barbara creed the monstrous feminine pdf file

CHAPTER 1: KRISTEVA, FEMININITY, ABJECTION Creed summarizes Kristeva’s argument about abjection in the border, the mother-child relationship, and the feminine body 8.

Later Creed will focus on “questions of sexual desire woman as the deadly femme castatrice, the castrating mother and the vagina dentata” rather than motherhood: “Whereas Freud argued that woman terrifies because she appears to be castrated, man’s fear of castration has, in my view, led him to construct another monstrous phantasy – that of woman as castrator” 7. What Creed would like to do is expand this to explain why: “woman is represented as monstrous almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions: the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the witch, the vampire, and the possessed woman” 7. Creed cites Linda Williams, who argues “in her article ‘When the woman looks,’ that it is woman’s ‘power-in-difference’ that is central to the representation of the monster in horror ‘a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman’ in that woman’s look acknowledges their ‘similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing biological freaks’ whose bodies represent a fearful and threatening form of sexuality ‘the woman’s look at the monster is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to vulnerable male power'” 6. “Only those writers whose analysis of horror draws on recent debates about the nature of sexual difference attempt to come to terms with the nature of monstrosity in relation to gender from the Freudian position that woman horrifies because she is castrated” 5. “As with all other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality” 3. Whether this stems from Freud’s assertion that men see women as castrated or the toothed nightmare of vagina dentata, for Creed, it is intimately embodied – “What is the relationship between physical states, bodily wastes (even if metaphoric ones) and the horrific – in particular, the monstrous feminine?” 3. This paper has been adapted from the original, presented at the Fluid Physicalities symposium at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2017.1993 Creed begins by asserting that previous critical work has focused too much on the woman as victim of the monster, not as the female monster her/itself 1.

The analysis will look at the fungible quality of milk and blood in historical contexts and their ability to create feelings of fear and repulsion towards maternal icons and women's bodies.

This can be seen trans-historically by comparing medieval to modern conceptions of abject maternity. The application of Julia Kristeva's theoretical notion of the abject and Barbara Creed's concept of the monstrous-feminine will demonstrate how blood and milk inspire a particular horror of the female body that renders the body monstrous. The film and paper make comparisons between late medieval imagery of Christ's wounds and feminine tropes found recurrently in horror movies such as Suspiria (1977) and Possession (1981). Abstract : This film essay Puncture, by Rachel Frances Sharpe, and accompanying paper, by Sophie Sexon, examine the abject qualities of blood and breastmilk.

Barbara creed the monstrous feminine pdf file