullwick’s right wrist which is visibly prominent
in many of the photographs that Cullwick and Munby staged together.
These were mainly produced in the studios of cheap trade photogra-
phers (Dawkins 1987, p. 171). Cullwick, Munby’s servant, entered into
a clandestine relationship with the bureaucrat and would subsequently
marry him although the formalising of their union also appears to have
led to their quasi-permanent separation. As Kuhn explains, Munby had
a penchant for seeing working women ‘in their dirt’. To this end, he
collected photographs of pit girls and servants. The photographs of Cull-
wick, which form part of this collection, are varied in theme, sometimes
showing her dressed as a lady and sometimes as a servant (these con-
trasting images, Kuhn notes, were often juxtaposed). In those of her as a
servant, the ‘dirty pictures’, she is shown at work polishing, scrubbing,
sweeping. It is in these images, arms bare, that the wrist band is visible,
a black strap conspicuous against white flesh, enticing the eye. In these
pictures, like Manet’s Bar, arms are an index of class and a source of
erotic interest. Hands too are often a key focus. Lynda Nead (2018,
p. 653) finds a close-up of Cullwick’s hands, ‘cut off from the rest of her
body and displayed like specimens, with callouses and dirt caught by
the recording process’ to be ‘one of the most extraordinary images of
Victorian class and gender’.
In a sophisticated reading, Kuhn describes all the photographs by
Cullwick and Munby as forms of performance rather than mere docu-
mentation. The couple seemingly explored dominance and submission
through their photographs and writings, their collaborations signalling
a complex power dynamic in which they clearly switched roles. At least
 Feminism and Psychoanalysis 39
two of the photographs of Cullwick in the role of servant are crafted to
showcase her biceps, the size of which (measured at 13 and a half inches)
was plainly of note (Mavor 1995, p. 73). In the first she stands slightly
at an angle rather than head-on, her right hand loosely gripping what
may be a mop or broom. With her left hand she is rolling up the sleeve
of her blouse, revealing her right bicep which was hitherto veiled by the
fabric. The photograph represents something akin to a strip-tease yet
without the need for disrobing. In the second, she is seated, ‘her right fist
pushing out the muscles of her left arm’ (Dawkins 1987, p. 183). Munby
also delighted in being lifted up by Cullwick, in her shows of strength
(Atkinson 2003). His desires seem, in part, akin to those of the contem-
porary muscle worshipper although, as Pierre Samuel’s (2000) examines
through the works of literary figures such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and
Émile Zola, bourgeois male erotic fascination with working-class female
muscularity has a long history.
The photographs by Cullwick and Munby often seem to turn on class
as masquerade, the pairing of Cullwick ‘passing’ as a lady with Cullwick
performing as a scullery maid, the index of transformation, clearly key
to the couple’s fantasy role-playing. Class, Kuhn suggests, is also key
to Riviere’s conception of masquerade. Turning to a dream featuring
bare arms recounted by one of Riviere’s patients, Kuhn subtly teases out
how, through her interpretation, the analyst seeks to screen her own her
dirty thoughts. As Patrick Boucheron (2013, p. 38, our translation) has
noted, ‘words sometimes cover over as surely as cloths or overpainting
that which we do not wish to see’. Although Kuhn’s focus is not the ab-
ject, there are clear points of connection with the monstrous-feminine
in terms of discourses of the clean and proper, the pure and virtuous,
as against the unclean, the improper and the repellent. Masquerade, as
we discuss in our Introduction to this volume, is also crucial to Creed’s
thinking although her conception of it differs from Riviere’s. For Riv-
iere, women may adopt exaggerated forms of behaviour culturally coded
as feminine as a means to offset qualities deigned masculine and garner
male approval whereas for Creed, masquerade forms a means by which
to veil abject qualities feared by the male psyche.
In the final essay in this section, ‘Feminism, Film, and Theory Now’,
Elizabeth Cowie centres a series of reflections on film, feminism, femi-
ninity, and subjectivity around the question of horror. Cowie combines
ideas from philosophy and psychoanalysis, demonstrating the produc-
tive potential of dialoguing across these fields of knowledge. The es-
say offers in microcosm something of Cowie’s own development as a
thinker with the use of psychoanalysis in works such as Representing
the Woman (1997) now increasingly supplemented by ideas from philos-
ophers including Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Bernard Stiegler,
among others. Cowie’s engagement with Stiegler is motivated by a need
to address the impact of technological change upon the fantasy-life of
40 Nicholas Chare et al.
the self. For Stiegler, as Marcel Swiboda summarises succinctly, technol-
ogy is not something that defines the human after the fact but ‘a defining
quality through which the human thinks and becomes’ (Swiboda 2012,
p. 116). Understanding contemporary subjectivity therefore necessitates
attending to technology’s role in its fashioning. Like Mulvey, Cowie’s
thinking has increasingly sought to address the complexities of the con-
temporary viewing subject through exploring the effects of technologi-
cal innovations upon that subject, including their reception of film.
For Cowie, feminism ‘is a politics of sexual difference’. This politics
revolves around issues of sayability and visibility, around what can be
said and seen in a given socio-historical context. It is therefore, in signif-
icant part, an aesthetic project. For this reason, Rancière has become an
increasingly important interlocutor. For Mulvey (2018, p. 87), Cowie’s
turn to Rancière with his ‘demand that the invisible should be made
visible and the unsayable […] be spoken’ is one that evokes ‘aspects of
1970s feminist political aesthetics that demanded an end to women’s si-
lences, the invisibility of their everyday lives and their exclusion from the
Symbolic order’. Rancière provides a crucial vocabulary for apprehend-
ing and describing the ‘unincluded’ (Cowie 2015, p. 49). It is necessary
here to refer to the ‘unincluded’ rather than the excluded, as exclusion
already presumes recognition and rejection. It therefore already implies
a kind of visibility even if that visibility is registered through turning
away or ignoring. In this sense, the ‘unincluded’ is never the abject. The
abject is indisputable, it shows itself, it can be known, perceived, but is
expelled and repressed. Here there is therefore a measure of difference
with Creed’s project and the monstrous-feminine although Cowie de-
rives inspiration from Creed’s capacity to explore the politics of sexual
difference and its representation as it manifests in horror films.
Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s thinking, horror, for Cowie, is a phe-
nomenon that registers the precariousness of human identity. In this
sense, there is crossover with the monstrous-feminine as an embodiment
of the horrific in that encounters with the monstrous-feminine neces-
sitate a skirting of the dissolution of those boundaries that guarantee
the self. A comparable confrontation with identity’s precariousness is in-
volved. For Cowie, horror as experience is profoundly affective and also
­empathic (rather than sympathetic). To be horrified in an encounter with
film or art or another medium of imaging is to identify with another’s
anxiety, to share their feelings. This other is not known, not possessed,
but felt. Representation as a practice of coding requires knowledge of its
subject. The affective dimension to horror is therefore beyond represen-
tation, existing alongside the represented but not subsumed by it. Cowie
employs the language of trauma to describe this unknown felt. The trau-
matic is often conceived as the unsymbolisable. For Cowie, therefore, the
‘unique role of the horror film […] is not its symbolizations as such, but
its enjoining the spectator to symbolize’.
 Feminism and Psychoanalysis 41
Cowie builds on her 2003 essay on the horror film Eyes without a
Face (Dir. George Franju, France, 1960) in which she analyses anxi-
ety to consider a different register of horror that of ‘ravage’. Ravage, as
Cowie explains, is a term Lacan associates with feminine jouissance,
with feminine pleasure, and which he links to the death drive. Through
compelling analyses of the figure of the monstrous woman in In the
Realm of the Senses (Dir. Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1976) and Trouble
Every Day (Dir. Claire Denis, France, 2001), she mulls over whether or
not they can be considered feminist horror films. This feminist dimen-
sion emerges by way of the affective engagement each film encourages. It
is an engagement which elicits an encounter with sexual difference in the
viewer, an encounter which moves beyond what is currently knowable
or sayable regarding sexual difference. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s idea
of the sinthome [the symptom, Man the Saint, artificial man] to argue
that ‘what we name as our sexual difference is itself a sinthome’, Cowie
postulates sexual difference as a ‘not’, as a phenomenon not bound by
the Symbolic but existing outside of it. Through encounters with sexual
difference, a gap is opened within the factual known of everyday life, a
gap that demands ‘a thinking otherwise and anew’ (Cowie 2015, p. 49).
In this sense, Cowie, like Creed, foregrounds how horror films often per-
form important psychic work for the viewer, work which has potentially
vital political implications. Cowie’s essay, along with those of Kuhn and
Mulvey, signals the ongoing importance of thinking about and through
feminist theory in relation to the visual.

References
Atkinson, D. (2003) Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and
­Hannah Cullwick. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boucheron, P. (2013) Conjurer la peur: Essai sur la force politique des images.
Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Cowie, E. (1997) Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis.
­M inneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cowie, E. (2003) ‘The Lived Nightmare: Trauma, Anxiety, and the Ethical
Aesthetics of Horror,’ in S. Schneider & D. Shaw (Eds.), Dark Thoughts:
Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror. Lanham: Scarecrow Press,
pp. 25–46.
Cowie, E. (2011) Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Cowie, E. (2015) ‘The Difference in Figuring Women Now,’ Moving Image
­Review and Art Journal 4(1&2), pp. 46–60.
Creed, B. (1986) ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary
­Abjection,’ Screen 27(1), pp. 44–70.
Creed, B. (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny.
­Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Dawkins, H. (1987) ‘The Diaries and Photographs of Hannah Cullwick,’ Art
History 10(2), pp. 154–187.
42 Nicholas Chare et al.
Malouf, J. (2000) ‘Recovering and Discovering another Perspective: Recent
Books on Latin American Women Writers,’ Latin American Research Review
35(1), pp. 243–255.
Mavor, C. (1995) Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in
­Victorian Photographs. Durham: Duke University Press.
Meynell, A. (1897) ‘Symmetry and Incident,’ in A. Meynell (Ed.), The Colour
of Life and Other Essays of Things Seen and Heard. London: John Lane,
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Press.
Mulvey, L. (2006) Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.
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Mulvey, L. (2007) ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai): from After to
­B efore the Photograph,’ Oxford Art Journal 30(1), pp. 27–37.
Mulvey, L. (2018) ‘Afterword: Some Reflections on the Engagement of Femi-
nism with Film from the 1970s to the Present Day,’ Moving Image Review
and Art Journal 7(1), pp. 83–90.
Nead, L. (2018) ‘The Extraordinary Archive of Arthur J. Munby: Photograph-
ing Class and Gender in the Nineteenth Century,’ Victorian Studies 60(4),
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Pollock, G. (1996) ‘The “View from Elsewhere”: Extracts from a Semi-­public
Correspondence about the Visibility of Desire,’ in B.R. Collins (Ed.), 12
Views of Manet’s Bar. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 278–314.
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Steedman, C. (2007) Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English
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­Orthographic Temporal Objects in the Philosophy of Bernard Stiegler,’ New
Formations 77, pp. 111–126.
2 Symmetry and Incident
Laura Mulvey in Conversation
with Nicholas Chare
Laura Mulvey

Nicholas Chare: I first studied your work in depth for a course at the
University of Leeds, entitled ‘Reading Laura Mulvey,’ that was run by
Griselda Pollock.1 I’d like to begin by asking you what it is like writing
as Laura Mulvey? In Visual and Other Pleasures, you discuss the role
of language in feminist film analysis, drawing attention to the need to
find an adequate and appropriate conceptual vocabulary as a means to
articulate the influence of patriarchy upon film form. In the Introduction
to that volume, you describe how structuralism and semiotics permitted
a previously invisible world in images to be ‘materialised with the lan-
guage that could name its objects, like the appearance of invisible ink
in front of a flame’ (Mulvey 1989, p. xiii). You clearly reflect carefully
on how words relate to images. Do you think your approach to writing,
including your style of writing, has changed over the years in parallel
with changing emphases and approaches to images in your research?
You’ve also called yourself an essayist, therefore expressing a preference
for shorter pieces of writing. What do you perceive to be the benefits of
the essay form for yourself as a film scholar?
Laura Mulvey: Various events in 2015 marking the fortieth anniver-
sary of the 1975 publication of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
brought me back yet again to some of these questions about writing
and style. In the Introduction to Visual and Other Pleasures (­Mulvey
1989) that you refer to, I reminisced about the particular difficulties
that I had with writing during my time at school and university. As
I was a precocious, intellectual child/young woman who benefited
from a family with a strong tradition of intellectual women as well
as a very privileged education, this was specifically a difficulty with,
even perhaps, in retrospect, a resistance to writing and self-expression.
When I joined the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s,
I found new ways of thinking that were enormously exciting; and fem-
inist ideas, as drawn for instance from psychoanalytic theory, did have
the illuminating effect you mention above. It was in this polemical
and feminist context that I saw some point in trying to put ideas into
words, as though, at last, I had found something to say. This exhil-
arating new experience might have influenced the imagistic kind of
44 Laura Mulvey
style I think you’re referring to and that I invested a lot of thought and
imagination into at the time. Since then, now I come to think about
it, ‘writing as Laura Mulvey’ has changed. I’ve tried to simplify my
style and tend to edit out any too obvious flourishes, which is part of
a search for an economical form of expression that’s part, in turn, of
a commitment to writing about ideas and theory directly and ‘unaca-
demically’. I’m not at all sure if this has always been successful but it’s
a continuing aspiration.
You are right that I have fallen instinctively into an essay form. I have
always seemed to work better with ideas than, for instance, careful his-
torical research. In some ways, this has been a disappointment to me.
I studied history, my first intellectual passion, at university but my lack
of success with it might well be symptomatic of my mentality, which
seems to be more suited to a style in which a personal point of view
co-exists with a commitment to ideas. Furthermore, I didn’t do a PhD.
I didn’t have an academic position until 1979, that is, 16 years after
I left Oxford. I was fortunate that new film studies programmes de-
pended on amateurs, rather than proper academics, to get established
in their very early years! My great-grandmother, my mother’s mater-
nal grandmother, Alice Meynell, was an essayist who wrote about art
and literature but also everyday life from a woman’s point of view
and very often about women. 2 Reading her essays recently I have felt
some affinity with her approach to writing, but rather than any direct
legacy, I think that her presence persisted in my family through the
intellectual women who brought me up and strongly influenced me, as
I mentioned earlier. To say that the essay as a form lacks intellectual
ambition might seem disparaging, but it is, in fact, a strength and per-
haps has enabled some women writers to find a way of writing within
an overwhelmingly patriarchal culture. I should mention here, in the
context of this interview, that I have the greatest admiration for Bar-
bara Creed as an outstanding example of the ‘extended essayist’; she
builds on a thorough and complex initial idea, which is then argued
through specific examples into a carefully researched, fascinating book
length exposition.
NC: Another similarity between yourself and Barbara is your shared
interest in film-making. You have always made films as well as think-
ing critically about them. In part, the films enabled you, in your own
words, to express what your writings could not, ‘reaching out beyond
the limits of the written word’ (Mulvey 1989, p.ix), providing another
mode of activism and of investigation. In the 1970s and 1980s, you
co-wrote and co-directed a number of very important works of avant-
garde cinema with Peter Wollen and you continue to produce films in
the present including your ‘remixes’ (as you have called them) of Gen-
tlemen Prefer Blondes (Dir. Howard Hawks, USA, 1953) and Imitation
of Life (Dir. Douglas Sirk, USA, 1959). Your work in the 1970s and
 Symmetry and Incident 45
1980s, as avant-garde, seem very much to be working from the without
of mainstream cinema, whereas your more recent projects start within
Hollywood productions. How do you conceptualise your career as a
film-maker? What are the continuities and/or differences between your
earlier and more recent film-making?
LM: I haven’t always made films. In fact, my film-making has always
been dependent on an outside initiative or context. For instance, Peter
and I were able to make films during the 1970s in the context of a flour-
ishing British independent film movement, which had come into being
due to a combination of circumstances. Speaking for myself (rather than
Peter), these circumstances opened up possibilities: there was a collec-
tive energy and commitment to political film (in all its varied forms)
in the UK at the time, funding was available (briefly) for the kind of
‘theory’ films that interested Peter and me. As images of women were a
site of feminist struggle and as psychoanalysis had raised the question
of language (through the Lacanian concept of the Oedipus Complex),
we took advantage of this extraordinary and unusual opportunity to
think about, for instance, word and image, representation and myth,
through the flexibility and ingenuity of film form. Working with and
collaborating with Peter was, of course, a special circumstance of its
own and the dialogue between our ideas and interests, in the context
of the politics of the time, was exciting and definitely enabling. But ev-
erything changed after the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979… the
earlier possibilities for theoretical avant-garde films closed down. Our
late films show an attempt to adapt to changing circumstances. But it
was a disorientating time. Although for a short time Channel 4 offered
a haven for independent film-makers of the 1970s, I personally found
it hard to make the move. The shift to television demanded a level of
dedication and professionalisation that I just didn’t have… Perhaps this
relates back to my preference for the dilettantism of the essay that I
mentioned above.
Much later, I made two films with my friend Mark Lewis that mix
the documentary and the essay forms. Disgraced Monuments (Dirs.
Mark Lewis & Laura Mulvey, UK, 1994) also came about due to chance
circumstances: Mark asked me to collaborate on his project for a film
about the removal of the old Soviet monuments. We were fascinated by
their visual power (whether you liked them or not) and, more conceptu-
ally, their personification of the problem of continuity and discontinu-
ity within history, the literal falling of the (even if debased) communist
idea. I got back some of my old enthusiasm for transforming ideas into
film images in Disgraced Monuments. In this case, it was interesting to
think about the spaces of historical time, how the Soviet monuments
both marked and occluded earlier histories. Mark, much more recently
(in 2013), helped me make 23 August 2008 (Dirs. Mark Lewis & Laura
Mulvey, UK, 2013), in which Faysal Abdullah, in single shot monologue,
46 Laura Mulvey
talks about Iraq, exile, and the life and death of his brother Kamel. This
is a project I have always wanted to follow up and expand…and still
hope to, if possible.
My remixes do, as you point out, go back to the Hollywood of the
studio system and movie cinephilia; they are a direct product of my ex-
periments in the early to mid-1990s with new kinds of spectatorship,
that is, watching favourite and very familiar old movies on electronic
or digital formats. These experiments led to and formed the basis of
my 2006 book Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Im-
age. I made the 30 seconds of Marilyn (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
stretched into a three-minute remix before writing the book where I re-
fer to it briefly as an example of both pensive and possessive spectator-
ship. I found that this mode of spectatorship fragmented the narrative
homogeneity of a movie, and it was possible to detach a sequence from
its place in the original film and turn it into an object in its own right.
The remix of the four opening shots in Imitation of Life came later,
out of the analysis that makes up a chapter of Death 24. I hadn’t really
looked back at these favourite Hollywood films for some time. More
and more, I became conscious of the whiteness of Hollywood, that its
apartheid nature was confirmed, with few exceptions, by the subservient
images of African Americans that dominated this cinema. I had tried to
conceptualise Marilyn as a racially marked image in an essay, ‘Close-
ups and Commodities,’ published in Fetishism and Curiosity (Mulvey
1996). I came to see this fetishistic, highly constructed vulnerable façade
to be signalling racial disavowal as well as the male castration anxiety
that was more familiar from my background. But I haven’t pursued this
further, anyway as yet… Imitation of Life is a rare Hollywood film in
that it actually engages with day to day racism, beyond the emotional
implications of the story, in a violent and vivid series of ‘tableaux’. In my
last work with the film, I re-edited it to show only Sarah Jane’s story. It
comes out in an exact pattern of sequences that works as a contained
and conceptual realisation of American racism in the 1950s.
NC: Picking up on your reference to Fetishism and Curiosity, Barbara
Creed is an important interlocutor for you in that book, with her writ-
ings about abjection and the monstrous-feminine cited several times. In
what ways did you find Barbara’s work enabling for you as a feminist in
the 1990s?
LM: The essay ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine’, the basis for
Barbara’s future book, published in Screen in 1986, introduced me
to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) and the concept of abjec-
tion. When we were working on Riddles of the Sphinx (Dirs. Laura
­Mulvey & Peter Wollen, UK, 1977), Peter and I had been influenced
by Kristeva’s work on the semiotic and the chora, which was important
for our thinking about language outside the Symbolic order. Retrospec-
tively, ­Barbara’s discussion of the archaic mother would also have been
 Symmetry and Incident 47
relevant to Riddles of the Sphinx, especially the concept of a pre-phallic,
pre-­Oedipal maternal. And she does, indeed mention the figure of the
Sphinx in her essay. But as I only encountered her ideas later, here I
would like to focus specifically on the concept of abjection and its influ-
ence on the development of my work in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
To reiterate: I only encountered the concept of abjection through
­Barbara’s essay. I was deeply impressed by the way she developed Freud-
ian psychoanalysis through Kristeva to formulate her own specifically
feminist film analysis of this particular representation of the female
body and, furthermore, its cinematic narrativisation. Her essay drew
my attention, retrospectively, to a theoretical lack in the arguments that
I had begun to develop in my article on Allen Jones (Mulvey 1973) as
well as ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey 1975).
A background aside: in the early 1970s, I read Mario Praz’s The
Romantic Agony (1933), which, with its detailed analysis of a phobic
misogyny at the heart of late nineteenth-century culture, vividly docu-
mented the disgust with which the male unconscious contemplated the
female body. Although I don’t mention Praz in either of those early es-
says, his cultural criticism supplemented Freudian theory, particularly
the effects of male castration anxiety, which he, Freud, would also have
encountered around the same, late nineteenth century, time. The cultural
phenomena that Praz analysed pre-figure the idea of the female body as
abject: castration anxiety fuses with the disgust aroused by the maternal
body and fits, for instance, with Barbara’s analysis of the ­Medusa image
and her reading of Freud’s reading of the myth. I think she included in
the book The Monstrous Feminine an extraordinary and typical Sym-
bolist image of snakes writhing out of a beautiful woman’s vulva – with
castration anxiety explicit without resorting, that is, to the displacement
intrinsic to the Medusa.
Retrospectively (again), I realise that I had been, in those two 1970s
essays, in search of a theoretical concept, such as abjection, that would
have taken my ideas beyond an initial engagement with fetishism
and woman as spectacle. But my interests then veered away towards
­Hollywood melodrama, the avant-garde, and finally an attempt to face
the political, social, and economic tragedies of Thatcherism. During the
late 1970s and early 1980s, furthermore, I had started to make films
with Peter Wollen and had become involved with the radical indepen-
dent film movement in the UK, as I mentioned above. But by the mid to
late 1980s, the political and economic climate had changed, rendering
independent film-making much more difficult and avant-gardist aspi-
rations foundered … That’s another story. But it might have been that
enforced abandonment of film-making that precipitated my return to
my early interests, that is, to images of women in film, art, etcetera, and
to feminist engagement with psychoanalytic theory. Barbara’s essay was
probably the crucial influence on this phase of my thinking.
48 Laura Mulvey
As you point out in your question, the impact on ‘The Monstrous
Feminine’ emerges quite suddenly in Part 2 of my 1996 collection of
essays Fetishism and Curiosity, later subtitled Cinema and the Mind’s
Eye (2nd edition 2013). The essays in Part 2 (on Pandora’s Box, on Cindy
Sherman and on late 1980s Godard) all revolve around a new kind un-
derstanding of the female body, not simply as spectacle, but figured by
the patriarchal imagination as divided between interior and exterior – as
I explain further below. The crucial influence of Barbara’s work emerges
immediately in the Preface: I point out that, as I shifted away from my
longstanding concern with male spectatorship and the female body as
spectacle to ‘the “rebus” of the fetishized female body’, it was Barbara’s
work that ‘helped me find a figure for the space into which the fetish
collapses’ (Mulvey 1996, p. xii; 2013, p. xxiv). That is, male castration
anxiety, once complicated by the place of the maternal body in the male
unconscious, demanded the further theorisation that ­Barbara offered
via Kristeva. As my ideas developed under these influences, my earlier
work on woman as spectacle moved towards a ‘topographical’ image of
the female body. While, for instance, the image of the Medusa seemed to
arise as a horrific phantasmagoria, abjection seemed to occupy an inside,
an interior space concealed by the surface glamour of the phantasmatic
female body.
This preoccupation with ‘an imaginary spatial relationship and a
phantasmatic topography’ (Mulvey 1996, p. xii; 2013, p. xxiv) first ap-
pears in the chapter on Pandora’s Box (first published in 1992), where
I specifically use Barbara’s articulation of the abject as emanating from
varying images of the maternal body, as she puts it ‘the horrifying im-
age of woman as archaic mother, phallic woman and castrated body
represented in a single figure’ (quoted in Fetishism and Curiosity (Mul-
vey 1996, p. 64; 2013, p. 83)). 3 While Barbara’s analyses of the horror
movie led her to explicit representations of the ‘monstrous feminine’,
her ideas influenced me rather towards this split between an alluring,
cosmetic surface and an abject, concealed but threatening, interior,
which I developed through my analogy between Pandora and her box.
In my chapter on Cindy Sherman, I refer back to Pandora, once again
citing Barbara, to discuss Sherman’s photographs as a collapse of the
body’s boundaries, revealing the internalisation of abjection within a
woman’s own psyche: ‘The images of decaying food and vomit raises
the spectre of the anorexic girl, who tragically acts out the fashion fetish
of the female body as an eviscerated, cosmetic and artificial construc-
tion, designed to ward off the “otherness” hidden inside her’ (Mulvey
1996, p. 72; 2013, p. 93).
I was interested in two aspects of the relation between Pandora and her
box: first of all, there was the spatial analogy, that I mentioned above,
but the association between Pandora and curiosity led to a woman’s look
that, in the first instance, was turned towards the enigma that her body
 Symmetry and Incident 49
represented for the patriarchal unconscious. If the box, as I argue in the
essay, is a metaphor for the female genitalia, Pandora can look inside it
without fear or disgust. Her look into the space of the male-designated
abject enables its mutation into a symptom, and the ‘phantasmatic to-
pography’ can be reconfigured into a riddle. Ultimately this offered an
image of feminist curiosity, addressing and articulating the vast mass
of displacements behind representations of the feminine across patri-
archal culture, and psychoanalytic theory could provide a code, of a
kind, to initiate the process. Although Barbara took the horror film as
the object to be deciphered, whereas I continued to focus on a variation
of woman as erotic spectacle, we shared a political commitment to ‘fem-
inist curiosity’. I would like to quote the last lines of ‘Horror and the
­Monstrous-Feminine’ essay:

We can see its [the horror film’s] ideological project as an attempt

to shore up the symbolic order by constructing the feminine as an
imaginary ‘other’ which must be repressed and controlled in order
to secure and protect the social order. Thus, the horror film stages
and re-stages a constant repudiation of the maternal figure.
But the feminine is not per se a monstrous sign; rather, it is con-
structed as such within a patriarchal discourse which reveals a great
deal about male desires and fears but tells us nothing about femi-
nine desire in relation to the horrific. When Norman Bates remarked
to Marion Crane in Psycho that: ‘Mother is not herself today’, he
was dead right. Mother wasn’t herself. She was someone else. Her
son – Norman.
(Creed 1986, p. 70)

To my mind, these lines sum up precisely the kind of sleight of hand

that feminist theory and criticism must always perform. And however
wary feminism should be of Freud, psychoanalytic theory has offered
feminism, to quote your quotation above: ‘a language that could name
its objects, [materialising] like the appearance of invisible ink in front of
a flame’.
The idea of a ‘phantasmatic topography,’ that is the idea of woman’s
exterior and interior split between a perfect and alluring mask conceal-
ing an abject interior, has stayed with me and contributed to my thought
about two other topographical configurations that do not at first glance
relate to the image of woman. By the time I wrote the Introduction to
Fetishism and Curiosity, I had absorbed the concept of abject and was,
as it were, ‘recycling’ its implications, perhaps stretching at the limits of
the theory. But I would like to note the way that Barbara’s original influ-
ence carried on in these rather different contexts. The idea of ‘an inside/
outside’ opposition, an alluring surface that conceals something, ‘un-
sightly’ allowed me to make an analogy between Marxist and Freudian
50 Laura Mulvey
fetishisms. I summed up the relation between the two fetishisms in the
Introduction to the second edition of Fetishism and Curiosity:

Fetishisms disguise, on the one hand, (Marx) the workers’ labour

as productive of value under capitalism and, on the other, (Freud)
the anxiety provoked by the maternal body perceived as castrated.
These, too real, material bodies disappear into the spectacular forms
of commodity fetishism and fetishised femininity…’.
(Mulvey 2013, p. vii)

It was not until I wrote this second Introduction, in 2013, that I paid any
attention to that most repressed mechanism of the cinema, the projector,
that then suggested a third topographical pattern. The worker’s labour
power, hidden by the commodity fetish, suggested an analogy with the
labour of the projector and projectionist, hidden, or, in psychoanalytic
terms, repressed in a box at the back of the cinema. Here the image of
woman returned. I began to think about the screen and most of all, the
‘to-be-looked-at’ female star, as the site of cinema’s own, material and
specific fetishism, disavowing the labour power of the projector that lay
behind its very existence. So the fetishism invested in the female star and
of the apparatus creates the circuit of ‘visual pleasure’. In another aside:
I noticed that this sense of a circuit was lacking in ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’, where my understanding of the cinematic apparatus
was restricted, simply and only, to the camera. In a form of repression of
my own, I ignored the process of projection. Retrospectively, of course,
how the still images of the film strip are transformed into the fascinat-
ing, moving, illusion on the screen seems much more vital for an analysis
of spectatorship than the registration of the original film by the camera.
In films such as Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Dir. Jean-Luc
Godard, France, 1967), Godard came close to bringing all three fetish-
isms into visibility. As he ‘defetishized’ the cinematic apparatus, he also
linked a cosmetically constructed female sexuality to a female, domestic
consumption of commodities, weaving the ‘phantasmatic topography’
across Marx, Freud, and the cinema itself.
I would like to add a few final words about the great originality and
importance of Barbara’s 2005 book Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the
Primal Uncanny. The book takes feminist psychoanalytic theory and
criticism to a further stage, examining the flaws and weaknesses of the
Symbolic order as personified by deviant masculinity (beyond those per-
sonified by the feminine, by now a more established discourse). In both
The Monstrous-Feminine and Phallic Panic, I have been impressed by
Barbara’s ability to use the Lacanian orders, especially the symbolic (she
uses the lower case), an essential concept for feminist political, cultural
critique, of the system on which patriarchy is constructed and sustained.
Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ is her major point of psychoanalytic
 Symmetry and Incident 51
reference. I also used ‘The Uncanny’ in Death 24 x a Second: Still-
ness and the Moving Image (Mulvey 2006) and I also discuss E.T.A
­Hoffmann’s story ‘The Sandman’ and although I have a rather different
reading of the automaton Olympia, we both use Freud’s association of
uncanniness with the maternal body. From the perspective of criticism,
I was struck not only by her emphasis on ‘feeling’ but also by her careful
attention to its textual construction, to its filmic materiality, the speci-
ficity of the cinema’s embodiment of monstrosity, and those feelings of
fear and the frightening that define the horror genre. And she goes on
to analyse a primal uncanny and male monstrosity that the horror film
brings to the surface and into the light of day.
Barbara’s key idea is that the primal uncanny emerges when aligned
with the three principle figures of symbolic taboo: ‘The male monster
is made monstrous when he enters the domain of woman, death and
nature’ (Creed 2005, p. 17). But in her discussion of Jack the Ripper,
she suggests that there is also something essentially and necessarily
masculine to this thing that ‘strikes at the heart of the symbolic order’
at the masculinity that ‘embodies phallic power and asserts masculine
qualities of power, rationality, ascendency and control’ (p. 201). That
is, the monster threatens the ‘ruin of representation’, standing for ‘the
point where meaning collapses’ (p. xviii). She sums up: ‘If inscription in
­language – in the symbolic – is almost always phallocentric and designed
to shore up the power and authority of the symbolic, then the monster’s
nonmeaning, which includes enjoyment, is designed to unsettle the sym-
bolic order and as such is ideological’ (p. xviii). Finally, in the closing
paragraphs of the Introduction, Barbara wonders whether the monster is
designed to act as a safety valve for the Symbolic order or whether in the
last resort ‘the male monster signifies a desire for the collapse of patriar-
chal civilisation’ (p. xix). As well as the variety of monstrous forms that
Barbara discusses throughout the book (all of whom are threatening to
women), to my mind she also conjures up the pre-Oedipal father from
whose rage and irrationality civilisation has always been supposed to
offer a safe-guard.
I was deeply impressed by Phallic Panic when I first read it. But read-
ing it again it seems to have a new relevance. As I read the Introduction
a particular figure rose in my mind, one who is flamboyantly uncon-
strained by any patriarchal inhibition, who has brought nonmeaning
into the public sphere, who, in a return of the Symbolic repressed, fuses
lies with incoherent speech, who can only actually conceive of objects
(a wall) unable to handle the abstract (administrative rules and regu-
lations)… that is, (you’ve doubtless guessed) the present President of
the US. It’s very likely that he does want to bring about the collapse of
patriarchal civilisation. Probably only an alliance between women and
non-patriarchally invested men can construct, with difficulty, an alter-
native symbolic and a transformed public sphere.
52 Laura Mulvey
Notes
1 [NC] I am grateful to Michelle Gewurtz and Silvestra Mariniello for their
help and advice in preparing the questions that formed the basis for this
conversation.
2 [NC] The title of this conversation, ‘Symmetry and Incident’, is also the
title of one of Alice Meynell’s (1897) essays from the collection The Colour
of Life and Other Essays. For further discussion of Meynell’s essay, see the
introduction to Part 1 of the present volume.
3 [NC] The essay ‘Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity’ (Mulvey
1992) was published in the volume Sexuality & Space.

References
Creed, B. (1986) ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjec-
tion,’ Screen 27(1), pp. 44–70.
Creed, B. (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny.
­Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of ­Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated from
the French by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Meynell, A. (1897) ‘Symmetry and Incident’, in A. Meynell (ed.), The Colour
of Life and Other Essays of Things Seen and Heard. London: John Lane,
pp. 73–87.
Mulvey, L. (1973) ‘You Don’t Know What Is Happening, Do You, Mr Jones?’
Spare Rib 8, pp. 13–16.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16(1),
pp. 6–18.
Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: The Macmillan
Press.
Mulvey, L. (1992) ‘Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,’ in
B. ­Colomina (ed.), Sexuality & Space. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, pp. 53–72.
Mulvey, L. (1996) Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
­I ndiana University Press.
Mulvey, L. (2006) Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.
­London: Reaktion.
Mulvey, L. (2013) Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye. 2nd ed.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Praz, M. (1933) The Romantic Agony. Translated from the Italian by
A. ­Davidson. London: Oxford University Press.
3 A Dream of Bare Arms
‘Womanliness’, Dirt, and a
Quest for Knowledge
Annette Kuhn

When Joan Riviere’s paper ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’ was pub-

lished in 1929, it was intended as a salvo in the interwar debate within the
pyschoanalytic movement about the nature of femininity and its mental
aetiology and organisation. Freud’s more widely known contributions to
this debate are his 1931 paper ‘Female Sexuality’ (Freud 1977a) and his
1933 lecture ‘Femininity’ (Freud 1973). Other key interventions were
made by Karen Horney (1926) and Helene Deutsch (1930).1
The argument in ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’ is based upon ma-
terial arising in the analysis of one of Riviere’s patients, a professional
woman who, despite considerable ability and success as a writer and
speaker, craved reassurance from men by seeking sexual and ­professional
compliments from them after any public engagement: this she would do
by flirting and generally presenting herself as ultra-feminine. ­R iviere’s
conclusion was that for this patient, womanliness could be assumed and
worn like a mask, ‘both to hide the possession of ­masculinity and to
avert the reprisals expected if she was found to ­possess it’ (Riviere 1986,
p. 38). ­Decades later, following Lacan’s ‘retrieval’ of her notion of the
masquerade in his seminar series from 1958 to 1959, Riviere’s ­paper was
reprinted in a 1966 anthology on psychoanalysis and female ­sexuality. 2
Subsequently, with the rise of second-wave feminism, the idea of fem-
ininity as a masquerade or performance was enthusiastically taken up
within an emergent strand of feminist film criticism interested in mining
psychoanalytic thinking on sexual difference for insights on the rela-
tionship between women, femininity, films, and cinema.3 So it was that
Riviere’s clinical interpretation of ‘womanliness’ and the concept of the
masquerade were taken up in Anglophone cultural theory, notably in
feminist and psychoanalytic thinking around sexual difference, gender
performativity, female spectatorship in cinema, and the role of fantasy
in the constitution of sexual and gender identity.4 Interestingly, though,
it is rarely, if ever, referenced in these contexts today.
This chapter will make a return visit to Riviere’s paper, approach-
ing it from a fresh angle, to reflect on the enigma of Riviere herself,
and to scrutinise some of the detail of the case history she sets out in
‘Womanliness as a masquerade’. Who was Joan Riviere? In his 1986
54 Annette Kuhn
essay, ‘Joan Riviere and the masquerade’, Stephen Heath notes that
she was born Joan Verrall, but does not indicate how she came by a
different name. In fact, Riviere was born in 1882 into an established
Sussex county family and acquired her slightly exotic surname when
she married a barrister, Evelyn Riviere, at the age of 23. Heath sifts
through the literature on the psychoanalytic circles of the early de-
cades of the twentieth century, in search of clues in the correspondence
between the ‘great men’ of the movement about Riviere, who became
a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a lay
analyst. He comes up with some intriguing fragments, among them
that Freud’s b ­ iographer and epigone, Ernest Jones, wrote to Freud in
1921 about her: she had been in analysis with Jones since 1916. Jones
recommended Riviere to Freud as a potential analysand, describing
her as colossally narcissistic and masculine-identified. He regarded her
analysis as a ‘failure’ (Heath 1986, p. 45).
Heath also mentions a brief reference in Jones’s book Sigmund Freud:
Life and Work to the sort of woman that Freud was attracted to: Freud,
says Jones, liked to surround himself with ‘intellectual’, ‘masculine’
women (among them his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, and indeed Joan
Riviere herself) (Jones 1984, p. 474). Jones is at pains to emphasise, how-
ever, that this was not an erotic attraction. Finally, Heath quotes a strik-
ing, almost cinematic, image in a 1958 memoir by Katherine West, in
which Riviere is remembered as a ‘tall, Edwardian beauty with a picture
hat and scarlet parasol – walking up and down the seashell path in lively
conversation with a gentleman’ (Heath 1986, p. 47).
Joan Riviere, then, certainly according to some of the men in her life,
was narcissistic, intellectual, and masculine-identified: in their eyes,
these qualities made her both admirable and troublesome. One wants to
know more; and in their study of Freud’s women, Lisa Appignanesi and
John Forrester (1993) flesh out Heath’s tantalising sketch. Ernest Jones
had referred Riviere to Freud for further analysis after he had himself
‘failed’ with her, due (in Freud’s view at least) to his, Jones’s, mishan-
dling of the transference. Freud rebukes Jones for his ‘technical error’ in
befriending his patient before her analysis was brought to a close (Jones
had recruited her as a lay analyst, allowed her to use his country cottage,
and in several other ways breached the boundary between an analyst-­
client relationship and friendship) (Appignanesi and Forrester 1993,
p. 355).5 Freud took Riviere on as his analysand, and she was in anal-
ysis with him for a year or so in the early 1920s. It is clear that he had
considerable respect for her intellect, and persuaded Jones to offer her
the ­important post of translations editor on the International Journal
of Psychoanalysis. Riviere had in fact already translated some of Freud’s
works into English, and was later to be Melanie Klein’s principal transla-
tor. In later years, she would cross swords with Freud over her espousal of
the ­K leinian view on the development of the superego in infancy. Ernest
 A Dream of Bare Arms 55
Jones, for his part, spoke of the ‘elegant and acerbic’ ­R iviere’s ‘disdainful
way of treating other people, like dirt beneath her feet’ (Quoted in ibid.
p. 354; emphasis added). Despite her high-handed manner – she was, it
seems, a perfectionist who did not suffer fools gladly – her role within
the psychoanalytic movement was in many respects a classically femi-
nine one: as a translator, she was in effect a channel or conduit for the
words and ideas of others. There is clearly an element of handmaidenli-
ness, and even of servitude, in such a role; though the issue is obviously
far from clear-cut in Riviere’s case.
Besides all this, it appears that Riviere was a sharp dresser. Heath
­relates that she liked cosmetics, too (rather unusual, perhaps, in a
woman of her class and generation), and had once worked as a dress-
maker ­(couturier would probably be a more appropriate term, since af-
ter being ‘finished’ in Germany she served an apprenticeship to a court
dressmaker); not something one would normally expect to find on the
CV of a psychoanalyst, even a lay one. Riviere is altogether fascinating,
and remains something of a puzzle.
The vivid memory-image of Joan with her hat and parasol in ‘lively
conversation’ with a gentleman places her at a moment in history that
evokes less the post Jazz-age moment of the masquerade paper than the
pre-First World War moment of another of Freud’s women, the hysteric
‘Dora’, whom Freud had analysed in 1901 – indeed Joan and Dora
would have been similar in age. The picture of Joan and her ­gentleman
companion, fixed forever in an era conventionally remembered as one
of innocence and leisured cultivation (for a certain class, at least), re-
calls nothing so much as Freud’s Dora’s lakeside strolls with her dodgy
‘suitor’ Herr K (Freud 1977b, pp. 55–56). The hat and the ­parasol –
­remembered as scarlet (not merely red), with all the overtones of that
colour-name – suggest, aside from an evident elegance and style, a
­certain occlusion. Does Joan have something to hide? Are we perhaps
not seeing everything there is to see about Joan? Could she be a ‘scarlet
woman’? A picture hat (a woman’s elaborate hat with a wide brim)
and a parasol seem too much: either one would be enough on its own,
surely? There are too many clothes in this picture, and perhaps a cer-
tain flashiness as well. If Joan is exhibiting elegance through her attire,
its excessiveness suggests that there is also something else afoot, that
the clothes could be a cover-up as well as a display – in several senses.
We might recall that in the course of one of his repeated puzzlings over
the ‘enigma’ of femininity, Freud (1973, p. 146) quotes some lines from
a poem by Heine:

Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets

Heads in turbans and black birettas,
Heads in wigs and thousand other
Wretched, sweating heads of humans.6
56 Annette Kuhn
The remembered scarlet ‘bonnet’ sported by Joan is itself something of
a hieroglyph – the memory-image is a code, condensing a riddle whose
solution, in the classic manner, lies concealed within itself.
The picture hat and the parasol also bring to mind other devices of
female costume that conceal or occlude or otherwise get in the way of
the gaze – while at the same time alluding to something that cannot be
seen: the veil, the hijab, even the fetishist’s furs and feathers. Riviere’s
picture hat – aptly, even symptomatically, named – is exactly a screen,
in several senses of the word. In the Victorian drawing room, a screen
hides something, interrupts the gaze; in cinema, on the other hand, the
screen is a site for exhibition, for display; in psychoanalysis (as indeed
in cinema), a screen is a tabula rasa onto which fantasies are projected.
Concealment, display, fantasy – all of these are condensed in Joan’s hi-
eroglyphic bonnet-fetish.

***

Édouard Manet’s painting ‘A Bar at the Folies Bergère’ was made in

the early 1880s.7 It portrays a woman, a barmaid, standing behind a
bar counter, engaging the spectator’s gaze. Her hands are braced on the
counter as she appears to lean slightly forward. Behind her is a mir-
ror in which her back view is reflected, along with the theatre audience
and – at top left of the picture – the shins and feet of the acrobat who is
performing. The woman presents herself to the gaze, we may assume, of
a male spectator, a customer at the bar, and steadily returns that gaze.
But there is more to it than is visible on the picture’s surface. The art
historian Griselda Pollock (1995) notes that an X-ray of the canvas re-
veals an earlier version of Manet’s painting, in which the barmaid stands
with folded arms.8 Pollock’s interpretation of the change in the way the
woman’s arms are painted turns on the meanings – in social-historical
context – of certain gestures of arms and hands in women; of sleeves and
gloves; and of their presence or absence.

In the paradoxical conventions of bourgeois society, women could

bare their chests and upper arms in ballgowns, but their lower arms
and hands had to be gloved…. Hands thus acquired a symbolic sig-
nificance in the sexual geography of the female body totally unfa-
miliar to us today. To go about ungloved was akin to leaving your
body naked. Such exposure was a classed sign which functioned
metonymically for both nakedness and vulgarity.
(Pollock 1995, pp. 26–27)

The barmaid’s fully visible gloveless hands signal the erotic charge,
for the fin-de-siècle man of the world, of the lower-class or declassée
woman’s bare hands and forearms. Semiotically speaking, the exposed
 A Dream of Bare Arms 57
forearms and the frank outward gaze are mutually reinforcing. This
woman is no lady – unlike Joan Riviere, whose hands, we may safely
assume, would have been discreetly gloved as she strolled along the sea-
shell path with her gentlemen interlocutor. But Joan’s gloves, like her
hat and parasol, and like the extra layer of paint on ‘A Bar at the Folies
Bergère’, are screens in every sense of the word: they hide, they display,
they inscribe fantasy; they do all of those things at the same time.
Once you become aware of it, the trope of the bare arms seems to
surface everywhere. Certainly from the standpoint of nineteenth-­
century bourgeois masculinity, it figures recurrently in imaginings of
transgression – transgression above all of the limits of respectability and
of divisions between social classes, as well as, relatedly, in fantasies of
forbidden sexuality. From the standpoint of the feminine, on the other
hand, and on either side of the dividing line between the working and
the middle classes, the bare arms trope stands for the absolute necessity
of recognising one’s proper place as a woman of a particular class.
The fantasy, the dream, of bare arms condenses many layers of mean-
ing, then; some of them unconscious. I want now to look at an intriguing
nineteenth-century case in which the meanings of bare arms, and their
associated psychical energies, underlie and structure certain kinds of
activities and enthusiasms. For the time being, we can leave Joan Riviere
to her conversations with the men in her life; but she will be back.

***

For she is still a working wench

And sits with hands still bare,
O’ Sundays, on the poor folk’s bench:
But he is with her there.

This verse was written by Arthur Munby (1828–1910), a quintessential

Victorian gentleman: respectable civil servant, barrister, teacher, ama-
teur artist. In common with many others of his caste, Munby was also
a man with a hobby. His was one that preoccupied him to the point
of obsession: throughout his life, he was powerfully drawn to working
women. ­Munby’s copious journals record innumerable encounters with
such women – colliery women, fishwives, farm workers, dairymaids
and acrobats, as well as servant women – whom he names, describes
in detail, interviews, and sometimes befriends (Hudson 1974). Munby
­commissioned photographs of dozens of his ‘subjects’, and executed
sketches of many more. He was particularly fascinated by the trouser-­
wearing pit girls of Wigan, and visited his contacts there repeatedly
over a number of years. He especially liked to see them, and have them
­photographed, ‘in their dirt’. Munby’s quest was only in part, if indeed at
all, a documentary one, à la Henry Mayhew. Like Mayhew’s, Munby’s
58 Annette Kuhn
encounters largely took place in public, and were – by definition, in Vic-
torian class terms – with strangers. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, though
perhaps more purposeful in his pursuit of a particular desire, Munby
haunted city streets and places of public entertainment and resort.
Here he describes an encounter which took place in May 1860:

[A]bout eleven I went to see a masquerade of a very singular charac-

ter at the Victoria Theatre. The ball took place on stage, the house
itself being densely crowded with spectators of the lowest class,
many of them young women – orange girls, coster girls, servants
and the like. The masqueraders, whose costumes when they wore
any were absurd enough; were of a somewhat better class. I was in
a private stage box (price sixpence) and to me entered two uninter-
esting young women, rather tawdrily dressed, one of whom, though
not at all immodest, paid me the most unnecessary & undesired
attentions. They were hat trimmers, working for Christy the hatter;
earning some 15/ a week: all the lining and braid of hats are made
up by women, it appears. They said that most of the young women
masquerading were envelopefolders [sic] and bootbinders, earning
from 15/[sic] to £1 a week: these have the reputation, said the hat
trimmers of being ‘fast’ and fond of dancing….
(Hudson 1974, pp. 60–61)

Munby’s reports are somewhat ethnographic in character (indeed the

tone of this passage is highly reminiscent of reports by the amateur
Mass-Observers of the 1930s and 1940s), and there is no suggestion that
he is engaged in any sexual quest. The reference to ‘undesired attention’
is characteristic: Munby insists on a certain distance between himself
and his subjects. This, however, is by no means to deny the possibility
of a sexual – or more accurately, perhaps, a libidinal – energy behind
Munby’s researches. On the contrary: his activities suggest classic subli-
mation, of the sort that would be described by Freud some decades later:

[T]he libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from

the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the
powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the
research becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for
­sexual activity.
(Freud 1985 [1910], p. 180)

To the extent that the specific objects of such a powerful drive for re-
search are distinctive or particular, though, they may productively be
treated as symptomatic. In Munby’s case at least, other aspects of his life
suggest that this is appropriate; for his ‘researches’ overlapped with, and
fed into, his emotional life in a quite extraordinary manner.
 A Dream of Bare Arms 59
From his mid twenties, Munby enjoyed a secret liaison with his
maidservant, Hannah Cullwick. The couple eventually married and,
by their own accounts (Hannah also kept a diary), enjoyed a contented
life together.9 Throughout their relationship, even after they were mar-
ried, Hannah insisted on remaining Munby’s servant (she called him
‘Massa’), and it seems that – unlike, say, the upwardly mobile partners of
a number of her husband’s acquaintances among the pre-Raphaelites –
she refused to try and turn herself into a ‘lady’, and intended this refusal
as a gesture of independence. Indeed this appears to be the secret of the
longevity of Hannah’s and Arthur’s deeply mutually loving (if perhaps in
the Freudian sense deeply perverse) relationship.
Munby’s verse, which is of course dedicated to Hannah herself, eulo-
gises her ‘hands still bare’. These same bare hands (and forearms) feature
prominently in many of the photographs the couple collaborated over
the years in producing. They include portraits of Hannah in her work
clothes and at work, ‘in her dirt’ (Figures 3.1–3.3). Elsewhere, Hannah
appears in a range of other guises – as a ‘lady’, in men’s clothing, as a
chimney sweep, a peasant.
It has been rightly suggested that these photographs, of which H­ annah
should certainly be regarded as co-creator, ‘rupture the politics of vis-
ibility and representation of the bourgeois household…at a time when
household dirt, servants and their work were to be invisible’ (Dawkins
1986, p. 1).10 It is perhaps also worth pointing out, however, that the

Figure 3.1 Hannah Cullwick in work clothes, 1864.

Figure 3.2 Hannah Cullwick seated, cleaning boots, 1864.

Figure 3.3 Hannah Cullwick scrubbing the floor, no date.

 A Dream of Bare Arms 61
photographs are conventional in the sense that some are reminiscent
of a type of popular imagery prevalent at the time in mass-produced
sentimentalised vignettes, in various media, of peasant and lower-class
persons and lives. Perhaps more significantly, Munby’s photographs, and
especially his collaborations with Cullwick, embody elements of perfor-
mance in their staging of a range of different activities and ­identities.
These are certainly not documentary images, in the twentieth- and
twenty-first-century sense of the word: indeed the category of documen-
tary had yet, in Munby’s time, to be invented.
A fetishisation of the bare hands of working women is apparent also
in Munby’s writings; as, for instance, in an account of a visit to a large
gathering of ‘the English working classes’ at Crystal Palace:

…I passed a tallish woman, evidently a servant, who was notice-

able for the size of her gloveless hands. She seemed to be alone in
the crowd, and (with a view to her hands) I asked her if she meant
to dance? No, she couldn’t dance at all – only liked to look on: for
which I was not sorry. So after a little chat we walked away, and I
(still with a view to my hobby) proposed to rest n the bank near,
under the trees. She gave me her hand to help her up – and, oh ye
ballroom partners, what a breadth of massive flesh it was to grasp!
She sat down by me, ready to talk, after the blunt fashion of such
maidens, but not forward…She was a maid of all work at Chelsea,
it seemed….I looked at her hands, and spoke my opinion of them.
‘How can you like them?’ she says, like Margaret in the garden;
‘they are so large and red, I’m ashamed of them’. ‘They are just the
hands for a servant,’ say I: ‘they show you are hardworking, and
you ought to be proud of them. You wouldn’t wish them to be like
a lady’s?’ ‘Yes I should!’ said she, bitterly: ‘and I should like to be a
lady, and I wish my hands were like yours!’ [….] Her right hand lay,
a large red lump, upon her light-coloured frock: it was very broad
and square & thick – as large and strong & coarse as the hand
of a sixfoot [sic] bricklayer…the skin was rough to the touch, and
hard & leathery in the palm: there was nothing feminine about it in
form or texture….
(Hudson 1974, pp. 71–72)

This passage, in common with others like it, suggests that it is precisely
the hands – gloveless and work-worn – which alert Munby to his quarry,
and which then become the object of his questing gaze. Like the passage
quoted earlier, this one also evidences Munby’s sensitivity to details of
female attire. His photographic collaborations with Hannah Cullwick
suggest that they were both alert to the potential of clothing to effect
mutations of identity: significantly in this regard, in Munby’s albums,
photographs of Hannah in her work clothes were often juxtaposed with
portraits of her as a lady. At the same time, hands and arms may speak a
62 Annette Kuhn
truth which costume can dissemble. In her own diary, Hannah describes
an incident of class ‘passing’ on a friend’s part:

Well she said how Mrs Shepherd borrow’d an opera cloak for her –
she’s got one for herself & a black velvet skirt, what she wears to go
into the theatres. And Ellen wore her black silk frock, white gloves, &
her hair was done up with a bow of ribbon somehow, & they left
their bonnets in the cloakroom. Then Ellen said they was shown up
an elegant staircase with flowers each side of it, & to a row of chairs,
so fine, & when they sat down it was like a down pillow they sank
down so. She said to herself, ‘Can it be myself that’s here?’ And she
felt so comfortable that she wanted the acting to have no end, & yet
uncomfortable too, for she was afraid to turn or speak for fear of the
rest seeing she was a servant [….] Ellen seem’d to rather like being a
lady – if her hands wasn’t so red she said, & if she’d plenty o’ money.
(Stanley 1984, p. 156)

Hannah herself ‘passed’ from time to time; often describing the great sense
of relief she felt on dropping her masquerade and going back to being a
servant (‘…I actually jumped for joy & felt as if I was let out o’ prison. The
feeling is dreadful – that being stuck in a drawing room and having a fussy
fine lady talking to you.…’ (Stanley 1984, p. 74)). It is the tension between
the masquerade of the clothes on the one hand and the ‘truth’ of the hands
and arms on the other that organises the pleasures and the productivities
of Munby’s researches and of his relations with Hannah Cullwick.

***

We may now return to Joan Riviere, for whom the masquerade is, on the
face of it, about gender identity rather than class. But on closer inspec-
tion it transpires that class does indeed lurk beneath the story she tells
in ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’. It is insistently present in a dream –
significantly, a dream of bare arms – produced by Riviere’s professional
woman patient, who is the dream’s protagonist. It is recounted by ­R iviere:

She was in terror alone in the house; then a negro came in and found
her washing clothes, with her sleeves rolled up and arms exposed.
She resisted him, with the secret intention of attracting him sexually,
and he began to admire her arms and caress them and her breasts.
(Riviere 1986, p. 37)

In this intensely erotic scenario, the dreamer declasses herself – not just by
performing menial domestic work, but also, and especially, by ­exposing
her arms, which then figure centrally in the ensuing sexual encounter. At
the same time, the dreamer takes up at least two enunciative positions
 A Dream of Bare Arms 63
at once: she is both observer of the scene, and observed within it. In a
scenario which recalls a peepshow, the dreamer/narrator is at one and
the same time maidservant and voyeur. This dream mirrors, and perhaps
even sheds light on the workings of, the fantasies that power the Munby-­
Cullwick collaborations. But there is something more here as well.
The dream’s content and emotional colour call to mind some of the
anxieties Riviere reports in her client, notably the woman’s fear of the
otherness of certain forms of masculinity for a woman. According to
Riviere, she ‘had great anxiety in dealings with men such as porters,
waiters, cabmen, tradesmen’ (Riviere 1986, p. 39). From a middle-class
lady’s standpoint, the bare arms of the dream stand for disgrace, for
‘falling’ in class terms and/or sexually. But the sibling of fear (‘she was in
terror alone in the house’) is, of course, desire, which is perhaps where
the ‘negro’ of the dream comes in. Riviere rather too hastily explains
away his appearance by noting that the patient had spent her youth in
the southern states of the US. While this makes sense at the first level of
dream interpretation, Riviere chooses not to acknowledge the conden-
sation and displacement which characterise the dream-work. There is
surely more to the ‘negro’ image than a reference to the dreamer’s back-
ground. In recruiting a black man to the erotic scenario of this dream of
bare arms, its enunciation calls on positionalities of race and ethnicity as
well as of class and gender in a scenario that mixes up, confirms, and at
the same time, upends, culturally conventional positions of d ­ ominance
and servitude. Who, to appropriate Munby and Cullwick’s fantasy
­scenarios, is the ‘Massa’ in this dream of bare arms?

***

Taken together, the ‘negro’ and the bare forearms of the dreamer/­
maidservant are clearly fetishes that point towards a fear of, and a
­simultaneous desire for, relegation to the social and sexual margins, to the
place where dirt proliferates and must be swept out of sight. E ­ roticisation
of dirt seems an appropriate enough fantasy for an ­analysand to offer up
to a woman analyst who treated those she considered her inferiors ‘like
dirt beneath her feet’. It perhaps ultimately provides a key to Munby’s
and Cullwick’s secret liaison and shared interests, the illicitness of which
was grounded in, and produced, a nexus of energy in which fantasies
centring on dirty work and the mutability of class, gender, and even ra-
cial, identity are bound together in displaced form in an obsessive quest
for knowledge – a quest to see, to know, and to record all.

Acknowledgement
Photographs from the Munby Papers are reproduced by kind permission
of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
64 Annette Kuhn
Notes
1 Joan Riviere (1929), ‘Womanliness as a masquerade.’ Page references
throughout the present chapter are taken from the version reprinted in
Victor Burgin et al. (eds.) (1986), Formations of Fantasy. See also Freud
(1977a), ‘Female sexuality’; Freud (1973), ‘Femininity’; Horney (1926), ‘The
flight from womanhood’; Deutsch (1930), ‘The significance of masochism in
the mental life of women’.
2 Lacan (1977), ‘The signification of the phallus’; Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek
(ed.) (1966), Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality.
3 An early example is Claire Johnston (1975), ‘Femininity and the masquerade’.
4 For example, Mary Ann Doane’s (1982) influential ‘Film and the ­masquerade:
theorising the female spectator’, brought Riviere’s article to the centre of
feminist debate on cinema. Judith Butler (1990, pp. 50–54) set out a critique
of Riviere’s notion of masquerade in Gender Trouble. In Burgin et al. (eds)
(1986), Formations of Fantasy, Riviere’s article was reprinted and com-
mented upon in relation to the instrumentality of fantasy in shaping mental
life and cultural experience.
5 See also Athol Hughes (1991).
6 ‘Häupter in Hieroglyphenmützen/ Häupter in Turban und schwarzem Barett/
Perückenhäupter und tausend andre/Arme, schwitzende Menschenhäupter’.
7 The painting is in the collection of the Courtauld Gallery in ­London: see
https://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collection/impressionism-post-­impressionism/
edouard-manet-a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere [accessed 29 July 2018].
8 The X-ray can be viewed online at https://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/­collection/
impressionism-post-impressionism/edouard-manet-a-bar-at-the-folies-
bergere [accessed 25 July 2018].
9 See, for example, Davidoff (1979) and Atkinson (2003).
10 Dawkins (1986), Purloined Portraits. Available online at https://e-artexte.
ca/id/eprint/173/1/PurloinedPortraits.pdf [accessed 26 July 2018].

