Monstrous Women Research Articles

Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King

Reviewed by: Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King Tanya L. Shields GROTESQUE TOUCH: WOMEN, VIOLENCE, AND CONTEMPORARY CIRCUM-CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES, by Amy K. King. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 248 pp. $95.00 hardback; $32.95 paperback; $25.99 ebook. Amy K. King's Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives is a deeply researched, historically contextualized, and effectively argued work that takes seriously women's violence in a range of texts—fictional, visual, and audiovisual. King's interdisciplinary effort extends the work of several scholars to provide a rich, intersectional analysis of creative texts from the Caribbean and the United States that span the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. For her, the grotesque "focus[es] on bodily performances of violence and how these performances mirror a corrupt sense of self formation in the legacies of slavery" (p. 12). In using the grotesque as a mode, King hopes "to uncover what was frequently present, yet somehow ignored . . . what we frequently take for granted in terms of identity and representation" (p. 12). She contends that the grotesque is made legible primarily through touch, and she interrogates how the absence and presence of physical touch creates and undermines the forced intimacies that are entrenched in plantation logics. This strategy allows King to study issues of power, violence, and complicity among women. By exploring the legacies of plantation slavery in this way, King scrutinizes active participation and investment in the patriarchal order, [End Page 369] particularly by white women who use a system of grotesque violence in reality and fiction. Additionally, she indicates how the uncritical repetition of such grotesque violence impacts contemporary perceptions particularly as it relates to the limitations of interracial "sisterhood." King's work uses a variety of tropes that I could not always keep track of, including jealousy, social prestige, rivalries that threaten social stability, and talking back to probe what patterns of women's violence reveal in wide-ranging and fruitful contexts in work by United States and Caribbean cultural creators. Each chapter explores multiple historical periods, genres, and geographies to interrogate these patterns of complicity. For instance, using the trope of jealousy, she discusses the iconography of plantation logics and desires in nineteenth century woodcuts and book covers of plantation pulp fiction. Chapter two analyzes how scripts of sadism are rendered by enslaved and enslaver alike in texts as diverse as Gayl Jones's poem "The Machete Woman" (1983), Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising (1995), and the Dutch film Hoe Duur Was de Suiker (2013; The Price of Sugar) by Jean Van de Velde. In chapter five, King uses the horror genre to interrogate rivalries that threaten social stability using Barbara Creed's conception of "the monstrous-feminine" (p. 143). King extends Creed's ideas to discuss how monstrous women destabilize society but are disciplined, reaffirming the social order (p. 143). To do this, she examines texts such as the anthology television show American Horror Story (2011) and the novels Unburnable (2006) by Marie-Elena John and Memory Mambo (1996) by Achy Obejas. One of the most interesting explorations is King's argument, in chapter three, about the continuum of sexual violence in the 2016 version of Roots, Valerie Martin's novel Property (2003), and several short stories from Ann Allen Shockley's The Black and White of It (1980) (p. 76). In this chapter, King considers coercion, desire, power, and the ways in which false notions of intimacy impact women's sexual experiences—particularly forced and violent ones. The chapter forecasts her analysis of sexual violence in lesbian relationships that appears in the chapter on horror, specifically her reading of Obejas's story. King's work may also have benefitted from engagment with recent novels, including John R. Gordon's Drapetomania: Or, the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, Lovers (2018), Robert Jones Jr.'s The Prophets (2021), and Nathan Harris's The Sweetness of Water (2021), and short stories like Kei Miller's "The Business of Tea" (2014), as they also explore same gender desire in plantation settings. Nonetheless, the aforementioned chapters confront these intimate and challenging topics to...

Marwood, Milton, and Monstrous Women: The Neglected Villain of The Way of the World

