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Femininity and Queerness as Resistance in the Home - Hanson and Freccero

In her book, Helen Hanson writes on the female Gothic heroine, what that typically entails, what kind of agency they might possess from within the tropes and in breaking outside them, and how they might function in terms of identification beyond the textual realm. Importantly for evolving Gothic sensibilities, castles and ruined estates eventually gave way to the old house, which maintained the deathly, creaking sensibilities of older Gothic and moved cultural anxieties more clearly into the site of the contemporary family. In the same turn, this gave way to shifts in sexual and domestic organization for women, which was spearheaded by women writers moving into the literary field, giving way for a female self-conscious perspective to grow. The Gothic heroine, therefore, can often be seen as one moving into the active role of adventure and navigating the pressures of old sensibilities while creating the means for change and the new. Noting the promiscuity of genres the Gothic heroine resides in film, Hanson points out some of the gendered specificity of her use in both more progressive and conservative impulses. In other words, the Gothic heroine can often be used to track evolving gender roles across various subcultural spaces-- and different perspectives about it. 

Positioning queerness as itself promiscuous, Carla Freccero moves the discussion on queerness, the Gothic, and femininity one step further. In asking the question, what does it mean to move, to act, or to think in a queer way, Freccero examines both the pleasures and pains of being mobilized by an ethical and open imagination for a different future. She portrays the present as a sort of perpetual and noticeable haunting by the past. This leads me to imagine a queer or Gothic heroine as weighed down by the ghosts of the past who act as a force pulling to conserve a movement of their time, and these characters must on some level move by the dragging of the old form in attempting to move against it but with a twist of the new. This is, of course, why progress is incremental. The weight of the past keeps certain movements in check that can only be marginally adjusted in resistance. Some of the pain, therefore, is knowing that there is a way to move altogether differently if the force were to subside but being unable to implement a vision or affect practically in the present. 

Both of these are depicted materially in the mise-en-scene of Crimson Peak by the literal dragging of the ghosts upon the floorboards of the house. They don’t literally repel our Gothic heroine away, but they try to instill a queer disposition towards the old home as a heritage of terror rather than of warmth. It’s the same way many of our political dispositions depend on how we feel oriented versus how we’ve been shown we should be oriented in terms of attraction and repulsion towards subjects, objects, and concepts of the world. On the other hand, the physical forces come from her husband and his sister in the end, who will grab at her body or sneak poison inside her. In these instances, our Gothic heroine must literally move by the way she is being directed but attempt to repel against it in hopes that her forces of resistance will be enough to break for at least a split second.

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Evolving Gender Roles as a Threat to the Family - Reid and Clover

Roddey Reid’s essay, “Death of the Family” is about the evolving way the role of the family is defined and, therefore, evolving threats to the family that follow suit. Reid positions the perceived role of the family as a protective foundation that provides the basis of the larger community. Ethical or proper citizens are seen to adopt anxieties surrounding the threat to the family to socially demonstrate care for the safety and survival of the values of the community. It is the survival of those values and the future that is at stake. Reid then delineates some of our major anxieties through prominent news stories: child molesters, domestic abusers, AIDS crises, low class adolescent influences and temptations, and more. However, they are not only reproduced in myth and news; they are also reproduced in institutional research and upheld by official establishments as habits of what kinds of questions come to mind, how one phrases the question, in setting up the experiment and interpreting data. The already “dead” and destitute family is continually depicted as a problem for marginalized and poor people-- where they are somewhat “undead,” as if their refusal to stay inactive is an inconvenience for the rest of society that must be continually fought back-- rather than as victims of a horror that has happened to them. It’s a genealogy that can be traced back to the eighteenth century where the myth of the normative family spurs a perceptual culture war between that of the norm and non-normative infiltrations, a concept that is overwhelmingly present in the horror genre to this day. 

One of the threats to the family lies in gender binaries, deriving from those same heteronormative prescriptions Reid referenced in the eighteenth century where families might be “safe” if only men weren’t tempted by gambling and sexually loose women and instead earned an honest living and invested time in the domestic space. Carol J. Clover discusses the huge role gender plays conceptually in giving shape to the anxieties of the Slasher film. It lends itself well to depicting how some of these threats are conceived in the 80’s when the genre really thrived (and of course beyond) due to its affinity with pornography, orgasmic displays of violence, and its tropes that often involve a queered masculine killer with a phallic object preying on predominantly female victims. There is something usually different about the final girl that allows him to be defeated or momentarily staved off. In Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, the main character Nancy’s more chaste and boyish qualities allow her to tango with the monster long enough to better understand what drives him and how he works. In the very beginning, for example, it is her friend’s proclivity for sex that appears to get her killed where Nancy and her boyfriend abstain. It is also Nancy’s masculine interest in booby traps and cunning that allow her to pull the monster out from the dream space into a physical space where she can now maneuver and deal with him.  

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Unconscious Semiotics - Wood and Doane

In Introduction to Horror Film, Robin Wood introduces psychoanalysis into pop culture and media studies in a way that is broken down to be more palatable for his readers and applicable to the moving image. Following Marcuse, his theory is guided by the function of repression and its symptoms that bubble up to the surface of consciousness and, finally, the various rationales that necessarily come to be in explaining symptoms of the invisible. While basic repression is necessary to have a functioning human being and a functioning society, individuals and societies also repress a slew of surplus repressions, which are additionally repressed by norms of the family, the social structure, or the state in order to maintain certain kinds of social orders where parts (subject and objects alike) tend to fall in particular places. Closely linked is the concept of “the Other,” which is a divisive split between I and the differences that are not I-- or those things that exist in consciousness that are most misrecognized and therefore must be rationalized by a logic that can uphold and protect the truth in the construction of the self.  Therefore, in order to deal with the Other, they must be either rejected and destroyed or assimilated into a signifying structure that the self deems useful (even if that use is hatred and blame where the self can be seen positively as a hero in battle against). The monster, therefore, becomes an embodiment or expression of the Other’s perception from a centered self. The monster can act as a site to understand repressed anxieties and how their symptoms then distort interpretation. 

