Recreational Terror by Isabel Cristina Pinedo

Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992) Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999) Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 15–34. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).ĭiana Fuss, “Oral Incorporations: The Silence of the Lambs,” in Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996), 83–107. Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).Īlexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000), 180. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 233. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Ĭarol J. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. While Demeter’s grief occupies a considerable amount of the myth’s narrative, other themes it foregrounds are the young woman’s struggle between her desires to remain with her mother and to be married, marriage as a social death for women, and marriage and heterosexual male desire as hellish.

The mythic precedent for both psychoanalysis and these film genres is the myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which Persephone, the maiden daughter of Demeter, the mother-grain goddess, is abducted by Hades, the king of hell, leading to her mother’s world-destroying grief.

Loss of connection with one’s mother pervades the genres of the woman’s film and the horror film, as well as psychoanalysis. Despite my admiration for her work, I argue against Creed that horror film also, perhaps even more ardently, expresses a powerful desire to return to the mother and to origins, to a state of total oneness with the world (the mother’s body indistinguishable from the child’s body) that psychoanalytic theory calls primary narcissism. Barbara Creed, in her reading of the horror film, argues that it expresses and defends against a fear of return to the archaic mother and her mawlike, devouring womb. The chief subject of this book has been the ways in which female protagonists of the woman’s film and horror film transform within cinematic narrative and the significance of this transformation.

Recreational Terror by Isabel Cristina Pinedo