Defining the Monstrous Feminine
*Image is a promotional still from the film 1973 film Carrie.
The monstrous-feminine is a theoretical framework through which to analyze, challenge, confront, upend, and reinvent the cultural mythology of womanhood, femininity, and gender in relationship to monstrosity. Monstrous women linger in every margin of American pop culture, exist as precipices and liminal spaces, as unwieldy threats to structures of power and normative gender roles. The monstrous-feminine stages and performs monstrosity as a gendered experience, births a theatre of rage, desire, mortality and violence. The monstrous-feminine is a historically omnipresent construction, multi-dimensional and unlocatable, but in modern culture the monstrous-feminine lives most visibly in horror films, performance art, music, and even social media. The monstrous-feminine ejects femininity and/or devours itself, self-cannibalizing, hungry, insatiable. Femininity, as a social construct, loses its footing and comes undone. Monstrosity is political, monstrosity is not isolated or comfortable. The monstrous-feminine deals in abjection, is abjection's most visceral embodiment. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers the first thorough, gendered theory of abjection, defining the experience of the abject as so: "It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that, "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it to the father's account [verse au pere—pere-uersion]: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture" (Kristeva 2).
The monstrous-feminine posits and engages femininity as a unique expression of the abject. In the deconstruction of gender norms and conventional concepts of womanhood, can monstrosity be examined with the most ferocity and creativity.
This exhibit primarily uses two integral texts, referenced throughout each piece and analysis. These texts are Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). A selection of contemporary films, music, and videos will be organized through a series of "abject" locations, or sites of monstrosity unique to the monstrous-feminine, which I have defined for this exhibit. Those sites include:
DESIRE — pleasure, devouring, carnal and intellectual
RAGE — unhingedness, sourness, uninhibited rotting and externalized or self-inflicted violence, expulsion/embodiment of trauma and want
HUNGER — physical, visceral, orifice-focused, bodily and gendered
UGLINESS — "deformity," non-normativity, anti-beauty, unrulliness and repulsiveness, performing the monstrous
BODY — literal and political, locatable and metaphorical, mythological, body-horror, blood and bodily fluid
These categories are broad and do not intend to encompass the immeasurable connections and shared limbs between these different examples of the monstrous-feminine. Rather, I intend to display the conceptual throughlines stitching these differing mediums and forms into a synthesized concept.