Re Reading The Monstrous Feminine

This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking work of feminist 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.

In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body. With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho, Creed analyses the seven `faces' of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Her argument that man fears woman as castrator, rather than as castrated, questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts.

In this accessible introductory guide, the author identifies key feminist approaches to popular culture from the 1960s to the present and demonstrates how the relationship between feminism, femininity and popular culture has often been a troubled one. The book introduces the central ideas of both second-wave feminism and feminist cultural studies and demonstrates how they inform feminist debates about a range of popular forms and practices through a series of case studies: the woman's film; romantic fiction; soap opera; consumption and material culture; fashion and beauty practices; and youth culture and popular music.

This follow-up to the classic text of The Monstrous-Feminine analyses those contemporary films which explore social justice issues such as women’s equality, violence against women, queer relationships, race and the plight of the planet and its multi-species. Examining a new movement – termed by Creed as Feminist New Wave Cinema – The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine explores a significant change that has occurred over the past two decades in the representation of the monstrous-feminine in visual discourse. The Monstrous-Feminine is a figure in revolt on a journey through the dark night of abjection. Taking particular interest in women directors who create the figure of the Monstrous-Feminine, in cinema that foregrounds everyday horrors in addition to classic horror, Creed looks at a range of diverse films including The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland, Carol, Raw, Revenge, and the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. These films center on different forms of revolt, from inner revolt to social, supernatural and violent revolt, which appear in Feminist New Wave Cinema. These relate in the main to the emergence of a range of social protest movements that have gathered momentum in the new millennium and given voice to new theoretical and critical discourses. These include: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, queer theory, race theory, the critique of anthropocentrism and human animal theory. These theoretical discourses have played a key role in influencing Feminist New Wave Cinema whose films are distinctive, stylish and diverse. This is an essential companion to the original classic text and is ideal for students in Gender and Media, Gender and Horror, Gender and Film and Feminist Film theory courses.

This is a timely update of a seminal text which re-interprets key films of the horror genre, including Carrie, The Exorcist, The Brood and Psycho. In the first edition, Creed draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to challenge the popular view that women in horror are almost always victims, and argues that patriarchal ideology constructs women as monstrous in relation to her sexuality and reproductive body to justify her subjugation. Although a projection of male fears and paranoid fantasies, the monstrous-feminine is nonetheless a terrifying figure. Creed’s argument contests Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference to offer a provocative rereading of classical and contemporary horror. This updated edition includes a new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory. Creed proposes a new concept of radical abjection to reinterpret the monstrous-feminine as a figure who embraces abjection by reclaiming her body and re-defining her otherness as nonhuman – while questioning patriarchy, anthropocentrism, misogyny and the meaning of the human. Films discussed include Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Atlantics, The Girl with All the Gifts, Border and Titane. Barbara Creed’s classic remains as relevant as ever and this edition will be of interest to academics and students of feminist theory, nonhuman theory, critical animal studies, race, and queer theory.

Jane Ussher takes a unique approach to the study of the material and discursive practices associated with the construction and regulation of the female body.

Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award From White Review Short Story Prize winner Julia Armfield, a brilliant, provocative debut story collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link. In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women’s experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers’ sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan’s shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates’. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected. Blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism, salt slow is an utterly original collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock, heralding the arrival of a daring new voice.

This book explores the monstrous-feminine in Japanese popular culture, produced from the late years of the 1980s through to the new millennium. Raechel Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. The book focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.