Marwood, Milton, and Monstrous Women:The Neglected Villain of The Way of the World Rachel Ewing Tell me if Congreve's Fools are Fools Indeed?1 – Alexander Pope Raphael, said he, thou hear'st what stir on earth / Satan from hell scaped through the darksome gulf / Hath rais'd in Paradise, and how disturbed / This night the human pair, how he designs / In them at once to ruin all mankind.2 – Paradise Lost Although William Congreve's The Way of the World was first performed in 1700, critics regard the play as a glory of the late Restoration stage, a work that deftly pushes established comedic conventions to suit the shifting social norms of the day. Like many Restoration comedies, the play turns on the exploits of a truewit hero with a knavish reputation, who must secure both his sweetheart and her fortune. But Congreve famously tempers the customary bawdy plot points of cuckholding and "ruined" virginity with unexpected complications. Protagonist Mirabell is a reformed rake, a new beau ideal who struggles to overcome his past flirtation with love interest Millamant's aunt, Lady Wishfort, and his selfish seduction of Lady Wishfort's daughter, Mrs. Fainall. The supporting cast is also notably rounded, acting mostly from individual motivation and personality, rather than according to type. Arguing for the play's exceptionalism, Brian Corman, among many others, has pointed to the significance of Congreve's secondary characters, including his villains: [End Page 65] Lady Wishfort could have been the only obstacle to the marriage of the hero and heroine, but she is not. Mirabell's uncle could have been the traditional senex figure to be overcome by the lovers, but he is not. Fainall could have been the loyal friend of the truewit hero who provides atmosphere through witty, cynical epigrams, and his wife could have been another revenge-seeking, cast-off mistress, but they, too, are not.3 Given this notice of Congreve's character complexity, it is surprising that relatively little critical analysis has focused on Marwood, the strange and lonely nemesis of the celebrated Millamant. When Marwood does appear in critical discussion, she is generally dismissed. Though Richard W. F. Kroll notes her social competency, he ultimately relegates her, along with Fainall and the flatter characters of Witwoud, Petulant, and Willful, to the "'natural' realm," arguing that, unlike Millamant, Marwood succumbs to base passions that she is unable to socialize, losing control of language and eventually lapsing into silence.4 For Pat Gill, she "becomes the butt of the play's satiric joke" as the comedy dramatizes women's subordination to male authority.5 Even Corman, while recognizing Marwood as powerful, claims that Millamant reduces her to "a ranting termagant void of all decorum."6 The circumstances of the play's original performance are one indication that Mar-wood warrants further exploration. Congreve created the part for renowned actress Elizabeth Barry, pairing her with his favorite female lead, Anne Bracegirdle, as Millamant. Though in her youth Barry played many comedic ingenues, she secured her acting reputation with her portrayal of Thomas Otway's ill-fated Monimia, delivering a performance that set a standard of greatness for generations of later tragediennes.7 By the time The Way of the World debuted, Barry, who was then about forty, had come into full command of her powers and was focused primarily on tragic roles.8 James E. Evans is one of several scholars who note that Congreve's play doubtless capitalized on the pairing of Barry and Bracegirdle.9 The actresses were famous for their publicized rivalry and disparate reputations—Barry being known to cause a scandal while Bracegirdle maintained a chaste life-style.10 But Congreve's choice also lends weight to the character of Marwood, written to make the most of Barry's ability to, in the words of one reviewer, "[force] Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory, especially those who have any sense of Pity for the Distress't."11 What results from a reexamination of Marwood as a vehicle for tragic passion? Given the play's critical acclaim as a morally serious comedy in which "real" people make their way in a less than perfect world...

Monstrous Women in Comics ed. by Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody

