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This chapter will focus on the Netflix television series The Exorcist (2016–) starring Gina Davis as Angela Rance/Regan MacNeill and Ben Daniels as Father Marcus. The Rances are a well-off urban family in Chicago, with Angela, a successful and powerful professional woman. The Exorcist allows Angela Rance, a woman in midlife, to be central to the narrative, despite the paucity of positive, central roles for women over 50.

The chapter will also examine the depiction of gender through the themes of families and homes. Homes are sanctuaries but can also be a site of violence. The Rance home is the first clue that all is not well, when Angela hears noises in the walls. Families, homes, faith and betrayal are everywhere in The Exorcist, including the Rances, the Church, the priesthood, the Friars of Ascension and the homeless settlement. Traditionally, families and homes are where women can achieve creativity and some kind of agency, as well as being contained.

The third approach of this chapter will be to compare gender representations in the television series and the film The Exorcist (1973). In theory, the intervening 44 years could have seen gains for women and feminism, but 2017 has seen women’s rights eroded yet again. The film was made at the height of the women’s liberation movement and second-wave feminism, and at the start of the era of ‘video nasties’ and explicitly gory slasher and cannibal films, so I will use the historical context to frame a discussion about the two different versions.

Carrying on the arithmetization of Euler diagrams by George Boole, with refinements by Augustus De Morgan and others, the full‐scale incorporation of binary strings into the scheme is discussed, with emphasis on the usefulness of the operator EXOR and its consequent EXORcism of what had remained unclear. Examples and applications are given. By this powerful extension of Boolean algebra Euler/Venn diagrams of class relations can be digitally computed. Its uses to system theory and cybernetics are manifold.

The horror genre is and always has been populated by women, who can be seen to be at once both objectified and empowered. Building off the preexisting gender hierarchies and dynamics embedded in the history of horror cinema, this chapter looks at a number of New French Extremity films that assault audiences with unrelenting scenes of violence, torture and self-mutilation, which are performed almost exclusively upon or by women. Although the films of the New French Extremity have been dismissed as exploitative in their representations of wounded and suffering female bodies, their narratives also offer internal criticisms of the misogynistic portals of victimhood that are prevalent in the genre. Through a close analysis of the films Inside (Bustillo & Maury, 2007) (French title: À L’intérieur) and Martyrs (Laugier, 2008), this chapter will examine how both films deviate from the male monster/female victim dichotomy. Although the women of these films may start off vulnerable, they take charge of their situations, while also compacting the nature of feminine identity.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

This chapter investigates the recent surge of social media (mis)use in horror films including The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Unfriended (2015) and #Horror (2015) and how young women’s relationship to social media in these films often pillories females for existing under, and delighting in, an anonymous, ubiquitous gaze. In these narratives, women are slut shamed both in the plot and through the threat of social media’s panoply of screens, sur- and selfveillance. In my discussion, I will utilize feminist film theory including the writings of Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams and Barbara Creed, while also including contemporary cultural criticism from writers and journalists like Nancy Jo Sales and Leora Tanenbaum to explore the horror genre from a more contemporary, multi-discourse perspective. The technology in these films serve as harbingers, intimating the figurative and literal dangers to come for their female protagonists, ultimately suggesting that the horror in these films is the medium itself and the patriarchal social media culture that these devices cultivate.

This chapter explores the episodes of Doctor Who featuring the Weeping Angels, in order to explore how their femininity impacts their monstrosity. Other (male) monsters in Doctor Who kill the victims outright: Daleks exterminate their victims and Cybermen upgrade (essentially extracting all of their humanity, turning them into mindless robots) their victims. The only reoccurring feminine monsters, the Weeping Angels, do not kill anyone. They don’t take away their humanity; they simply transport them to another time. They live out their entire lives in this new time, unharmed beyond the inconvenience of temporal displacement.

The Weeping Angels could be analysed as a reversal of Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine (1993); as their femininity makes them more human and more compassionate instead of more monstrous. They also could be thought of in terms of feminist ethics à la Nel Noddings’ feminist approach to care. In this chapter, I will argue that though traditionally villainous women are made monstrous via their femininity; in the case of the Weeping Angels, their femininity gives them a sense of humanity and compassion, thus making them less monstrous.

OTHER FILMS, it is true, were more talked about in '74, notably The Exorcist and Last Tango, each arguably depicting a gadarene trend of our times. But The Sting, Gatsby, and The Way We Were probably tell us more about middle‐class, and perhaps middle‐aged, opinion, British and American, in that year of inflation and confusion; indeed, as New Society almost noticed wordily in November, about middle‐class reaction from just those trends Bertolucci and Friekdin exhibit. They deserve thus a clinical, although they ask insistently a roseate, retrospect.