Episode 6: Our Monstrous Killjoy
Episode 6: Our Monstrous Killjoy
Hi Folks! Last episode we scared ourselves silly by taking a closer look at the horror genre and how those films operate to not only scare us, but also to keep us wedded to the dominant, patriarchal order.
In this episode we are delving into monstrosity, which is, perhaps the reason why horror films scare us so much. Like horror, monsters transcend boundaries and thus provide us with perspectives on what is normal, abnormal, good, evil. The monstrous also dabbles in morality, and plays with what, or whom, is at the core of these abstract concepts.
I wanted to give a shout out to two important sources – Jack Halberstam’s 1995 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, and Barbara Creed’s 2022 Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. I am particularly indebted to Creed, for helping me make sense of Julia Kristeva – when it came to Power’s of Horror, my struggle was real!
I call these scholars out because while they are not quoted at length in this episode, I know they have and will continue to influence my broader Kamp Krystal Killjoy project.
Like all good literature review research, I pulled a thread in Barbara Creed’s work, that of the 2021 horror film Titane, which led me to gynaehorror, and Erin Harrington’s wonderful work on the subject.
When you hear this creepy backdrop….
You will know that I am quoting directly from Harrington’s 2018 Women, Monstrosity, and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. It’s the actual audio from Titane’s trailer. How cool is that?
While Titane shares a unique story of the “monstrous,” I was somewhat surprised to find a thread of what I read as “monster stories” across the feminist books that are part of my Killjoy Survival Kit. Sara Ahmed, Mona Eltahawy, and even bell hooks, share stories in their work that draw from the monstrosity of patriarchy.
When you hear this little ditty…. You will know that it is story time and I am recounting the tale, as told in their original work.
And of course, we will get lots of Killjoy nuggets, and even a quote from Living a Feminist Life – by now we know, when we hear this – we are getting full on killjoy wisdom, unadulterated.
So, Let’s get on to it!
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Episode 6: Our Monstrous Killjoy
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The bite. The curse. The possession. The transformation. The “mad” at his lack of respect scientist who uses technology for evil self-benefit. We learn quickly through classic horror movies that monsters are unnatural, man-made, rather than always already existing… and that’s what makes them scary – anyone can become a monster, at any time.
Still, what makes a monster ‘a monster’? Jeffrey Weinstock (2014) contends that monsters “und[o] our understanding of the way things are and violat[e] our sense of how they are supposed to be”(2014, 1 and 2). Monsters can be grotesque in appearance and are thus visibly monstrous.
Victor Frankenstein’s “creature” for instance, although gentle and kind, was viewed and treated as a monster because of the way he looked. Shunned, and facing society’s loathing, the creature lashed out, performing the monstrosity his appearance accused him of.
Thus, monsters are monsters because of their monstrous behaviors.
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Sucking blood, stealing souls; feasting on brains; and of course, the general terrorizing, stalking, and gruesome acts of murder. Monsters are everything “human” is NOT, both in terms of appearance and behavior. In constructing the NOT, monsters, by default, also construct what is considered human – typically, white, cis gender, straight, middle class, male.
In Recreational Terror, our friend Isabel Pinedo envisions the “monster” as a smokescreen, a bait-and-switch if you will, from what we are really to fear. According to Pinedo,
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“Horror denaturalizes the repressed by transmuting the ‘natural elements’ of everyday life into the unnatural form of the monster… [thus] monstrous elements disguise the quotidian terrors of everyday life.” (Pinedo, 1997, P. 39).
We focus on the construction of the monster as what we should fear, while the real, everyday terrors – in this case, those of patriarchy – remain unscathed. That’s because when we kill the monster, we kill the person it has “corrupted” rather than killing the actual corruption. Applying Halberstam’s term, we can say the monster “de-monstrates,” and brings to life, abstract corruptions like misogyny, racism, etc…
Halberstam (1995) also points out that:
“who [or what] the monster represents tells us who must be removed from society at large” (p. 3).