Mary Ann Doane considers signifying systems of sound in the cinematic space, including that of what it means within the diegesis, outside the diegesis, and within the audience. She begins by pointing out that, despite its name, even early silent cinema had sound, but the sound-image relation in terms of signification had a different configuration. She then explains sonic reproduction in terms of Benjamin’s “aura” where the reproduced voice appears to get closest to its origin when it is tethered to the image of the body, which is then tethered to the image of a space that holds the subject. Its credibility depends on a certain logical formation that, when untethered from the synchronized body, appears instead as narration instead of dialogue, which then more apparently belongs to and makes visible the film’s body. In other words, the signifying systems reconfigure meaning, despite the fact that all synchronized dialogue also belongs to the film’s body. She continues this practice of carefully delineating the sound-image relations in other terms, such as the voice-off and the voice-over. Finally, she outlines the pleasures of hearing that, through repeated use of certain sound-image relations, create a politics of sound. The aggressivity of sounds that are un-tethered to diegetic existence guide the viewer through feelings and responses to certain content.

Tying both of these authors together, we can then begin to understand how there is both a politics of repression, often depicted through narrative content in horror as people come to terms with embodying a singular monster to represent strange unconscious affects, and a politics of sound, which gives way to what kinds of content we typically feel certain, recognizable emotions for-- and therefore what kinds of things are left as pure feeling, pure affect, only to be rationalized as discomfort of some sort in the aftermath.

[couchchronicles]

The Lesbian Vampire Film - Zimmerman and Griggers

In her Jump Cut essay, Bonnie Zimmerman talks about the surge of lesbian vampires in film through the 1960s and early ‘70s. Fist, she mentions the importance of class dynamic to the female vampire’s power. The seductress must appear dominant by occupying a social position of status, as in comparative films that exploit the allure of the schoolteacher fantasy. Next, they typically mobilize gothic tradition utilized by masculine vampires in the past. The aristocratic mise-en-scene supports their feminine social status transitioning into that of the masculine genre while its surreal qualities likewise continue to prop up the fantastic quality of its new allegorical elements. Many lesbian vampire films continue to mobilize a subtle tension between death and sexuality, but ones that were made in the 1970’s get more explicit in their connection between sex and violence, suggesting there is a tighter link between women, sex, and pain-- and their capacity to bond intimately and romantically over it. The genre as a whole expresses an evolving male anxiety, whether portrayed in a powerful or malicious light, surrounding the idea that women bonding threatens male supremacy and the affordances / desires heteronormativity appears to supply likewise being lost to a more sinister future. 

Camilla Griggers, on the other hand, considers the lesbian vampire film and its responses as one mode of deterritorialization. In other words, it is one expression of the collective coming to terms with the gradual subsumption of female violence and relationships into previous masculine structures, including both its allure and inevitable pushback. In feminine becoming through subsumption, certain feminine/masculine traits carried over by previous social structures must merge with new ones and gendered histories must be repressed, come to light, or mutate. Such gendered histories include the coming to light of abortions kept secret in the past that now fuel the current narrative of women killing machines as women fight for both their rights and their right to be public, outspoken, proud of their actions. These histories include the repression of women as analytical, calculating machines during the war as those traits strategically move away from the administrative, dull, busywork signifiers and increasingly toward that of the masculine cunning. Griggers associates these advancements with changes in the production of myth and the female predator. As traits must necessarily mutate, merge, evolve, the monstrous feminine, including the “lesbian psychofemme predator,” is a prime place for these perceived horrors to be expressed by the collective and neatly embodied in a comprehensible form with a grotesque body, where one of its particularly queer horrors is self or same sex reproduction. 

Both of these converge in Daughters of the Darkness, particularly in its finale when the old vampire is passed in/through its new host whose body she has coveted since they laid eyes on each other. Throughout the course of the movie, we have seen a feminized male with his secret male lover who must act out his masculinity and fail to keep his wife happy and under control. Both happiness and control seem impossible when the familial structure that should have kept him on the “straight” path seems out of the picture, replaced by the voice and instruction of his male lover instead. Through the wife’s unhappiness, she is attracted to the blood, violence, darkness, and burials of her older vampiric lover. They escape together and presumably merge flesh in order to continue to spread their contagion, even though the light has almost destroyed the latter.

[couchchronicles]

Queerness in Gothic and the Uncanny - Gledhill and Vidler

Evan Hayles Gledhill advances scholarship on conventions typical of horror by examining queerness in its relation to gothic conventions, more specifically, rather than sticking to the genre itself or the monstrous. He does this through a reading of Hannibal, which expresses a highly charged relation between two same sex individuals, forcing us to grapple with heteronormative assumptions and deviance-- and all the binaries that come with it-- in really interesting ways. The show follows conventions of other exemplary instances of gothic romance, including the tension between a rich and powerful suitor and a relatively resource scarce and powerless one. Thus, many of the heteronormative assumptions brought out relate to power dynamics and what those mean in a contemporary media text, where traditional understandings of gender and desire for both subjects and objects alike have become more malleable. One of the main breakthroughs the series changes from its gothic predecessors is its desire that seems to move both ways. Hannibal is the powerful suitor who is interested in less powerful creatures, their potential, what they might change into. It is not the lesser subjects who are positioned to desire first, seeking win over affection by jumping through competitive hoops to prove a special capacity to interpret and care for the harsh lord. While Hannibal’s expressions are overtly cruel and violent, there is care, a desire to make them equal, mobilizing the strange abuse for those he desires. While heteronormative expressions are read as care, there is abuse, a desire to create a dominant / submissive situation mobilizing the abuse. It’s a queer inversion of desire in its structure.  