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Burgin, V., J. Donald and C. Kaplan (eds.) (1986) Formations of Fantasy.
­London: Methuen.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
Davidoff, L. (1979) ‘Class and gender in Victorian England: the diaries of
­A rthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick’, Feminist Studies 5 (1), pp. 86–141.
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Freud Library, vol. 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 145–169.
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vol. 7. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 367–392.
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Freud, S. (1977b) ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’, in A. Richards
(ed.), Pelican Freud Library, vol. 8. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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pp. 151–231.
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and C. Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen, pp. 45–61.
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­Psychoanalysis 7, pp. 324–339.
Hudson, D. (1974) Munby: Man of Two Worlds. London: Abacus.
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­Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers 1920–1958. London: K ­ arnac
Books, pp. 1–43.
Johnston, C. (1975) ‘Femininity and the masquerade: Anne of the Indies’, in C.
Johnston and P. Willemen (eds.), Jacques Tourneur. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Film Festival, pp. 36–44.
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don: Tavistock Publications, pp. 281–291.
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Riviere, J. (1986) ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, in V. Burgin, J. Donald and
C. Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy. London: Methuen, pp. 35–44.
Ruitenbeek, H.M. (ed.) (1966) Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality. New
­Haven, CT: College and Universities Press.
Stanley, L. (ed.) (1984) The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian ­M aidservant.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
4 Feminism, Film, and
Theory Now
Elizabeth Cowie

In these notes I explore current questions of feminism and femininity

as well as subjectivity and film, drawing on my work over a number of
years and in recently published essays. These notes are themed around
the question of horror – the horrible – in an engagement with the ground-
breaking study of the horror film by Barbara Creed. They address the
seen and the heard – the gaze and the voice – in film and new media.
What has remained for me a central issue for film and feminist theory
is the concept of the subject who is addressed. In the work of M ­ ichel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze the subject is posited as an effect of prac-
tices, while Actor–network theory describes and analyses not the cog-
nising subject but the networks of relations arising between agents,
human and non-human that produce a performativity of subjectivity as
agency. The subject is an effect and not agent of these networks and
discourses, indeed she is herself a ‘network’ of affect arising through
her rhizomatic interaction with the world. Yet the subject is at the same
time someone who laughs, or cries, and who desires. It is this subject and
her desires that psychoanalysis attends to and which I continue to draw
upon in thinking about moving images and sounds and photography. In
our era of multiplying technological media forms of address and interac-
tion the question then arises: what does the addressee want – ­desire – to
hear, to see, to know or to not know? What does the addressor want –
­desire – of the other as a response to their address via Facebook, Twitter,
­I nstagram, Tumbl, etcetera? And how is difference engaged, for the sub-
ject of address is always a subject in difference and subject to the diffi-
culties of difference, of sexuality and gender, of class and wealth, of race
and colour. Social media connects people, just as the letter in the post
or the telephone has in the past, but now as a kind of ‘conference call’,
in a performance of the self in the theatre of the accumulated photos,
mementoes, and anecdotes of everyday life uploaded onto Facebook, or
Instagram, which had always also been part of our postings to friends
and family via mail – and even now continues in the round-up of ones
activities over the year sent at Christmas. What is engaged is a being seen
and known by the other – our friends and acquaintances – and what
is different is the temporality of social media. A tap on a keyboard or
phone instantly communicates to friends and groups online.
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 67
Bernard Stiegler has proposed that the relation of the human subject
and the technical is co-originary, and that each tool or artefact is a form
of memory of the consciousness that produced it, and thus can be re-­
examined. In his concept of the ‘mnemo-technical system’, he addresses
the way in which in each epoch there is also a technology by which mem-
ory is exteriorised and is central to the way we adopt and adapt to new
technology that introduces new knowledge and new ways of life. He ar-
gues that ‘The concept of desire is the key to understanding the relation
between economics and psychoanalysis, that is, between social and psy-
chic investment, or between productive and libidinal economies’ (2011,
p. 150). In question here is not specific objects of desire, but ‘desire’ as a
psychological category, and our embodied engagement with technology,
for which scale, temporality and our embodied relation are central, hence
for Stiegler, cinema is a key ‘mnemotechnical system’. For it combines a
technology as memory-machine while engaging the spectator as herself a
‘memory machine’, in ‘the coincidence between the film’s flow and that of
the film spectator’s consciousness, linked by phonographic flux, initiating
the mechanics of a complete adoption of the film’s time with that of the
spectator’s consciousness – which, since it is itself a flux, is captured and
‘channelled’ by the flow of images. This movement, infused with every
spectator’s desire for stories, liberates the movements of consciousness
typical of cinematic emotion (Stiegler 2011, p. 12; italics in original).1
Christian Metz (1985, p. 81), writing on the differences between the
photograph and cinema, addresses these in terms of the kinds of ways we
engage with each form, as a socialised unit of reading, that is, the mode of
reception or reading of works – in sculpture the scale, material, and siting
of works, in music the performance heard and setting, and ‘the photo-
graph, a silent rectangle of paper … much smaller than the cinematic lexis’.
Scale of image, the presence of sounds, speech and music, of duration –
and thus temporality, as well as mode of engagement – holding a photo,
or visiting a cinema, all distinguish photography from film and video. For
new media and the internet, what comes into play is interactivity, and our
tactile relation to the mobile phone, computer, lap top or iPad or tablet,
access – like a book, or photograph – anywhere and anytime. These new
forms of social interaction, with new limitations on that interaction, open
new ways to fantasy, to narratives of the self and others that are addressed
to a fantasmatic audience of interlocutors. They also engage us in new ways
of remembering, as Stiegler notes, and which Sigfried Kracauer (1947) had
explored in relation to photography that in the 1910s and 1920s was seen
by many to be a threat to memory, and remembering.2
Following Laura Mulvey’s (1975) groundbreaking essay, ‘Visual Plea-
sure and Narrative Pleasure’, the gaze has been a central focus of anal-
yses of film, media, and new technology. While most certainly there are
power relations involved in who holds the gaze, and whose look is dom-
inant in the cinematic narrative, these cannot be simply reversed in gen-
der terms because of wider social assumptions that still obtain regarding
68 Elizabeth Cowie
the power of the male look. What I have been concerned to address is
not simply the look as such but the look of the represented or imagined
other, the look back. Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2010, p. 185) suggests that
through ‘the uncanny fact that in some way, through the technological
setup, the object stares back…. It is a feeling of Unheimlichkeit, which
questions the changing boundaries of the human itself within complex
socio-technical assemblages’.3 For Slavoj Žižek (1994, p. 194), ‘Specters
belong to the Real, they are the price we pay for the gap that separates
reality from the Real’.4 It is a gap arising as well in relation to the voice
such that, he suggests, it too is spectral:

An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from “its”

voice. The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs
to the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking,
there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the
speaker’s own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks “by it-
self”, through him.
(Žižek 2001, p. 58)

Dolar (2006, p. 70), drawing on Žižek, goes on to argue that,

Ventriloquism pertains to voice as such, to its inherently acous-

matic character: the voice comes from inside the body, the belly,
the stomach – from something incompatible with and irreducible to
the activity of the mouth. The fact that we see the aperture does not
demystify the voice: on the contrary, it enhances the enigma.5

Dolar explores the voice not only as a vehicle of meaning or as a source

of aesthetic admiration, but also as an object cause of desire, in the
sense that Jacques Lacan gives this, drawing on Freud, of the little ob-
ject other, objet petit a, that, Dolar suggests, can be seen as the lever of
thought for the subject who speaks. For to speak is first of all to desire
to be heard by an other, to engage an encounter with an other. The voice
itself, however, is what does not contribute to making sense. It is the
material element recalcitrant to meaning, and if we speak in order to say
something, then the voice is precisely that which cannot be said’ (Dolar
2006, p. 15; italics in original). And, it is precisely the voice that holds
bodies and language together (ibid., p. 60; italics in original).
Derrida (1973, p. 85), too, posits a gap that language institutes,

this pure difference, which constitutes the self-presence of the living

present, introduces into self-presence from the beginning all the im-
purity putatively excluded from it. The living present springs forth
out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a reten-
tional trace. It is always already a trace.
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 69
This is a subject divided, as the one who speaks, but who also hears her
own words as if another’s. Žižek (1996, p. 90) emphasises that ‘gaze and
voice are objects, that is, they do not belong on the side of the looking/
seeing subject but on the side of what the subject sees or hears’. More-
over, Alice Lagaay (2008, p. 59) notes, ‘it is not a particular person’s
gaze, and not a particular sounding voice, that these objects refer to.
Instead, gaze and voice have a quasi-fundamental status in Lacan’s the-
ory insofar as they refer to the fundamental relation from outside (the
other) to inside (the self), which in constituting the subject at the same
time defines it as lack’.6
What then of sexual difference? Difference is heard in the first words
introducing the new-born baby, ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’, instituting dif-
ference as performance for another that realises, or not, that first invo-
cation of sexual difference. It was Sigmund Freud who placed sexuality
as a central term in understanding the human mind, and it was also
Freud who displaced it as a unified phenomenon, instead proposing a
polymorphous sexuality, and arguing that it is the drive and desire, and
not instinct, that is central to sexuality, while sexuality is but one aspect
of human desire. Lacan, in his rethinking of Freud, further emphasises
that we are formed psychically through our relations to others and the
desire of the other. With his concept of the objet petit a as cause of desire
Lacan posits the human subject as a subject of lack, not of the object
lost but of the lostness of the object, such that every replacement object
nevertheless signifies that ‘lostness’.7 Lacan (2006, p. 147) famously in-
sisted that Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel ‘there is no sexual relationship’;
instead there is the possibility of love.8
In Lacan’s (2016, p. 68) late Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, the conse-
quences for the subject that the sexual relation does not exist are explored
in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the symptom. Lacan uses
the term sinthome to mark a difference in the psychical formation of the
symptom in that the sinthome, unlike the symptom, involves a creative
process that upholds the consistency of reality for a subject, ‘knotting’
the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic through an identification with
one’s symptom. The symptom, as Žižek (1991, p. 207) notes, is a particu-
lar pathological signifying formation in the unconscious which enjoys, re-
sisting interpretation, ‘a stain which cannot be included into the circuit of
discourse, of social bond/network’, that is the Symbolic, ‘but which is at
the same time a positive condition of it’. Identifying with one’s sinthome
is a way of managing one’s symptom, of managing that which intrudes
upon, and defines one. Lacan develops this concept subject through an
exploration of the writings of James Joyce and he not only develops his
conceptualisation of the Real but also addresses how art – the artifices of
art – might be engaged through the symptom in relation to Joyce’s writ-
ing, while at the same time Lacan complicates the role of the phallus and
The-Name-of-the-Father. As a result, Lacanian analyst Geneviève Morel
70 Elizabeth Cowie
(2005, p. xvi) suggests that Lacan’s theory of the symptom ‘allows us to
think the relations between the sexes and the generations without nec-
essarily referring to the Name-of-the-Father nor to the phallus, as tran-
scendent norms of a symbolic order’. While Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric
Declercq (2002, p. 76) refer to the sinthome as, ‘a particular process that
is situated entirely in the line of femininity’.9 For what Lacan introduces
through this term is the subject’s individuation without the phallic signi-
fier. I see this, however, not as a ‘feminine way’ (op. cit., p. 59), but rather
as other or as indifferent to the sexual difference that is posited by the
Symbolic order, namely as Lacan (1993, p. 171) asserts: ‘The subject’s
sexual position…. is tied to the symbolic apparatus’. For Lacan there is
no feminine outside language because, as Jacqueline Rose (1982, p. 55)
notes, first ‘the unconscious severs the subject from any unmediated rela-
tion to the body as such … and secondly because the “feminine” is consti-
tuted in a division in language’. Yet difference is present, as Lacan argues
in Seminar XXIV, ‘the Other with a capital O that is at stake in the
unconscious. I do not see how one could give a sense to the unconscious,
except by situating it in this Other, the bearer of signifiers’. This Other,
which is also the m/Other, introduces the Real of lack in that it desires.
The naming and names of sexual difference both institutes and attempts
to assuage this lack, and it is the symptom that, for the subject, attests to
the failure of such naming – of woman, or man, and the object choices
of the other sex, or the same sex. For Lacan, the concept of the sinthome
as knotting the Real, Symbolic and the Imaginary is a naming of one’s
Real, one’s lacking, that is, it seems, indifferent to sexual difference. I
speculate that what we name as our sexual difference is itself a sinthome.
In one sense both Freud and Lacan have queered sexuality, in making it
‘strange’, and in terms of contemporary queer politics.
It is the namings of sexual difference and their imagining that Barbara
Creed (1993) addresses in her groundbreaking study, The Monstrous-­
Feminine. She argues that the horror film, ‘is populated by female mon-
sters, many of which seem to have evolved from images that haunted
dreams, myths and artistic practices of our forebears’ for, as she notes,
‘All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of
what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’
(Creed 1993, p. 1) She uses the term ‘monstrous-feminine’ because

the term “female monster” implies a simple reversal of “male mon-

ster”. The reasons why the monstrous feminine horrifies her audience
are quite different from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his
audience. A new term is needed to specify these differences. As with all
other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined
in terms of her sexuality. The phrase “monstrous feminine” empha-
sises the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity.
(Creed 1993, p. 3)
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 71
In the subtitle of her book – ‘Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis’ – Creed
poses psychoanalysis as the theoretical space in which to explore the
question of the monstrous-feminine in film, at the same time as she in-
troduces the question of the politics of sexual difference and its repre-
sentation. She suggests,

It may be that the horror genre is more directly responsive to ques-

tions of sexual difference, more willing to explore male and female
anxieties about the “other”, than film texts which belong to main-
stream genres such as the detective, suspense thriller, comedy and
romance films.
(Creed 1993, p. 152)

For me the feminist claim of the 1970s that ‘the personal is political’
a­ ddressed what it is to experience being a woman and its anxieties, that
is, the shaping of our experience through norms of representation –
­images of women – in society as a product of ‘patriarchal ideology’.
Laura Mulvey (1973) analysed the gaze of patriarchy that forms and
deforms the feminine for masculine pleasure and control, noting later
in 1978 that ‘Patriarchal ideology is made up of assumptions, “truths”
about the meaning of sexual difference, women’s place in society,
the mystery of femininity and so on … However, ideology – whether
­bourgeois or patriarchal – is not a blanket-like or eternal totality and it
is crucial for feminists to be aware of contradictions within it’ (Mulvey
[1978] 1989, p. 121; Cowie 2015c).
It is the work of Michel Foucault – which was a central focus of the
journal m/f that I was co-founder and co-editor of 1976–1986 – that of-
fered a new understanding of our discursive construction and the politics
of representation as not simply that of a patriarchy controlling our im-
ages but more complexly as the discursive ordering that figures daughter,
sister, girl, woman, mother, wife, femme fatale, whore, harridan, crone,
and which names how we should be. Here it is not a question of equality,
or of an injustice that could be righted, but of how we learn, or not, to
be ‘a woman’, ‘feminine’, or a ‘mother’ in relation to an other in a field
of possibilities in which our biology is only one element. The politics of
feminism relates not to a unified subject, a singular identity of woman,
nor is it simply plural; it is a distributed subjectivity in process. We are
‘hailed’ (Althusser 1971), for example, as a daughter or we enact ‘hail-
ing’ as a mother: ‘be tidy/good/pretty’. Judith Butler, in her concept of
gender performance, draws on Foucault’s work in her rejection of gender
as an essential difference. Further, she uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1969,
p. 45) claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no “being”
[or “I”] behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction
added to the deed – the deed is everything’, when she argues: ‘There
is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is
72 Elizabeth Cowie
performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be
its results’ (Butler 1990, p. 25).10 What is not addressed by Butler is the
way our performance is for another, and how our sense of ourselves that
we call our ‘identity’ is experienced performatively through our relation
to others, and how others bring to us ways of knowing ourselves through
interactions that are figured through a desire to be for the other, to be
the other’s desire. The question is then, how to be in the world as a body
that is ‘female’? That is, how to perform for the gaze of others by which
we know and tell others ‘who I am’ as a person who is a ‘woman’, which
may be as lesbian or heterosexual, or transgender. Yet we are formed as
much by our resistance as by our acquiescence to the constructions our
affective relations give rise to.
This is equally the case in relation to our political subjectivisation
which is also, Jacques Rancière (1992, p. 62) argues, ‘a logic of the
other’, because ‘it is never the simple assertion of an identity; it is al-
ways, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by an other’.
Rancière calls this a heterology, namely, a lack of correspondence be-
tween apparently similar bodily parts due to differences in fundamental
makeup or origin. He argues that subjectivisation is also ‘a demonstra-
tion, and a demonstration always supposes an other’ (p. 62). Even if
that other refuses the demonstration, what is established is a ‘polemical
commonplace’ for addressing the ‘wrong’ of difference. Rancière asserts
that, ‘the logic of subjectivisation always entails an impossible identifi-
cation’ (p. 62).
Feminism is a politics of sexual difference and, drawing on the work
of Rancière, I want to characterise the politics of feminism as one which
is not simply a struggle for power or rights or equality but, rather, an
engagement with the political whereby, as Rancière (2004, p. 13) pro-
poses, ‘politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about
it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the
properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’. It ‘consists in refigur-
ing space, that is, in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in
it. It is the instituting of a dispute over the distribution of the sensible’
(Rancière 2010a, p. 37). Feminism is such a dispute about the norms
of sexual division and difference, of who can speak, and who can act
within the social. It is also an ethos in relation to living, that is, in a
dwelling, in a being and a doing as a woman. Rancière posits man, or
woman, or citizen as ‘political subjects’ not ‘definite collectivities’:

They are surplus names, names that set out a question or a dispute
(litige) about who is included in their count. Correspondingly, free-
dom and equality are not predicates belonging to definite subjects.
Political predicates are open predicates: they open up a dispute about
what they exactly entail and whom they concern in which cases.
(Rancière 2004, p. 303)
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 73
For Rancière (2004, p. 309), what is central is not ethics but politics:

Ethics is indeed on our agendas. Some people see it as a return to

some founding spirit of the community, sustaining positive laws and
political agency. I take a fairly different view of this new reign of
ethics. It means to me the erasure of all legal distinctions and the
closure of all political intervals of dissensus. Both are erased in the
infinite conflict of Good and Evil.

The current focus on equality of pay and opportunity in Hollywood

and in film and television production more widely, as well as the issues
of sexual harassment and the Me Too movement is the constitution of a
dispute in Rancière’s sense. It is a challenge to the lack of women behind
the camera, as directors, writers, directors of photography, sound, as
well as the lack of women in film, not only as central characters but even
as extras in scenes.11 The inclusion of women does not just even things
up with men, however, but more importantly it opens up opportunities
for film-makers and audiences that can also be challenges to think our-
selves within these stories as agents in the world and in our relationships
to others.
Feminism is also an aesthetic project in relation to the understanding
of, and intervening in, the representation of woman and her imagin-
ing, her difference, and practices of art are political not because they
promote political awareness or provoke political actions but insofar as,
Rancière (2010a, p. 149) writes, ‘they contribute to the constitution of
a form of common sense that is “polemical”, to a new landscape of the
visible, the sayable and the doable’. Feminist politics, therefore, involves
not only disputing existing canons of film or literature, and challenging
norms of representation, but also in posing the difficulties of difference
and desire for women (and men) as social beings and exposing the con-
tradictions of ‘femininity’, of motherhood and gender, in the production
and circulation of images of women.
Rancière (2004, p. 38) argues that, ‘The real must be fictionalised
to be thought’, and the ‘“fictions” of art and politics are heterotopias’
(p. 41) that introduce dissensus, ‘the “heteron” or the “other”: the other
as the effect of a reconfiguration of the distribution of places, identities,
and capacities’ (2010b, p. 21).12 Rancière here draws on Lacan’s concep-
tualisation of the Real as the unrepresentable that haunts the subject.
Dissensus for Rancière (2010a, p. 38) names the process of a fissuring of
the sensible order made possible not by a perception of a new ‘fact’ but
by the perception of an incompleteness, ‘a gap in the sensible itself’.13
The political effect of films arises not through the words or actions of
their participants, or as a knowledge that seeks to persuade. Rather, as
Rancière (2009, p. 72) argues, it arises through ‘a multiplicity of folds
and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography
74 Elizabeth Cowie
of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible’. The folds entwine el-
ements that are incommensurable, disturbing the commonsense of the
knowable – the ‘distributed sensible’ of sexual difference – that bears on
how one looks and how one is engaged by an art work, thus producing
a gap in knowledgeability. This is the ‘good’ of my affectual experience,
and it is feminist in engaging the viewer in her or his difference. It is a
politics, a dissensus.
We experience film, and art, cognitively as affect as well as the
thought, and here I turn to the question that Sigfried Kracauer (1960,
p. 285) posed in Theory of Film, ‘which is the most central of all: what
is the good of our experience of film?’ The ‘good’ is how film engages us
in our dwelling, being and doing, namely to social and thus the political.
Kracauer (p. 308) goes on to argue that,

much as the images of material moments are meaningful in their

own right, we actually do not confine ourselves to absorbing them
but feel stimulated to weave what they are telling us into contexts
that bear on the whole of our existence.

Kracauer (p. 305) also notes that,

In acquainting us with the world we live in, the cinema exhibits

phenomena whose appearance in the witness stand is of particular
consequence. It brings us face to face with the things we dread. And
it often challenges us to confront the real-life events it shows with
the ideas we commonly entertain about them.

Philosopher Stanley Cavell (1979, p. 419) writes that,

Horror is the title I am giving to the perception of the precariousness

of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded,
that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, or
take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting
for, and are unaccountable.

Here is the underbelly of affect, those states we term fear or terror, hor-
ror and anxiety that are engaged through performance art, photography,
and film. How are these feelings reconciled or repudiated? Can images
be too disturbing? What is the relation of Cavell’s horror to anxiety,
trauma, and mourning, and to the other represented?
Kracauer’s question, ‘what is of the good of our experience?’ poses
not only a question about our evaluation of what we have experienced
as art – image, sound, film, or video – but also the experience itself and
the temporal and emotional relation between affect that gives rise to
thought as an understanding that is also an interpretation, and affect as
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 75
a ‘felt’ that arises with thought, but which we might think of as osten-
sibly independent of thought. Affects are our experiences of the world,
how we are touched by the world, viscerally as hot or cold, or fainting at
the sight of blood, but also as we are touched by the coldness of a stare
or the warmth of a gaze that we receive. Affect is the mind caught by
the scene, both sound and image, experienced in the body. For sympathy
often leads us to turn away from the abjection of the other in a horror
which is disavowed. Affect is not singular, it is a process in time whereby
feelings are continuous with one another, interpenetrate one another,
and may even be opposed to one another. It is not a question of ethical
‘thought’, but of ‘being’, in an experiencing that becomes an action of
felt being, for example in an identification – ‘that could be me’ – giving
rise to empathy for another or of anxiety at the very thought – ‘that
could be me’. Or the felt being experienced as anger – against those oth-
ers who drive badly, or do not pick up litter, or take our jobs or who in
other myriad ways may prevent me enjoying/being. It is this complexity
that Henri Bergson (2002, p. 73) describes when he notes: ‘We instinc-
tively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in lan-
guage, hence we confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state
of becoming, with its permanent external object, and especially with the
word which expresses this object’. We actualise our responses, as ‘this’,
and then as another ‘this’.14
Vikki Bell (2008) writing about Andrew Jarecki’s documentary film,
Capturing the Friedmans (Dir. Andrew Jarecki, USA, 2003) draws on
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994, p. 175) who write that artists
are ‘presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not
only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us be-
come with them, they draw us into the compound’. The work of art is
‘a being of sensation and nothing else’ (p. 164). Bell (2008, p. 100) con-
cludes: ‘what is unsettling about this particular film is that, as viewers,
we are also captured in the cinema assemblage in terms of its percepts
and affects…. And if it makes one feel uncomfortable, the burden of that
sensation is also a movement and in itself an ethics; having looked at this
picture/film, who – or more properly the question, for all the reasons
I have argued here, is how – do we become?’
The debates and different concepts of ‘affect’ are themselves a symp-
tom of the complex issues – and politics – surrounding the concept of
affect in cognitive theory, in philosophy and ethics, but with which psy-
choanalysis is much more comfortable. The felt which is not immedi-
ately subsumed to knowledge is the sublime of the eighteenth-century
writers and later romantics – a wonder, an awe, a terror, a sudden up-
welling of tears, or laughter, and thus of the unconscious. It is the felt of
the ‘real’, Lacan’s term for the felt that is unrepresentable, unsymbolis-
able. This is not the ‘unrepresentable’ in art of Theodor Adorno, which
Rancière (2010a, p. 195) argues conflates impossibility and interdiction.
76 Elizabeth Cowie
Instead Rancière posits the unrepresentability of trauma, drawing on
Lacan’s discussion of Sophicle’s play Antigone, which replaces Oedipus
in Freud’s thinking as a new form of secret,

one that is irreducible to any salvational knowledge. There is nei-

ther beginning nor end to the trauma encapsulated in Antigone. The
tragedy bespeaks the discontent of a civilization in which the laws
of social order are undermined by the very things that support them.

Which are the powers of affiliation. Rancière (2010a, p. 187) argues

that for ­Lacan, Antigone ‘is not the heroine of human rights created
by ­modern democratic piety. Instead she is the terrorist, the witness of
the secret terror that underlies the social order. Terror is precisely the
name that trauma takes in political matters’. If, in the play by S­ ophocles,
­A ntigone is monstrous then perhaps the monstrous woman of the h ­ orror
film, too, is a terrorist.
What role might the art work play in relation to the traumatic remem-
bered? What I suggest is that the anxiety – horror – of the art work as
traumatic does not involve a remembering of a past trauma as a kind of
recovery of an experience. It is the experience and as such may produce a
remembering, as Nachträglichkeit, or, as psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche
(1999, p. 165) terms it, ‘afterwardsness’,15 which haunts the subject but
which can become translated, symbolisable, enabling us to move beyond
imaginary captivation. This symbolisation, however, bears the trace of
the Real thereby rendering it into the reality of its sounds and images.
The art work, too, enables the apprehension of the Real in dreadful anx-
iety without losing oneself as a subject, through a form of sublimation in
which one confronts, but is not overwhelmed by, the limits of one’s ex-
istence.16 This is not a matter of rational explanation, yet the processes
of thought here are not without reason, that is, of cause and effect, such
that, moreover, they produce purposive action and understanding on the
part of the subject. The art work confronts us, therefore, in a way which
opens us psychically – like the joke! – as Freud (1905/1960: p. 161, 165)
argues, to a repressed wish better understood through Lacan’s concept
of the Real, which is not sublimated in or through the art object, or the
images and sounds, but rests in us. Not ‘as if’ but ‘as me’.
But what of fear, and fear of the horrible? For Lacan, the anxiety that
exceeds reasonable fear ‘is not a symbolic phenomenon, but is situated
at the border of the imaginary and the real’ (Shepherdson 2013, p. lx).
Trauma is a symptom of the Real, it is not a simply past event, it is ‘the
experience you are awaiting’ (Hernandez 1998, p. 139),17 namely, an
annihilation. It is not the infraction – the wound – as such but the pos-
sible future wound that will destroy, just as this wound might have; it
is the unrepresentable of anxiety, whereby the subject herself or himself
is placed as lack, as objet petit a, in relation to the desire of the Other
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 77
that the subject desires.18 Lacan (Harari 2001, p. 108) refers to Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s classic dialectic between the master and the
slave, developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which desire is for
recognition – the desire of desire, to ‘be’ for the Other. Yet, in this, I be-
come the object of the Other’s desire in a recognition that thereby denies
me the subjectivity I desire in desiring the Other’s desire. Lacan identifies
a fundamental asymmetry here, as the result of which a reciprocity of
recognition is impossible. Instead, he argues, what I seek in desiring the
Other’s desire is to find myself in the other, in which I thereby also seek
the Other’s loss. The reverse is thus that what the Other seeks, desires,
in desiring me is to find itself in me, ‘for which it solicits my loss’ (Harari
2001, p. 108). In desiring the desire of the Other, I confront the O ­ ther’s
desire, which Lacan (1979, p. 263) characterises as ‘I love you but, be-
cause inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet
petit a – I mutilate you’.
Georges Franju writes of his film, Eyes without a Face [Les Yeux sans
visage] (Dir. Georges Franju, France, 1960), ‘It’s an anguish film. It’s
a quieter mood than horror, something more subjacent, more internal,
more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses’ (Quoted in Durgnat
1967, p. 83). Franju’s comments on Eyes Without a Face suggest an
approach to horror that, perhaps not coincidentally, closely relates to
­Lacan’s view of anxiety:

In my experience, it is necessary to canalise it [anxiety] and, if I may

say so, to take it in small doses, so that one is not overcome by it.
This is similar to bringing the subject into contact with the real’.
Homeopathy – established on the principle of ‘Let likes cure likes’ –
seeks to heal through the similar, prescribing a remedy that will
cause the symptom in a healthy person, and thus in the ill body stim-
ulate it to restore itself to health. Yet for psychoanalysis this cannot
be a form of inoculation against or resistance to anxiety, or the real,
as if it were a pathogen, which could be removed. The experiencing
of “small doses” must, rather, bring about some accommodation
with the real of anxiety, circumscribing anxiety so that it no longer
floods the subject or defines every encounter with others in everyday
reality as always being in the service of the jouissance of the Other.
(Lacan 1979, p. 41)

Indeed, this film was my own encounter with the horrific that I wanted to
look away from. But while the horrible evokes visceral revulsion it is not
simply the body torn, but rather it arises from an identification, of my
own body torn, for certain stories and images don’t go away when you
stop looking. The horror film’s monstrous figures of abjection and scenes
of terrifying destruction and chaos, by engaging us in a compulsive re-
turn to look, to watch, to know what we dread, snare us in the uncanny,
78 Elizabeth Cowie
and in the pleasure/unpleasure of repetition.19 That is, they snare us in
the repeated re-encounter of the jouissance of the Other, which I serve
insofar as I find my enjoyment, my jouissance, in the desire of the Other,
and resist by attempting to master the Other – to abject her.20 Rather,
what is necessary is a re-figuring of my relation to the desiring Other
through symbolisation and not as jouissance. The unique role of the
horror film here is not its symbolisations as such, but its enjoining the
spectator to symbolise. Public performances of horror address us as both
traumatic and as symbolising, translated. Both its compulsive attraction
and its ethical dimension lie in this double role of horror. That we can
find the fictitious terrors of the horror film traumatic testifies not to the
success of its illusionism – its ‘realism’ – nor to the humanist truths of
its fabrications, but to the appearance of the uncanny Real that is never
either reality or fiction.
Where my discussion in my essay ‘The Lived Nightmare: Trauma,
Anxiety, and the Ethical Aesthetics of Horror’ (Cowie 2003) focussed
on anxiety, I now want to draw upon the idea of ‘ravage’ in Lacan and
the monstrous feminine. In his seminar on The Sinthome, Lacan (2016,
p. 107) speaks of being ‘stupefied’ on seeing Nagisa Oshima’s In the
Realm of the Senses [Ai no korīda] (Dir. Nagisa Oshima, Japan/France,
1976), because ‘it was feminine eroticism’, and that ‘In it feminine erot-
icism … seems to be carried to its extremes’. Lacan suggests that ‘this
extreme is the fantasy, no more or less, of killing the man. But even that
does not suffice. Having killed him, she goes further still. Afterwards –
why after?’. 21
The film is based on a real event in Tokyo reported by newspapers in
1936 – recounted by Oshima’s voice-over at the end of the film – of a
woman named Sado found after wandering through Tokyo for several
days with a man’s penis inside her. Lacan (2016, p. 107) comments that
‘We all know it’s a fantasy’, but a fantasy of what is less clear to him, for
he suggests that there ‘is a shade of what I just now called doubt. This is
where one can clearly see that castration is not the fantasy’. He does not
explore this further but says that, ‘As for what the woman fantasises, if
this is really what the film presents us with, it is something that, either
way, impedes the encounter’ (p. 108).
Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2008, p. 2), writing on Trouble Every
Day (Dir. Claire Denis, France/Germany/Japan, 2001), is equally vis-
ceral in writing about the film’s fatal carnality, arguing that,

We must understand that the bite of the kiss here, devours the sexes
(their organs), not by castration, but by an absorption which opens
on to a kind of horrific sublimation: not that of sex in which a body
takes pleasure, but that of an entire body in which sex bursts out and
is spattered with the body’s blood, with its life/death and with that
which explodes it: that which exposes it in splashes, drops, streams
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 79
and stains, clots and ribbons that will never again be restored to a
form. We might say that the film’s entire story is the allegory, and
its entire image the literality of this: the unbearable tearing apart of
orgasm.

Both these films centre a fatal – indeed monstrous – woman, each of

whom realise Lacan’s (1979, p. 263) aphorism: ‘I love you but, because
inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit
a – I mutilate you’. While Lacan is ‘stupified’, and foregrounds the issue
of feminine desire, Nancy declares ‘This film is shattering’, just as ‘Ec-
stasy shatters the image of itself (the image of self and the proper image
of ecstasy)’, the film shuts ‘out the gaze by opening it onto a wound, a
bite mark’. While Nancy does not address the obsession of the film’s
murderess, Coré, or that of Dr Shane Brown, in terms of their differ-
ence, Douglas Morrey (2008, p. 18), in his essay ‘Open Wounds: Body
and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis’ does when he asserts
‘If Coré’s kill shows sex as killing, Shane’s murder of the hotel cham-
bermaid, Christelle, presents killing as sex’. Morrey (p. 16) comments
that, ‘A body never penetrates or opens up another, wrote Nancy (2006,
p. 27) in Corpus, except in murder. But in his text on Denis’s Trouble
Every Day, this comes across as the truth of desire’. And it is a truth that
is, nevertheless, marked by sexual difference.
Shane had been obsessed by Coré some years before his return to Paris
with his newly married wife, and he now seeks Coré out. She has been
imprisoned by her husband (a former colleague) to prevent her murder-
ing further men, and when he finds her she is in the sexual act with a
young male intruder she is gorging, and as she turns to him, he strangles
her as she moves to bite him. The house is then enveloped in flames.
Unable or unwilling to realise sexual relations with his wife earlier – we
see him frantically masturbating in the hotel bathroom after failing to
consummate lovemaking with his wife – the vampiric desire suggested
in the kiss she receives from him on their plane to Paris is realised when,
after killing Coré, he first seduces then rapes a maid before biting her to
death, starting with her sexual organs.
What might it mean to view each film as a feminist horror film? Cer-
tainly each is a ‘splatter’ movie, with grisly scenes of blood and organs
spilt, and each presents awful sexual violence, while centring a woman
and addressing us with her story, her desire, and the puzzle of her iden-
tity, thereby raising issues of feminist politics. For each film complicates
how we can make her the object of our gaze, of our desire to know her,
to fix her identity, or to be or to have her. It is thereby engaging us affec-
tually through the ways that we encounter her desire in the film, as well
as that of the men for whom she is an object of desire. And each film
is feminist in engaging the viewer in her or his difference in the sense
I suggested earlier, whereby the folds of cinematic expression entwine
80 Elizabeth Cowie
elements that are incommensurable, disturbing the common sense of the
knowable – the ‘distributed sensible’ of sexual difference – that bears on
how one looks and how one is engaged by an art work, thus producing
a gap in knowledgeability.
In In the Realm of the Senses, which relates a true incident, Kichi’s
submission to Sada’s demands, and her ecstasy when she playfully, but
finally mortally, gently strangles him with a cord, disturbs, and delights.
Trouble Every Day, however, poses sexual ecstasy as death in the con-
text of a risible plot – noted by many reviewers as incomprehensible –
that centres on a brain disorder arising from the research Shane (who is
employed by a pharmaceutical firm) and Coré’s husband had been work-
ing on together in South America that a former colleague Shane meets in
Paris accuses Shane of stealing. But such a possible rational explanation
is left shadowy in contrast to the ecstasy of vampirism. Sada and Coré
each ravage their lovers, destroying as they enjoy him sexually in a rav-
ishment, and this is their ‘monstrousness’. In both English and French,
the two terms overlap in their meanings. The adjective ravishing comes
from the verb ravish, which is from the Latin word rapere, meaning to
seize, as a verb, either to seize and take away by violence, to be raped; or
to overcome with emotion (such as joy or delight), ravished by the scenic
beauty. Ravage also derives from rapere, taking the first meaning, to be
plundered, laid waste. And it is ravage that is the term Lacan uses in
relation to a feminine jouissance that is not erotic – phallic pleasure, and
not subject to the Name-of-the-Father, instead ravage has to do with the
death drive. 22 It is this ravishing ravage that I suggest is also in play for
each woman in these two films. And it is ravage that engages us in the
horror of the horror film.
Central to Barbara Creed’s discussion of horror is Julia Kristeva’s the-
ory of abjection, which, Creed (1993, p. 14) writes, ‘provides us with an
important theoretical framework for analysing, in the horror film, the
representation of the monstrous-feminine, in relation woman’s repro-
ductive and mothering functions. However, abjection by its very nature
is ambiguous; it both repels and attracts’. The abject, as explored by
Kristeva (1982) in her book, Powers of Horror, in its literary and met-
aphorical appearances, has been a compelling concept and account for
discussions of the horror film, articulating the fascination as well as the
horror of the abject. The abject, or abjection, refers to two distinct phe-
nomena for Kristeva. The first is the act of abjection in which the subject
separates itself from the object and thereby designates it as abject, the
‘horrible’, thus also instituting a distinction of inside/outside but where
what is put outside is abjured, evicted, and effaced. Yet in this process
of abjecting, the abject retains a dreadful fascination. The second is the
state of abjection, of being the lost, abjected, reviled object.
Where abjection is the experience of borders disrupted, unsettled,
made disturbingly permeable, ravage is the perpetrator of abjection.
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 81
While Kristeva emphasises the body as surfaces and drives, Lacan’s con-
cept of the Real addresses the emergence of the child as a subject in
language in his triad of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. The Real is the
unrepresentable, the felt but unnamed of the body that is experienced
psychically. It is our terror of the Real, the taint of which always remains
attached to the objet a, not the projections of the abject, that is ­central
for understanding the unpleasures and pleasures of horror. For both
­Lacan and Kristeva, the maternal is linked to the experiencing of ravage
and/as abjection for men and women. Lacan (1973, p. 21) refers to, ‘the
ravage that in a woman is her relation to her mother’ where it is the child
who is abject, who is ‘laid waste’ by the mother. Kristeva (1982, p. 5)
writes of this as the abjection of the self,

If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes

the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of
its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify
with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it
finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is nothing
other than abject (italics in original).

For Lacan (1998, p. 271), it is not the mother’s body, but her desire that
is central to the experience of ravage,

the subject’s primary dependency in reference to the Other’s

­ esire …. Here is what is being inscribed in the structure through
d
the subject’s history: the fortunes and misadventures of the constitu-
tion of this desire as subjected to the law of the Other’s desire.

Lacan rephrases the question of the primary relation to the mother as

one where, for the subject,

what matters is to finally acknowledge – with reference to what is

an x of desire in the mother, that which made it possible to become
or not become the one who responds to it, to become or not become
the desired being.

Hence the question that Lacan places in the foreground of the psychoan-
alytic experience: what does the (m)Other want from me?
It is not only the mother that effects ravage for the woman (and indeed
for the man) however, for Lacan (2016, p. 84) writes of the sexual rela-
tion, ‘If a woman is a sinthome for any man, it’s quite clear that another
name needs to be found for what’s involved in man for a woman, since
the sinthome is characterised precisely by non-equivalence. One can say
that for a woman, man is anything you please, specifically an affliction
that is worse than a sinthome. A ravage, even’. The sinthome knots the
82 Elizabeth Cowie
Real, imaginary and symbolic registers, while ravage exposes the subject
to the Real, to horror, to the death drive.
In each film desire, and sexual ecstasy, is also deathly for the other of
the woman’s desire. Sada and Coré each realise Lacan’s (1979, p. 263)
verdict on desire, that in desiring the other they nevertheless want some-
thing more than the other – the objet petit a – and thus mutilate, indeed
destroy, the other of their desire. It is the spectator’s journey with Sada
and Coré that engages her with the symptom, the ravage, articulated
by each character’s story and imaged by each film. Oshima prefaces In
the Realm of the Senses with a shot from the end of the film of Sada
lying down, gazing out off screen to a space that is, in effect, that of the
spectator, and repeated as the film’s final shot, but now we see, traced
in red – the blood of Kichi’s severed genitals – the words ‘Sada, Kichi
together the two of us only’, while Oshima’s voice-over relates the af-
termath, as reported in the news, of Sada found wandering in Tokyo
with his ­penis. Coré, too, narrates her symptom in her victim’s blood –
through her paintings on the wall of her room. Each film engages us in a
cinematically narrated ecstasy that is also deathly, posing the question of
desire and the fatal implications of desire and difference enacted through
the symptom.
Stephen Heath (1981, p. 160) argues what is at stake In the Realm of
the Senses is, ‘throughout, that is, evidently (but with great difficulty)
the whole problem of representation and sexual difference in cinema’.
This is no less true for Trouble Every Day, where Shane’s devouring
of the maid is off-screen, unlike the graphic image of Coré’s ecstasy,
and instead Denis’ camera simply gives us the woman’s transformation
from ecstasy to agony. At the end of the film, Shane is washing away his
victim’s blood in the shower, when his wife appears and asks: are you
happy? He replies that yes, he’s happy, and that he’s now ready to go
home, as the camera shows her noticing watery blood on the shower.
While Coré dies, immolated in flames, Shane returns home with the
‘happiness’ that he’s found from their visit to Paris, that is, a pleasure,
the nature of which remains ambiguous.
Each film incites and excites, requiring the spectator to manage the
folds of audio-visual representation entwining elements that are incom-
mensurable, that disturb the commonsense of the knowable – the ‘dis-
tributed sensible’ of sexual difference – that bears on how one looks and
how one is engaged by an art work, producing a gap in knowledgeability
that is the Real, namely the possibilities and impossibilities of what we
call sexual difference in relation to the deathly ecstasies of passion.

My thanks to Nicholas Chare for all his help with this article, and to
the editors of the journals and books in which my articles that I quote
from were published. In each case their comments and support have
been invaluable.
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 83
Notes
1 On Stiegler and film, see Roberts (2006) and Stiegler (1998).
2 On this, see Kracauer (1947). Also, Leslie (2010).
3 I explored this further in ‘The World Viewed: Documentary Observing and
the Culture of Surveillance’ (Cowie 2015a).
4 Jacques Derrida observes in the film Ghost Dance (Dir. Ken McMullen, UK/
West Germany, 1983) that ‘A specter is … a trace that marks the present
with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive
logic … Film plus psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts … a trace that
marks the present with its absence in advance’.
5 I discussed the question of voice in documentary in ‘The ventriloquism of
documentary first-person speech and the self-portrait film’ (Cowie 2015b).
6 The letter a refers on the one hand to the a of l’autre (other); on the other
hand, as the first letter of the alphabet, it stands for both the beginning of
a symbolic system and the algebraic place-holder, meaningless in itself, but
essentially open to take on significance in a particular context.
7 I explored desire and the Real in chapter 4, ‘Documenting the Real’, in
­Recording Reality, desiring the real (Cowie 2011, pp. 118–134).
8 The phrase is used in following Seminars, especially in Encore in relation to
the sexual relation not being ‘able to write the sexual relationship’ (Lacan
1999, p. 35).
9 The sinthome is thus, for Lacan, a new way to understand the end of ­analysis.
The conclusion of the treatment is ‘the identification with the Real of the
symptom, the choice of jouissance, and the creation of a neo-subject’ I am
drawing here on my essay on sexual difference, desire and the symptom/
sinthome (Cowie 2019).
10 In Bodies that Matter, Butler (1993, p. 6) argues that, ‘if gender is con-
structed, it is not necessarily constructed by an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who stands be-
fore that construction in any spatial or temporal sense of ‘before’. Indeed, it
is unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who had not been submitted, sub-
jected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the ­differentiating
relations by which speaking subjects come into being … the ‘I’ neither pre-
cedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within
the matrix of gender relations themselves’. Butler draws from J. L. Austin’s
work on performative speech, the non-necessity of an ‘inward’ performance
to accompany the ‘outer’ performative. It is a move to go against the simple
binary: Do I make or cause myself and my identity, or am I made or caused
by factors – social or biological – outside of my control? Instead, the ‘inte-
riority’ of subjectivity is displaced to be an effect of the performativity that
is undertaken without any ‘inward act’, that is, in doing this I do not think
or reflect that I am doing something that ‘makes’ me; I just do it, but in do-
ing it I become ‘made’. The problem of the origin of subjectivity continues
to haunt, notwithstanding Judith Butler’s later work that incorporates an
account of melancholia, of a lost object, and thus of identification, for she
fails to address the identifying that arises with the wish to be what the other
wants, to be for the other. See on this Butler’s (1997) The Psychic Life of
Power, especially chapters 3 and 4.
11 For more on this, see Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, ­online:http://
seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/. Accessed 19 N ­ ovember 2015.
12 Rancière’s concept here of heterotopia is quite different from that articulated
by Foucault (1986, p. 24) in his essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, in which he argues
that ‘whereas utopias are unreal spaces whose alternative worlds contest
by remaking reality, heterotopias are real spaces, locatable sites, that enact
84 Elizabeth Cowie
contestation in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found
within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.
Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to
indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different
from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way
of contrast to utopias, heterotopias’.
13 The gap in the sensible that is dissensus, like Lacan’s concept of the Real,
arises not before but after symbolisation. Here, we might also think of
Deleuze’s (1989, p. 214) account of the ‘irrational’ cut, or interval, of film
that is also the opening of a gap, and a thinking of what is not yet, and not
yet thought – and a movement between before and after in the now.
14 This is central for Deleuze’s distinction between the affection image of the
movement cinema and the affect of time cinema. My discussion here draws
on my arguments in ‘The difference in figuring women now’ (Cowie 2015c).
15 I explore more fully Laplanche’s idea of afterwardsness in ‘The Lived
Nightmare: Trauma, Anxiety, and the Ethical Aesthetics of Horror’ (Cowie
2003, p. 33), and draw on this essay in the following discussion of horror
and film.
16 This idea is explored in Philippe Van Haute’s (1998, pp. 115–116) ‘Death
and Sublimation in Lacan’s Reading of Antigone’.
17 Hernandez is referring here to the work of Alvin Frank (1969) in ‘The Unre-
memberable and the Unforgettable: Passive Primal Repression’.
18 The subject is thus what Julia Kristeva terms abject. As explored in her book
Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1982), in its literary and metaphorical appear-
ances, the abject has been a compelling concept and account for discussions
of the horror film, articulating the fascination as well as the horror of the
abject. The abject, or abjection, refers to two distinct phenomena. The first
is the act of abjection in which the subject separates itself from the object
and thereby designates it as abject, the ‘horrible’, thus also instituting a dis-
tinction of inside/outside but where what is put outside is abjured, evicted,
and effaced. Yet in this process of abjecting, the abject retains a dreadful
fascination. The second is the state of abjection, of being the lost, abjected,
reviled object. Lacan’s concept of the objet a makes clear its role as cause or
support of desire, avoiding (Kleinian) implications of the object abjected as
bad. It is our terrors of the Real, the taint of which always remains attached
to the objet, not the projections of the abject, which are central for under-
standing the unpleasures and pleasures of horror.
19 The terror and dread of the specular and its fascinating seduction in cinema
are vividly articulated in Kristeva’s (1979) essay, ‘Ellipsis on Dread and the
Specular Seduction’. The specular seduction brings identity, meaning, and
symbolisation, so that ‘The glance by which I identify an object, a face,
my own, another’s, delivers my identity which reassures me: for it delivers
me from frayages, nameless dread, noises preceding the name … name …
Intellectual speculation derives from this identifying, labelling glance’ (ibid,
p. 42). The specular is the point of origin not only of signs, and of narcissistic
identifications, but also for ‘the phantasmatic terror one speaking identity
holds for another’. Once that terror, which is the incursion of the other,
‘erupts into the seer, that seen stops being simply reassuring, trompe-l’oeil,
or invitation to speculation, and becomes the fascinating specular. Cinema
seizes us precisely in that place’ (ibid, p. 45). The specular for Kristeva here
marks that which is beyond identification, unverbalised, unrepresented,
namely, the Real. It represents the unrepresented because it ‘includes an ex-
cess of visual traces’ (ibid, p. 42), useless for signification, but insistently
there and naming the before of symbolisation.
 Feminism, Film, and Theory Now 85
20 Seduced to speculate, Kristeva (1979, p. 45) labels terror as ‘to do with the
dependency on the mother’, while seduction lies with ‘an appeal addressed to
the father’. While she invites a dangerous homogenisation in the categories
‘man’ and ‘woman’ here, she goes on to say, in an important qualification,
‘But if they enter the game, they will both be led to cross both zones and
attempt both identifications – maternal, paternal. Test of sexual ­difference –
of homosexuality, that brush with psychosis—they never stop letting it be
intimated, even when they don’t let it be seen: Eisenstein, Hitchcock.
21 I have used here the unauthorised translation by Cormac Gallagher from
unedited French manuscripts, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-­
content/uploads/2010/06/Book-23-Joyce-and-the-Sinthome-Part-2.pdf, p55
uploaded 13/12/2018. In the Jacques Alain-Miller authorised translation by
A.R. Price, Lacan was ‘taken aback’ (2016, p. 107).
22 Patrick Monribot (2013, p. 15) writes that, for Lacan, ‘love has to do with
speech, whereas ravage has to do with the death drive’, and he characterises
what Lacan speaks of as ‘feminine jouissance’ as feminine ravage. Thus,
for Lacan, ‘the end of analysis “feminises” the speaking-being: the treat-
ment pushes the analysand to name his or her link to the real of feminine
jouissance’. See also the work of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger who, while
drawing closely on Lacan’s work, has introduced the concept of the ‘ma-
trix’, as the encounter with the mother and mother-tongue, drawing as well
on Lacan’s concept of the sinthome. ‘A border-Other I becoming-together
between presence and absence’ is developed in The Matrixial Borderspace
(2008, p. 163).

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Part II

Introduction
Expanding the
Monstrous-Feminine
Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn,
and Audrey Yue

Many of the analyses of films offered in The Monstrous-Feminine have

become classics shaping subsequent readings of those same films or, at
the very least, acting as their foils. The three essays in this section either
reflect on or build upon some of these benchmark analyses. The section
begins with a lively and thought-provoking interview with Creed her-
self, ‘The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now’ in which she reflects
on a variety of themes. The interview starts by looking back on the
genesis of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, tracing the influence of Elizabeth
Cowie’s, Laura Mulvey’s, and Julia Kristeva’s work upon her ground-
breaking 1986 Screen article ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine’ and
the 1993 book, The Monstrous-Feminine, that developed out of that.
Creed then tracks how she has gone on to develop ideas latent in The
Monstrous-Feminine in later work.
Creed’s current interest in representations of non-human animals, for
example, already registers within many of the analyses offered by the
book. Cat People (Dir. Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1942), for instance, is
read as offering a portrayal of ‘woman as non-human animal’ (Creed
1993, p. 1). The film The Brood (Dir. David Cronenberg, USA, 1979)
also figures the central character Nola as ‘like an animal’ at one point
(47). Carrie (Dir. Brian de Palma, USA, 1976), which is analysed by Pa-
tricia Pisters in her essay in this section, depicts Carrie as pig-like (p. 80).
Were-creatures such as the werewolf are entities ‘whose bodies signify a
collapse of the boundaries between the human and the animal’ (p. 10).
Citing Freud, Creed also links the primal scene with the child observing
sexual intercourse between animals (p. 17). Non-human animals and
humans becoming non-human animals, boundary breakdowns between
human and animal, in varied manifestations the animal is a recurring
presence, if not a major theme, in The Monstrous-Feminine. Creed ex-
plains that her third book, Phallic Panic (2005), fleshes out this theme,
examining how the monstrous masculine is allied with the feminine and
the animal. In more recent works the animal has increased in importance,
90 Nicholas Chare
with Darwin’s Screens (Creed 2009) exploring the role of fictional or
‘screen animals’ in cinema. For Creed (2009, p. 178), through its use of
‘screen animals’ cinema can potentially challenge ‘the bases on which
the differences between human and animal have historically and philo-
sophically been founded’. This belief in cinema’s capacity to effect social
change also features in Creed’s later discussion of her own film-making.
Creed moves on to reflect about the role of sound in horror films,
foregrounding sound as a ‘crucial dimension’ of the abject. The abject
as it relates to sound has not attracted considerable scholarly interest
although Creed draws attention to notable exceptions in the essays of
­Deborah Dixon (2011) and Elizabeth Fairweather (2014). Addition-
ally, Greg Hainge (2013, pp. 67–68) has examined noises that might
be thought of as abject in relation to nausea in Noise Matters. Abject
sounds are qualitatively different to sounds which register as disgusting.
In an undated letter, the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White
(1987, p. 226) observed of sounds that ‘[w]e are more apt to be capti-
vated or disgusted with the associations which they promote, than with
the notes themselves’. This prefigures Andras Angyal’s (1941, p. 402) ob-
servation that ‘[s]ensory qualities as such are never disgusting’, but they
may contribute to the disgusting qualities attributed to an object by way
of their being ‘specifically associated with disgusting material’. Abject
sounds, however, do not operate by association. They rather function as
a force of meaninglessness within the Symbolic, a troubling semiotic (in
Kristeva’s sense of the term) upsurge.
The shifting nature of the horror film as a genre is then explored. Creed
discusses changes in the way the monstrous-feminine is articulated in
some recent horror films. She attributes these changes, in part, to the
growing number of women directors working in the genre. The increasing
number of women directors making use of formal and thematic elements
from the horror genre is a phenomenon also discussed by Patricia Pisters
in her essay in this section. For Creed, the horror film provides an import-
ant space within which women can push boundaries relating to gender,
desire, and female agency. In this sense, horror as a genre has a potentially
vital contribution to play in feminist film-making both now and in the
future. In this regard, her position resonates strongly with that articulated
by Elizabeth Cowie in her essay for this volume. Creed concludes by dis-
cussing her preparations for a new edition of The Monstrous-Feminine in
which she will examine ways in which the concept resonates with many
of the pressing concerns of our time relating to human and animal rights.
The new edition will place greater emphasis on the ‘radical potential’ of
the abject, exploring its revolutionary promise in greater depth.
The next essay, Mark Nicholls’ ‘Abjection beyond Tears’, builds on
Creed’s reading of The Exorcist (Dir. William Friedkin, USA, 1973) in
The Monstrous-Feminine, providing an inspired reading of the actor’s
craft as it is embodied in Ellen Burstyn’s interpretation of her role as
Chris MacNeil, the mother of a daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), possessed
 Expanding the Monstrous-Feminine 91
by demons. Nicholls foregrounds the complexity of Burstyn’s role, with
Chris functioning as an interface between good and evil and also con-
fronting symbolic (in Kristeva’s sense of the term) collapse through her
daughter’s abject appearance and behaviour. This behaviour involves
emitting abject substances and inflicting violence. In The Monstrous-­
Feminine, Creed (1993, p. 40) explores the acoustic dimension to this
behaviour, discussing Regan’s ‘snarling, grunting voice’. She returns to
this theme in her interview for this section, identifying vocalisations of
this kind as abject sounds. For Nicholls, Regan’s possession causes Chris
to become literally and emotionally soiled. Through her portrayal of
Chris, Burstyn must attest to this process of sullying. Nicholls focusses
on the experiences and techniques she drew upon to create the role. Her
fashioning of the emotional reality of the situation, an extraordinary
case of demonic possession, can be seen as central to the film’s success.
In analyses of film, the roles of actors are often viewed as peripheral,
the skills necessary to their craft frequently overlooked and undervalued.
The common emphasis placed on narrative analysis and cinematography
is often to the detriment of acting. Nicholls’ subtle and sophisticated es-
say, however, speaks powerfully to the importance of attending to how
roles are created and interpreted. In The Exorcist, Nicholls demonstrates
how personal experiences play into Burstyn’s performance, the break-
down of her marriage to Neil Nephew informing her portrayal of her
relations with her estranged husband in the film. In this sense, the emo-
tional tenor in some scenes can be understood as autobiographical. The
feelings are from life but find expression through fiction. The extent to
which they can be called ‘staged’ is questionable. The emotional verac-
ity of Burstyn’s performance is undeniable. This contrasts with Linda
Blair’s interpretation of Regan. As Nicholls discusses, there is consider-
able argument over how ‘knowing’ her portrayal is, over whether she is a
consummate professional imitating behaviours of which she is ignorant
or a faux-naïf (in which case her dissimulation, her playing at oblivious-
ness to the devilishness of her behaviour, also merits credit). Nicholls’
attentiveness to Regan’s ‘sexual gestures’ in this context is invaluable.
Gesture is often sidelined in film analysis yet as Carol Mayo Jenkins
(2015) has eloquently attested it forms a crucial component of any ac-
tor’s artistry. Regan’s gestures, such as stabbing herself in the crotch
with a crucifix, embody her moral corruption and may also embody
Blair’s awareness of that corruption. This gesture, as Nicholls implies,
is sexual. Teenage knowledge of sexuality is therefore being employed
to signify Regan’s fallen status (with potentially negative ramifications,
through guilt by association, for Blair). Using The Monstrous-Feminine
as a point of reference, Aviva Briefel (2005) has traced the conservative
politics often underpinning such acts of self-mutilation in horror films,
including in The Exorcist.
Nicholls also notes moments where Burstyn improvises within the
film, adlibbing, deviating from the script. This is, again, a key dimension
92 Nicholas Chare
to acting yet one which can frequently only be recognised and appreci-
ated through archival work of the kind practised in ‘Abjection beyond
Tears’. In the context of theatre, Denis Podalydès (Stiegler 2018, p. 230)
has observed that ‘an actor’s capacity to go beyond the template provided
by the stage directions is […] crucial’. He explains that it is through im-
provisation that performance rises above the automatic. Nicholls pro-
vides the cinematic example of Burstyn as Chris on the telephone to her
estranged husband. In this scene, through improvisation, breaking with
the script and drawing on her lived experience, Burstyn gives her char-
acter an emotional roundness which acting by rote would be unable to
achieve. Burstyn also encouraged Blair to improvise. Improvisation, as a
mode of interpretation, encourages the emergence of the extraordinary
(Stiegler 2018, p. 239). Through analysing elements of Burstyn’s perfor-
mance and her personal reflections on the process, as well as those of
her colleagues, Nicholls offers a creative practice account which demon-
strates the subtlety and intelligence of her approach towards the creation
of Chris as abject mother. Her reactions to the image of female mon-
strosity embodied by Blair as Regan, her ability to register the process
of degradation this confrontation with monstrosity prompts in Chris,
demonstrate that Burstyn is an actor of the highest order.
In the final essay in this section, ‘Carrie’s Sisters’, Patricia Pisters ex-
plores the significance of the appropriation of horror aesthetics by female
directors, arguing that their work demonstrates the ongoing relevance of
the monstrous-feminine for film analysis. She begins by revisiting Creed’s
celebrated analysis of Carrie and also examining Kimberly Pierce’s 2013
remake. Pisters then goes on to consider In the Cut (Dir. Jane Campion,
USA, 2003) and Evolution (Dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović, France, 2015) Her
conception of the monstrous-feminine, however, is one that seeks to move
beyond the Freudian, Lacanian, and Kristevan framework employed in
The Monstrous-Feminine offering alternative perspectives that look be-
yond the abject as anxiety-inducing and repulsive. In a beautifully crafted
analysis, Pisters links her case studies by way of a common thread, the
appearance of blood red, which is visible across her corpus.
Pisters (2003, p. 49) has previously discussed blood as a theme in Car-
rie in The Matrix of Visual Culture, explaining how traditional fears of
witchcraft are ‘explicitly related to all kinds of blood (menstrual blood,
pig’s blood, birth blood, the blood of sin, the blood of death)’. In a psy-
choanalytic reading, she explains, bodily material such as blood comes
to stand for ‘what is outside the subject but nevertheless also constitutes
the subject’ (p. 49). In patriarchal ideology of the kind embodied in the
1976 version of Carrie, for instance, blood comes to figure Woman as
unruly body, as uncontrollable and monstrous by nature, the antithesis
of rational Man. For Pisters, however, this negative portrayal contrasts
markedly with the 2013 remake. In Carrie as directed by Pierce, mon-
strosity is viewed from a woman’s perspective and there is considerable
 Expanding the Monstrous-Feminine 93
emphasis on female agency. Qualitative differences between the two
films have important implications for issues of female empowerment.
Empowerment and agency, Pisters shows, are also noteworthy themes
in In the Cut. The sophisticated chromatics of In the Cut have already
attracted considerable and considered attention (Bolton 2011; Watkins
2007, 2013). Pisters’ approach is markedly different, however, in its fo-
cus on gendered violence as it is explored by way of the film’s use of
colour. Through a compelling close reading of its chromatics, Pisters
traces how the film explores the significance of the colour red by way of
both the fantasy life of the central character, Frannie Avery, and her re-
al-world experiences (which are tinged by that fantasy life). Pisters’ read-
ing, her tracing of the colour red across varied forms as something in
excess of them, possesses parallels with Jean-Louis Schefer’s attention to
red as an enigmatic quality in paintings that cannot be captured by way
of an iconographic approach. For Schefer, red forms part of a picture’s
economy of intensities. He repeatedly links red with blood, exploring the
religious connotations of the colour in Renaissance art, its sacred and
profane qualities (Schefer 1995, 2007; Bann 2010; Rifkin 2005). His
analysis of Paolo Uccello’s Profanation of the Host (1467) in L’Hostie
profanée includes a section that traces how the emergence of the vampire
as a monstrous figure paralleled and was shaped by mediaeval debates
regarding the Eucharist, debates which can be seen to inform elements of
Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel Dracula. In this sense, blood as a staple of
the horror genre has an often disavowed link to the sacred.
Pisters looks beyond historical aspects to consider the affective qual-
ities held by the colour red in contemporary horror aesthetics and how
these link with violence and sexuality. For her, these affective qualities
can be read as registering a monstrous-feminine but one incompatible
with the disgusting affects associated with the abject. In this sense, she
can be seen to identify a turn away from the religious underpinnings of
much modern horror, underpinnings central to The Exorcist and also
strongly present in Carrie through Carrie’s religious mother who identi-
fies red with fallen womanhood, with profanation and sin (Greven 2011,
p. 4). In In the Cut and also Evolution, red no longer operates in a
religious register. Pisters’ final case study, Evolution, which also builds
out from inspiring close readings of the film’s use of the colour red, ex-
amines the theme of motherhood. For Pisters, Evolution again borrows
elements from horror aesthetics but transforms them, expanding the af-
fective potential of these elements. To appreciate this enhanced affect,
Pisters suggests, it is necessary to think ‘horror’ anew. Her call echoes
that of Cowie in her essay in the previous section as does the overall
emphasis on the importance of attending to affect. For Pisters, the films
by women directors that she analyses are united by a desire to provide
a female perspective on the monstrous-feminine and to offer visions of
female agency that are of considerable contemporary importance. Each
94 Nicholas Chare
of the essays in their different way therefore revisit familiar case studies
yet explores the monstrous-feminine in those studies across new terrain,
sound in Creed, actors in Nicholls and colour in Pisters.

References
Angyal, A. (1941) ‘Disgust and Related Aversions,’ The Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology 36(3), pp. 393–412.
Bann, S. (2010) ‘A New Orientalism?’ History and Theory 49, pp. 130–138.
Bolton, L. (2011) Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Think-
ing Women. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Briefel, A. (2005) ‘Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification
in the Horror Film,’ Film Quarterly 58(3), pp. 16–27.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny.
­Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.
Creed, B. (2009) Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual
Display in Cinema. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.
Dixon, D. (2011) ‘Scream: The Sound of the Monstrous,’ Cultural Geographies
18(1), pp. 435–455.
Fairweather, E. (2014) ‘Jerry Goldsmith and the Sonification of the “Monstrous-­
Feminine” in his Science Fiction Scores,’ Divergence Press 2 [online].
Available at http://divergencepress.net/articles/2016/11/3/jerry-goldsmith-
and-the-­sonification-of-the-monstrous-feminine-in-his-science-fiction-scores
(Accessed: 8th March 2019)
Greven, D. (2011) Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hainge, G. (2013) Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. New York:
Bloomsbury.
Jenkins, C.M. (2015) ‘A Mark on the Canvas,’ Journal for Cultural Research
19(1), pp. 110–113.
Pisters, P. (2003) The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film
Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rifkin, A. (2005) ‘From Structure to Enigma and Back, Perhaps,’ Journal of
Visual Culture 4(3), pp. 365–381.
Schefer, J-L. (1995) Question de style. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Schefer, J-L (2007) L’Hostie profane: Histoire d’une fiction théologique. Paris:
Éditions P.O.L.
Stiegler, B. (2018) ‘Out Automated Lives: An Interview with Denis Podalydès,’
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 14(1), pp. 229–247.
Watkins, L. (2007) ‘The (Dis)Articulation of Colour: Cinematography, Femi-
ninity and Desire in Jane Campion’s In the Cut,’ in W. Everett (ed.), Ques-
tions of Colour in Cinema from Paintbrush to Pixel. Oxford: Peter Lang,
pp. 202–213.
Watkins, L. (2013) ‘Disharmonious Designs: Colour Contrast and Curiosity in
Jane Campion’s “In the Cut,”’ NECSUS 2(1), pp. 197–212.
White, G. (1987) [1788] The Natural History of Selborne. London: Penguin.
5 The Monstrous-Feminine,
Then and Now
Barbara Creed in Conversation
with Nicholas Chare
Barbara Creed