If we look past the individual monstrous perpetrators – Donald Trump, P. Diddy, Harvey Weinstein, etc… and apply feminist phenomenology…
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Killjoy Equation: Noticing = The Feminist Killjoy’s Hammer.
…we can see that the true monster is patriarchy, as implied by many feminist media scholars – like Clover, Pinedo, Creed, Halberstam, and Harrington. More specifically, we begin to see patriarchy as a “totalizing monster,” one which “threatens community from all sides and from its very core rather than from [simply the] outside” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 29).
Of course, patriarchy is the totalizing monster from my feminist perspective. From the patriarchal symbolic order’s perspective, however, the female body is the totalizing monster. Indeed, the female body is so monstrous, that there is an entire film subgenre called gynaehorror:
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“Gynaehorror… is horror that deals with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from the reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity and first sex, through to pregnancy, birth and motherhood, and finally to menopause and post-menopause” (Harrington, 2018, p. 3)
Indeed, Gynaehorror embraces the rotten to the core aspects of the totalizing monster, this time totally gendered. It
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recognizes how sociocultural discourse marks the female body as always-already monstrous (Harrington, 2018, p.7)
Both Sara Ahmed and Mona Eltahawy cite monsters in the stories they tell about their own journeys to becoming feminist. The stories are very different and are important for paving different routes to feminism through different motivations.
In a section titled “willful girls” in Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed (2017) includes the Grimm story titled, appropriately, “The Willful Child.” She includes the full story, for those who had not read it before, and so will I:
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“Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in [again] and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.” (p. 66)
In unpacking the story, Ahmed continues that “the very judgement of willfulness is a crucial part of the disciplinary apparatus” (p. 67) that keeps girls/women acting appropriately female/feminine and following the rules of patriarchy. The story, thus, is a warning of the consequences of not being willing to obey. We gender our discussion, focusing on the “she/her” because it is girls and women who are not supposed to have a will of their own.
Truly, feminist writing is full of stories of women punished for speaking their minds, expressing their will, which in its feminism, is always contrary to the will of patriarchy. The quickest to my mind is Gloria Watkins who was to become one of feminism’s most inspirational teachers – bell hooks. As hooks tells it:
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“I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the corner store when I first really heard the full name bell hooks. I had just “talked back” to a grown person. Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks – a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back. I claimed this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech” (hooks, 2015, p. 9).
While hooks does not invoke the figure of the monster at all, and the monstrosity in Ahmed’s story is somewhat subdued, Eltahawy goes for the jugular and is in-your-face grotesque in describing the monstrosity that prompted her feminism.
The very first line of Mona Eltahawy’s Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls reads, “I wrote this book with enough rage to fuel a rocket ship” (p.1). She goes on to list several appalling sexual assaults she experienced across her lifetime, some in what should be safe places like the balcony of her childhood home, and while performing the hajj – the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca that is the fifth pillar of Islam. While each heartbreaking and enraging, I was particularly affected
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Killjoy Equation: Affect Alien = Alienated by How you are Affected
by the monstrosity evident in this experience, which Eltahawy recounts in Chapter 1:
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“One day when I was four years old, a man stopped his car on the street under my family’s balcony in Cairo, pulled his penis out of his pants and beckoned for me to come down. He did the same to my friend who had been talking to me from her family’s balcony across the street. I was so small that I needed a stool to see my friend from above the balcony railing” (p. 15)
Eltahawy added that she “waved [her] slipper at him to frighten him away” – already, even as a child, channeling her feminist rage into action, the best she could do at the moment. The power imbalance is shocking, and perhaps a harbinger of the power differential between patriarchy and feminism – the power of an adult waving his penis, versus a child waving a slipper.
In these stories, we can read monstrosity as both drawing us towards becoming feminist, and an expression of our feminism. The monster of patriarchy produces our monstrous feminist response – a snap that allows us to break ties and invest in new possibilities.
According to Ahmed,
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“Snapping refers not only to the moment we can’t take it anymore or to how we recover a history of those who would not take it anymore. Snapping can be what we are trying to achieve” (Ahmed, 2023, p. 233).