Anthony Vidler, on the other hand, pivots to examine the uncanny in relation to spatial configurations, using the most prominent example of the haunted house. He examines it through its contradiction, which itself gestures towards Freud’s uncanny as something familiar and comfortable made unfamiliar and unsettling by an adjustment to the norm that seems in excess or lacking. As a site of memory and tradition, as well as sanctuary, the home is an especially potent site for tradition, norms, and safety to be ruptured. The kitchen, in particular, used frequently in Hannibal is a site where familial recipes and traditions are fondly remembered and passed down through generations. It’s a biblical site as well, known for breaking bread when forging alliances, joining families in marriage, and in celebration with friends. The strange blur between the warmth of the kitchen, the comfort of a host and a friend who cooks for the professional community, and the meta-knowledge that he is killing and feeding people who have likewise passed through their lives suggests that it might equally be them one day, depending on how the tides turn. The surface level affection we associate with the familial is likewise tainted by depths that continually dredge up violent incestual relations. Both of these are ways in which the familiar of the home appears uncanny, perverted, or distorted by queerness in practice. 

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Queer Monstrosity and the Ethics of Such - Benshoff and MacCormack

Harry M. Benshoff outlines the way in which fears surrounding homosexuality often position non-heteronormative sexualities as a threat to the self, to others, or society. In other words, it is a monstrosity that begins as a contaminant or mutation within the individual body but holds the capacity to infect those in direct contact and eventually spread more broadly if the threat is not contained as quickly as possible. As a contagion that perverts normalcy, therefore, homosexuality is seen to also infect, distort, or destroy the very values that uphold community and civilization. The homosexual can then be seen as the othered backdrop which reaffirms values that are masculine-oriented and straight in light of the feminized (per)version of values that the homosexual displays-- and of course the anxious fantasies about the individual and collective consequences of them. 

In Hannibal, the semiotic relationship between Hannibal and Will versus those of their female romantic partners (or prospective ones). Hannibal and Will are both endlessly attracted to one another, curious, and cannot find the same level of mental stimulation in another. At the same time, they live for each other’s repulsions, their disgust with one another’s inability to cross into their respective social expectations that would allow them to let go of their compulsive attractions and actions. It’s the tension between their attraction and repulsion-- and the perversions of self that take place because of it-- that appears to stifle each from really investing in and playing with their female partners instead.   

On the queer ethics of monstrosity, Patricia MacCormack discusses just such a phenomenon-- that of the inextricable link between fetishization and shame. In this way, the individual can be viewed as a desiring subject, positioned only in a particular relation to subjects and objects of desire and repulsion. As these relations change and evolve, the singular narrative of a subject’s unfolding events appears to take shape on its own (a representation) with tentative bounds as a system of flows that are always in flux. She therefore defines “commonality” as the openness to which an element is open to experiencing the other as self and the self as other-- open to finding a similar or attractive relation instead of a repulsive one. Elements that the self (or the central element in question) tends to find more commonality in move towards the top of its categorizations of affinity. Ones in which are unknown, therefore, often take the bottom of the hierarchy and appear to develop monstrous qualities-- morph by those additions that are perceived through mis-understanding and less relation to the element in actuality. In other words, neglected or marginalized elements often take the collective bottom of the hierarchy and appear / take shape in representations with additive, fictional or fantasized elements put there by the collective. In short, in addition to individual shifts in affinities and repulsions, we also have social shifts in monstrosity, therefore necessitating an ethics of monstrosity.

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In her essay on black invisibility and white science, Robin R. Means Coleman compares many of the ways black subjectivity and humanity is obscured by doing away with the materiality of the black body. Jazz bands are replaced by mechanical jukeboxes, which remain haunted by black voices and sonic structures. Black outsiders who move into white towns are often mysteriously met with their swift disappearance at the hands of police, replaced by the visible materiality of the prison. As a metaphor for white conformity, Coleman examines Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which humans are replaced by “emotionally neutered clones.” She says despite lack of diversity in explicit representation, especially amidst fears of desegregation in the 50’s, racial symbolism was common in jungle films and racially coded monsters in horror who often possess an insatiable desire to possess the white woman leading to either submission or death.

The figure of the zombie is one of the prominent racially coded monsters in U.S. history. Chris Vials traces the origins of the zombie in U.S. radio and film as a particularly racial history that arose out of voodoo and foreign spirituality that was brought over through slave trade as a contagion. The earliest zombie stories were originally set in Haiti and came from a voodoo master who would create slaves for labor rather than transferred through a bite. These fantasy stories fostered an environment where people became ambivalent about imperial expansion to take over these regions. Imperialism, in other words, was for the greater wellbeing of these nations, who now seemed inhuman, racially barbaric, and uncivilized in comparison, and could be easily deprived of their humanity. Finally, Barry Keith Grant writes on the progressive differences in the original Night of the Living Dead and its revamp in 1990. For instance, domestic tension is made explicit into domestic abuse and the race relations of having a black main character is likewise explicitly commented on in the narrative. However, Grant is especially interested in what the changes in one of the main characters Barbara might mean in context with Romero’s auteuristic understanding of gender. In doing so, he shows how the new movie is perhaps not as reductive or “professional” in its depiction of Barbara-- in other words only living up to a masculine defined society-- as other feminist scholars have suggested. However, I’d say, his closing remarks contradict his own argument quite a bit when he points out that Barbara uses the same line as the white cop who mistakenly shot our black protagonist Ben in the original movie then deployed dogs on the masses and hung them up with hooks. In this way, Barbara’s gaze, and our camera’s perspective, probably can’t be trusted. Ben’s turning into a zombie seems more like a perception, a fantasy, and a rationalization than an objective fact-- a fantasy that the writers themselves had to make to justify his killing in the new narrative. In the original, it’s obvious that the cop feels no remorse and genuinely believes he’s killed a zombie in that same way Barbara and audiences do in the updated version. In this way, the narrative seems more like a transfer of masculine power than a woman’s redefinition of power by her own terms.