Nicholas Chare: I’d like to begin by asking you about the genesis of your
idea of the monstrous-feminine, the subject of your groundbreaking arti-
cle (Creed 1986) in Screen and your subsequent book (Creed 1993). Did
the idea emerge gradually or was there a moment of epiphany?
Barbara Creed: A complex question – many factors were involved.
I loved horror movies. And I had always been interested in psychoana-
lytic theory. I recall that I gave my first public lecture on the monstrous-­
feminine in 1985. I was invited by Sneja Gunew to present a keynote
at the Australia-Europe Cultural Crossroads Conference run by the
Victorian Ministry of Arts. The title was ‘The Monstrous-Feminine in
Film: Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror’. Why Kristeva? I had recently
attended a public lecture in Sydney by Liz Grosz in which she presented
Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject from Powers of Horror (Kristeva
1982). The book had been translated in 1982 and was causing quite a
stir. Liz is a great speaker and I was mesmerised. In the early 1980s,
I had been teaching a new subject on the horror film with a particular
focus on the female monster who had emerged as a new force in horror
films of the 1970s. Think of the horror films released in that decade
which featured a female monster. Alien – of course. The Exorcist, Car-
rie, Rabid, The Brood, and the rape revenge film, I Spit on Your Grave.
And, of course, two great lesbian vampire films – Vampire Lovers with
Ingrid Pitt and Daughters of Darkness starring Delphine Seyrig. Then
Sam Riami’s wonderful Evil Dead in 1981. Fantastic! These films were
all to become central to different chapters in The Monstrous Feminine.
Inspired by the essays in E. Ann Kaplan’s (1978) edited volume,
Women in Film Noir, which argued for the power of the femme fatale,
I found myself searching for a new female protagonist of horror. And
suddenly here was Kristeva’s theory of abjection that explained horror
in terms of the dangerous feminine, borders, and the body. Although
Kristeva does not refer to film, the application of her theory of abjection
to the horror film made perfect sense. Then, in 1985, I received an in-
vitation from Screen to write an article on Kristeva’s Powers of Horror
for an edition they were planning to publish on the horror film. Mandy
Merck was the editor. I was thrilled. Writing this article (Creed 1986)
96 Barbara Creed
helped me to crystallise my ideas and develop my argument. I remem-
ber I called the article: ‘The Monstrous-Feminine in Film, an Imaginary
Abjection’, because I wanted to emphasise that these images of female
monstrosity were first and foremost imaginary – patriarchal stereotypes,
many of which were centuries old. The Screen edition of 1986 featured a
fantastic image of female monstrosity on the cover – one of the witches
from Sam Rami’s Evil Dead whose terrifying face, her mouth oozing
blood, is both disgusting and compelling. It’s a very in-your-face im-
age. A key aspect of the monstrous-feminine. She commenced life as
a patriarchal stereotype but like Frankenstein’s monster she embarked
on a life of her own. Shortly after the Screen article came out, Tony
Bennett and Graham Martin invited me to submit a book for their ‘Pop-
ular Fiction Series’. Routledge published the book in 1993. And here we
are – 25 years later, and the concept of the monstrous-feminine contin-
ues to stimulate debate and discussion. I think this is largely because her
various ‘faces’ have evolved over time, adapting to changing social and
ideological conditions. In many films and art works, particularly where
the artists are female, she offers a clear and direct challenge to dominant
patriarchal values.
NC: What had drawn you to psychoanalytic theory and work of Julia
Kristeva, in particular, in the context of studying the horror film?
BC: I had always been interested in Freud and his theory of dreams,
repression, and the unconscious. I was also reading other works such
as Freud’s (1985) The Uncanny as well as Briffault’s (1931) The Moth-
ers and Bachofen’s (1967) Myth, Religion and Mother-Right. These
all inspired my thinking about women, myth, and horror and the
fact that patriarchal images of female monstrosity went right back to
Greek myths and legends and no doubt earlier. As Freud wrote about
the power of myth, the Medusa and male castration anxieties, and
the story of Oedipus, his ideas seemed particularly relevant. Then, in
1975 Laura Mulvey’s brilliant article, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’ took all of us by storm. Mulvey’s use of psychoanalytic the-
ory in the interpretation of film suddenly went to a whole new level.
I was particularly interested in her use of Lacan’s mirror stage and
Freud’s theory of castration. Mulvey (1975) showed how the patriar-
chal unconscious influences not just meaning but also filmic structure,
that is, structures of looking. This was completely new. The idea that
the gaze could be gendered through unconscious structures of looking
changed everything. It affected film form. On close analysis I could see
that when the male character subjected the woman to his controlling
gaze, he was almost always physically positioned to the left or right of
the frame and in the foreground. The woman was to the centre in the
middle ground. This structure applied to almost every film I watched
across all genres with one exception – the horror genre. While the fe-
male monster does not necessarily ‘control’ the gaze in the same way as
 The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now 97
the male, she ‘captures’ the gaze in an aggressive manner because of her
monstrous nature and appearance – particularly when she presents the
threat of active castration. So Mulvey’s theory opened up a new way
of thinking about film and psychoanalytic theory for me. It showed
how the patriarchal unconscious, or the unconscious full stop, struc-
tures representation and ideology. This is why I am still committed to
psychoanalytic theory. By the time I read Kristeva’s Powers of Hor-
ror, I was already drawn to psychoanalytic theory. Kristeva’s theory
of abjection and the abject feminine offered such a persuasive way of
understanding the concept of woman as monster. It changed the way
I viewed the horror film. Then around the same time. I read Elizabeth
Cowie’s (1984) impressive article, Fantasia, which appeared in m/f. She
theorised that film could be viewed as fantasy and as a reworking of
three major fantasies – the primal scene, and the fantasies of castration
and seduction. She argued that the protagonist can occupy one, two
or all three positions even if contradictory. Similarly the spectator can
switch identification from male to female and even hold contradictory
positions. Although she did not specifically discuss horror, her theory
added a new dimension to my understanding of the horror film, partic-
ularly Alien and other science fiction horror films where primal scenes
were key. I was drawn to the horror film because it offered narratives
that featured a very different image of woman – woman as a terrifying
monster, one whose main aim seemed to be to undermine or destroy
the patriarchal symbolic order.
NC: Robin Wood (1978) argued something along these lines, didn’t he?
BC: Yes, of course. Robin Wood presented a similar argument in his
famous Film Comment article of 1978. It was called ‘Return of the Re-
pressed’. He did not write specifically of the female monster but of mon-
sters in general. Very little of a serious nature had been written on horror
in the seventies and eighties. I was particularly taken with Wood’s dis-
cussion of Freud, the surrealists, and the unconscious. He held that the
horror film was so very appealing because it spoke, through the figure of
the monster, to our repressed desires to ‘smash the norms that oppress
us’ – I think that was his phrase. Here he included the Church, State &
Family as well as the Family. I wondered at the time if female spectators
might have very specific norms they might like to see smashed. His ar-
gument seemed to make sense of the reasons why audiences found the
monster such a sympathetic figure and why horror was so popular with
younger people.
NC: What did your students think of the female monster? You said
that you screened a number of 1970s films such as The Exorcist and
Carrie which focussed on female monstrosity.
BC: They loved her! Particularly the female students. But not all stu-
dents. When I screened I Spit on Your Grave, a group of male students
came up after the lecture and told me they were shocked and offended
98 Barbara Creed
and said I should have warned them first about the castration scene. The
female students replied: ‘Well, now you know how we feel. We are vic-
tims all the time. No-one warns us!’
I suggested we form a study group, meet monthly and watch horror
films with female monsters. They loved the idea – they even had T-Shirts
made, which were emblazoned with the logo: ‘Savage Sisters’. We each
agreed to raid our local video shop for promising titles. We watched so
many films – many were totally blood and gore. It soon became obvious
that women were just as likely to play the monster as the victim. The
fact that she was uncontrollable, a horrifying female monster held great
appeal. I think Kristeva describes her as a ‘wily, uncontrollable’ power –
this is why she was so fascinating to us.
NC: Rereading The Monstrous-Feminine in the light of your more
recent work informed by animal studies such as Stray (Creed 2017), I’m
struck by how present the non-human animal already is as a theme in
your first book. There you discuss boundary collapses between the hu-
man and animal and instances in which women are figured as animal. In
what ways, if any, have your early readings of horror cinema informed
your subsequent writings about animals and human-non-human animal
relations?
BC: That is a great question. One of Kristeva’s most powerful state-
ments, which has always stayed with me is where she directly links wom-
an’s ability to procreate and give birth to the animal world and to what
she describes as ‘the great cycle of birth, decay and death’. I think this
is why woman and animal are frequently aligned in fairy tales, horror,
and science fiction. Think of Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding
Hood, King Kong, and Alien. The female werewolf and female vampire
are fascinating creatures. One horror film that makes this association
between women, female animals and birth is David Cronenberg’s The
Brood. The scene that the censors found most offensive, and cut in many
countries, including Australia, is not where the mutant creatures attack
their human victims in a bloody frenzy but the scene where Nola, the
mother, gives birth from her external womb sac and bites through the
bloody umbilical cord with her teeth. This is what horrified the most –
visible evidence the primal connection between human and non-human
animals. The Alien quartet also draws compelling yet horrific compar-
isons. There is Ripley, on the one hand, a woman who ‘adopts’ Newt,
her surrogate daughter, in a kind of clean birth, lined up against Mother
Alien who gives birth in a completely animalistic way – laying eggs from
her great slimy ovipositor. I see Mother Ripley and Mother Alien as op-
posite sides of the same human/animal being. In the end of course Ripley
is impregnated and gives birth to an alien monster herself – one that she
is forced to kill. She essentially morphs into Mother Alien – a terrifying
form of the monstrous-feminine who confronts us with our worst night-
mares about our animal origins.
 The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now 99
NC: Is this a major aim of Phallic Panic – to explore the connection
between human and animal?
BC: Yes. Phallic Panic is essentially a study of the monstrous mas-
culine in which I argue that when man is made monstrous he is almost
always assimilated into the feminine and the animal. This is the pri-
mal uncanny. He bleeds, gestates, gives birth, creates life (in test tubes),
grows hair, and transforms into a creature. In order to become mon-
strous, to threaten the symbolic order, he must first abandon that order
and cross over into the realm of the abject – to align himself with woman
and animal. Despite his monstrous appearance, he is almost always a
sympathetic figure from the Beast, the Wolfman, to the Creature from
the Black Lagoon, and King Kong.
To return to your other question – Yes, these readings of the horror
film have informed my recent work on human/animal because they con-
firm our animal origins – something that the Symbolic order is at pains
to repress and deny. Think of the many discussions throughout the his-
tory of philosophy, from Aristotle to Descartes and Lacan whose main
aim is to deny our animal origins –a connection championed by Charles
Darwin. More recently, I explored the animal question and the influence
of evolutionary theory on early film genres in Darwin’s Screens (Creed
2009). The feminist philosopher, Kelly Oliver (2009), has written a fan-
tastic book on the views of philosophers throughout history. Animal
Lessons: How They Teach us To Be Human. Oliver challenges the belief
that man is essentially different from the animal. She examines the writ-
ings of all the major philosophers to show how they go to great lengths
to separate the two. Man is rational: animals are not. Man feels pain:
animals do not. Man understands he will die: animals do not, etc. The
horror film of course keeps this connection alive which I see as one of
its more radical themes. It is essential that we do deny our kinship with
the animal world – otherwise how could we even begin to justify the
monstrous cruelty we inflict on our animal counterparts in scientific lab-
oratories, factory farms, zoos, war, and sport. One of the very first doc-
umentary short films, which were made by Thomas Edison in 1903, is
called Electrocuting an Elephant. A restored version is on YouTube. The
elephant was Topsy. She had spent her life in circuses. Topsy was pub-
licly electrocuted on Coney Island because she killed her trainer. Topsy
was also fed poison in case the electrocution failed. It didn’t. The film
is a shocking testimony to human cruelty. The public were able to view
the film on coin-operated kinetoscopes. Some great directors have made
films about the human/animal relationship. Robert Bresson’s wonderful
Au Hasard Balthazar of 1966. Georges Franju’s Blood of Beasts. Nicolas
Philibert’s Nenette and more recently Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor. There
are many, many more. Don’t get me started …. I firmly believe that film
theorists need to become more engaged with the animal question. This
is what I attempted to do in Stray, which explores human-animal ethics
100 Barbara Creed
in the Anthropocene. Although my focus is as much on other cultural
forms such as photography and art as it is on film.
In Stray I have drawn on Kristeva’s concept of the ‘stray’ to explore a
state of being that human and animal share as well as the ways in which
the stray is frequently rendered monstrous. In the context of abjection,
Kristeva discusses human strays, beings who ceaselessly stray rather than
establishing their bearings – as such the stray exists outside the symbolic
order. The stray is a non-subject, what Kristeva (1982, p. 8) calls ‘a de-
ject’. I am interested in both human and animal strays, how they differ
and what they share in common, such as a borderless, abject state of
being. I think it is crucial to address the fact that in the period of the
Anthropocene, through global warming, wars and the extinction of spe-
cies, both human and animals are losing their homes/habitats and are in
danger of living permanently in a state of exile. I think that animals who
have been abandoned, ejected, and rendered homeless, u ­ nderstand – just
as we do – how it feels to be othered, to live on the outside. I argue that
in order to understand what is happening, and to act, we need to think
from the outside, to develop a ‘stray’ ethics.
NC: In both The Monstrous-Feminine and Phallic Panic you discuss
the importance of sound in horror films, from Regan’s ‘snarling, grunt-
ing voice’ in The Exorcist as a form of semiotic upsurge in the former, to
creaks and howls as signifiers of the uncanny in the latter. The complex-
ity of sound in horror films is frequently ‘underheard’ but you clearly
recognise it. Can you speak a little about the importance of sound as
well as the visual in your research as a film scholar?
BC: Sound is a crucial dimension of the abject. Kristeva’s semiotic
proposes a pre-verbal dimension of language when the infant experi-
ences itself through maternal sounds and the mother’s tone of voice. The
meanings contained therein do not relate to the symbolic order. Given
that Kristeva’s semiotic chora signifies a pre-lingual stage in which the
infant is engulfed by a chaotic mix of emotions, feelings, and sounds,
there is always the potential for the abject to irrupt through sound. Yes,
definitely. Films about horror and the uncanny play on the power of
sounds to unsettle the spectator. The rights sounds in horror can be
very scary. Because the semiotic refers to the time of the mother-infant
relationship, prior to entry into the symbolic and language, the maternal
figure, particularly the monstrous-feminine, is associated directly with
the irruption of abject sounds – grunts, howls, snarls and screams, and
so on.
The scream, particularly woman’s scream, is a staple of the horror
genre – she seems to scream on behalf of all of the traumatised beings
of the narrative. Sometimes, as in Psycho, her terror is also registered
through her open mouth which forms an ‘O’ or a ‘nothing’ signifying the
collapse of meaning in image and sound making way for the irruption
of the abject. In films such as Psycho abject sounds can create a surplus
 The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now 101
of affect. Here the relationship between image and sound combines to
bring about a collapse of the symbolic order. Sounds such as the ‘snarl-
ing and grunting’ in The Exorcist and, as you say the creaks and howls
of the uncanny, cross the border between meaning and meaninglessness.
The spectator may well take perverse pleasure in sounds that signify
a tearing down of the patriarchal symbolic. There is a great article by
Deborah Dixon (2011) called ‘Scream: the sound of the monstrous’ in
which she explores sound, horror and the monstrous-feminine. There
is another by Elizabeth Fairweather (2014) on Jerry Goldsmith and the
sonification of the ‘monstrous-feminine’ in his science fiction scores.
This is an area, which I would like to explore in more depth.
NC: As well as a key thinker on film, you are also a documentary film-
maker. Your 1975 work Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion seems
to demonstrate a belief in the potential of documentary to transform
perceptions. Can you tell me about your own approach to film-making
and your personal history as a film-maker?
BC: I take that as a compliment because I really did not make many
films – only a few. I shot in super-8 and 16 mm. One is a documentary
about my travels through China in 1978. This was just after the Cultural
Revolution. It was an amazing experience. The other is the film you
mention, which was on the beginnings of Gay Liberation and the daily
lives and political activities of lesbians and gay men in Melbourne in the
1970s. Its focus is on two women and two men and their own personal
histories. I also interview the general public on their views about same
sex relationships. That was an eye-opener. I also made a short fiction
film on a lesbian relationship. Yes, I still do believe in the power of the
documentary film (and the fiction film) to change lives. I think this is
particularly true for those of us who belong to marginalised groups in
society. As a lesbian, I found film a powerful medium in helping me to
understand the processes of othering and the workings of patriarchal
ideology. Allowing for the way film can manipulate viewers, even in this
age of fake news, film, assisted by the Internet, has the power to create
what you might call ‘a community of viewers’. I think this is most im-
portant. It enables the individual to see that they are not alone, that oth-
ers share their values, and that collective action can bring about social
change. My personal history as a film-maker was very short, but I keep
thinking I should make a follow up to Homosexuality in which I would
re-interview the four main participants. The interview was based on
the structure of a 1970s conscious-raising group where the participants
talk to each other about their childhoods, school, parents, and first re-
lationships. It would be a kind of LGBTI 40-UP along the lines of the
wonderful 7-UP series directed by Michael Apted. It would be great to
see where each one is now, what happened to them, their thoughts on
gay marriage, the move into LGBTI politics, etc. I just need to find the
time….
102 Barbara Creed
NC: The 1975 documentary foregrounds your important contribution
to the Gay Liberation movement. In The Monstrous-Feminine there is
clearly a strong feminist dimension to the work but would it be fair to
say that sexuality is also, at times, a key concern?
BC: Yes, definitely. Sexuality is crucial. I wanted to convey the idea
that the monstrous-feminine is very much in-your-face with her sex-
uality. During the period of Gay Liberation, we turned around the
stereotypes, making ‘Lesbians are Lovely’ and ‘Gay is Good’ our new
slogans. Other political liberation groups adopted similar strategies
with: ‘Black is Beautiful’, ‘The Personal Is Political’, and ‘I am Woman’.
The monstrous-­feminine is saying, in a similar fashion, ‘The Mon-
strous Feminine is a Real Bitch’. ‘Watch Out’! The monstrous-feminine
has many faces given to her by patriarchal ideology – castrator, witch,
lesbian, abject womb, mad mother, menstruating monster, etc. But as
I have said, many artists and film-makers have turned that around. She
also has her own history. Long before I theorised the concept in terms
of the abject female body, female artists, for instance, such as Cindy
Sherman were already creating images of the monstrous abject woman
designed to shock the spectator. In relation to the horror film, the les-
bian vampire held particular significance. Horror was virtually the only
cultural form where you could see lesbians and lesbian desire albeit in
a supernatural context.
NC: Have the psychic underpinnings of horror films changed signifi-
cantly since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine or do you feel
the same kinds of anxiety about Woman and her phantasised body still
regularly inform contemporary horror?
BC: Yes, I do think the nature of the genre has changed in relation
to the representation of the monstrous-feminine. It has become more
knowing, even satirical. A major reason is that an increasing number
of women directors are making horror films – or are involved in some
way, writing or having input into the script. Women use the phantasised
or imaginary body of the monstrous-feminine in knowing ways. I am
thinking of Ana Lily Amirpour’s brilliant A Girl Walks Home Alone
at Night in which the female vampire’s body is shrouded in a burqa or
Julia Ducournau’s Raw in which becoming cannibal also means be-
coming liberated from all kinds of patriarchal norms of proper femi-
nine behaviour. Ginger Snaps, which is co-scripted by Karen Walton,
plays knowingly on the theme of menstruation as the heroine metamor-
phoses into a werewolf, while Teeth, a black comedy about the vagina
dentata, thanks Camille Paglia in the credits for her inspiration. She
introduced the director, Mitchell Lichtenstein to the ancient concept
of the vagina dentata; his response was to make a comic female re-
venge horror film. I can think of a significant number of horror films
which explore the monstrous-feminine and which women have directed
since 2000. These include Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Claire Denis’
 The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now 103
Trouble Every Day, Julie Delpy’s The Countess, and Karyn Kusama’s
Jennifer’s Body. I think horror allows women film-makers and artists
unusual freedom in which to push boundaries regarding gender, desire,
and female agency.
An interesting and unexpected consequence of having proposed
the idea of the monstrous feminine in the horror film is that women,
and sometimes men, in a range of other disciplines, have subsequently
taken up the concept. I did not expect that the idea would resonate
so widely. I have come across articles on the monstrous-feminine in
art and performance art, fashion, music, literature, medieval studies,
the classics, women’s health, religious studies, and research into new
media technologies. One of the most unusual articles discussed the
monstrous-feminine in relation to equality and inclusion in the work-
place (Vacchani 2014). The majority of these did not regard her in
a negative context at all, but rather used the concept to discuss how
it might empower women. Sometimes I read works or see an exhibi-
tion, which somehow assume that the monstrous-feminine is a concept
that has always existed, which I suppose it has in a way, well the idea
of the female monster has, but some authors and artists use the term
‘monstrous-feminine’ without acknowledging its origin. I think it is
important to understand that I developed the concept of the monstrous-­
feminine in the 1980s, which was a very political time, and in the
visual arts, specifically in relation to the horror film and Kristeva’s
theory of the abject. The article first appeared in Screen, in an edition
devoted to body horror at a time when feminist film theory was highly
influential and women artists were exploring the nature and meaning
of female sexuality in a patriarchal world.
NC: Given the insightful and compelling readings you provide of films
from the Alien franchise in The Monstrous-Feminine and Phallic Panic,
I’d very much like to hear your thoughts on Ridley Scott’s recent efforts,
Prometheus and Alien Covenant, and their re-visioning of the alien(s),
which strike me as ultraconservative.
BC: I couldn’t agree more. Ridley Scott re-works his original idea,
which is about the primeval mother, in order to return to the father
as the origin of life. Prometheus was the Greek God who created man
from clay. Feeling sorry for his offspring, he stole fire from Zeus. Zeus
punished him by creating the first woman – Pandora. We all know
about Pandora. She opened the forbidden box and set loose all of the
evils that befell the world. Prometheus, which is a pretty dull film, is
all about man as the creator of life – the male mother. Mary Shelley
made this very clear with her subtitle for Frankenstein – ‘the Modern
Prometheus’. I wrote about the male mothers of the horror film in Phallic
Panic and they are all a lot more interesting than the duo in these two
films. Alien Covenant is a better film but it simply continues the theme
of male mothers starting right in the opening scene where Guy Pearce,
104 Barbara Creed
as the mad scientist, and Michael Fassbinder, as his android son, David/
Walter, establish the latter’s origins. ‘You are my creation’ Pearce tells
him, echoing Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and all of those
films from the mad-scientist sub-genre of horror films. There are some
spectacular moments and genuinely scary scenes in Alien Covenant but
nothing new. Certainly nothing to compete with the Alien franchise.
And somehow I find it impossible to believe that the wonderfully mon-
strous cavern of fleshy pulsating eggs sprang first from the son’s imagi-
nation, which is what these two films are arguing. Back to Zeus’ noble
forehead! The origin-of-life narrative of these films is very dull. In fact,
neither Prometheus nor Alien Covenant seem to have much to do with
the themes of the Alien franchise which offered a completely new take
on origins, birth, maternity, cloning, alien-ness, sexuality and female
power
NC: It seems fitting to end by asking you if there are any aspects of
The Monstrous-Feminine you now wish you could revisit and, possibly,
rethink. Do you disagree at all with your earlier self?
BC: Well, it is timely that you ask about revisiting The Monstrous-­
Feminine as Routledge have recently invited me to write an additional
section of around three to four chapters, for a new edition of The Mon-
strous Feminine. This will explore developments over the past two de-
cades. I am not planning to change my original argument in any way.
Rather add to it – emphasise some aspects more. Although I am always
ready to disagree with my earlier self as you put it. In the main, I will
explore different or new representations of the monstrous-feminine in
new contexts – queer, human/animal theory, the Anthropocene, the in-
human, and the #MeToo movement, for example. One thing I will em-
phasise more, however, is the notion of abjection and boundaries. Some
theorists have criticised my argument for talking about the abject as if
it were an object, rather than something that is produced when bound-
aries are traversed. I thought this was clear enough but I will emphasise
this in more detail.
The thing that I do wish I had discussed more was Kristeva’s ar-
gument about the radical potential of the abject. In the section on
‘signs’ she writes something along the lines of ‘In abjection, revolt is
completely within being or self’. She sees the abject self as creating
new forms of culture. I do discuss the subversiveness of the monstrous
feminine, and her espousal of the improper body and her black hu-
mour. Looking back, I should have emphasised this more – the fact
that she has subverted her own stereotypes. But now I wish I had also
explored possible outcomes of her revolt. This is what I will do in the
new section. So, yes, it is a very relevant question you ask. Twenty-five
years later, and there is still much to say. Like all true monsters, the
monstrous-­feminine is a tricky creature. She knows how to adapt to
whatever comes her way.
 The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now 105
References
Bachofen, J. J. (1967) Myth, Religion and Mother Right. Translated from the
German by R. Manheim. New York: Bollingen Foundation.
Briffault, R. (1931) The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins.
New York: The Macmillan Company.
Cowie, B. (1984) ‘Fantasia,’ m/f 9, pp. 70–105.
Creed, B. (1986) ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjec-
tion,’ Screen 27 (1), pp. 44–70.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2009) Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual
Display in Cinema. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Creed, B. (2017) Stray: Human Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene. Sydney:
Power Publications.
Dixon, D. (2011) ‘Scream: The Sound of the Monstrous,’ Cultural Geographies
18 (1), pp. 435–455.
Fairweather, E. (2014) ‘Jerry Goldsmith and the Sonification of the “Monstrous-­
Feminine” in his Science Fiction Scores,’ Divergence Press 2 [online].
Available at http://divergencepress.net/articles/2016/11/3/jerry-goldsmith-
and-the-­sonification-of-the-monstrous-feminine-in-his-science-fiction-scores
(Accessed: 15th March 2019).
Freud, S. (1985) ‘The “Uncanny”,’ in The Pelican Freud Library: Volume 14.
Translated from the German by James Strachey. London: Pelican, pp. 339–376.
Kaplan, E. A. (ed.) (1978) Women in Film Noir. London: BFI.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated from
the French by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16 (3),
pp. 6–18.
Oliver, K. (2009) Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Vachhani, V. (2014) ‘Always Different?: Exploring the Monstrous-Feminine and
Maternal Embodiment in Organisation,’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:
An International Journal 33 (7), pp. 648–661.
Wood, R. (1978) ‘Return of the Repressed,’ Film Comment 14 (4), pp. 24–32.
6 Abjection beyond Tears
Ellyn Burstyn as Liminal (On
Set) Mother in The Exorcist
Mark Nicholls

In her landmark analysis of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (dir. 1973),

Barbara Creed writes of the way in which the film mobilises abject sub-
stances, such as blood, urine, excrement, and bile, in staging a clash be-
tween the worlds of the symbolic and the pre-symbolic. These substances
become abject when they disturb our secure sense of borders, particu-
larly those relating to the inside and outside of the body. The effect of
this strategy of abject mobilisation in The Exorcist is to inscribe upon
the audience the terrifying and compelling prospects of a highly fragile
symbolic order (Creed 1993, pp. 32–42). The pervasive and enduring
cultural impact of The Exorcist demonstrates both the power of this
message and, indeed, the power of its method. Mediating the extremes
of the symbolic and pre-symbolic in The Exorcist is the central character
of Chris MacNeil. Played by Emmy, Tony, and Academy Award-winning
actress, Ellyn Burstyn, Chris is a Hollywood actress who discovers her
daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), is demonically possessed. Regan becomes
subject to bodily levitation, 360-degree head-panning, and the involun-
tary production of an impressive range of the most abject substances and
the most abject language imaginable. It is her mother Chris, however,
who endures both the literal and the more damaging emotional soiling
of the experience, situated, as she is, at the very border of this struggle
between good and evil. This essay considers the way Ellen Burstyn cre-
ated the role and conjured the emotional reality of its situation, central
both to Friedkin’s project as an established documentary film-maker and
to the film’s reception ever since. Analysing elements of Burstyn’s perfor-
mance and her significant personal reflections on the process, as well as
those of her colleagues, particularly Linda Blair’s, this essay provides a
creative practice account which demonstrates Burstyn’s creation of the
abject mother of the liminal space. It also investigates the limits to which
William Friedkin, as director, was prepared to push his cast, Burstyn
and Blair in particular but not exclusively, in order to create a horrifying
and convincing image of female monstrosity. This joint performance,
I contend, is both central to Barbara Creed’s groundbreaking analysis
and, indeed, to the power of The Exorcist as one of the most influential
films in cinema history.
 Abjection Beyond Tears 107
The sadistic behaviour of male directors (Hitchcock, Tarantino) to-
wards actresses has recently received detailed attention in the confes-
sional female narratives of the #MeToo movement. I argue that this
emerging feminist global discourse is relevant to the experiences of the
two main actresses of The Exorcist in the context of their work with the
film’s director, William Friedkin. Creed’s argument is that the monstrous
feminine is essentially a creation of male fears and fantasies projected
onto abject images that fill the screen. In this essay I go behind the screen
to explore what took place on the set of The Exorcist and in particular
to Ellyn Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, the mother charged with engaging
with her teenage daughter as she metamorphosed into something both
human and inhuman. In The Exorcist, off-screen events, desires and
emotions were central to the construction of one of the most horrific –
yet strangely compelling – female monsters of twentieth-century cinema.
Burstyn writes about her work on The Exorcist in over 30 pages of
her revealing memoir, Lessons in becoming myself (2006). She has also
been most forthcoming about this role in extensive interviews and Q&A
sessions given to fellow actors and film festival audiences. Together with
similar evidence provided by her colleagues who also worked on the film,
this primary material provides a compelling and sometimes insightfully
banal illustration of the film and Burstyn’s significant role in its creation.
Assembled in this way, the creative practice account stands as a useful
method in understanding the somewhat obscure and under-­theorised
notion of social history within the creative arts. It engages interview
material, memoirs, reflections, and auto-biography as primary evidence
but, most importantly, assumes such texts to be relative, highly subjec-
tive and therefore not of unassailable authority. As any internet search
will divulge, the history of The Exorcist is replete with myth and hype to
almost absurd levels. Max von Sydow, who played Father M ­ errin in the
film, has pointed out the almost-too-obvious publicity agenda behind
the hype and clearly Burstyn’s account contributes to this compromised
authority (Jones dir. 1998). It is therefore important to point out that,
looking at these texts together with the primary evidence of the film, the
creative practice account does not aspire to create a definitive history of
the performing arts event. In an industry saturated in fiction and cre-
ative logic, however, it does provide compelling insights into its opera-
tions which should not be ignored.

Nine Months in 1972 and 1973

The author of the original best-selling novel, William Peter Blatty, based
the character of Chris MacNeil on his friend, Shirley MacLaine. Warner
Bros. and William Friedkin considered MacLaine’s future on-screen ri-
val in The Turning Point (Ross dir. 1977), Anne Bancroft, for this much
sought-after role early in 1972, but Burstyn was finally approached soon
108 Mark Nicholls
after her nomination for best supporting actress in Peter Bogdanovich’s
The Last Picture Show at the Academy Awards that year (Bustyn 2006,
p. 247; Friedkin 2013, p. 241). Apart from some location shooting in
Manhattan, Georgetown, in the autumn of 1972 and Baghdad the fol-
lowing spring, the film was shot at F&B Ceco Studios on West 55th
Street and 10th Avenue in New York between August 1972 and May
1973. At that time, the US was concerning itself with the November
Presidential Elections, the re-election of President Nixon, and largely
ignoring the emerging news about the Watergate break-ins. The substan-
tial backdrop to the production of The Exorcist for Burstyn, however,
was the business of her divorce, the stalking, erratic, and violent be-
haviour of her estranged husband, Neil Burstyn, and the traumatic effect
of this on her 11-year-old son, Jefferson (Bustyn 2006, pp. 247–254).
The extraordinary nature of the material that Burstyn was dealing with
in the film necessarily required a particular process. This process was
designed to allow her to understand that material and place her work as
an actor at a suitable distance from the obvious distractions of her per-
sonal life and, indeed, the series of deaths, fires, robberies, and accidents
that plagued the production.
Burstyn’s pre-production preparation for the role and her work during
the shoot were, unsurprisingly, extensive. She prepared a character his-
tory for Chris MacNeil – a surname of shocking co-incidence, given
Burstyn’s marital crisis at the time – and worked to chart Chris’ con-
sciousness across the plot as she progresses towards deeper knowledge of
the supernatural for which her character once had little concern (Bustyn
2006, pp. 255–260). To match her idea of the MacLain-esque ‘movie
star’ persona of her character, she initiated a physical ‘regimen’ of diet-
ing, yoga, ballet, tap classes, and swimming (Bustyn 2006, p. 256). In
the context of this character study, she worked with Friedkin to select
a costume designer, Oscar de la Renta, a collaboration which always
required a great deal of fitting work in the lead-up to a shoot (Bustyn
2006, pp. 256–261). As the first actor cast in the production, she read
with a number of other actors auditioning for various parts. This in-
cluded particular work supporting the young girl who would eventually
be cast to play her daughter, Linda Blair (Bustyn 2006, pp. 256–278;
Friedkin 2013, pp. 242–245).
Once the company had moved into the studio in New York, Burstyn
and Friedkin rehearsed extensively (Friedkin 2013, p. 285; DallasFilm-
Society 2013). The relatively generous and leisurely rehearsal time al-
lowed in those days, and the results it produced, also spread over into
a work environment which encouraged significant improvisation during
the shoot itself. Burstyn’s improvisations around Chris’ phone conversa-
tion with her estranged husband, who we never see in the film, provide
a key example (Burstyn 2006, pp. 261–263; von Sivers dir. 2015). Burs-
tyn and Friedkin also undertook extensive research for the production.
 Abjection Beyond Tears 109
They explored intended visual aspects of the film in art galleries and mu-
seums. They also interrogated its psychological dimension through read-
ing and discussing the writings of C.G. Jung as well as recent studies on
the paranormal undertaken at Duke University by J.B. Rhine (Burstyn
2006, pp. 255–263; Friedkin 2013, p. 261). Clearly, Burstyn had great
admiration for her director on this project and the collaboration with
Friedkin is central to the rhetoric of her production account (Burstyn
2006, p. 263). Beyond this research and conscious of the potential psy-
chological impact of the work itself, quite apart from her own personal
circumstances at the time, Burstyn’s account makes much of the work
she did with her California-­based ‘spiritual teacher’ Reshad Field. Field
gave her special prayers and meditations to work on at the beginning of
each day of the shoot (Burstyn 2006, pp. 260–261). She also explains
the significant impact of reading Margaret Fuller and Gloria Steinem
writing for Ms. magazine at that time, and contemplating the ideas of
female equality and advancement that were finding purchase in contem-
porary discourse in the age of Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan (Burs-
tyn 2006, p. 271; Stockholms 2015). The fruit of much of this reading
would be Burstyn’s next film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Scorsese
dir. 1974), which she produced and which had a profound impact on
feminist film discourse thereafter. Describing her own work on The Ex-
orcist shoot itself, Burstyn places particular emphasis on the trauma and
physical scars of her scenes with Linda Blair in the infamous bed-shaking
and crucifix vaginal-­stabbing scenes (Burstyn 2006, pp. 272–276).1 Less
sensationally, but equally revealing, she also offers a detailed account of
her work with Jason Miller who played Father Karras, particularly in one
Georgetown exterior scene, shot on location, where she has to convince
the priest/­psychiatrist that her ‘little girl’ is possessed (Burstyn 2006,
pp. 270–276). An important piece of dialogue about the nature of good
and evil at the end of the film, that she worked hard to change, also re-
ceived a significant amount of her attention (Burstyn 2006, pp. 265–277).

Protecting the Father Image

Burstyn’s account clearly emphasises the extent to which the psycho-
drama with her former husband Neil, and its effect on Jefferson, infil-
trated her work on The Exorcist. As she begins to tell the story of the
production and the back story of her character, Chris MacNeil, a show-
biz history very much like her own, Burstyn pauses to write of Jefferson’s
encounter with a child psychologist, Jane Bauer. Jefferson, she writes,
‘had put on a lot of weight during the past year and was beginning to be
teased at school for being fat’ (Burstyn 2006, p. 255). Intending to spend
Jefferson’s first 50-minute counselling session reading volume 9 of The
Collected Works of Carl Jung dealing with archetypes and the collective
unconscious, her study was interrupted after ten minutes when Jefferson
110 Mark Nicholls
emerged from Bauer’s office in tears. At this point Burstyn spoke pri-
vately with Bauer, who advised her to inform Jefferson about the true
mental condition of his father. Burstyn writes that she told Bauer that
she had not done so before because she thought, from what she cites as
‘a Jungian point of view’, she should protect ‘the father image’ in her
son’s eyes. Having accepted Bauer’s advice, Burstyn’s narrative returns
with almost shocking fluency to Chris MacNeil, her own physical ‘reg-
imen’, the idea that to look like a movie star she needed to get thinner
and the idea that her weight had always been her ‘bête noire’ (Burstyn
2006, p. 256). The unfortunate overinvestment in this particular Hol-
lywood ‘shadow’ archetype and the extent to which it influenced her
work at the time could have been helped by the subsequent, deliberate
non-­casting of certain talented, young, and beautiful actors audition-
ing to play Chris’ assistant. Burstyn realises the full implication of this
dynamic at the time of writing, but it could have escaped at least some
impact on her preparations while working on the film in 1972 (Burstyn
2006, pp. 255–263). In a diary entry which she quotes for December 7,
1972, her fortieth birthday, she writes:

. . . The work is good. Better than good. I’m doing my best work.
All is well with me. I’m not fat. I’m in love. My kid is doing good in
school. I have money in the bank.
(Burstyn 2006, p. 273)

Burstyn ends her discussion of The Exorcist with the story of a trou-
bling and disturbing, attempted moment of death-bed rapprochement
with her biological father (Burstyn 2006, pp. 280–281). Her previous,
deliberate protection of ‘the father image’ in the eyes of her son and,
more broadly, in her own, perhaps accidental and unreflecting general
conduct haunts Burstyn’s history of the film. Throughout the narrative,
her estranged husband Neil keeps ‘jumping out of the bushes’ (Burstyn
2006, p. 257), quite literally on one occasion. Prior to her move from
Los Angeles to New York, Neil violently smashed his way into her home
early one morning, forcing her to flee and the police to be called to take
him away (ibid.). Subsequently, she had to face Neil, and her own feel-
ings of pity for his condition, in court over the question of his psychosis
and potential custody of Jefferson. The result of this court date was that
she received full custody but had to agree to give Neil half her royalties
from The Last Picture Show (Burstyn 2006, pp. 258–259). Having left
Los Angeles, partly to get away from Neil, she discovered that he was
staying with family three blocks away from her building and that she
would have to be constantly looking over her shoulder (Burstyn 2006,
p. 261). Soon after shooting began, she learned that Neil had attacked
his own father, had been hospitalised, and was receiving shock treat-
ment (Burstyn 2006, pp. 268–269).
 Abjection Beyond Tears 111
Considered in this context, we can see how the filming of The Exor-
cist presented Burstyn with very particular dilemmas of self-protection,
let alone workplace professionalism, in relation to broader contempo-
rary dilemmas of male authority, violence, and, indeed, the issues of
the protection of children. Burstyn’s emphasis that she took particular
care that her initial negotiations with Friedkin and author Blatty should
take place not in their offices but in neutral territory is important to
note (Burstyn 2006, pp. 245–250, SAG-AFTRA 2013, Filmfest 2016).
The fact that when he arrived in Los Angeles, Jason Miller seemed to
think he had the right to demand Burstyn pick him up at his hotel, take
him out to dinner and then, when she demurred, said ‘Get your ass over
here’ (Burstyn 2006, p. 257) is clear evidence that her sensitivities about
working with such men in the industry of that time were in no way un-
founded. Only on reflection did she finally refuse Miller’s dictates and
this encounter did not stop him from making a pass at her when they
finally met with Friedkin the very next day (ibid.).
Burstyn’s collaboration with Billy Friedkin was, gratifyingly, more
professionally conducted. Like her colleagues, Burstyn has always been
at pains to stress her admiration for Friedkin and his work on the film
(Burstyn 2006, pp. 262–279; Bouzereau dir. 2010; Jones dir. 1998;
Stockholms 2015). She also relates the extent to which she was clearly
‘spellbound’ by him and eager that he should be pleased with her work
(Burstyn 2006, 263–278). Reading her account, we realise that their
mutual negotiation of issues of power and authority on set were far
from simple. Key moments in the filming process clearly demonstrate
the complexity of these issues. These moments demonstrate how sub-
tle and challenging these working relationships can be in an indus-
try where notions of professionalism and that concept’s relationship
to wider community standards is somewhat confused and, at times,
highly tenuous.
Writing of her first scene in the movie, the first scene she shot, Burs-
tyn tells of a delay caused by the colour of her satin pyjamas. Owen
Roizman, director of photography, had them dyed from white to pink.
This colour did not please Burstyn, who was justifiably concerned that
the new shade was too close to her skin colour and made her looked
washed out. Deliberating over the issue, trying, as she writes ‘to be a
good girl, as was my habit’ (Bursytn 2006, p. 269), she finally took the
problem to Friedkin who exploded, reduced her to tears and left her
begging him not to cancel the day’s shoot and not to blame anybody.
Burstyn’s appraisal of the situation is instructive:

During this tearful plea, I saw Billy scrutinizing me, watching my

nose and eyes turn red and blotchy and calculating that if this con-
tinued, he wouldn’t be able to photograph my face. It was a many-­
layered exchange, and I say Billy decided that he couldn’t yell at
112 Mark Nicholls
me. I cried too easily and ruined my face. He’d have to be careful.
He never yelled at me again. Everyone else, to be sure, but if he was
going to blow, he would actually tell me to leave the set and go to
my dressing room.
(Bursytn 2006, p. 269)

What is evident in this passage is an all too familiar element of han-

dling. This reveals Friedkin as a subtle manipulator and as a director
who can deploy aggression and turn it off at will, according to who he
is dealing with at the time. The incident also points to a slightly placa-
tory tendency in Burstyn, and a not unreasonable note of relief that she
found personal exemption from the less savoury aspects of what, we can
only really conclude, were nothing less than patent directorial tactics
(­Burstyn 2006, p. 269).
In shooting the infamous scene in which Regan repeatedly stabs
her vagina with a crucifix, Burstyn was badly injured. Recounting the
scene she extends the discussion of her collaboration with Friedkin
and makes her director’s deliberate use of violence, personal danger,
and extreme manipulation abundantly clear. As Burstyn explains the
incident, at the point where Regan was to hit Chris, the special-effects
expert, Marcel Vercoutere, was required to pull a wire connected to a
rig around Burstyn’s midriff so that she would crash violently to the
floor. On the first take she landed on her bottom and when ­Friedkin
wanted to shoot again, she complained that she was being pulled
too hard and that she feared injury. Friedkin insisted that the event
needed to look real but agreed to her request. At this point he clearly
instructed Vercoutere not to pull so hard, but Burstyn then writes
that she ‘felt an exchange between them behind my back’ (Burstyn
2006, p. 275). Vercoutere confirms that Friedkin did, indeed, reverse
his earlier instruction, telling him to “give it to her this time” (Jones
1998). According to Burstyn’s account, this resulted in her being
pulled ‘much harder than the first time’ (Burstyn 2006, p. 275), caus-
ing her to fall on her sacrum, injuring herself badly and screaming
with ‘the worst pain I ever felt’ (ibid.). She then looked to Friedkin
to cut, but he simply instructed cinematographer Owen Roizman to
move the camera in closer, holding the shot to capture her pain, until
Burstyn forced the cut but telling him to ‘turn the fucking camera off’
(Burstyn 2006, p. 276).
Burstyn’s evaluation of the incident comes two pages later. It tells a
great deal about levels of genuine ambivalence that confront actors, di-
rectors, and other creative professionals in such situations both imme-
diately and upon later and mature reflection. The incident was clearly
significant and had physical impact on her. She writes, ‘this was the
beginning of a long line of doctors and practitioners who would treat my
back and the arthritis that developed in the scar tissue’ (Burstyn 2006,
 Abjection Beyond Tears 113
p. 278). Notably, however, she appraises Friedkin’s performance with a
level of generosity and an obvious sense of personal responsibility:

Although I’ve been angry at Billy for this, I don’t blame him. If I had
to shoot the scene today, I would insist on padding on me and the
floor. I would not allow anyone to yank me so hard. I would take
care of myself. I didn’t know how to do it then. That was not Billy’s
fault. Billy would do anything to ‘get the shot’. That was his priority.
I knew that about him. I just didn’t know yet how to defend myself
in the face of that fact. I do now.
(ibid.)

Nevertheless, both in Lessons and in the broad spectrum of interviews

on the making of the film, Burstyn gives a very clear indication that
Friedkin’s methods were ‘way beyond what anyone needs to do to make
a movie’ (Jones dir. 1998).

“Father Karras, It’s My Little Girl”

Quite apart from Burstyn’s personal anxieties over the care of her son
Jefferson at the time of shooting The Exorcist, there is nothing remark-
able in her modest references to her specific, somewhat protective, work
with the child actor playing Regan, Linda Blair. Creed’s analysis of the
film emphasises repressed sexual desires between mother and daugh-
ter, maternal authority over the mapping of the daughter’s clean and
proper body, the daughter’s possessiveness over her mother, and the
psychological and social energies at play working to disrupt this dyadic
relationship (Creed 1993, pp. 35–40). In addition to the way we under-
stand the relationship in this context, the particular nature of Burstyn’s
role as Regan’s mother would necessarily bring them both into a close
working relationship, as it would for two actors in almost any similar
circumstances. Friedkin points out that, ‘Ellen and Linda developed a
rapport that allowed their scenes together to become effortless’ (Fried-
kin 2013, p. 256). In Lessons, Burstyn points to her work with Blair in
two important instances. In pre-production she indicates the way she
worked with Blair to loosen up and improve her performance by inten-
tionally moving away from the script and improvising during her initial
readings and screen test (Burstyn 2006, p. 256; Friedkin 2013, p. 245).
Pre-­empting her own experience of on-set physical danger as discussed
above, Burstyn tells the story of Blair’s own back injury endured during
the filming of the bed tossing scene when a strap which was to hold her
securely in place came loose. Blair kept yelling ‘stop’ which was appar-
ently too close to the script to alert anyone that she was no longer in
character and Burstyn had to take her aside to advise her to yell ‘Cut,
Billy’ (Burstyn 2006, p. 272).
114 Mark Nicholls
In a film which is essentially about rescuing a child from significant
harm, Burstyn’s reference to Blair’s incident demonstrates the full ex-
tent to which both actors had to confront the extremities of Friedkin’s
set and its particular incarnation of a type of theatre of cruelty. The
general account of Blair’s own experience as a child actor working
with ­Friedkin demonstrates the extent to which the set housed an en-
vironment of anxiety which cannot but have impacted on the work of
­Burstyn and her colleagues. Beyond the extremity of the material they
were working on, this anxiety was certainly about the relationship of
that material to their own lives outside work – a familiar discourse for
any actor trained in the Adler and Strasberg schools of acting, ‘method’
or otherwise. The fact that their work involved a child to such a great
extent obviously extended this anxiety and their subsequent recollec-
tions of it. Beyond her account of the bed tossing scene, Burstyn’s ver-
sion of Friedkin’s attempts to ‘protect’ Blair from the excesses of the
material tells us more about Friedkin’s relative lack of success in this.
Hiring actor Eileen Dietz as Blair’s body double, then later being forced
to argue that Dietz had little more than 8 s of actual screen time in
the film, confirms what any viewing of the film will demonstrate as
to how much Blair did and did not have to do. It was certainly Mer-
cedes McCambridge’s voice which was later used to overdub ‘some of
the demon’s lines’, but any notion that Blair did not have to at least
mouth expressions such as ‘Fuck me. Fuck me’, ‘your cunting daughter’
and ‘let Jesus fuck you’ while on set is naïve in the extreme (Burstyn
2006, pp. 272–273). As many of her adult colleagues have remarked,
Blair was certainly called on to speak such lines regularly on set (Jones
dir. 1998). According to Friedkin, whatever lines were overdubbed by
­McCambridge, he is quite definite about the fact that ‘Linda Blair re-
corded everything’ (Friedkin 2013, pp. 285–304).
Blair’s own account of the shoot emphasises the extreme difficulties
she encountered, but she is equally concerned to stress her own preco-
cious professionalism. In relation to the bed-tossing scene, Blair contra-
dicts Burstyn by making a point of the fact that she called ‘stop it, really’
rather than ‘stop it Billy’ and hence she boasts that she ‘never broke
character’(Jones 1998). In relation to the foul language, sexual gestures
and concepts and extreme behaviour in which she was required to in-
volve herself and contemplate, she repeatedly states that, as a 13-year-
old child, she did not understand what any of it meant. Furthermore she
emphasises that the processes she went through to deliver the lines and
perform the business were thoroughly mechanical and simply the result
of her carrying out her director’s instructions exactly as he required. In
this she clearly endorses Friedkin’s view that their relationship was one
of “mutual trust” and makes much of her consistency with the general
cast tendency to ratify Friedkin’s personal vision for the film however
extreme. Clearly essential to Blair’s mature vision of the shoot was the
 Abjection Beyond Tears 115
fact that she understood that Friedkin was convinced of her psycholog-
ical stability and suitability for the job and that he had a developed un-
derstanding and consciousness of the full implications of working with
a minor (Bouzereau dir. 2010; Jones dir. 1998). It is also important to
remember that Blair was accompanied on set by one of her parents at
all times.
As Burstyn makes clear, the dilemma was clearly a concern for the
cast and crew as a whole. Highly aware of the situation, many of her el-
der colleagues on set have praised Blair’s precocious professionalism and
her ability to keep the line between her character and herself. This in-
volves stressing both that she had a particular understanding of this line
and that this understanding was demonstrated in her on-set behaviour
and performance. It is important to also make the point that, for all their
assertions of her professionalism, her colleagues were highly conscious
of her as a child and the extent to which her ‘professionalism’ was re-
ally ignorance and innocence remains an open question (Burstyn 2006,
pp. 272–273; Bouzereau, dir. 2010; Jones dir. 1998). The fact that Fried-
kin has totally contradicted Blair’s statements about her own ignorance
of, an innocence towards, the explicit material she encountered, fur-
ther raises the question as to how much those around her were deluding
themselves. More importantly, however, Friedkin’s account of his first
meeting with Blair and her mother – in which Blair told him she had read
the novel and fully understood what, for example, masturbation was –
may slightly detract from the tale of her precocious professionalism, but
it does confirm her view that Friedkin felt assured of her sense of balance
and that he knew she could handle the material. This is Friedkin’s en-
during view also (Friedkin 2013, pp. 243–245; DallasFilmSociety 2013;
Jones dir. 1998; Maron 2016). Friedkin has said very little about these
events and comparatively little about Burstyn and Blair, but he has re-
peatedly emphasised his opinion that Burstyn is ‘supremely intelligent’
(Friedkin 2013, p. 238; Jones dir. 1998), and that the primary quality he
looks for in an actor is intelligence (Maron 2016).
With Burstyn, Roizman, make-up artist Dick Smith, and especially
Blair expressing their understanding of these anxieties on set, particu-
larly in relation to working with a minor, there is no direct complaint
made by anyone. As in her own account of her own on-set trauma,
Burstyn does not comment on Friedkin’s work with Blair. Reading her
account closely, however, leaves little room for doubt as to what was
actually going on. In the 1988 interview, she makes her positive feel-
ings for Friedkin clear, but has little reluctance in pronouncing him ‘a
maniac’ (Jones dir. 1998). There are a great many personal and pro-
fessional reasons for looking at these pronouncements by film-makers
as questionable. In an environment where the principal protagonists
of a shoot have no particular interest in calling out bad behaviour we
can still learn a great deal about process and practice. In a context of
116 Mark Nicholls
extremity, but not clouded by accusation and enduring recrimination –
at least as we can read it here through, largely, Burstyn’s perspective –
we can come to a less sensationalised understanding of practice. As
Burstyn and her colleagues present it, we gain a strong sense of what
actually happens on these shoots and how this can inform our under-
standing of the final film.

Artificial Stimulants
In Burstyn’s account of the two back-injuring scenes of the film, we learn
of Friedkin’s drive towards making these scenes look real. We also note
that on set, during one of these scenes, he played a recording of a real
exorcism (Burstyn 2006, p. 274). Following the troubles with theft and
fire on the set, we also learn that Friedkin brought in a priest, Father
William O’Malley who played the character of Father Dyer, to bless the
set (Jones dir. 1998). From these demonstrative gestures of questionable
professionalism we understand how Friedkin was clearly concerned with
creating an environment to induce suitable performances from his actors
in response (DallasFilmSociety 2013). For Friedkin, ‘acting is reacting’,
and by telling his actors to forget everything they had done in their ex-
tensive rehearsal period Friedkin demonstrates the way in which he was
clearly interested in what they produced in the environment and in the
moment he had created for them on set (Friedkin 2013, pp. 253–265).
This is also emphasised by Burstyn’s colleagues discussing the problems
associated with freezing Regan’s bedroom set to below-zero tempera-
tures in order to achieve the effect of visible breath during the climactic
exorcism scenes (Friedkin 2013, p. 267; Jones dir. 1998). In his 1988
interview, Jason Miller tells of his complaint that Friedkin undermined
his professionalism as an actor by firing off guns and using other artifi-
cial stimulants to induce the sort of anxious performances he required
(Jones dir. 1998). Friedkin confirms this but says he fired off blanks,
not a gun (DallasFilmSociety 2013). Beyond this, Friedkin induced, and
later highly praised, a performance from Miller in a key scene shot at
the time of Miller’s son’s life-threatening injury and hospitalisation. He
also created a similar performance from an apparently thankful Bill
­O’Malley (Fr. Dyer) by slapping him across the face just before he was to
act the scene in which his character gives Fr. Karras a final blessing and
absolution. From these examples, we can determine the extent to which
such environmental stimulants are appealing to Friedkin as a director,
and seemingly justifiable (Friedkin 2013, p. 258).
In his memoirs, Friedkin says nothing of the moments of on-set ten-
sion that Burstyn and Blair have discussed and which I have considered
here. In fact, in discussing over 90 pages of his treatment of The Ex-
orcist, his account of his work with these actors, as has been alluded
to, is full of praise and places an emphasis on their intelligence but it is
 Abjection Beyond Tears 117
comparatively brief. Not commenting directly on these scenes, his does
give some indication of his thoughts in terms of the potential criticism of
his excessive measures. Of the O’Malley slap scene he writes:

This is not a solution I recommend to aspiring directors, but there

are times when you have to have the solution to whatever problems
arise. Occasionally and rarely, the solution is as drastic as the one
I’ve described, which I have used on only three occasions in a career
spanning more than forty years.
(Friedkin 2013, p. 265)

Actor’s Studio Co-President (since 1995) and Artistic Director (New

York, 1981–1988 & 2008–2017), Burstyn has expressed caution over
the relationship between the artificialities of demonstrative technique
and good acting. She has also expressed challenges to certain popular
perceptions of the ‘method’ by making statements, for example in rela-
tion to the use of character make-up, which demonstrate her belief in
the necessity to separate her work from the rest of her life (Stockholms
2015). In terms of her collaboration with directors, when recently asked
about what she appreciates in a director, she has responded repeatedly,
if a little churlishly, ‘I look for a director that does not interfere with
my process’ (SAG-AFTRA 2013). Furthermore, Burstyn has indicated
that she likes a director who leaves here alone and interferes only when
strictly necessarily (SAG-AFTRA 2013; Stockholms 2015). Despite
these statements, this essay has clearly indicated the extent to which
Burstyn’s essential lack of dogmatism on these points did not get in the
way of her pursuit of the ‘real’, nor in the way of Friedkin’s process to
achieve this goal.
Outlining the notorious sound problems involved and the anticipated
requirements of post-synchronisation, Burstyn makes much of her
Georgetown exterior location scene with Jason Miller. In this she asserts
her particular lack of compromise over the performance she achieved
in this emotionally potent encounter in the film when she has to admit
that she is asking the priest for an exorcism for ‘my little girl’ (Burstyn
2006, pp. 270–271). She also makes much of the debate with Friedkin
and Blatty over her last lines in the film, essentially Chris MacNeil’s
conclusions as to her beliefs about God and the devil and what had, in
fact, happened to her and her daughter (Burstyn 2006, pp. 265–267). In
both cases, Burstyn asserts the case for her character, which she has ar-
ticulated in more recent interviews in general terms as ‘about being real’
(Filmfest 2016; Walsh 2018). For Burstyn, this comes from her training
under Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio. The idea of ‘being real’ is quite
different from being ‘natural’, in the sense of what we might think of as
a confident on camera/stage performance, of being at ease. What Stras-
berg taught her to articulate in this context of ‘real’, she explains, was ‘to
118 Mark Nicholls
be present on the stage’, in the moment and in character (Burstyn 2015;
Filmfest 2016). Frequently she has acknowledged Peter Bogdanovich’s
direction when she was having difficulties with a dialogue-free scene on
the set of The Last Picture Show, ‘Think the thoughts of the character
and the camera will read your mind’ (Filmfest 2016; SAG-AFTRA 2013).
In this context and despite her expressed reservations about Friedkin’s
maniacal tendencies, subscribing to such ideas, she can allow herself lit-
tle room for disagreement with Friedkin’s methods. Concluding that his
approach was about building the film in such a way that audiences be-
lieved in the characters, particularly in the performance of a female child
succumbing to possession by the devil, and their relationships, Burstyn
can only really see these methods as substantially consistent with at least
the essential aims of her own process (Stockholms 2015). Certainly this
seems to be the conclusion of many of her colleagues who, like Max
von Sydow, view Friedkin’s methods on the film as stimulating but most
unusual (Jones dir. 1998).
One of the most popular discourses about the making of The Exorcist
is the cataloguing of accident, misfortune and even death that occurred
during that time – the so-called ‘Exorcist Curse’. For all her intelligence,
professional insight and broad-minded common sense, Burstyn is not
exempt from indulging the audience’s appetite for this type of delicious
publicity hype and she carefully sets the fires and cast-related deaths out
in an obvious list (Burstyn 2006, pp. 264–265; Jones dir. 1998). 2 Be-
yond the attractive fodder they provide the films on-going publicity, one
reason for Burstyn’s dedication to their significance lies in their essential
validation of her Jung-inspired spirituality. In raising the idea of a film
company exhibiting a ‘collective shadow’ and that shadow being po-
tentially a manifestation of evil, like the ‘collective shadow of G­ ermany
during World War II’, she directly references one of Jung’s most well-
known and politically complex observations (Gellert 1998, p. 75). Con-
tinuing to highlight the extent of bad luck which fell on the cast and
crew during the shoot simply operates to justify a largely harmless nu-
minous curiosity in Burstyn. It also articulates a spiritual engagement
which she has obviously found useful in the creation of her roles and,
indeed, in the difficulties encountered in the more complex performance
of self. Beyond this, however, there is a strong sense that in continuing
to spin the tale, Burstyn is once again validating Friedkin’s method of
creating of an environment of extreme, artificial events and stimulants
deemed necessary in constructing a convincing narrative of female meta-
morphosis, hysteria, and possession. Friedkin, she points out, was not
pursuing a religious curiosity in making the film, but a psychological one
(Stockholms 2015).
Friedkin himself sees no particular advantage in advancing or taking
away from the narrative of The Exorcist Curse. He merely states that had
he thought there was anything untoward happening at the time, he could
 Abjection Beyond Tears 119
not have continued with the project (DallasFilmSociety 2013; Maron
2016). The idea then that he brought in the priest, William O’Malley,
to bless the set should thus be seen to be as artificial and tactical as his
ability to turn his workplace rage off and on at will. In repeatedly em-
phasising the spooky story of the film’s engagement with evil, Burstyn
is doing the same thing. As Friedkin built an environment for his actors
to elicit a certain emotional response Burstyn continues to build such an
environment to play on the emotional sensibilities of the film’s audience.
This should not be reduced to the status of a necessarily commercially
minded activity, nor is Burstyn’s Jungian explanation of co-incidence in
this case particularly convincing. Burstyn, like Friedkin, is essentially a
storyteller. Whatever she may believe about the truth of the list of events
that occurred in the lives of those she worked with over an nine-month
production, we can easily excuse her the indulgence of reciting them in
connection with her substantial work on the film. Everyone knows, ghost
stories are always best heard and told very late at night with the lights
turned out. As she observes in Friedkin’s process, the surreal is achieved
by convincing the audience of the extent and viability of the real, of
characters and their relationships, and then taking them one step be-
yond it (Jones dir. 1998; Stockholms 2015). Convinced of this practice,
Burstyn’s recourse to the fabulous is not surprising. It works gradually
to lure the spectator into an environment of doubt based on the presence
of thoroughly believable but extraordinary incidents. It is up to the film’s
ever-increasing audience how much to insist on tightening the metaphor-
ical restraining straps and laying down the protective padding. Never-
theless this still leaves the issue of Friedkin’s maniacal method casting a
dark shadow over the film. Given the new feminist stand of the #MeToo
movement, which has impacted on the Hollywood scene, one wonders
whether Burstyn, if asked, might not offer a different perspective on the
extra-diegetic events which took place on the set of The Exorcist.
With thanks to Alison Wirtz and Terrie Waddell for their contribu-
tions to this essay.

Notes
1 Burstyn goes on to refer to this as ‘the masturbation scene’ (2006, p. 275),
and the scene is commonly referred to in this way. Blatty and Friedkin use
this term in interviews (Bouzereau dir. 2010; Jones dir. 1998; DallasFilm-
Society 2013). In the novel Blatty writes ‘she thrust down down the crucifix
into her vagina and began to masturbate ferociously’ (1973, p. 183).
2 These accidents include the near death of Jason Miller’s son when hit by a
motorcycle while playing on a beach, the unexplained fire which destroyed
the Regan bedroom set, and the deaths of cast member Jack MacGowran,
Max von Sydow’s brother, Linda Blair’s grandfather, the assistant camera-
man’s new born child, the designer of the Regan bedroom set, and one of the
production’s security guards who was accidentally shot by a New York po-
liceman who believed him to be carrying a gun (Burstyn 2006, pp. 263–265).
120 Mark Nicholls
References
Blatty, W. 1973, The Exorcist, Corgi: London.
Bouzereau, L. (dir.) 2010, Raising Hell: Filming The Exorcist, videorecording,
Warner Brothers, USA.
Burstyn, E. 2006, Lessons in Becoming Myself, Riverhead Books, New York.
Creed, B. 1993, The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
Routledge, London.
DallasFilmSociety. 2013, William Friedkin at 2013 Dallas International Film
Festival, viewed 2 March 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP2M4Gsp-rQ
Filmfest München. 2016, Film Makers Live! Ellen Burstyn, viewed 2 March
2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AsTwAjd9GQ
Friedkin, W (dir.) 1973, The Exorcist, motion picture, Warner Brothers, USA.
Friedkin, W. 2013, The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir, HarperCollins, New
York.
Gellert, M. 1998, ‘The eruption of the shadow in Nazi Germany’, Psycholog-
ical Perspectives: A Semiannual Journal of Jungian Thought, vol. 37, no. 1,
pp. 72–89.
Jones, N. (dir.) 1998, The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist, videore-
cording, BBC, United Kingdom.
Maron, M. 2016, ‘#684’, WTF Podcast with Marc Maron, podcast, www.­
wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_684_-_william_friedkin?rq=684
Ross, H. (dir.) 1977, The Turning Point, motion picture, 20th Century Fox.
SAG-AFTRA Foundation. 2013, Conversations with Ellen Burstyn, viewed
2 March 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3E3ECle1bk
Scorsese, M. (dir.) 1974, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, motion picture,
Warner Brothers, USA.
Stockholms filmfestival. 2015, Ellen Burstyn – Stockholm Achievement Award –
Face2face, viewed 2 March 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hktV8lhVGGU
von Sivers, M. (dir.) 2015, Skådespelaren Ellen Burstyn tar Kampen för
­Kvinnorollerna: Malou Efter tio, videorecording, TV4, Sweden.
Walsh, K. 2018, An Evening with Ellen Burstyn, Florida Film Festival.
7 Carrie’s Sisters
New Blood in Contemporary
Female Horror Cinema
Patricia Pisters

One evening I stood in the middle of my living room and I looked out
at a blood-red sunset spreading out over the horizon of the Pacific. Sud-
denly […] I saw a huge black centrifuge inside my head. I saw a tall
figure in a floor-length evening gown approaching the centrifuge with a
vase-sized glass tube of blood in her hand. […] I watched as the figure
carefully put the tube of blood into the centrifuge, closed the lid, and
pushed a button on the front of the machine. The centrifuge began to
whirl. […] Blood was everywhere. […] I looked out toward the ocean
and saw the blood on the window had merged into the sunset; I couldn’t
tell where one ended and the other began.
(Jamison 2016, pp. 79–80)

A hallucinatory scarlet moment, full of images of blood. In the quote

above, clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison vividly describes her
own experiences of bipolarity. When the gowned shape turns around, to
Jamison’s great horror, the figure appears to be herself. Her dress, cape,
and long white gloves are covered in blood. The tube of blood splashing
out centrifugally, leaving red splashes everywhere on the windowpane,
on the walls and paintings, soaking into the carpet. Finally, inner and
outer worlds fuse in the colour red. While this scene is not from a horror
movie, it nevertheless brings together several elements that I want to
explore in this essay: a female perspective and female agency (Jamison
is both observant and observer) in horror aesthetics; the forms, affects,
and meanings of the red/blood splashing, seeping, staining everywhere;
and an intimate, inner perspective merging with perceptions of the outer
world. These are all dimensions of the vein of ‘new blood’ in the contem-
porary horror cinema directed by women that will also run through the
following pages.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the cinematographic horror genre reinvented
itself, partly inspired by societal developments concerning sexual liber-
ation and women’s emancipation. While many of these developments
found translations in generic images, the horror genre was nevertheless
dominated by male directors, with the exception of a few female direc-
tors that confirmed the rule.1 Barbara Creed’s The monstrous-feminine
122 Patricia Pisters
made a tremendous contribution in understanding the deeper gendered
psychology of these popular horror films.2 Beyond the classical idea of
the male monster and the female victim as ‘damsel in distress’, Creed
adapted Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection to identify the feminine, and
especially its reproductive functions, as monstrous. And beyond Freud’s
classical idea of the woman as castrated, she, rereading Freud’s case study
Little Hans, made an argument for the dangerous ‘castrating’ woman. By
referring to a large spectrum of horror subgenres, Creed demonstrated
how monstrous femininity takes shape in these films that are by and
large inspired by male phantasies and anxieties about the other sex.
Since the new millennium, a striking number of women have started
to adopt and adapt formal and thematic elements from horror cinema.3
In this essay, I will look at some of interesting horror films directed by
woman, asking how these films are indebted to Creed’s psychoanalytic
concepts, and investigating if and how they might open new perspec-
tives on ‘female monstrosity’ as abject or/and castrating. By following a
common red thread of blood in the aesthetics (as form, affect and mean-
ing) of contemporary horror cinema, I focus my arguments around Jane
Campion’s In the Cut (dir. 2003) and Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution
(dir. 2015). But let’s start by returning to Creed’s work and one of the
bloodiest heroines of the 1970s horror cinema, Brian de Palma’s Carrie
(dir. 1976), and its remake by Kimberly Pierce in 2013.

Carrie and the ‘Curse of Blood’ as Abjection and

Castration
One of the most seminal images of popular horror cinema of the 1970s
is that of a girl in a soft pink prom dress drenched in thick red gushes of
pig’s blood; the apotheosis of humiliation and shame that unleashes the
shy (and bullied) heroine’s hidden telekinetic powers in Brian de Palma’s
Carrie (1976). The film is based on the novel by Stephen King (1974),
featuring Sissy Spacek as Carrie. Barbara Creed argues in the opening of
The monstrous-feminine this scene symbolises one of the most striking
images of abjection in the modern horror film: the association of pig’s
blood with menstrual blood. As insisted by the film, girls ‘bleed like
pigs’ when their bodies are ready for reproduction. The bloody alliance
of the nonhuman and human, combined with the procreative and ma-
ternal function of the female body, summarises the monstrous feminine
as confrontation with ‘the abject’. Creed transposes Julia Kristeva’s psy-
choanalytic notion of the abject as that ‘which signifies the place where
meaning collapses, the place where “I” am not’ (p. 8) to themes and
images in the horror genre. The abject is related to any notion of an am-
biguous border: between inside and outside of the body such as blood,
wounds, retch and excrement; between mother and child; between hu-
man and nonhuman; and ultimately between life and death.
 Carrie’s Sisters 123
Creed convincingly argues that the horror film can be seen as a ‘mod-
ern defilement rite’ that ‘attempts to separate out the symbolic order
from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that
her universe signifies’ (p. 14). It is the ‘impure’ feminine body that sig-
nifies the abject par excellence: menstrual blood, intra-uterine spaces as
monstrous wombs, and terrifying mothers as obsessed and mad crea-
tures that cannot let go of their bodily offspring are all images that find
many translations in horror figures such as alien monsters, possessed
women, lesbian vampires, and scary witches. In de Palma’s film, Carrie
White’s own mother, who suffers from theomania, is the first to declare
this abjection of the feminine body as she lectures Carrie on the ‘sin and
weakness of women’ (the first sin being intercourse and sexual pleasure)
and God’s punishment as ‘the curse of blood’. This curse of blood is first
of all translated in another curse, the curse of childbearing. Blood signi-
fies the abject as it defies the inside and the outside of the body (at least
once a month for fertile women, and mothers in labour).
Does it make a difference when these female issues are presented from
a woman’s perspective? The question as to whether a feminine directo-
rial gaze makes all the difference is a thorny one to which I will return at
the end of this essay. For now, I just want to observe two differences be-
tween the versions of Carrie that provide us with a starting point. First
of all, Kimberly Pierce’s Carrie (dir. 2013) has added a prologue and
changed the epilogue. Contrary to de Palma’s version that starts with the
gym lesson and Carrie’s showering body erotically filmed in slow-motion
and soft-focus (until she discovers the blood running down her legs), the
new Carrie starts with a flashback of Carrie’s panicked mother crawling
up the stairs in the throes of giving birth, leaving a trail of blood, asking
God for forgiveness, thinking she is dying, in shock discovering that she
has delivered a baby, trying to kill her offspring with a knife, but finding
herself unable to do so. The film also ends with a nightmarish image of
a female body in labour. Now it is Sue, Carrie’s only friend who survives
the prom massacre, who finds herself pregnant in Pierce’s version of the
story. We see her body struggling with contractions, when suddenly Car-
rie’s bloody hand shoots out of her body. As in de Palma’s version (where
Carrie’s hand grabs Sue from the grave) this then appears to be a hor-
rific nightmare indeed. The ‘curse of childbearing’ is literalised in this
new prologue and epilogue and clearly resonates with Creed’s notion of
abjection. Nevertheless, these scenes seem to translate more the fears
and anxieties from a woman’s perspective, whose experience of having
something growing inside her own body can be scary and alienating for
herself as well.
Moreover, Pierce’s version emphasises the necessity of knowledge for
women to understand their own bodies, desires, feelings, and social and
religious doctrines. A second difference is that the new Carrie, now em-
bodied by Chloë Grace Moretz, has much more knowledge, agency, and
124 Patricia Pisters
control than her ‘twin sister’ from De Palma’s film. For instance, this
Carrie counters her mother’s biblical dogma that all women are sinful
(‘I am not Eve, mother!’). And when she discovers her powers to break
glass or move things by her mental energy, she starts to read about tele-
kinesis and practises her skills in her bedroom. In this way Carrie’s fem-
inine powers are not just wild, uncontrollable forces of nature that just
unleash under great (social) pressure, but can be learned and practised.4
Both the internal, subjective female perspective and feminine knowledge
agency and control seem important elements in female-directed blood-
filled stories, to which I will return in the next sections as well.
Creed connects female monstrosity also in another way to ‘the curse
of blood’, namely the blood of violence provoked by women as fearsome
castrating figures, possessed by ‘the curse of murder’ as proclaimed by
Carrie’s mad mother. In the second part of The monstrous-feminine,
Creed rereads Freud’s case of Little Hans, insisting that ‘Hans’s var-
ious phobias and fears all stem from his original anxiety concerning
his mother’s genitals …[which] ultimately represent castration, suffoca-
tion, death, the void – themes also common to the representation of
the monstrous-feminine in the horror film’ (Creed 1993, p. 102) Creed
explains further that ‘not knowing anything about the true nature of
the female genitals, coition, and the origin of babies […] he constructs a
series of phantasies […] in which he is almost always the passive victim
of his mother’s frightening sexuality’(p. 103). Creed discusses Carrie’s
witchcraft as a dimension of abjection and the ambiguous borders be-
tween the natural and the supernatural. Clearly, the unleashing of her
uncontrollable, avenging, and murderous powers that turn the happy
prom night into a blood flooded massacre colouring the entire lighting
and mise-en-scène red, turns Carrie also into a dangerous, violent, and
murderous femme castratrice, leaving no one alive, except Sue, the one
schoolmate who was kind to her.
In de Palma’s Sisters (1972), we also see this combination of mon-
strous femininity both as abject (the film opening with intra-uterine im-
ages of a Siamese twin) and as castrating (one of the twins embodying all
the dark and murderous powers of the other). Like the images of abject
femininity, the idea of the castrating woman takes many different forms,
especially in the modern slasher film. It most prominently features in
the subgenre of the rape-revenge movies of the 1970s and 1980s, one of
the most controversial ones being Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave
(1978).5 As Creed explains, the slasher film deals specifically with cas-
tration anxieties. Among the group of youngsters who become sexually
active and who typically are one by one killed with primitive weapons
(axes, saws, knives) by an anonymous murderer, there is always one girl
who survives. In her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover
called these resourceful and surviving heroines who are usually brown-
haired and rather boyish (think of Laurie in Halloween [Carpenter dir.
 Carrie’s Sisters 125
1978]) ‘final girls’ (p. 201). The final girl allows cross-gender identifica-
tion, and could be called the more innocent, that is sexually non-active,
sister of the avenging castrating women of the rape-revenge films. The
castrating woman in this more feminist subgenre takes revenge after a
sexual assault and makes sure all of her perpetrators end in a bloodbath.
However, in spite of the gruesomeness of the heroine’s revenge that is
always justified by the rape at the beginning of the plot, Creed observes
that there is still a gender misbalance if one compares the utter humili-
ation of the rape sequences of the woman, to the masochistic pleasures
of the men who often die lured by the prospect of intercourse as they are
first seduced before being murdered. Which makes her conclude that I
Spit on Your Grave is ‘still misogynistic in its representation of women’
(Creed 1993, p. 129). Coralie Fargeat’s over-the-top bloody Revenge
(dir. 2017) presents a femme castratrice of the #MeToo-epoch with cult
potential. Revenge’s empowered castratrice shows that it does make
a difference when a female director films the same plot but with less
masochistic pleasure for the men involved. Just like Anna Biller’s The
Love Witch (dir. 2016) offers a feminist pastiche on witchcraft, present-
ing a smashing modern-day sorceress who puts men under her deadly
spell. These films offer new appropriations of typical horror elements
described by Creed that nevertheless stay close to the genre formulas and
all seem to confirm male anxieties, albeit from a female perspective and
with certain feminist twists.

