Cross-Cultural 'Othering' Through Metamorphosis

Abstract

Cross-Cultural Othering Through Metamorphosis Kristi M. Wilson In her 1995 book. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam calls for an historic reading of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and twentieth-century horror cinema in terms of their shared participation in the process of Othering. In both genres, monsters function as technological which contain and reveal (monstrare) social anxieties class, sexuality and gender. In this paper I will be comparing the narrative structures of Clive Barker's 1987 film, Hellraiser and Apuleius's second-century story. The Golden Ass, to provide evidence for pre-nineteenth-century othering machines and to argue against Halberstam's assertion that the monsters of modernity are unique in their proximity to humans (which I assume refers to their presence in or around the domestic sphere) and unique in their tendency to indicate the collapsible nature of subjects about race, boundaries. According to Halberstam, Gothic activity fiction gave nineteenth- century readers the excitement of reading about perverse physical foreign body while situating the Other (sexually, racially, etc.) in the of the monster. Nineteenth-century authors sought answers to political questions concerning race, class and sexuality, and Gothic writing reflected an urge to discuss these themes in terms of biological separation. Similarly, horror cinema functions as a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known (2). Drawing upon Homi Bhabha's essay, The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism (1986), Halberstam identifies skin as one of the key signifiers of cultural larly in and racial differences which functions simi- Gothic fiction and contemporary horror films. Skin, a motif which will serve as one of the important links between my discus- sions of The Golden Ass and Hellraiser, enforces a stereotype in the genres of Gothic fiction and horror cinema which simultaneously stabilizes the Other within a discourse of racist representation and acknowledges their power as a threat to notions of racial purity.