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Fantastic Ethnographies of Race - Rony, Briefel, and Ngai

Fatimah Tobing Rony traces some of the historical association between racism and spectacle in the 1933 film King Kong and the modern entertainment industry to its ethnographic roots in Western study. At the beginning of the century, for instance, the U.S. would display people who they considered “exotic” in fairgrounds and zoological exhibits. Alongside ethnography, foreign nations and tribal cultures took on an othered role in Western practice, including those of the documentary genre in cinema, creating a justification for capture and close study of people and activities who are strange relative to their “civilized” norms. In this way, Western study gets to define civilization and normalize intervention in other blossoming civilizations, shaping the way they would be positioned going forward in a global economic and cultural market. 

King Kong, for instance, is a great example of how norms in our study, our facts, and our beliefs influence those things we consider fiction, in speculation about how events would or should go down in fantasy narratives. As a former documentarian, the director of King Kong created a fantasy / horror movie that depicts ethnographers and documentarians from within its narrative universe. In this universe, the adventurers somehow overlook all of the prehistoric dinosaurs popping up to battle King Kong. In other words, they make the distinction that dinosaurs-- while out of time-- belong to a category that has already been accepted and defined by a Western knowledge base. It is the gigantic gorilla that is of interest to capture and put on display because he belongs to the “unexpected” or “exotic” realm. While the dinosaurs on the island are the “correct” size, the racially coded gorilla represents traits and abilities yet unknown to the scientific community. The Western scientific community functions as an interloper who necessarily adjusts the course of the newly discovered life form indefinitely.

In Briefel and Ngai’s essay on Candyman, they question the privilege of fear as a form of emotional property-- and who has the right and property to be afraid and/or haunted-- charting a long standing pattern for victims in horror and slasher films to represent a place of entitlement. Candyman pushes against the traditional suburban mise-en-scene of the slasher genre to address questions specific to post-Reagan era housing policy and the subsequent demographic shifts. The movie depicts an urban space where its characters who are up and coming grad students or instructors live in nice apartment buildings while low income minority populations live in precarious slums always on the verge of being torn down. In addition to a shift in location, the hook as the slasher weapon of choice in a contemporary era (amidst the genre of gangster films that took place in the projects and highlighted the use of guns, which were popular at the same time) marks this moment of U.S. history as just another notch in the ongoing social, political, legal progression of racism derivative in this country’s inception. The juxtaposition of the archaic and rusty hook that appears to stand out with the present day characters and mise-en-scene signifies the anxiety of property-- and that of a racial horror/trauma as an emotional property that cannot update or change with the times no matter how much pressure is put on it by its governing institutions.

[couchchronicles]

What Feeling through the Viewer’s Body might Add to our Knowledge on Horror Tropes - Williams and Savoy

This Linda Williams essay on film bodies is actually one of my favorites because it is simply put (yet very critical and innovative in her time), easy to build upon, and really useful for work on both embodiment and temporality. Her opening arguments appeal to the more traditional Cartesian methods of studies and address one of its major discussions between that of high culture and low culture. Typically, body genres have been delegated to the “not art” low / mass / popular culture realm and don’t seem to hold the same weight in academic focus. At the time she was writing, academia was just beginning to put more focus in meta-analysis type fields like historiography and phenomenology. Scholarship was becoming critical of itself, its habits, and thinking through all of the knowledge we might be missing when only one method of study is held as more rigorous and more prestigious than the others-- and how the benefits of the higher status influences scholars to take more interest in old standards. Some of the knowledge base we are missing from the body genres (horror, porn, melodrama), she argues, is a phenomenological understanding of temporality and gender. She criticizes the idea that we are meant to mirror the characters and feelings within these genres and that those phenomenological experiences are necessarily mediated through patterns accumulated in the individual experience, including but not limited to their social positioning and own personal negotiations with identity and gender. 

Eric Savoy opens his untraditional approach to the Gothic and, more specifically, the American Gothic with the “poetics of terror.” Poetics of terror are the heart, the semiotic absence that the monster is said to embody, which instead relies on visceral knowledge. However, American culture revolves around the imperative of repetition, of habit and of tradition. It relies on a repetitive temporality to ascribe rational meaning to the strange as what is queer or uncanny. Since Gothic turns towards the unthematizable narrative, it often charts the failure of covering up or repressing trauma, bringing the traumas of the past into symptoms of the present, which Savoy believes is too often positioned alongside allegory, which has flattened all that the Gothic does to its rational / trope components. While the Gothic always charts physical and psychic terrain, American haunting has a specific terrain. In The Wind, the terrain is one of American expansion into dust zones to try to farm or make habitable deserted lands. The psychic terrain is one that believes in Americanized over-glorification of masculine strength and ruggedness-- and that failure to overcome signifies a failure in the individual. The contradiction, of course, is that both the psychic and literal terrain of expansion and ruggedness is one of American nostalgia. Savoy notes that how frequently traditionally nostalgic sites are depicted in the American Gothic unearth the considerable ways in which those were also horrific sites of trauma. He brings forth the proliferation of prosopopoeia, personification of an abstract disembodied Other, as a master trope in Gothic, which marks both a return and a loss. The personification of the evil in The Wind that could only be seen by women, marked them as crazy or weak if they didn’t pretend the evil didn’t exist and deal with it alone in the night. It also marked this often masculine nostalgic obsession with conquering impoverished lands (both the literal deserts and the traditional pressures put on heterosexual expressions of “love” that made love almost impossible to actually flourish and provide through the years) as a site of trauma that rears its head in the present as both symptoms of repression in the cultural sphere, but also returns in our horror which presents the loss of the Classic Western. 