Reviewed by: Monstrous Women in Comics ed. by Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody Candida Rifkind (bio) Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, eds. Monstrous Women in Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 296 pp, $99, $30. Why are comics full of monsters? What can these monsters who lurk in the dark and on the margins tell us about a specific moment in history or the particular fears of a culture? Why are so many of the monsters in comics coded as female? In this collection, Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody assemble an impressive group of comics scholars working on representations of monstrous women across a range of sources, from US superhero comics to Bolivian Chola comics to snake women in Chinese comics and animation. The fifteen essays are highly readable and richly varied in approach, accompanied by thirty-five illustrations for readers who may not know the comics first-hand. This is a landmark volume in transnational feminist comics studies that needs to be on the shelf of every comics scholar. It will be a touchstone for future comics research thanks to its rigorous discussions of how femininity, sexuality, disability, maternity, ethnicity, race, nationality, and even childhood are potential sites for both monstrous othering and monstrous empowerment in comics. Langsdale and Coody's introduction situates the volume within popular culture studies and feminist theory, explaining that "the authors of this volume are specifically interested in patriarchal cultural contexts, wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject such that women frequently become monsters" (3). Moreover, as the subsequent chapters illustrate, coding the female as monstrous is "overwhelmingly exacerbated by the intersection of gender with other markers of identity like sexuality, race, nationality, and disability" (4). Over the course of the volume, it becomes [End Page 126] clear that monstrosity is often an embodied transgression of sociocultural norms and hierarchies, through which comics artists register specific anxieties about the unregulated, non-normative female body. At the same time, as the editors explain, "it is crucial not to collapse a study of monstrous women into nothing more than a survey of degradation and marginalization" (4). Accordingly, many of the chapters consider characters who reclaim monstrosity as a source of empowerment and thereby challenge the gendered systems that relegate difference to the realm of the monstrous other. While the introduction establishes a broad thematic context for the volume, each chapter delineates specific social, cultural, economic, political, and aesthetic formations of monstrosity in particular comics texts. These detailed discussions, framed by broader critical analyses, work individually to variously reframe familiar texts and introduce less familiar ones, and the shared methodology provides the collection with a welcome unity and coherence. A number of thinkers appear frequently throughout, providing the volume with a conceptual unity: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Barbara Creed, and Margrit Shildrick are referenced by multiple authors to ground the comics analysis in theories of monstrosity, alterity, and femininity. References to Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway, and Julia Kristeva will also make this volume of interest to feminist scholars working in other fields. Likewise, the chapters draw on comics theory to offer formal as well as thematic readings, such that fans and scholars of the specific works will find a satisfying attention to breakdowns, layouts, caricature, color, characterization and visual rhetoric. The book is divided into five thematic sections of three chapters each, beginning with the origins and types of monstrous representations of women in comics and ending with female characters who take on the role of monster as a form of resistance and retaliation. Part 1, "The Origins, Agency, and Paradoxes of Monstrous Women," sets up the collection's central insight that monstrous women produce fear because they are paradoxical creatures: they "are neither wholly empowered nor entirely disenfranchised, but often they are both" (6). In chapter 1, Elizabeth Rae Coody explores how the multiple origin stories of Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Mary Magdalene refect the various storytellers' anxieties about these characters' subversive powers. As a religious studies scholar, Coody first analyzes the comics characters and then brings her findings about their boundary-crossing monstrosity to the cultural discomfort around Mary Magdalene's origin story, skillfully highlighting how transdisciplinary...

“Catastrophically Romantic”: Radical Inversions of Gilbert and Gubar’s Monstrous Angel in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl

Abstract In their landmark text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteen Century Literary Imagination (1970), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pose a series of hypotheses concerning women-authored fiction in the nineteenth century, identifying two archetypical female figures in patriarchal literary contexts – the Angel in the House, and the Monstrous (Mad)Woman. Gilbert and Gubar echo a Woolf-ian call to action that women writers must destroy both the angel and the monster in their fiction, and many contemporary women authors have answered that call – examining and complicating Gilbert and Gubar’s original dichotomy to reflect contemporary concerns with female violence and feminism. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and in particular the character of Amy Elliott Dunne, explores modern iterations of the Angel v. Monster dynamic in the guise of the “Cool Girl,” thus revising these stereotypes to fit them in a postmodern socio-historical context. The controversy that surrounds the text, as well as its incredible popularity, indicates that the narrative has struck a chord with readers and critics alike. Both Amy and Nick Dunne represent the Angel and the Monster in their marriage, embodying Flynn’s critical feminist commentary on white, upper-middle class, heterosexual psychopathy.

Elementos terroríficos en La cruel aragonesa de Alonso de Castillo Solórzano

Hay obras barrocas destacables por sus aspectos terroríficos y macabros, pero ninguna conjuga todos los elementos presentes en La cruel aragonesa, novela corta de Alonso de Castillo Solórzano (Jornadas alegres, 1626), donde hallamos a una mujer monstruosa capaz de ejecutar con gran crueldad los actos más terribles y asistimos a varios homicidios, a la profanación de cadáveres, al recurso de la magia negra y al tormento ejercido por las voces espectrales que persiguen a la protagonista. Estos aspectos, entre otros, a los que la crítica ha sido sistemáticamente indiferente, le aportan un marcado goticismo. Por ello, las siguientes páginas pretenden contribuir a la revaloración de esta novela corta de Castillo Solórzano y demostrar por qué los elementos que reúne la sitúan en un lugar privilegiado entre las de su especie.

