Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film

Gynaehorror

Erin Harrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472467294
• eBook ISBN: 9781134779338
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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 misogynistic. 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.

1 Roses and thorns

Virgins, vagina dentata and the monstrosity of female sexuality

Within the world of the horror genre, virginity is of great importance: it is a state, a category, and an expression of femininity that is endowed with power, significance and prestige. In a typically intertextual scene in the post-modern slasher Scream (1996), the aptly named virginal, geeky film nerd Randy Meeks outlines the conventions of the horror film to a crowded room of party-goers who are watching director John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher Halloween: if you want to survive you can never have sex, because sex equals death. You can’t drink or do drugs either, because like sex, these are sins, and teen vice is a quick and bloody road to dismemberment and destruction. To prove his point, Randy cites actor Jamie Lee Curtis’s roles as a heroic, virginal ‘scream queen’ in a series of early slasher films: Halloween, The Fog (1980), Terror Train (1980), Prom Night (1980), Halloween II (1981) and Road Games (1982). When another party-goer announces that he wants to see Curtis’s breasts, Randy replies that Curtis didn’t show her ‘tits’ until she hit the mainstream and went ‘legit’ in her BAFTA-award winning role in the 1983 comedy Trading Places. By contrast, in her roles as a horror heroine her virginity and her sexual ‘purity’ was always assured.¹

This wry, self-reflexive commentary on the nature of sex and transgression in the horror film, and the way that virginity appears as character trait, expression of sexed and gendered implicitly feminine (or feminised) identity, and, sometimes, plot device within the genre, serve to highlight how widespread and taken-for-granted ideas about male and female (hetero)sexuality come to be represented, expressed and reinforced in popular culture. As sexuality researchers Holland, Ramazanoglu and Thomson argue, “the meanings of virginity and its ‘loss’, and the acquisition of heterosexual identities, continue to be socially gendered and differently embodied for men and women” (1996, 143), such that virginity is associated more with femininity, passivity and penetrability than it is with masculinity, to the extent that the concept of male virginity is shaped by an association with incompleteness or even outright failure. However, this construction of virginity does not exist in a vacuum; the stereotype of the chaste, virtuous female virgin, who appears in horror film as both victim and hero, is defined explicitly in opposition to unbounded carnal female sexuality. Such sexuality, which is presented as monstrous and voracious, is persistently illustrated in the horror film through allusions to the toothed vagina,² or vagina dentata. Through its associated iconography and expressions, the toothed vagina is often leveraged to articulate profoundly negative and hostile attitudes towards women’s genitalia. And yet, it is also a provocative and expansive expression of embodied sexuality that refutes the suggestion that women’s sexualities and desires must be contained, domesticated or positioned as for the use of another.

Within the popular, violent and abject space of the horror genre, myths about virginity are informed by, and in turn contribute to, normative and often very restrictive binary representations of heterosexual sexuality and femininity that deny a breadth of sexual expressions and identities. In this chapter I consider how, at a surface level, horror films engage with and enforce a dualistic socio-cultural construction of heteronormative female sexuality, and assumptions about sexual difference, in a largely uncritical manner. Very often this relies on simplistic tropes such as the feminised yet desexualised sacrificial virgin and the predatory, hypersexual vixen or she-demon, each of whom evoke an archetypal engagement with female sex: one that looks to female sexuality as either docile and contained, or expansive and dangerous. Indeed, even in instances where there may be a greater degree of ambiguity or nuance in the development of character, horror narratives have a tendency to force characters into these strict, sexually demarcated roles, refusing nuance or complexity in the name of generic standardisation. Nonetheless, popular culture is a dynamic site of struggle and contestation of meaning, and the complex richness of these archetypes, images and expressions of female sexuality cannot be easily boxed in. I suggest that thinking through these representations, expressions and relationships as ‘gynaehorrific’ offers a way of complicating engagements with sex that trouble and expand the aggregation of traits implied through molar binaries such as safe/unsafe, angel/demon and virgin/whore. As I will discuss, the ‘danger’ of female sexuality, sensuality and desire can certainly be shoehorned into a schema that positions monstrosity simply as the messy dipole of the closed, pure, virgin, to the extent that one becomes the negative image of the other. However, throughout this chapter I also indicate ways that the becomings inherent in the configurations of monstrosity offer a more provocative, proactive way of thinking through expressions of female sexuality. These may serve to trouble the assumptions that are emphasised through the construction of such dualisms, and in doing so challenge the reductive shorthand and the conventions of a genre that has a tendency to fall back on, if not trade upon, sexual essentialism and stereotypes.