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Division, Unity, and Passing Through - Foucault and Doyle

In his essay on space and heterotopias, Michel Foucault writes on the nineteenth century crisis in history. Its accumulation of pastness had become overwhelming and cyclical, resulting in a prioritization in space and segmentation. When we create spatial segments, we can also create divisions in understanding to whatever chosen areas of study with relative similarity. Therefore, Foucault is more interested in the meta study of space as a concept in Western experience in what seems to be an attempt to interlock seemingly unlike spatial histories with a technology of form. In understanding space as a technology of form, the changing proximity, arrangements, and relations of coded elements both within and outside a space might give a different and productive way of understanding the continual unfolding of historical relations. 

In Snowpiercer, for instance, we might say this dystopia acts as the site of the other. For Foucault, utopias act as a sort of mirror held up to our society, a placeless place of desired self-recognition. It’s a place that acts as a perfect vision of what we’d like to see in it and what it could be. But from the standpoint of the mirror, we also discover our absence. The dystopia could be seen in a similar light, but one of dysmorphia. Like the misrecognition of dysmorphia, science fiction often mobilizes extrapolation-- taking certain pieces that exist within our society now and magnifying them into an imagined potential future if those issues go unchecked. As such, Snowpiercer takes class divisions and turns them into physical train cars with locked gates, where the governing bodies define who and what might “logically” pass through. Codes are inscribed on the body in the form of dress, hairstyles, uniforms, and each suggest a relation to each train car’s space as one of belonging and mobility or that of intrusion that must be expelled or exterminated. 

Adding to the relational and technological elements of Foucault’s heterotopias, Briohny Doyle gives us a more specific space to consider: the post-apocalyptic space. For Doyle, the apocalypse takes on the temporality of “the middest” or what Vivian Sobchack might consider “lounge time” in looking back on the historic shift that gave way to film noir in their day. Both of these are periods of waiting and, like Sobchack, Doyle notices that such apocalyptic depictions may seem stagnant between historical modes of meaning-making but, like noir’s “lounge time,” apocalyptic tales can also be attributed to anxieties about the shift between specific moments of history. Likewise, the newer trend towards post-apocalyptic narratives, or the lull after the big event, charts Foucault’s nineteenth century feeling of accumulating non-history, with big events that never seem to bring about any real change; they just move into a new aesthetic version of the old-- Doyle’s “catastrophe without revelation.” As such, post-apocalyptic narratives revolve around shifting relations and identity to best chart the codes of the present within the new aesthetic of the post-apocalyptic space. This can be seen in the proliferation of “between” characters like cyborgs or hybrid human creatures, but this can also be seen plainly in evolving status and who and what kinds of people and actions move that status forward. The big reveal at the end of Snowpiercer that the conductor had been sending the messages of revolution all along, for instance, charts a very specific relation to our protagonist’s heroic status, as one that was secretly permitted and not earned-- even though we as audience members received the same affective quality of this sort of “American Dream” quality we get with other heroes throughout the whole movie. This relation is an important part of the let down. However, this is clearly not to say the aesthetic space is unimportant, although I’m running out of blog space. Ghosts and ruins often proliferate within the post-apocalyptic space, charting a future that is not devoid of its past but distinctly haunted by it and, in this movie, one that goes around and around and around as each new character is permitted to start a “new” society for Earth.

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Subjective and Objective Dualisms in and on the skin - Haraway and Halberstam

In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna Haraway’s main task is to destabilize. As the title suggests, each of these subjects-- simians, cyborgs, and women-- destabilize traditional evolutionary, technological, and biological assumptions about the way the world works and, thus, the role of of each within it. All of these are what she terms boundary creatures who inhabit the not quite here of one space or assumption but not quite there of another, but predominantly between conceptions of a split between subject and object. In focusing on these creatures, she is interested in the ways we have and continue to collectively produce and reproduce knowledge of or ways of thinking about such boundary creatures and what implications and ramifications there are within the socius. She is therefore specifically interested in how the inherent doubleness of these boundary creatures in our society might offer more probable opportunities for disruption or breakage in cyclical-- almost compulsive or habitual-- reproductions of knowledge. 

In demonstrating this history, Haraway does three things in this opening. First, she states that grammar is politics, which centers the individual, the collective, the subjective above all else. She notes that there is always a perspective center that tends to “other” the non-representative forces of the world. Second, the split between the object and the organism is another rung in this hierarchy. While non-representational forces act as a sort of “repressed” or unseen figure, the object is more of a marginalized figure on the peripheries of the more centered subject space. She clearly states that this is a method of domination which creates the fetish surrounding the idea of objective sciences in which the object can be mastered and studied, and there is an infallible truth to some of the world. This fetish has both forced feminism to originate and develop apart from those “objective” truths, regardless of its influence in contemporary studies, and circulated the belief about a biological reality located in our bodies that we remain susceptible to regardless of the given socius. My word count is getting too long to get into this much further, but she essentially argues that these prevent the needed radical overhaul of scientific information that creates its foundation and charts some strategies for that in biology, in the primate groups of the animal / human boundary. 

Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows, on the other hand, is still interested in centered subjectivities and deviant subjectivities but instead tracks the growing popularity in identifying objective markers of deviance on the physical body of the other. Her leading argument that “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one that produces deviant subjectivities opposite the normal, the healthy, the pure…” lines up both with her observation that this literary tradition fits perfectly with Michel Foucault’s other technologies of subjectivity emerging within the nineteenth century but also our earlier essay on Gothic convention that identifies the monsters in this time as something unique to myth; these are totalizing monsters, rather than ones that lie outside the community, and therein lies the threat. For Halberstam, the monster is the semiotic void that centers the unresolved, conflicting tensions characteristic of the gothic. They can all cling relative to the monster in some way who can now be misrecognized as the source of the social ills, rather than a victim of it, through the monster’s obvious surface-level association. In addition to coding the body as representative of the soul, the monster appears as a reversal of who is consumed and who is doing the consuming. In this way, the monster can represent various things from sexuality, race, class markers, who all appear to want to take and consume some of what was previously owned and consumed by those with the “appropriate” skin markings.

[couchchronicles]

The Abject and Skin - Kristeva and Creed

In her chapter “Suffering and Horror, Julia Kristeva makes a major move regarding “the abject” and its role in horror. Earlier in her book, she defines the abject succinctly as the undefinable affective tension between attraction and repulsion. The abject is found in objects that are radically excluded and opposed to oneself-- or some relative center-- making the external object necessarily a site of constant comparison or relation and bringing the center constantly towards its opposite as it is positioned in its repulsion. In the present chapter, she considers the abject’s relation to suffering and horror, both in terms of narrative content and formal structure. The major move Kristeva makes, then, is identifying her text’s relation to suffering and horror not only through its themes on the surface but also to abjection as the narrative’s driving force, necessitating certain plot structures and formal moves through its development. Horror’s narrative is plagued by confusions between subject and object, inside and outside, and, formally, through what can be narrated at all and must instead be danced around, creating a sense of the scene in the reader. She demonstrates this by looking at the way the story’s structure in moments of horror or disgust or even suffering as desire and longing must paint a vague picture of the scene, intended to provoke feelings with vivid language and interruptive exclamations. Despite the imprecision, there is a feeling of something precise that occurred and its sufficiency propels the narrative forward. The oscillation, here, would be between the feelings of dread or suspense supposedly outside the narrative universe in the reader that likewise compel the reader forward through the internal narrative. 

Building on Kristeva, Barbara Creed is interested in the monstrous feminine and the abject’s role in the skin as the physical and phenomenal boundary that separates an individual subject from the rest of the external world as an intrinsic role in shaping the subject’s cognitive experience. She traces the monstrous feminine through myth, the medusa and the figure of the witch. These mythic women fit easily within the concept of the abject as an easily othered subject relative to a Freudian viewpoint (and, really, representative of the white, male Western philosophical and academic history as a whole), whose opposing existence represents both allure and anxiety about the “strange” and “unknown” ways in which they behave. The phallic qualities of these two feminine monsters, such as snake hair and long noses and fingers, posit the penis but with a difference when the women take up such assertive or aggressive roles in their story. She then moves the discussion towards that of a horror in our reality, the expulsion of the corpse. Abjection in our skin is often found in our bodily functions, like gagging or shitting, where the body protects the insides from threats to life on the outside, ironically (or abjectionally?) always gesturing towards its inevitable fate in non-life and death. Like the borders of the body, the border is also “central to construction of the monster in horror film” (42). Finally, her textual analysis demonstrating the maternal as abject through Alien not only explains many of these concepts in much greater detail but also reinforces the deep connection between the spatial construction of borders and the internal psychic states of the characters in horror narratives that we hit on last week in Gothic conventions.

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Gothic Conventions - Freud, Sedgwick, and Higley

The major distinction Freud makes in coming to terms with the uncanny is between what is familiar or heimlich (home-ly) and what is unfamiliar or unheimlich (un-homely). The unheimlich is not simply what is strange, per se, but it is what was once familiar made strange. Examples include a smile that might usually be warm and inviting that now seems too wide becoming unsettling. A doll or a clown are usually fun and jovial, but they become frightening when the doll moves on its own or the clown wields a knife. The uncanny is the feeling evoked by unheimlich events, and it is a tool that can be used in horror and elsewhere. 

Like the uncanny, gothic conventions can be applied to a horror narrative but can also set the stage for mysteries and alternative stories. Unlike the uncanny, gothic is not a feeling evoked from certain events but more like an environment or sub-genre with its own distinguishable features. In writing on gothic conventions, Eve Sedgwick creates an extensive list of its history and traits. The mise-en-scene typically includes wild landscapes or ruins within a Catholic or feudal society. Its narrative typically centers a couple pitted against a third, tyrannical old man who wants to rape or murder them. The characters then traverse the mise-en-scene over the course of the narrative so that the blockages in the self and the psyche are spatially coded. There is a “doubleness where oneness should be” and an impossibility of ever bridging the gap, the split, or the blockage that separates the two entities. Likewise, conceptions of inside and outside are often confused from traditional boundaries that distinctly separate the two, yet there is also no way to resolve the tension or bring about any overlapping sense of singularity either. Most importantly, there are forces of both desire and repulsion that can neither be conflated nor resolved. 

