Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror

In this path-breaking work, Erin Harrington offers an analysis of women in horror film through an exploration of ’gynaehorror’: films that are concerned with female sex, sexuality and reproduction. The majority of prior work in this area has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon psychodynamic theories, which has limited the field of inquiry, especially in the way it frames female monstrosity as inherent and as the result of a woman’s ’lack’. The research focusses on five broad thematic streams: the relationship between normative heterosexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; the representation and expression of female subjectivity in horror films that feature pregnancy and abortion; the manner in which cinematic representations of reproductive technology are bound up within hegemonic constructions of gender and power; the ways that discourses of motherhood and maternity in horror films do and do not shift over time; and the theoretical and corporeal possibilities opened up through applying Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of the processural body to films about the aging female body. It makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new approaches and readings in the broader area of popular culture and gender.