Defining virginity

Throughout this chapter I move between sociocultural constructions of virginity and heterosexuality and more conceptual engagements with female sexuality, and as such it is important to consider baseline assumptions and constructions that inform the construction of the figure of the virgin. In popular parlance virginity is spoken about as if its definition – “the state of never having had sex” (Carpenter 2009, 1673) – were natural and ahistorical, but it is a complex cultural construct that amalgamates centuries’ worth of ideas about sex, gender, agency and morality, let alone the nature and function of sexual difference. Virginity is important: sociologist Laura M. Carpenter (2009) indicates that “Distinguishing between virgins and non-virgins is an ancient practice” (p. 1673), and virginity has certainly been celebrated in myth and antiquity, such as in the ancient Greek veneration of virgin goddesses. The term is first found in written English near the beginning of the 13th century with specific reference to pious, unmarried women who were celebrated by the Christian church; the first mentions in English of the Virgin Mary are likewise found around this time. The association of the term with chastity and purity – that is, with the presumption of a lack of sexual activity and desire, as separated from its strictly ecclesiastic meaning – is first noted in the late 14th century (“Virgin”). The word ‘virgin’ comes from Latin root virgo, or maiden, and despite a long history of celibate male religious orders, in general the term has been applied almost exclusively to women (Blank 2007, 13).

French post-structuralist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s conceptualisation of virginity is helpful at this point, for she connects this historic figure of the virgin to two modalities. In Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a), her landmark critique of the construction of the female subject in male-centric (Freudian, Lacanian) psychoanalysis, Irigaray begins by scathingly unpicking Sigmund Freud’s masculine bias in his construction of the implicitly male/masculine subject, alongside his positioning of woman as perpetual riddle or enigma (p. 13). Irigaray asserts that the implicitly masculine subject needs – indeed wholly relies upon – the figure of the woman and the feminine so that it may define itself in opposition to it. Toying with the images of both gynaecological tools and the mirror central to Lacan’s formulation of the ‘mirror stage’, in which an infant’s recognition of ‘his’ external, unified self establishes an ideal “I” that he will forever seek to attain, the speculum of the title is the “faithful, polished” mirror (p. 136) that woman becomes in the construction of the male subject. This renders the figure of man/the male subject visible to himself – “wholly in the service of the same subject to whom it would present its surfaces, candid in their self-ignorance” (p. 136) – as she is eclipsed. The woman, here, is therefore necessary to the construction of the masculine subject for the feminine’s negativity sustains the masculine’s positivity; that is, it is not simply that male subject is inherently, by default, the positive, and the feminine its Other, but rather that the male subject needs its other, its not-, to define it, even though this need is also a site of extreme vulnerability. The feminine, then, is “a sort of inverted or negative alter ego … like a photographic negative” (p. 22) as opposed to a symmetrical Other. The primacy of the masculine is a construction that thrives on the invisibility of this of this relationship, such that the feminine has “no part of the masculine mastery of power”: shaped by and defining the male, she is “Off-stage, off-side, beyond representation, beyond selfhood” (p. 22). The (passive, contained, perpetual) virgin, then, is denied her subjectivity. Irigaray argues that she is a foil to and props up masculine, patriarchal power, agency and phallic primacy through two things: her facilitation of the masculine divine and her exchange value.

