The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Popular Fictions Series)

Product Information

Other than that though, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the horror genre, or in film studies in general. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I have used the term “monstrous-feminine”’, she wrote, ‘as the term “female monster” implies a simple reversal of “male monster”’.

This opening session traces the history of monstrous women, through the gorgons and sirens of Greek mythology to Early Modern witch hunts and 21st-century media narratives, before turning to two enduring archetypes: the witch and the mother. The Monstrous Feminine refers to the interpretation of horror films conceptualizing women, predominantly, as victims. This book is sometimes hard to read, and the concepts of psychoanlaysis that she draws on are often dubious.

Julia Kristeva is one of Creed's major feminist influencers, as she studied Kristeva in great depth, particularly with her examination of the abject. This updated edition includes a new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory. Kristeva's theory therefore can be applied to the monstrous feminine, particularly the themes of the mother-child relationship and the mother's womb, which both relate to the ‘ archaic mother’.

One word of warning to potential readers is that the book, being a decade old, does not consider more recent horror films. Twenty-first Century feminist horror, Creed shows, introduces a series of startling tropes: the metamorphizing adolescent girl, the female zombie, and the creatrix. The reproductive system within horror movies is often depicted as monstrous, for example, the 1979 film Alien clearly depicts this theory. The Monstrous Feminine [4] discusses the psychoanalysis theories of Sigmund Freud, primarily ideas of castration and the female genitalia as monstrous. Near the beginning of the book, she scolds the patriarchy for believing that there is no Monstrous Feminine.She is the author of seven books, including Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (2009); and Stray: Human- Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017). In this new edition Creed expands and updates the filmography to include horror films created by women to augment the ways in which the monstrous-feminine functions deliciously as patriarchy’s retribution. Creed examines Freud's psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference, and the marking of female sexuality as dangerous, as Freud believed women had vagina dentata and that they were castrators of men. Mis]conceptions of female sexuality are inherent within the horror genre, as a common motif is that virtuous or "pure" women survive to the end of the film, and women who exhibit sexual behaviour commonly die early into the narrative.

The questions children have regarding the genitals are not explained by rational adults, so the child is left to fill in the blanks. Creed uses films that were influenced by Darwin in the nineteenth century to analyze film techniques related to Darwin's works. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. One final note: Creed has found some shortcomings in Sigmund Freud's theories and has provided some brilliant solutions, especially to the famous "Little Hans" case.

In this new and expanded edition of the classic The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed adds a crucial monstrous-feminine register: the nonhuman.