The ‘Curse of Murder’ of a Poetic Final Girl in In the Cut

Jane Campion’s film In the Cut (2003) offers an interesting case with
which to reconsider a feminine perspective and agency more radically
but also more ambiguously. Usually described as an erotic thriller,
I think it is defendable to consider Campion’s female lead character as an
atypical slasher or rape-revenge heroine. The film is about Frannie Av-
ery, a high school literature teacher who gets involved with the detective
that investigates a series of brutal murders of women in her Manhattan
neighbourhood. In the space of this article I will not be able to do justice
to all of the film’s rich complexity, but I will highlight a few salient ele-
ments that indicate a different take on gendered violence through horror
aesthetics.6
Let me start with images from towards the end of the film where we see
Frannie (Meg Ryan) in a red dress, smeared with blood walking barefoot
on the roadside. She has just killed the man who raped and dismembered
her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh); a fate of several other girls in
her neighbourhood, all ‘disarticulated’ in particular violent ways. We see
bloody body parts being pulled out of a bathtub, a washing machine,
and on graphic evidential photos – all images that we are familiar with
from the slasher genre (and unfortunately also still resonate with socially
126 Patricia Pisters
gendered violence). This gruesome fate was almost Frannie’s as well. By
escaping from the murderer she is a ‘final girl’ and by avenging her sister’s
assaulter she could classify as a ‘castrating woman’ of the rape-revenge
plot (even though she uses a gun rather than a knife). In some respects,
the typical gender roles of the slasher plot are reversed. Where in De Pal-
ma’s Sisters, for instance, the twin sisters Danielle and Dominique (both
played by Margot Kidder), symbolise the docile ‘good girl’ and the terri-
fying ‘bad girl’ Campion presents us with a perverse version of a ‘good
cop/bad cop’ embodied by detective Giovanni Malloy (Marc Ruffalo)
and his partner Richard Rodriguez (Nick Damici). Frannie gets sexually
involved with Malloy and throughout the film there is a constant am-
biguity whether or not he’d be a ‘homme fatale’. In the final scenes, she
finds out it was Rodriguez who is the murderer, and the film ends when
she returns to Malloy whom she tied to the water pipe of her apartment.
Even if this role-reversal could be considered as a feminist perspective
that the film offers, Campion does not just reverse plot roles. To under-
stand why Campion’s heroine gets involved in this potentially dangerous
situation, it is important to take into consideration how the aesthetics
of the film create a fusion between inner spaces and the outside world.
From the beginning the film sets up a whole range of ambiguities. Over
the opening credit sequence, for instance, we hear a sweet women’s
voice singing ‘Que sera sera’, while the accompanying piano music has
threatening disharmonious tones. Images of a sleazy New York neigh-
bourhood reveal garbage in the streets, filtered through a soft morn-
ing sunlight, a red flower painted on the pavement vaguely resembles
the body contour of a crime scene; a courtyard garden is full of lush
plants, some scarlet red flowers breaking the harmony and at the same
time adding a lively dimension. Pauline, wearing a vermillion orange-red
dress, is in the garden, drinking a coffee, observing the plants, the sky;
suddenly white petals drop from the sky, dotting the summer scenery
like a snowstorm. An interior shot shows the ‘snowstorm’ through the
window, while a red Chinese wind chime in front of the window reveals
a small cozy apartment. Frannie, still in bed half-awake, sees the white
dots and dozes off again; the petals merging with snow-flakes of dreamy
sepia black-and-white images of a winter landscape, a woman making
pirouettes in ice, a man’s hand forming a fist in close-up as if he is about
to hit out but then he just skates away from the camera. When he returns
towards the camera, his skate carves a deep black cut into the white ice.
The cut slowly turns red, the title of the film appears, the letters seem to
start bleeding.
Dream and reality merge in the mise-en-scène of this opening se-
quence, bringing us closely into Fran’s private space and mental world.
Fran and Pauline (who stayed the night with her sister) leave the apart-
ment, talking about slang words and their meanings, slang words that
are ‘either sexual or violent, or both’ as they comment in their dialogue.
 Carrie’s Sisters 127
Fran has sticky notes with expressions and poetic phrases everywhere in
her apartment. Soon it becomes clear that she is writing a book on slang,
loves poetry, and teaches literature at a high school. Throughout the film
we see her looking, noting down poetic lines on display in public spaces,
savouring the words and expressions, enjoying language, and talking
with her sister about lovers and sexuality. Back to the beginning of the
film, by the time the sisters walk outside, the fluid frames of the camera
work and frames within frames in the mise-en-scène have rendered all
spaces small and intimate. The warm yellow-brown colour palette is
covered in almost every scene with flecks of bright red (a dress, a chime,
a curtain, a cap, a cup, a couch, a notebook, a flower, flecks of red
light, bloodstains), and the soft summer light combined with the hints
of violence in the music, the icy snow, the title design, and the words
has established a familiar world that feels safe, and at the same time has
a threatening undertone. The colour red that pops up consistently as
flecks, dots, specks, and spots in the mise-en-scène indicates this ambi-
guity, perhaps even creates the double affective quality of violence and
sexuality that runs throughout the entire film.
As Creed and Clover demonstrate, the combination of sex and vio-
lence is characteristic of the horror genre, but the differences in Campi-
on’s aesthetics are striking. Instead of a lonely girl in a terribly deserted
house, there is confidentiality in an urban setting, an intimate bond be-
tween two sisters who talk about relationships, sex, work, and daily life;
Campion presents us Frannie’s private world, where dreams, memories,
poetry, imagination, daily life and harsh reality of gendered violence
all blend together. In the Cut explores the female psyche through erot-
icism and sexual desire (Benoit) but also through language and poetry,
and through the female look (Frannie secretly observing a man receiving
fellatio in the basement of a café being one of the most salient acts of
looking). All this creates a deeply twisted appropriation of genre conven-
tions of the horror film. Campion’s film addresses something beyond the
expression of male anxiety for the monstrous-feminine and the thrill-
ing disgust that usually is the affect that the genre calls for.7 Rather,
In the Cut stylistically constructs affective relations that open up the
range of affects that the horror genre can reach for, thereby creating
space for new perspectives. Here it is useful to make reference to Eugenie
Brinkema, who argues for a more formal approach to the horror genre,
emphasising that horror is a question of design and componentry that

opens up fields of possibility for thinking horror in unexpected

places, within unexpected juxtapositions […] horror as a prob-
lematics of aesthetics, form, design, element, and composition […]
insisting that textual structures and components are not incidental
to affective charge but are indeed responsible for it.
(Brinkema 2015, p. 265; See also Brinkema 2014).
128 Patricia Pisters
While I am not sure if form is responsible for affect and meaning (as I
think all formal innovations are always connected to content and reso-
nate with wider social developments), I do think that paying attention to
the formal aspects of horror aesthetics, and especially thinking horror
beyond the genre conventions, is helpful to rethink its affective meaning
beyond gender conventions as well. I will just highlight one more ele-
ment of In the Cut that speaks to this point. A central image in the film is
the lighthouse. To the lighthouse is where the murderer takes his victims
and where Fran is taken at the end of the film as well. It is here that she
realises the truth, and where she kills her assaulter the moment he asks
to marry her, offering her a blood-covered ring that all his victims wore
when they were raped and killed. Obviously the lighthouse also refers
to Virginia Woolf’s famous novel To the lighthouse. Fran teaches the
novel to her students, and in a scene at the beginning of the film we see
her in class, a red lighthouse drawn on the blackboard, while she refers
to Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style. One of her students complains
that nothing happens in the novel, ‘just an old lady who dies’. When Fran
asks how many ladies have to die to make it good, the student replies
‘at least three’. One cannot help to see this as a self-referential wink to
the plot of the film, where indeed three women are brutally killed, per-
haps as a formal reference to popular genre conventions, while at the
same time the entire film is much closer to a subjective and meandering
consciousness.
Virginia Woolf herself had a purely formal conception of the image
of the lighthouse, as she stated: ‘I mean nothing by the lighthouse, one
has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design
together’ (Woolf 2004, p. xiii). I’d like to suggest that the colour red in
In the Cut functions in a similar compositional way as the lighthouse
in Woolf’s novel. The lighthouse functions as a beacon in the subjective
worlds of Woolf’s characters, such as Mrs Ramsay:

She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for
when one woke at all, one’s relation changes, she looked at the
steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her,
so little her […] but for all that, she thought, watching it with fas-
cination, hypnotized, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers
some sealed vessel in the brain whose bursting would flood her
with delight.
(2004, p. xiv)

Similarly, the composition of the images, sounds, and words in In the

Cut create a stream-of-consciousness, create a subjective sphere of in-
timate relationships, of female sexuality as personal experience rather
than display, of poetry, vulnerability and sexual pleasure, of trust and
fear – and above all of creative agency.8
 Carrie’s Sisters 129
Maud Ellmann argues in her introduction to To the lighthouse that
‘if the lighthouse is the “central line” it stands for all dividing lines that
holds design together, for division as a principle of creativity. […] To the
lighthouse intimates that art is necessarily ambivalent, destructive and
reparative by turns’ (in Woolf 2004, p. xxii). As an element of compo-
sition, the redness of her lighthouse (and of all the other red splashes in
the settings) stands for the poetry and erotic love that Frannie is quietly
looking for, writing down lines of poetry in the metro, sticking them on
the walls of her apartment. ‘I want to do with you what spring does with
the cherry trees’, Malloy reads one of her notes when he visits her apart-
ment for the first time. The metaphor is strong, connects to the summery
petal storm at the beginning of the film, and starts to do its creative
subconscious work in the aesthetics of the film, where the destructive
physical violence afflicted on women’s bodies is countered with repara-
tive happiness of intimate pleasure; where the love for a potentially dan-
gerous man has nothing to do with masochistic thrill-seeking but with a
search between trust and distrust; and where reality merges with subjec-
tive perceptions, ambiguous feelings and thoughts in the composition of
images and sounds. In short, if we can consider In the Cut as a feminine
take on the horror film, it renders the notion of the monstrous-feminine
itself ambiguous, presenting us with a ‘dreamy final girl’. The abject as
an ambiguous notion or border, cut and extended into creative abjection
reaches beyond the typical horror emotions of fear, disgust, and other
negative emotions infusing it with notions of poetry and feminine desire.

Posthuman Evolution and the ‘Curse of Childbearing’

Let me return now to the curse of blood in relation to the curse of child-
bearing to see if, here too, we find new perspectives. As Creed observed,
one of the most salient features of monstrous femininity is related to ‘the
fear of her generative power’(1993, p. 16), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) con-
tains not only a reworking of Freud’s primal scene (where the child sees
the parents have intercourse and phantasies about the question: where do
babies come from?) as a scene of birth, but also the idea of the archaic par-
thenogenetic mother, the mother who can give birth without the help of a
male counterpart. Creed analyses several different variations of birth scenes
inside the mother-ship of Alien, all staged by the invisible alien archaic
mother. Moreover, Alien is also an example of a horror film that contains
‘monstrous wombs …intra-uterine settings that consist of dark, narrow,
winding passages leading to a central room, cellar or other symbolic place
of birth’ (Creed 1993, p. 53). Other horror films refer to the monstrosity of
the womb belonging to a woman who usually gives birth to some kind of
terrifying creature; see David Cronenberg’s The Brood (dir. 1979) as case in
point. Again, the point of view on the terrifying ‘curse of child bearing’ in
1970s horror cinema is presented from the point of view of male anxiety.9
130 Patricia Pisters
In spite of its gendered specificity, it took quite a while before female
directors picked up the question of pregnancy and childbearing them-
selves. Petra Costa and Lea Glob recently translated the anxieties about
and changes caused by pregnancy in their beautiful docufiction Olmo
and the Seagull (2015). While not a horror film, the inner experiences and
uncertainties involved in this feminine life changing experience are nev-
ertheless powerful and terrifying. Considering the transformative bodily
experience that pregnancy is, Alice Lowe, who directed herself in Pre-
venge (2016) while being pregnant, indicates that ‘pregnancy is the per-
fect time to make a horror movie’ (in Miller 2017) As Harriet Cooper
indicates, ‘Prevenge is a black-comedic slasher film about a pregnant
woman turned serial killer working on the instructions of her fetus’
(Cooper 2017, p. 1) that explores the status of pregnant women ‘with
a marvelous and hilarious directness’ (ibid.). However interesting these
films are, I will focus again on another female-directed film that ad-
dresses the questions of alien, alienating, and archaic motherhood and
primal birth scenes, in more oblique and obtuse ways. Evolution (2015),
directed by Lucille Hadzihalilovic addresses monstrosity in terms of
striking and strange horror aesthetics. In 2004, Hadzihalilovic made
Innocence, a film about girls growing up in a secluded boarding school
deep in the woods who at the age of seven arrive in a coffin, all dressed
in white, the colour of the ribbons in their hair indicating their age
stages in becoming a proper woman. It is a film about the education of
girls. Hadzihalilovich’s soft use of horror elements in the mise-en-scène
and narration creates feelings of unease, as Nikolaj Lübecker analyses
in his book The feel-bad film (2015). Evolution also contains elements
of mystery, mythology, and menace and striking formal elements that
infuse Creed’s notions of motherhood with new elements of ambiguity
and ambivalence, addressing the feminine and female consciousness in a
comparable yet different way than In the Cut.
Evolution is set in a remote microcosmos, a seaside village, filmed at
the rocky shores of the Canary island Lanzarote. The village is uniquely
populated by pre-adolescent boys, each of them living with a mother
that might not be their biological mom. The women have a special con-
nection to the sea, all alike in a sober, skin-coloured light-brown dress,
wet hair worn in a tight tail, something alien in their black ‘vaguely ce-
tacean’ eyes (Combs 2016, p. 71). At the beginning of the film, Nicolas
(Max Brebant) is swimming in the sea when he sees among the waving
corals a glimpse of a drowned body of a boy, a starfish on his body.
Frightened, he runs home where his mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier)
tells him that ‘the sea makes you see strange things’. A little later, she
swims to the surface with a huge and bright red starfish as proof that
he imagined things. She feeds him with slimy black-green seaweed and
makes him swallow a black substance that is his medication ‘because
at your age your body is changing and weakening like lizards or crabs’.
 Carrie’s Sisters 131
The eerie qualities of the setting and figures that populate this coastal
commune, evoke horror scenarios in our mind but fail to fit any well-
known template or affective response.
The starfish is an important and recurrent figure in the film. Be-
sides its compositional bright red colour (to which I will return) it rep-
resents among others the Virgin Mary as Stella Maris (Star of the Sea),
and as protector and guarantor of safe conduct over troubled waters
(Combs 2016, p. 71). Connecting thus the sea (la mer in French) to
motherhood (Virgin Mary, la mère in French) and to the language of
the unconscious (the sea being a powerful force of nature and symbol
for unconscious imagination). If Marguerite Duras, who was a master
in describing la mer/la mère in poetic connection to the unconscious
of her abstract characters, would ever have made a horror movie, she
could have made Evolution. The starfish, however, also indicates a
more posthuman conception of the unconscious, reproduction, and
sexuality. One of the characteristics of starfish is that they can repro-
duce both sexually (by spawning, releasing sex cells into the water,
usually in groups) and asexually (by breaking in two and regenerating
the missing parts). And Hadzihalilovic has indicated in an interview
that the film does not deal with sexuality, rather addresses a pre-sexual
unconscious (in Prigge 2016).
Therefore, while the images that raise ‘archaic motherhood’ in first
instance are more poetic and less horrific (the sea the starfish rather
than an alien monstrous creature) Creed’s notion of monstrous femi-
ninity is still relevant, albeit with another twist. As already indicated,
the boys get some kind of medication to prepare them for ‘changes in
their body’. After the starfish incident, Nicolas becomes suspicious of
his mother and follows her when she leaves the house at night. From
behind a rock, he observes how the women of the village have grouped
their naked bodies in a star-like pattern, crawling on the rocks like
fish on dry land, seemingly giving birth to strange small creatures, or
perhaps they are spawning. Definitely there is some form of nonhuman
sexuality and reproduction going on; the women groan and cry, al-
most like a siren or mermaid call. Shocked and horrified, Nicolas runs
back home. When he sees his mother later taking a shower, he notices
strange suction cups on her back. Nicolas starts to rebel (drawing pic-
tures, asking questions about the medication, openly doubting whether
his mother truly is his mother). As a punishment he is brought to a
gloomy hospital where all the doctors and nurses are also women. Here
he undergoes an operation on his belly and is impregnated. The boys
in the clinic, not all of whom survive, give birth either on the operating
table or in some kind of water tank.
Here, we are in the full nightmare of phantasies about the monstrous
feminine, archaic and parthenogenetic motherhood, and fearsome pow-
erful women. While the operations on the boys’ bellies and their giving
132 Patricia Pisters
birth to some kind of creature certainly has a Cronenbergian touch to
it, the body horror is all rendered in a very quiet way, subdued by the
unmoved faces of the nurses who are watching the operation. And by
the boys who are afraid but also very calm. There is no screaming that
could invite the audience to do likewise. At the same time, also contrary
to the male horror films about scary motherhood and primal birthing
phantasies, it’s a boy’s body that undergoes the scary transformation.
While for Hadzilalilovic the choice of young boys has more to do with
a pre-pubescent gender-neutral perspective that she wanted to convey,
she realised that choosing a girl would have brought in all the cultural
connotations there are (in Prigge 2016). However, in spite of this neutral
sexuality she intends, the fact that these are all boys in the hands of
scary mother figures who, moreover, seem to undergo typical female ex-
periences, does address a man’s worst nightmare embodying monstrous
femininity. But there is also more.
The boys regain strength on the ward. Here one of the nurses who
takes care of Nicolas (Roxane Duran) is kind and protective of him and
helps him to escape from the hospital and from the island, using her own
cetacean mermaid body as his oxygen tank they swim underwater, in an
ambiguous embrace, an ‘underwater odyssey that is also a kind of mat-
ing’ (Combs 2016, p. 71). Perhaps we could even argue that Evolution
presents us with a thwarted tale of a ‘final boy’ who manages to escape,
if only with the help of a not-completely-human friend. The nurse takes
Nicolas to a boat far from the shore, where she dives back into the water,
leaving him behind. It is only at this moment, at the end of the film, that
he shouts her name and we learn that she is called Stella. Thereby recall-
ing the starfish from the beginning of the film and closing the dreamlike,
nightmarish loop. Hadzihalilovic comments in an interview that Evolu-
tion is an ‘intimate and psychological story’ (in Prigge 2016). So even if
the film addresses something that we could call a collective unconscious,
raising the symbolic images of the sea and the starfish, just like Cam-
pion did in In the Cut, Hadzihalilovic constructs a dreamy (nightmarish)
world, borrowing some elements from the horror genre, but also com-
pletely transforming its aesthetics, opening to a wider array of emotions
and an ambiguous open-ended meaning.
As in in Campion’s film, the colour red is the formal element in the
mise-en-scène that constructs all these layered and ambivalent mean-
ings. Godard’s famous ‘not blood, just red’ and ‘not red, just blood’
comes to mind (Barry 2012, p. 4).10 In Evolution, most of the settings
are in dark or bleak colours: the black volcanic rocks of the island; the
sand or skin-coloured dresses of the mothers; the white houses of the
village at night covered in yellowish light points; and the green of
the walls in the hospital matching the colour of the sea water in the deep
sea scenes, sometimes filtered with some yellow sunlight, rendering the
hospital like an underwater space of the unconscious (this also created
 Carrie’s Sisters 133
the impression that the scene where Nicolas gives birth in a water tank
could also be a dream). And in these monochromatic fields, red speck-
les, dots, and splashes stand out. The red starfish in close-up at the be-
ginning of the film covers almost the entire scene, like a gigantic and
almost hallucinatory pool of red. Nicolas is the only boy who wears red
swimming trousers, and when he runs on the rocks in a long shot, his
body is seen almost a moving red blood drop. In the hospital, the boys
are covered by a dark red blanket, drenching their bodies in the subdued
but violent redness of dried blood. Nicolas has a brown notebook and
charcoal pencils to make his drawings, but Stella gives him a red pencil
which he uses to colour the starfish on the belly of the boy in his draw-
ings, and the curly vermillion hair of a female figure that he draws, and
that seems to be inspired by the trails of wavy coral plants that he has
seen in the deep sea.
All these formal elements in the mise-en-scène, and especially the con-
struction of colour as both dangerous and trivial, nightmarishly myth-
ical and mundane, add to the intimate, dreamlike, private unconscious
dimensions of the film where the inner world and outer world seem
to merge and where the nonhuman and human seem to combine in a
posthuman universe.11 This creates new dimensions of the monstrous-­
feminine where perhaps not everything is negative, and not every story
needs to end in a gush of violence. The construction of colour red creates
a psychological inner environment that invokes both danger and won-
der. We see here how the notion of abjection as a liminal space between
dream and reality, between the human and nonhuman, moves beyond
Freudian psychoanalysis, perhaps into a posthuman mythical collective
consciousness that is lurking below sea level.

A Trail of Red Transfusions

In talking about ‘new blood’, I cannot avoid one of the most notori-
ous blood-sucking human/nonhuman abject figures of the horror genre:
the vampire. Within the space of this article, I can only conclude by
gesturing towards this bloodletting subgenre that prominently features
in The monstrous-feminine. As Creed argued, the vampire, especially
the female vampire, signifies the ‘menstrual monster’ par excellence
(1993, pp. 59–72). Moreover, she is also an archaic mother-figure, giv-
ing and taking life, living for eternity herself as in Daughters of Dark-
ness (Kümel dir. 1971) and The Hunger (Scott dir. 1983) One of the
most striking new vampire films directed by a woman is A Girl Walks
Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour (dir. 2014). While the girl-­
vampire in Kathryn Bigelow’s earlier take on the genre in Near Dark
(dir. 1987) is brought back to a ‘normal human life via a blood transfu-
sion, leaving the question whether or not she is happy with that confir-
mation of the status quo at the end of the film dubious’ (Schneider 2003,
134 Patricia Pisters
p. 87), Amirpour’s vampire girl is the first Iranian-American vampire
that does not return to humanity. She is lonely, roams the streets of ‘Bad
City’, her black hijab floating around her like a bat cloak. She feeds on
bad guys and spares those who are good. The film is filmed in beauti-
ful black -and-white cinematography. Red appears only in the posters
but is ­absent from the mise-en-scène of the film. And yet, as Richard
Misek has pointed out, in black-and-white film, blood is an example of
an ‘absent colour, that trace of colour reality that underlies black-and-
white-­images’ (2010, p. 83). And so, also in this vampire film, there is a
construction of ‘red’ at certain pointed (or rather ‘fanged’) moments in
the film. Like Campion and Hadzihalilovic, Amirpour has created an
inner space by using elements of horror aesthetics, in particular a formal
and new red/blood. It is ‘the Iranian environment in my brain’ she ex-
plains in an interview, where she also talks about her interest in Jung’s
archetypes and Jodorowsky’s dream logic (Juzwiak 2014).
And so, in concluding, I argue that the increase of female directors
who have appropriated the elements of horror aesthetics, indicates that
the monstrous-feminine as a figure signifying bloody abjection and vio-
lence, is still incredibly valuable. At the same time the strictly Freudian
psychoanalytic interpretations of the monstrous-feminine have opened
up to other perspectives where female empowerment, agency and creativ-
ity create different kinds of ambiguities, different kind of affects, espe-
cially between inner streams of consciousness and outer perspectives on
social injustice, power balances, and our relation to the world. Granted,
the extension of horror aesthetics beyond fear and disgust, and across
other genres in appropriating formal elements to address the notion of
the abject in new ways, is also happening in male-directed films. Think
of the friendship between a bullied young boy and a girl-vampire (who is
a victim of child abuse) in Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (dir.
2008). But then again, this ‘gender neutrality’ can only happen by work-
ing through the notions of the monstrous-feminine, by transfusing the
fresh blood of the multiple feminine perspectives of ­Carrie’s sisters with
other human and nonhuman, natural and supernatural consanguineous
relationships central to the horror film.

Notes
1 Stephanie Rothman directed Blood Bath (1966) and The Velvet Vampire
(1971); Amy Holden Jones made The Slumber Party Massacre (1982).
­Deborah Brock and Sally Matison directied the second and third part of this
trilogy, all made within Roger Corman’s production company. Katherine Bi-
gelow co-wrote and directed the vampire-western Near Dark (1987). Other
female directors in the 1980s are Jackie Kong (Blood Diner, 1987), Mary
Lambert (Pet Semetary, 1989) and Katt Shea (Dance of the Damned, 1989).
I also should mention here from the art world the short 8 mm films by Ana
Mendieta such as Sweating Blood (1973), Blood Writing (1974), Blood Sign
(1974), Blood and Feathers (1974), Blood Inside Outside (1975), Silueta
Sangrienta (1975) and Corazón de Roca con Sangre (1975).
 Carrie’s Sisters 135
2 Carol Clover’s Men, women and chainsaws (1992) and Rohna Berenstein’s
Attack of the leading ladies (1996) are other important studies on horror
and gender from the same period.
3 Between 2000 and 2018 the list of female directors who have appropriated
the horror genre has become quite impressive and this essay is part of a
book length study on female authored horror cinema. Among the directors
that have used the language and tropes of horror cinema in one or more
films are Mary Harron, Claire Denis, Marina de Van, Jane Campion, ­Lucille
­Hadzihalilovic, Kerry Ann Mullany, Julie Delpy, Karen Kusama, ­Emily
Hagins, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsey, Jen and Sylvia Soska, Kimberly
Pierce, Axelle Carolyn, Helene Cattet, Ana Lily Amirpour, Leigh Janiak,
Carol Morley, Jennifer Kent, Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala, Ruth Plath,
Karyn Kusama, Kate Shenton, Anna Biller, Julia Ducournau, Alice Lowe,
Jovanka Vuchovic, Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin, Lisa Bruhlman, Issa
Lopez, Coralie Fargeat, and Shin Su-Won.
4 Pierce’s Carrie thus resembles one of the heroines in Naomi Alderman’s
novel The Power (2016), who discover they have electrical superpowers that
they can use (and abuse) to change the gender balance in the world.
5 See David Maguire’s ‘cultography’ (2018) on this film (originally called
Day of the Woman) and its remake and sequel by Steven Monroe (in 2010
and 2013) for its historical and political contexts and its polemic status as
‘ground zero’ for the rape-revenge genre and its countless imitators.
6 The film received mixed reviews, especially from male critics. Philip French,
for instance, after wittily but flatly summarising the plot, remarks that the
film just repeats the plot of The Eyes of Laura Mars (Kershner dir. 1978) to
conclude rather condescendingly that of course the difference is that now,
25 years after male directors broke the taboo subject (a woman falling in
love with a murderer), a feminist director changes the style, singing ‘non,
je ne regretted Ryan’ (French 2003). See for an overview of In the Cut’s
critical reception Lucy Butler (2014). See for an extended analysis of Campi-
on’s film Gozde Onaran’s Escaping entrapment (Onaran 2017, pp. 117–157)
and Catherine Benoit, ‘Sex and violence as phantasm: eros and thanatos in
­Campion’s In the Cut’ (Benoit 2006).
7 See also Linda Williams, ‘Film bodies: gender, genre, and excess’ (1991).
8 See for the international reception of In the Cut Lucy Butler (2014).
9 Another worthwhile example to mention here is David Lynch’s Eraserhead
(dir. 1977), a film filled with anxieties about pregnancy and a monstrous
brood that was inspired by his own experiences of becoming a parent.
10 ‘Not blood, just red’ was Godard’s commentary on the colour scheme
of Pierrot le Fou (1965); ‘Not red, just blood’ was what he noted about
La ­C hinoise (1967).
11 In Horror film: a critical introduction, Murray Leeder recalls H.P. Love-
craft’s short story ‘The colour out of space’ in which Lovecraft describes
the polluted consequences of an alien meteorite as a ‘colour that was almost
impossible to describe’ (Leeder 2018, p. 186). Lovecraft’s story then is the
starting point for reflections on chromophobia and chromophilia in relation
to the construction of fear through colour in horror cinema.

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Night”, Gawker, 21 November, viewed 01 March 2019, https://gawker.com/
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Kershner, I (dir.) 1978, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Columbia Pictures, USA.
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Part III

Introduction
Reproductive and Post-
Reproductive Bodies and the
Monstrous-Feminine
Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn,
and Audrey Yue

In this section, Tara Brabazon, Sneja Gunew, and E. Ann Kaplan each
explore the monstrous-feminine in relation to biological themes and also
as it intersects with resistance to patriarchy. In ‘“I will not be that girl
in the box”’, Brabazon reflects on the popularity of Bruce Miller’s tele-
vision adaptation of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel
The Handmaid’s Tale. The essay takes its title from words uttered by the
central character, the handmaid Offred/Jane. As Brabazon observes, At-
wood’s feminist novel was influenced by the political situation in North
American in the early 1980s, particularly Ronald Reagan’s presidency
and policies. She therefore poses the question why this story, a story
which centres on women’s subjugation in a fictional, patriarchal, totali-
tarian state known as the Republic of Gilead (a state which has replaced
the US), is now of current interest. Brabazon suggests that the dystopian
vision of oppression that is The Handmaid’s Tale seemed unthinkable as
a reality in 1985 but now appears painfully close to becoming prophetic.
Brabazon believes efforts to make connections between The Handmaid’s
Tale and America as Trump envisions it are well founded. The ongoing
television adaptation can justifiably be read as re-visioning the novel in
the light of Donald Trump’s presidency.
In the screen version of The Handmaid’s Tale, the abject dimensions
of the novel are graphically realised. Brabazon views the television show,
with its vivid depictions of ‘biological slavery’, as ‘more explicit and
more violently ruthless’ than the novel. The abject aspects of the show
often revolve around bodies, particularly the female body viewed as a re-
productive body, one regularly subject to violence. Due to the abject con-
tent, Brabazon finds the monstrous-feminine (as a way of thinking about
anxieties towards women’s bodies) a particularly valuable explanatory
framework. She is also indebted to Creed for pioneering serious analysis
of popular screen culture. Although Creed focusses in significant part on
140 Nicholas Chare et al.
horror films, Brabazon here turns to television foregrounding the signif-
icant potential of the monstrous-feminine for transmedial approaches to
the study of culture. For Brabazon, popular cultural forms such as the
science fiction novel and science fiction television series should be viewed
as providing crucial spaces for thinking the political.
A recurring theme in Brabazon’s essay is what she sees as the need
to re-energise cultural studies as a means to make sense of the contem-
porary political situation in the US. Brabazon does not believe cultural
studies in its current form is capable of analysing and understanding
­creative responses to cultural phenomena like The Handmaid’s Tale
such as the fandom it has generated evolving around the relationship
between the central character, the handmaid, Offred/June and a servant
called Nick. For Brabazon, phenomena such as the ‘shipping’ of Offred
and Nick, the desire which fans have manifested for that particular rela-
tionship within the show, must not be celebrated and efforts (inspired by
readers of thinkers such as John Fiske) to read such occurrences as evi-
dence of resistance are misplaced. Kristen Warner (2018, p. 200) reads
the ‘shipping’ of Offred and Nick as therapeutic with ‘the fantasy of pas-
sionate, unrelenting sexual desire in the midst of a hellscape’ granting
sanity ‘in a time of need’. For Brabazon, however, as a mode of reception
to the show it is essentially a leisure activity. She seeks to lay out exam-
ples of more politically engaged forms of reception for fans citing femi-
nist responses to the show that openly speak resistance to its dystopian
worldview. In this sense, Brabazon argues for more disruptive practices
of reading. In a fan fiction context, Ika Willis (2006) has noted the value
of supplementation in readings of texts, a coaxing into being of some-
thing lacking in a cultural text. For Brabazon, what The Handmaid’s
Tale lacks but holds the potential to spur into being through particular
practices of reading, specifically ones informed by the concept of the
monstrous-feminine, is a feminist politics for our times.
The next essay, Sneja Gunew’s ‘“From a speculative point of view I
wondered which of us I was”’, again uses a quotation for its title but this
time from Leonora Carrington’s (2005) The Hearing Trumpet. In an ex-
quisite essay, Gunew weaves together reflections on ageing and readings
of the paintings and writings of Carrington and the recent Bulgarian
films Letter to America (Dir. Iglika Trifonova, Bulgaria, 2001) and Mila
from Mars (Dir. Zornitsa Sophia, Bulgaria, 2004). The effects of ageing
are often described in terms that connote the abject. In his angry medita-
tion on growing old, On Aging, Jean Améry, for example, tells of a wom-
an’s (presumably his wife, Maria) aversion to her yellowing complexion
(Améry 1994, p. 28). The woman experiences ageing as an existential
crisis, one causing her disgust and horror when she looks in the mir-
ror (p. 29). Gunew notes that the ageing female body has traditionally
been linked to the monstrous-feminine by way of the figure of the wiz-
ened crone, the witch. Griselda Pollock (2007, p. 47) has similarly noted
 Reproductive and Post-Reproductive Bodies 141
in the context of art history that ‘[o]ld women represented by men […]
are there to terrify us as a memento mori; juxtaposed as scary witches,
hags, old bags to the soft fullness of the one moment of feminine desir-
ability: youth’. In the context of the monstrous-feminine, Jane Ussher
(2006, p. 118) likewise observes that ‘the post-menopausal women are
­represented primarily as the crone, the hag, or the dried-up grandmother
figure, her body covered and her sexuality long left behind’. Additionally,
Vivian Sobchack (1999, p. 202) has reflected on ageing women in rela-
tion to horror films such as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Dir. Nathan
Juran, USA, 1958) and The Wasp Woman (Dirs, Roger C ­ orman & Jack
Hill, USA, 1959), suggesting middle-aged female characters are some-
times ‘figured as more horrible in […] their own middle-aged bodies than
in or by the bodies of the “unnatural” and deadly monsters they be-
come’. Gunew argues, however, that contemporary culture offers a more
expansive iconography for representing female ageing, one that some-
times breaks with conventional negative imagery of this kind.
The essay begins with a description of Gunew’s visit to Plovdiv Na-
tional Archaeological Museum where she surveys the museum’s exten-
sive collection of prehistoric figurines. To Gunew, the figurines appear
to be portrayals of the female body yet the gender is left indeterminate
in the labelling of the exhibits. She speculates this reluctance to sex the
artefacts is related to backlash against archaeologists such as Marija
Gimbutas who linked such figurines with an ancient society of goddess
worshippers in what she termed Old Europe (Gimbutas 1982). Mother
Goddess interpretations of figurines have increasingly been challenged
within archaeology (Bailey 2005, p. 12). Writing of Palaeolithic figu-
rines in her history of art by women, Helen Rosenau (1944, p. 22) also
urged caution noting that it is unclear whether the sculptures portray
human beings or goddesses but she nonetheless suggested they ‘express
a subconscious notion of the potential powers of women’. For Gunew,
continuing to read the figurines as goddesses offers a valuable ‘alter-
native representational grammar’ of the feminine. This grammar is at
work in Carrington’s art. Carrington was a leading exponent of Surreal-
ism who employed the goddess as a motif in her work. In 1981, Rozsika
Parker and Griselda Pollock signalled how the contribution of women
such as Carrington and others including Leonor Fini and Remedios
Varo to the Surrealist movement had ‘been masked by male attitudes’
(p. 137). Writing over 30 years later, Gunew contributes to resisting this
neglect while examining the theme of ageing femininity as it manifests
in Carrington’s work.
Gunew then moves to a consideration of femininities in Bulgaria. She
perceives Bulgarian women as sharing geographical kinship with god-
dess figurines of the kind displayed in Plovdiv. This may explain why,
in Bulgaria, ageing women are not always viewed in negative terms,
the figure of the ‘granny’ is venerated and valued. Gunew’s analysis of
142 Nicholas Chare et al.
Letter to America attends carefully to the significance of sound, of song
and also of silence, in the film. Song functions as a crucial vehicle of
folk wisdom with grannies transmitting important knowledge by way
of their lyrics. In Mila from Mars, grannies are portrayed as caring, as
‘guardians of continuing life’, and also as strongly communitarian. The
two films present different but positive visions of ageing femininity that
resist negative tropes.
Returning to prehistoric figurines in her conclusion, Gunew calls for
a reconsideration of the archaeological record not in terms of what it
reveals about the actual past but as a resource from out of which each
age can construct its particular truths. Here the essay resonates with
Brabazon’s in that it calls for a shift in the reception of cultural artefacts.
Gunew urges that we see the figures not simply or solely as evidence of a
past culture but also as a resource for thinking our present and possible
alternatives to it. In this context, she suggests the traces of a society of
the mother goddess (real or imagined) embodied by the figurines help
contribute to a different perception of women, including old women,
that can form the basis for viewing post-menopausal women otherwise
than as pitiful or terrifying. Gunew celebrates alternative articulations
of the monstrous-feminine that emphasise wisdom and insight.
An alternative mode of re-articulating the monstrous-feminine is
formulated by Joanna Frueh. In Monster Beauty, Frueh (2001, p. 100)
writes of the stigma surrounding menopause with ‘menopause discourse’
sometimes producing ‘an erotically exiled body’. Frueh, however, en-
visions post-menopausal women appropriating the monster as trope
(through practices such as bodybuilding) as a means to counteract neg-
ative discourses and representation. Her concept of monster/beauty as a
form of post-menopausal female embodiment is one that simultaneously
attracts and repels, skirting the abject yet not embracing it. Gunew’s
re-visioning of ageing femininity is not reliant upon bodily transforma-
tions of this kind but on transforming attitudes and outlooks (although,
of course, body modifications can also potentially encourage perceptual
transformations). This re-visioning can be fostered through art and film
but also by way of scholarship such as Creed’s.
The final essay in this section, E. Ann Kaplan’s ‘The “Monstrous-­
Feminine”: Dementia, Psychoanalysis and Mother-Daughter Relations
in Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s’ offers a compelling analysis of the art-
ist and writer Dana Walrath’s (2016) graphic novel exploring the impact
of Alzheimer’s on her mother and on her relationship with her mother.
Kaplan, like Gunew, discusses the social abjection experienced by older
women in society. As she notes, older women have often been linked
with ‘the image of the wicked witch’. Examining ageism alongside con-
temporary perceptions of female ageing has never been more important
given that, as Kaplan notes, the ageing population is growing. Kaplan’s
specific focus is on perceptions of women with dementia. These women
 Reproductive and Post-Reproductive Bodies 143
can be perceived as monstrous in the negative sense of ‘no longer having
a recognizable subjectivity’. Media portrayals of dementia often employ
a rhetoric allied to the monstrous-feminine. Dementia is signified by the
blank stare, the look that is not, with empty eyes called upon to index
an absent subject.
Although Kaplan does not make the connection, the ‘blank stare’
sometimes features in a horror context. In Ambrose Bierce’s (1964, p. 8)
horror story ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’, a vengeful ghost is described
as possessing a ‘blank stare’ in which ‘was neither love, nor pity, nor
intelligence’, indexing ‘a body without a soul’. The blank stare is also a
recurring trope in films featuring the living dead. Matthew Weise (2009,
p. 252) has written of the zombie that it ‘possesses no reason or higher
intelligence’. Bernard Perron (2016, p. 308) similarly describes zombies
as often depicted as having ‘lost their higher intelligence’. Lucy S­ wanson
(2014, p. 178) explains that ‘across cultural traditions and generic
boundaries’, the figure of the zombie has been ‘characterized by a key
physical trait: the blank stare’. In Gerontophilia (Dir. Bruce LaBruce,
Canada, 2013), the central character Lake describes the retirement home
where he works as like ‘Night of the Living Dead’ although he seems to
link this vacantness with excessive use of medication rather than dementia.
The zombie as a living dead embodies the corpse as abomination (Creed
1993, p. 11).
Kaplan argues that Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the
Looking Glass offers a vital corrective to media depictions of dementia,
one that resists the trope of the dead-eyed monster. Like Brabazon and
Gunew, therefore, she thinks through questions of resistance in relation
to dominant representational frameworks. The graphic novel also pro-
vides a sensitive exploration of changing mother-daughter relations in
response to the effects of Alzheimer’s. Kaplan’s reading of these relations
is partly inspired by Melanie Klein’s ideas about guilt and reparation as
they manifest in mother-child relations and partly by Creed’s careful dif-
ferentiation between ‘maternal authority’ and ‘paternal law’. Maternal
authority poses a threat to male dominance and links with woman as a
castrating rather than castrated figure. The child’s relation to the mother
as a powerful agent is potentially ambivalent. Kaplan is interested in
what happens to a daughter when her mother ceases to register as an
authority figure because of dementia, becoming increasingly dependent
on her daughter.
The textual and visual analyses of Aliceheimer’s register different
layers to the graphic novel, communicating both conscious and uncon-
scious perceptions of events. Kaplan is attentive to the nuanced role of
colour in the novel, the ‘pallid palette’ which renders images dreamy
and spectral. Additionally, she notes how the collage technique em-
ployed at times potentially incarnates traces of unprocessed aggression
towards the mother. Like Pisters’ essay in the preceding section, Kaplan
144 Nicholas Chare et al.
reads the novel not just in terms of its narrative but also as a vehicle of
affect. In another link with Creed’s work, she sees the novel as likely
cathartic. The encounter with abjection that the mother’s deepening
dementia causes forms a spur to catharsis. As Walrath’s mother, Alice,
begins to forget her recent past earlier life experiences come to the fore.
Dementia in the novel is therefore not read as a loss of self but revealed
as process of unbidden self-refashioning. Alice had always sought to
mask her Armenian ancestry but with the onset of Alzheimer’s this as-
pect of her identity, for instance, attains prominence. Alice had also not
always behaved kindly to her daughter, likely envious of her, causing
feelings of resentment. Through the dementia, however, a space for for-
giveness and reconciliation to occur is created. The complex account
of Alzheimer’s provided by the graphic novel contests the dominant
narrative of loss of self that is associated with the condition. Kaplan,
like Gunew, therefore explores abjection as it shapes perceptions of the
post-reproductive body and also how such perceptions are contingent
and open to change. Her emphasis on culture as a nodal point for re-
sistance to oppressive representational practices also resonates strongly
with Brabazon’s essay. The analyses of all three essays are only made
possible by Creed’s psychoanalytic framework as it is advanced in The
Monstrous-Feminine.

References
Améry, J. (1994) On Aging: Revolt and Resignation. Translated from the
­G erman by J.D. Barlow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Atwood, M. (1985) The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
Bailey, D. (2005) Prehistoric Figurines: Representations of Corporeality in the
Neolithic. London: Routledge.
Bierce, A. (1964) ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser,’ in Ghost and Horror Stories of
Ambrose Bierce. New York: Dover, pp. 1–14.
Carrington, L. (2005) The Hearing Trumpet. London: Penguin.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Frueh, J. (2001) Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Gimbutas, M. (1982) The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult
Images. 2nd Edition. London: Thames & Hudson.
Parker, R. & Pollock, G. (1981) Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology.
London: Pandora.
Perron, B. (2016) ‘Wandering the Panels, Walking through Media: Zombies,
Comics and the Post-Apocalyptic World,’ Journal of Graphic Novels and
Comics 7(3), pp. 306–318.
Pollock, G. (2007) Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space
and the Archive. London: Routledge.
Rosenau, H. (1944) Woman in Art: From Type to Personality. London: Iso-
morph Ltd.
 Reproductive and Post-Reproductive Bodies 145
Sobchack, V. (1999) ‘Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery and Special Effects,’ in K.
Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, pp. 200–211.
Swanson, L. (2014) ‘Blankness, Alienation and the Zombie in Recent
­Francophone Fiction,’ International Journal of Francophone Studies 17(2),
pp. 177–197.
Ussher, J.M. (2006) Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Repro-
ductive Body. Hove: Routledge.
Walrath, D. (2016) Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass.
University Park: Penn State University Press.
Warner, K. (2018) ‘JunexNick: The Quietist Ship in the Handmaid Fandom,’
Communication Culture & Critique 11, pp. 198–200.
Weise, M. (2009) ‘The Rules of Horror: Procedural Adaptation in Clock Tower,
Resident Evil and Dead Rising,’ in B. Perron (ed.), Horror Video Games:
Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 238–266.
Willis (2006) ‘Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary
Sue) at Hogwarts,’ in K. Hellekson & K. Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and
Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC:
­McFarland & Company, pp. 153–170.
8 ‘I Will Not Be That Girl
in the Box’
The Handmaid’s Tale,
Monstrous Wombs and
Trump’s America
Tara Brabazon

But abjection is not something of which the subject can ever feel free – it
is always there, beckoning the self to take up its place, the place where
meaning collapses. The subject, constructed in/through language,
through a desire for meaning, is also spoken by the abject, the place
of meaninglessness – thus, the subject is constantly beset by abjection
which fascinates desire but which must be repelled for fear of self-­
annihilation. The crucial point is that abject is always ambiguous.
(Creed 1986, p. 48)

Barbara Creed’s career has been courageous. She stared down theoret-
ical dogma with a light intellectual touch, but staunch political imper-
atives. Her most famous article, published in 1986 in Screen, identified
the monstrous-feminine as a powerful entity overturning the myth of
monstrosity as a specifically masculine entity. I return to this essay and
her resolute attention to abjection in screen culture, but translate and
migrate her focus and platform of enquiry. I interrogate The Hand-
maid’s Tale (creat. Miller 2017). Originally written by Margaret At-
wood in 1985 amidst Reagan’s America, this narrative was refashioned
and refocussed for Trump’s America through a small screen re-­visioning.
I summon Creed’s monstrous-feminine and explore what happens when
misogyny fuses with fascistic militarism amid a theocratic regime. I probe
the rationale for the programme’s renewed popularity and re-­purposing
in an array of cultural forms, particularly through comedic presenta-
tions on YouTube. There is something beckoning to the self under those
red dresses and cloaks. There is something repellent yet appealing about
the Unwomen, the discarded ‘runt’ of femininity that refuses to fit into
the system and are dumped in colonies to work with toxic waste until
their death.
There is intent and will in the alignment of this theory and popu-
lar culture, following the example of Barbara Creed. The monstrous-­
feminine has travelled from Reagan’s America into Trump’s interregnum
presidency. So has Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
 I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box 147
My chapter aligns this time travelling theory and fiction to reveal the bru-
talising patriarchy and the feminist resistances that fight it, even amidst a
‘place of meaninglessness’ (Creed 1993, p. 10). In an era in which a presi-
dent was elected after describing how he ‘grabs ‘em by the pussy’ (Trump
2016), it is no surprise that in difficult times, feminism retracts to the
body. The vagina remains the last stand of feminism. Managing (even)
this entrance and exit to the body was the misogynist goal of Gilead.
The rare fertile women needed their legs open and their mouths shut.
They also needed to be repressed and obedient. Their only value was pro-
creative. The remaining majority of women were expendable,1 useless
and unhuman. The women of value – but without rights – were walking
wombs carrying future citizens to be subjugated to this theocratic patri-
archy. June, the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale, affirmed ‘I won’t
be the girl in the box’ (Trope 2018, pp. 186–188). Yet that is her required
role. Being released from the box creates phallic panic.

Phallic Panic
Barbara Creed is a trailblazer who – rare for Australian researchers –
aligned high theory and popular culture with rigour and delight. Freud,
feminism and horror films mashed with relish and precision. Her sum-
moning of the monstrous-feminine and the monstrous mother in par-
ticular not only transformed the viewing of Alien (Scott dir. 1979) and
Carrie (de Palma dir. 1976), but the theorisation of the diversity of
women in popular culture (Creed 1993). While Creed’s deployment of
‘phallic panic’ in her book of the same name shaped the interpretation
of male monstrosity as a displacement of and debt to the monstrous
mother, the fear created through lack and loss extended far beyond hor-
ror and science fiction as genres (Creed 2005).
The deep repression, the indentured servitude and slavery, conveyed in
The Handmaid’s Tale is shocking but confirms the fear of the feminine. The
abject infiltrates: mutilated bodies, discarded body parts, severed fingers,
congealed blood, gouging, and visible injuries are inflicted in the name of
discipline and disobedience. But as Creed demonstrated, the maternal is
also abjected. Shame and humiliation hook into a woman’s body, tightly
restricting movement, behaviour and freedoms. This is a symbolic corset.
Being a woman means being a slave. No income. No property. Possessing
a vagina creates life narratives of becoming an ‘unwoman’, cleaning toxic
waste until death, or a household cook and cleaner, a prostitute, a wife
without purpose beyond the ornamental, a violent bullying ‘aunt’, or a
vagina for hire (without payment) as a handmaid.2
The monstrous-feminine is not real, or accurate. It is not an object or
a representation. It does not reside in Baudrillard’s simulacrum, hook-
ing, and unhooking signifiers at speed. Instead, it is mobile, coalesc-
ing anxiety, confirming ‘male fears … about female desire or feminine
148 Tara Brabazon
subjectivity’ (Creed 1993, p. 7). It manifests through panic and violence.
The conditionality of relationships – between husband and wife, wife
and wife, wife and handmaid, wife and servant – is visceral in its fickle-
ness. The arbitrariness and meaninglessness add to the absolute power.
There is no reason for the capricious clothes or haphazard and ferocious
subsidence by powerful men in the social order they created. But the
tight, callous semiotic and structural violence demonstrates the vulner-
ability of women whether they are able to have children, or not. Either
way, the presence of a vagina dooms them to capricious cruelty and the
acidic corrosion of human rights.

The Handmaid’s Tale: The Travelling,

Transforming Oppression
The Handmaid’s Tale did not have the markings of saturatingly success-
ful popular culture. Yet it became the first series on a streaming service
to win an Emmy for Outstanding Series. Created for television by Bruce
Miller and based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, it was produced and
distributed by Hulu for ten episodes. Production began in late 2016.
Trump’s election and presidency would provide the inevitable frame for
the show, with the first episodes released in April 2017. By May 2017, it
was clear that the success was propulsive and international and its un/
predictable context had fired and disseminated its iconography beyond
the programme. A second series was renewed and broadcast from April
25, 2018, with a third series commissioned in May 2018.
The plot is unusual, even for a dystopic speculative fiction series.3
The dissonance occurs because the second civil war in the US, alongside
environmental pollution and sexually transmitted diseases, led to the
collapse of fertility rates. The response to this reality was Gilead, a the-
onomic government where men rule and women are brutalised, raped,
and subjugated. Women cannot read, own property, or work. This was
a ‘simpler’ time that allowed a blinkered, anachronistic nostalgia to re-
press and kill. These behaviours are then naturalised (Moosavinia &
Yousefi 2018, pp. 162–174). The women are classed, and dressed to per-
form their status. The Handmaids wear red. Marthas – the servants –
wear green, wives wear blue, and prison women – called Unwomen – are
worked in the colonies until death. Aunts wear brown and train the
Handmaids. Jezebels are the prostitutes in the secret brothels servicing
the needs of the ruling class of men.
While much is made of Trump and The Handmaid’s Tale, the orig-
inal context for the novel was also strange. Anti-abortion, televange-
lists, is the foundation for the Christian Right, affirming, like Tammy
Faye Bakker, ‘traditional marriage’. Ronald Reagan publicly shook the
hand of Jerry Falwell, Fundamental Christian leader of the political
group Moral Majority, on January 30, 1984. Catharine MacKinnon
 I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box 149
and Andrea Dworkin argued that consent to sex was not possible in a
patriarchy and pornography was rape-inducing. This was the odd jig-
saw of sex, abortion, rape, and hypocrisy in the mid-1980s. A review
at the time by Mary McCarthy in the New York Times demonstrated
the scale of the dystopia: ‘I just can’t see the intolerance of the far right,
presently directed not only at abortion clinics and homosexuals but also
at high school libraries and small-town schoolteachers, as leading to a
super-biblical puritanism by which procreation will be insisted on and
reading of any kind banned’ (1986). McCarthy was wrong. The resil-
ience, momentum, and traction of the far right – fuelled by xenophobia,
racism, sexism, and an unemployed and underemployed working class –
have naturalised the language of intolerance. In over three decades, the
dystopia has moved from unthinkably distanced from any possible re-
ality to a legitimate warning and fear of the budding intolerance and
misogyny emerging in daily life.
Such a change could have been predicted. Communities, even extreme
communities, gain an audience for their ideas, enhanced through the de-
territorialisation of the online environment. These communities dialogue
and naturalise and normalise particular languages and behaviours. What
may seem bizarre to those outside of the community is shared within
it, and these shared ideas become more extreme. This is a technique of
neutralisation, that justifies the unjustifiable through generalizations and
patterns of language such as, ‘everyone does this’ or ‘most people think
this way’ (Sykes & Matza 1957, pp. 664–670) Religion is a strong tech-
nique of neutralisation. Irrational and illogical behaviours become neu-
tralised through community engagement and repetition. But politically,
this is how populism disconnects from popular culture. Empty slogans
like ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘Blessed be the Fruit’ are repeated so
often they are naturalised and neutralised. They block questions such as,
Was America ever great? What is ‘greatness’ in a nation? Why is nation-
alism a functional model for social, economic or political organisation?
Why is Jesus’ mother Mary configured as a modern model for women?
Why should a procreative woman be valued more than a non-­procreative
woman? Such questions (and doubts and critiques) are silenced. There-
fore the techniques of neutralisation and digitised populism carry these
extreme views, languages, and behaviours beyond a small, localised
community and concurrently render them more extreme.
The othering of foreigners, migrants, women, citizens of colour, and
gays and lesbians is a quick tactic to naturalise and neutralise a series
of highly contextual identities and behaviours. Sara Ahmed argues that
‘normativity is comfortable for those who can inhabit it’ (2014, p. 147).
This is a powerful realisation. That is why colonisation continues in the
mind, long after the armies have vacated the territories. A white face,
speaking a national language and fulfilling the expectations of a ‘normal
body’ enables a comfort not granted to many. But what is remarkable
150 Tara Brabazon
in The Handmaid’s Tale is Offred/June’s capacity to adapt to bizarre
rituals. The role of the Aunts in normalising rape and mistreatment is
important in validating discomfort and suffering as the life path of the
Handmaids. The Aunts implement techniques of neutralisation.
Besides Atwood’s book being critiqued in its original context for not
being even remotely possible and thereby not fulfilling the parameters of
speculative fiction, it was also questioned for its popular cultural genre
poaching, particularly from romance. Maria Dvorak argued that At-
wood ridiculed popular culture – which she described as ‘mass ­culture’ –
while working within it (2001, p. 143). This rigidity in thinking about
literature, writing, and culture is not only stunningly stuffy, but theoret-
ically and politically inelegant. It is also wrong. Although this chapter
from Dvorak was published in the early 2000s, it is remarkable that once
more scholars repeat the divisions and demarcations of high and low cul-
ture. Because of the television series, the book has been released from the
suffocating grip of literary critiques that require ‘quality’ and earnest re-
statements of historical determinations of cultural value. It can be a part
of a breathing popular culture and is freed from its earnest discussions
in school and university curricula. It can be political. It can transcend
genre. Like Creed’s work with horror, it can create discomfort.
The iconography of the novel summons Puritanism from New
­England, but also American slavery and Eastern European surveillance
(Reis 1995, pp. 15–36).4 It quilts historical events. The bible is twisted,
selectively quoted, and actioned on flesh, like a knife through butter.
Gilead, the renamed US, is derived from a biblical narrative of Joseph,
his two wives and two slaves. He had children with all of them, but the
slaves relinquished their children to the wives. However, because of the
pervasive infertility in the post-war US, the currency of the culture is
reproduction, because of its scarcity. The handmaids are sexual slaves
and the children they produce from this slavery return to the elite after
birth. At the conclusion of this eugenicist intervention, the handmaids
are then moved to the next household so that no intimacy or relationship
is possible with their child.
The television iteration is tougher, nastier, more explicit, and more vi-
olently ruthless than the book. But as Emily Nussbaum confirmed, both
are unified with the ‘recognition of the futility of trying to separate the
personal from the political’ (2017). What is clear in both the book and
the television series is the impact of misogyny, the cost and consequences
of a systematic, brutalising undermining and unravelling of the feminine
(Massanari & Chess 2018, pp. 525–542).5 An array of disciplines has
used the narratives in the novel and screen form to provoke debate and
consciousness, including research on the ethics of surrogacy and the his-
tory of biology (Busby & Vun 2010, pp. 13–93; Tonn 2018, pp. 415–417).
Gilead is Atwood’s imagining of a post-civil war theocracy. Signifi-
cantly, the attack on human rights is first, foremost, and structurally
 I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box 151
focussed on women. While originally framed by the anti-abortion
Christian Right in Reagan’s America, the relationship to the alt-right, a
loose collection of misogynist, white ethno-nationalists, is provocatively
drawn in the screen version (Marghitu & Johnson 2018, pp. 183–185).
This ‘community’ only existed in nascent form through Reagan. Neolib-
eralism ruled. Money ruled. Profit ruled. Other concerns lagged. After
the Global Financial Crisis, neoliberalism failed, publicly and starkly.
Therefore new enemies to justify inequality needed to be summoned.
Women – the monstrous-feminine – were the clear target and decoy. The
globalising infertility created the excuse for the enslavement of fertile
women. They are each designated to a member of the ruling elite where
they are repeatedly raped, justified as part of a ritual. Their biological
slavery grants the theocracy a future (Gibson 2018, p. 36). The valued
currency of Gilead is children. As Margaret Atwood has confirmed, ‘the
ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime ar-
range to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids’ (2017). The
productive vagina is all that is of value. Then the woman is discarded.
The violent attacks on women’s bodies through stonings, hangings,
eye gouging, finger severing, and repetitive rapes in the name of theo-
cratic order transcend the conventional parameters of brutality in popu-
lar culture. Certainly the 2010s has seen television series screen ‘torture
porn’, particularly when pop literature is reinscribed for television. Out-
lander (creat. Moore 2014), Game of Thrones (creat. Benioff & Weiss
2011) and The Handmaid’s Tale are clear examples where watching the
intricacies of torture has become part of post-broadcasting popular cul-
ture. Netflix and iTunes reorder ‘broadcasting standards’ to create alter-
native ways of seeing. Yet this torture and the rituals of public death are
not part of a popular cultural dystopia alone. Writers such as Kevin Wil-
liamson have called for the hanging of women who have abortions. That
is not fiction or dystopia. That is a real, frightening public commentary
(Johnson 2014). The point of hanging, as so clearly shown in Foucault’s
Discipline and punish (1977), is that its public nature offers a ‘lesson’
about crime to the wider society. As Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price
confirmed, within the Cartesian tradition, the body is to be monitored
and feared as it is a barrier to rational thought (1999, pp. 1–14). Pain
and torture must be visible to be a ‘lesson’. While Fifty Shades of Grey,
the books (James 2011) and films (Johnson 2015), naturalised an odd
rendering of bondage, discipline, and sado-masochism, The Handmaid’s
Tale only permitted pleasure in the spaces between the theocratic rituals.
It is furtive, desperate, and illicit.

Trump Studies Does The Handmaid’s Tale

Barbara Creed’s research, arguments, and tropes became the punctua-
tion of much of Cultural Studies. Her rigour, insight, and imagination
152 Tara Brabazon
were passionate propulsions for the field. Returning to her work, the
fire and innovation remains, but it is also clear how Cultural Studies
has lost its energy, focus, rationale, and momentum. Cultural Studies as
a paradigm has been based on a single premise: context matters to cul-
ture. From the earliest interventions by Raymond Williams and Richard
­Hoggart, the purpose of Cultural Studies was to demonstrate that New
Criticism was wrong, offensive, elitist, and unproductive, both politi-
cally and intellectually. While the paradigm has travelled away from its
key political imperatives since the 2000s, losing its way through under-
theorised sorties into creative industries and neoliberalism, the irratio-
nality of Trump’s Presidency and confused events like Brexit confirm
that the time has emerged for its resurgence. What is required is a tough,
rigorous, hard, passionate critique of irrationality, injustice, and igno-
rance. Trump Studies6 can – and must – graft a new branch to the his-
tory of Cultural Studies.
Much has been made in the popular literature about the ‘parallels’
between Trump and The Handmaid’s Tale. It is accurate to draw these
connections: border crises (Gunduz 2010, pp. 35–47), religious fanati-
cism, hypocrisy from political leadership, repression of gay, lesbian, bi-
sexual and transgender communities (Himberg 2018), and the rise of
conservative populism, particularly from women (Waterhouse 2018).
Significantly Margaret Atwood confronted this con/textual relationship:
‘People woke up on the 9th of November, people in the show, and they
said we’re in a different show. Nothing about the show had changed.
But …the frame had changed’ (2018). That is the Cultural Studies mo-
ment. That is the moment where culture becomes popular culture and
text becomes context. That is the moment where popular memory dis-
connects from one frame and rehooks into another.
Yet ‘the audience’ – never singular – is disobedient. We still – as Ien
Ang confirmed – desperately see it (1991). Even in the midst of rape,
murder, and violence, fans pick a particular narrative and fetishise it.
Cultural Studies scholars – at their best – probe these uncomfortable
fandoms. The JunexNick fandom that burgeoned on Tumblr7 was un-
comfortable and configured as a guilty pleasure by followers. Kristen
Warner’s refereed article summoned this unpopular ‘shipping’ to aca-
demic visibility (2018). So amidst the death, fear, rape and brutality,
a group of fans still manage to ‘ship’ two characters, offering an alterna-
tive pathway through this dehumanising popular cultural maze.
Such a focus is important to summon, log, recognise, and contextu-
alise, but not to celebrate. Too much of cultural studies, spurred on by
John Fiske’s ‘resistive readings’ (1989) and Henry Jenkins and his Tex-
tual Poachers, celebrated fans for being fans (1992). It was part conde-
scension and part, as I have described it, ventriloquist dummy (Brabazon
2017, pp. 274–286). Theorists used fans to perform a ‘resistance’, even
 I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box 153
when one appeared to not exist or – let’s be frank – did not exist. In
good times, that strategy may be benevolent. But with Donald Trump
in power, there must remain a focus on the political economy, on social
justice and citizenship. Love and romance are fine. Shipping fictional
characters on Tumblr is a leisure activity to pass the time. But more is
required of scholars and citizens. Much more. The key point to grasp and
remember is that the majority of the voting public in the US voted for a
misogynist to be the president – although he failed to win the popular
vote. This misogyny was not hidden. It was in plain sight. It was not an
accident. What it does confirm is that for a particular voting commu-
nity, the rights of women are not important. Claiming sex – claiming a
woman’s vagina – is the right of men. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, other
women create the conditions for extreme misogyny. Women, such as Val-
erie Huber, from Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services
validated the rhythm method over birth control and argued that women
abstaining were more important than sexual planning (Crary 2018).
Once women lose control of their bodies and the narratives of sex and
reproduction then their own cultural role is Creed’s monstrous-feminine,
the depository/repository of male fear, horror, loathing, and disgust.

The Enslaving of Women

Men: if you want to know what women’s nightmares look like, just
watch The Handmaid’s Tale.
(Valenti 2018)

The Handmaid’s Tale remains important for political and intellectual

reasons. It reclaims and summons Barbara Creed’s theories, demonstrat-
ing the fear and hatred of women and their monstrous wombs. This
fear evolves into an ordered, organised repression and is controlled by a
brutalising theocracy. The combination of Creed’s theory and Atwood’s
book and screen-inspired manifestations demonstrates that women will
be co-opted to attack and facilitate the rape of other women (Pratama
2018). One of the truly remarkable, sadistic, and devastating female
characters in contemporary fiction and television is Aunt Lydia. Played
by Ann Dowd, her violent re-education of women performs so clearly
the maxim that a woman does not a feminist make. However, the pro-
gramme also demonstrates the powerful fightback of feminism. Four of
the five directors on The Handmaid’s Tale were women (Ketterer 1989,
pp. 209–217). The iconography of the programme was powerfully fem-
inine. When this iconography entered the simulacrum, the ­signifiers –
particularly the red cloaks – bounced and ricocheted and hooked and
unhooked into a diversity of debates.8 In this chapter I am not en-
deavouring to understand The Handmaid’s Tale in Donna Haraway’s
154 Tara Brabazon
‘situated knowledges’ (1988, pp. 575–599). Instead, I am fascinated and
summon Trump Studies (Barbazon et al. 2018), and the posthumous
Baudrillard’s ‘double refusal’ (2010, pp. 17–18), to embrace the chaotic,
the trans-contextual, accelerated, bouncing meaning. There is no ‘priv-
ilege’ in the ‘partial perspective’. Instead, the disempowerment from
viewing, through multiple lenses, the scale of the systematic disempow-
erment, injustice, ignorance, and error is a productive horror. Haraway’s
validation of ‘objectivity’ 30 years on seems not only counterproductive
and anti-intellectual, but facilitating the disconnection of research from
Trump Studies.

Objectivity turns out to be particular and specific embodiment and

definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all
limits and all responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial per-
spective promises objective vision … Feminist objectivity is about
limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence
and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answer-
able for what we learn how to see.
(Haraway 1988, p. 581)

This ‘feminist objectivity’ is accountable feminism. Yet the problem

with empirical / empiricist science is that there is an assumption that
the research questions matter. That the funding agencies are supporting
research in the best interests of human development and that all knowl-
edge systems should be ‘answerable’. Yes, research integrity is based
on repeatability, transparency, accountability, and verification. But
­theory – staunch, unapologetic, anti-empiricist theory – must be more. It
must create discomfort. It must move. It must wedge into uncomfortable
spaces. It is not answerable. It answers back.
For example, in March 2017, women, dressed in red with white bon-
nets, protested abortion restriction bills in Texas. During the Women’s
Marches in 2017 and 2018, thousands of women dressed as Handmaids
(Marghitu & Johnson 2018). As Schwartz confirmed, ‘Yes, The Hand-
maid’s Tale is feminist’ (2017). Of greater interest is the doubt about this
designation. What type of feminism would question a female writer pick-
ing the scab of theocratic misogyny? Atwood has confirmed that life –
particularly a writer’s life – is ‘complex and mysterious, with ironies and
loose ends, not a tidy system of goodies and baddies usefully labelled’
(Atwood 1990, p. 21). The basis of the doubt about its feminist creden-
tials is dismissed by carefully working with Barbara Creed’s theories. In-
stead, Lucy Freibert argued that while the book is feminist, women were
complicit in their own oppression, as if this reality cancels or erases the
feminist resistance (Friebert 1985, pp. 280–291). The feminine juts and
jars. It has edges. It cuts. It is implicated in patriarchy. It is required by
misogyny to add repulsion to the injustice. There is no clean feminism,
 I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box 155
just as there is no impenetrable patriarchy. Complicity may reinforce
already existing power. It may also offer a pathway through repressive
patriarchy until a resistive option presents itself. Offred’s ‘resistance’ to
Gilead is clear, if small and tenuous: ‘I will not be the girl in the box’.
Feminists may want her to be the woman on the barricades or swing-
ing from the multiple ropes drawn by hangmen. Sometimes summoning
desire, hope, identity, and consciousness from hopelessness is enough.
Sometimes summoning a future when there is none is the resistive act.
Feminism rarely presents clean and crisp victories. Barbara Creed’s the-
orisation of the monstrous-feminine is a reminder of the repulsion and
hatred that all things feminine summon within the oppressor. Mostly,
it is a repulsion of difference, a fear of a loss or a lack. Through The
Handmaid’s Tale, the response to that fear is rape, persecution, violence
and death.

