ABSTRACT

This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking work of feminist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-Feminine, which was first published in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films, with their narrow emphasis on woman’s victimhood. This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine, brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who take up Creed’s ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, explore possible futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art history and film theory.

chapter 1|34 pages

Re-reading The Monstrous-Feminine

New Approaches to Psychoanalytic Theory, Affect, Film, and Art

part I|54 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|10 pages

Symmetry and Incident

Laura Mulvey in Conversation with Nicholas Chare

chapter 3|13 pages

A Dream of Bare Arms

‘Womanliness’, Dirt, and a Quest for Knowledge

chapter 4|23 pages

Feminism, Film, and Theory Now

part II|49 pages

Introduction

chapter 5|11 pages

The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now

Barbara Creed in Conversation with Nicholas Chare

chapter 6|15 pages

Abjection beyond Tears

Ellyn Burstyn as Liminal (On Set) Mother in The Exorcist

chapter 7|17 pages

Carrie’s Sisters

New Blood in Contemporary Female Horror Cinema

part III|48 pages

Introduction

chapter 8|15 pages

‘I Will Not Be That Girl in the Box’

The Handmaid’s Tale, Monstrous Wombs and Trump’s America

chapter 9|12 pages

‘From a Speculative Point of View I Wondered Which of Us I Was’

Re-reading Old Women 1

chapter 10|14 pages

The ‘Monstrous-Feminine’

Dementia, Psychoanalysis, and Mother-Daughter Relations in Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s

part IV|68 pages

Introduction

chapter 11|16 pages

Polluted Water

Demotic Thai Cinema and Queer Abjection in the Films of Poj Arnon

chapter 12|21 pages

The Monstrous-Feminine in the Millennial Japanese Horror Film

Problematic M(O)thers and Their Monstrous Children in Ringu, Honogurai mizo no soko kara and, Ju-On

chapter 14|14 pages

In-Your-Face

The Monstrous-Feminine in Photography, Performance Art, Multimedia, and Painting