Irigaray notes the relationship between the Virgin Mary, the masculine God, and the virgin-born Son of God, in which the figure of the virgin is “the condition for the incarnation of the masculine divine” (1993c, 117): her virginity is “mandatory for the purity of conception” (1985a, 345). The symbolic archetype of the masculine divine, in the figure of the paternal God (as well as his perfect Son), becomes “an identificatory figure for masculine perfection” and an anchor point for masculine identity (Deutscher 1994, 93) that similarly displaces the woman and the feminine into the role of Other. Looking again to the figure of the mirror, Irigaray notes the way that such purity of conception becomes a “polished surface that will not be scratched or pierced, lest the reflection be exaggerated or blurred” (1985a, 345). Julia Kristeva, in “Stabat Mater”, similarly critiques the relationship between the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary, the “consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity” (1985a, 133), and the way that such mythic femininity is integral to the construction of the motherhood and maternity, for the “Virgin’s only pleasure is her child who is not hers alone but everyone’s, while her silent sorrow is hers alone” (Oliver 1993, 50). Like Irigaray’s suggestion that the role of women in a patriarchal society is to act as the present-yet-absent reference point for the construction of male subjectivity, Kristeva suggests that the patriarchal construction of the cult of the Virgin works to highlight and accommodate femininity while simultaneously controlling it. Instead, the mythic figure of the Virgin mother erases the abject nature of the maternal body and the mother–child relationship, denies the articulation (in terms of the stating as well as the piecing together) of a matrilineal line and disavows the pleasure, enjoyment and eroticism (that is, jouissance) that may have accompanied conception and the presence of female subjectivity that this supposes. This last point is important, for as Kristeva suggests, the labelling of Mary as a virgin “was an error of translation: for the Semitic word denoting the social-legal status of an unmarried girl the translator substituted the Greek parthenos, which denotes a physiological and psychological fact, virginity” (1985, 135). Kelly Oliver (1993), in her reading of Kristeva, looks to the transgressive, threatening nature of this non-married status, indicating that the jouissance associated with the primal scene, then, is a type of ‘outlaw jouissance’, for neither it nor its ‘bastard’ offspring come under paternal code. Conversely, the mythic figure of the Virgin has no jouissance, and is thus recuperated (p. 51).

It is important, then, that it is not simply that Mary was a ‘virgin’, but that she “remained forever a virgin” (Kristeva 1985, 210). Her mythic, blessed virginity is perpetual, renewing and enduring, seemingly dynamic but locked in its crystalline, circular sameness, such that the son of God is “begotten … without shame of copulation” (1985, 210).The mark of this copulation, the ‘blurring’ trace of the feminine in the (re)production of both Son and the masculine ideal ego, would serve to destabilise the taken-for-granted phallologocentricism of the masculine divine. The masculine divine, like the aborescent root-tree discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is, in that it is predicated on and imposes the verb ‘to be’ (2004, 27), and in this be-ing it is rendered always-already present and perfect. “Man is able to exist because God helps him to define his gender” (Irigaray 1993c, 61), but in contrast, the female subject is lost, forgotten: “Providing the basis for the auto-logical speculations, she lives in darkness” (Irigaray 1985a, 345).

Irigaray also emphasises that the value of the virgin stems from the way that she exists and is defined both for and between men: the virgin has significant exchange-value; she is “a cash-convertible body” (1993b, 87). The mandatory virginity of the divine Virgin becomes the mandatory virginity of the virgin bride, who is passed from father or brother to husband as a means of establishing marriage and thus codifying the transfer of property (Irigaray 1985a, 120–3). The virgin, here, is both possession-object and relationship or vector, and woman’s work (her “domestic slavery” (1985a, 122)) keeps her locked within the home, just as the enforcement of her own monogamy (but not that of the man) submits her body and subjectivity to the power and desires of her father-husband. This capture and erasure of feminine subjectivity (let alone sexuality) both assures and privileges a patrilinear bloodline, for she is an invisible matrix – matrix, here, drawing from its Latin and Middle English meanings of mother, breeding female, and ‘womb’ – through which the patriarchal economy structures itself, congratulating itself on its apparently self-sustaining endurance, and erasing the blood-relationship between women (1985a, 125). It is for this reason that Irigaray calls for a reconfiguration of the legal codification of virginity that centralises the subjectivity and autonomy of women. She argues that this might open a pathway to the feminine divine, in which ‘virginity’ (as a sort of “physical or moral integrity” (1993b, 86)) becomes a part of a woman’s identity that is legally protected, just as the women’s right to consent (or not consent) to sex is essential for an ethical, mutual relationship that is not predicated on the alienating force of masculine power (1993b 87; see also Irigaray 1993a).