Transcending the Academic Box

Like other things now, thought must be rationed.
(Atwood 1985, p. 17)

The Handmaid’s Tale was filmed in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton,

Oakville, and Cambridge in Ontario, Canada. Critical of the US, this
series configures Canada as a site and source of freedom. Yet the claust-
ropolitanism remains clear. Borders are everywhere. The US is a prison.
This US is re-imagined within the borders of Canada. Similarly, the ac-
tors playing the key roles in The Handmaid’s Tale carry their ambiva-
lent popular cultural relationships and pasts with them. Elisabeth Moss
re-assembles Peggy Olsen from Mad Men (creat. Weiner 2007) and
Robin Griffin from Top of the Lake (dir. Campion 2013). She summons
a tough woman that – regardless of the obstacles – does not wilt. Samira
Wiley, playing Moira, gathers Poussey from Orange is the New Black
(creat. Kohan 2013) to add rejection and confusion to sexual denial,
refusal, and displacement. Ann Dowd, who performs the depressingly
powerful and implicated Aunt Lydia, was the cult leader from The Left-
overs (dir. Leder 2014).
These movements of ideas, ideologies, and iconographies are import-
ant and are crucial to creating a saturating – overwhelming – popular
cultural intervention in normative expectations. Contextual dystopias
matter to political debates (Ketterer 1989, pp. 209–217). They offer a
confused and productive reshuffling of past, present and future. While
Barbara Creed summoned and sucked the monstrous-feminine through
horror films, there is something profoundly appropriate in re-presenting
her theories through a book that has been recognised as high culture and
worthy of school and university curriculum,9 but then permeates pop-
ular culture through an array of screen-based platforms and interfaces.
156 Tara Brabazon
How are women to understand their lives? More precisely, how are
they meant to understand how and why the feminine is systematically
marginalised, demeaned, refused, decentred, and ignored? Creed’s mon-
strous feminine – as a theory, concept, and trope – captures the fear and
disgust in men that women’s bodies summon. These bodies leak. They
grow other humans. They stand for difference. They stand for an alter-
native to the phallic punctuation of culture. The rise of the a­ lt-right –
and yes, that verb was intentional – with the attendant retraction to
heteronormative, procreative femininity creates new challenges and op-
portunities for feminism. In response, we must hope for a tough femi-
nism that does not shirk or shrink for the fear, the abuse, the repulsion,
and the disgust.
The Handmaid’s Tale – the novel – finishes unusually in the history
of dystopian fiction. It is an academic ending of a fictional tale. Dysto-
pias are warnings and most frequently finish – as with George Orwell’s
1984 – with a boot to the face10 rather than a gentle hand (up) to the
future. But the final part of the novel is composed of ‘Historical Notes’
from a conference on Gileadean Studies at the University of Denay, Nun-
avit in 2195. Professor Pieixoto’s commentary confirms that the Repub-
lic of Gilead had ceased and it remains – only – of historical interest.
Through an academic intervention, the burning cruelty and relentless-
ness of The Handmaid’s Tale is released. It is in the past. Resistance did
triumph. The screen series is yet to release its account of this future. The
consequence of the Donald Trump context for the narrative is that not
only is the book transcended, but there is a sense that this story will not
end well. An academic conference and Gileadean Studies will not dis-
charge the pressure from this present.
And yet. And yet. The Handmaid’s Tale – through screen-based
media – is an inspirational source for another generation of feminist
scholars. Perhaps the academic conference in Gileadean Studies was a
disappointment to readers. It was certainly a fascinating twist in plot
and writing. Yet this disappointment has not been seen in contemporary
higher degrees that remain inspired by the book, the film and the tele-
vision series. Gileadean Studies – or indeed Handmaid’s Tale Studies –
have proven resilient. As Hedvig Marx, from her thesis derived from the
Master’s Programme at Linkoping University, revealed:

The Handmaid’s Tale makes me feel things; it reminds me of how

precarious my human rights and privileges are, and, somewhat de-
spite itself, how abundant they still somehow are at the same time …
I know it is fiction, but I also know that it isn’t. In a way, its own
history is part of what gives its dystopian threat such momentum
in the now. The almost impossible future of 1985 is the seemingly
imminent future of 2017, and both of them are already in the past.
(Marx 2018, p. 4)
 I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box 157
Marx, as part of the next generation of feminist scholars, took the dys-
topia and summoned a resistance to it to create her dissertation. Perhaps
Gileadean Studies is not required. Feminism will do just fine. These Hand-
maids, like all of us, have Tales. It is up to feminist scholars to tell them.

Notes
1 For a discussion of the diversity of feminisms in the book, please refer to
Elizabeth des Chenes, Women’s issues in Margaret Atwood’s The Hand-
maid’s Tale (Farmington Hills, Greenhaven Press, 2012).
2 The handmaid is based on the biblical story in Genesis of Jacob and his
two wives, Rachel and Leah. They had two handmaids. One man had four
women to impregnate and produced 12 sons. But the handmaids could not
claim their children because they ‘belonged’ to Rachel and Leah.
3 I am recognising and applying Margaret Atwood’s distinction between sci-
ence fiction and speculative fiction. She stated that, ‘I like to make a distinc-
tion between science fiction proper – for me, this label denotes books with
things in them we can’t yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never
meet, and places we can’t go – and speculative fiction, which employs the
means already more or less to hand, and takes place on Planet Earth’ (At-
wood 2004, p. 153).
4 Significantly, Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale
in West Berlin in 1984. Please refer to R. Setoodeh, “Margaret Atwood
on how Donald Trump helped ‘the Handmaid’s Tale,” Variety, April 10,
2018, https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-
trump-feminism-1202748535/
5 Barbara Creed’s theorisation of the monstrous feminine was deployed with
profound effectiveness to understand the grammar of the post-alt-right on-
line environment.
6 Trump Studies was first used as a phrase in the journal Cultural Anthropol-
ogy in January 2017. Please refer to M. Taussig, “Trump Studies,” Cultural
Anthropology, January 18, 2017, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1046-trump-­
studies. From this foundational work, Tara Brabazon, Steve Redhead, and
Sunny Rue Chivaura wrote a monograph, demonstrating how Trump Studies
can be a rebooting moment for Cultural Studies. Please refer to Brabazon, T,
Redhead, S & Chivaura, S 2018, Trump studies: an intellectual’s guide to
why citizens vote against their best interests, Emerald, Bingley.
7 ‘Splitscreen’ is a strong example of the genre: http://splitscreen.tumblr.com/
post/175782336779
8 An array of parodies of The Handmaid’s Tale are available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=handmaid+tale+parody
9 The curricula politics and the politics of reading The Handmaid’s Tale was
well explored in Heidi Laing’s The Right (Not) to Read ‘The Handmaid’s
Tale’ in School: Tensions with/in Conversations about Risky Texts (Saar-
brucken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010).
10 This metaphor has been used intentionally. George Orwell in 1984 described
a ‘boot stamping on a human face – forever’ (1984, p. 390).

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9 ‘From a Speculative Point of
View I Wondered Which of
Us I Was’
Re-reading Old Women1
Sneja Gunew

On a recent visit to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, I was perusing various c­ abinets of

what looked like small female statues (triangles at the crotch and dots for
breasts) dating back millennia, but the labels made no such a­ ttribution and
stated merely that these were humanoid figurines found in ­particular lo-
cations. ‘Why the caginess?’, I wondered. It could, ­arguably, be construed
as a transgender moment, but somehow I doubt it. I think it may well have
been a legacy of the backlash against the work of archaeologists such as
Marija Gimbutas who saw these figurines as proof of goddess ­worship
in the area and concluded that this was linked, amongst other attributes,
to societies from which warfare was absent. That body of research in-
cludes figures such as Mary Daly, Heide ­Göttner-Abendroth, Gloria Fe-
man Orenstein, and many others, and ­perhaps this ­interpretation was
being discouraged by museologists of the area. Looking back I r­ ealise
I’ve been stalking the goddess (or g­ oddess discourse) throughout my life
in various contexts, but not because I’m searching for a religion or uto-
pia in the past. I’m not capitalising the term ­goddess, because I think
that would instantly evoke archetypes that are also ­stereotypes such as,
for example, when it is coupled to the maternal, as in Mother Goddess
or the Great Mother, combinations that are also confining in the sense
that the stench of male fantasy intrudes immediately (Purkiss 1996,
p. 32). Feminist cultural theorists have rightly been wary of this concept,
because when we are mostly battling for gender equity goddess invo-
cation may be perceived as a retreat from material circumstances into
a la-la land of fantasy (or phantasy). Even if one perceives the goddess
as a figure (in the sense of figurative) of rebellion against patriarchally
based heuristic frameworks, that still reinstates ­patriarchal concepts and
confirms the male-female binary that is rightly being interrogated today
(with the collateral damage often attendant on such interrogations such
as the demise of anything labelled women’s studies). But how then to
­imagine otherwise, to escape those confining conceptual structures? Fig-
ures such as Hélène Cixous and Catherine C ­ lément (1986) and the move-
ment around écriture féminine generated a promising direction but were
also (unfairly) confined to the binaries of essentialist sexual difference.
The attempts to consider another reality continue.
162 Sneja Gunew
Twenty-five years ago Barb Creed’s book The Monstrous-Feminine
e­ ffectively reversed the abject status the feminine had acquired ­after Freud
by making a case for its proactive status: she claimed that the f­ eminine
might be considered as castrating rather than castrated. Not surprisingly
this move branches out into many complex considerations of where else
in the history of representation across the s­ ensory field ­(visual, ­auditory,
taste etc.), there had been those kinds of ­inspiring ­reversals. If we con-
sider the rather dismal terrain of old age and w ­ omen’s place within it,
we soon come across the crone and ­certainly, in ­mainstream ­theorising,
the crone remains an abjected figure, a ­cautionary tale, a m ­ emento
mori. But not always and everywhere. For instance, Ally Acker’s ­recent
­documentary The Flowering of the Crone: Leonora Carrington. ­Another
Reality (dir. 2014) is a spirited examination of ­precisely ­‘another reality’
and of ­Carrington as an artist who still has to be assigned her right-
ful place within the history of Surrealism and the Avant-Garde more
broadly. Whitney Chadwick’s book Women Artists and the ­Surrealist
Movement (1985) ushered in a new awareness of S­ urrealist women
­artists, including Carrington, and Chadwick is ­featured in ­Acker’s film.
The film ­celebrates Carrington’s consistent interrogations of norma-
tivity, ­especially her wide-ranging intellectual enquiries into multiple
­mythologies, including those of the Great Mother/Goddess. Carrington
depicts that figure in a range of incarnations, for example, as Mother
Goose as in her paintings: Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen
(1975)2 or in The Giantess (1947). Carrington and her ‘coven’ of female
friends variously and intermittently gathered in Mexico City (Remedios
Varo, Kati Horna)3 fed each other and nurtured each other’s work and
such meetings are often depicted as taking place in a demonic kitchen
from Hell (but then Hell is another goddess figure). Acker’s film shows
such a gathering towards the latter part of Carrington’s life, at a time
when her longstanding friends (alas neither Varo nor Horna survived)
clearly enjoy each other’s company. Carrington’s work comprises skewed
realities within plain sight of mainstream representations – the philoso-
pher’s stone of alchemy linked, in turn, to that ultimate metamorphosing
space, the womb.4 Although what is transmuted into what form remains
enigmatic, that has not prevented a number of critics from claiming to
provide ‘keys’ to her iconography.5
Carrington is a rare figure whose art spans painting and w ­ riting.
­Acker’s film uses the framing device of an early short story C ­ arrington
produced called ‘The debutante’ (Carrington 2017b). It is a ­scathing
­satire of early twentieth-century social rituals that launched young
women of a certain class onto the marriage market. It also i­ncorporates
many of the themes and motifs that subsequently ­permeated her
art. The debutante protagonist invokes the aid of a hyena who
­i mpersonates her at the social gathering causing chaos and creative
mayhem. ­A nimal companions are also alter egos; food becomes both
 Re-reading Old Women 163
solace and instrument of deadly vengeance; cannibalism ­generates
a necessary rebirth––all these elements are present and recur in her
­subsequent written work. The tone is consistently wry and helps
achieve a kind of common-sense acceptance that poses the question:
why would anyone think otherwise? Apart from this unsettling short
story, Carrington produced several ­notable longer works: Down ­below
(2017a), a d ­ evastating autobiographically based a­ ccount of being
­i ncarcerated in an insane asylum where the p ­ rotagonist is subjected
to horrific ­chemical invasions that leave a lasting legacy and her novel
The ­hearing ­trumpet (2005) dealing with the unexpected ­‘reflowering
of the crone’ to borrow Acker’s title.6
That latter work was composed in either 1950 or 1960 when Car-
rington had moved to Mexico City, where she remained for the
­remainder of her long life (Suleiman 1990, p. 169). Down Below was
written in the 1940s, not long before The Hearing Trumpet (if we accept
the 1950 date). As Susan Suleiman points out, The Hearing Trumpet is
to some extent a rewriting of Down below, as the replication of madness
in Down below is transmuted into a controlled artistic c­ omplexity in
The Hearing Trumpet (1990, pp. 171–172). The helpless young ­‘victim’
protagonist of Down below eventually becomes the agent of her own
­destiny. This shift has been analysed as Carrington’s reversal of the
femme enfant worshipped by Surrealist male artists who reduced her
and other women to this role (Chadwick 1985, p. 74). Both texts draw on
autobiographical material and both are flanked by the complex iconog-
raphy, the visual grammar, of her paintings. Particularly in The Hearing
Trumpet, support is bestowed by female bonding along the lines that
several heads are best for plotting subversion. Although it was ­written
when Carrington was in her early 30s (Smith 2005, p. x), it concerns
a group of elderly inhabitants of a care home run by a ­sinister doctor,
who engineer their own liberation in a context that is eerily prescient,
amongst other things, of the devastations of climate change. Along the
way we also have transgender manifestations (an old woman revealed to
be an old man in death)7 as well as inter-species procreation where life
on earth will likely be incarnated in werewolves. The home appears to
be situated in Mexico (but this remains somewhat vague) and the text
ends with a new Ice Age when the poles become inverted. Meanwhile,
the 92-year-old protagonist Marian Leatherby basks in her designated
utopia – Lapland (sic).8
As one would expect from the title, The Hearing Trumpet features
sound as an important element. In her first novel, The stone door,9
­music is a soothing element that facilitates communication in diffi-
cult ­circumstances (Carrington 1977, p. 86) whereas in The Hearing
­Trumpet sound delivers hidden truths. Analysts from Marina Warner to
Ali Smith have provided readings of this text and Smith’s introduction
­conveys the ­insight that:
164 Sneja Gunew
Fundamentally, The hearing trumpet is a book about profound
­disconnection; at its centre are people unable to hear each other, or
unwilling to. It’s about how we hear, and how we don’t, or can’t,
and it’s about what happens when people can hear or see differently.
(Smith 2005, p. xii)

As a long-term friend, Gloria Orenstein figures as commentator and

i­nterpreter in Acker’s film but her reading of Carrington’s work s­ ometimes
appears to be a little too schematic – this equals that. ­However, she offers
illuminating links to the many mythic systems ­explored by ­Carrington
including Tibetan, Mayan, and Celtic (Orenstein 1982, p. 65). She
also translates the old Irish inscriptions in Carrington’s ­painting The
­Ancestor (Orenstein 1990, p. 69). As Suleiman suggests in her 1987
study, Orenstein misses out on the humour that Carrington’s work
­exudes. The winking nun or the old ladies who enjoy their odd feast of
sardines and port as the new Ice Age descends are elements that recall
the nuanced comedy of Angela Carter and Ali Smith. The text’s moment
of revelation is contained after all in a hot broth of oneself:

As I drew near the fire the woman stopped stirring the pot and rose to
greet me. When we faced each other I felt my heart give a ­convulsive
leap and stop. The woman who stood before me was m ­ yself…. She
nodded gravely and pointed into the soup with her long wooden
spoon. “Jump in the broth, meat is scarce this ­season.”…I never had
any pretensions of a glorious death, but ending up as meat broth
had never entered my calculations. …When I was well within range
she suddenly jabbed the pointed knife into my backside and with a
scream of pain I leapt right into the boiling soup…A mighty rumbling
followed by crashes and there I was stirring the soup in which I could
see my own meat, feet up, boiling away merrily…From a speculative
view I wondered which of us I was…Holding the mirror at arm’s
length I seemed to see a three-faced female whose eyes winked alter-
natively…I felt very much refreshed after the hot broth….
(Carrington 2005, pp. 136–138)

And like all good cauldron stories (critics have noted that it is a re-
telling of the Grail story) the protagonist’s new incarnation is a some-
what ­rejuvenated version of herself. Suleiman’s pioneering work on
­Carrington links her to the burgeoning feminist revisionism of writers in
the 1970s such as Monique Wittig and Hélène Cixous (Suleiman 1990,
pp. ­144–145). More recent publications have situated Carrington more
broadly as a significant avant-garde artist (Eburne & McAra 2017).
While Carrington’s work has yet to be turned into film, it is not a
stretch to imagine this occurring in the future and Acker’s film begins
by animating some of her paintings to great effect. Barb Creed’s work
is located in the field of contemporary film studies and the examples she
 Re-reading Old Women 165
uses are from the domain of the horror film, a marginalised genre, when
she wrote The Monstrous-Feminine. One might suggest that, ­generally
speaking, the representation of old women on screen could also be
deemed as belonging to the category of horror films since old women tend
to be tied to witches and other negative manifestations of the monstrous
feminine usually associated with anti-life forces. But perhaps this trend is
changing. Because of current demographics there appear to be a greater
range of options for representing old age and women.10 My next examples
are taken from contemporary Bulgarian films by female directors where
there is an honouring of the ‘granny’, which appears to arise as much out
of social contexts as from artistic imaginations. In communist Bulgaria,
women had to work outside the home while at the same time sustaining
the home itself, and this simply could not have been accomplished with-
out the help of the granny (Ghodsee & Bernardi 2012). They also share
a certain kinship with the many female figurines from prehistoric times
that were found to litter the region (after all this was Thrace!). Scholars
such as Marija Gimbutas (1989) have used these archaeological finds to
make a case for evidence of goddess religion and have encountered dis-
missive and toxic criticism. Without getting into the pros and cons of that
debate, there is certainly an alternative representational grammar here
that can be attached to the feminine. One can look, as Creed did herself,
to Kristeva and other pioneering feminists to produce possible readings
of this legacy without flattening it too much into archetypes that, in the
effort to universalise them, retain limited explanatory powers.

Iglika Trifonova: Letter to America (dir. 2001)11

In Trifonova’s Letter to America, music is a generative force that resur-
rects the dead in all its metaphorical complexity. Dedicated to her own
grandmother, this film explores (arguably somewhat sentimentally) the
healing power of returning to one’s rural roots from the alienation of the
urban scene where people speed past life – as exemplified by Kamen’s
opening footage from NY. The next thing we learn, via a phone call to
his friend Ivan in Sofia, is that Kamen has been hit by a car and is lying
in a coma. Ivan tries unsuccessfully to gain a month-long visa to Amer-
ica from a scoffing US bureaucrat and states in broken English ‘I really
really do not want to emigrate to America’ (hence the ­importance of ‘to’
rather than ‘from’ in the film’s title). In the course of dealing with his
thwarted mission, Ivan recalls that there is a song that is meant to have
healing powers and begins to hum it when he first hears the news about
Kamen but cannot recall it fully. As Ivan (named after the a­ rchetypal
wanderer in Slavic folktales) crosses the country to find Kamen’s grand-
mother who knows the song, he encounters a range of guides who lead
him to explore other layers of Bulgarian life. In particular (but not
­exclusively), he meets a number of grandmothers who have all encoun-
tered tragedy but have ‘gone forward’ (a refrain in the film).
166 Sneja Gunew
Each of the grannies is permitted her singularity (for example, one
shows him her immaculately woven and knitted burial clothes, renewed
regularly, while another does a sprightly dance after a few glasses of ­fiery
rakia). Each of them sings a song but it is the wrong one. When Ivan
­begins hitchhiking to Kamen’s village, his first guide is an icon restorer
with an icon of St John the Baptist eerily seated on the back seat of the car.
The driver, Nevena, tells him about the semi-remembered song, one that
brings the dead back to life, but of which people have forgotten either the
lyrics or the melody. She links it to the Orphic mysteries inevitably associ-
ated with the Thracian ur-history of Bulgaria. After she conveys this, they
enter a dark tunnel and emerge into light suggesting a rebirth.
Thereafter his quest begins in earnest and Ivan is not only directed
­towards grannies. He encounters a truck driver sceptical of this folkloric
tradition and a tractor driver looking for a mate who wants Ivan to film
him for a lonely hearts TV programme. The cinematic style of the film
shows a consistent pleasure in the unvarnished realities of these ordinary
characters whose affective power is compellingly registered on each of
their idiosyncratic faces. As part of his education Ivan watches the gran-
nies perform a death ritual where the dead person’s clothes are dipped in
water and then a scythe is passed over the water to cut away death’s con-
tamination. Perhaps his most mysterious guide is a young boy who does
not speak but takes him to the grave of Kamen’s grandmother (the keeper
of the song) and directs him to perform a mourning ritual before pointing
him towards another grandmother, Rusa, who is also supposed to know
the song. When Ivan first encounters the boy he has just lost his paper boat
on the stream so he is lightly associated with the ferryman of the dead.
Sound is a significant aspect of the film’s signifying frame – the silence
of the young spirit guide and the miraculous song that is recovered in spite
of a taboo. Because her own son has died, Rusa is in mourning for two
years and cannot sing or even listen to music. However, she is moved by
Ivan’s story and Kamen is, after all, part of her village. To lessen the taboo,
Rusa removes her kerchief before singing the magic tune. But in fact Ivan
already knows the song and merely has to recover it. The film ends with
Ivan back in Sofia, together with his now pregnant girlfriend, watching
footage from NY where a recovered Kamen is participating in a Japanese
tea ceremony with his friend Seiji (the one who had made the initial phone
call to Ivan) and it is Seiji who sings the magic song into the camera. One
might conclude that the grannies in the film function as the repositories
of a robust folk wisdom that is in danger of being forgotten and when
remembered, restores a fractured society that has lost its way to health.

Zornitsa Sophia: Mila from Mars (dir. 2004)12

Mila, who is fleeing from her murderously abusive partner to whom
she had been trafficked out of an orphanage, lands in a crumbling and
almost deserted village somewhere near the Greek border. Sporting
 Re-reading Old Women 167
a black eye and split lip from her latest beating and wearing fishnet
­stockings and short leather shorts Mila slumps on the step of one of
the ­ruined houses. She is watched by a bevy of grannies and older men
(the ­remaining guardians) who discuss whose child or grandchild she
might be while passing around (what viewers identify later as) a toke.
­Eventually, in spite of warnings concerning the murderous intentions
of such emissaries of modernity, one of the grannies takes Mila into
her custody. Gradually it becomes clear that Mila is pregnant and the
­villagers set about making one of the houses habitable for her. She is
led in like a bride, dressed in improvised traditional white clothes. The
grannies ensure that she is properly nurtured and that she gives birth –
around ­Christmas. The son is therefore named Christos and since the
father (Alex the abuser) is a­ bsent, there are subtle suggestions of a
­parthenogenetic birth.13 Throughout, flashbacks reveal Mila’s life in the
orphanage where Alex is a creepy benefactor who occasionally brings
cakes for the deprived children – implying that while he may have lived
there himself in the past he now traffics girls from there. Meanwhile,
viewers have discovered (as has Mila) that Alex comes to the village
once a year to buy the pot the elders have grown–illustrative of their
­enterprise and survival tactics in a context where there are few resources.
After ­giving birth, as a modern girl, Mila is frustrated and bored in the
village and her various acts of ­rebellion include writing graffiti on the
walls with her menstrual blood––the word ‘Maika’ (mother) – for her a
curse as much as a statement about her condition. The implication is that
she may also be suffering from post-partum depression.
Mila also learns about the mysterious ‘Teacher’ who lives in a nearby
tower along which he rappels by means of ingenious ropes and pulleys.
The vertical dwelling contains sleeping and cooking areas as well as
books that he burns for fuel. When Mila eventually moves there with her
son she discovers that he has written down the ‘essentials’ gleaned from
all his reading – the four Buddhist vows––on the walls of the tower,
using the soot from the burnt books. Meanwhile, he survives by means
of his herd of sheep. Haunted by fear of Alex’s reprisal (he has vowed
to find her wherever she is) Mila tries to persuade Teacher to kill Alex.
However, she also discovers that Alex has links to Teacher whose life
he saved in a recent war (presumably in the former Yugoslavia). Teacher
is evidently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and
trying to heal. While he and Mila form a couple to some degree they
do not tell each other their names, that is, there are limits to the trust
between them. Teacher eventually confronts Alex in the ruined church
with Christos (Alex’s son) in his arms. While we don’t hear the dialogue
we do see Alex pointing a gun at Teacher who stares him down. Mila
has meanwhile joined the volatile mix but once again we don’t hear the
dialogue because the point of view has shifted to that of the old people
who watch the exchange with acute anxiety. Alex eventually drives away
and Mila and Assen tell each other their names and the film ends.
168 Sneja Gunew
What is clear here in relation to the themes I have been examining is
that, in terms of the monstrous feminine, Mila (significantly) gives birth
within the domain of the grannies who are increasingly and d ­ emonstrably
­prepared to let her go but not the child: they are the guardians of ­continuing
life. Towards the end of the film, Mila’s room is covered in the ‘Maika’
graffiti although she herself is not particularly ­maternal in any traditional
manner. For example, she leaves her infant son at the roadside and, in her
frustration at being held captive in the ­village ­combined with her fear of
Alex, attempts to hang herself. This is where Assen finds her and prevents
the suicide. He also takes care of the child and does all the cooking, show-
ing more maternal/nurturing characteristics than Mila does. As well the
inside of the (phallic) tower has been upholstered in sheepskins so that it
is transformed into a soft and ­welcoming space – more like an extended
cradle. The faux phallic tower has a parallel former patriarchal structure
in the ruined church. There the granny leader sits in its cathedra (implic-
itly usurping the power of the bishop) and it is where the final confron-
tation that frees Mila from her oppressor also takes place, ushering in a
new and more equitable ­sociality. Christos really will be brought up by
both parents as well as the idiosyncratic community. What prevails here
is that no-one is defined as a victim – neither the old people stranded by
versions of modernity, nor Mila, in spite of her abuse by both institutions
and individuals, nor Assen the traumatised soldier. These are survivors
and the implication is that there is a ‘new’ holy family (like Joseph, Assen
is not the biological father) and that eventually they too will become the
guardians of the village community.

Goddess Redux
References to the ‘goddess’ tend to split readers into opposing c­ ategories:
those who see this concept as a deluded quest for comfort by sub-
jects designated as victims, and the enthusiastic goddess worshippers
who ­inhabit latter-day New Age alternative universes consisting of
Goop treatments at one end and crystals and corporate mindfulness
at the other. My examples of granny depictions suggest another kind
of ­approach. Perhaps the problem lies with considering that there is a
pre-existent world or religion of which the many prehistoric artefacts
and figurines are the ‘proof’ and that many attributes of the assumed
societies can be established, such as peaceful lives without conflict and a
better status for women. What if instead we considered this archaeolog-
ical record in terms of the reality that each age constructs its own truths
(present and future) out of these data? In other words, just as Carrington
and her female friends created narratives (including visual ones) that
nurtured their mysterious and compelling life-as-art, we do the same
now in turning to this archive: we extract what we need and use it to fuel
our own curiosity about what might be attached to what, underpinned
 Re-reading Old Women 169
by the continuing feminist enterprise whereby we persist in trying to
change the terms of engagement for women. Diverse trends, including
Celtic ­mythology (linked or not to alchemy) and a pre-­Christian world
that produced the female ­figurines that are littered across Thrace and
­A natolia, may indeed have a continuing life in the folklore of various
regions including Bulgaria (formerly Thrace). And perhaps these traces
contribute to a d ­ ifferent perception of, in this instance, old women,
that could be utilised as a basis for reconsidering the ways in which
post-menopausal women signify within culture.
In the Zeitgeist we inhabit, we probably want to leave behind the in-
terpretive certainties of Gloria Orenstein or Marija Gimbutas but should
not dispose of their useful insights (in connecting the dots or trying to
decode the data). This is where psychoanalysis as a tradition and the
framework within which Creed and many others work demonstrates its
usefulness since psychoanalysis functions outside linear time, and this
has profound implications for how we consider history–– both public and
private.14 The creative frameworks provided by Carrington, ­Zornitsa
Sophia, and Trifonova suggest new ways of considering the signifying
possibilities of the crone. What undoubtedly animates both Zornitsa
Sophia’s and Carrington’s work in particular is a revolt against author-
itarian and abusive patriarchal structures. Looking for an alternative
grammar of representation to articulate this rebellion means that the
reimagined crone prevails. In Carrington’s case, her recourse to Celtic
myth, alchemy (the hidden history of chemistry that includes the reign
of Big Pharma),15 should not preclude her being seen as an important
artistic conduit to the avant-garde, and this is the animating principle
of recent critical reappraisals of her work. The crone is both a repos-
itory of painfully acquired knowledge and a keeper of many confluent
knowledge systems, and artists are skilled at mashing up these systems
to generate unexpected futures. The humour in Carrington and Zornitsa
Sophia, in particular, endows their work with an endearing lightness
that is missing from the earnest attempts to connect Carrington, for
example, to goddess quests. Carrington operated until the first decade
of the twenty-first century and the vehicle for her continuing relevance
is the postmodernist playfulness her work exudes. What is sacred is that
nothing is sacred.16
It is clear that each feminist attempt to re-vision the representation of
the feminine, including post-menopausal women, is usually met with a
vicious backlash. For instance, Gimbutas was reviled, as were figures
such as Mary Daly, Judy Chicago, and Germaine Greer. Their s­ cholarly
reputations were trashed, enveloped in a miasma implying something
fraudulent about their creativity, that there is something inherently
hysterical or unhinged about their discoveries and insights (and their
work is often misconstrued). But does this amount simply to a case of
­inter-generational matricide? Not just a case of killing the mother but the
170 Sneja Gunew
sense that women are nothing outside the maternal f­ unction – that this
alone is meant to define them.17 Women who do not espouse that func-
tion do not fare well within history. The Bulgarian grannies in the films
examined are the glue that holds their crumbling communities ­together,
nurturing each other as well as the men and children. C
­ arrington ­resisted
the femme enfant stereotype and as her art ­(including The Hearing
Trumpet) shows, she animated a different and self-contained universe.
She refused to be defined by others as an aberration to the rules of their
representational cultural grammar – something she found confining in
many different ways. Her writing and art open up other interpretive
frameworks for the feminine, including her own versions of the mon-
strous feminine. As in the case of Creed’s work, Carrington gave us new
points of view on a familiar archive.

Notes
1 My thanks to Valerie Raoul and Margery Fee for comments on earlier drafts
of this essay and to Emilia Slavova for introducing me to the two films.
Thanks to her as well and to Kornelia Slavova for helping me to navigate the
(at times) less-than-accurate subtitles to the films.
2 See Orenstein (1982, p. 65).
3 In 2010, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester mounted an exhibition ­entitled
Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna that
­juxtaposed the work of those three artists who were also close friends and
lived in Mexico City. See van Raay (2010), Kaplan (1988), p. 93ff.
4 In relation to this, Carrington has her character the Artisan say in The stone
door: ‘My womb is no larger than a grain of rice because its powers have all
been used in discovery’ (1977, p. 40).
5 Suleiman takes issue with Gloria Orenstein. But see as well Carrington’s son
Gabriel Weisz (2017, p. 132). See also Catriona McAra who makes the point
that due perhaps to her dramatic biography, Carrington often functions as a
character constructed through the accounts of others (McAra 2017, p. 179).
6 There is also her first novel, The stone door (Carrington 1977), which is out
of print, although an extract is included in The seventh horse (Carrington
1988b). Anna Watz’s (2017) essay points to its importance.
7 Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (1991) reads this episode as ‘we might conclude
that one’s sexual identity is a matter of personal choice and should be left at
that’ (p. 87).
8 The Sami have rejected the term ‘Lapland’ as the name for their lands.
9 Published in French in 1976 but actually written in 1946 (Warner 1988, 20).
10 The recent films of Agnès Varda come to mind.
11 Iglika Trifonova. In 2001 she made her feature debut as director and
­screenwriter of the film Letter to America. The film received the Special
Prize at the Golden Rose Bulgarian Feature Film Festival after the jury
­decided not to bestow a grand prix. Letter to America was the Bulgarian
nomination for best foreign language film at the 73rd Academy Awards.
12 Zornitsa Sophia. Her first film Mila from Mars (dir. 2004) was declared
‘the dreamed beginning of Bulgarian independent feature moviemaking’ (in
Women Film Directors in the Bulgarian Cinema, para. 2). Variety magazine
wrote that ‘the film marks the bow of a director to watch’ (ibid.). It has won
many awards.
 Re-reading Old Women 171
13 One is reminded of Creed’s point that ‘the womb signifies “fullness” or
“emptiness” but always it is its own point of reference’ (Creed 1993, p. 27).
14 It is worth recalling here Kristeva’s influential essay ‘Women’s time’ in
which she states the following: ‘Some contemporary thinkers maintain that
­modernity is the first era in human history in which human beings have
attempted to live without religion. As it stands today, is feminism not about
to become a sort of religion? Or will it manage to rid itself of its belief in
Woman, Her power, and Her writing and support instead the singularity of
each women, her complexities, her many languages, at the cost of a single
horizon, of a single perspective, of faith?’ (Kristeva 1997, p. 366). In spite of
reinventing herself as a Frenchwoman Kristeva started her life in Bulgaria
and her writing is, and continues to be, haunted by this fact.
15 It is worth recalling that Carrington’s father was the major shareholder of
Imperial Chemical Industries.
16 What I am trying to convey is akin to Svetlana Boym’s very useful ­distinction
between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia: ‘Restorative nostalgia stresses
nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost
home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the
homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not
absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the
gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. Restorative nostalgia
does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflec-
tive nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging
and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative
nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into
doubt’. (Boym 2010, para. 10)
17 Suleiman, for example, constantly ties Carrington to the maternal.

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Acker, A (dir.) 2014, The Flowering of the Crone: Leonora Carrington. A
­ nother
Reality, Reel Women Media, New York.
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http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/­
nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html
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antiquesandartireland.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/carring.jpg
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viewed 5 March 2019, www.irishtimes.com/opinion/lionising-­leonora-an-
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­C arrington, Dorothyproject, St. Louis, pp. 3–7.
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Hudson, London.
172 Sneja Gunew
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Minnesota P, Minneapolis.
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10 The ‘Monstrous-Feminine’
Dementia, Psychoanalysis, and
Mother-Daughter Relations in
Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s
E. Ann Kaplan

In her groundbreaking volume, Barbara Creed (1993) reworks

­psychoanalytic theories to show how dominant culture has constructed
a feminine that is ‘monstrous’ – a monstrosity evident in horror film
after horror film. Relying especially on Julia Kristeva’s (1982) concept
of ­abjection, Creed demonstrates how women have been relegated to
the margins of culture, abjected, cast aside, and thereby rendered
­‘monstrous’. Creed’s interest in how women’s biology, sexuality/sexual
difference, and especially their reproductive functions create a ­crisis for
men and their masculinity which results in their inventing what Creed
calls ‘a monstrous feminine’.
In this project I show how pervasive images unconsciously continue
to render women ‘monstrous’ only now in relation to age. Older women
have long been abjected: As Creed reminds us,

The place of the abject is “the place where meaning collapses,”

the place where “I” am not. The abject threatens life; it must be
­“radically excluded” (Kristeva 1982, p. 2) from the place of the
living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the
other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that
which threatens the self.
(Creed, p. 9)

Older women are abjected because threatening for economic, ­political,

and social reasons. Their abjection takes the form of being made ­invisible,
rendered ridiculous in off-colour jokes, or pushed to the margins, even
to the other side of the border, because no longer fitting the youthful,
slender, sexual being men fantasise and desire, no longer, then, bearing
meaning. Older women have also long been linked to the image of the
wicked witch, who, with her long pointed nose seems to have co-opted
the penis for evil ends. In Creed’s (1993, pp. 76–77) words, in psychoan-
alytic theory ‘woman as witch is positioned as the oral sadistic mother
and the phallic woman…’. Creed further adds that the words ‘irrational,
scheming, evil… are used to define the witch,’ who is also associated
with a range of abject things from puss to cannibalism.
174 E. Ann Kaplan
Anxiety about ageing – especially as regards older women – has
i­ncreased exponentially in the Millennium for several reasons: First,
­simple demographics. In most advanced nations, people are living ­longer,
putting pressure, not only on healthcare systems, but also on e­ conomics,
politics, transportation, education; second, while ­dementia is far from
­being inevitable as people age, incidence is increasing. A ­ lzheimer’s
disease – the debilitating illness – is on the increase, especially among
women. Five million people, most of them women, currently have
­dementia in the US, and this is expected to grow to 17 million in 2050.
The economic and social consequences of so many women with d ­ ementia
is ­heightening an ageism always already in place. Finally, people living
longer lives, ­often healthy ones, can seem threatening to upcoming gen-
erations seeking to replace older people in the workforce. If such people
keep on working, age panic can set in (See Kaplan/Chivers 2018).
With this larger framework, in this chapter I want to turn the t­ ables
on the construction of older women as monstrous much as Creed does
in ­revealing the seemingly hidden power underlying the diverse kinds
of ­monstrous feminine she explores in the Horror Film – a power
that ­creators of these female monsters apparently deny, or perhaps,
­unconsciously take some pleasure in. The most obvious threat ­offered
by women with dementia (AD for short) is their apparent loss of a
‘self,’ their no longer having a recognisable subjectivity. The ­pervasive
view, especially within neuroscience discourse is that once a person
loses her memory, she no longer can be a subject.1 She is no longer the
­autonomous, self-­directing, independent individual that neo-liberal
­capitalism ­requires. Western culture eschews dependency as a weakness.
The reality of not being in control is terrifying in this context. Thus,
people with dementia create what I call ‘age panic’.
Let me briefly indicate how this kind of ‘monstrous feminine’ is
­evident in the images of dementia widely circulated in the media. My
selection is mainly from journalism between 2014 and 2015, when the
panic about dementia was reaching its height. The AD figure as ‘absent’
dominated reports. For example, a New York Times report ­(November
2014), ­‘Facing the Challenges of Keeping an Aging Nation on its Feet,’
included a somber photo of a fragile grey-haired woman, bent over and
struggling to move with the help of a walker. Another New York Times
report in April 2015 was titled ‘In Race for Medicare Dollars, ­Nursing
Home Care May Lag,’ and it showed an image of a frail ­elderly lady
­sitting in a cluttered room with a lost expression on her face. The story
­discussed the neglect and injuries AD people suffer in many poorly
funded ­facilities. In November 2015, a report, ‘As C ­ ognition Slips,
­Financial Skills Are O
­ ften the First to Go,’ showed a rare frail elderly
man (usually, women are imaged) with a blank face, staring straight
ahead, while his depressed female relative looked on. Significantly, the
article discussed the difficulties for AD subjects to keep atop of their
 Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s 175
finances, given that the US and individual States do not allocate much
funding for long-term care f­ acilities. 2 A 2018 New York Times ­article,
‘Continuing Care Homes Need a Financial Checkup,’ discussed the
enormous ­upfront fees demanded for Continuing Care Retirement Cen-
ters (CCRC’s) and ­people’s fears that the home may go bankrupt, as
some have done. In Europe, by contrast, at least until recently, long-term
care has been seen as a human right.3 In all the images noted, it’s as if
the person is not there in any shape or form as a viable subject. Blank
looks predominate.
Things are changing rapidly, partly in response to intervention by
certain outlier neuroscientists, some younger gerontologists and by
the coming together of scholars from these disciplines and many in the
­humanities in the growing international field of Age Studies. But this
ageist ‘monstrous feminine’ has not gone away.4
For the rest of this chapter, I want to counter the pervasive n
­ egative
­image of women with dementia, using Creed’s Kristevan mother-­
daughter psychoanalytic formulations, together with some of M ­ elanie
Klein’s concepts, in relation to a powerful graphic memoir, Dana
­Walrath’s ­Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass (2013).
The ­ageing protagonist in the text is far from ‘monstrous’ when viewed
through a very different lens than that of popular media’s ­repeated
­abject stereotypes of women with dementia. I’ll suggest some of the
psychoanalytic mechanisms undergirding this fear of loss of ‘self,’ and
then turn to analyse mother-daughter relations as these are ­dramatically
changed because of the mother’s dementia. Psychic patterns and images,
far ­different than the ‘monstrous feminine’ of AD subjects in popular
culture, are revealed in the process.
This then becomes a study of a text that counters the demented
monstrous feminine, and that offers new perspectives. It also becomes
a study in how a mother’s dementia impacts the prior psychoanalytic
relationship of mother and daughter. That this narrative is written by
a daughter confronting her mother’s gradual succumbing to dementia
only adds to the psychoanalytic interest of the project. How does Wal-
rath react to the changes in her mother? How does the daughter avoid
situating her mother as ‘monstrous,’ given Kleinian theories of early rage
towards the breast and cultural frames the daughter lives within? What
underlying psychoanalytic issues are expressed or inferred in each case?
What is it about mother-daughter relations, viewed psychoanalytically,
that makes the changes in the mother so very difficult for the daughter to
handle? What strategies does Walrath discover to deal with changes in
both herself and her mother? How is the pervasive dementia ‘monstrous
feminine’ countered by the text, showing that new realities create new
and altered psychic situations?
As we know from the reworking of Freud’s theories in the 1950s
and 1960s (especially by Melanie Klein, Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari,
176 E. Ann Kaplan
and centrally, Julia Kristeva), Western culture relies on fantasies of a
­unified self, denying the unconscious severely split self of p ­ sychoanalytic
­theory. Such a fantasy of subjects as unproblematically ‘whole’ sets
­extreme ­emphasis on being in control – something patriarchy insists on.
In ­classical Freudian theory, the child only separates from the mother
with difficulty, largely through identification with the Father enforced
by culture.
Creed’s interpretation of Kristeva’s mother-child theories clarified
­issues for me, and inspired my reading of Walrath’s memoir. Especially
helpful is Creed’s (1993, p. 13) reading of Kristeva’s concept of what
she calls ‘maternal authority,’ versus the familiar ‘paternal law’. The
child early on has contact with this maternal authority through the
­mother’s role in toilet training and in mapping out areas of the body
for the child in the processes of feeding and cleaning her, separating
the ‘clean’ from the ‘dirty’ body. This is different from the paternal law
within which language is acquired, along with a vast number of cul-
tural and social performances where guilt, embarrassment, and shame
come into play (Creed 1993, p. 13). As the child tries to break away,
struggling to ­become a separate subject, the mother becomes the ‘ab-
ject’. Creed shows how in many horror films the maternal figure is
constructed by ­Patriarchy as the ‘monstrous feminine’ in the sense of
preventing the child from taking her proper place in relation to the
Symbolic. But the child partly longs to ­remain locked ‘in a blissful
­relationship’ with the mother, and is ‘terrified of separation’. So the
child easily succumbs to the comforting pleasure of the dyadic relation-
ship, while simultaneously resenting the mother for apparently holding
her back (Creed 1993, p. 12).
Lacan calls this sphere, where mother and child perhaps long to
­remain, the Imaginary (Lacan 1949/1977). Building on Freud, Lacan
argues that the mother and child first reside in this sphere, but culture
insists the mother release the child into the Symbolic – a situation which
inevitably causes extreme ambivalence towards the mother, even in some
cases, passive aggression. The child is caught between conflicting desires:
psychically yearning for symbiosis, while patriarchal culture pushes for
separation.
For Patriarchy, there are also conflicting processes. While the image
of the saintly mother, holding and caring for her child, may be com-
forting in patriarchy, there is always looming her opposite, namely the
‘Maternal Authority,’ controlling, powerful and dangerous, a threat to
male dominance, a violation of paternal law. She is linked to the figure
Creed discusses, namely woman, not castrated, but castrating. And this
mother can be intimidating for the child.
If new family structures are now in place as a result of the ­Women’s
Liberation Movement and developments within psychoanalytic ­practice
and theory, the Father is still crucial as an authority, if to a lesser degree
 Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s 177
than before. Indeed, with more maternal authority allowed to the mother,
a daughter’s ambivalence might be increased. So a major question is what
happens when the mother, as this authority, suddenly relinquishes her
position because of oncoming dementia? How does the daughter r­ espond
to her mother no longer being in control? How does she ­respond to the
boundary issues suddenly changing as the mother becomes d ­ ependent on
her daughter, instead of the reverse? I will try to show that, in a sense,
once the mother has dementia, positions are reversed, but ­long-held
­psychic patterns remain. Where the mother in Kristeva’s reading yearns
to keep the child down with her in the ­imaginary but is forced to release
her into the Symbolic, where the mother herself inevitably resides, now
the mother cannot help but retreat from the Symbolic, back, we could say
to the imaginary. This raises interesting psychoanalytic questions, includ-
ing exploring how far that ‘monstrous feminine’ lurks around the mar-
gins of the narrative as the protagonists are forced to play reversed roles.
Dana Walrath’s (2013) engaging Memoir, Aliceheimer’s: ­Alzheimer’s
Through the Looking Glass, belongs in a relatively new ­graphic-­medical
genre about AD. As I have argued elsewhere, Aliceheimer’s expands
­perspectives of the AD subject towards a more complex view than is
generally found in at least Western culture (Kaplan/Chivers 2018). In her
introductory essay, Walrath speaks in her professional, ­somewhat dis-
tanced voice, as is appropriate. She tells us she is approaching her m­ other’s
dementia through the lens of her training in medical a­ nthropology, and
she insists that ‘the biomedical story of dementia and how we approach
aging globally’ is in desperate need of revision (Walrath, p. 4). She dis-
cusses how medical anthropologists, like herself, ‘locate sickness and
health in three interconnected bodies…’ which Walrath names ‘the
political, the social and the physical’ (p. 4). In Aliceheimer’s, Walrath
shows her mother creating a new subjectivity as her ­dementia advances,
as against becoming the blank ‘absent’ subject of popular m ­ edia noted
earlier, or even returning to a stereotypical normative self as in some AD
narratives. In a sentence that could almost come from Kristeva w ­ riting
on abjection, Walrath (p. 5) notes that ‘Stigma, silence and social death
surround rejected ways of being and echo through the hallways of
­hospitals’. She claims however that comics can ‘rewrite the dominant
narrative’ (p. 5).
But much more is ongoing in the drawings and text of the memoir ­itself,
as Walrath herself realises without trying to tease out hidden ­meanings,
as I will try to do. For my purposes, it’s significant that W
­ alrath’s ­interest
in AD emerged from direct experience with her mother’s illness. The
complex view partly arises because Walrath attempts as best she can
to show events as Alice experiences them, which is partly aided by the
author’s chosen graphic form. Complexity is achieved through the inte-
grated combination of narrative and drawings. As Walrath (p. 3) notes,
talking about her form, a graphic image is able to slow things down, and
178 E. Ann Kaplan
to capture ‘the complexity of life and death, sickness and health’ (p. 3).
She indicates that the drawings embody the subconscious, and the text
the conscious, and that moving back and forth between the visual and
the verbal ‘lets us tap into our collective memory’ (p. 3). Walrath implies
that in so doing, her text comes closer to revealing her mother’s inner
­experience than can words alone.5 Walrath’s narrative (usually on the
page opposite the drawings) situates what the drawings reveal; the com-
bination allows the reader to access some of Walrath’s own e­ motions
and inter-personal issues vis-à-vis her mother. Thus is set up a sort of
duality that runs throughout the text of on the one hand, Walrath’s con-
sciousness about events, and on the other, unconscious tensions from
the past that stealthily emerge. These reveal complex psychic conflicts
following what Walrath presents as an almost idyllic early year or two.
Starting with the lens of Kristevan psychoanalytic mother-daughter
theories, especially as interpreted by Barbara Creed, what does Walrath
tell us about her relationship with her mother before Alice started to
show signs of dementia? What unconscious aspects emerge in the draw-
ings or between image and text? Significantly, as one opens the book,
one finds an image of a mother and child in a forest landscape, with the
label ‘Alice and Dana Camping 1960’. The mother is smiling, and her
body arches protectively over the contented child, who looks directly
at the camera. The inserting of the image with blurred outlines, not a
frame as such, on the lower right hand corner of a totally white page,
suggests an almost dreamlike or ghostly quality, which as we’ll see,
is also conveyed in the largely pallid palette Walrath uses for most of
the drawings. The photo presents an image of intimacy and harmony,
suggestive of Lacan’s imaginary. Yet almost immediately, in her intro-
duction detailing how her project came about, we learn that later on
Walrath (p. 1) saw herself ‘as the daughter who got on her (that is, her
mother’s ed.) nerves. The feeling was mutual’. It was this ‘unfinished
business,’ as Walrath calls it (a desire for Kleinian reparation, perhaps,
as her words below suggest), that motivated Dana to invite her mother
to live with her as her Alzheimer’s progressed. ‘I wanted to create a
bond with my mother, to redo the past, and to fill the hole inside of me.
In the middle of dementia, somehow, my mother wanted to do the same’
(Walrath, p. 1).
The process does seem very much that which Melanie Klein theorised
in the 1930s regarding the urge for reparation to ease guilt for uncon-
scious aggressivity towards the mother as the child struggles to become
a subject. Klein argues that a crucial period in the child’s development
is the change from seeing the mother as only a partial object-relation
‘to the relation to a complete object’ (Klein 1935/1975, p. 264). Klein
continues to note that ‘Not until the object is loved as a whole (ibid.)
can the loss be felt as a whole’. Part of this process involves making
 Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s 179
reparation to the object. The ego, Klein (1935/1975, p. 265) continues,
‘feels impelled…to make restitution for all the sadistic attacks that it has
launched on that object’.
Soon, in the section ‘Disappearing Alice,’ Walrath (p. 11) tells us that
Alice, ‘a proud, hardworking career woman,’ had often ‘wished aloud’
that she had gone to medical school instead of becoming a biology
teacher. Walrath then observes, ‘The years of her pushing me in this
direction and away from creative work made sense at last’. This is sig-
nificant in its inference of prior tension between mother and daughter:
Walrath would have preferred studying the arts, but Alice insisted on her
going to medical school. We find, then, the child struggling to separate
from the mother, and the mother not letting go. Alice projects her own
desires onto her daughter, thereby showing that she is unconsciously
­unable also to fully separate. The early symbiotic relationship has not
quite been mastered on either side.
Significant in this section are comments that implicate the level of the
Symbolic as it pertains to Alice’s new condition: Walrath notes that ­A lice’s
‘internal governor’ (basically, the Paternal Law) was ­disappearing, so that
parts of Alice’s self, previously hidden, could now emerge. Alice is ­fi nally
able to appreciate her daughter’s artistic creativity evident in o ­ bjects
around the house, marking an important change in their r­ elationship –
a coming to terms not possible before Alice began to change with her
­illness. Alice no longer projects her desires onto her daughter.
The drawing opposite the text on this page is frightening, almost a
kind of ‘monstrous feminine’ somewhat out of place: I wondered why
Walrath chose this image to accompany a narrative which, on the sur-
face, suggests reconciliation between mother and daughter. The heading
for the drawing is ‘Alice is Disappearing; Soon There will be None’. The
cut-up Alice in Wonderland pages that form the shape of Alice’s body do
not show any head! Indeed the ‘heading’ takes the place of Alice’s head.
In addition, the furry framing of Alice’s cut out body renders her not
quite human. Was there unconscious aggression here, remaining from
the days of tension mentioned earlier? Was Alice in her new way of being
unconsciously ‘monstrous’ to Walrath?
In the next related text entitled ‘None is Hard to Draw’, Walrath
seems to repair the possible prior aggression, including guilt, towards her
mother. For she has painstakingly drawn an elaborate page of marks in
her mother’s honour, to the tune of 28, 126. The text also suggests rep-
aration, with Walrath expressing how she exhausted her young mother
struggling in a period of wartime scarcity. Her mother also seems to
desire healing, for when Walrath (p. 13) returns home to visit her dying
father, Alice hugs her and thanks her for her help: ‘And you used to be
so annoying,’ she adds. Walrath, as often, ends the page with the note,
‘Aliceheimer’s,’ indicating that these changes are due to the condition.
180 E. Ann Kaplan
But more may be going on: Perhaps the next two pages, which situate
the two drawings side-by-side, aim to reconcile Walrath’s ambivalence
about her mother, on the one hand, and her trauma at seeing her mother
‘disappear’. Does the focus on her mother ‘disappearing’ reflect a com-
plicated unconscious wish in play? Since consciously Walrath will go on
to show how very much there her mother still is!
The following page suggests the Kleinian relationship between
­aggression and reparation, since it repeats both the disturbing ‘Alice
is Disappearing’ drawing and the restitution page of 28, 126 marks.
Taken together, these pages resonate with some aspects of ­K risteva’s
insights into the role of art as catharsis and psychic healing, enabling a
move away from abjection. In Black Sun, for ­example, Kristeva (1989,
p. 24) talked about the cathartic possibilities of ­l iterature: ‘…the
­l iterary (and religious) representation possesses a real and i­ maginary
effectiveness that comes closer to catharsis than to e­ laboration; it
is a therapeutic device used in all societies throughout the ages…’.
Meanwhile, in Powers of Horror, Kristeva (1982, p. 200) discussed
the power of language in literature to ‘reveal an intense, passion-
ate attitude through which the speaking subject displays his desire
and calls upon the reader to embrace it, beyond words, through the
­a rchaic configuration of melody…’. What she says here applies also to
­Walrath’s techniques in Aliceheimer’s with the rhythm and flow of her
images providing affects from extreme sadness (and abjection) (as in
the drawing discussed above) to exuberant joy (catharsis) (when her
mother ­hallucinates her husband up in a tree) paralleling the melody
intonation in speech can provide.
In addition, in an interview dealing with an exhibition, Rites of
­Passage: Art for the End of the Century at the Tate Gallery a few years
ago, Kristeva (1995, p. 26) noted the weakening and banalisation of
signs, ‘which means,’ she says, ‘that we are subject to psychosomatic
reactions’.6 Artists use the body as a sign, but ‘it is always subverted,
transformed, an object at the frontier of subject and object, of word and
flesh’ (p. 26), basically abjected, as in some of Walrath’s images.
In the section, ‘Missing Pieces,’ we learn about another issue from
Walrath’s childhood, namely her mother’s ‘distorted affinity to all things
blond’ (Walrath, p. 17) – something Walrath couldn’t understand at
the time. An Armenian immigrant, Alice was (according to Walrath)
­‘beautiful, with thick, curly black hair, olive skin and big dark eyes’
(17). Knowledgeable about Lamarckian inheritance theories, Alice
would try to push her nose upwards in the hopes of changing her body
to US norms. Walrath was supposed to drop everything Armenian in
order to fit in. ‘Hiding,’ she says, ‘had always been Alice’s friend,’ the
‘missing pieces’ kept out of sight. The drawing again insists on ‘missing
pieces,’ showing Alice’s face with only one eye, or her head without any
facial features. While sympathetic now to her mother’s plight, clearly as
 Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s 181
a child Walrath resented having to hide her Armenian inheritance. With
­A lzheimer’s ‘blond values begin to disappear,’ and her mother dresses
‘like an Armenian princess’ (Walrath, p. 17). The ‘missing pieces’ are
being revealed.
Here Kristeva’s notion of art opening out to catharsis from a­ bjection
may again be helpful. In creating her mother’s body out of cut-up text,
especially in the first half of the graphic memoir, Walrath creates a sub-
jectivity for her mother that does not rely on memory or what many call
‘patriarchal’ time. Her mother’s textual body has its own kind of being,
something many do not attribute to people with Alzheimer’s. I­ mages
convey ambivalence and fear, since sometimes they are ­disturbing
(Alice’s face may miss an eye or other detail, for example), and often
fragmented.
But as we’ll see the catharsis emerges in her mother’s sheer joy at imag-
ining her husband up in the trees. Walrath adds colour – bright reds
and green – to convey this joy. In the following sections, ‘Flight,’ ‘Alice
Ungrounded’, and ‘Aliceheimer’s,’ Walrath attempts to give us access to
this joy happening to her mother. The drawings express even more than
can the words accompanying them, something of changes involved with
Alzheimer’s. One drawing shows her mother in the process of using her
new ‘special powers’ to ‘take off’; another draws Alice half up in the
air, with the text below reading ‘She’s still here. She’s just losing her
memory, the part that kept her grounded’. In these sections, we learn
that Alice tried to keep the ‘double dose of authority and confidence’
she had when Walrath was a child (the Kristevan ‘Maternal Authority’).
This voice enables her to carry on, even if, as we learned already, in fact
it had no actual power behind it anymore. The description of playing
scrabble with Alice, when she made up words, offers a glimpse again
into past conflict between mother and daughter. When Walrath (p. 19)
notes, ‘Challenge her? Never’ (19), we assume that in the past she did
challenge her mother, with the predictable resulting conflict. Reading to
Alice now enables them to find common ground.
As the condition continues, it seems Walrath begins to accommodate
to the inevitable reversal of mother as the abjected, and herself the child
struggling to be free. Now Alice is released from the Symbolic, living
in a kind of Imaginary of her own making, while Walrath assumes the
position of reason and the law, gradually coming to terms with, and
beginning to understand, the radical changes in Alice.
These changes are marked by Walrath changing the ghostly palette
that has dominated the text so far, now adding splurges of colour, as
noted. This suggests a vitality and energy lacking in earlier sections.
In a wonderful section, just called ‘Up,’ Walrath first conveys, and
then interprets, some of Alice’s hallucinations. One is that ‘Alice often
sees my father high in the branches of one of our maple trees’. Walrath
(p. 27) wonders what this means, and finally decides that, after years of
182 E. Ann Kaplan
tumultuous marriage, Alice’s vision reveals ‘longing – longing for him,
longing to make amends’. And ‘There he is, up in the branches, waiting
for her’.
The drawing opposite has two big panels: in one, Walrath and her
mother stand together, Walrath with her arm around her mother,
­watching Dave (Father, husband) dancing up in a tree. The other shows
her mother with her hand on her breast – the gesture a gifted ­therapist,
­Martha Whitney, taught Alice to make when it was dark and she
couldn’t see Dave up in the tree! One senses here Walrath’s new ten-
derness ­towards her mother, a love that enables her to see from within
Alice’s new mind how Alice now sees the world. Obviously, with the
changes in Alice, so her daughter, Dana Walrath, is gradually able to let
go of hostility, ambivalence, and aggression from inevitable childhood
conflicts, and come to love her ‘new’ mother. But not all at once: there
are more steps they have to go through.
An example of Walrath’s ability to follow her mother’s new mental
processes is when, enjoying meat for dinner, Alice asks her daughter
where she got the meat, stating, ‘Isn’t there rationing’? Walrath immedi-
ately understands her mother to be mentally back in the Second World
War, when indeed there was rationing. As always, Walrath does not try
to bring her mother back to the present; she is simply glad to see that her
mother’s comment made sense given a certain context. What may seem
like arbitrary fantasies or hallucinations Walrath rather sees follow a
certain logic. Alice’s brain, in other words, still works, but it’s working
differently. Walrath comments that instead of sticking with science and
biomedicine, which define visions as symptoms to be eradicated, she and
her husband rather used ‘other branches of science,’ validating Alice’s
special power, from their point of view, to accommodate simultaneous
realities in accordance with relativity theory.
As the memoir continues, Walrath turns to her very early life with her
mother, as if unconsciously drawn to explore the realm of the ­imaginary
when she and her mother were in a harmony depicted in the photo at
the book’s opening. It’s as if, because now her mother is no longer a con-
trolling, somewhat aggressive presence, a space has been opened up for
Walrath to look back at their relationship more objectively. And ­Walrath
actually returns to the moment of her birth. The section ‘­Umbilicus’ starts
with a drawing on the left-hand side, of a man (her father? Or, given the
strap with a light on it over the man’s head, the doctor?) h­ olding up baby,
saying ‘It’s a girl child’. On the right-hand side, the narrative starts with
a reflection that is a bit startling because, like that photo, so intimate:
‘I was never close to my mother, not counting those first nine months
and the six months that followed when she breastfed me, unlike most
mothers in the scientific 1960s’ (Walrath, p. 39). Her mother no longer
threatening provides room finally for Walrath to e­ xplore how she felt
about her mother, and how she now feels. Walrath describes the pleasant
 Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s 183
home Alice created for her, but what was missing was intimacy: ‘But no,
we were never close (that is after her first year, ed.) until Alzheimer’s’.
Further, Walrath explains that she didn’t invite her mother to live with
her (once Alice was sent to the lockdown Alzheimer’s unit at the facility)
because wanting to repay her mother or something like that. Rather, ‘it
was our unfinished business of finding a good “close,”’ she says.
And indeed Alzheimer’s does allow Walrath’s mother to behave quite
differently to her daughter, even if Alice does not really know what she’s
saying. It’s as if Alice’s split off self is now able to speak: For example,
Alice tells Walrath (in the course of a memory about her own childhood),
‘You know, you must have been a cute little kid. I wish I had known
you then’. This suggests that unconsciously Alice had appreciated her
daughter more than she could consciously acknowledge or indicate at
the time (unconscious competition? Envy of opportunities her daughter
had which Alice hadn’t?)
In the last sections of the graphic novel, it seems Walrath earns more
warm words from her mother, just because (ironically) her mother does
not consciously know that the woman taking care of her is her daughter.
So it’s a sort of bitter irony for Walrath, although it seems also r­ ewarding
because the emotion Alice expresses is genuine. For example, in the sec-
tion ‘Because You Are My Mother,’ Alice asks her daughter, ‘Dana, why
are you so good to me?’ Walrath answers ‘Because you are my mother,’
a concept Alice has a hard time accepting. Having been reminded about
her husband and Walrath’s siblings, Alice says ‘I wasn’t very good to you.
I’m sorry’. A remarkable moment of lucidity allows Alice to reach back
in time and finally finish that ‘unfinished business’ that Walrath says is
the reason she brought Alice into her home. Alice asks to be forgiven,
and Walrath accepts her wish. When Alice wants to know why Walrath
is forgiving, Walrath tells her ‘it’s because you did the best you could’.
This shows how far Walrath herself has come in moving from uncon-
scious hostility and aggression towards the ‘Maternal Authority’ of her
childhood to empathy for that ‘authority’ (p. 43) now that Alzheimer’s
had ironically opened up space for difficult and conflicting feelings to
emerge. Walrath sees herself as able to ‘redo the past,’ reworking her
prior fantasy of yanking her mother’s hair while brushing it, or getting
annoyed at the knots and ‘chopping all her hair off’. This last phrase
shows just how angry Walrath had been at her mother, and how much
now her feelings have changed. Walrath tells us she wants to listen to
her mother and help her through her mental difficulties. The moment
of lucidity, of course, passes as it must with AD, when her mother says
‘Running a hotel must be very hard’!
As the narrative comes to an end, we learn even more about Walrath’s
childhood and family difficulties of two distinct kinds. One was that
­evidently Walrath had looks closer to her white American father, while
her siblings were dark skinned with black hair. Neighbours queried
184 E. Ann Kaplan
Walrath as to where she came from, obviously making her feel very
­awkward. The second was her brother being disabled – something that
Alice experienced as shameful, especially when other parents refused
play dates with her son. Somehow, Walrath was to make things right, but
was also to blame when her brother had angry outbursts. Walrath, being
light-skinned, was to show Alice deserved her ‘wonderland,’ namely her
neat American suburban home and life.
It’s easy to see why Walrath would have built up a resentment
­towards her mother that could not be confronted and that smouldered
all these years until Alice’s condition. Now things can be said because
­A lzheimer’s ­allows for moving beyond social codes and conventions that
inhibit frank speaking. One snapshot reveals the merging of roles be-
tween mother and daughter – a merging that, if confusing, allows frank
talk. Alice’s hands are hurting from IV’s put in them while Alice was
ill in hospital. Walrath takes her hands and kisses them where it hurts.
­A lice thanks her and asks ‘Are you my mother?’ Walrath replies: ‘I am
your daughter,’ although her motherly attention justifies the question.
When Alice says that it’s nice that Walrath is her daughter, Walrath
(p. 55) says: ‘It is nice. At last’.
Another snapshot reveals still more about Walrath’s childhood and
­A lice’s inability to nurture her properly. Walrath is reminded of an
­incident when Alice confuses memories of her having periods with her
current Alzhheimer’s induced incontinence. Tending to her mother’s
­resulting messes, Walrath is reminded of how her mother was unable to
talk to Walrath about anything to do with the body, resulting in Walrath
having no preparation for when her periods began. Alice gave her the
most curt of instructions, and Walrath (p. 57) says: ‘I double bagged and
smoldered. The rage only surfaced when facts born from the filmstrip
(shown in school, ed.) didn’t pan out. No. Bleeding doesn’t stop when
you go swimming, that is, if you are from the Hair Belt’.
Walrath finally spends some time recounting details about her
­mother’s life and family in Armenia, where Walrath went to track down
older family members and do some family archival research. It seems her
project is part of a reparation process, involving coming to terms with
her genetic and historical background.
At the very end of the memoir, in a section ‘Who Are You?,’ W ­ alrath
has some important insights about relationships and social roles ­inspired
by her experience with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. As Walrath puts it,
‘Identity is the public side of self. Daughter, mother, anthropologist,
wife – each of these prescribes a series of social behaviors that go with
the role’. But Walrath learns that in fact what’s important, more so than
social roles, ‘is recognition of intention and behavior…’. Alice’s con-
stant questioning of Walrath as to her role (is Walrath her mother, her
­sister?) leads Walrath to say that somewhere Alice knew Walrath was
her daughter, and this, in turn, says Walrath (p. 69), ‘…helped me know
 Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s 185
my deepest self’. ‘Alice,’ Walrath says, ‘remained with me even when we
weren’t on Skype, because now, thanks to Alice, I recognize myself’.
This is a very profound result of Walrath’s experience caring for her
mother. It seems that in the process of writing about this time Walrath
was in fact working through a lot of unconscious rage which could now
become conscious. Meanwhile, in her own way, Alice too is able to work
through her unconscious guilt at how she failed Walrath as a mother,
and how she was unable to properly nurture her. Because of Alzheimer’s,
Alice is able to articulate as if to a stranger how she failed her daughter,
and to ask for forgiveness. Both mother and daughter seek reparation and
reconciliation (à la Melanie Klein) as Alice’s life is coming to an end. The
very last sequence of exchanges between the two over Skype might well
be showing the two back enjoying a kind of rare harmony found in a kind
of fantasy (Lacanian) imaginary visualised in the o ­ pening photograph.