The Danger in Metaphor: “Dismembering Resemblances” in Dunbar and King Lear

ABSTRACTDunbar, Edward St. Aubyn’s novelistic adaptation of King Lear, re-presents the role of metaphor in Lear’s madness as an experience of disorientation. Abused by his two older daughters, Dunbar finds visual and conceptual distinctions dissolving into ubiquitous similarity. This essay takes St. Aubyn’s visual metaphor for metaphor itself as an incitement to view the role of this figure as an agential force upon the linguistic topography and structure of the tragedy. The breakdown of Lear’s world, I argue, begins with the love test as a staged metaphor that seeks, unsuccessfully, to associate land with his definition of love. Thereafter, metaphor operates with an element of agency and dramatic irony: Lear’s comparison of unfaithful daughters to sexually monstrous women, and his self-parody, are metaphors whose resonances transcend his epistemology and intent. While traditional semiotics do not account for language’s agency, I offer a reading which extends Alfred Gell’s theory of art as index to texts as a model for this agency. Via Gell, I explore the process whereby Shakespeare’s language unshackles itself from semantic meanings in moments of sonic repetition and, concomitant with this freedom, creates new associations between concepts within Lear’s language and across the action of the play.

The Ludic Bestiary: Misogynistic Tropes of Female Monstrosity in Dungeons & Dragons

This article introduces the concept of the ludic bestiary, a game mechanic that the authors argue produces abject bodies. Using the “hag” in Dungeons & Dragons as a case study, the authors demonstrate how the game’s bestiary, the Monster Manual, functions as a tool of patriarchal control by defining, categorizing, and classifying the body of the female other as evil, abject, and monstrous. Importantly, the ludic bestiary not only exists as a core rulebook in Dungeons & Dragons but has also been remediated as a narrative-heavy submenu in several digital games. The authors find that the figure of the monstrous woman persists in games because of the widespread distribution of the Monster Manual to young men in hobby communities, the cultural influence of Dungeons & Dragons, depictions of monstrosity that blend the erotic with the maternal, and the discursive categorization and objectification of the female body by ludic systems.

“Emissaries of Death and Destruction”: Reading the Child-as-Killer in We Need to Talk about Kevin and Sharp Objects

ABSTRACTMonstrous children possess “a unique power as horrific figures”, able to generate disturbances that are as disquieting as they are enthralling. Focusing on Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, this paper examines how representations of children-who-kill dislocate mythologies of childhood to reveal anxieties about the threat of monstrous women to patriarchy. As David Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg argue via Kristeva, the monstrous child evokes a fear of the disruptive potential of the archaic mother (116), a reading in line with Karen J. Renner’s discussion of how “monstrous births” disclose a cultural fixation on women as sites of loss and corruption. Moreover, in a complication of perceptions of the child as a symbol of futurity, the child-who-kills resists binaries of innocence and sin to expose cultural scripts which define the “real” as little more than “a hideous social mask”. Exploring the monstrous child “within the intricate matrix of relations” in which it is produced reveals, this paper argues, a series of concerns about the symbolism (and sanctity) of the child and childhood per se, as well as deep-seated fears about the maintenance of normative culture more broadly.

Conference Report: Women Who Kill in English-Speaking Cinema and TV Series of the Postfeminist Era

The topic of this conference does not, on the face of it, present anything new. Indeed, the last forty years have been overflowed with research on the figure of the murderous woman and the various types of characters associated with it (the jealous girlfriend, the monstrous woman). This conference, however, focused on the Postfeminist era and considered women who kill in the light of the recent shift in the queer position that has, for the last twenty-five or so years, encouraged a more flexi...

Monstrous Women: Exploring Historical Witchcraft and It's Presence in The Witch

Accusations of witchcraft in America were often death sentences for women that society considered as acting outside of the norm; however, in Robert Eggers’s film, The Witch, embodying the role of a witch becomes a powerful tool in fighting Puritanical social expectations with magic, appearance, and behavior. Through the application of monster theory, historical contextualization, and feminist theory, this essay explores the implications of portraying the film’s main villain as a grotesque hag, the meaning behind its use of gory magic, why the protagonist chooses to become a witch herself, and finally, the consequences of othering marginalized groups from society.