These relationships are echoed in more recent popular usage of the term ‘virgin’, which moves away from its specifically sexual sense and comes to indicate a novice or someone naïve or uninitiated in something, such as a ‘political virgin’; similarly, a ‘maiden voyage’ refers to a ship’s first outing. The term virgin also alludes to possession and alteration: virgin land is that which has not been explored or developed, a virgin city or fortress is one that has not been conquered, virgin forest has not yet been milled or felled, and virgin waters have not been sullied or fished. These terms imply both impending consumption and economic use-value, and given the conflation of virginity with femininity and women, they also signal a denial of female self-possession: Rebecca Whisnant posits that a “woman’s body cannot be her sovereign territory precisely because it is the ‘virgin’ (at first) territory for someone else to conquer and annex” (2010, 161). These metaphors are indicative of the way that, within a patriarchal heterosexual framework, first sex begins with a man’s penis entering a woman’s vagina and ends with his orgasm. Where sexual debut is the “young man’s moment” (Holland, Ramazanoglu and Thomson 1996, 146), virginity is a passive state in which the female body has not (yet) been acted upon. The widespread use of the term ‘penetration’ as a word for sexual intercourse, which marks the penetrator as active and the penetrated (be they male or female) as passive, further evokes this asymmetrical relationship.

To tease out some of this implications of the relationship between the virgin, her feminine passivity, her significance and her exchange-value, I offer here a series of sites of cultural meaning-making – sociosexual practices, invasive acts that impact upon autonomy and self-determination, social and ideological movements, pornography – that each express and explore the cultural impulse to reify the virgin-figure in terms of her use-value. Given the circulation and exchange of meaning within popular culture and cultural practice, each of these expressions casts light upon the way the virgin is structured and represented in horror film; that is, these are all a part of the broader, dynamic cultural ecosystem within which horror and film exist. I work from the supposition that virginity is a concept that is less concerned with a lack of sexuality per se, but instead indicates a particularly feminine value or potential (untapped, nascent, or otherwise), be that potential sexual, cultural or something else entirely. What is important, though, is that this value is situated as less for the woman herself – that is, that her value is not self-contained nor self-sustaining – and instead acts as a relationship with an-other: she is the material through which an implicitly masculine other, interest or relationship envisages and enacts itself.

Female virginity is, to a large degree, discursively constructed as a state that marries embodiment with morality: it is often popularly defined anatomically with regards to the status of the hymen, the small porous membrane that can cover all or part of the vaginal opening (or not even be present at all). The presence of blood-spotting has long been an (unreliable) indicator of first penetrative sex, but the role of the hymen itself as a specific mark of virginity was first posited in the 14th century by the physician Michael Savonarola, who noted its rupture at the time of ‘deflowering’ (Blank 2007, 45). Although the hymen exists in many terrestrial and aquatic species and is hypothesised to fulfil both reproductive and pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: mapping the spaces/faces of gynaehorror
• 1. Roses and thorns: virgins, vagina dentata and the monstrosity of female sexuality
• 2. The lady vanishes: pregnancy, abortion and subjectivity
• 3. Not of woman born: mad science, reproductive technology and the reconfiguration of the subject
• 4. The monstrous-maternal: negotiating discourses of motherhood
• 5. Living deaths, menstrual monsters and hagsploitation: horror and/ of the abject barren body
• Afterword: monstrous miscarriages and uncanny births
• Index