Notes
1 There is by now a substantial sub-field in Age Studies with humanists d ­ ealing
specifically with dementia and Alzheimer’s in literature, film, the Arts. The
work of Anne Davis Basting (2009) is exemplary both in terms of theory and
practice, writing, and performance. See her ground-breaking monograph,
Forget Memory, See also bibliography in Kaplan/Chivers (2018), a forth-
coming collaborative essay where the many authors working in this area are
detailed.
2 In some States, Medicare may be used, but it’s mainly left to the families
of AD subjects to find and fund their care, being ground down to poverty
before being eligible for Medicare dollars See Peter Finch, ‘Continuing
Care Homes Need a Financial Checkup’. New York Times, Sunday Review,
­Sunday March 1, 2018, p. 7.
3 For information regarding vastly different provisions for elderly care
in ­European nations still retaining elements of prior State Welfare pro-
grammes, see a series of essays in Aging in European Societies (2013), edited
by ­Constantinos Phellas.
4 For more on continuing abjection of AD subjects and on arts and humanities
theories and practices for alternatives to prevailing dementia discourses, see
E. Ann Kaplan/Sally Chivers (2018), ‘Alzheimer’s, Age Panic, ­Neuroscience:
Media Discourses of Dementia and Care’. Forthcoming in The Oxford
­Encyclopedia for Research in Communication.
5 Much has been written in recent years about unique opportunities offered
by the comic form. Art Spiegelman’s (1986) graphic memoir Maus about the
Holocaust first generated attention to what the form could achieve, above
and beyond the long-standing popular comics prevalent across the globe.
One might say that Maus ushered in a new era for the comic form, hitherto
seen as an art form below ‘literature’. Increasingly, in the intervening years,
artists have gravitated to the form, re-inventing in each case new approaches
and different results, as for example in Alison Bechtel’s (2006) Fun Home
or Marjane Satrapi’s (2003) Persepolis. For more on the virtues of the comic
form and details of its history, see Hillary Chute (2010, 2017).
6 I want to thank Nicholas Chare for letting me know about this interview,
and further yet, providing a copy.
186 E. Ann Kaplan
References
Basting, A. D. (2009) Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with
Dementia. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press.
Bechdel, A. (2006) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
Chute, H. (2010) Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Chute, H. (2017) Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York:
Harper.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London and New York: Routledge.
Kaplan, E. A. & S. Chivers (2018). ‘Alzheimer’s, Age Panic, ­N euroscience:
Media ­D iscourses of Dementia and Care.’ in the Oxford Research
­E ncyclopedia of Communication [Online resource]. http://oxfordre.com/
com mu n ication /view/10.1093/acrefore /97801902 28613.0 01.0 0 01/
acrefore-9780190228613-e-765.
Klein, M. (1975) Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945,
Vol. 1. of The Writings of Melanie Klein. Ed. R. E. Money-Kyrle. London:
Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated from
the French by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated from
the French by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1995). ‘Of Word and Flesh: An Interview with Julia Kristeva by
Charles Penwarden.’ In S. Morgan and F. Morris (eds.), Rites of Passage: Art
for the End of the Century. London: Tate Gallery Publications, pp. 21–27.
Lacan, J. (1949/1977). ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.’ In J. Lacan (ed.), Ecrits: A ­Selection.
Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Co, pp. 1–7.
Satrapi, M. (2003) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon.
Spigelman, A. (1986) Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History.
New York: Pantheon.
Walrath, D. (2013) Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass.
­Yerevan: Harvest Publishers.
Part IV

Introduction
Rethinking the Monstrous-Feminine
through a Transnational Frame
Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn, and Audrey Yue

Most of the films discussed in The Monstrous-Feminine derive from

American and European cinema. In this final section, four chapters
consider the monstrous-feminine as it manifests in cultural produc-
tions from other geographical contexts. The sections open with Brett
­Farmer’s ‘Polluted Water’, which examines abjection in Thai cinema in
relation to the films of Poj Arnon. Arnon is a major force in the Thai
film industry but one whose corpus is often viewed ambivalently. Farmer
reads this ambivalence as, in part, a symptom of class-based snobbery.
In ­Thailand’s taste economy, admitting to admiring Arnon’s oeuvre
risks being perceived as evidence of a lack of cultural refinement. The
intensity of repulsion directed towards Arnon, however, leads Farmer
to argue that turning to class to explain his negative critical reception is
insufficient. Arnon’s films, Farmer explains, are identified as nam nao,
as ‘polluted water’, dangerously impure and therefore unfit for common
consumption. Arnon makes pictures that are abject.
Farmer carefully unpacks the make-up of this abjection, finding this
boundary-troubling manifests across genre, form, and content. The
two major topoi of abjection in Arnon’s films are female ghosts and
queers. Foregrounding the need to address issues of cultural ­specificity,
Farmer builds on Katarzyna Ancuta’s (2017) and Rachel Harrison’s
(2017) ­critically reflexive employment of Barbara Creed’s conception of
the monstrous-feminine in the context of Thai culture to explore how
­patriarchal anxieties in Thailand manifest by way of efforts to control
the unruly, abject feminine. Many of Arnon’s female characters can be
read as embodying this abject. Farmer gives the example of Dao (Mai
­Charoenpura) in Tai Hong [Still] (Dirs. Poj Arnon, Chatchai K ­ atenut,
Tanwarin Sukkhapsit & Manussa Vorasingha, Thailand, 2010), whose
character is middle-aged sex worker. In shots at the beginning of the
film, Farmer describes her as embodying ‘the ageing female grotesque’.
Age intersects with gender and class to produce a vision of abject
­femininity. This ­vision, however, based on surface appearances and the
­preconceptions they encourage, is subsequently replaced, subverted,
188 
Nicholas Chare et al.
when Dao is shown to be ‘a sassy working-class wisecracker’ who endears
herself to the audience through her world-weary wit. Dao ­reappears in
the final story of the quartet forming Tai Hong, a ­nonsensical horror
story which Farmer ­suggests ‘with its cavalcade of abject sexual and
social marginals – ­prostitutes, queers, ageing women – […] is classic
Poj Arnon’.
This practice of placing the socially marginalised at the centre of the
action also characterises Arnon’s signature work, his Ho Taeo Taek
­series of films which centres upon a group of kathoey who run a haunted
boarding house. Farmer traces the etymology of kathoey and also draws
attention to its shifting usage and contemporary complexity. Kathoey
­signals being ‘[b]etwixt and between masculinity and f­ emininity’,
­therefore embodying a capacity for border-crossing. In the Ho Taeo
Taek series, kathoey function as an interface between ‘the living and the
dead, the monstrous and the human’. The kathoey in the films possess
agency and are rebellious and transgressive. Farmer contrasts their de-
piction with those of other kathoey in contemporary Thai cinema which
­frequently operate in the service of national fantasies of unity and social
reconciliation. In Farmer’s persuasive sociopolitical reading, Arnon’s
kathoeys function as a reminder of the real social tensions that continue
to characterise Thai society. The disqualification of Princess Ubolratana
from running as a candidate in the 2019 Thai general ­election gave r­ ecent
international exposure to these ongoing social tensions. U ­ bolratana’s
candidacy was intended to reconcile the rival political factions of the
exiled Shinawatras and their rural powerbase and the urban middle class
who are opposed to them. Arnon’s films, as Farmer discusses, have been
censured for threatening ‘national morality’. His queer ribaldry clearly
perceived as a challenge to moral propriety as a source of social cohesion
and compliance.
Alongside his sociopolitical readings of Arnon’s films, Farmer also
compellingly argues that their popular appeal lies not so much in their
formulaic storyline but in their ‘ritualised structures of feeling’. The in-
tense affect registered by audiences viewing these horror-comedies is
central to their popularity. Like essays such as Cowie’s and Pisters’ in
this volume, Farmer is therefore attuned to the importance of attending
to sub-narrative dimensions within films. Understanding Arnon’s films
is not simply a case of following their storylines but also of appreciating
their affective dimensions.
Valerie Wee’s chapter, ‘The Monstrous-Feminine in the ­M illenial Jap-
anese Horror Film’, also extends the insights afforded by the monstrous-­
feminine beyond Western cinema. Additionally, Wee’s ­analyses parallel
Farmer’s in their attention to how horror films register social change.
She reads millennial Japanese horror films as expressing anxieties arising
from a weakening in Japan of traditional patriarchal values. Wee begins
with an historical overview of the figure of the onryō [vengeful ghost],
 Rethinking the Monstrous-Feminine  189
a common feature in recent Japanese horror cinema ­appearing in films
such as Ringu [Ring] (Dir. Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998), Hongurai
Mizu [Dark Water] (Dir. Hideo Nakata, Japan, 2002) and Ju-on [The
Grudge] (Dir. Takashi Shimizu, Japan, 2002). Inspired by The Mon-
strous-Feminine (Creed 1993), she reads the ­onryō as an abject figure.
For Wee, traditional tales featuring the onryō, in which women who
have been murdered by the men responsible for p ­ rotecting and caring
for them return from the dead to exert violent revenge, c­ annot be read
as affirming women’s autonomy as they end with the revengeful spirit
returning to the supernatural realm from whence they came. In this
sense, traditional patriarchal society is left untouched, u ­ nchanged. The
role of the onryōi is simply to warn men to fulfil their prescribed duties
towards women (Wee 2011). These wrathful wraiths do not ­challenge
the status quo.
Wee then situates the onryō within the sociopolitical situation of
­Japan at the end of the twentieth century, convincingly demonstrating
ways in which the figure of the vengeful female spirit has been revised
to respond to societal change. She outlines how traditional feminine
roles ­revolving around motherhood and caring are being increasingly
challenged ­despite the persistence of traditional gender hierarchies.
Wee describes the ­growing emergence of sexually liberated young
women ­unwilling to conform to traditional expectations of chasteness
and ­submissiveness. The onryō in millennial Japanese horror cinema
can be read as a ­response to these trends. In films such as Ringu and
­Hongurai Mizu, for instance, the vengeful spirits are not adult women
as was ­common in traditional tales of onryō but pre-teenage girls. The
age differential has come into being as concerns have risen in Japanese
society about the rise of ­‘selfish personal indulgence’ in shojo, young
females. The ghosts in Ringu and ­Hongurai Mizu, Sadako and Mitsuko,
are ­excessive, with their rage and zeal for revenge insatiable, refusing to
be bounded by convention. Wee reads this unappeasable dimension to
their characters as ­registering ­anxieties about conspicuous consumption
and self-indulgence in ­Japanese girls.
Building on her sensitive analysis of abjection in Ju-on in Japanese
Horror Films and their American Remakes (Wee 2014), Wee also traces
how the ghost in that film, Kayako, can be read as extending the on-
ryō tradition. Kayako is a woman rather than a girl but she possesses
similarities with Sadako and Mitsuko in that she supports fears of the
feminine as ‘essentially unfixable, indeterminate, and unknowable’.
The three films of Ringu, Hongurai Mizu, and Ju-on each demonises
the maternal even if their envisioning of the monstrous-feminine as it is
­incarnated in onryō is qualitatively different from traditional represen-
tations of the spirit. They all also explore the collapse of the traditional
family though many of their female characters. For Wee, therefore,
the films contribute to the demonisation of a new generation of young
190 Nicholas Chare et al.
women unwilling to conform to traditional norms of comportment and
­seeking intellectual, social, and sexual independence. After a period of
decline, the ­Japanese film industry is resurgent and more cinemas are
being built to meet ­consumer demand (Yamamura 2008). Viewing films
at the ­cinema is a leisure activity. As Laura Spielvogel (2003) has dis-
cussed, in Japan both the home and the workplace can be sources of
pressure and ­responsibility. In this context, leisure spaces such as the
cinema potentially provide a valuable opportunity for women to relax
and escape social norms. As Wee demonstrates, however, the ideological
underpinnings of contemporary Japanese horror films work to reaffirm
those very norms.
The penultimate essay in this section also examines the monstrous-­
feminine in the context of non-Anglophone cinema, in this case from
Slovenia. There is a strong personal dimension to Polona Petek’s chapter
‘Women in the Way?’ as Petek was taught by Creed who also went on
to supervise her doctoral thesis. Creed’s The Monstrous-­Feminine was
a touchstone for Petek’s subsequent thinking in relation to ­Slovenian
­cinema, a film industry in which women were, for a long time, highly
marginalised. It was while Petek was studying at the University of
­Melbourne that the first Slovenian feature-length fiction film directed by
a woman was released, Varuh meje [Guardian of the Frontier] (Dir. Maja
Weiss, Slovenia/Germany, 2002). A decade later, Petek begin to study in
depth the position of women in Slovenian cinema.
The Monstrous-Feminine has been important for Petek as it offers rich
ways in which to theorise marginality and reflect on efforts to e­ xploit
marginal status for positive political ends. One of Petek’s case studies
in this context has been the director Maja Weiss whose film Varuh meje
was a revelation when Petek came across it listed as a ­feature at the
2003 Melbourne Queer Film Festival. Weiss’ films frequently include
borders and boundaries (physical, emotional, figurative, and literal) as a
theme. The border also informs another of Petek’s case studies, the films
of Sonja Prosenc. Petek reads Prosenc’s Zgodovina ljubenzi [History of
Love] (Dir. Sonja Prosenc, Slovenia, 2018) as a work where the narrative
is less important than the emotions it enables the director to stage. This
is reminiscent of Farmer’s emphasis in the first chapter of this section
on the importance of feeling in Arnon’s films. Petek’s sensitive a­ nalysis
of Zgodovina ljubenzi emphasises the significance of the repeated v­ isual
references to water in the film. Petek also notes its sophisticated use of
sound. Given the importance of the border as a theme in the films of
Prosenc and Weiss, The Monstrous-Feminine, with its many insights
into boundary-crossings and anxieties about border-dissolutions is an
invaluable resource. Petek also turns for inspiration to the work of Henk
van Houtum on borders, the ordering of space and the claiming of place.
The final essay in this section and the volume, is Jeanette Hoorn’s
‘In-Your-Face’ which adopts a transnational approach to the monstrous-­
feminine exploring how it manifests in examples of modern and
 Rethinking the Monstrous-Feminine  191
contemporary art from Australia, Mexico, and the US. Like the three
preceding essays, Hoorn’s complex exploration of the role of the abject
in Australian Indigenous artist Destiny Deacon’s works and also those
of the multi-cultural Mexican painter Frida Kahlo demonstrate the
value of Creed’s ideas for cross-cultural analysis. Hoorn deftly outlines
the value of the monstrous-feminine for analysing a range of artistic me-
dia and movements including bio-art and art exploring animal-human
relations. Her primary focus, however, is on how representations of the
abject female body relate to issues of male power and colonialism.
Hoorn begins by analysing Kahlo’s works as art produced from a
­liminal position. The limen is, as Stephen Greenblatt (1995, p. 29) notes,
‘the threshold or margin, the place that is no-place’. By i­dentifying Kahlo
as a painter of the margins, the marginalised, Hoorn, like ­Petek in the pre-
ceding essay, emphasises the value of the monstrous-­feminine as a way of
conceptualising social ostracism and means to contest and ­resist it. Some
of Kahlo’s paintings provide an uncompromising ­portrayal of parturi-
tion. Hoorn reads these as breaking with a sanitised rhetoric of birth that
suppresses its bloody, painful reality. Hoorn then moves to a consider-
ation of the American feminist artist Judy Chicago, specifically her much
celebrated installation The Dinner Party (1979) and the controversies
it initially generated. In her subsequent discussion of Cindy Sherman’s
photography, Hoorn examines how Laura Mulvey (1996) drew inspira-
tion from Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine for her own interpretations
of Sherman’s work. Mulvey discusses Creed’s i­nfluence on this research
in her interview for this volume. Remaining in a North American con-
text, Hoorn then considers Carolee Schneemann’s p ­ erformance works
and her portfolio of photographs Eye Body. Some of the photographs in
Eye Body could easily pass as stills from a horror film. Taken cumula-
tively, the analyses of the works by ­Schneemann, ­Sherman, Chicago, and
Kahlo in their varied media, painting, performance, ­photography, and
installation demonstrate the extent to which the m ­ onstrous-feminine
can serve as an important explanatory f­ ramework for modern and con-
temporary art.
Hoorn concludes with an in-depth reading of Deacon’s art. Deacon is
principally known for her photographic works which draw attention to
the racism and structural violence that are a legacy of settler colonial-
ism. She has always been attuned to the role of language as an o ­ ppressive
force as her use of word play and neologisms attests to. H ­ oorn’s subtle
and perceptive reading of Deacon’s artworks builds out from a con-
sideration of them as reflections on liminality. For Hoorn, Deacon’s
­engagement with abjection is understated and nuanced in contrast with
some of the more visceral takes that can be found in contemporary art.
Hoorn’s essay, like those of Farmer, Petek, and Wee, powerfully demon-
strates the kinds of insights the monstrous-feminine can provide outside
of the context of Anglophone horror cinema in which it was initially
conceived.
192 Nicholas Chare et al.
References
Ancuta, K. (2017) ‘Beyond the Vampire: Revamping Thai Monsters for the
­Urban Age,’ eTropics: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 16(1),
pp. 31–45.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Greenblatt, S. (1995) ‘Liminal States and Transformations,’ in S. Morgan and
F. Morris (eds.), Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century. London:
Tate Gallery Publications, pp. 28–30.
Harrison, R. (2017) ‘Dystopia as Liberation: Disturbing Femininities in
­Contemporary Thailand,’ Feminist Review, 116(1), pp. 64–83.
Mulvey, L. (1996) Fetishism and Curiosity. London: BFI.
Spielvogel, L. (2003) Working Out in Japan: Shaping the Female Body in Tokyo
Fitness Clubs. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wee, V. (2011) ‘Patriarchy and the Horror of the Monstrous Feminine,’ ­Feminist
Media Studies 11(2), pp. 151–165.
Wee, V. (2014) Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes. New
York: Routledge.
Yamamura, E. (2008) ‘Socio-economic Effects of Increased Cinema Attendance:
The Case of Japan,’ The Journal of Socio-Economics 37, pp. 2546–2555.
11 Polluted Water
Demotic Thai Cinema and
Queer Abjection in the Films
of Poj Arnon
Brett Farmer

In 2015, Poj Arnon,1 one of Thailand’s most successful contemporary

film-makers, celebrated his 20th anniversary as a feature film director.
In the two decades since his breakout directorial debut with the 1995
hit comedy, Sati Taek Sud Khua Lok/Crazy, Arnon directed close to
30 other motion pictures and executive-produced a dozen more. It is
a prodigious output made all the more impressive by the fact that the
­majority of these films were solid box office performers with several
ranking among the highest-grossing domestic releases of recent times
(Nainapat 2017). Given this extraordinary track-record, it shouldn’t
surprise that Arnon’s anniversary milestone garnered considerable
­attention in both the print and online Thai media. What might prove
less expected is that, for the most part, the tenor of the coverage was
distinctly icy – even ­derisive. The respected film magazine, Bioscope,
provides a ­characteristic example. Devoting a multi-page retrospective
to ‘Poj Arnon … 20 Years,’ complete with photographic highlights and
specially commissioned portraits, the tributary guise of the lavish spread
was quickly undercut by the accompanying commentary which starts:

Love him or loathe him, you can’t have escaped the cinematic v­ ision
of Poj Arnon in some form. His name is never out of the film ­industry
and, reviewed on the basis of numbers alone, there’s no denying he
has worked regularly and continuously. Of all our current genera-
tion of filmmakers, it must be said that he alone is the person who
makes Thai movies, one of the few who can survive making real
old-style movies.
(Pimnam 2016, p. 45)

Damning with faint praise – and, even then, through gritted-teeth – the
thinly veiled condescension evidenced here indicates the ambivalent posi-
tion Poj Arnon has come to assume in contemporary Thai film cultures.
His brash and often vulgar brand of populist film-making plays well with
substantial segments of the domestic Thai audience, but among others,
notably the middle-classes and cultural elites, he is, to quote the headline
of another media profile, ‘a man maligned’ (Pajee 2017, p. 12) branded
as everything from ‘Thailand’s reigning cinematic snakeoil salesman’
194 Brett Farmer
(Wise Kwai 2014, para. 2) to its ‘infamous master of schlock’ (Winston
2016, p. 7). Detractors of Arnon’s films, writes Kong Rithdee, ‘never get
tired of ridiculing, disparaging and raising eyebrows (or something else)
at what they see as pre-packaged nonsense that corrupts the integrity of
Thai cinema in the director’s prolific output’ (Rithdee 2012, p. 4).
As the moralising rhetoric of ridicule and raised-eyebrows might
­suggest, a good deal of the disdain for Arnon’s brand of populist film-­
making is an effect of class-based taste economies, pure and simple.
Scratch the surface of even the most benign aesthetic judgement, faithful
readers of Bourdieu (1984, pp. 2–6) will know, and one will inevitably
find a correlative social judgement working to index and affirm taxono-
mies of status and rank. It’s a process of taste-based social distinction that
assumes a particularly intense cast in Thailand, a deeply status-­oriented
country where complex codes of hierarchical relationality g­ overn nearly
every aspect of social and cultural interaction (Mulder 2000, pp. 43–55).
Thailand has, moreover, undergone tumultuous processes of economic
growth and social modernisation in recent times that has seen the rise to
ascendancy of vast new urban middle-classes who explicitly stake, and
often fiercely guard, their precarious claims to legitimacy in the valorised
taste economies of spectacular cultural consumption and commodity
lifestyles (Phongpaichit and Baker 2016; Vorng 2017).
Cinema has been a significant part of this latter-day history of
­expanded social distinction in Thailand. Prior to the economic boom
of the late-twentieth century, Thai movies were a largely déclassé affair,
consisting of quickly produced, low-budget products geared to socially
devalued markets of teenagers, urban labourers, and Thailand’s massive
agrarian sector – ‘fit only for low-class people and rural nobodies’ as one
observer of the time put it (Hamilton 1994, p. 151). In addressing these
popular audiences, Thai films cultivated a strategically ­sensationalist style
of attractional cinema rooted in misprized traditions of rural folk c­ ulture
and demotic carnivalesque. Widely described through the ­culinary ­idiom
of khrob tuk rot or ‘bursting with all flavours’ (Fouquet 1989; Herrera
2015), vernacular Thai movies mixed disparate elements, styles, and
genres into a multiform ensemble that offered optimal points of a­ ppeal to
the heterogeneous reading formations of the popular classes but bore scant
resemblance to the well-wrought ideals of international film ­aesthetics,
thus further reinforcing the domestic industry’s r­ eputation for unrefined
boorishness. In the 1990s, however, Thai cinema experienced a marked
reversal of fortunes when a raft of factors stemming from the era’s eco-
nomic boom and the increased internationalisation of capital and c­ ultural
flows led to an exponential improvement in the range, style and cultural
cachet of local film-making (Harrison 2006; Lewis 2003). ­Sporting vastly
improved production values and ­international-style ­‘quality ­aesthetics’
and screened in the gleaming new multiplexes of ­Thailand’s roaring
consumerist infrastructure, the renovated products of the so-called ‘new
 Polluted Water 195
Thai cinema’ surged in popularity and status, b ­ ecoming part of the
era’s ‘upwardly mobile, bourgeois culture of “globalized” consumption’
­(Ingawanij 2006, p. 149).
Within this context, older models of vernacular Thai film didn’t
­disappear, but, freighted with further negative attributes of archaic
anachronism, they became ever more marginal and devalued. It’s here
that we can begin to contextualise the widespread disdain for a film-
maker like Poj Arnon who, to repeat the telling description from Bio-
scope above, remains one of the few who continues to ‘make Thai
movies … real old-style movies’ (Pimnam 2016, p. 45). A self-avowed
populist––‘I make movies for the masses,’ he asserts, ‘the lower and mid-
dle market … movies that are fun and easy to understand’ (in P­ etvirojchai
2017, p. 23)––Arnon is the latter-day heir to the fast-and-furious tradi-
tions of demotic Thai film, complete with ad hoc production practices
and patchwork khrob tuk rot textuality. With little formal education
and no film training, he churns out movies at lightning speed, typically
without a script and improvising as he proceeds. ‘I’m not a person who
studies theory, I just do it’, he declares with characteristic chutzpah
(Pimnam 2016, p. 45). It is a utilitarian, quick-and-dirty approach to
film-­making as provisional trade that, not surprisingly, sits uncomfort-
ably with the bourgeois quality ideals and ‘world-class’ aspirations of
the ‘new Thai cinema’. Detractors ‘may say [my films] are tasteless’, the
director ­declares, but ‘I have the audience on my side. I make films for
my fans’ (Rithdee 2009, p. 1).
On its own, however, a class-based taste analysis isn’t quite ­sufficient
to account for the full weight of revulsion – or, for that matter,
­fascination – elicited by the cinema of Poj Arnon. As the director him-
self points out, he is hardly the only Thai film-maker to churn out pop-
ulist fare, so ‘I have to wonder what I did … that they come down so
­heavily on my films’ (Pajee 2017, 12). To answer that requires, perhaps,
a deeper probe. One of the Thai language terms used most frequently
to denote the d ­ emotic style of films made by Poj Arnon – as indeed
other ­‘lowbrow’ media entertainments – is nam nao or ‘polluted water’
(Eaosriwongs 1980; Fouquet 2003). Typically translated into English
via the much weaker cognate of ‘trash’, nam nao is charged with a deep
frisson of c­ ultural anxiety that ‘evokes the look and smell of stagnant
water and rotting garbage … of decay and refuse,’ of a ‘social pollution
that need[s] to be expelled or quarantined’ (Farmer 2015, p. 215). It is,
in other words, a potent expression of abjection.
Julia Kristeva famously defines abjection as that which ‘disturbs
­identity, system, order [… and] does not respect borders, positions,
rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (1982, p. 4). In
her ­primarily psychoanalytic purview, abjection is linked to processes
of identity constitution as the developing subject – or in the case of
­collective identities, the developing social group – comes into being
196 Brett Farmer
through processes of differentiation and expulsion, drawing borders
around self and other, subject and object. The abject, she writes, is ‘what
is jettisoned from the symbolic system … the logic of prohibition … of
excluding filth … ­establishing the “self and clean” [corps propre] of each
social group if not of each subject’ (Kristeva 1982, pp. 64–65). To the
extent that abjection remains the grounds of subjective ­production, what
is deemed abject and unclean is never entirely ejected, never ­completely
erased. It broods over the very borders it defines, ever poised to revolt,
to return, to pollute, setting in motion a perpetual p ­ as-de-deux of
­attraction and revulsion. ‘We may call it a border’, Kristeva writes, but
‘abjection is above all ambiguity … a composite of judgment and affect,
of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives’ (1982, pp. 9–10).
It is a theoretical image that corresponds suggestively both to the
semiotic valences of nam nao––with its metaphoric condensation
of borderless fluidity and profane contamination – and to the outra-
geous mongrelism of demotic Thai cinema. In the case of Poj Arnon,
his films present a giddy web of abject border-crossings that fuel much
of the a­ nxiety at play in the love-him-or-loathe-him, dread-and-desire
­extremes of his polarised reception. Aesthetically, they continue the pro-
nounced textual eclecticism of khrob tuk rot – with moments of comedy,
romance, pathos, fear, action, and music rubbing cheek by jowl with
little sense of logic or cohesion – while upping the attractional ante with
a rash of more contemporary cultural flourishes and allusions. The result
is something of a sensorial assault that, depending on perspective, can be
exhilarating or disorienting. ‘The movie has romance and family drama
parts throughout, with a bit of everything squeezed in,’ huffs one disap-
proving reviewer of Poj’s 2018 film Toot Too Ku Chart, ‘The result is a
sense of “too muchness” (kwam-lon-ti-woe-wang) in the film. There’s
no control, whatever happens happens’ (23Scenes 2018, para. 5). Faced
with the aesthetic lawlessness of Arnon’s mongrel films, readers primed
for meaning, order, and control experience the anxious non-sense and
dis-order of the abject – ‘the place’, as Kristeva asserts, ‘where meaning
collapses’ (2).
It is part of the reason commentators almost universally struggle to
denominate, let alone evaluate, his films and routinely fall back on either
a sui generis exceptionalism – where a ‘Poj Arnon film/nang Poj Arnon’
acts as a taxonomic register unto itself (Petvirojchai 2017, p. 21) – or
resort to strings of awkward hyphenates2:

The bottom line is: [Poj Arnon] has been accused of making bad
films. Stupid films. Of producing Trash … Of promoting crimes
against artistic integrity by giving birth to the cine-hybrid that can
only be witnessed in Thai cinema: the homosexualised horror-­
comedy, featuring gays and ghosts and gags, inwardly multiplied
among one another into a species that’s garish, vulgar and, hell, fun.
(Rithdee 2009, p. 1)
 Polluted Water 197
The turbid mix of weighted metaphors here – trash and criminality, birth
and hybridity, death and perversion – indicates that abjection in the films
of Poj Arnon isn’t limited to the scandalous impurities of its ­mongrel
aesthetics but saturates every level: form and content, s­ trategy and state-
ment, discourse and narrative. And taking the alliterative ­allusion to
‘gays and ghosts and gags’ as a cue, there are two topoi of abjection that
loom particularly large in Poj’s films: female ghosts and queers.
In terms of the former, the female ghost or phi – a category that
in the Thai language includes not just spectres but animistic spirits,
­deities, and demons – is a longstanding staple of Thai cinema across
­multiple forms (Fuhrmann 2016; Knee 2005). It is also a classic fi ­ gure
of ­cinematic abjection. In her influential elaboration of Kristevan ­theory
for feminist studies of horror cinema, Barbara Creed (1993) iden-
tifies female ghosts as a privileged expression of what she terms ‘the
­monstrous-feminine’: ‘what it is about woman that is shocking, terri-
fying, horrific, abject’ (1). As Creed argues, female corporealities and
other manifestations of the feminine operate as a powerful source of
abjection in ­phallocentric imaginaries, playing out primal fantasies of
incorporation and ­separation from the maternal body and the violent
secondary elaborations of ­patriarchal misogyny. With its spectacular
catalogue of monstrous ­female archetypes – ‘archaic mother, monstrous
womb, vampire, possessed monster, femme castatrice, witch, castrating
mother’ (Creed 1993, pp. 151–152) – horror cinema functions as ‘a form
of modern defilement rite [that] attempts to separate out the symbolic
order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all
that her universe signifies’ (Creed 1993, p. 14).
It is a provocative account that has generated widespread ­critical
­interest and enquiry, even in cultural contexts far removed from Creed’s
principal focus on Hollywood film (Dumas 2018; Lee 2015; Ng 2014).
­Rachel Harrison, in exploring the monstrous-feminine as a lens for
­reading ‘disturbing femininities in contemporary Thailand’ (2017,
p. 64), wisely cautions against an erasure of cultural ­specificities, ­noting
that ‘Creed’s Eurocentric focus’ and adoption of ‘theoretical ­positions
­derived from … Judaeo-Christian philosophical thought’ don’t always
translate ­automatically into the Thai context (p. 72). Nevertheless,
as ‘a way of u ­ nderstanding how woman is made monstrous … and a
threat to the moral, spiritual, and social status quo’, theories of the
­monstrous-feminine, Harrison avers, remain ‘highly relevant to Thai
cultural studies and to instances of its cinematic horror genre’(ibid.),
where ‘female spirits and ghosts’ (ibid.) abound. Katarzyna Ancuta sim-
ilarly argues that ‘Creed’s model of the monstrous feminine can be criti-
cized … for promoting ­cultural conceptualisations of gender that may be
­incompatible with Southeast Asian realities’ (2017, p. 35), but it resonates
powerfully with Thai patriarchal anxieties around sexual ­difference
and psychosocial measures ‘to exercise control over [female] sexuality’
through cultural spectacles of demonisation and abjection (ibid.).
198 Brett Farmer
Importantly, both Harrison and Ancuta extend the ­hermeneutic
a­ mbit of the Thai monstrous-feminine to encompass inter-related modes
of ­sexual and social difference such as class, ethnicity and ­region.
­T hailand’s ‘skewed gender and socio-economic hierarchies which ­favour
men over women, rich over poor, and Bangkok over the rest of the
country’ (p. 36), writes Ancuta, imbue its cinematic iterations of female
monstrosity with multiple modes of abjection deemed threatening to the
authority of not just masculinities but ‘the public image of a country
focused on the u ­ rban middle classes’ (ibid.). In a similar vein, H
­ arrison
suggests that Thai cinematic images of the monstrous-feminine con-
dense and speak to a range of anxieties and struggles between opposing
sexual, social and spatial realms:

the rational, enlightened and conservative-nationalist masculine

thrust, perceived as being ‘modern’ and represented by Siam’s po-
litical and cultural elite at the centre, and the unrestrained, super-
natural expressions of the feminine as sexualised body, aligned with
the supposedly pre-modern ‘irrationality’ of ‘the natural world’ at
the periphery.
(Harrison 2017, p. 75)

It is an argument that chimes evocatively with the cinematic ­articulations

of feminine monstrosity in the work of Poj Arnon which is, as we have
seen, centrally coded as scandalous ‘other’ to Thailand’s hegemonic
bourgeois subject positions and sensibilities. Instructively, the multiple
monstrous spectres that haunt Arnon’s films are typically drawn from
the twilight world of social subalterns: premodern revenants, ­provincials,
urban workers, and sexual outsiders.3
Consider, by way of example, Tai Hong/Still (2010), an omnibus
­quartet of interlinked ghost stories which was conceived, produced,
and (partially) directed by Arnon. Taking its name from phi tai hong
or ‘ghosts of bad death’, the classic vengeful spirits of Thai folklore, Tai
Hong weaves together four separate tales – each helmed by a different
director – based loosely around a series of real-life murders and t­ ragedies
ripped from the headlines of recent Thai news. Though it is a somewhat
more sober affair than most entries in the Poj Arnon oeuvre – due, no
doubt, to the tempering contributions of the other three film-makers –
Tai Hong still exhibits the maverick film-maker’s trademark textual
transgression and thematic focus on social and sexual misfits.
A prologue sequence, directed by Arnon, introduces the central
­characters who will subsequently feature in the constituent tales by way
of a framing device where they cross paths in the lead-up to a New Year’s
Party at Santaka nightclub. This diegetic location is an obvious riff on
Santika Club, a Bangkok entertainment venue that tragically burned
down during New Year’s celebrations in 2009, killing 66 partygoers,
 Polluted Water 199
and that forms the basis for the first of the film’s four tabloid-driven
ghost stories (‘Fire’ 2009).4 Chief among the characters introduced
in this opening sequence is Dao, an ageing exotic dancer, played with
tough brillo by celebrated Thai singer and veteran TV-film actor, Mai
Charoenpura. Apart from the star casting, Dao’s textual centrality is
underscored by the fact she is afforded the very first shot in the film:
a studied close-up of her mouth, lips moist and slightly parted, as she
­meticulously paints them with a run of blood red gloss, accompanied by
the ominous strains of an atonal musical score. The marked combina-
tion here of sexualised femininity and uncanniness is further accented
as we watch Dao – intercut in parallel montage with shots of the other
characters – progressively make up her face in a series of fragmentary
close-ups. At one point, she stops abruptly and, in a weighted moment
of literal abjection, plucks out a nasal hair with her fingers, momentarily
staring at the detached and abjectified body part with unsettling dispas-
sion before resuming her ritual of cosmetic sexual enhancement. The
fact that Dao is evidently coded as a sex worker, a literal painted lady,
and one moreover who is past the flush of youth – Mai Charoenpura was
41 at the time of filming – further enshrouds her character with addi-
tional registers of illicit sex and the ageing female grotesque.
Yet, having introduced Dao through a classic horror tropology of
­abjectified female sexuality, the film sets about subverting or at least
problematising its signifying effects. Setting off to her job in a cheap
and forlornly empty gentlemen’s club, Dao gives it her all in an increas-
ingly desperate pole dance, accompanied by a pronounced musical shift
on the soundtrack to a hackneyed disco-beat backing track. A ­quartet
of young men enter the bar, take one look at the slightly long-in-the-
tooth woman gyrating like a mad thing on the stage, and promptly
leave. ­Engrossed in her athletic performance, Dao continues for several
beats, all forced toothy smiles and backside wiggles, when, suddenly
realising her potential clients have fled, she stops mid-twerk, drops the
act, and mutters to herself in coarse argot, ‘Where the fuck did they
go … all the other girls went to Dubai, I should have gone too. I’m outta
here!’ Played with sharp self-deprecating irony, the sudden switch from
the enigmatic, threatening seductress of the opening shots to a sassy
working-class wisecracker recodes Dao as an endearingly comic – and
very human – presence, ­suggesting that whatever guise of monstrous
­femininity she may assume is a knowing performance. It is an interplay
between ­monster and ­human, mask and self, deception and truth that
the film keeps in abeyance through the fourth and final story of the
­omnibus quartet where Dao returns as a protagonist.
Titled ‘Khuen Khru/Haunting Motel’, the final story, which is entirely
directed by Arnon, signals a marked change in the film’s style and tenor.
Where the preceding stories are all presented with relative naturalism de-
signed for optimal chills, ‘Kheun Khru’ is geared for horror-comic excess.
200 Brett Farmer
It is also the only one of the four entries to use a female-­dominant narra-
tional economy with Dao serving as primary focalising agent throughout.
As it opens, we see Dao saunter with feigned nonchalance to the end of
a line of very young streetwalkers. She sports a prominent surgical mask
in an ostensible attempt to conceal her age, while literalising the interplay
of mask and role established in the prologue. After a bit of humorous
business with failed client negotiations, Dao is approached by a pair of
bumbling young men on a motorcycle, Thua (Rutchanon Sookprakorb)
and Dam (Kachapa Tancharoen). The fact that their names combine
to form a colloquial Thai expression for anal sex is a none-too-subtle
­index of the queer dynamics at play in the set-up where the outrageously
gay Dam is urging his reluctant straight friend Thua to engage Dao’s
­services for a threesome. Engineering a deal, the three set off rather un-
gracefully on the motorbike to one of Bangkok’s many curtained drive-in
‘love ­motels’. There they encounter a crazed cat-stroking ‘Gold-Toothed
Aunty’ (Wasana Chalakorn) who manages the motel and tells the hapless
trio that the room they have rented is haunted by a phi tai hong. Cue
the scene for a delirious sequence of spoofed Thai horror conventions,
shifting identities and sexual farce that sees all four of the characters in
the motel assume and then relinquish the roles of seducer and seduced,
haunter and haunted, killer and victim, living and dead. At one point,
Dao is identified as the terrifying spectre, slithering across the floor with
the classic menacing moves of the long-haired female ghost of Thai and
other Asian cinemas, only to have it redefined in the next instant as a
lapse of perception. In the end, Dao is actually revealed to be the only
figure in the tale who isn’t a ghost via a flashback sequence where we see
Dam, crossdressed in skirt and wig, trying to seduce a protesting Thua
in the motel room. In a fit of homophobic panic, Thua kills Dam, only
to have the Gold-Toothed Aunty enter the room and kill Thua, but not
before he, in turn, uses his last breath to kill the Gold-Toothed Aunty.
The net effect is patently nonsensical and logically inconsistent, but lots
of disorienting fun and, with its cavalcade of abject social and sexual
marginals – prostitutes, queers, ageing women – it is classic Poj Arnon.
Without doubt, Arnon’s penchant for abject social and sexual ­dissidence
finds it fullest expression in the hugely successful Ho Taeo Taek series
of queer comic horror films, widely regarded by most commentators,
­including the director himself, as his signature work (Petvirojchai 2017,
p. 20). With a crude play-on-word title that defies translation but equates
roughly to ‘the dormitory hotel of chaotic sissies’, Ho Taeo Taek focusses
on a trio of ageing flamboyant kathoey – a Thai gender/sexual category
of transfemininity – who run a haunted boarding house for young men in
­provincial Thailand. Launched in 2007, the first Ho Taeo Taek (Arnon)
proved such a winner at the Thai box office that it generated not only a ­series
of ­direct sequels – six to date and counting – but an emulative mini-cycle
of kathoey-themed horror-comedies.5 Each Ho Taeo Taek film works to a
programmatic formula: the kathoey protagonists encounter some manner
 Polluted Water 201
of supernatural haunting, and their efforts to exorcise the malevolent spec-
tres furnish the pretext for 90+ minutes of ‘wacky h ­ omo-gags, succulent
expletives and flippant horror’ (Rithdee 2009, p. 1).
The formulaic recursiveness of the series suggests that the ­pleasure
of these films is rooted not so much in story or even meaning, as in
­ritualised structures of feeling, the intense affective and psychical
­energies ­afforded by their sensationalist spectacles of wanton u
­ nruliness.
It’s not without significance that the series is grounded in a hybridised
register of horror-comedy: two genre forms known for their ritual
repetitions and ‘lowbrow’ status as what Linda Williams terms ‘body
genres’, so-called because they ‘privilege the sensational’ and play out
reactive effects on the body of the viewer (1991, p. 4).6 Moreover, both
genres are, as we have seen with horror, constitutively invested in spec-
tacles of abjection linked, more often than not, to the body. Whether
in terms of their ­iconography of befouled objects – corpses, ghouls,
freaks, blood, ­excrement – or their comic rhetoric of filth – toilet jokes,
sexual ­innuendo, profanities – the Ho Taeo Taek series revels in the
obscene detritus of corporeal, erotic, and social abjection. Refusing
­injunctions against the monstrous Other, the films bring the occluded
spectres of a­ bjection from the margins to the centre, creating a sur-
real and p ­ otentially subversive realm of riotous possibility not unlike a
Bakthtinian carnivalesque, ‘a world inside out’ where ‘rank, privileges,
norms, and prohibitions’ are suspended and hierarchies inverted ‘from
top to b ­ ottom’ (Bakhtin 1984, p. 11).7
That the Ho Taeo Taek series positions transgendered kathoey at
the heart of this topsy-turvy derangement accentuates the ­sexual and,
­arguably, political dimensions of its destabilising operations. ­Popularly
translated as ‘ladyboy’, but also known in Thai as ‘second kind of
woman/sao braphet song’, kathoey is a liminal category with long
roots dating back to pre-modern Siamese cosmologies and their ternary
­systems of gender/sexual organisation (Morris 1994). In recent times,
the category has been subject to multiple revisions and m ­ odernisations –
opening up into ‘an array of kathoey varieties … in the ­domains of sex
­(hermaphroditism), gender (cross-dressing, transsexualism) and ­sexuality
(homosexuality)’ (Jackson 2000, p. 411) – but it is certainly not quit of its
interstitial status nor, indeed, of its archaic associations with pre-­modern
traditions (Käng 2014). Betwixt and between m ­ asculinity and feminin-
ity, the past and the present, kathoey signify a r­ esonant and highly vis-
ible register of trans-categorical displacement or what M ­ arjorie Garber
calls ‘category crisis’ (1992, p. 16): ‘a failure of definitional distinction,
a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits border-crossings
from one (apparently distinct) category to a­ nother’ (ibid.). It is part of
the reason kathoey figure so prominently in Thai folk cultures as spirit
mediums where, as Rosalind Morris argues, ‘the kathoey becomes the
displaced synonym … for a space (a spacing) through which alterity, and
thus death, passes’ (2000, p. 134).
202 Brett Farmer
The radical capacity of the kathoey for border-crossing and liminal
displacement is vital to the semiotics of the Ho Taeo Taek series where
the kathoey protagonists are positioned across multiple, intersecting
­categories of difference. Apart from the obvious aspect of their sexual
intermediacy, kathoey function in the films as a literal interface between
the living and the dead, the monstrous and the human. They are the
ones who confront the haunting entities and who ultimately serve to
pacify them at film’s end, frequently after more ‘conventional’ figures
of ­institutional authority – Buddhist monks, Brahmin priests, male
­shamans, and ghostbusters – have failed. Indeed, one of the kathoey
protagonists, ­Pancake, played by ­beloved comic Kohtee Aramboy, is
­herself a ghost, killed in the first episode and ­returned as a spectral force
who aids her sisters’ engagements with the other side. In keeping with
these ghostly dimensions, the kathoey characters also denote a blurred
temporality, mixing iconographic ­signifiers – costume, props, settings –
from vastly different eras to the point where it becomes impossible to
place them and the films historically. Are they in the past, the present, or
somewhere in-between?
The kathoey of Ho Taeo Taek assume an equally ambivalent social
­status. Though kathoey in Thailand seldom face the kind of violent trans-
phobic ostracism suffered by trans- and genderqueer-identified people in
many other societies, they are still subject to stigmatisation in what Peter
Jackson calls ‘the tolerant yet unaccepting character of Thai discourses
about non-normative sexuality and gender’ (1999, p. 230). Kathoey are
figures of ambivalent fascination in contemporary Thai ­culture and the
degree to which they are tolerated is almost ­always ­indexed to ­socially con-
servative scripts of classed Thainess. The most tolerated, even ­admired,
kathoey are those who ‘exhibit a high standard of ­feminine beauty’ and
‘adopt the reserved, polite manners and speech of a ­genteel Thai man or
woman’, Jackson contends, while the most ­stigmatised kathoey are ‘those
considered loud-mouthed, aggressive or lewd, q ­ ualities widely regarded
as low-class’ (ibid.). No prizes for ­guessing where the Ho Taeo Taek crew
sit on this spectrum. Indeed, a good deal of the films’ scandalous comedy
arises from the slippage between the protagonists’ outward assumption
of a demure classed Thai ­femininity and their sudden eruptive vulgarity
of speech and comportment as they curse, shriek, spit, fart, and, in a
particularly Thai ­social taboo, use their feet to humiliate each other
and their ­opponents. Moreover, while their spectacular consumerist
style and professional ambitions as small b ­ usiness operators suggest an
aspirational ­bourgeois habitus, there is never any doubt about their pre-
carious subaltern ­status in the rigid ­hierarchies of the Thai class system.
In the series’ third i­nstalment, Ho Taeo Taek Waek Chi Mi (­A rnon dir.
2011), the women make a ‘step up’ the social ladder when they are con-
tracted to run the dormitory at an elite boarding school for boys, but in
their initial meeting with the ­college’s ­headmistress – Khun Waeosawat
Miruluem, a wildly over-the-top parody of a Thai high-society matron
 Polluted Water 203
played to camp excess by ­Apaporn Nakornsawan – they are reminded in
no ­uncertain terms of their subordinate position: ‘just remember you are
here as dormitory caretakers only, you are not teachers!’
These compounded codings of sexual, social, and discursive a­ lterity
render the kathoey characters of Ho Taeo Taek what might be termed
­‘revolting subjects’ in both senses: as disgusting and obscene but also
transgressive and rebellious. They are abjectified figures of d ­ isgust
but they assume a determinative agency as active subjects, driving the
­narrative and serving as vehicles of audience identification. Here it is
instructive to compare the kathoey of Ho Taeo Taek with the long
line of other kathoey-themed comedies that have emerged in Thai
­cinema in recent years. Dubbed ‘the kathoey wave’ (Schoonover and
Galt 2016, p. 200), these films exploded in the wake of Satri Lek/Iron
­L adies (2000), Yongyoot Thongkongtoon’s hugely successful feel-good
­underdog sports comedy about a real-life kathoey volleyball team from
Lampang who battled the odds to become national champions.8 ­Notable
for a structural centralisation of kathoey characters from the discur-
sive periphery of comic relief or paternalistic pity to the limelight of
active protagonism, these films have been widely read as restorative
­nationalist fantasies that work to reimagine ‘Thai national identity and
its renewed positioning in a global cultural field’ (Schoonover and Galt
2016, p. 206). In their emblematic status as social outliers fighting to
achieve a place within the national community, the kathoey protagonists
of these films function as therapeutic agents of national conciliation,
bringing the wayward heterogeneity of Thai social and sexual difference
into symbolic harmony and restoring order in the dominant cultural
narrative of ‘Thainess’ (kwam-pen-thai). As Serhat Ünaldi notes, ‘this
post-2000 wave of … Thai kathoey movies is progressive to the extent
that it grants kathoeys [sic] more agency [b]ut this agency is seldom used
to challenge underlying power structures, being exercised to become a
good member of Thai society’ (2011, p. 68).
One would be hard pressed, however, to claim the ‘revolting’ kathoey
of Ho Taew Taek as ‘good members of Thai society’. Far from it. They
are, if anything, social iconoclasts, upending notions of sacralised
­Thainess and highlighting the cleavages of class, region, gender/­sexuality,
and ­ethnicity that, as David Streckfuss notes, have been ‘long papered
over and held together by incessant calls for unity and a century-old
­construction of an ossified national identity’ (2011, p. 313). Acting in
­flagrant contravention of middle-class Thai ideals of social and corporeal
comportment, speaking loudly and defiantly in the vilified base tongues
of pasa talat (marketplace Thai) and regional/subcultural dialects, and
lampooning the orthodox gatekeepers of hegemonic Thainess (social,
religious, and governmental elites), the kathoey of Ho Taew Taek are
brazen recalcitrants of sociopolitical dissidence, abject ‘others’ excluded
from the dominant narratives of Thai nationhood who, quite simply,
refuse to know, let alone stay in, their place.
204 Brett Farmer
That this performance of ‘revolting Thainess’ should occur against
the historical backdrop of one of the most violent and sustained peri-
ods of social and political instability in Thailand’s history – what has
been ­described as ‘a slow-burn civil war’ between ‘hierarchical and
­egalitarian conceptions of the Thai nation’ (Ferrara 2015, p. 264) – lends
added ­import to the spectacle, while at the same time s­ uggesting yet
­another level of contention in the culture of violent polarisation around
the ­cinema of Poj Arnon. More than one commentator has, in fact,
joined these speculative dots. ‘The scathing reception that i­nvariably
greets Poj’s every new film,’ writes Kong Rithdee, ‘speaks of the gap,
or the tension, b­ etween old and new, urban and rural, the masses and
the rest, perhaps not unlike the messy politics we’ve found ourselves in’
(2009, p. 1). It is ­instructive, therefore, that the ­M inistry of ­Culture,
the state agency charged with monitoring and policing ­‘appropriate’
expressions of ­cultural Thainess, should have made one of its most
explicit interventions against a Poj ­A rnon film during the period of
heightened political anxiety that ­followed the bloody state crackdown
on ­pro-­democracy ­protesters in central B­ angkok in ­mid-2010. Amidst a
systemic purge of any and every kind of sociopolitical dissent – which,
not ­incidentally, ­often took the rhetorical cast of a cleansing of ­polluting
forces ­(Montesano, Chachavalpongpun and Chongvilaivan 2012,
pp. 122–123) – the Ministry of Culture ordered Arnon to change both
the title and the poster art of his third instalment in the Ho Taew Taek
series, citing unspecified ‘threats to national morality’ (Wasana 2010,
para. 2). Though it amounted to little more than a symbolic gesture
of disciplinary control, it evidences the genuine disquiet felt by state
hegemons in the face of Arnon’s ‘revolting kathoey’. In the end, the
minor changes were made and the film came out to the inevitable bad
reviews and just as inevitable strong box office. The obnoxious kathoey
and other irreverent subalterns that populate the carnivalesque demotic
cinema of Poj Arnon might be subject to measures of repression but, like
the abject, they are bound to return.

Notes
1 This chapter uses the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) to
render Thai names unless, as is the case here, a divergent form is already in
common use. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Thai are the
author’s.
2 It’s also why Arnon’s films seldom get an international release as they are all
but unintelligible outside domestic Thai frames of reference and sensibility.
In a rare non-Thai review of an Arnon film, US critic Peter Nelhaus recounts
his bewildered reaction watching, Ho Taeo Taek /Haunting Me during a
2007 visit to Bangkok:
Imagine the stupidest Thai horror-comedy combined with outtakes from
Wigstock. That pretty much describes Haunting Me … I would have
hoped to be even slightly amused. Obviously there is a culture gap as
 Polluted Water 205
I was surrounded by an audience that couldn’t stop laughing… The film
is my introduction to Poj Arnon, a guy who admittedly knows how to
please Thai filmgoers.
(Nelhaus 2007)
3 In one of the few appreciative critical assessments of Arnon’s oeuvre,
­Prepanod Nainapat (2017) argues that a concern with social subalterns or
minority groups (khon klum noi) is a defining theme of his work, singling
out the frequency of queer characters in his films and the young protagonist
with Down syndrome in Oe Rue/Beautiful Wonderful Perfect (2005): ‘The
work of Poj [Arnon] opens a space for minorities as people who persevere
against difficulties no matter how many times’ (para. 16).
4 The practice of mobilising true-life news stories, often grisly and of recent
­occurrence, as the basis for otherwise fictional films is a common feature of
Thai horror that can seem unethical, even exploitative, to the outside o ­ bserver.
In part it is designed to increase a film’s topicality and, therefore, ­marketability –
something Poj Arnon does to a notoriously naked degree in many of his films,
not just horror – but it also speaks to the distinctive ­cultural status of hor-
ror in the Thai popular imaginary. Belief in the supernatural and spirit world
­remains an integral, if diversely articulated, aspect of ­contemporary Thai cos-
mologies. As such, there isn’t the same epistemological division ­between real/
unreal, truth/fiction – or, by extension, the same requirement for suspension
of disbelief – that typically frames horror in ­Western contexts. For a further
discussion of these matters, see Ancuta (2016).
5 Notable entries here include: Koi Thoe Ke/Ghost Station (Sippapak dir.
2007); Phi Ta Wan Kap Achan Ta Po/The Ghost and Master Boh ­(Pothineth
dir. 2008); Phi Tum Tim (Narintr dir. 2009); Nam Phi Mong Sayongkhwan/
H2-Oh! (Cheamcharoenporn dir. 2010); and Phi Kathoei/Drag Ghost
(Saengsoi dir. 2011).
6 Williams brackets comedy out from her original model, suggesting it lacks
the same degree of bodily mimicry between image and spectator that charac-
terises her paradigmatic examples of horror, melodrama, and pornography.
Other critics, however, mount a convincing case for including comedy films as
a ‘body genre’, the success of which is directly ‘measured by bodily response’
and ‘the excessive sensation and emotion they produce’ (Martin 2006, 190).
7 In an insightful reading of an earlier Arnon kathoey film, Phlon Na Ya /
Spicy Beauty Queen of Bangkok (dir. 2004), Atit Pongpanit (2011) draws
parallels to a close corollary of the carnivalesque, the ‘theatre of the absurd’.
Like the absurd, Pongpanit argues, the films of Poj effect an ‘abandonment
of the straitjacket of logic, social norms and conventions’ and ‘a sense of
enjoyment which results from this new sense of freedom’ (198).
8 Examples here include: Phrang Chomphu/Saving Private Tootsie (Liasirikun
dir. 2002); Satri Lek 2/Iron Ladies 2 (Thongkongtoon dir. 2003); Wai Bum
Cheer Krahuem Lok/Cheerleader Queens (Arnon dir. 2003); and Beautiful
Boxer (Uekrongtham dir. 2003).

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12 The Monstrous-Feminine
in the Millennial Japanese
Horror Film
Problematic M(O)thers and
Their Monstrous Children in
Ringu, Honogurai mizo no
soko kara and, Ju-On
Valerie Wee

All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of

what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 1.

The alignment of horror with the feminine has long prompted the
­assertion that horror texts reveal patriarchy’s enduring fear of the
­female, a claim insightfully explored by Barbara Creed in her seminal
book, The Monstrous-Feminine. Published in 1993, Creed examined
American and British horror cinema’s obsession with representations
depicting the female propensity for terrifying deviance, violence, and
destruction. As Creed argues, women and the feminine exist in horror
films as ­persistent and disturbing threats to society’s dominant patriar-
chal structures, ­values, and beliefs. In marking the 25th anniversary of
Creed’s influential study of the monstrous-feminine in Western horror
film, this c­ hapter extends Creed’s observations beyond Western cinema
and examines their relevance to Japanese horror films with a ­particular
focus on the millennial J-Horror tradition that rose to prominence with
the release of Ringu (Nakata dir. 1998), Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara
(Nakata dir. 2002, henceforth Honogurai Mizu), and Ju-on: The Grudge
(Shimizu dir. 2002, henceforth Ju-on). These three films, which revolve
around ambiguous maternal figures and their monstrous children, drew
global attention to Japanese cinematic horror.
In examining the horror film, Creed focussed on the genre’s m ­ ediation
of the abject and abjection, highlighting three prevailing tendencies: (1)
the genre’s propensity for images of abjection; (2) the notion of the b
­ order
as a means of identifying the abject; and (3) horror film’s ­overreliance
on abjecting the maternal figure (1993, pp. 10–11). Unsurprisingly, these
three elements dominate millennial J-horror.
210 Valerie Wee
Japanese horror films have a long history of addressing the ­concerns and
anxieties resulting from social and cultural changes within the n ­ ation,
in particular, shifts that have undermined or destabilised t­ raditional
­gender roles and identities (Balmain 2008; Wee 2014). The millennial
J-horror films examined here express fears rooted in ­social changes
that were ­undermining long-held patriarchal values and ­behaviours
in ­modern Japan. The horror in Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and Ju-On
is explicitly aligned with maternal actions and (ir)responsibilities that
reference larger socio-cultural shifts in gender behaviour, reflecting the
growing gender tensions in contemporary Japan.
This study begins with a brief historical overview of the onryō,
a ­vengeful female ghost, as a figure of the uncanny, the abject, and the
monstrous, before advancing to consider Japan’s socio-cultural and
­political environment at the end of the twentieth Century. These discus-
sions provide the backdrop against which I then interrogate millennial
J-horror’s representations of femininity and the female through the lens
of Barbara Creed’s psychoanalytic framework of the monstrous feminine.
Notably, while Creed offers significant insights into cinematic f­ emale
monsters such as the archaic mother, the castrating mother, the possessed
monster, the vampire, and the witch, she does not engage with the figure
of the female ghost. By examining J-horror’s representations and revisions
of the traditional onryō, I hope to add to the ­existing discussions of female
monstrosity, while also considering how the c­ omplexity and ambiguity of
these films’ treatments of the female, the maternal and the (m)Other align
with the anxieties that dominated Japan in the millennial era.

Japanese Kaidan: A Brief Historical Overview of the Onryō

Kaidan are supernatural myths and folktales that date back to the Edo
period (1603–1867). These stories typically feature monsters, demons,
and ghosts (Hearn 1971). A sub-category of these pre-modern kaidan
focusses on women who are betrayed and murdered by their husbands
and/or samurai masters. The dead women then return as terrifying
­onryō to wreak vengeance on their murderers, and in some instances, on
the society that allowed their mistreatment.1
In Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan/Ghost Story of Yotsuya, Iemon, a s­ amurai,
poisons his devoted wife, Oiwa, so that he can marry another woman of
higher status. Oiwa’s ghost returns to haunt her faithless husband, causing
him to murder various people, including his new wife and father-in-law.
Oiwa’s ghost is appeased only after Iemon is killed. In Kaidan Bancho
Sarayashiki/The Story of Okiku, a maid, Okiku, is murdered by Tessan
Aoyama, her samurai master, who throws her body down a well. Okiku’s
ghost haunts Aoyama, finally driving him mad. Another Japanese fable,
Kuroneko/The Black Cat features a woman and her daughter-in-law who
are robbed, raped, and murdered by samurai. The women then return as
vengeful demon cats that kill any samurai they encounter.2
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 211
In The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed examines the ‘woman as ­monster’,
aligning the monstrous-feminine with the abject. Creed builds on Julia
Kristeva’s assertion that the abject is that which ignores ‘borders, ­positions,
rules’, and ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ with impunity (Kristeva 1982,
p. 4). Onryō clearly epitomise the abject; they terrify and destabilise ­because
they transcend the boundary between life and death, between ­human and
demon/monster. Onryō are also free from patriarchally ­imposed limits on
female power, agency and independence, and are allowed to exact their
terrifying vengeance on the men who betrayed them.
Japanese horror cinema’s depictions of the traditional onryō ­conform to
Creed’s assertion that ‘the horror film abounds in images of ­abjection, fore-
most of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an a­ rray of
bodily waste such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears, and ­putrefying flesh’
(1993, p. 10). Nabuo Nakagawa’s 1959 cinematic ­version of ­Tokaido Yot-
suya Kaidan offers lurid images of the poisoned O ­ iwa’s putrid, ­disfigured
face. And after Oiwa’s death, her corpse, which was ­unceremoniously
thrown into a river to rot, is later seen surfacing in a m ­ ucilaginous pool
of blood-red gore. Kuroneko’s raped and m ­ urdered mother, Yone, and her
daughter-in-law, Shigei, are abject in their ­ability to transform between
human and demon cat form, an ability that clearly d ­ isrupts natural order.
Kaneto Shindo’s 1968 film version included close-up shots of the women
in human form, but in stylised kabuki-like make-up that represented their
feline Otherness, lapping up milk from bowls. Yone and Shigei clearly
­embody ‘were-creatures, whose bodies signify a c­ ollapse of the b ­ oundaries
between human and animal’ (Creed 1993, p. 10).
These kaidan reveal the underlying values and dominant ideologies that
historically organised the Japanese worldview. In Japan, social ­harmony
and stability was (and remains) of crucial importance, and these beliefs
were grounded in Confucian teachings that stressed ­idealised notions of
order, and personal and social responsibility. As Yoko Sugihara notes,
‘the Confucian ethical system emphasizes a harmonious society in which
a hierarchical structure is maintained … which assumes … men’s dom-
inance over women and children’ (2002). For the Japanese, this highly
patriarchal view was not historically deemed oppressive. Rather, the
view was that ‘there were certain benefits for women under this system.
In theory at least, the extreme dependence of women upon their menfolk
meant that the [men] had the obligation to ensure [women’s] well-being
and protection’ (Kanematsu 1993, p. 58; emphasis mine). These kaidan,
therefore, explored the consequences when men cast-off their responsi-
bilities and murdered the women they were obligated to protect, causing
these women to return as onryō.
One might be inclined to see the onryō as a terrifying and destructive
supernatural female force threatening patriarchy and masculinity. Yet
a careful examination of these folktales reveals the opposite. While the
­appearance of an onryō was indication that individual men had betrayed
their patriarchal duties, it is vital to recognise that the validity of the
212 Valerie Wee
patriarchal system itself is never in fact questioned in traditional kaidan.
Rather, the onryō served a crucial function in destroying the flawed in-
dividuals threatening the security of the patriarchal structure so that
­traditional social order could be re-established. While clearly terrifying
and malevolent, the onryō should in fact be viewed as serving a crucial
role in punishing and destroying those masculine elements within society
who had abandoned their prescribed duties, and in doing so, ultimately
threatened the order, stability, and harmony so prized in Japanese ­society.3
Such an interpretation aligned with Confucian teachings that state: ‘if a
ruler, a subject, a father…do [sic] not fulfill their duties, they abuse their
titles…this is the beginning of the collapse of ritual/propriety…, and is one
of the causes [of] social disorder and political chaos’ (Yao 2000, p. 35). In
such situations, Confucian teaching prescribes that it is in fact necessary
for subordinates to rise up against these irresponsible figures of authority,
as only then can order and balance be reestablished.
This perspective is clearly dramatised in the historical onryō-centred
kaidan, which adhered to a typical pattern. While alive, the women rep-
resent the idealised Japanese female – Oiwa, Okiku, Yone, and Shigei are
innocent, submissive, and obedient; they defer to dominant patriarchal
power and are explicitly depicted as content with their subordinate and
domestic positions in life. It is only after they have been betrayed and
murdered that they return as terrifying, destructive, beings. No longer
human and no longer admired, they are feared for possessing the super-
natural power to destroy men. As Samuel Leiter notes of the traditional
kaidan narrative,

one of the chief ways in which women who have been trampled on
become empowered is to turn into vengeful spirits after they have
died. The entire world of selfish, unfaithful husbands and lovers
must take cover when one of these women comes back from the
other world to seek revenge on those who have wronged her.
(2002, p. 225)

Onryō, therefore, embody the two distinct female tropes that Creed
­identified within the horror film; they are initially ‘woman as victims of
the (mainly male) monster’, before becoming ‘woman-as-monster’ (Creed
1993, p. 1). Once these women have effected their vengeance and their
anger has been appeased by the destruction of the men who betrayed
them, however, these monstrous females then return to their s­ upernatural
realms, leaving the larger patriarchal society reinstated and intact. As
Creed notes, ‘the horror film attempts to bring about a ­confrontation
with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the m ­ onstrous-feminine) in
order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the
human and the non-human’ (Creed 1993, p. 14).
Thus, while these classic kaidan’s depictions of the empowered fe-
male as a destructive, terrifying, and vengeful wraith play into a typical
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 213
patriarchally inflected fear of the feminine – as Fumiko Enchi observes,
‘Just as there is an archetype of woman as the object of man’s eternal
love, so there must be an archetype of her as the object of his eternal fear,
­representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions’ (1983, p. 57) –
the figure of the onryō in fact exists to reinforce Japan’s p ­ atriarchal
­structures, in so far as she serves to warn men against neglecting their
­duties or betraying their roles. Should this warning not be heeded, her
actions ensure the reinstatement of the proper hierarchical patriarchal
system.
The vengeful onryō reemerges as a critical figure in millennial ­J-horror.
Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and Ju-on all feature memorable ­versions
of betrayed females who return as terrifying female ghosts intent on
­haunting the living.