The Horror Plays of the English Restoration by Anne Hermanson

Reviewed by: The Horror Plays of the English Restoration by Anne Hermanson Marta Figlerowicz Anne Hermanson. The Horror Plays of the English Restoration. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. vii + 192. $110. Between the 1670s and 1680s, English playwrights composed a series of exceptionally violent plays. Before then, an English tragedy might have included rape or murder as a plot twist, but a decade after the Restoration, Ms. Hermanson claims, such shocking scenes begin to be performed and lingered over for their own sake. Ms. Hermanson sets plays by Behn, Settle, Lee, Dryden, Otway, Shadwell, and Rochester apart from the cultural products of the preceding and succeeding decades: from the "heroic" plays of the 1660s and the "serious" plays of the 1680s. The plays she examines "are characterized by a cynical and unrelenting depiction of evil, violence, an insatiable human drive for power, and an explicit absence of providential justice or moral absolutes." These dramas, according to Ms. Hermanson, convey an intense disenchantment with the ruling classes and the social order they bring into being. Their unrelenting violence reveals what their authors perceive as [End Page 63] a truth about how callous and godless the world generally is. Ms. Hermanson marshals many examples of this relentless violence which make these plays unquestionably horrific. Behn's demonic mothers, Lee's egotistical kings, Lee and Dryden's lustful Oedipus—as the list goes on, these plays' fascination with depravity becomes increasingly difficult to contest. They merit being seen not merely as forms of sensationalism, but as wild speculations about alternative, nonreligious political and social worldviews. But her study does not quite succeed in its attempts at weaving a larger historical and theoretical narrative out of its observations. First, this book does not do much to connect its chosen plays back to a longer history of English literature's obsession with violence before and after the 1670s. Versions of the argument Ms. Hermanson makes about these horror plays—that they record and sublimate experiences of social unrest and violence—have been made about vast swathes of British writing from Beowulf to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Within this broader context, the typologies and explanations that Ms. Hermanson offers frequently seem too generic: "the monstrous woman is a disruption of the natural order of things"; "The English people were caught up in recurrent patterns over which they had no control." Where do the particular style and focus of these plays' preoccupation with violence come from? How do these plays borrow from their predecessors? These questions are all the more pressing since Ms. Hermanson's case for these plays' qualitative difference from those of the 1680s is not fully convincing. Her two introductory chapters: "Horror and Spectacle" and "Memory, Re-enactment, and Trauma" also disappoint: the robust theoretical framing they promise turns out to be extremely thin. In the first chapter, Ms. Hermanson does not cover even the basic theoretical literature about horror, understood either as a feeling or as a trans-historical genre. The latter is especially surprising since Ms. Hermanson herself mentions horror films as other critics' point of comparison for the plays she examines. The theoretical framework this monograph does establish leans on a mixture of historicism and psychoanalysis. Ms. Hermanson claims that these plays are a "traumatic" response to the shock of the former decade's political and social turmoil. But the trauma theory she mentions is sparse—it is buttressed by only a handful of American critics, mostly Dominick LaCapra, without much mention even of Lacan or Freud. More important, her insistence on trauma as these plays' point of origin short-circuits a variety of other, equally significant questions. For instance, Ms. Hermanson does not really talk about these plays as sources of pleasure both for their writers and, even more important, for their spectators. Her book also does little to distinguish between plays that appear genuinely troubled by the immorality they represent and ones, like Rochester's, that relish it immensely. As a result of both its shortcuts and its overreach, this book offers less than it promises. While useful, Ms. Hermanson's monograph is not fully satisfying. Marta Figlerowicz Yale University Copyright © 2017 W. B. Gerard, E...

Revisiting the Final Girl: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards

Revisiting the Final GirlLooking Backwards, Looking Forwards Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (bio) and Stacy Rusnak (bio) Autumn of 2017 marks thirty years since the publication of Carol J. Clover's "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." The most enduring premise of this essay—which was originally included in the special issue Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy in the journal Representations and later re-published in an abridged version in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)—is Clover's theorization of the Final Girl, a term that encompasses the common attributes of female survivor figures in slashers. As Clover famously argues, the Final Girl constitutes a powerful source of identification for the slasher's (mostly) adolescent male audiences.1 Through this concept Clover challenges the pervasive assumption that horror cinema is produced purely for misogynistic men in order to indulge their voyeuristic fantasies against women, advancing a radical rethinking of fundamental categories in Film Studies such as the gaze, identification, and spectatorial pleasures. The remarkably mobile and infinitely interpretable figure of the Final Girl has evolved into an important concept for theoretical work on film, gender, and sexuality by scholars including Jack Halberstam, Isabel Pinedo, and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn. Despite its unquestionable influence on horror studies and on the directions often taken in this field in the intervening years, Clover's model has been widely critiqued in academia. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Clover's formulation has been the characterization of the Final Girl as a "male in drag" (216), which refers to her presumed masculine aggression and phallic agency. One of the central arguments in "Her Body, Himself"—and one that has led to many misconceptions that continue to surround Clover's theory today—is that the Final Girl is gender non-normative or, in Clover's words, "boyish" (204): "Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine…. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls" (204). In fact, as Clover clarifies at some point, the Final Girl is not even a girl, but an "agreed-upon-fiction" (214); she merely stands-in for male desires, a subject for a man to identify with, to use "as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies," "an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty" (214). Significantly, and against the comprehension of the Final Girl as a strong, feminist heroine who turns the knife on the killer—an interpretative framework that has largely determined the reception of "Her Body, Himself"—Clover states: "to applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development … is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking" (214).2 Another reading strategy that has persisted in the contemporary circulation of Clover's theory—that the very raison d'etre of the masculinized Final Girl is to become a source of identification for teenage males—was challenged by Barbara Creed as early as the 1990s in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Creed's contribution to these debates largely pivots on her insights into the "monstrous feminine," a concept that has turned out to be equally groundbreaking and long-standing in horror criticism. According to Creed, "the avenging heroine of the slasher film is not the Freudian phallic woman whose image is designed to allay castration anxiety … but the deadly femme castratrice" (emphasis in original, 127). The castrating woman in 1970s horror films, such as the rape-revenge I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and the psychotic slasher Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), points not so much to male fantasies of being subjected to feminine sensations, but to men's fear of (and, importantly, ambiguous fascination with) monstrous women. Like Clover, however, Creed is cautious of reading these images as immediately progressive: "I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is 'feminist' or 'liberated'. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity" (7). Both scholars agree, then, that horror...

Staging Monstrous Women: The Codification of Feminine Gender Norms in William Hatchett’s The Fall of Mortimer, An Historical Play

William Hatchett’s The Fall of Mortimer, An Historical Play has long been interpreted as a satire of England’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and his corrupt government. In adapting Bancroft’s 1696 play King Edward the Third, with the Fall of Mortimer Earl of March, An Historical Play, however, Hatchett proves just as interested in criticizing the character of Isabella, a stand-in for Queen Caroline, the wife of George II. Although Hatchett takes his storylines and much of his wording directly from Bancroft’s play, his alterations in the play render Isabella monstrous. Hatchett furthers his criticism of Caroline by contrasting the monstrous Isabella with Maria, an ideal female character who consistently acts to preserve the glory of patriarchy. Hatchett’s paradoxical use of Isabella-he downplays her role in the play’s events even as he positions her as the central target of his criticism-demonstrates Hatchett’s dislike and distrust for Caroline’s central role in George II’s government. Here, Hatchett breaks with much of the contemporaneous criticism of George II’s court, which largely ignored Caroline as it sought to condemn Walpole and the King. Hatchett’s Isabella thus serves not only as a scapegoat for Walpole’s governmental failure, but also as a target for Hatchett’s intense misogyny.

Monstrous Morgana: Arthurian Women as Unnatural Amazons in Madame Xanadu (2008–2010)

