By exploring The Passion of New Eve through the theoretical ideas of Julia Kristeva, I hope to demonstrate that the fecund female body, which is frequently contained and constrained in other practices that serve to diminish the maternal authority, in this novel, is re-translated as both a site of man’s horror and woman’s celebratory defiance. This paper will discuss the notion of female sexuality as the site of man’s terror. This surgically-sculpted new Eve(lyn) is thus made to psychically as well as physically experience what it means to be gender positioned on the boundaries of a pallocentric order. Her vibrant, fleshy, multi-breasted ‘Mama’ takes the sexually nonchalant Englishman Evelyn, subjects him to a humiliating rape then castrates him and carves into his body a bona fide, fully functioning, leaking, seeping womb a ‘wound that would, in future, bleed once a month, at the bidding of the moon’ (Passion, p. In The Passion of New Eve, Carter rips through the autocratic authority of a paternal order and unleashes a horror absolute. Penetrating the vagina can be a site of anxiety for a man, instigating a fear that his penis might disappear forever into the vaginal void. Freud argued that representations of the vagina and menstruation reflect men’s fear of castration. The fecund female body is often positioned as a site of danger and pollution, of fear and disease. ‘I am the Great Parricide, I am the Castrix of the Phallocentric Universe, I am Mama, Mama, Mama!’, thunders Mother, Angela Carter’s terrifying, bounteous, abject, life-affirming creation of womanhood. Teeth’s avenging heroine updates the sexual politics of second-wave feminism to resist recent political efforts to regulate women’s bodies. Second, I argue that this revision of the rape-revenge genre equips audiences with important symbolic resources for feminist critiques of cultural misogyny. This subversive iteration of rape-revenge cinema is assisted by the filmmaker’s introduction of camp, a playful and self-conscious cinematic style that renders transparent the fantasies guiding the cinematic construction of violence and the male gaze. First, I illustrate how Teeth intervenes in the gendered politics of spectatorship by cultivating identification with a violent heroine who refuses to abide by the stable binary between masculine violence/feminized victimhood. The film chronicles Dawn’s post–sexual assault transformation from a passive defender of women’s purity to an avenging heroine with castrating genitals. This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal mythologies undergirding the gendered logics of both screen violence and cultural misogyny. Erin Harrington is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Canterbury, New Zealand. It therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new insights in the broader area of popular culture, gender and film philosophy. The book not only offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces of productive, radical and subversive monstrosity within a mode of representation and expression that has often been accused of being mis-ogynistic. Some of the themes explored include: the intersection of horror, monstrosity and sexual difference the relationships between normative female (hetero)sexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata embodiment and subjectivity in horror films about pregnancy and abortion reproductive technologies, monstrosity and 'mad science' the discursive construction and interrogation of monstrous motherhood and the relationships between menopause, menstruation, hagsploitation and 'abject barren' bodies in horror. This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of 'gynaehorror': films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. Horror is a space of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes the complexities that arise when boundaries-of taste, of bodies, of reason-are blurred and dismantled. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film Women occupy a privileged place in horror film.
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