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As we snap out of it, we begin to see the value and positivity of monstrosity to the feminist killjoy. Feminist scholarship around horror strongly supports this notion, offering “the monster” as good, and necessary for transformation.
Julia Ducournau, the director of the 2021 horror film Titane says of her film:
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“The idea was to create a new humanity that is strong because it is monstrous – and not the other way around. Monstrosity, for me, is always positive. It is about debunking all the normative ways of society and social life” (Ducournau Interview)
Monstrosity can be read as liberating, emancipating – the abnormal is transformational as it confronts the constructedness of “the normal” and who that dominant construction serves.
Tellingly, Harrington (2018) suggests that through its disobedience, its violations of borders, the monster
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“begs the question, ‘who is being disobeyed and whose borders disrespected’? The monstrous also signals a body-in-process… offer[ing] representational and aesthetic space in which women’s bodies and embodied lives insist on being seen and insist on being important” (p. 28).
The insistence of the willful “arm” reaching upwards, defying to be put down.
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“Arms can embody how we fail to [appropriately] inhabit a category. Arms can be how we insist on inhabiting a category we are assumed to fail” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 88)
Barbara Creed christens this productive failure the “monstrous feminine” and situates it within a “specific historical movement” in horror films that she calls Feminist New Wave Cinema.
Feminist New Wave Cinema is mostly directed by women, and always “tell stories of women who are in revolt against male violence and corrosive patriarchal values including misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anthropocentrism” (2022, p. 2)
Playing on the gothic pun, or campy, double meaning around the word, revolt – to be in revolt, female characters become revolting; they become the monstrous-feminine. Indeed, Creed describes Feminist New Wave Cinema as requiring female characters to “embark on a journey into the dark night of abjection.”
One needs to look no farther than the everyday lived experiences of feminist killjoys, and women more generally to confirm that we are monstrous and abject. We open our arms to monstrosity by
• Abandoning “proper” feminine roles and violating gender norms
• Rejecting institutions of family and/or “normal society”
• Creating trouble for patriarchy through self-questioning of identity, system, order
In short, we become childless cat ladies running for President of the United States.
And if you’ve been following along with the Killjoy blog,
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like Kesha, we have entered our “joy” era and wear our abjectness like a badge of honor for
• Speaking out against injustice
• Undermining male power
• Resisting fixed concepts of place and identity
• Undertaking legal action against perpetrators of violence against women
• Following our own desires
What we learn from slasher films is that there is nothing scarier than a woman wanting to live her life on her own terms. To confront the killer, the final girl, our feminist killjoy, needs to become as monstrous as the monster. She, we, need to go on that “journey into the dark night of abjection” to become abject enough to kill the abject patriarchy. We need to use our paranoia to notice and take the threat seriously (will not get over what is not over); we need to use our minds/brains – figure out how the monster works and turn it in on itself. It works because we let it. We just need to stop. Stop doing it. Be willful – have our own wills. We need to ferociously wave our slippers. We need to be the arm; pull ourselves up; we need to grab the other upwardly reaching arms – pull them up; we move from arm to arms, to army. We overthrow.
Sources:
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Creed, B. (2022). Return of the monstrous-feminine: Feminist New Wave cinema. Routledge.
Ducournau Interview: https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/julia-ducournau-interview-palme-dor-titane-1234652010/
Eltahawy, M. (2019). The seven necessary sins for women and girls. Beacon Press.
Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Duke University Press.
Harrington, E. (2018). Women, monstrosity, and horror film: Gynaehorror. Routledge.
hooks, b. (2015). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Routledge.
Pinedo, I. C. (1997). Recreational terror: Women and the pleasures of horror film viewing. Suny Press.
Titane Trailer (2021). https://youtu.be/Q5_w2W5G9OM?si=0pckDLBhVLxjfCN_
Weinstock JA (2014) The ashgate encyclopedia of literature and cinematic monsters.
Ashgate, Farnham