Millennial J-Horror: Ringu, Honogurai mizu, and Ju-On

In Ringu, Reiko, a divorced single mother, works as a reporter. While
investigating several mysterious deaths linked to a videotape, Reiko and
her son, Yoichi, inadvertently become the tape’s next victims. She and
her ex-husband, Ryuji, try to uncover the tape’s origins in the hope of
saving both mother and son. Their investigation reveals that the tape
is haunted by a young girl, Sadako, who was brutally murdered by her
father. Seven days after the tape is viewed, Sadako’s terrifying form
­appears to claim the viewer’s life.
The theme of a hapless mother trying to protect her child from a
malevolent pre-teen wraith also shapes the plot of Honogurai Mizu, in
which another divorced single mother, Yoshimi Matsubara, is trying to
raise her daughter, Ikuko, in a small urban tenement. ­Psychologically
fragile and struggling to cope with her job, Yoshimi inadvertently
­neglects Ikuko, who gradually comes under the sway of another child
whose presence she senses around the apartment building. After a series
of mysterious and creepy events, it is revealed that this child, Mitsuko,
had been neglected and ignored by her own parents. Left to fend for
herself, she drowned after falling into the building’s roof-top water tank.
Mitsuko’s ghost is determined to find another mother to give her the
attention she craves, and she chooses Yoshimi as her intended surrogate.
Ju-On, like Ringu and Honogurai Mizu, revolve around a failed
­marriage and familial betrayal. The film opens with a violent murder
that includes jarring shots of torn family photographs, a man’s bloody
hands, and a close-up of a woman’s dead face. This act of violence
against the female taints the house in which this murder occurs so that
the site is cursed by malevolent forces. Those who enter the haunted
house meet various disturbing ends after encountering the ghosts of the
murdered woman, Kayako, and her son, Toshio.
As these brief plot synopses show, the onryō is a crucial figure in
­millennial J-horror. Like their pre-modern onryō sisters, Sadako,
214 Valerie Wee
Mitsuko, and Kayako are female victims betrayed and destroyed by
the patriarchal systems they inhabited, and in the case of Sadako and
Kayako, by specific patriarchs. However, these millennial J-horror films
have revised the onryō in ways that reference the dominant anxieties
of the modern age, reflecting the specific challenges that were plaguing
Japanese society at the time.

Patriarchal Anxieties in the New Millennium

Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and Ju-On reveal a growing patriarchal
­anxiety that is best understood against the backdrop of gender-rooted
conflicts which arose in the final decade of the twentieth century, devel-
opments that have steadily undermined the conventional gender roles
and relationships that once formed the stable foundations of traditional
Japanese life.
Ever since the Meiji and Taisho periods (1868–1926), two feminine
ideals have dominated Japanese culture: the idea of bosei honno, which
defined motherhood and child rearing as an innate and immutable
­female inclination, and the ideal of ryosai kenbo, essentially the para-
digm of the ‘good wife, wise mother’. As McKinlay observes,

In Japanese society, the notion of motherhood has traditionally

served as a powerful and pervasive symbolic function which tran-
scends the pragmatic aspects of the role. To become a mother is not
simply to give birth, but to achieve ichininmae, to become a real
woman.
(2011, para. 1)

This view persists even in the twenty-first century, for ‘as recently as
2000 … Japanese women are still assessed on their motherhood roles,
and most particularly their skills in nurturing and educating children,
regardless of other roles they may have – such as participants in the
paid workforce’ (McKinlay 2011, para. 4). Well into the 1990s, even
after the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1986,
­discrimination continued to be informally practised both ­institutionally
and in the workplace, where women were largely relegated to lowly
­clerical ­positions, which they were promptly expected to leave when they
married (Morley 1999, pp. 72–73, p. 78). Much of modern ­Japanese
­culture and society remains committed to traditional hierarchies in
which the male/masculine remain superior to the female/feminine,
where the female submits to the male, and where the public constituted
the ‘male’ domain while the ‘feminine’ is relegated to the domestic.
By the late 1990s, however, Japan was beginning to witness a grow-
ing number of young women rejecting conservative values, roles, and
­behaviours that previously circumscribed female potential and contained
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 215
the perceived ‘hazards’ posed by female independence and agency.
A growing number of media reports detailed the emergence of a gener-
ation of sexually liberated young women who deliberately abandoned
traditional notions of the chaste and submissive Japanese female and
instead actively pursued sexual independence and ­(potentially contro-
versial forms of) empowerment. These included ‘wealthy and leisured
young Japanese women who travel[led] to exotic locales to pursue…
sexual ­liaisons’ with foreign men (Kelsky 1996, p. 173) and Japanese
schoolgirls (particularly kogyaru) who engaged in enjo kosai ­(‘subsidized
companionship’), an activity that evoked notions of teenage prostitu-
tion wherein young girls received an allowance or gifts to ‘date’ (and
have sex with) adult men (Leheny 2006, p. 16; Miller 2004, p. 239).
­Japanese women were also rejecting traditional notions of marriage that
­emphasised ­submissiveness and domesticity, instead embracing (­ Western)
­notions of ­romantic love, greater personal and professional freedom, and
­demanding a more ­equitable division of labour – ­expectations that were
motivating women to delay marriage until they could find husbands who
shared these a­ ttitudes (Tipton 2002, p. 230).
Far from endorsing or celebrating the apparent advances that J­ apanese
women were experiencing in the period, contemporary Japanese films
largely offered conservative critiques of how female empowerment and
independence were dangerous and destructive to both tradition and
­patriarchy. In 1996, Susan Napier observed that ‘women seem to have
become increasingly other, unreachable, even demonic’ in contemporary
Japanese cinema and fantasy literature (1996, p. 56). In the final years of
the twentieth century, contemporary Japanese horror films resurrected
the figure of the vengeful onryō, reimagining her in ways that reflected
contemporary socio-cultural anxieties.
The following examination of these millennial versions of the
­monstrous-feminine further builds on Creed’s framework of horror and
the abject to better understand the underlying anxieties that shaped the
modern versions of the J-horror onryō. As I will show, the onryō has
been reinterpreted in new and interesting ways.

J-Horror: The Onryō, Abjection, and the Border

According to Creed, the abject ‘threatens life, [and] must be radically
excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the
body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which sep-
arates the self from that which threatens the self’ (Creed 1993, p. 65).
Encapsulated in this assertion are the notions of abjection as a threat,
the crucial need to establish the border between what is ‘us’ and the
abject ‘not-us’/dangerous to us, and the importance of reinstating and
maintaining that clear distinction. The treatment of the onryō in tradi-
tional kaidan largely adhered to this.
216 Valerie Wee
J-horror’s modern depictions of the abject onryō borrow from estab-
lished kaidan traditions in many ways. Like their predecessors, Sadako,
Mitsuko, and Kayako are dead females who refuse to respect the border
between life and death, who escape their graves and return to haunt
and threaten the living. All three make their appearances in sequences
characterised by notable moments of horror, where feminine abjection
and monstrosity are deliberately associated with corruption, bodily de-
formities, and putrefaction.
In Ringu, our first sight of the dead Sadako centres on her decaying
corpse, which, like her predecessor Okiku, had been left to rot in a well.
In attempting to appease Sadako’s vengeful spirit, Reiko descends into
the watery pit to reclaim Sadako’s body for proper burial. The scene is
rooted in the abject. There is a terrifying instance in which Sadako’s
rotting corpse appears to be attacking Reiko as the former flails around
in the water, before she gains her balance and is seen cradling Sadako’s
body. Where water is traditionally associated with cleanliness, purity,
and by extension, life, the scene instead associates the well water with
putrefaction, contamination, and death.
These instances of Sadako’s abjection are intensified only a few
scenes later. Having retrieved Sadako’s body, Reiko and Ryuji, Reiko’s
ex-­husband, assume that all is well, effectively setting up perhaps the
­singularly most infamous sequence in Ringu in which Ryuji returns
home to notice that his television has switched itself on. As he watches,
the contorted figure of the dead Sadako is seen crawling out of the
well towards the television screen and then out of the screen into the
­physical realm. Sadako’s emergence from the television is coded for
terror – she is ­visually disturbing, possessing the long, dank hair, and
swollen, ­deformed face historically associated with the classic d ­ epictions
of onryō found in ­Japanese woodcut prints, cinema, and on television.
­Furthermore, the sight of Sadako emerging from the two-­dimensional
screen ­image and taking malevolent three-dimensional form is t­ errifying
in its ­incoherence. It is essentially the moment of ­abjection where
­meaning collapses, for S­ adako’s appearance effectively overturns the
rules of r­ eality and dismantles established natural order as it foregrounds
her ­uncanny ability to cross the suddenly permeable border/boundary
­between the natural and supernatural world, between the television
­image/screen and the physical world, between image and materiality,
between death and the living. On her destructive and malevolent quest
for vengeance, Sadako shows that she is the abject that is not constrained
by any limits or boundaries.
While the horror and abjection that Sadako represents echoes that
of her onryō predecessors, unlike the traditional onryō, Sadako’s mon-
strosity is further heightened by the fact that she prevails despite Reiko’s
many efforts to assuage the former’s anger. Despite Reiko’s success in
solving the mystery of Sadako’s death and seeking out her body for
proper ritual burial, Sadako’s anger remains unassuaged, indicating that
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 217
the traditional rules of the kaidan no longer hold; this onryō will not
return to her side of the border, she will not be repudiated, appeased,
or contained. Reiko’s quest to save her son, to reinstate a safe world for
patriarchy, fails. As the film concludes on Reiko’s phone call to her fa-
ther to ask him to sacrifice himself to Sadako to save Yoichi, it becomes
apparent that Sadako’s threat against patriarchy endures. Unlike her
predecessors, therefore, Sadako refuses to be ‘ejected’; she thwarts any
attempts to ‘redraw the boundaries between human and non-human’
(Creed 1993, p. 14).
Honogurai Mizu similarly equates horror with the abject and the fem-
inine. In the film’s climactic sequence, after Yoshimi has a vision that
reveals the circumstances of Mitsuko’s death – the child’s accidental
drowning in the apartment’s roof-top water tank – the water tank begins
to bulge, gushing out water. There is a cross-cut to Ikuko drawing a bath
in their apartment. As the bathtub begins to fill with filthy water, Ikuko
tries to turn off the taps only to be attacked by a pair of rotting arms
bursting out of the water, a shot that echoes Sadako’s corpse in the well,
and the classic horror images of Oiwa and Okiku rotting in their watery
graves. Like her predecessors, Mitsuko’s rotting body clearly evokes no-
tions of impurity and decay, marking her as the abject.
This scene culminates in one of the film’s most powerfully disturbing
moments. Rushing back to their apartment to save Ikuko as the walls
and corridors are drenched in water, Yoshimi sees an unconscious child
in the bathroom, picks her up, and rushes into the elevator, only to see
Ikuko stagger out into the hallway unharmed. Yoshimi realises that
the child she is holding is the corporeal form of Mitsuko, who clasps
Yoshimi’s neck while calling her mother. At that point of realisation, the
lift doors close on Yoshimi. When the doors re-open, the lift is empty.
The terror and incoherence of this sequence lies in the disintegration
of the vital boundary that distinguishes the living Ikuko from the dead
Mitsuko, the difference between Yoshimi’s innocent daughter and a
­malevolent supernatural ghost. In this scene, the human Self and the mon-
strous Other are indistinguishable. When the difference cannot be seen,
there is no means to identify, avoid, or escape from the dangerous abject.
While Mitsuko and Yoshimi’s disappearance might appear to signal
the reestablishment of the vital border that separates the subject from
the abject, the safe from the dangerous, the living from the dead, this
moment of relief is short-lived. In the film’s final coda, a teenage Ikuko
returns to the old, abandoned tenement years later. Yet she finds the
apartment where she and her mother used to live, clean and seemingly
still occupied by her mother. When Ikuko asks if she can stay with her
mother, a brief glimpse of Mitsuko is seen in the shot, standing behind
Ikuko, even as Yoshimi denies Ikuko’s request. Ikuko, sensing Mitsuko’s
presence, turns to look behind her, but sees nothing. As Ikuko turns back
to her mother, she finds herself alone in the apartment. While H­ onogurai
Mizu concludes with Ikuko exiting the apartment, leaving her mother’s
218 Valerie Wee
ghost with Mitsuko, the final shot also suggests that the supernatural
remains at large in the physical world. Clearly, Mistuko and the dead
Yoshimi continue to haunt the old apartment building. They have not
been banished or confined to the other side of the border, separate from
the living; the boundary between the natural and supernatural realms
remains porous.
Although Ringu and Honogurai Mizu’s treatment of Sadako and
­M itsuko clearly reference elements of earlier onryō, they deviate from
tradition in one notable aspect – their youth. Unlike Oiwa, Okiku, Yone,
and Shige, who are adult women, Sadako and Mitsuko are younger
­pre-teen girls.
The emergence of the young (often adolescent) female ghost hints
at Japanese society’s growing anxieties regarding the young Japanese
female, culturally labelled shojo. The term – literally meaning ‘little
female’ – traditionally refers to a girl aged 7–18, who is ‘socially unan-
chored, free of responsibility and self-absorbed – the opposite of the ideal
Japanese adult’ (Orbaugh 2003, pp. 258–259). Originating in the Meiji
period, shojo were initially depicted as ‘innocent girls who were sedate,
smiling, and unassuming’ (Ogi 2001, p. 172). However, the term shojo
took on more problematic and negative inflections in the 1990s, when it
evolved from describing young girls engaging in innocent, unrestrained
consumption, and self-involved enjoyment, and took on connotations of
selfish personal indulgence, an apparent thoughtless disregard for others,
and a rejection of established social mores. As Tomoko Aoyama notes,
contemporary Japanese society tends to view shojo as ‘free and arrogant’
(2005, p. 53). According to Fran Lloyd, rising economic independence
and sexual freedom resulted in changing perceptions of Japanese teenage
girls: ‘presented by the media as bodies to be consumed, they were also
seen as consuming bodies who congregated in Tokyo’s fashionable shop-
ping centers awaiting opportunities to acquire the latest luxury goods’
(2001, p. 78). By the 1990s, the term had ‘become a shorthand for a cer-
tain kind of liminal identity’ (Napier 2001, p. 118); shojo were viewed
as existing on the boundary between adulthood and childhood, power
and powerlessness, awareness and innocence. This liminality echoes the
abject’s refusal to respect borders. Ringu and Honogurai Mizu appear
to foreground this alignment between the shojo’s ‘in-between’ status and
her propensity for abjection.
This evolving perception of the shojo also coincided with the advent
of other negatively inflected (stereo-)types of female adolescence. The
kogyaru (or kogal) emerged as another problematic young female figure.
The kogyaru is commonly viewed as ‘impertinent, vulgar or indecent,
egocentric, lacking manners, absurd or lacking in common sense’ (Miller
2004, p. 238) in media depictions and public perceptions; she is often
deemed transgressive, decadent, self-indulgent, hedonistic, materialistic
and prone to excessive consumption (Miller 2004, p. 241). As Balmain
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 219
notes, ‘in a similar manner to the moral panics that accompanied other
sub-cultural movements … the Japanese and foreign media in the 1990s
constructed the kogal lifestyle and language in terms of deviant behav-
ior’ (2008, p. 123). Both the shojo and the kogyaru are associated with
notions of (negative) independence, freedom, self-absorption and selfish-
ness; they are deemed adolescent females who feel entitled to consume
and destroy heedlessly.
Ringu and Honogurai Mizu offer exaggerated representations of the
demanding, greedy, increasingly deviant attitudes associated with the
shojo and kogyaru in their depictions of Sadako and Mitsuko, ­reflecting
contemporary Japanese horror’s growing tendency to ­locate the ­terrifying,
disruptive, supernatural forces within the figures of young girls.4 Unlike
their processors, all of whom were either defeated or ­withdrew from the
physical realm after attaining their revenge, ­Sadako and ­M itsuko resist
exorcism or appeasement. As mentioned earlier, ­Sadako’s threat endures
even after her body was reclaimed and ritually buried, and Mitsuko
continues to hold Yoshimi hostage to her demand for ­maternal atten-
tion. Their insatiable desires, their insidious haunting of their v­ ictims,
and the impossibility of containing their threat and a­ bjection all hint at
contemporary Japanese society’s growing fears regarding the rise of a
new generation of females increasingly outside patriarchal control and
containment. J-horror therefore continues the genre’s enduring practice
of associating horror and monstrosity with the feminine, while also ex-
tending patriarchal fear of the feminine onto the figure of the female
adolescent.
Ringu and Honogurai Mizu’s treatment of the onryō figure further
­deviates from tradition by emphasising Sadako’s and Mitsuko’s ambigu-
ity. Where Oiwa, Okiku, Yone, and Shige all begin as victims and trans-
form into monstrous villains upon their betrayals and murders, Sadako
and Mitsuko are simultaneously victims and monstrous villains. This is
particularly clear with Sadako, whose monstrous ability to kill people at
will even as a living child is made apparent long before she is murdered
by her father. While little is known about Mitsuko while she was alive,
her demand for maternal attention as ‘payment’ for her unfortunate ac-
cidental drowning, alongside her continued malevolence towards Ikuko
even years after Yoshimi’s death, casts her as both victim and irrational
monster. In both cases, these onryō are inherently ambiguous and abject
because they inhabit a space where the border between villain and vic-
tim cannot be established.
Contemporary J-horror’s increasing ambivalence towards the onryō is
also found in Ju-On, where the ghosts of a wife, Kayako, and her young
son, Toshio, haunt the home in which they were murdered. Ju-On’s cycle
of supernatural violence begins with (what we later learn is) Kayako’s
brutal murder5; the film’s ambiguous monstrous-feminine, she is another
female who is both victim and (possible) villain.
220 Valerie Wee
Kayako and her son Toshio bear the visual markers of the s­ upernatural
and abject; there are numerous shots of both mother and son looking
unnaturally pale with blue lips and vacant eyes. Kayako possesses the
long, lank black hair that characterises the onryō. In one horrific scene,
Kayako’s deformed, broken body creeps down the stairs towards Rika,
a young woman who has entered the haunted house. In her appearances,
Kayako is marked as abject Other, monstrous, and threatening. Like
Sadako and Mitsuko, Kayako references her historical predecessors. She
is the onryō of a murdered wife, haunting a cursed family home. Her
encounters with the living are terrifying and lethal.
While Kayako is easily placed within the onryō tradition, ­however,
like Sadako and Mitsuko, Kayako’s abject Otherness is tinged with the
­ambiguous and irresolvable. Throughout Ju-On, Kayako’s ­motivations,
intentions, and actual actions are intentionally left unclear and incoher-
ent, for while she appears to be implicated in the demise of ­several people
who have come in contact with the haunted home, the film ­deliberately
obscures her actual role in their deaths. In one d ­ isturbing sequence, we
see an unidentifiable dark shadow menacing a guard sent to investi-
gate some mysterious noises coming from a restroom. Later investiga-
tions of the security tapes show the guard being consumed by the dark
shadow while Kayako stands apart, gazing directly into the camera.
Later, when Kayako is seen creeping up on and grabbing hold of Hitomi,
whose brother Katsuya had moved into the haunted house, the scene
that immediately follows simply shows that both Kayako and ­Hitomi
have disappeared. In these various instances, Kayako is implicated in the
supernatural events, but it is deliberately left unclear if Kayako is con-
trolling the shadow that kills the guard, if she is a passive supernatural
witness to the guard’s d ­ emise, or if she in fact kills Hitomi. This ambi-
guity is reinforced in a later sequence in which Kayako approaches but
does not harm Rika, moments before Rika is attacked and murdered by
Takeo, Kayako’s husband and murderer. Thus, while Kayako is clearly
haunting the various victims in Ju-On, she remains a largely mysterious
and ambiguous force, as she is never seen actually killing the victims.
In fact, Ju-On utilises heightened ambiguity and incoherence to in-
tensify horror and anxiety. The film deliberately dispenses with a clear,
­linear narrative, and instead presents the events in the film in frag-
mented, disordered vignettes with obscure causal or temporal connec-
tions. This sense of disorder and instability, anathema to a culture that
reveres order and harmony, is reinforced by several scenes of feminine
abjection that are deliberately constructed to confound and confuse. In
one scene, when Rika is in the haunted house, she looks in a mirror only
to see an image of Kayako trying to break out of her (Rika’s) body. Rika
raises her hands to cover her eyes in horror, only to see what appears
to be Kayako’s hands covering her eyes. The moment is grounded in a
loss of bodily integrity and ambiguous identity, provoking deep anxiety
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 221
and uncertainty for it dissolves any reliable boundary between Self and
Other, raising the idea that just as it is impossible to distinguish Rika
from Kayako, it is impossible to distinguish villain from victim. In fact,
it is not even possible to conclusively identify Kayako as the villain.
­Notably, Ju-On refuses to offer any explicit explanation for Kayako’s
murder, further reinforcing her ambiguity.6 Ju-On intensifies the fear
that Woman and the feminine are essentially unfixable, indeterminate,
and unknowable.
Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and Ju-On depict the harrowing ­consequences
that ensue when traditional values and behaviours are abandoned e­ voking
a heightened state of anxiety – one reflective of the fear, ­insecurity and
increasing paranoia experienced by Japanese ­patriarchy, which was
witnessing its previously unassailable power and authoritative position
being steadily undermined by a growing ­generation of youth and, in
particular, young women, who actively reject the established norms of
conservative tradition.

J-Horror, Abjection, and the Maternal

Yet even as millennial J-horror introduced a new type of monstrous
femininity, it nonetheless continued to adhere to the popular horror
tradition of demonising the maternal, for Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and
Ju-On, with their emphasis on divorced, irresponsible, and/or ineffec-
tual mothers, offer largely negative depictions of adult femininity that
explicitly deviate from the traditional Japanese ideals of bosei honno
and ryosai kenbo.7
In Ringu, Shizuko, Sadako’s psychic mother, appears only briefly.
Asked to participate in a press event to demonstrate her psychic gift,
Shizuko is denounced as a fraud despite offering proof of her ­abilities.
Conforming to the idealised notion of the submissive and docile J­ apanese
female, Shizuko remains silent and endures the taunts of the press.
­Moments later, when a male journalist falls down dead with a terrified
expression on his face, a horrified Shizuko exclaims, ‘Sadako, you did
that!’, publicly condemning her daughter who was presumably acting in
defence of her mother. Shizuko’s behaviour in this brief scene positions
her as a woman who has fully entered into a patriarchally organised
symbolic order serving the law (and the interests) of the father.
This view of Shizuko is, however, undermined by later revelations.
While investigating Sadako’s past, Reiko visits a village where Shizuko
once lived. An old man who remembers Shizuko suggests that S­ adako’s
father ‘wasn’t human’, mentioning that Shizuko spent long hours by
the sea, and commenting that Shizuko conceived Sadako with a sea
­demon. While the film does not overtly confirm this claim in any way,
this ­revelation effectively aligns Shizuko with the abject, introducing the
implication that like her daughter, Shizuko also scorned the boundary
222 Valerie Wee
between human and non-human, between the land and the sea, between
the natural and the supernatural. This one revelation further suggests
that far from being the chaste female and submissive wife, Shizuko her-
self flouted patriarchal and natural laws, and in doing so, brought the
monstrous Sadako into existence. These narrative developments hint
at the heightened masculine anxieties structuring the film’s narrative,
aligning J-horror’s concerns with those that Creed already identified in
Western horror films: ‘popular images … which represent woman as
monstrous also define her primarily in relation to her sexuality, spe-
cifically the abject nature of her maternal and reproductive functions’
(1993, p. 151). As Creed notes, such representations ‘reinforce the phal-
locentric notion that female sexuality is abject’, while also ‘[challenging]
the view that femininity … constitutes passivity’; rather, the opposite is
true, woman terrifies because she is castrating (ibid.). In possibly con-
ceiving a child with a demon (which might explain Sadako’s powers),
Shizuko served as the conduit by which a supernatural threat is born, a
threat that refuses to recognise male patriarchal power, and who kills
at will. These revelations clearly align both mother and daughter with
terrifying acts of deviance and associate them with a destructive super-
natural feminine power.
Ringu’s ambivalence towards mothers extends to Reiko, Ringu’s ­heroine,
who is also presented as a woman who rejects Japan’s dominant ­patriarchal
structures and ideologies. Reiko is a divorced mother ­pursuing a career as a
journalist, two qualities that distinguish her from the ­idealised, ­domestically
confined, traditional Japanese woman. Notably, the film also ­explicitly
links Reiko to dangerous and destructive supernatural forces. Reiko’s jour-
nalistic curiosity drives her to investigate reports of fatalities linked to a
mysterious videotape. She is the one who seeks out, finds, and brings the
malevolent tape into her own home, ultimately endangering herself and
her son, Yoichi. In subsequently seeking help from her ex-husband, Reiko
damns him to a terrifying and deadly encounter with the s­ upernatural.
Furthermore, after her plan to appease Sadako’s destructive spirit fails, she
turns to her father and asks that he sacrifice himself to Sadako to save
Yoichi.8 Reiko, as daughter, wife, and mother, brings danger and potential
destruction to her father, ex-husband, and son.
Honogurai Mizu, with its narrative focus on wives and mothers who
divorce their husbands only to struggle to raise their daughters, also
­directly engages with the ryosai kenbo (‘good wife, wise mother’) ideal.
In the film, women remain tethered to the maternal identity, even as
­anxieties about the collapse of the traditional family are explicitly linked
to maternal failure resulting in neglected and endangered children. These
circumstances shape the relationships between Yoshimi and her mother,
Yoshimi and Ikuko, and Mitsuko and her mother. These intersecting
stories, with their shared elements and resonating echoes of tensions and
betrayals between mothers and daughters place increasing stress on the
mother-child bond.
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 223
The film’s conservative stance is clearly reflected in an early scene
that contrasts a stereotypically neurotic and superstitious Yoshimi with
her (overly-)rational, facts and detail-oriented ex-husband, ­Kunio. His
subsequent revelation that she has suffered an emotional breakdown
­foregrounds Yoshimi’s mental and psychological fragility. In emphasis-
ing Yoshimi’s frail, neurotic state, the film casts her ­decision to leave
her ­husband in highly problematic terms, especially as this decision
­ultimately places her and her daughter, Ikuko, in the path of a danger-
ously threatening supernatural force. From a conservative, patriarchal
Japanese perspective, Yoshimi appears thoughtless and irresponsible,
particularly where Ikuko’s well-being is concerned. In rejecting the
­socially approved role of good wife and wise mother within a ­marriage,
and a domestic existence that promises security, social position, and
­respectability, Yoshimi has placed herself and her daughter outside
­patriarchal society’s safe and protected norms. Mother and daughter are
not only socially exiled to a rundown apartment after the divorce, they
find themselves plunged into an increasingly disturbing, confined, and
threatening space haunted by an onryō.
The film’s depiction of the mother-child bond also deliberately under-
mines the traditional ideal of bosei honno. Rather than representing the
idealised mother-child connection, the film undermines and problema-
tises the traditional ideal of motherhood via three different portrayals of
women/mothers in modern Japan, women who either through circum-
stance or choice, must raise their daughters alone without a husband/
father’s presence.
The film’s opening sequence offers a flashback to Yoshimi as a child
waiting in vain for her mother to pick her up after school. When a teacher
tells Yoshimi, ‘No one’s come for you’, Yoshimi’s sense of abandonment
and loneliness is explicitly emphasised. A cut to the present shows the
adult Yoshimi looking out a window, setting the stage for the subsequent
revelation that her relationship with Ikuko mirrors the one she had with
her own mother.
This opening prologue, of a neglected child and an absent mother,
raises the film’s key fascination with maternal failures, in which these
shortcomings inevitably lead to supernatural mayhem, for the young
­female ghost, Mitsuko, who stalks Ikuko and Yoshimi, died as a ­result
of maternal neglect and irresponsibility when she was left alone to
­accidentally drown in the apartment’s water tank. Honogurai Mizu’s
plot weaves together the fates of three daughters, Yoshimi, Ikuko,
and Mitsuko, who find themselves entwined in a supernatural battle
for ­maternal attention, atonement, and survival after suffering from
­maternal indifference and neglect.
In Ju-On, Kayako’s and her son’s murder at the hands of her enraged
husband raises the spectre of her failure as good wife and wise mother.
Her subsequent appearances, haunting her home and stalking those
who enter the space equates her with the malevolent, threatening, and
224 Valerie Wee
mysterious female Other that contains echoes of Creed’s archaic mother,
‘everything associated with the archaic mother belongs to (a) the idea
of an empty, forgotten house, that first mansion or dwelling place, and
(b) the image of that last resting place, the grave, Mother Earth’ (1995,
p. 148), even as the film ambiguously hints at her trapped powerlessness.
Kayako’s appearances throughout the film explicitly align her with death
and, in the final scene, with the grave, for Ju-On concludes with a shot
of a female body wrapped in a plastic sheet in the house’s attic. The
corpse’s eyes open as the camera zooms into a close-up, and the uncanny
croaking sound associated with Kayako is heard. This shot encapsulates
Kayako’s very ambiguous nature. As a broken body sealed in plastic and
abandoned in the house by her murderous husband, she is the epitome
of the victim, yet her life-in death, signalled by her opening her eyes and
her croaking, mark her as the terrifying uncanny, abject. There is also
the lingering uncertainty of whether this body is Kayako’s, or Takeo’s
latest female victim, Rika, since the plastic sheet blurs the victim’s face.
All these contribute to the film’s heightened opacity and ambivalence
towards the female/maternal monster-victim, an attitude that permeates
millennial kaidan. Clearly, Ju-On consciously problematises its depic-
tion of Kayako – while she is clearly Takeo’s victim, her actions as wife,
mother, and onryō are deliberately left ambiguous and obscure.
The notion of maternal failure resulting in the death of a young child
who then returns for vengeance has emerged as a popular trope in
­millennial J-horror.9 In Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and Ju-On, the ­mothers
are not directly responsible for the children’s deaths ­(Mitsuko drowns in
an ­accident; Sadako and Toshio are murdered by their ­fathers), yet these
fatal events nevertheless inevitably reflect on the failed m
­ others for ‘[there
is a] pervasive belief in Japanese society that a child’s actions r­ eflect
­directly upon the mother, even when the mother is no longer ­directly
responsible for or involved in the child’s life’ (­ McKinlay, para. 26). From
a Japanese perspective, these mothers’ failure to n ­ urture, ­protect, and
raise their children to conform to social expectations and acceptable
behaviours makes them responsible for their offspring’ d ­ eviance and
monstrosity.
In fact, contemporary Japanese horror films overwhelmingly depict
the mother-child relationship in dark, ambiguous, and highly disturbing
terms: Shizuko utters the accusation that presumably dooms Sadako,
Reiko brings the cursed video into their home and exposes her son to
its malevolence, and the scene of Reiko cradling the rotting remains of
Sadako’s body is disturbingly gruesome; the image of Yoshimi cradling a
child is fraught with horror as the child is not her daughter but a venge-
ful spirit; Ju-On features a malevolent mother-and-son pair of ghosts
haunting their cursed family home where they were murdered. While
clear links are drawn between monstrous children and their mothers,
these depictions deviate from Creed’s claim that ‘…the monstrous child
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 225
is ultimately depicted as a creation of the psychotic, dominating mother’
(Creed 1993, p. 79). In J-horror, these monstrous children are more o
­ ften
the products of ineffective, irresponsible or negligent mothers.

Conclusion
Ringu, Honogurai Mizu, and Ju-On all explore the collapse of the
­traditional family. Sadako is betrayed by her mother and murdered by
her (step-?)father, while the divorced Reiko’s focus on her career e­ xposes
her son, Yoichi, to Sadako’s malevolence; Mitsuko and Ikuko must
cope with maternal negligence and abandonment; Toshio is an innocent
­victim of his father’s murderous and jealous rage. In these contemporary
Japanese horror films, the traditional onryō narrative has been adapted
to reflect an almost hysterical anxiety about adolescent menace and
­malevolence that originates from familial/parental failures and ­betrayals.
They reveal deep social anxieties about the adolescents coming of age in
modern Japan. These films appeared to be responding to a moral panic
caused by a spate of reports detailing shocking and disturbingly violent
crimes committed by Japanese children in the 1990s and early 2000s
(Arai 2006; Faiola 2004; Kakuchi 2013; Kawakami 1999), a fear that
spawned the term kodomo ga hen da, ‘the child is turning strange’ (Arai
2006, p. 222), or ‘the strange-changed child’ (Lury 2010, p. 29).10 While
expressing the nation’s growing anxieties about an emerging generation
of Japanese youth in crises, these horror films continue to ground their
representations of horror and monstrosity around the feminine and the
maternal.
Creed avers that ‘the horror film attempts to bring about the con-
frontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-­
feminine) in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries
between the human and non-human’ (1993, p. 14). This trajectory once
structured the traditional kaidan. As I have argued, the abject figure
of the historical onryō served a crucial function. Her appearance sig-
nalled social dysfunction and potential crisis. Her role was to destroy
that which was undermining and tainting the community, clearing the
way so that the patriarchal order could be reestablished and order re-
stored, a process that ensured that all the traditional boundaries (be-
tween dominant masculinity and submissive femininity, between the
natural and supernatural, between safety and danger) would eventually
be reinstated. The onryō, therefore, was ‘the abject [that] must … be
tolerated, for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life’
(Creed 1993, p. 9). In contemporary J-horror, however, the return to the
normal and the redrawing of the necessary boundaries remains elusive;
Ringu, Hongurai Mizu, and Ju-On all conclude on profoundly ambigu-
ous and ambivalent notes, the abject is not effectively ejected, and once
clear boundaries r­ emain blurred and indistinct.
226 Valerie Wee
In evaluating the monstrous female, Creed notes, ‘the presence of
the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more
about male fears than about female desire or female subjectivity’ (Creed
1993, p. 7). Millennial J-horror reinforces a system in which dominant
patriarchal concerns continue to demonise a new generation of young
women who are increasingly ignoring, if not actively rejecting, the
traditional and socially approved roles of wife, mother, and domestic
homemaker, ­preferring to remain single, embracing financial and ­sexual
freedom, while actively engaging in conspicuous material consump-
tion. These versions of the unruly Japanese female appear to be finding
greater ­representation on screen, where the female and the feminine are
quite often relegated to the supernatural, the horrific and the terrifying.
The depictions of female Otherness and deviance, and the alignment of
these qualities with the unnatural in Japanese horror overtly reference
the on-going and publicly recognised gender anxieties that find expres-
sion and debate in Japanese public discourses. It would appear that the
vengeful and angry onryō at the centre of contemporary Japanese horror
films may, in fact, have just cause for their antagonism.

Notes
1 Notably, Japanese male ghosts or yurei do also appear in Japanese folk
tales, but they are seldom motivated by revenge, unlike their female
counterparts who are traditionally angry, vengeance driven, and often
­malevolent (Screech 2006). Far from displaying the violent and destructive
tendencies, and terrifying demeanours characteristic of female yūrei, male
yūrei are often, in stark contrast, calm, quiet, contemplative, and largely
unthreatening.
2 All three folktales have received the cinematic treatment, with the most no-
table versions dating to the 1950s and 1960s. Kaidan bancho sarayashiki
(Ghost Story of Broken Dishes at Bancho Mansion, Juichi Kono, 1957),
Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Nabuo Nakagawa 1959), and Yaba no naka no
kuroneko (The Black Cat, Kaneto Shindo 1968) used the Edo Gothic set-
ting, which is characterised by flux, insecurity, and anxiety linked to the
decline and eventual disappearance of the samurai and the shift to moder-
nity, to articulate fears about the erosion of tradition and the undermining
of gender roles in the face of externally imposed change during and after the
Japanese Occupation.
3 It is, in fact, possible to view these men as instances of the abject for they chose
to ignore their ‘positions’ and the social ‘rules’ that define proper ­patriarchal
behaviour, and by their actions, they disturb (masculine) ‘­identity, system,
order’ (Creed 1993, p. 4).
4 While the figure of the kogyaru is essentially a teen identity, it appears that
the inner character traits associated with the figure are increasingly being
mapped on younger pre-teen females in Japanese horror films.
5 While Kayako’s murder is depicted on screen, Toshio’s is not.
6 While Ju-On: The Grudge, deliberately withholds the reason for Kaya-
ko’s murder, two telemovies, Ju-On: The Curse 1 and 2, which preceded
Shimizu’s film, reveal that Takeo suspected Kayako of an extramarital
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 227
affair. In i­gnoring her marriage vows, Kayako is ‘[t]he [monstrous] female
­subject … who refuses to take up her proper place in the symbolic order’;
­K ayako represents ‘­abjection … constructed as a rebellion of filthy, lustful,
­carnal, female flesh’ (Creed 1993, p. 38). Kayako’s death at her husband’s
hands can thus be interpreted as patriarchy’s attempts to punish and con-
tain her. As Creed notes, ‘patriarchal ideology works to curb the power of
the mother, and by extension all women, by controlling woman’s desire
through a series of repressive practices which deny her autonomy over her
body’ (1993, p. 162).
7 Significantly, a national population survey revealed that between 1975 and
1990, there was an approximate 50% increase in single-mother families in
Japan, with a majority of these families the result of divorce; furthermore,
over 70% of divorces in Japan were initiated by women (Peng 1996, para. 4,
para. 9).
8 In Ringu, the original victim can save themselves by make someone else
watch the video, thereby passing on Sadako’s deadly curse. Reiko, in letting
Ryuji watch the tape, unknowingly saved herself and doomed him.
9 Chakushin Ari (Takashi Miike 2003) is another J-horror film that deals with
similar themes.
10 Jessica Balanzategui offers an in-depth consideration of contemporary
­Japan’s youth and child-focussed anxieties in her examination of the
­uncanny ghost children depicted in J-horror (2018, pp. 175–178).

References
Aoyama, T 2005, ‘Transgendering shõjo shõsetsu’, in M McLelland and R
Dasgupta (eds.), Gender, transgenders and sexualities in Japan. Routledge,
London, pp. 49–64.
Arai, A 2006, ‘The wild child in 1990s Japan’, in T Yoda and H Harootunian
(eds.), Japan after Japan: social and cultural life from the recessionary 1990s
to the present. Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 216–238.
Balanzategui, J 2018, The uncanny child in transnational cinema: ghosts of
futurity at the turn of the twenty-first century, Amsterdam University Press,
Amsterdam.
Balmain, C 2008, Introduction to Japanese horror film. Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh.
Creed, B 1993, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis,
­Routledge, London.
Creed, B 1995, ‘Horror and the carnivalesque: the body monstrous’, in
L ­Devereaux and R Hillman (eds.), Fields of vision: essays in film ­studies,
­visual anthropology and photography, University of California Press,
­B erkeley, pp. 127–159.
Enchi, F 1983, Masks, trans. J Carpenter, Random House, New York.
Faiola, A 2004, ‘Youth violence has Japan struggling for answers’, The ­Washington
Post, 9 August, viewed 30 September 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A50678-2004Aug8.html?noredirect=on
Hearn, L 1971, In ghostly Japan: spooky stories with the folklore, superstitions
and traditions of old Japan. Tuttle Publishing, Vermont.
Kaidan bancho sayarashiki (Ghost Story of Broken Dishes at Bancho M ­ ansion).
Dir. Juichi Kono. Toei, 1957.
228 Valerie Wee
Kakuchi, S 2003, ‘Youth murder shocks Japan’, Asia Times, 15 July, viewed 25
October 2013, www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/EG15Dh02.html
Kanematsu, E 1993, Women in society: Japan. Times Book International,
Singapore.
Kaneto, S (dir.) 1968, Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko (The Black Cat), motion
picture, Toho, Japan.
Kawakami, R 1999, Gakkō Hōkai (School Collapse], Bungei Shunju, Japan.
Kelsky, K 1996, ‘Flirting with the foreign: interracial sex in Japan’s
­“international” age’, in R Wilson and W Dissanayake (eds.), Global/local:
cultural production and the transnational imaginary, Duke University Press,
Durham, pp. 173–192.
Kristeva, J 1982, Powers of horror: an essay in abjection. Trans. Leon S.
­Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York.
Leheny, D 2006, Think global, fear local: sex violence and anxiety in
­contemporary Japan, Cornell University Press, New York.
Leiter, S 2002, ‘From gay to gei: the onnagata and the creation of kabuki’s
­female characters’, in S Leiter (ed.), A kabuki reader: history and p
­ erformance,
­Routledge, London, pp. 211–229.
Lloyd, F 2001, ‘Strategic interventions in contemporary Japanese art’, in
F Lloyd, (ed.), Consuming bodies: sex and contemporary Japanese art,
­Reaktion Books, London, pp. 69–108.
Lury, K 2010, The child in film: tears, fears and fairytales. I. B. Tauris, London.
McKinlay, M 2011, ‘Unstable mothers: redefining motherhood in contemporary
Japan’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context,
vol. 7, web, viewed 20 February 2019, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue7/
mckinlay.html
Miller, L 2004, ‘Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese kogals, slang, and media
assessments’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 225–247.
Morley, P 1999, The mountain is moving: Japanese women’s lives, University of
British Columbia Press, Vancouver.
Nakagawa, N 1959, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost Story of Yotsuya), motion
picture, Shintoho, Japan.
Nakata, H (dir.) 1998, Ringu (Ring), motion picture, Basara Pictures, Japan.
Nakata, H (dir.) 2002, Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara (Dark Water), motion
picture, Nikkatsu, Japan.
Napier, S 1996, The fantastic in modern Japanese literature: the subversion of
modernity, Routledge, London.
Napier, S 2001, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: experiencing
­contemporary Japanese animation, Palgrave, London.
Ōgi, F 2001, ‘Gender insubordination in Japanese comics (manga) for girls’, in
J Lent (ed.), Illustrating Asia: comics, humour magazines, and picture books,
University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, pp. 171–186.
Orbaugh, S 2003, ‘Busty battlin’ babes: the evolution of the shōjo in 1990s
visual culture’, in J Morrow, N Bryston, and M Graybill (eds.), Gender and
power in the Japanese visual field, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu,
pp. 201–265.
Peng, I 1996, ‘Single-mother families in Japan: a conspicuous silence’, NIRA
Review, viewed 21 January 2011, www.nira.or.jp/past/publ/review/96spring/
peng.html
 Millenial Japanese Horror Film 229
Screech, T 1994, ‘Japanese ghosts’, Haunted Times, viewed 5 July 2006, www.
hauntedtimes.com/japanese-ghosts/
Shimizu, T (dir.) 2002, Ju-On: The Grudge, motion picture, Nikkatsu, Japan.
Sugihara, Y 2002, ‘Gender role development in Japanese culture: diminishing
gender role differences in a contemporary society’, Sex Roles: A Journal of
Research, vol. 47, no. 9–10, pp. 443–452.
Tipton, E 2002, Modern Japan: a social and political history, Routledge,
London.
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London.
Yao, X 2000, An introduction to Confucianism, Cambridge University Press,
New York.
13 Women in the Way?
Re-reading The Monstrous-
Feminine in Contemporary
Slovenian Cinema
Polona Petek

Introduction
In 2018, the Slovenian Film Council – following the Council of E ­ urope’s
recommendations and emulating the Eurimages’ strategies for gender
equality in European film industries1 – commissioned researcher and
film producer Nika Gričar to conduct a survey on gender equality in
­Slovenian film culture (Gričar 2018). The results covering the past
quarter-­century (the period since 1995, the year the Slovenian Film Fund,
the Centre’s forerunner, was established) were alarming. At the Acad-
emy of ­T heatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT), ­approximately
a third of s­ tudents in the Film Directing programme in the Department
of Film and T ­ elevision are women and also approximately a third of
active ­Slovenian film directors are women. Yet, the share of women di-
rectors backed financially by the Slovenian Film Centre in the past de-
cade amounts to a meagre 9%. By now, only 13 fiction feature-length
films have been made by eight women directors in Slovenia 2 – a dis-
mal number compared to more than 500 titles attributed to Slovenian
film-makers since 1948, the year of the release of the first Slovenian
sound feature-length film (Štefančič 2005, 2016).3
Still, this year seems to be a watershed for women in Slovenian c­ inema.
I write this just days after the closure of the 21st Slovenian Film ­Festival,
the annual national showcase, whose competition programme this
year featured four feature-length, one medium-length and seven short/­
student films directed by women.4 Director Urša Menart was the first-
ever woman to receive the Best Feature Film award for My Last Year As
a Loser (2018).5 She was also the first-ever woman to receive the Best
Screenplay award.6 In addition to these achievements and accolades, it
is also worth mentioning that the current director of the Slovenian Film
­Festival is a woman (Jelka Stergel); the current director of the Slovenian
Film ­Centre is a woman (Nataša Bučar); and I myself have just been in-
vited on board the national Film Realisation Programme Commission,
the expert body that decides which film projects are to be financially
backed by the S­ lovenian Film Centre and which not – that is to say, the
central body of the ­(financial) decision-making part of Slovenian film
 Women in the Way? 231
culture, in which women have thus far been most meagrely represented
(Gričar 2018, p. 2).
What a different world Slovenia was 20 years ago when I decided
to pursue film studies overseas! Its film production, newly established
as a national cinema following the declaration of Slovenian indepen-
dence in 1991, was in what seemed like a permanent state of searching:
­searching for funding, searching for a workable and affordable infra-
structure, searching for audiences7 and, last but not least, searching
for its new pioneers, including the first woman to direct a feature film.
Namely, despite the long-standing tradition of film in Slovenia, 8 97
years passed before the first fiction feature-length film was directed
by a woman in Slovenia.9 This was The Guardian of the Frontier,
directed by Maja Weiss, which premiered in 2002. Film scholarship
in Slovenia was in an equally ­peculiar state. The tradition of writing
about film in S­ lovenia is strong and long-standing.10 Yet, in contrast
to the prolific field of film j­ournalism, Slovenian film scholarship in
the late 1990s was to a large extent synonymous with a single name –
­Slovenia’s prime scholarly ­export, Slavoj Žižek, who had by then pub-
lished several of his academic bestsellers, including The sublime object
of ideology (1989), Enjoy your symptom! (1992a), and Everything you
always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitch-
cock) (1992b). There were no ­u niversity programmes for studying film
scholarship, only individual undergraduate courses such as Sociology
of Cinema taught in the ­Department of Sociology at the Faculty of
Arts in Ljubljana.11
No university programmes, no school of film theory (apart from the
Ljubljana Lacanian School surrounding Žižek), and marginalised women
film-makers. This was the climate in which I, a comparative l­iterature
graduate, decided to go overseas to pursue my interest in ­cinema, its
history and theory. It was not a carefully planned or even calculated
­career decision, but rather one of those instinctive moves that only a very
enthusiastic young person is capable of, a rite of passage of sorts, a leap
into the unknown, for I could hardly have gone further away from what
was then my home, with no friends or family to lean on.

Melbourne
Fortune favours the bold, says an old Latin proverb, which certainly
proved true in my decision to move to Australia and enrol in the
­Cinema Studies Master of Arts programme at the University of Mel-
bourne. It was there, in an absorbing course called ‘Film, Modernity,
and the Avant-Garde’, that I first encountered Barbara Creed, an in-
spiring scholar and a most generous teacher, who guided me steadily
into the world of film scholarship. It was not my conscious decision to
232 Polona Petek
spend my time at M ­ elbourne getting equipped for a feminist analysis
of Slovenian cinema, and I feel grateful that this was not the case, for
this initial lack of determination allowed me to explore many fork-
ing paths of film history and theory. But then a decisive coincidence
occurred.
It was March 2003, the beginning of a new semester at the univer-
sity. I was already a confirmed PhD student supervised by Barbara
Creed and also tutoring and giving occasional lectures in her courses on
­‘Feminist Film Theory’, ‘Surrealism and Cinema’ and ‘Film Noir’. Her
book, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis, was my
bedside reading, so to speak, for – despite the application of its concep-
tual framework to horror12 , hardly my first preference when it comes to
genre film-making – it proved a most useful source of ideas for how to
approach and interpret feminist, surrealist, and noir representations of
women on screen. But March in Melbourne is not just the beginning of
a new school year; it is also the month of the biggest and oldest queer
film festival in Australia, established in 1991 and officially called the
Melbourne Queer Film Festival since 2003. In March 2003, I was l­eafing
through the festival brochure when I noticed a Slovenian film listed in
the programme. It was Maja Weiss’ Guardian of the Frontier, hailed not
only as the first Slovenian queer film but also the first-ever Slovenian
fiction feature-length film directed by a woman.
This was a bizarre moment: a moment of pride and respect for a
film-maker ‘from home’ who had made the first Slovenian queer
film so soon, only a decade after the term exploded onto the global
­cinematic stage; but it was also a moment of shock for having real-
ised that it was the b ­ eginning of the twenty-first century, yet, this was
only the first ­Slovenian film directed by a woman. Up until that mo-
ment my ­interest in Slovenian cinema had been slight, certainly not
comprehensive, and I must have ­repressed the fact that women were so
­conspicuously ­absent from Slovenian cinematic limelight. But this was
a potent ­moment and it was Barbara Creed’s book that made it such.
Namely, it would have been a humbling, shameful moment if it was
not for The ­monstrous-feminine, the book’s core message, which made
me realise in that moment that marginalised, victimised positions are
symptomatic of those who create them, not those who assume them,
or, more accurately, are forced into them. No doubt, this idea could
have come from many other sources, ­feminist or otherwise; but The
monstrous-feminine had another, even more important message for me
in that moment: just as Barbara Creed discovered that the monstrous
women of horror cinema are not necessarily victims, the juxtaposition
of Weiss’ Guardian and The monstrous-­feminine suggested to me that
these marginalised ­positions of women in Slovenian cinema need not be
seen as necessarily disempowering.
 Women in the Way? 233
Ljubljana
For almost a decade, this remained a brief, passing observation and my
interest in Slovenian cinema remained that of a keen, but passive and
distant observer, discovering more and more details about the unenvi-
able position of women in Slovenian cinema: about unfinished projects
and impossible visions;13 about the fact that the national film school
had never had any women professors and it was only in the twenty-first
­century that the first woman started teaching film editing there; and
most importantly, about the fact that a comprehensive feminist analysis
of Slovenian film history and the local film culture is still lacking. This
was not the reason for my decision to return to Slovenia in 2008; it was,
however, the reason to become involved in 2011 in a research project on
The role of women’s migrations and migrants in the construction of the
Slovene national identity.14 Through work on this project I met Maja
Weiss and started studying her work and the work of other S­ lovenian
women directors more closely. Gradually, my initial monstrous-­
feminine-inspired observation started taking a more substantial, more
elaborate shape, and I shall outline one such case study below.
If we stay with Slovenian women directors, there are only eight women
to choose from. This scarcity is hardly unique to Slovenian cinema.
Iordanova (2003, p. 119) argues that women have been ‘traditionally
marginalised’ in Eastern European cinemas, whereas Mantziari (2014)
documents this absence as a wide-spread phenomenon in global art-
house cinema. It would be hard to argue, then, that Slovenian women
film-makers are a compelling subject of enquiry simply because of their
marginalisation. I want to argue that what makes them fascinating is the
way they actively and imaginatively adopt their marginal positions and
through their creative process transform them into perfectly enabling
and unique positions.
I studied this process in-depth in relation to Maja Weiss’ work
­(Petek 2017). She was the obvious choice for my first case study not
only ­because of her standing as the first woman to have directed a
­fiction ­feature-length film in Slovenia, but for number of other
­reasons, too. Her career spans the entire period of Slovenian national
cinema proper;15 her opus, which contains more than 30 titles, is
­extremely diverse, and as such appears defiantly ‘unauthorial’; yet, it
also shows Weiss’ peculiar all-encompassing thematic affinity: in all
her works, Weiss in one way or another brings into play the ­issues of
borders and border-­crossing.16 She has made documentaries ­exploring
­Slovenian border areas; she has made documentaries about the fates
of ­people who were forced into leaving their homes and crossing
­borders; her ­d irectorial debut, The Guardian of the Frontier, is a film
about ­exploring, transgressing, and redefining national, sexual, and
234 Polona Petek
­ etaphysical borders; her second feature, Installation of Love (2007),
m
is a film about crossing the boundaries between reality and fiction;
and Weiss herself crosses professional and geographical borders and
blurs genre boundaries. In short, borders and border-crossing pervade
Weiss’ work not only in a representational, but also in an ­‘existential’
sense; her opus not only thematises these phenomena, but in fact
­enacts them. They are the enabling fil rouge of her creativity.
A similar, yet different process can be observed in the work of Sonja
Prosenc. Her directorial curriculum vitae is short, yet, remarkably
­focussed and consistent. She has directed six titles to date, two of them,
The Tree (2014) and History of Love (2018), are feature-length fiction
films. Prosenc is an obvious outsider in Slovenian film culture, not only
because she is a woman, but also, even more so, because she has never
studied film-making at AGRFT, the national film school, which claims
a monopoly, so to speak, on artistically accomplished film-making in
­Slovenia.17 Prosenc (b. 1977) studied journalism and cultural studies at
the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, and found her way
into film-making via an international path. She took part in ­B erlinale
and Sarajevo Talent Campuses, and was selected for the Script & Pitch
postgraduate programme at TorinoFilmLab. She has also c­ ompleted a
Midpoint course in script development and film dramaturgy at FAMU
(the renowned Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts
in Prague).
Already with her directorial debut, the short film Free-Spirited Friends
(2005), Prosenc established herself as an unconventional film-maker
whose primary interest is certainly not the story, or the action, but rather
the psychological states of her characters and the emotional charge of
the story, which she uses as a background, a canvas on which she paints
her characters’ feelings. Nowhere is this more evident than in her lat-
est feature, History of Love, a film about a teenage girl (Doroteja Na-
drah) whose mother (Zita Fusco) has suddenly died and the girl is now
­struggling to come to terms with her loss and the discovery that her
mother had a s­ ecret lover (Kristoffer Joner). The synopsis sounds like
a springboard for an emotionally charged drama. Yet, Prosenc hardly
develops it in this direction; rather, she uses it as a stage where intense
emotions run free, crossing the boundaries between reality and fantasy,
anger and sadness, life and death, which the v­ iewers experience through
numerous extreme close-ups of human faces and shots of water of all
shapes (pools, rivers, streams, ponds, lakes), combined with often com-
pletely inarticulate sounds with which the film’s mesmerising soundtrack
is interspersed.
Yet, it is not crossing the boundaries between reality and fantasy, ­anger
and sadness, or life and death that makes Prosenc stand out in contem-
porary Slovenian cinema. What has turned her outsider standing into an
 Women in the Way? 235
enabling and empowering stance is her audacious crossing of the tacit
boundary separating the turfs of AGRFT and the Ljubljana A ­ cademy of
Fine Arts and Design (ALUO). The former sees its mission in narrative
cinema and claims it as its prerogative, whereas the latter (among other
things) cultivates non-narrative screen-based forms of v­ isual art without
calling them cinema.18 Not many Slovenian film-makers have dared to
call themselves film-makers and make non-narrative films.19 By cross-
ing this boundary, Prosenc has succeeded in carving out a unique space
for herself as the author of affect-based, almost non-narrative cinematic
experiences.
We could go on laying out examples of Slovenian women film-­makers’
engagement with borders and boundaries. Suffice it to say that this ­affinity
seems to be the common denominator of women who have managed to
penetrate the until recently male-dominated world of ­Slovenian cinema.
Where does this come from? What is the ­fascination, the ­empowering
­potential of borders? Barbara Creed would no doubt invoke Julia
Kristeva and her notion of abjection here. Since my ­subject of enquiry
is less i­ntimate, less grounded in the body and the psyche, but rather
more sociologically constructed, I have turned to social ­scientists to find
a suitable explanation. Dutch scholar Henk van H ­ outum, ­professor of
political geography and geopolitics, points out that ‘border’ should be
considered primarily a verb: borders are processes rather than objects;
the making or the setting up of borders – in short, bordering – is a pro-
cess of ordering as well as ‘othering’ (van Houtum 2011, pp. 50–51).
Yet, he does not suggest that this process is something we should strive
to abandon:

[Borders] are not like eyes that can be shut. […] By closing the
­borders, closing the eyes, the fear for the other will not be shut
off. The uncertainty will only be greater. […] It is highly unlikely
that the spatial b/ordering of our self-interest to increase our own
­comfort and to diminish the fear of loss of control will ever end.
But that does not mean that we unwillingly and uncritically need
to reproduce our own borders or that we are forced to close our
eyes obediently. We are not only victims of the border, but also the
producers of it.
(van Houtum 2011, pp. 58–60; emphasis added)

And this is what I believe Slovenian women film-makers are acutely

aware of. They have been actively recasting the boundaries that had
once kept women out. In her book Cartographies of diaspora, British
sociologist and anthropologist Avtar Brah defines borders as ‘arbitrary
­dividing lines that are simultaneously social, cultural and psychic; [they
are] ­territories to be patrolled against those whom they construct as
236 Polona Petek
outsiders, aliens, the Others’ (1996, p. 198). Yet, they are also the sites
where claims to identity, belonging and ownership are ‘staked out, con-
tested, defended, and fought over’ (ibid.).

***

It might sound like my interest in Slovenian cinema and its women film-­
makers has taken me a long way away from The monstrous-feminine.
I would have to disagree. Indeed, The ­monstrous-feminine is a feminist-­
inflected psychoanalytic exploration of the horror genre, whereas my work
is a feminist-inflected sociological analysis of a national ­cinema (and one
with virtually no horror tradition!20). Yet, my reading of S­ lovenian women
film-makers’ works, which has recently found resonance in sociological
and anthropological conceptualisations of borders, is t­ horoughly indebted
to The monstrous-feminine – not only for the initial inspiration, but also,
more importantly, for the attitude and the intellectual stance cultivated
in Barbara Creed’s work. I have always read her interpretation of Julia
Kristeva and its application to the horror genre as a stance of defiance,
the stance of unswerving determination to find something enabling in a
situation that seems dismal and disempowering at first sight. Without The
monstrous-feminine, the position of women in Slovenian cinema would
look quite different.

Notes
1 See Gender equality in the audiovisual sector – a new Council of Europe
recommendation and Eurimages strategy for gender equality in the film
industry 2018, available at https://www.coe.int/en/web/eurimages/­gender-
equality-documents (last accessed on 22 September, 2018).
2 The list includes (in chronological order): The Guardian of the Frontier/
Varuh meje (Weiss dir. 2002), Blind Spot/Slepa pega (Slak dir. 2002), In-
stallation of Love/Instalacija ljubezni (Weiss dir. 2007), L… for Love/L
kot ljubezen (Glogovac dir. 2007), Teah/Tea (Slak dir. 2007), Reality/­
Realnost (Jemeršić dir. 2008), For the End of Time/Za konec časa
(Kugler dir. 2009), Panic/Panika (Zemljič dir. 2013), Echoes of Time/
Odmevi časa (Kugler dir. 2014), The Tree/Drevo (Prosenc dir. 2014),
The Miner/Rudar (Slak dir. 2017), ­H istory of Love/Zgodovina ljubezni
(Prosenc dir. 2018), and My Last Year As a Loser/Ne bom več luzerka
(Menart dir. 2018).
3 On Our Own Land/Na Svoji Zemlji (Štiglic dir. 1948) is considered the first
Slovenian feature-length sound film. It is worth pointing out that the film
was made in Yugoslavia, but the language spoken in the film is ­Slovenian, the
story is set in a small Slovenian village, and the entire crew were ­Slovenians –
the usual criteria for determining retrospectively which Yugoslavian films
count as Slovenian.
4 The total number of films in the competition programme was 52. See http://
www.fsf.si/2018/en/
 Women in the Way? 237
5 This is the third time a woman was awarded one of the two most prestigious
awards; the first woman to receive the Best Director award was Maja Weiss
in 2002 for her directorial debut The Guardian of the Frontier, followed by
Hanna Slak in 2017 for her third feature The Miner.
6 In fact, Melina Pota Koljević received the award for Best Screenplay last
year, but she shared the award with Janez Burger, Aleš Čar, and Srdjan
­Koljević, the co-authors of the screenplay for Ivan (Burger dir. 2017).
7 Slovenian film and Slovenian audiences are ‘incompatible’, argues ­Veingerl
(2016). Rugelj (2007) attributes this to the divide between art-house
­aspirations of Slovenian film-makers and entertainment-focussed prefer-
ences of Slovenian filmgoers.
8 The first film projections in Slovenia (which was then part of the
­Austro-Hungarian Empire) took place as early as November 1896 and
the first films, Lumière style actuality films, were made by lawyer Karol
­Grossmann in 1905 (Vrdlovec 2013).
9 This may sound surprising, because there had been women before who had
graduated from AGRFT (and other European film schools) with formal
­degrees in film directing. Yet, at best, they ended up making made-for-TV
documentaries and TV commercials, or simply doing something completely
different. I discuss these issues at length elsewhere (Petek 2017).
10 France Brenk notes that the first book on film in Slovenia, Pavel Debevec’s
How to approach film? (Kako pridem k filmu?), was published as early as
1929 (Brenk 1955, p. 7). Zdenko Vrdlovec notes Debevec’s book was pre-
ceded by two shorter articles published in 1924 (2013, pp. 61–62).
11 Even today, film scholarship is still an ‘orphan’ in Slovenian academia, an
academic discipline with a dispersed and understaffed institutional domi-
cile, with no locally based peer-reviewed journals, and with no recognition
as yet as an independent habilitation field.
At the moment, there are three institutions offering programmes and
courses on film at the University of Ljubljana, yet, there is no official institu-
tional ­exchange facilitating or vindicating this situation: AGRFT offers several
practice-­oriented undergraduate courses and (since 2013) a graduate pro-
gramme in Film and Television Studies; the Faculty of Social Sciences offers one
undergraduate (‘Film Studies’) and one graduate course (‘Aesthetics and Poli-
tics of Film’); and the Faculty of Arts offers one undergraduate (­‘Introduction
to Film Studies’) and one graduate course (‘History of Film Theory’).
The term ‘habilitation’ is derived from the Mediaeval Latin habil-
itare. The ­academic concept of habilitation developed in Germany in the
­seventeenth century. Initially, it was synonymous with doctoral and later
on with post-doctoral qualification. It is now defined as the qualification to
­conduct university teaching and it is the prerequisite for lectureship in many
­European countries including Slovenia.
12 I first studied The Monstrous Feminine while working on my Master’s thesis
(also supervised by Barbara Creed), in which I explored the patriarchal con-
notations of David Cronenberg’s films, particularly in relation to his male
protagonists’ relationship to women.
13 I am currently writing an article for Slovenian film journal Kino! about
­Polona Sepe’s unfinished children’s film Desovila, which was in ­production
in the early 1980s and could have become the first feature-length film
­directed by a woman.
14 The full title of the project, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS),
was The role of women’s migrations and migrants in the construction of the
238 Polona Petek
Slovene national identity from national to postnational era: Comparative
Slovenian, European, and global aspects; project leader: Ksenija Vidmar
Horvat; Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
15 Weiss finished her studies at AGRFT at the end of the 1980s and started
making shorts and documentaries for Slovenian national television in the
early 1990s.
16 Weiss’s thematic interest in these issues has been observed before (Falcinella
2005).
17 See Rugelj (2007) and my own discussion of the peculiar reception of Mitja
Okorn in Slovenian film culture (Petek 2017). Okorn is a typical example
of a Slovenian film-maker, who remains part of Slovenian film culture, yet,
is persistently marginalised by the Slovenian film establishment because he
is a self-taught film-maker with a flair for light-hearted genre film-making
and a commercially successful transnational career (which has now reached
Hollywood). See also Lešničar (2011).
18 The actual programme is called Visual Communications Design; see http://
www.aluo.uni-lj.si/studijski-program/oblikovanje-vizualnih-komunikacij/
19 A prominent similar attempt is Jan Cvitkovič’s Archeo (2011) which c­ ritics
and the director himself have described as an example of ‘pure cinema’. It is
worth pointing out that Cvitkovič, too, did not study film-making at AGRFT,
but rather archaeology at the Faculty of Arts, University of L ­ jubljana. On
the other hand, Nika Autor, Slovenian representative at the 57th Venice
­Biennale in 2017, does not describe herself as a film-maker, but rather as a
visual artist whose ‘practice is primarily based on experimental videos and
documentary films, film essays, newsreels and spatial video and film instal-
lations’ (https://www.autor.si/biography.html). The author obtained her BA
degree at ALUO.
20 Many critics have described Killbillies (Idila, Tomaž Gorkič, 2015, ­Slovenia),
the winner of the Best Film award at the 2015 Slovenian Film Festival, as the
first Slovenian horror film.

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240 Polona Petek
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14 In-Your-Face
The Monstrous-Feminine in
Photography, Performance
Art, Multimedia, and Painting
Jeanette Hoorn

In recent years, Barbara Creed’s concept of the m ­ onstrous-feminine

has played an increasingly important role in discussions of art and
gender. It can be applied to a range of confronting images from those
on the plates of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–1979) and ­A nnie
­Sprinkle’s Public Cervix Announcement (uncovered 2017), to Cindy
Sherman’s profoundly abject Sex Pictures series (1989–1992) and the
chaotic in-your-face images of femininity in Carolee Schneeman’s
Eye/Body (1963–1973) series and Meat Joy (dir. Gaisseau 1964) of
the 1960s. Frida Kahlo’s My Birth (1932b) and Mary Kelly’s Post-­
Partum ­Document (1973–1979) both repel yet draw the viewer in their
­denouement of labour and infant excrement. Manifestations of the
monstrous-­feminine also inspire a diverse range of multi-media works
including the profoundly disturbing scenarios of ‘female flesh’ in Linda
Dement’s ­interactive Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995); Destiny Deacon’s
­photographs and installations about rebellious Indigenous women in
Australia, My Boomerang Won’t Come Back (1994), and Walk & Don’t
Look Blak (2004); Maria Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque performance at
the Venice Biennale in 1997; Chrissy Amphlett’s shocking stage perfor-
mances such as I Touch Myself (1990) and more recently Lady Gaga’s
playfully disruptive Mother Monster Manifesto (2013) on the birth of
‘the eternal mother in the multiverse’. All of these unquestionably tap
into monstrous-feminine territory.
Although Creed published her major article on the monstrous-­
feminine in 1986, the concept has proven remarkably relevant to the
work of a­ rtists from earlier periods, such as Chicago and Schneeman,
as well as the contemporary era. Thinking about the work of women
artists who explore the monstrous-feminine from the perspective of the
abject opens up new ways of understanding how patriarchal ideology
continues to construct woman, from earlier centuries to the present, in
terms of stereotypes related to female sexuality, reproduction, and the
body. Many women artists have taken these stereotypes and recreated
them from their own perspectives, often with enormous flair and dark
humour, in order to challenge male anxieties and patriarchal myths
about women. Gradually, this controversial and challenging figure, the
monstrous-feminine, has moved from the margins to the mainstream.
242 Jeanette Hoorn
Creed argues: the monstrous-feminine appears in a range of discourses
such as ‘literature, art, poetry and pornography and other popular
­fictions’ (Creed 1993, p. 166). I would also add bio-art and more recently
art that explores human-animal relations. Here I wish to explore ways in
which Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine as abject addresses the
work of a range of women artists, as well as, and most importantly, the
complex relationship between representations of the abject female body,
male power, colonialism, and the position of First Nation Peoples. Race
has rarely been interpreted in the context of the monstrous-feminine;
however, a number of Australian artists have drawn on this concept to
present a critique of white racism and colonial oppression of Indigenous
Australians and especially of Black female Australians. Central to this
critique is the notion of borders.
Drawing on Kristeva’s influential theory, Creed stresses the crucial
importance of understanding the emergence of the abject through the
erosion of borders. Creed explains:

[T]he concept of the border is central to the construction of the

monstrous … Although the specific nature of the border changes
from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same –
to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that
which threatens its stability.
(Creed 1993, p. 11)

Strangely there is pleasure in viewing this struggle between two

­irreconcilable powers. As Kristeva argues, the abject signifies that which
‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 4). The irony is
that the patriarchal symbolic order has produced a range of feminine
­stereotypes (witch, vampire, monstrous womb), whose purpose is to
shore up that order but which ironically have the power to undermine
it. This is because the abject itself, as defined by Kristeva, is profoundly
­ambiguous. It both attracts yet repels. It lures yet repulses. Its ambiguity
relates to its power to undermine borders between the clean and proper
self, and the abject, disgusting self: boundaries between the so-called
upright masculine and the degraded feminine.