adame Xanadu, written by Matt Wagner and published by DC Vertigo from 2008-2010 in twenty-nine issues, is one of DC Comics' most recent retellings ofArthurian characters operating in the modern world.1 The story focuses on the sorceress Nimue (aka Madame Xanadu) as she travels through the centuries from the idyllic days of Arthur's court until she settles in New York City in the 1930s (Issue 9, May 2001) where she remains until the series concludes in the 1960s (Issue 29, January 2011). Throughout these many centuries, she battles her nemesis, her sister Morgana (aka Morgan Le Fay), whose every behavior and interest contrasts jarringly with Nimue's. Readers easily recognize Morgana as the villain of the story because of her unchecked sexual appetite, her revealing clothing, and her bloodlust as she destroys her lovers and devotees or anyone who crosses her. Morgana dresses as an Amazon warrior determined to dominate those around her through trickery, seduction, and violence. Nimue has been constructed to appeal to a more 'natural' reading of medieval fantasy femininity based on her gentle interactions with woodland creatures, her submission to the powerful men in her story-including Merlin and the Stranger-and also her girlish, waif-like appearance that positions her as more sexually demure and passive than her lascivious sister. Even though Merlin and the Stranger often behave in ways that could be seen as also questionable or self-serving, it is Morgana's gender that marks her as the clear villain.2 Yet, Morgana appears as more than a villain; she has evolved into a monster. This series offers contrasting dichotomies of womanhood that clearly envision Morgana as the unnatural, destructive, and monstrous woman whose bid for agency, sexual autonomy, and power consistently meets with punishment and reprimand by her sister. Her contrapuntal role allows writers and readers to define that which is normal, right, and good through their understanding that Morgana is inherently abnormal, wrong, and bad.MORGAN LE FAY IN COMIC BOOKSFor decades, Morgan Le Fay has appeared in a number of comics as a villain whose unnaturally aggressive sexual behaviors have almost always been the cause of her defeat and demise.3 Since the 1950s, Morgan has appeared frequently in a number of titles published by Marvel and by DC as the sexy scoundrel and hero's nemesis.4 She was first introduced into the Marvel Comics Universe in May 1955 when she debuted in Black Knight #1. Writer Stan Lee and illustrator Joe Maneely created a large-breasted, scantily clad sorceress whose character would often materialize in many other Marvel titles over the next fifty years. In these books, Morgan battled Doctor Doom, the Scarlet Witch, Iron Man, and Spider-Woman, Marvel's first spin-off heroine.5 This Morgan has made at least fifty-seven appearances in a variety of Marvel comic titles.6 Jack Kirby later introduced his own version of Morgaine Le Fay for DC Comics, debuting in The Demon #1 in September 1972 and acting again as the eponymous hero's archenemy.7 Over the decades, this Morgan also challenged many of the great heroes of the DC Universe including Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman in the series Trinity (June 2008 until July 2009).8 Generally, Morgan Le Fay's power derives from her sexuality and desire to destroy the heroes around her by using her cleavage and charms. Unnaturally libidinous, Morgan functions as a sexual deviant whose appetite may be monstrous, but she herself is not drawn as a monster. Her sexuality certainly is represented as causing alarm and disdain, but does not always mark her as totally inhuman, especially as she battles other women who also possess their own sexual agency and peculiarities in these issues.9Morgan Le Fay's dehumanization and transformation into a monster began with DC Comics' maxi-series Camelot3000, published from December 1982 until April 1985 in twelve issues and written by Mike W Barr (writer) and Brian Bolland (penciller and inker). …

“Y vivieron infelices para siempre”: ilusiones románticas y desengaños realistas en Dos mujeres de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Abstract: The analysis in this article displays how Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel Dos mujeres (Two Women) undermines its own narrative structures and models. The format of serialized fiction, which appears to influence the character development and narrated events, is deconstructed through the author’s critique of marriage as an ideal destiny for women. In the novel, she challenges models such as “the angel in the house” and the monstrous woman, and advocates for stronger alliances between women. The ethics and aesthetics of literary romanticism allow Gómez de Avellaneda to explore the passions, desires, fears, and fantasies of the novel’s female protagonists, who are thus portrayed with complexity and ambiguity. Despite the importance placed on love as a path to fulfillment, the novel displays how women are condemned to a sterile existence by being prohibited from entering other spaces where they might seek development and fulfillment.

A regiment of monstrous women: Female horror archetypes and life history theory.

A regiment of monstrous women: Female horror archetypes and life history theory.

"Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp"

In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswang transmedia—a 2011 Filipino novel (Ricky Lee’s Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata [Amapola in 65 Chapters]), mainstream film (Mga Bata ng Lagim [Children of Terror], dir. Mar S. Torres, 1964), and amateur digital video (Amabilis 2, 2011)—the aswang, an iconic female monster, is being destabilized and re-imagined. Gay men (or more accurately, bakla subjects) are occupying the place formerly reserved for monstrous women. This queering of aswang transmedia is a forceful, funny, yet undeniably risky reapproriation lodged in language (“swardspeak”) and a kind of pinoy [Filipino] camp style. This essay attempts to theorize a distinctly Filipino camp sensibility in relation to queer time. It wrestles with queer aswang transmedia’s implications for both temporality (since anachronism underpins the cultural figures of both bakla and aswang) and visibility (queer scholars argue that the bakla, stigmatized as effeminate and lower class, is increasingly the object of forcible bourgeois erasure in the face of the urban gay scene’s aspirations toward an imagined gay globality).