Finally, Sarah L. Higley writes on Edward Scissorhands, a movie that mobilizes both the uncanny and gothic conventions. She calls Edward a piece of “cunning work” whose hands take on the dual function: those of blades pieced together, following historically masculinized slasher monsters, but also those of scissors used by feminized seamstresses and hairdressers. As such, he represents a sort of “perversion” of the masculine. There is therefore a tension between the two poles of the normal and the abnormal that we see in the gothic, represented succinctly-- though also elsewhere in the characters and the mise-en-scene-- through differences in the hands. Higley thus notes that hands can gesture, point, and “get things done,” in terms of productive creation and sexual gratification amidst a commercialized town where tangible and intangible desires alike constitute products. She notes that the character Joyce in the film likewise has long fingernails that cannot get material work done, and her “product” of choice is allure and sexuality. The monster, however, both warns and points. Where the normal and the abnormal meet are in the singular pointing function, but they digress in doubleness and difference nonetheless. Edwards hands of pure mechanical utility warn, Higley hints (although this is my reading of the end, and she does not explicitly make such a claim), of a society that has moved on past pure industrial and material needs, one in which the immaterial gestures of the hands are necessary for one to assimilate into an evolving consumer socius.

[couchchronicles]

Introduction to Horror - Carroll, Moretti, and Wood

Noel Carroll is interested in defining and mapping what he terms the art-horror. Art horror is a cross-media genre that began to emerge around the last half of the eighteenth century. The art horror is different from natural horrors or horror as a concept or feeling; it has specific traits that must be met in order for a work of art to fit within the genre. For one, the art horror is intended to elicit a certain emotional state. Second, the art horror must have a monster or a supernatural entity. It is not enough for the feeling of threat or disgust to come from a serial killer or a concept that can exist within our world. Finally, the nonnatural being must be positioned as a creature of both threat and disgust relative to its counterparts-- rather than a being that should exist in the given world, such as those in fairy tales. 

In “The Dark Mirror: Murnau’s Nosferatu,” Robin Wood is predominantly interested in the tension between the natural and the unnatural through symbolism and myth in Nosferatu. Because it’s mostly a textual analysis, I will simply repeat some of the comparisons he draws out in the “mirror” between the two worlds: whether those worlds be the visible vs. repressed, the day vs. night, natural versus experiment or mutation, etc. Typically, the film suggests a romanticized affection towards nature, one that suggests a desire to conserve the natural realm, and an artifice or corruption about the city and its mutations of nature, so to speak. The major “mirrors” include the vampire as a perverted form of the protagonist who are both linked to arches, death and the dirt of the coffin as the flip side of the life and growth of Nina’s flowers, and the sea as the barrier between the “here” of society where its humanistic predators are businessmen during the day and the “there” of the foreign land where the jackals and vampires are the animalistic predators of the night. 

Finally, Franco Moretti’s “The Dialectic of Fear” considers some of horror’s trajectory as a sort of arborescent historical branching off from variations in its two founding monsters, represented by Dracula and Frankenstein. He argues these two figures represent societal extremes, the ruthless proprietor and the disfigured wretch, or the property owners and the propertyless workers respectively. These monsters are different from previous monsters in their significance as totalizing monsters who wreak havoc in and through society rather than apart from it on the outskirts. Frankenstein is a collective, artificial, created creature with reformist demands, ones that desire for human relations respective to its own monstrous body and needs. However, the parallels and substitutes to human versions of its desires never satiate or fit in the same way, in other words, are never equal. Frankenstein’s existence is thus defined by negation, what it is not and cannot live up to. Dracula, on the other hand, in the vampire’s inception is an aristocrat but is not lavish. He is frugal and takes blood because he needs it. He does not like waste and intends to use his victims to sustain his own existence; there is no pleasure in it. As an allegory to capital, the vampire is sustained by living labor and, in order for it to continue to live, the more life it must drain. Thus, the empire must grow to accommodate his far-reaching needs. The larger the body count, the stronger the vampire and the weaker humanity becomes. In this way, the evolution of the vampire can likewise be tracked through evolutions of Capitalist stages.

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Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Media Switching and Media Technologies - Ilana Gershon

Noticing that college students often indicated the medium used in their breakup stories, Ilana Gershon conducts an empirical study on college breakups to better understand what they can tell us about media ideologies. Gershon defines media ideologies as “the assumptions that people hold about how a medium accomplishes communicative tasks... [they] are what people believe about how the medium affects or should affect the message” (391). She notes that media ideologies are culturally constructed, meaning they are multiple and contradictory, and they are shaped by all the media within their media ecologies (389, 391). This means, additionally, that media ideologies change as new media technologies enter the market. New media is susceptible to ideologies already in place based on existing media but also that older media are susceptible to new connotations and perceptions based on new media (393). To begin, Gershon notes that a vast majority of interviewees implicitly privileged certain media over others and assumed there was a widespread social etiqueette at the same time they understood people used and conceptualized media in different ways (399). Interviewees’ inability to move beyond their own media ideologies often caused the tensions in their perception of the breakup. Gershon finds several interesting observations over the course of her study. For one, media ideologies were not always accurate to the way media actually functioned, but their ideology would shape their perceptions regardless (394). Second, refusing to switch media played an equally important role as media switching in determining media ideologies. Third, increased technological mediation could strategically conceal intonations that are more difficult to express in person or over the phone, indicating certain ideologies surrounding text, e-mail, and voice mail. Fourth, nearly all parties considered in-person break ups a social ideal, although they indicated that in-person interaction was not un-mediated. The decision to communicate in person is actively choosing a medium of exchange with certain benefits and drawbacks. Fifth, sometimes media switching acted like an act of emphasis or a finalization of the breakup. Finally, media choices could indicate different locations for different types of conversations or activities. In each of these strategies, participants revealed assumptions about specific mediums based on their media ideologies and how they negotiated compatible or conflicting ideologies between former partners. Each participant indirectly traced their uncovering of their partner’s media ideologies through their breakup, pointing to media assumptions that either organized their dialogue as hinting towards a breakup or clashed with their own etiquette. Gershon draws three conclusions from these. First, most people were savvy to media ideologies and could analyze other peoples’ differing uses and understandings, but this became muddled in their own situations when they tended to hold to their own ideologies as “polite” or “correct.” Second, while a text message and an e-mail are functionally equivalent, the ideologies surrounding them change, which becomes apparent in the context and perceived “appropriateness” of a breakup. Third, as I’ve mentioned, face-to-face interaction is assumed to be a medium, although not explicitly addressed. Through these interviews, Gershon shows that breakups become a particularly revealing site to uncover differences in media ideologies. 