Horror emerges from the fact that woman has broken with her
proper feminine role – she has ‘made a spectacle of herself’ – put her
unsocialized body on display.
(Creed 1993, p. 42)

‘There is a pleasure in perversity’ (1993, p. 13), Creed writes. Thus,

Creed sees the figure of the monstrous-feminine, although inspired by
male fears of woman’s sexuality and reproductive functions, as having
a radical purpose. As Kristeva argues: ‘There looms, within, abjection,
 In-Your-Face 243
one of those violent, dark revolts of being’ (1982, p. 1). Creed sees this
as an ideological struggle. She explores this age-old trope through myth,
religious discourses, and surrealist art, but her main focus is on the
­cinema and the horror film. ‘An encounter with the monstrous-­feminine
of the horror film takes us on an aesthetic and ideological journey’
(Creed 1986, p. 166).
What interests me is the work of female artists such as Destiny ­Deacon
who portray the monstrous-feminine as a black woman, thereby extend-
ing Creed’s argument to explore the borders, and their erosion, between
opposing entities: feminine and masculine powers, black and white sub-
jects and between indigenous peoples and colonial invaders. What kind
of ideological journey is depicted in artistic works and practices that
explore issues of race from the perspective of the ­monstrous-feminine?
How is the monstrous-feminine represented in their works?
Frida Kahlo’s remarkable small paintings are now iconic in the history
of modernist art and perhaps unique in their revelation of the emotional
and physical pain experienced by the artist throughout her life which
she places in the context of the colonial history of M ­ exico. Herself a
woman of mixed racial endowment and of indigenous (­Mestiza) descent
through her maternal grandmother, Kahlo draws from her personal
­experience in a range of portraits and self-reflexive tableaux in which
she speaks from a liminal position that simultaneously attracts and
repels the viewer through arresting and confrontational imagery; My
Birth (1932b), Henry Ford Hospital (1932a), and My Nurse and I (1937)
reveal traumatic narratives of parturition and early life.
My Birth shows a woman (who is the artist’s mother), lying upon a bed
with the head of her baby (Kahlo herself) fully emerged and bloody from
the birth canal. Her mother’s head and shoulders are covered in a white
sheet in what is a clear reference to the iconography of the s­ urrealists
and in particular to some of René Magritte’s paintings in which we see
the central figure’s upper torso draped in a cloth. In My Nurse and I,
Kahlo is breast-fed by her nurse who wears a black pre-­Columbian
mask-­perhaps a reference to her mother’s mestiza background. The in-
fant Kahlo is represented with her adult head, and is held by her nurse
who is seated in a stormy landscape. These elements combine to present
a bleak, indeed horrifying image of the artist’s infancy and her own
reflections upon it. And in Henry Ford Hospital, the artist is lying on a
bed, surrounded by the aftermath of a miscarriage connected through
umbilical cords to her dead baby, as well as objects of medical parapher-
nalia associated with the shocking accident she experienced as a young
girl as well as her miscarriage.
These abject images are for some viewers too ‘monstrous’ to counte-
nance, as the bloody reality of parturition and infancy is brought to light
and the privacy of what is referred to in English as ‘confinement’ is over-
turned. The witnessing of birthing has until relatively recently been almost
244 Jeanette Hoorn
universally the preserve of women and medical staff, while men kept their
distance in hospital waiting rooms, domestic drawing-rooms and outlying
spaces. These images make public what has previously ­remained private,
overturning decorum and revealing the real-life trauma of birth.
Frida Kahlo frequently crossed the boundaries of respectability in a
range of subject-matter in her work. The numerous self-portraits with
small monkeys wrapped around her neck, repeatedly show the artist
in closer proximity to tiny primates than is usual in the history of art,
revealing the intimate relationship which the artist maintained with her
pet animals. Kahlo breaches the boundary between human and animal
in these endearing icons. In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940),
Kahlo has donned the suit of her husband, Diego Rivera, as she sits on a
bright yellow chair drawing attention to her distress. Scattered around
her are locks of her luxuriant hair which she has cut in protest over
­R ivera’s infidelity. Once again, Kahlo takes up taboo issues, launching a
protest against incest and the philandering of men by self-mutilating and
cross-dressing, thus remaking herself as a female/male subject.

It is through this element of monstrosity that Kahlo resists the patri-

archal order…Kahlo steps out of the private sphere of the ­female art-
ist and into the public… In portraying herself as ­grotesque, ­hybrid,
and misshapen, Kahlo presents herself as monstrous.
(Gribby 2019)

Kahlo’s retablos dealing with violence and death such as The Suicide of
Dorothy Hale (1938) and A Few Small Nips (1935) also take up subjects
which breach conventional rules of decorum.
Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, is an epic installation of 39 place s­ ettings
in a range of media, positioned around a triangular table ­representing
women throughout history from the Snake Goddess to Georgia O’Keefe.
Each side of the triangle represented women chronologically, with
the first wing ranging from Prehistory to Classical Rome; the second
the ­beginning of Christianity to the Reformation and the third, the
­A merican Revolution to the Women’s Revolution. Fabric, embroidery,
china ­painting, and ceramic sculpture were used to fashion the ­goblets,
cutlery, embroidered runners, and napkins. But what created contro-
versy was the ceramic plate, which consisted of intricate sculptural
forms in various subtle glazings, representing the genitals, in particular,
the vulva of the woman who was the subject of each place setting, in a
truly ­monumental and spectacular manner. Henry Hopkins, the ­director
of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who had supported the
project over many years, presided over the opening in San Francisco
on March 14, 1979 to great public enthusiasm. However, controversy
immediately erupted and several of the institutions who had booked the
exhibition cancelled. A 30-year history of rejections and neglect ensued
 In-Your-Face 245
until in 2007, Dinner Party found a donor and was purchased by the
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum,
New York.
Negative reactions to the installation claimed that Chicago’s ­practice
suffered from an overly essentialist view of feminism and that the work
is let down by its exclusion of women of colour from its pantheon had
some validity. However, suggestions that the work traded in sexual
­perversion, vulgarity, and pornography and that it was low art masquer-
ading as high art, by prominent critics such as Hilton Kramer and ­Robert
Hughes, reveal the underlining misogyny that informed the reaction to
this monumental work of art. Kramer, who was art critic for The New
York Times, described it as ‘an outrageous libel on the female imagina-
tion’ (1980) and revealing ‘an insistence and vulgarity more ­appropriate
perhaps to an advertising campaign’ (ibid.). Hughes described it in Time
Magazine as ‘an obsessive feminist pantheon’ employing ‘colours worthy
of a Taiwanese souvenir factory’ (1980. It also made headlines for the
reaction it created from members of the American parliament with Con-
gressman Robert Dornan from the House of Representatives, calling
it ‘ceramic 3-D pornography’, and fellow California Republican Dana
Rohrabacher describing it as ‘a spectacle of weird art, weird sexual art
at that’ (in Beckman 2007). The Dinner Table crossed boundaries in
terms of both its subject matter and the range of media that it employed.
Its liminal nature – the fact that it was accused of being a low art form
exhibited in a high art context underlined the general consensus that
Chicago’s epic work was nothing more than a vulgar display of genitalia
(‘vaginas on plates’) that amounted to a monstrous and abject retelling
of history (ibid.).
Laura Mulvey was the first to suggest that Barbara Creed’s concept
of the monstrous-feminine is helpful in understanding abjection in art
using as an example, the photographs of Cindy Sherman. Mulvey points
out that while Sherman’s ‘figures materialise as the stuff of irrational
terror, they also have pathos and could easily be understood in terms of
‘the monster as victim’ (1996, p. 96). Sherman’s abject photos such as
those of her Sex Pictures of 1989–1992 can be collected, Mulvey points
out, into a lexicon of horror and the uncanny just like the Untitled Film
Stills, and are like a lexicon of poses and gestures typical of respectable,
but still uncanny femininity (Mulvey 1991, p. 148). Mulvey concludes
with an important observation:

The 1987 series suggests that, although both sexes are subject to
­abjection, it is woman who can explore and analyse the ­phenomenon
with greater equanimity, as it is the female body that has come, not
exclusively but predominantly, to represent the shudder aroused by
liquidity and decay.
(Mulvey 1991, p. 148)
246 Jeanette Hoorn
Curators of the landmark exhibition, Abject Art, Repulsion and Desire
in American Art, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
1993, have similarly drawn on Creed’s monstrous-feminine to interpret
the photographs of Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith that were selected for
the exhibition. Simon Taylor in his chapter ‘The phobic object: abjection
in contemporary art’, argued that, as Creed points out:

the excessive violence and gore in horror films typically produce an

ambivalent experience that signals a desire not only for the perverse
pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images, being filled with
terror/desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, having taken
pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out, eject the abject (from
the safety of the spectator’s seat).
(Creed 1986, p. 48)

Taylor also discusses the monstrous-feminine in relation to other import-

ant female artists. The abject in Cindy Sherman’s and Kiki Smith’s work
is also characterised by its ambivalence in relation to the monstrous-­
feminine and Mary Russo’s notion of the ‘female ­grotesque’ (Taylor
1993, pp. 61–62). Rosemary Betterton has made similar ­connections
between Creed’s monstrous-feminine and Cindy Sherman’s photographs
(Betterton 1996, p. 133).
The performance artist Carolee Schneeman was among the first to
represent her body within the framework of the monstrous-feminine in
the 1960s and 1970s, which involved appearing naked on stage, alone
and as part of a group, being filmed having sex on stage, displaying her
pubic hair on stage, and smearing her body and those of others with
abject substances. She allowed herself to be photographed in a range of
erotic poses covered in toy snakes. In an interview with Steve Rose in
The Guardian in 2014, Schneeman recalled her own entry into the field
of performance art in the UK when she presented a piece at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 1968. Schneeman recalls:

‘I wore farmer’s overalls,’ she says, ‘and I had lots of oranges

stuffed everywhere. It was about Cézanne, so I showed slides and
talked about his influence – and I kept undressing and dressing.
I was naked under my overalls and I’d throw these oranges into the
audience, like a still-life escaping. Then I’d do my overalls back
up and continue the lecture.’ The audience, at the ICA in London,
did not appreciate the 29-year-old artist’s approach. ‘They went
a bit nuts,’ ­S chneemann recalls. ‘They were outraged, “This is
­i nfuriating! What does this mean? How can she be naked and talk
about art history?”’.
(Rose 2014)
 In-Your-Face 247
Schneeman had already broken a great many more taboos four years
earlier with Meat Joy which she later described as:

… an excessive, indulgent celebration of flesh as material: raw fish,

chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes,
­paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic – shifting and
­turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; ­qualities
that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.
­Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in
which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy
complement of the audience. The original performances became
­notorious and introduced a vision of the ‘sacred erotic’.
(in Art Gallery NSW 2007).

She became both subject and object in her own performance ­‘re-­enacting
a resistant reanimation of the aesthetic/sexual object’ (Moton 2017,
pp. 134–135). Schneeman recounts having worked with an impres-
sive range of avant-gardists in New York including Yoko Ono, Claes
Oldenberg, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Philip Glass,
Robert ­Rauschenberg, and Stan Brackage. However, Schneemann
could not find recognition from her male colleagues and found herself
­‘excommunicated from the Art Stud Club’ (in Schneider 1997, p. 35)
stating that she felt like the ‘cunt mascot on the men’s art team’ (in Rose
2014). As a result, she decided to abandon painting – by stepping right
into it. In 1963, Schneemann produced her Eye/Body series in which
she ­incorporated her own naked, paint-smeared body into tableaux she
­created out of painted panels, broken mirrors, old umbrellas, and toy
snakes in ­images that are confrontational, primal, unashamedly erotic,
and far from p ­ assive (ibid.). Recognising the powerful place which the
nude occupied in the history of art and also the powerlessness of the
models who embodied the nude, Schneeman decided to intervene by
becoming an empowered nude. As artist she executed the performance
and was simultaneously the nude. What her performance art sought to
achieve was to take the authority over depictions of her nudity away
from the male artists who were inevitably in control of it – who ­simply
made the model available for the viewer. Instead, she produced an
­image of the nude over which she as the model was in control and which
pleased her as boisterous, vulgar, outrageous, monstrous, abnormal,
and obscene (Frank 2017). In other words, by representing herself as
monstrous, she gave agency to the concept of the monstrous-feminine
as an in-your-face outrageous figure.
Singing from a similar song sheet two decades later, Chrissy Amphlett,
the lead singer of the rock group The Divinyls, outraged Australian au-
diences with on-stage performances and the videos recorded from them.
248 Jeanette Hoorn
The band debuted with Chrissy dressed in a school uniform and fishnet
stockings performing Boys in Town (1982). Amphlett declared:

I was surrounded by so many men and so the uniform was me giving

the finger to everyone. And the audience, as they tried to think that
they could have their way with me, I would react and get in first…
and become this monster and then I had the power.
(Women’s Agenda 2013)

This use of a monstrous identity to ‘take the power’ continued to man-

ifest in Amphlett’s stage performances with The Divinyls over the next
decade. I Touch Myself (1990) was right off the respectability register
and reached no. 1 in Australia, no. 4 in the US, and no. 10 in the UK.
Wandering across the stage in a low-cut flouncy black body suit and high
heels, Amphlett touched her own body erotically, declaring ‘I don’t want
anybody else when I think about you, I touch myself’ (ibid.).
Destiny Deacon (Ku Ku/Erub/Mer) has worked in Melbourne
for over 30 years making photographs which celebrate m ­ onstrosity
through a range of objects, people, and situations that evoke her
past and p ­ resent and which give rise to her memories of being
­I ndigenous (Black) in urban Australia. Central to her evocation of
the ­monstrous-feminine within her practice is the adaptation of a
range of kitsch items about Aboriginal cultures produced ­t hroughout
the ­C ommonwealth and stretching over the twentieth century. These
­b ecame central to the representation of Australia in art objects
­m anufactured for tourists which were broadly available for purchase
by overseas visitors as well as by Australians travelling to holiday
destinations in outback Queensland, the Top End, and The Kimberley
from the 1930s. These were also prominent in the imagery contained
in advertising Australia as an attractive place for British and other
European migrants. Today, they are dismissed by many Australians
as a kitsch art form whose racist overtones are apparent. They are
unwelcome reminders of the pervasiveness of the racism within the
community that existed in the recent past and should in the opinion
of many Australians be allowed to fade from the communal memory.
As Marcia Langton points out:

The tension between assimilating Aboriginal people by extraordi-

narily brutal means in reality and yet at the same time depicting them
as fascinating primitives reflected the need of the older c­ olonists for
security and for emblems of cultural uniqueness and difference from
Europe. The meaning at the heart of these depictions was the British
conquest and genocide best forgotten.
(Langton 1997, pp. 106–107)
 In-Your-Face 249
However, many Indigenous Australians value these objects as material
markers of their past. Deacon appropriates these into her photographs
and installations in a potent satire in which she makes clear the uncer-
tain position which Aboriginal people occupy within white Australia.
Perhaps the most defining aspect of her work are her strident inter-
ventions into the white art scene in which she undermines ‘the proper
­feminine role’ of black women in Australia. But not only does her work
challenge the colonial oppression of Indigenous women she also takes
on the abuse which women endure at the hands of black men, thereby
challenging patriarchal authority through intervening at multiple levels.
This challenging of the ‘blak patriarchy’ animates her No Fixed Dress
(1997a) series, the title of which lampoons the name of the black rock
group No Fixed Address. The group formed in Adelaide in 1979 and
was the first Australian Indigenous rock reggae band to tour the UK
and ­Europe. The band’s first recording We Have Survived on Rough
Diamond Records, a subsidiary of Polygram Records, and launched by
the Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1982, was the first to incorporate the
didgeridoo in a rock repertoire. No Fixed Dress interrogates the band’s
reputation in a range of confronting imagery that draws on horror and
abjection. In two photographs from the series, a white doll holds a string
of beads attached to the decapitated head of a black doll and the other, a
white doll holds onto a chain connected to the head of a black doll which
floats in the space above the head. These photographs recall ­Deacon’s
earlier work in which a black doll lies decapitated on a wooden floor with
an axe located between the head and the body of the doll. The ­images of
the dolls who appear as benign and smiling simulacra – there is no blood
or evidence of violence – are, nevertheless, gruesome ­reminders of the
axe murders perpetrated by whites and blacks upon each other and of the
placing of Indigenous people in chains by whites from the first m­ oments
of the arrival of Europeans on Australian shores. The pun on the title
No Fixed Address produced as No Fixed Dress and the ­alternating of
white and black decapitated heads and bodies ­suggest that both white
and black men are complicit in the violence against women.
This undermining of the ‘proper role of [blak] women’ is also
­brilliantly achieved in the large photographic Portrait – Eva Johnson,
Writer (1994) in which a woman of Indigenous descent is depicted with
grave intent, pausing with an axe over her shoulder which she is ready to
wield at any moment. The photograph is a re-configuration of an iconic
image from colonial Australia, the Portrait of Nannultera, a Young
Poonindie Cricketer (1854) by John Michael Crossland. Poonindie was
a mission established close to Adelaide in the mid-nineteenth century,
to train Indigenous men in agricultural and pastoral work. Cricket was
thought to present ‘civilising capacities’ to young Indigenous men and
Poonindie was famous for its own Black Eleven who played matches
250 Jeanette Hoorn
against white teams from Port Lincoln and the elite St Peter’s college.
Here is Nannultera, dressed in his cricketing whites shown displaying
his cricket bat which he holds at almost shoulder height, ready for the
first ball. He wears a red sweater over his whites and these details are
copied in Deacon’s darkly parodic Portrait – Eva Johnson, Writer. But
Crossland’s Portrait of Nannultera is a profoundly sad image. Alone in
the composition, his handsome body dominates the canvas, flanked by a
dry South Australian landscape. He is a figure of grace and humility; a
saintly figure. In this beautiful and deeply disturbing image, race, colo-
nialism, and the pastoral entwine as the man Nannultera, and the reality
of his existence is powerfully conveyed to Crossland’s third millennium
audience. After their labours in the fields and when the carting of wool
was complete, young workers like Nannultera were free to play cricket
to participate in the sacred sport of kings. They were allowed this pasto-
ral pleasure as a brief taste of the rewards of white upper-class culture,
but when it came to the ownership of a small parcel of their own land,
they were refused. (For a discussion of the mission at Poonindie, see
Hoorn 2007, pp. 116–119.) In Deacon’s portrait, a female Nannultera,
now armed with an axe rather than a cricket bat, interrogates the be-
trayal of civic humanism that the young black cricketer and those like
him endured.
As is clear in her Portrait – Eva Johnson, Writer, Destiny Deacon’s
photographs are about liminality, about living on the borders of white
Australia disenfranchised and in poverty. Marcia Langton’s words,
­written more than 20 years ago, still hold true:

To really understand Destiny and her work, it is almost essential to live

in a shared household, probably a squat, with a group of A ­ boriginal,
single mothers and or/ black separatists – whether i­nspired by ­Sappho
or Malcolm X or both – but more relevant, ­perhaps to have been
poor, very poor, to have a big intellectual take on the work and to
have been marginalised from the discourses of power.
(Langton 1997, p. 100)

Deacon’s work is also defined by its ambiguity – by its power to attract

and repel. On the one hand, her most acute interpreters such Langton
recognise Deacon’s ‘brilliant encapsulation of post-colonial anxiety, as
a window of understanding for new generations of Australians turning
away from the psychosis of the colonial relationship’ (Langton 1997,
p. 101). On the other hand, and in the same breath, she admits: ‘I have
often wondered if her work irritates whites in the same way as it irritates
me. Or is the message different for them’ (Langton 1997, p. 105). Lang-
ton explains ‘Destiny loves to resurrect the imagery of our oppression,
position her favourite dolls or people in her stage sets, and eke out the
discomfort’ (ibid.).
 In-Your-Face 251
Occasionally, Deacon’s images profoundly horrify, but more often they
throw the viewer off-balance, scandalising and unsettling, rather than
repulsing. She seems to invite the viewer to engage with the work, to stay
with it and to think about it. In this sense, Deacon uses abjection and hor-
ror in a subtle and nuanced manner designed to bring in the viewer, often
with dark humour prominently in the mix. This is seen in works such as
Trustee (2001), in which she plays with abjection and masculinity. Here
the image of a black man, whose head is represented in sharp focus and
who is wearing a baseball cap which announces in prominent lettering
TRUST ME: I AM A WITCH DOCTOR. His face melds into folds of
orange and yellow fabric in soft focus in the foreground and is located in
front of a line of beer cans, a bottle of Jim Beam and ­knick-knacks con-
taining tropical references. The overall effect is simultaneously charm-
ing and unsettling. It brings to mind the life of a slightly seedy bar, yet
the barman/witch doctor is sympathetic – even ­seductive – as he charms
the viewer with his soft gaze and appealing visage. Skid Row (Deacon
1997b), which engages directly with the monstrous-­feminine, is more
confrontational; it depicts as three dolls: two black or in blackface, with
one female in a free-flowing dress; the other wearing a red cap and tie.
These figures are flanked by a young white person of indeterminate gen-
der who seems relaxed or a bit bemused. They make a jolly and sympa-
thetic group of young folk out on the town. However, the title, Skid Row,
suggests that life may not be as buoyant and light hearted as the imagery
contained in the photo appears, pointing in the direction of the black
exploitation of popular theatre in the last century and to the struggle of
people of colour to represent themselves on stage.
Throughout her career, the image of black femininity presented in
her photographs undercuts any ideal of respectability. Her women are
not quiet girls brought up in missions who seek integration with white
­Australia and a subservient role in the patriarchal order, black or white.
Last Laughs (Deacon 1995a), like Tracey Moffat’s Nice Coloured Girls
(dir. 1987), is a representation of uproar and of female ­insubordination
and monstrosity. Nice Coloured Girls is about, what, in the early
­nineteenth century, pidgin were called captains, men who were fooled by
adventurous black women into buying them drinks and cigarettes with
the aim of easy sex, but who in this contemporary adaptation are hood-
winked by girls looking for a free night out. Similarly, in Last Laughs,
Deacon appears as part of a trio of lovely ladies who seek out and prefer
each other’s company, deriving pleasure from their own entertainment
and their own bodies, drunk with pleasure, depraved, and disorderly.
In her photograph, Peach Blossom’s Revenge (Deacon 1995b) the
monstrous-feminine is again at work as Deacon pastiches the cover of
a cheap video from the era of the Vietnam War. A woman dressed in
a cheongsam graces the cover in various provocative poses all involv-
ing the American flag and the brandishing of a gun. Offensive and
252 Jeanette Hoorn
satirical quotes, which give the appearance of having been cut from the
­newspaper with a pair of pinking shears, include ‘I spit on your medals’
(a reference to the cult rape-revenge exploitation film, I Spit on Your
Grave [dir. Zarchi 1978]) completes this outrageous penny shocker.
Here the ­artist traverses more controversial territory than much of her
other output which often is humorous rather than incendiary. Deacon’s
exhibition in Adelaide entitled, My Boomerang Won’t Come Back,
­satirises through hard-hitting humour, a very racist and offensive song
enormously ­popular in Australia as well as the UK and Canada where
it reached number 3 on the hit parade. Every child in Australia of my
generation knew the song. It was not banned in Australia until 2015.
Deacon’s later work, My Boomerang Did Come Back (2003) depicts a
woman’s hand holding a boomerang on high – it is covered in blood that
drips down onto her hand. Decapitated dolls, a bloodied boomerang,
a black woman brandishing an axe – many of Deacon’s images, along
with her irreverent word-play, suggest both a relentless attack on the
white symbolic order as well as the challenging figure of a black woman
seeking justice.
The monstrous-feminine, which began as a concept for understanding
female ‘monsters’ in myth, religion, and film, has over the last three
­decades become a much more widely used concept for negotiating a
range of art forms as well as conceptual entities that come from outside
of the visual arts emerging in areas quite distinct from the humanities
such as those that have emerged in the social sciences and medicine.
Here, I have selected some of the best-known examples from the art of
the twentieth century and into the new millennium in which we find the
monstrous-feminine appearing in critical writings about ­artists. ­Ranging
from Freda Kahlo to mid-century feminists such as Judy ­Chicago
and Carolee Schneeman, I have also re-interpreted the ­photographs
of ­contemporary artists working on race and gender such as Destiny
­Deacon and Tracey Moffatt whose photography brings to light the
connection between female authority and a powerful Indigenous voice
within colonial and postcolonial cultures. Drawing on a range of artistic
strategies which implicate the monstrous-feminine, from sexual shock to
black humour and carnivalesque display, these women artists seek a new
culture and a new language to enable and inspire their fight for equality.

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List of Contributors

Tara Brabazon is the Dean of Graduate Research and Professor of

­Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide. She is the winner
of six teaching awards and has published 18 books and over 200
­refereed articles and book chapters. She is also a columnist for the
Times Higher Education. Her personal website is www.brabazon.net.
Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor in the Department of History of
Art and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. He is the author
of After Francis Bacon (2012) and Sportswomen in Cinema (2015)
and the co-editor with Liz Watkins of Gesture and Film (2017) and
with Katharina Bonzel of Representations of Sports Coaches in Film
(2017).
Elizabeth Cowie is Professor Emeritus in Film Studies at the U­ niversity
of Kent, Canterbury. She was co-founder and co-editor in the 1970s
of m/f, a journal of feminist theory, and author of Representing the
Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).
She has subsequently written on film noir, the horror of the h ­ orror
film, and on the cinematic dream-work. In Recording Reality,
­Desiring the Real (Minnesota University Press, 2011), she ­addressed
documentary film as serious, as spectacle, and as an art of the real.
Recent essays ­include ‘Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape’,
in the online journal Media Fields (vol. 1, 2011); ‘The Ventrilo-
quism of Documentary First-Person Speech and the Self-Portrait
Film’, in ­Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis
and ­Cinema (Routledge, 2014); ‘The World Viewed: Documentary
­Observing and the Culture of Surveillance’, in A Companion to Con-
temporary Documentary Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); The Time of
Gesture in Cinema and Its Ethics, in Journal for Cultural Research
(vol. 19, no, 1, 2015); and ‘The Difference in Figuring Women Now’,
in Moving Image Review & Art Journal (vol. 4 nos 1 and 2, 2016,
special issue on feminism and women’s art).
Barbara Creed is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the
­University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books in feminist
256 List of Contributors
film theory, gender, and media, including The Monstrous-Feminine
(1993) and Stray (2017). Her recent research is in animal studies, e­ thics
in the anthropocene, and the inhuman; her articles have appeared in
journals such as the Journal for Cultural Research; Necsus: European
Journal of Media Studies; and Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism.
She is on the editorial advisory boards of the Animal Studies Journal
and the Animal Publics international book series. She is the director
of the Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research N ­ etwork (HRAE).
Brett Farmer is Lecturer in Screen and Design at Deakin University,
Australia. He is author of Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy
and Gay Male Spectatorships (Duke 2000) and numerous essays on
Thai cinema. Between 2001 and 2016, he developed, established, and
headed the cultural studies programme at Chulalongkorn University
in Thailand.
Sneja Gunew (FRSC) is Professor Emerita of English and Women’s and
Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She
has edited and co-edited anthologies of Australian women’s and mul-
ticultural writings including Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Con-
struct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (Routledge 1990–1991).
In Australia, she compiled (with others) A Bibliography of Australian
Multicultural Writers (the first such compilation in Australia) and
co-edited Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations
(1992), the first collection of critical essay to deal with ethnic mi-
nority writings in the Australian context. Her books include Fram-
ing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted
Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Routledge
2004). Her most recent book is titled: Post-Multicultural Writers as
Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators (Anthem 2017).
Jeanette Hoorn is Honorary Professorial Fellow and a former Director
of Gender Studies and Associate-Dean EO in the Faculty of Arts at
the University of Melbourne. In 2014 she designed Sexing the ­C anvas,
filmed and taught at National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of ­Modern
Art New York, and Huntington Library in Pasadena on the Cour-
sera platform https://www.coursera.org/course/­sexingthecanvas. Her
books include Australian Pastoral, the Making of a White Landscape,
2007; Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia, 2009;
Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism the ­Pacific,
2001; Idylle Marocaine, Hilda Rix Nicholas et Elsie Rix en Maroc,
due October 2019 with Afrique Orient. Her essays have appeared
in Art and Australia, Screen, Third Text, Continuum, Transnational
Cinemas, Hecate, Australian Historical Studies; Photofile.
E. Ann Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and
Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University. Kaplan
­
 List of Contributors 257
has written many books and articles on topics in cultural studies,
media, and women’s studies, from diverse theoretical perspectives
including ­psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, and post-­
colonialism. ­Kaplan’s pioneering ­research on women in film (see her
Women in Film: Both Sides of the Camera, Women in Film Noir
and ­Motherhood and Representation) continues to be in print. Her
Feminism and Film (2000) brings ­together major feminist film the-
ories from 1980 to 2000. Kaplan’s more recent research focusses on
trauma as e­ vident in her books Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural
Explorations (co-edited with Ban Wang in 2004), her Trauma Cul-
ture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005)
and her latest book, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dys-
topian Film and Fiction (2015). Her new research project continues
her concern with trauma, this time in relation to traumatic memory
loss and gender, with a focus on dementia.
Annette Kuhn is Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at
Queen Mary ­University of London and a Fellow of the British
­Academy. As co-­editor of Screen, she curated the special issue, Screen
and Screen ­Theorising Today, in commemoration of the journal’s
50th ­anniversary. Other publications include Oxford Dictionary of
Film Studies (co-­authored with Guy Westwell, 2nd edn, 2020) and
­Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural
­E xperience (2013).
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck,
­University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other P
­ leasures
(1989; second edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996; second
edition 2013), Citizen Kane (1992; second edition 2012), and Death
24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). She made six
films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the
Sphinx (1977; DVD publication 2013) and Frida Kahlo and Tina
Modotti (1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made
Disgraced Monuments (1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).
Mark Nicholls is Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of
Melbourne where he has taught film since 1993. He is the author of
Lost Objects of Desire: The Performances of Jeremy Irons, ­Scorsese’s
Men: Melancholia and the Mob, and recent articles on Italian C ­ inema
and The Ballets Russes. Mark is a film journalist and worked for
many years on ABC Radio and for The Age newspaper, for which
he wrote a weekly film column between 2007 and 2009. He has an
­extensive list of credits as a playwright, composer, actor, producer,
and director. His ten most recent plays are published as Unconven-
tional Women (Prahran Press).
258 List of Contributors
Polona Petek is Assistant Professor (Film and Television Studies) at
the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, and Research
­Fellow at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. She is
the author of Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the
Age of Audience Research (2008) and co-editor (with Nil Baskar)
of Phenomenology of Film: Traditions and New Approaches (2014).
Her recent research focuses on nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and
mobility in cinema; on the intersections of these issues and gender in
Slovenian and other European cinemas.
Patricia Pisters is Professor of film at the Department of Media ­Studies
of the University of Amsterdam. She is one of the founding ­editors
of the Open Access journal NECSUS: European ­Journal of ­Media
Studies. Publications include: The Matrix of Visual Culture (Stan-
ford University Press, 2003); The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian
Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University
Press, 2012), and Filming for the Future (Amsterdam University
Press). In 2019 she is scholar in residence at EYE Film Institute Neth-
erlands and research fellow at Cinepoetic at the Freie ­Universitat in
Berlin. See also www.patriciapisters.com.
Valerie Wee is an Associate Professor in the Department of English
Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore and
lectures on film and media studies. Her research areas include teen
culture and the American culture industries, horror films, and ­gender
representations in the media. Her work has appeared in ­Cinema
­Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Tele-
vision, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of two books,
Teen Media: Hollywood and the Youth Market in the D ­ igital Age
and Japanese Horror Film and their American Remakes: T ­ ranslating
Fear, Adapting Culture.
Audrey Yue is Professor in Media, Culture and Critical Theory, Head
of Communications and New Media, and Convenor of the Cultural
Studies in Asia PhD Programme at the National University of Singa-
pore. She is author, co-author, and co-editor of Sinophone Cinemas
(2014), Transnational Australian Cinema (2013), Queer Singapore
(2012), Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (2010), AsiaPacifiQueer (2008),
and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (2003). Her recent
essays appear in Media and Communication, International Journal
of Communication, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Urban Studies.
Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

Abjection 3–4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 26, Alien (film) 2, 13, 14–16, 19, 20,
28, 29n6, 36, 37, 46–7, 48, 75, 21, 22, 23–4, 25, 30n17, 97, 98,
77, 80–1, 84n18, 95–6, 100, 104, 129, 147
122, 123, 124, 134, 144, 146, 177, Aliens (film) 98
180, 181, 187, 189, 191, 197, 198, Alien Covenant (film) 14–15, 16–25,
199, 201, 209, 211, 215–16, 218, 103–4
219, 235, 242–3, 245–6, 249, 251; allegory 9, 29n10, 79
animal14, 100; corporeal 201; alt-right 151, 156, 157n5
creative 129; erotic 201; feminine alterity see Otherness
97, 122, 123, 197, 220–1; social Alzheimer’s 142–4, 174, 175, 177–85,
142, 173, 195–6, 201 185n1
Abraham, Nicolas 10 Améry. Jean 140
Acker, Ally 162–3, 164 Amirpour, Ana Lily 28, 102, 134,
acting 62, 91–2, 108, 114, 115, 135n3
116–17; demonstrative technique Amphlett, Chrissy 247–8
117; emotion 119; method 114 Ancuta, Katarzyna 187, 198
activism 44 android 19–20, 22, 23, 25, 36, 104
Ades, Dawn 13–14 Angyal, Andras 90
Adorno, Theodor W. 75 animals 14, 16, 17, 21, 24, 27, 89–90,
aesthetics 10, 68, 122, 126, 127, 98–100, 162, 191, 211, 242, 244;
129, 194, 243, 247; feminist 40, cat 89, 200, 210, 211; hyena 162;
73, 78; horror 93, 125, 128, 130, pig 89, 92, 122
132, 134; Japanese 35; Kristevan Anthropocene 100
4; lawlessness 196; mongrel 197; anthropology 3, 30n28, 177, 184, 236
photographic 36; political 25, 40; Arendt, Hannah 24–5
quality 194 Arnon, Poj 187–8, 190, 193–205
affect 9, 10–11, 24, 29n10, 40–1, 66, art 20, 21, 24, 30n17, 37–8, 56–7, 82,
72, 74–5, 79, 84n14, 93, 100–1, 93, 126, 140, 162–5, 191, 241–54;
122, 127–8, 131, 134, 144, 166, avant-garde 4, 29n7, 162, 164, 169,
180, 188, 196, 201, 235 247; Japanese 35–6; performance
ageing 17, 28, 140–2, 174, 175, 74, 103, 107, 191, 246–8;
187–8, 199, 200 prehistoric 30n19, 141–2, 162, 165,
agency 11, 66, 73, 93, 123, 124, 125, 168–9; Pre-Raphaelite 59; Surrealist
134, 188, 203, 211, 247; creative 13–14, 97, 141, 163, 243; women’s
128; female 90, 93, 103, 121, 215; 30n18, 141
feminine 3; Ahmed, Sara 149 asignification 11, 29n13
Aliceheimer’s (graphic novel) 142–4, Atwood, Margaret 139, 146, 148,
175–85 150–1, 152, 153, 154–5, 157n3
260 Index
Auschwitz 24 Carrie (1976 film) 2, 26–7, 89, 92, 93,
Australia 95, 98, 191, 232, 242, 95, 97, 122–4, 147
247–8; Aboriginal 248–52; Carrie (2013 film) 92–3, 123–4,
academia 147, 231 135n4
Carrington, Leonora 140–1, 162–4,
Bacon, Francis 13–14 169–70, 170n4, 170n5, 171n15,
Badejo, Bolaji 22 171n17; art 140, 141, 162, 164;
Bakhtin, Mikhail 26, 201 Down Below 163; Hearing
Balanzategui, Jessica 22, 227n10 Trumpet, The 140, 163–4
Balmain, Colette 218–19 Carter, Angela 164
Bataille, Georges 13–14 Carter, Lynda 6–7
Baudrillard, Jean 147, 154 Castle, Terry 27
Bauer, Jane 109–10 castration 1, 3, 7, 23, 27, 28, 46, 47,
beauty 80, 142, 202; Edwardian 54; 48, 50, 78, 96–7, 98, 102, 122,
Japanese 35 124–5, 126, 143, 162, 176, 197,
Bell, Vikki 75 210, 222
Bellour, Raymond 2 catharsis 4, 25, 29n7, 29n8, 144,
Betterton, Rosemary 246 180–1
Bierce, Ambrose 143 Cavell, Stanley 40, 74
Bioscope (magazine) 193, 195 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 4, 25,
birth 13, 16, 17, 20, 92, 98–9, 104, 29n6, 39
123, 129–30, 131–2, 133, 150, Chadwick, Whitney 162, 163
153, 166, 167, 168, 182, 214, 241, Charoenpura, Mai 199
243–4 Chicago, Judy 169, 191, 241, 245
Blade Runner (film) 19, 22 child actor 113, 114
Blair, Linda 91–2, 106, 108, 109, Chion, Michel 6
113–15, 116, 119n2 cinematography 91, 134; camerawork
blank stare 143 5, 45, 82, 112, 118, 123, 126, 127,
blood 12, 75, 82, 92–3, 106, 121, 133, 187, 199, 211, 213, 217–18,
122–5, 129, 132–4, 135n10 220, 224, 234
bodybuilding 142 Cixous, Hélène 161, 164
Bogdanovich, Peter 118 class 22, 23, 55, 58, 62, 63, 66, 187,
borders 3, 16, 29n4, 80, 95, 100, 122, 194, 195, 198, 202, 203; bourgeois
129, 152, 155, 188, 190, 195–6, (see middle); lower (see working);
201–2, 209, 215–16, 217–18, 233, middle 38, 39, 56, 57, 59, 63, 71,
235, 236, 242–3, 250 188, 193, 194, 195, 198, 202, 203;
Boucheron, Patrick 39 working 38–9, 56–7, 61–2, 149,
Bourdieu, Pierre 194 188, 194, 199, 202; upper 250
Brah, Avtar 235 Clément, Catherine 161
Bresson, Robert 99 clothing 5, 55–6, 61, 62, 148,
Brood, The (film) 2, 89, 95, 98, 129 166, 167
Buddhism 167, 202 Clover, Carol J. 5–8, 8–9, 124–5, 127,
Bulgaria 140, 141, 161, 165, 166, 135n2
169, 170, 170n11, 170n12, 171n14 colonialism 25, 191, 242–3,
Burstyn, Ellen 90–2, 106–20 249–50, 252
Burtsyn, Jefferson (née Roberts) 108, colour 38, 55, 63, 93, 94, 111, 121,
109–10, 113 130, 131, 135n11, 245; use in film
Butler, Judith 64n4, 71–2, 83n10 31n33, 93, 124, 127, 128, 132–3,
134, 135n10; use in graphic novels
Campion, Jane 92, 122, 125–9, 132, 143, 181, 182; use in television
134, 135n3, 135n6, 155 148, 153
Canada 155, 252 Confucianism 211–12
carnivalesque 194, 201, 204, Conrad, Joseph 24–5
205n7, 252 corporeality 9, 197, 201, 203
 Index 261
Creed, Barbara 9, 12, 17, 20, 24, Denis, Claire 79, 82, 102–3, 135n3
26, 29n7, 39, 41, 44, 66, 92, 94, Derrida, Jacques 68, 83n4
106, 113, 127, 129, 130, 139, 142, desire 9, 39, 51, 58, 66–7, 68, 69,
143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 151–2, 70, 72, 73, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 83n7,
154, 165, 169, 170, 171n13, 175, 84n18, 90, 103, 147, 173; 178, 179,
176, 178, 191, 215, 222, 224–5, 180, 219, 226, 226–7n6; conflicting
226–7n6, 232, 235, 236; Darwin’s 176; feminine 49, 79, 129; lesbian
Screens 90, 99; fifth look 10–11; 102; masculine 27; repressed 97;
Homosexuality: A Film for sexual 7, 113, 127, 140
Discussion 101; ‘Horror and the Deutsch, Helene 53, 64n1
Monstrous-Feminine’ 2, 36, 46–7, disempowerment 154, 232, 236
49, 89, 95, 96, 103, 241; Media discipline 147, 151
Matrix 29n4; monstrous-feminine disgust 9, 47, 49, 90, 93, 96, 127, 129,
1–3, 7–8, 15, 27–9, 30n18, 37, 134, 140, 153, 156, 203, 242
40, 46–8, 78, 80, 90, 92, 93–4, Divinyls, The (rock group) 247–8
96, 98, 100–1, 102–3, 107, 134, Dixon, Deborah 90, 101
139–43, 146, 147, 151, 153, 155, Doane, Mary Ann 26, 64n4
156, 157n5, 165, 168, 170, 174–6, Dolar, Mladen 68; dreams 14, 20, 39,
177, 179, 187, 188, 189, 190–1, 57, 62–3, 70, 96, 126, 133, 134;
197–8, 210–11, 212, 215, 219, 225, condensation 63; displacement 63
226, 241–3, 245, 246, 247, 248, Duras, Marguerite 131
251, 252; monstrous masculine 99; Dvorak, Maria 150
Monstrous-Feminine, The 1–3, 4, dystopia 139, 140, 148, 149, 151,
5, 10–11, 12–13, 16, 25, 26, 70–1, 155, 156–7
89, 91, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103, 104,
121–5, 133, 144, 162, 173, 189, Edison, Thomas 99
190, 191, 209, 211, 232, 237n12; Edward VIII 12
Phallic Panic 16, 22, 27–8, 29n1, emotions 5, 19, 35, 46, 58, 63, 67,
50–1, 89, 99, 100, 103, 147; Stray 74–5, 80, 91–2, 100, 106–7, 117,
14, 98, 99–100 119, 129, 132, 178, 183, 190,
criminality 151, 197, 225 205n6, 223, 234, 243
Cronenberg, David 2, 89, 98, 129, empathy 40, 75, 183
132, 237n12 empowerment 26, 93, 103, 125, 134,
Crossland, John Michael 249–50 212, 215, 235, 247
Cullwick, Hannah 37–9, 59–63 Enchi, Fumiko 213
cultural studies 140, 151–2, 157n6 equality 71, 72–3, 103, 109, 230, 252
eroticism 38, 39, 56, 62, 63, 78, 123,
Dali, Salvador 12, 13, 14 129, 142, 246, 247, 248
Daly, Mary 161, 169 essay 35–6, 43–4
Darwin, Charles 99 essentialism 5, 7, 26, 27–8, 161, 245
Deacon, Destiny 191, 241, 243, ethics 73, 75, 78, 99–100, 150,
248–52; Last Laughs 251; My 205n4, 211
Boomerang Did Come Back 252; ethnicity 22, 23, 31n32, 63, 198, 203
My Boomerang Won’t Come Back ethnography 58
241, 252; No Fixed Dress 249; Ettinger, Bracha 10, 29n11, 22n85
Peach Blossom’s Revenge 251–2; Evolution (film) 92, 93, 122, 130–3
Portrait – Eva Johnson, Writer 250; exorcism 116, 117, 219
Skid Row 251; Trustee 251 Exorcist, The (film) 2, 27, 90–2, 93,
death drive 41, 80, 82, 85n22 95, 97, 100–1, 106–20
deformation 71, 216, 220 Eyes Without a Face (film) 41, 77
Deleuze, Gilles 9–11, 39, 66, 75,
84n13, 84n14, 175 Facebook 66
dementia 28, 142–4, 173–85 Fairweather, Elizabeth 90, 101
Demos, T.J. 6–7 Farmer, Brett 187–8, 190, 191
262 Index
fear 1, 3, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, Gay Liberation Movement 101, 102
30n23, 39, 49, 51, 63, 74, 76, 92, gaze 30n25, 56–7, 61, 66, 67, 69, 72,
124, 129, 134, 135n11, 149, 151, 79, 96–7, 123, 251; patriarchal 71;
153, 155, 175, 181, 189, 196, queer 6
210, 212, 213, 219, 221, 225, gender 2, 5–6, 21, 28, 38, 63, 66, 67,
226n2; male 107, 147–8, 153, 156, 71–2, 73, 83n10, 90, 103, 122, 125,
226, 242 128, 130, 132, 134; 135n2, 135n4,
feelings 10, 19, 29n12, 40, 51, 74–5, 141, 187, 197, 198, 200, 201,
91, 100, 110, 123, 129, 130, 183, 203, 214, 241, 251, 252; anxieties
188, 190, 201, 234 226; binaries 6; equity 161, 230;
female grotesque 187, 199 feminine 5; gaze 96; hierarchies
female masculinity 21 189; identity 26, 53, 62, 71, 210;
femme castatrice 1, 14, 124, 125, 197 masculine 8; queer 202; violence
femme enfant 163, 170 93, 125–6, 127
femme fatale 23, 37, 71, 95 genetics 15, 17, 21, 184
femininity 6, 7–8, 21, 26–7, 37, 53, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (film) 44, 46
55, 70, 71, 73, 146, 156, 188, 201, genocide 19, 24, 31n32, 248
202, 210, 222, 241; abject 26, 124, gerontology 175
187; adult 221; ageing 142; black Gerontophilia (film) 143
251; fetishized 50; monstrous 27, gesture 6, 10, 56, 91, 182, 245
122, 124, 129, 131, 132, 199, 221; ghost 30n23, 83n4, 119, 143, 187,
sexualised 199; submissive 225; 188–9, 196–7, 198, 199, 200, 202,
uncanny 245 210, 213, 217–18,; 219, 223, 224,
feminism 39, 40, 48, 49, 71, 72, 73, 226n1, 227n10
147, 153, 154–5, 157, 157n1, Giger, H.R. 13, 22, 30n17
171n14, 245; accountable 154; Gimbutas, Marija 141, 161,165, 169
second-wave 35, 37, 53, 66; A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
tough 156 (film) 28, 102, 133–4
fertility 123, 147, 148, 150, 151 Godard, Jean-Luc 48, 50, 132,
fetishism 46, 47, 48, 50, 56, 63; 135n10
commodity 50; sexual 49–50; dirt goddess 29n14, 141–2, 161, 162, 165,
38, 57, 59, 63; hands 61; muscle 39 168, 169, 244
Field, Reshad 109 Goldsmith, Jerry 101
fifth look 10–11 grandmother 44, 141–2, 162, 165–8,
figuration 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 22, 48, 72, 89, 170, 243
98, 141, 161, 190 graphic memoir 175, 181, 185n5
Final Girl 5, 7, 21, 125, 126, 129 graphic novel 142, 143–4
Fiske, John Greenblatt, Stephen 191
Foucault, Michel 66, 71, 83–4n12, 151 Greer, Germaine 109, 169
Franju, Georges 41, 77, 99 Griĉar, Nika 230
Freud, Sigmund 2–3, 8, 13, 22, 47, Grosz, Elizabeth 95
49–50, 53, 54, 59, 68, 69, 70, 76, Guardian, The (newspaper) 246
89, 92, 97, 129, 133, 134, 147, Guattari, Félix 9–10, 11, 75, 175
162, 176; Castration 3, 47, 96, 122;
Dora 55; ‘Female Sexuality’ 53; Hadžihalilović, Lucile 122, 130–3,
‘Femininity’ 53; Interpretation of 134, 135n3
Dreams, The 2, 14; ‘Little Hans’ 2, Hainge, Greg 90
3, 122, 124; Oedipus complex 3, Halberstam, J. 6–7, 8, 12
8, 10, 76, 96; sublimation 58; ‘The handmaiden 55, 139–40, 147, 148,
Uncanny’ 50–1, 96; ‘Wolf Man’ 150–1, 154, 157, 157n2
3, 29n1 Handmaid’s Tale, The (book) 139,
Friedan, Betty 109 146, 147, 150, 152, 156
Friedkin, William 106–9, 111–19, Handmaid’s Tale, The (television
119n1 series) 139–40, 146, 147, 148–50,
Frueh, Joanna 142 150–2, 155, 156–7
 Index 263
Harrison, Rachel 187, 197–8 psychic 4; racial 63; sexual 53,
Heath, Stephen 54–5, 82 170n7; teen 226n4
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 77 improvisation 91–2, 108, 113,
heteronormativity 30n21, 156 167, 195
history of art 30n18, 141, 244, 247 inequality 151
History of Love (film) 190, 234 In the Cut (film) 92, 93, 122, 125–9,
Ho Taeo Taek (film series) 188, 200–3, 130, 132, 135n6, 135n8
204–5n2 In the Realm of the Senses (film) 41,
Hoffmann, E.T.A. 51 78, 80, 82
Hoggart, Richard 152 I Spit on Your Grave (film) 1, 95,
Hokusai, Katshusika 36 97–8, 124, 125, 252
Holland, Agniezska 99
Hollywood 45, 46, 47, 73, 106, 110, J-horror 209–10, 213–14, 216, 219,
119, 197, 238n17 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227n10
Holocaust 24, 185n5 James, M.R. 30n23
Honogurai mizu no Soko Kara (film) Jamison, Kay Redfield 121
209, 210, 213, 214, 217–19, 221, Japan 35–6, 166, 188–90, 209–27
222, 223, 224, 225 Jenkins, Carol Mayo 91
Hoorn, Jeanette 14, 29n7, 190–1 Jenkins, Henry 152
Horney, Karen 2, 53 Jones, Allen 47
horror films 1–2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, Jones, Ernest 54–5
12, 22, 26–7, 28, 40, 41, 49, 51, Joyce, James 69
66, 70, 76, 77–8, 80, 84n18, 90, Ju-on (film) 189, 209, 210, 213, 214,
91, 95, 97–8, 99, 100, 102–4, 123, 219, 220–1, 223–5, 226–7n6
124, 127, 129–30, 134, 141, 147, Jung, Carl 109, 110, 118, 119, 134
155, 165, 173, 174, 176, 188, 190,
191, 209–10, 211, 212, 214, 215, Kahlo, Frida 191, 241, 243–4, 252
224, 225, 226n4, 227n9, 238n20, kaidan 210–13, 216, 217, 224, 225,
243, 246; classic 28; comedy 1, 226n2
200; feminist 41, 79; male 132; Kaplan, E. Ann. 95, 139, 142–4
modern 122; popular 4, 122, 226; kathoey 188, 200–3, 204, 205n7
Western 222 Kelly, Mary 241
Horst, Horst. P. 12 khrob tuk rot 194, 195, 196
Houtum, Henk van 190, 235 King Kong 6, 16, 98, 99
Huber, Valerie 153 Kino! (journal) 237n13
Hughes, Robert 245 Klein, Melanie 10, 30n12, 54, 84n18,
humour 104, 164, 169, 241, 251, 252 175, 178–9, 180, 185
hysteria 8, 55, 118, 169, 225 kogyaru 215, 218–19, 226n4
Kracauer, Siegfried 67, 74, 83n2
iconography 1, 37, 93, 141, 148, Kramer, Hilton 245
150, 155, 162, 163, 201, 202, 243; Kristeva, Julia 9, 10, 16, 25, 29n3, 47,
feminine 153; vaginal 14 48, 85n20, 89, 92, 98, 103, 104,
ideology 29, 49, 51, 96, 97, 155, 122, 165, 175, 176–7, 178, 181,
190, 211, 243; patriarchal 16, 197, 211, 236, 242; abjection 3–4,
21, 28, 71, 92, 101, 102, 222, 8, 11, 14, 36, 80–1, 84n18, 95–6,
226–7n6, 241 97, 100, 122, 173, 181, 195–6,
identification 5, 8, 20, 31n32, 54, 69, 235, 242–3; Black Sun 180; chora
72, 75, 77, 83n9, 83n10, 84n19, 46, 100; ‘Ellipsis on Dread and the
85n20, 97, 125, 176, 202, 203 Specular Seduction’ 29n8, 84n19;
identity 6, 16, 28, 61, 71–2, 79, Powers of Horror 3–4, 10, 46, 80,
83n10, 84n19, 144, 155, 184, 195, 95, 97, 180; Revolution in Poetic
236, 248; abject 26; ambiguous Language 10; semiotic 10, 24, 25,
220; class 63; gender 26, 53, 62, 31n33, 46, 90, 100; symbolic 91;
63, 71; human 40, 74; liminal 218; ‘Women’s Time’ 171n14
maternal 222; national 203, 233; Kuhn, Annette 2, 15, 35, 37–9, 41
264 Index
Lacan, Jacques 2, 3, 7–8, 9–10, 53, Me Too movement 73
92, 99, 175; Antigone (play) 76; Menart Urša 230
fantasy 78; Imaginary 8, 69, 70, 76, menopause 141, 142, 169
81, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 185; menstruation 17, 92, 102, 122, 123,
lack 8, 69, 70, 76; mirror-phase 133, 167
(see mirror-stage); mirror-stage 3, Merck, Mandy 95
8, 96; Name-of-the-Father 69–70, mestiza 243, 244
80; objet petit a 68, 69, 76, 77, 79, Metz, Christian 2, 67
81, 82, 84n18; Oedipus complex Meynell, Alice 35, 44, 52n2
8, 45; Other 70, 76–7; ravage 41, migrants 149, 233, 248
78, 80–2, 85n22; Real 68, 69, Mila from Mars (film) 140, 142,
70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80–1, 82, 166–8, 170n12
83n7, 83n9, 84n13, 84n18, 84n19; Miller, Bruce 139, 148
sinthomme 41, 69–70, 78, 81, Miller, Jason 109, 111, 116, 117, 119n2
83n9, 85n22; Symbolic 4, 8, 17, 21, mise-en-scène 21, 25, 124, 126, 127,
27, 40, 41, 46, 49, 50, 51, 69, 70, 130, 132, 133, 134
76, 81, 99, 100–1, 106, 123, 176, misogyny 17, 28, 47, 125, 147, 149,
177, 179, 181, 197, 221, 226–7n6, 150, 153, 154, 197, 245
242, 252 mnemotechnics 67
Lady Gaga 241 Moffatt, Tracey 251, 252
Langton, Marcia 248, 250 monster 2, 5, 17, 20, 22, 24, 96, 98,
Laplanche, Jean 76, 84n15 102, 104, 123, 133, 141, 142, 143,
Last Picture Show, The (film) 108, 197, 199, 211, 219, 245; female 70,
110, 118 95, 96–8, 103, 107, 174, 210, 224,
Lawrence of Arabia 20, 30n20 252; male 16–17, 20, 23, 27, 51, 70,
Lawrence of Arabia (film) 20 96, 122, 212
lesbian 72, 101–2, 149, 152; vampire The Monstrous-Feminine (Barbara
95, 102, 123 Creed) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12–13,
Letter to America (film) 140, 142, 15, 16, 25, 26, 28, 35, 50, 89, 90,
165–6, 171n11 91, 92, 98, 100, 102–4, 121–2, 124,
Lewis, Mark 45–6 144, 162, 165, 187, 189, 190, 191,
liminality 106, 133, 191, 201, 202, 209, 211, 232, 235
218, 243, 245, 250 monstrous femininity 27, 122, 124,
literature 4, 25, 29n6, 44, 73, 103, 129, 131–2, 221
127, 150, 180, 185n5, 215, 242 mother 3–4, 8, 20, 24, 25, 27, 71, 81,
living-dead 11 85n22, 98, 100, 123–4, 143–4, 173,
Lloyd, Fran 218 175–85, 189, 243; abject 92, 106,
lobster 12–13, 15, 29n14 176; absent 223; archaic 13, 23,
Lomas, David 13 25, 46–7, 48, 129, 130, 131–2, 133,
197, 210, 224; castrating 197, 210;
Magritte, René 12, 243 failed 224; Japanese 214; male 17,
male monstrosity 16–17, 20, 23, 27, 103; monstrous 147; primeval 103;
51, 70, 122, 147 psychic 221; saintly 176; single 213,
Manet, Édouard 37–8, 56–7 250; wise 222, 223
Marx, Hedvig 156–7 mother-daughter relationship 113,
Marx, Karl 49–50 143, 175, 178, 222–3
masculinity 6, 8, 21, 27, 50–1, 63, Mulvey, Laura 20, 35–7, 40, 41, 71,
173, 188, 198, 201, 211–12, 214, 89, 245; Death 24x a Second 36,
225, 251; bourgeois 57; deviant 37, 46, 51; Fetishism and Curiosity
50; female 21 36–7, 46, 48–50, 191, 245;
masochism 20, 125, 129 phantasmatic topography 48–9,
masquerade 26–8, 37, 39, 53–4, 58, 50; Visual and Other Pleasures
62, 64n4 43; ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Mayhew, Henry 57 Cinema’ 2, 43, 47, 50, 67, 96–7
 Index 265
Munby, Arthur 37, 38–9, 57–62, 63 phallic pleasure 80
muscle worship 39 phallic signifier 6, 11, 70
music 67, 103, 126, 127, 164, 165, phallic substitute 6
166, 196, 199 phallic symbol 23, 30n23, 168
myth 1, 37, 45, 47, 70, 96, 130, 162, phallic woman 48, 173
164, 169, 210, 243, 252 phallocentrism 51, 197, 222
phallus 7–8, 29n9, 47, 69–70, 156
Nakagawa, Nabuo 211, 226n2 Philibert, Nicolas 99
nakedness 38, 56, 131, 246–7 photography 12, 14, 22, 24, 30n29,
nam nao 187, 195, 196 37–9, 48, 57, 59–61, 66, 67, 73,
Nancy, Jean-Luc 78–9 74, 100, 174, 178, 182, 185, 191,
Napier, Susan 215, 218 213, 241, 245–6, 248, 249, 250,
narrative 9, 10, 21, 24, 46, 67, 91, 251, 252; abject 245; aesthetic 36;
97, 104, 107, 118, 144, 146, 147, evidential 125
150, 152, 153, 168, 177–8, 179, Pisters, Patricia 11, 89, 90, 92–4,
183, 188, 190, 203, 220, 222, 225, 143, 188
235, 243 Podalydès, Denis 92
nationalism 149, 151, 198, 203 Pollock, Griselda 38, 43, 56, 141
Nead Lynda 38 popular culture 4, 139–40, 146, 147,
Nephew, Neil 91, 108, 109, 110 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 175
Nicholls, Mark 90–2, 94 populism 149, 152, 193–4, 195
Nietzsche, Friedrich 71 pornography 14, 149, 151, 205n6,
No Fixed Address (rock group) 249 242, 245
noise 90 postcolonialism 252
nostalgia 148, 171n16 pregnancy 123, 130, 166, 167
Nussbaum, Emily 150 prehistoric figurines 141–2, 161, 165,
168–9
Oliver, Kelly 99 Prevenge (film) 130
onryō 188–9, 210–13, 214, 215–17, primal scene 23, 89, 97, 129
218, 219, 220, 224, 225, 226 primal uncanny see uncanny
Orenstein, Gloria 161, 164, 169, 170n5 Prometheus (film) 15–25, 30n27, 103–4
Orwell, George 157n10 Prosenc, Sonja 190, 234–5
Oshima, Nagisa 78, 82 Powell, Anna 9–10, 29n10
Otherness 16, 22, 24, 30n31, 48, 63, Praz, Mario 47
201, 203, 211, 220, 226 Psycho (film) 5, 6, 27, 29n8, 49, 100
psychoanalysis 2–3, 5, 7, 9–11, 14,
Pandora 24, 36–7, 48–9, 103 15, 26, 28, 29n11, 36, 39, 43, 45,
parietal art 30n19 47, 49, 50–1, 53–6, 66, 69, 71, 75,
Parker, Rozsika 141 76, 77, 81, 83n4, 92, 95, 96–7, 122,
paternal law 8, 143, 176, 179 133, 134, 144, 169, 173, 175–6,
patriarchy 8, 15, 16, 21, 26, 28, 35, 177, 178, 195, 210, 236
36, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 71, 92, Puritanism 150
96, 97, 101, 102, 103, 139, 147,
149, 154–5, 161, 168, 169, 176, queer cinema 200, 232
181, 187, 188–9, 197, 209–13, queer politics 70
214–15, 217, 219, 221, 222–3, 225, queer theory 26, 104
226, 226n3, 226–7n6, 237n12, 241,
242, 244, 249, 251 Rancière, Jacques 39, 40, 72–4, 75–6,
Penwarden, Charles 4 83–4n12; dissensus 73–4, 84n13;
performativity 53, 66, 71–2, 83n10 heterotopia 73, 83–4n12; politics
Perron, Bernard 143 72–4
Petek, Polona 190, 191 rape 1, 79, 80, 95, 124–5, 126, 128,
Peters, Carl 24–5 135n5, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152,
phallic masculinity 27 153, 155, 211, 252
266 Index
Reagan, Ronald 139, 146, 148, 151 Simpson, Wallis 12
rebellion 131, 161, 167, 169, 188, slasher film 5–6, 9, 124, 125–6, 130
203, 226–7n6, 241 slavery 139, 147, 150, 151
religion 4, 93, 103, 123, 149, 152, Slovenia 190, 230–1, 232–6, 236n3,
161, 165, 168, 171n14, 180, 203, 237n7, 237n8, 237n10, 237n11,
243, 252 237n13, 237–8n14, 238n15,
Riddles of the Sphinx (film) 46–7 238n17, 238n19, 238n20
Riefenstahl, Leni 22, 30n29 Smith, Ali 163–4
Rifkin, Adrian 93 Smith, Dick 115
Ringu (film) 189, 209, 210, 213–14, Smith, Kiki 246
216, 218, 219, 221–2, 224, 225, Sobchack, Vivian 141
227n8 Sophocles 76
Rites of Passage (exhibition) 4, 180 sound 10, 25, 27, 31n33, 66, 67, 73,
ritual 150, 151, 162, 166, 199, 201, 74–5, 76, 90, 91, 94, 100–1, 117,
212, 216, 219 128, 129, 142, 163, 166, 190, 199,
Rivera, Diego 244 224, 230, 234, 236n3
Riviere, Joan 26, 27, 37, 39, 53–6, 57, spectatorship 9, 22, 36, 38, 39, 46,
62–3, 64n4 50, 67, 78, 82, 97, 100–1, 102, 119,
Roizman, Owen 111, 112, 115 246; female 26, 53, 64n4, 97; male
Rose, Jacqueline 7, 25, 70 16, 48, 56
Rose, Steve 246, 247 Spielvogel, Laura 190
Rosenau, Helen 141 Sprinkle, Annie 241
Russo, Mary 246 Steedman, Carolyn 38
Stiegler, Bernard 39–40, 67, 83n1
sadism 6, 20, 23, 30n24, 30n25, Stoker, Bram 93
30n26, 107, 153, 173, 179 subjectivity 2, 3, 11, 39–40, 66, 72,
sadomasochism 152 77, 83n10, 143, 147–8, 174, 177,
Schefer, Jean-Louis 93 181, 226
Schneemann, Carolee 191, 241, sublimation 58, 76, 78
246–7, 252 Suleiman, Susan 163, 164, 170n5
science fiction 97, 98, 101, 140, 147, Swanson, Lucy 143
157n3 Swiboda, Marcel 40
scream 5, 6, 9, 100–1, 132 Sydow, Max von 107, 118, 119n2
Screen (journal) 2, 3, 46, 89, 95–6,
103, 146 taboo 51, 135n6, 166, 202, 244, 247
screen memories 37 Tai Hong (film omnibus) 187–8, 198
semiotics 43, 56, 148, 196, 202 teaching 95, 97–8, 128, 231, 233,
sex 1, 12, 30n20, 62, 78–9, 89, 237n11; Confucian 211–12
123, 126, 149, 153, 199, 200, technology 21, 36, 40, 67
215, 246 Teeth (film) 1–2, 27, 102
sexual difference 3, 7–8, 11–12, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (film)
30n27, 35, 37, 40, 41, 53, 69–71, 6–7, 8
72, 74, 79, 80, 82, 161, 173, 203 Thailand 187–8, 193–205
sexual gestures 91, 114 Thomson, David 13
sexuality 1, 6, 8, 11, 20, 30n20, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (ghost story)
30n22, 30n23, 50, 53, 57, 66, 69, 210–11
70, 85n20, 91, 93, 102, 104, 124, Torok, Maria 10
127, 128, 131–2, 141, 173, 197, transference 10, 29n12, 54
199, 201, 202, 203, 222, 241, 242 transfemininity 200
Shelley, Mary 16, 103 transgender 17, 72, 152, 161,
Sherman, Cindy 37, 48, 102, 191, 163, 201
241, 245–6 trauma 40, 74, 76, 78, 100, 108, 109,
shojo 189, 218–19 167, 168, 180, 243, 244
 Index 267
Trifonova, Iglika 165–6, 169, 170n11 Weiss, Maja 190, 231, 232, 233,
Trouble Every Day (film) 41, 78–9, 237n5, 238n15, 238n16
80, 82 werewolf 16, 17, 89, 98, 102, 163
Trump, Donald 25, 51, 139, 146–7, West, Katherine 54
151–3, 154, 156, 157n4, 157n6 Western culture 174, 176, 177, 215
Tumblr 66, 152, 153 White, Gilbert
Williams, Linda
uncanny 16, 22, 27, 50–1, 68, 77, 78, Williams, Raymond
100–1, 210, 216, 224; femininity Willis, Ika
245; primal 17, 27, 51, 99 witch 92, 96, 102, 123, 125, 140, 141,
142, 165, 173, 197, 210, 242
vagina dentata 1, 12, 14, 27, 102 Wittig, Monique 164
vaginal iconography 14 Wood, Robin 97
vampire 16, 17, 28, 79, 80, 93, 133–4, Woolf, Virginia 128–9
134n1, 197, 210, 242; female 98, Wollen, Peter 44, 46–7
102, 133; lesbian 95, 102, 123 Women’s Liberation Movement 28,
Varo, Remedios 141, 162, 170n3 43, 176
vengeance 1, 14, 163, 210–11, 212, Wonder Woman 6–7
216, 224, 226n1 writing (styles of) 25, 35–6, 43–4,
Vercoutere, Marcel 112 162–4
visual cultures 17, 28–9, 30n19
visual disturbance 216 xenomorph 22
voice 5, 6, 27, 66, 68–9, 83n5, 91, xenophobia 149
100, 114, 177, 181
voyeurism 20, 63 youth 141, 173, 199, 218
YouTube 99, 146
Wall, Jeff 36 Yue, Audrey 2, 29n4, 30n21
Walrath, Dana 142–4, 173–85
Warner, Kristen 140, 152 Žižek, Slavoj 68, 69, 231
Warner, Marina 163 Zola, Émile 39
Watkins, Liz 29n3, 93 zombie 143
Wee, Valerie 188–90 Zornitsa, Sophia 166–8
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