Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film ─ Gynaehorror

In this path-breaking work, Erin Harrington offers an analysis of women in horror film through an exploration of ’gynaehorror’: films that are concerned with female sex, sexuality and reproduction. The majority of prior work in this area has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon psychodynamic theories, which has limited the field of inquiry, especially in the way it frames female monstrosity as inherent and as the result of a woman’s ’lack’. The research focusses on five broad thematic streams: the relationship between normative heterosexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; the representation and expression of female subjectivity in horror films that feature pregnancy and abortion; the manner in which cinematic representations of reproductive technology are bound up within hegemonic constructions of gender and power; the ways that discourses of motherhood and maternity in horror films do and do not shift over time; and the theoretical and corporeal possibilities opened up through applying Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of the processural body to films about the aging female body. It makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new approaches and readings in the broader area of popular culture and gender.

Erin Harrington is Lecturer in English, Cultural Studies and Cinema Studies at The University of Canterbury, New Zealand.