Tarae McQueen, & Dr. Rainer Buschmann
There is a precedent within the horror genre of film that allows the ‘monsterification’ of women, in particular with the language used to describe them. Often there are tropes or concepts that revolve around or are entirely dependent on violence against the female characters in the narrative, whether this is physical or – the focus of this research – linguistic. Words like ‘hysterical’, ‘whore’, ‘witch’, and ‘siren’ have become ingrained in popular culture’s view of women, and have defined the categories in which they exist within the genre at large. Categories that have been defined by Australian academic Barbara Creed.
In Creed’s text The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, she breaks down women in horror into 11 categories or stereotypes from witch and vampire to the vagina dentata and the uncanny creatrix. Creed’s research is based on the work of Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to examine why there is such a fascination and revolution where women’s bodies are concerned. All sections of Creed’s text examine the dehumanization and abjection of women in horror, and the fear that accompanies it for men in particular. She examines the intersections of womanhood to look at the ways in which women are also victimized by the same narratives in which they are the monsters. Which takes us back to linguistic violence.
The goal of this research is to examine how linguistic violence became a part of the monstrous feminine, which has influenced the aesthetic of the ‘dark feminine’ and played a large part in popularizing the idea of ‘feminine rage’. I have chosen a selection of 12 films, and will be using the films themselves, reviews, ratings, and academic research from a broad spectrum of disciplines to examine the transition. This intersectionality is key to the field of film and cinema studies, and that is exemplified in my research. I pull from psychology, sociology, medicine, religion, anthropology, and history for my analysis, showing that film as a vehicle of study is, in addition to being easily and widely accessible for a vast majority of students, distinctly interdisciplinary in an incredibly unique way.