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Fandom Before Fan - Daniel Cavicchi

Daniel Cavicchi outlines the way fans and fandoms have changed since the advent of the internet. Fandoms are not only increasingly accepted but also encouraged in the development of media and technologies as a profitable niche market with specific practices and habits that might be catered to. Cavicchi is not interested in the particulars of these shifts, however, but our understanding of fandoms throughout history. 

While contemporary fans ask the popular question: “How did fans congregate and find out new information before the internet?” With the advent of such questions, Cavicchi notices that fandoms had now developed an articulable past with a corresponding history. His work on oral histories, fanzines, fan mail, and material collections, once the “burgeoning field of fan studies,” had now become fandom’s origin with the “narrowcasting” of fans on new media the result of “broadcasting.” 

The problem, for Cavicchi, is that fan studies had become tightly linked to media and distribution practices. While this link is productive, he argues we must think about how a tight link without alternatives might limit the ways in which we can conceive of fan studies. He wants to begin with the etymology of the word “fan,” which links it to various pathological words and move from here, providing a much richer and lengthier historical background to fandom and fan studies.  The word “fanatic” originates with a multiplicity of words that often orient around excess, illness, and pathology. Conceived as a disease, the word “fan” effectively organizes a series of symptoms into a recognizable and coherent form. Like the origin of the word, diseases invade the body and mind but only exist as an abstract “disease entity” until we have perceived and named the collection of symptoms. In this sense, “fan” is not only an explanatory system but also relative to cultural determinations of what constitutes dis-ease. 

He charts the phenomenon of “fannish” symptoms through his area of expertise in music, giving us three major indicators: sustained interest in sensation (i.e. listening and longing), emphasis on celebrity and selfhood, and testing the expected limits of consumption and commercialization. Fandom re-configures beloved media and pushes beyond its original intent/bounds to support individual identity. In this way, fandoms become located alongside illness/excess/hysteria, class, and gender bounds with fans pushing the limits of normality and producers slowly evolving to capitalize on the resulting culture. Moving through several rich examples brought out in the history of music, Cavicchi argues that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Current knowledge needs to be further substantiated by pre-1900 audience practices that can provide a better foundation and history for digital fandom than simply pre-internet. The origins of fandom go back much further and can provide insightful parallels to newly visible cultural phenomenon due to the now rapid dialogue between fandoms and media producers in the age of the Internet. 

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From Custer’s Revenge and Mario to Fable and Fallout: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Digital Games - Adrienne Shaw

In her introduction, Adrienne Shaw outlines the need for study based on three main problems: For one, digital game studies has remained mostly industry-oriented with little focus on game play, culture, textual analysis, and representation of marginalized groups. Research that has been done on the representation of marginalized groups in game culture, however, have largely been concerned with gender, race, and sexuality as separate objects of study rather than groups that oftentimes intersect-- and even fluctuate in terms of sexuality. Finally, Shaw underscores researchers’ tendency to presume that representation is the ultimate goal for marginalized groups and often lead into such questioning or research without letting members of the audience guide the conversation based on their own experience, gameplay, relationships, and concerns.  In her book, Shaw’s goal is therefore to focus on how the discourse on representation from both and industrial and academic point of view needs to be transformed. It is less focused on transformation within the game texts themselves and more interested in methods and understanding to get a better grasp on representation in ways that may currently escape our grasp from such a targeted scope. 

Methodologically, she intends to do this by keeping both a microscopic and telescopic view on players, culture, and representation to pinpoint alternative issues and perspectives. For one, she looks predominantly at solo play where most studies have focused on online play. She is interested in how culture and social mechanisms necessarily interact with gameplay that has been deemed non-social. She is likewise interested in players who do not identify as gamers, stating the “gamer” label has a specific connotation and meaning to those who do identify as such, yet her interviewees all invested significant time and money into gaming. Finally, she takes the individual players as the branching off point for analysis on representation. She lets her interviewees be forthcoming on when and how representation becomes significant, which she admittedly states poses some issues in the context of a study but often becomes more forthright upon a second meeting or demonstrating her own “in-group” knowledge. She takes this stance despite its limitations to prioritize a study that does not guide interviewees to see what this method might add to the current discourses. 

She finds that by contextualizing her research through interviews instead of dividing up players into distinct categories, we can avoid some of the essentialism perpetuated by neoliberal segmentation. The obvious problem, here, is that “groups are representable only insofar as they are marketable” (18). Contextualization instead of segmentation similarly allows her to account for the fact that representation is always distortive. As marginalized groups come into view, their characters are carefully regulated. She also avoids addressing “stereotypes” that are often only problematic as a part of a “bad” value judgment for those in the out-groups; whereas, marginalized groups will often recognize accuracy in those depictions and use them to talk about larger, systematic issues. For these reasons, Shaw focuses on interviews with marginalized communities, mostly open dialogue, and contextualization with larger discourses to come to her analysis and conclusions.