Kvinnomisshandlare och maskulinitetens monstruösa framtid

In this article, the monstrous “woman batterer” is used as a figuration and made a point of departure in order to destabilise masculine ontology. The monster is here seen as a deviant figure that gives meaning to the normal, but also as a figure that blurs the borders between the strange/unfamiliar and the known/familiar due to its contingent ontological position. This argument is developed by analysing two sources of material: a newspaper column by a conservative male author, which shows how partner-violent men are understood as monstrous woman batterers, who are seen as the Other of “normal”, gender-equal Swedish men; and qualitative interviews with 44 partner-violent men, demonstrating how they distance themselves from the “woman batterer” figure and instead understand the woman batterer as a deviant and monstrous masculinity, which they do not want to be associated with. The fact that “normal” men cannot completely disassociate from the monster makes it threatening – it endangers the ontological coherence of masculinity. Paradoxically, the woman batterer therefore enables a “monstrous future” – it opens up for a volatile and vulnerable masculine becoming.

Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp

In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswang transmedia—a 2011 Filipino novel (Ricky Lee’s Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata [Amapola in 65 Chapters]), mainstream film (Mga Bata ng Lagim [Children of Terror], dir. Mar S. Torres, 1964), and amateur digital video (Amabilis 2, 2011)—the aswang, an iconic female monster, is being destabilized and re-imagined. Gay men (or more accurately, bakla subjects) are occupying the place formerly reserved for monstrous women. This queering of aswang transmedia is a forceful, funny, yet undeniably risky reapproriation lodged in language (“swardspeak”) and a kind of pinoy [Filipino] camp style. This essay attempts to theorize a distinctly Filipino camp sensibility in relation to queer time. It wrestles with queer aswang transmedia’s implications for both temporality (since anachronism underpins the cultural figures of both bakla and aswang) and visibility (queer scholars argue that the bakla, stigmatized as effeminate and lower class, is increasingly the object of forcible bourgeois erasure in the face of the urban gay scene’s aspirations toward an imagined gay globality).

Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (review)

Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power JOHANNA KATRIN FRIDRIKSDOTTIR, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-0-230-12042-6. $85.In the last few decades, numerous scholars have written about women in medieval Scandinavia; most of their efforts are concerned with literary portrayals of female characters, since information about women's lives that is directly factual-unmediated by texts-is hard to come by. Johanna Katrin Friðriksdottir's stated justification for yet another book about women in Old Norse literature is that previous studies have, for the most part, limited themselves to female characters in one genre of sagas-the Islendigasogur or Icelandic family sagas, which in our time have risen to a position of special prominence for reasons having more to do with modern criteria of literary excellence and significance than with medieval criteria. Friðriksdottir expands the investigation of female characters to include other genres that were considered important in medieval Iceland-the kings' saga, legendary saga, and chivalric saga genres; much to her credit, she includes the greatly-neglected genre of the samtiðarsogur (contemporary sagas) too.In this book, the content of each chapter often spans several genres, for the book is organized thematically, its five chapter divisions being 'Women Speaking,' 'Women and Magic,' 'Monstrous Women,' 'Royal and Aristocratic Women,' and 'The Female Ruler.' Many genres involve women resorting to magic as a way of circumventing male authority. Monstrous women, however-giantesses and female ogres-occur mostly in the legendary sagas. Friðriksdottir's analysis shows how these imaginary female creatures, and the imaginary magical powers sometimes imputed to human women, function significantly by providing a marked contrast to the sort of feminine deportment that would have been considered normal and socially acceptable in medieval Iceland.For all the breadth in the scope of this book, many sagas that might have been interesting to include in it are absent. The chivalric saga genre includes adaptations of Arthurian romances (for example Parcevals saga, derived from Chretien's Perceval) as well as other chivalric tales that do not take place in an Arthurian milieu; Friðriksdottir barely mentions the Arthurian sagas in passing, though the endnotes and bibliography make it clear that she is well aware of their existence and of the scholarship that has been devoted to pan-European Arthurian literature. For example, the author frequently gives credit to Carolyne Larrington for her study King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition, which Friðriksdottir frequently finds helpful for the conceptual framework it provides concerning women's use of magic. …