1st Edition

Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine Art, Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Edited By Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn, Audrey Yue Copyright 2020
    280 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    278 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    1. Re-Reading The Monstrous-Feminine: new approaches to psychoanalytic theory, affect, film and art

    Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn & Audrey Yue

    Part I: Introduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis

    Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue

    2. Symmetry and Incident: Laura Mulvey in Conversation with Nicholas Chare

    Laura Mulvey

    3. A Dream of Bare Arms: ‘Womanliness’, Dirt, and a Quest for Knowledge

    Annette Kuhn

    4. Feminism, Film, and Theory Now

    Elizabeth Cowie

    Part II: Introduction: Expanding the Monstrous Feminine

    Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue

    5. The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now: Barbara Creed in Conversation with Nicholas Chare

    Barbara Creed

    6. Abjection Beyond Tears: Ellyn Burstyn as Liminal (On Set) Mother in The Exorcist

    Mark Nicholls

    7. Carrie’s Sisters: New Blood in Contemporary Female Horror Cinema

    Patricia Pisters

    Part III: Introduction: Reproductive and Post-Reproductive Bodies and the Monstrous-Feminine

    Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue

    8. ‘I will not be that girl in the box’: The Handmaid’s Tale, Monstrous Wombs and Trump’s America

    Tara Brabazon

    9. ‘From a speculative point of view I wondered which of us I was’: Rereading Old Women

    Sneja Gunew

    10. The"Monstrous-Feminine": Dementia, Psychoanalysis and Mother-Daughter Relations in Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s

    E. Ann Kaplan

    Part IV: Introduction: Rethinking the Monstrous-Feminine through a Transnational Frame

    Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue

    11. Polluted Water: Demotic Thai Cinema and Queer Abjection in the Films of Poj Arnon

    Brett Farmer

    12. The Monstrous-Feminine in the Millenial Japanese Horror Film: Problematic M(O)thers and their Monstrous Children in Ringu, Honogurai mizo no soko kara and Ju-On

    Valerie Wee

    13. Women in the Way? Re-reading The monstrous-feminine in contemporary Slovenian cinema

    Polona Petek

    14. In-Your-Face: The Monstrous-Feminine in Photography, Performance Art, Multimedia and Painting

    Jeanette Hoorn

    Biography

    Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, Canada. He is the author of After Francis Bacon (2012) and Sportswomen in Cinema (2015) and the co-editor with Liz Watkins of Gesture and Film (2017) and with Katharina Bonzel of Representations of Sports Coaches in Film (2017).



    Jeanette Hoorn is Honorary Professorial Fellow and a former Director of Gender Studies and Associate- Dean EO in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2014 she designed Sexing the Canvas, filmed and taught at National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Modern Art New York, and Huntington Library in Pasadena on the Coursera platform https://www.coursera.org/course/sexingthecanvas. Her books include Australian Pastoral, the Making of a White Landscape, 2007; Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia, 2009; Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism the Pacific, 2001; Idylle Marocaine, Hilda Rix Nicholas et Elsie Rix en Maroc, due October 2019 with Afrique Orient. Her essays have appeared in Art and Australia, Screen, Third Text, Continuum, Transnational Cinemas, Hecate, Australian Historical Studies; Photofile.



    Audrey Yue is Professor in Media, Culture and Critical Theory, Head of Communications and New Media, and Convenor of the Cultural Studies in Asia PhD Programme at the National University of Singapore. She is author, co-author and co-editor of Sinophone Cinemas (2014), Transnational Australian Cinema (2013), Queer Singapore (2012) and Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (2010), AsiaPacifiQueer (2008) and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (2003). Her recent essays appear in Media and Communication; International Journal of Communication; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Urban Studies.

    Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine offers a welcome, far-reaching and much-overdue re-appraisal of one of the most influential pieces of scholarship on women, horror, and psychoanalytic film theory.’Erin Harrington, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

     

    'It is long past time for an extended appraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking conception of the "monstrous-feminine," and this collection makes clear the continued relevance of Creed’s theory to a proliferating array of bodies and texts.' --Dawn Keetley, Lehigh University, USA