Return Of The Monstrous Feminine

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 updated edition of The Monstrous Feminine includes an entirely new section examining feminist horror films of the new millennium in the context of abjection and nonhuman 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, T

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.

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.

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.

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.

'Phallic Panic is not only an impressive and elegant work of scholarship; it breathes new life into debates around the horror film, illuminating the genre's eerie and unsettling power. Like her groundbreaking The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed's new book is destined to become a standard text in the field.' Pam Cook, Professor of European Film and Media, University of Southampton 'Barbara Creed asks the question "what does man want?" and takes us on an exhilarating trip through the Freudian uncanny and horror cinema to provide the answers. This is a lucid and compelling account of male monstrosity which exhumes the uncanny and makes it come to life all over again as something "primal", perverse and chillingly subversive.' Ken Gelder, author of Reading The Vampire and The Horror Reader Vampires, werewolves, cannibals and slashers-why do audiences find monsters in movies so terrifying? In Phallic Panic, Barbara Creed ranges widely across film, literature and myth, throwing new light on this haunted territory. Looking at classic horror films such as Frankenstein, The Shining and Jack the Ripper, Creed provocatively questions the anxieties, fears and the subversive thrills behind some of the most celebrated monsters. This follow-up to her influential book The Monstrous-Feminine is an important and enjoyable read for scholars and students of film, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and the visual arts.