Search results

The woman has appeared in many films as an unknown dangerous monster for men. Barbara Creed, in The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminist, Psychoanalysis (1993), recognized the fear of women as a vampire and as witch. Masters of Horror (Showtime, 2005–2007) is a TV series that focuses their attention on distinct monsters, including female monster.

The aim of this chapter is to analyze some episodes of these two acclaimed TV series: ‘Deer Woman’ (Season 1 Episode 7) and ‘Jenifer’ (Season 1 Episode 4), in Masters of Horror. Both episodes show the struggle between the female threatening monster and the defensive male normalcy, where liberated women (they break the established rules) resist the males’ domination through cultural transgressions.

This chapter is based on different methodologies: cultural studies, history, discourse analysis and TV studies. That way, it will be essential to delve into the different readings about woman as a monster (dangerous creature for the established order) and as the otherness, where the flesh temptations (cannibalism, sex) and supernatural narrations place her outside society.

In this paper, we take up an autoethnographic review of literature on doctoral programs in order to engage notions of doctoral subjects. While the paper basically proceeds by taking up and entwining these methods, it is neither/both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review. Rather, this work – like many spaces of a doctoral seminar – emerges as an uncontainable, unpredictable monster. We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading of what this “I” might be. We search for a preconfigured “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of doctoral experiences that never quite exists and yet moves and haunts us. We take up a tentative (post-)monstrous position that recognizes our cruel attachment to the “good” doctoral student, a subject that remains the inevitable (im)possibility of graduate school. Reviewing literature as an ethnographic practice and looking at ethnography as textual helps us smash these methods together. Yet, at any moment, we defy our methods – ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move intends to focus on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well defined “researchers.” We hope our project provides space to question the very categories and credentials built into doctoral studies by decentering the “doctoral student” subject.

The first season of HBO's Lovecraft Country is based on Matt Ruff's 2016 novel and explores the horrifying world of H.P. Lovecraft and the very real Jim Crow-era racism that plagued the United States in the 1950s. The series, developed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists at the centre of a Lovecraftian horror story. The Black characters have to face shoggoths, grand wizards and magic but they also have to deal with and escape very realistic horror, in the form of racist police violence and white supremacy. By bringing the Black characters into the centre – often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft's stories – the series allows for a new layer of meaning to Lovecraft's fear of the other. Atticus, Leticia, Uncle George, Hippolyta and the rest of the cast are struggling to escape the everyday real and supernatural manifestations of racism. Their struggle can be seen as a reflection of the actual struggle of the Black communities today, who are trying to liberate themselves from the shackles of oppression and systemic racism once and for all, so all people regardless of the colour of their skin, gender, race and ethnicity can finally be free. Lovecraft Country can be read as a symbolic yet crucial contemporary representation of this struggle for freedom. The series was created before George Floyd's and Breonna Taylor's murders, but it came after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile and Sandra Bland. Once the viewers search deeper and look past the dark mansions, the wicked wizards and the shoggoth monsters, they can understand that the supernatural and fictional land of Lovecraft Country is not a distant place after all.

The Slender Man, an online monster born to the internet in 2009, loves to live in the boundaries, specifically the boundary between the digital and the non-digital worlds. This chapter seeks to explore the full engagement of the community with the myth, analysing it structurally to understand the way, in which the narrative’s construction reflects the relationship of monster to society and society to itself. The sincerity in which the narratives are told, at first appearing intense, is actually a form of play, revealing a boundary blurring between play and non-play as well. While fully engaging in play, the community’s structured narrative is more than this: pulling them into a trapped world in which they play with death in the digital. The triadic structure of the Slender Man narratives reveals an anxiety to the community and their place within broader non-digital worlds.

As Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have pointed out, the US TV serial Supernatural owes much of its success to the way it combines horror with family drama, strengthening the affective involvement of viewers in the lives of its protagonists, the monster-hunting Winchester brothers. The notion of home – presented variously as a domestic, feminine space from which the Winchesters and their compatriots are excluded; a mobile and contingent space of masculine bonding; and a hybrid space which allows for self-expression outside prescribed gender norms, but which also holds the potential for danger – is central.

Heather L. Duda has pointed to the ways monster hunters are excluded from the normative institutions of their societies, and this is certainly true of the Winchesters, who live in their family car and are unable to maintain ‘normal’ homes. Later seasons give them a home in the form of an underground bunker, not designed as a domestic space, but nonetheless a place where their hypermasculine behaviours can be relaxed. This chapter examines the tensions that emerge in this apparent move from a traditional narrative of the home as feminine space under threat to something more ambivalent, where masculine identity itself may be in danger.