The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Popular Fictions Series)

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The Monstrous-Feminine is a brilliant book and I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in a unique portrayal of gender in horror film. She explains that concepts of the monstrous feminine within horror arose from male concerns regarding female sexual difference and castration. Women in horror films have been consistently represented and portrayed as weak, submissive, and highly sexualized.

Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine is one of the most influential books to emerge in the early 90s.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. This book is sometimes hard to read, and the concepts of psychoanlaysis that she draws on are often dubious.

I was introduced to Barbara Creed in my course at my university and I was totally mind-blown by her ideas. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. When you rent one of our On Demand events, you will be able to watch it right away and stream the video anytime during the specified rental period.In her profoundly original analysis of horror films, Creed upended a concept emanating from psychoanalysis, traditionally perceived as scaffolding supporting patriarchy, to demonstrate how women could be seen as the agents of abjection rather than as its passive victims. Barbara Creed has identified several faces of the Monstrous Feminine in the horror film genre, and lays out the basis for these faces in psychoanalysis. Creed reflects back to the Renaissance where the uterus is depicted in connotation with evil and the devil. I have used the term “monstrous-feminine”’, she wrote, ‘as the term “female monster” implies a simple reversal of “male monster”’. Taking place during the week of International Women’s Day 2022, this online day course takes Creed’s work as a starting point, alongside the psychoanalytic theories of Kristeva and Freud.

The term vagina dentata was coined by Sigmund Freud and follows the myth that female genitalia are monster-like, having teeth. In this, "lack" signifies the female, wherein male monsters are identified as abject, lacking; ultimately feminine.

The ‘primal uncanny’, as Creed looks at, was firstly discussed in Freud's work as just the ‘uncanny’ that linked to ideas of psychoanalysis and castration. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Sigmund Freud's works on psychoanalysis theorizes that women once had penises, and are themselves castrated, resulting in the formation of female genitalia, and due to this "penis envy", seek to castrate men of their penises to make them as lacking as women.

Creed's work using the psychoanalysis framework validates its usefulness in the feminist film theory field. In this new edition Creed expands and updates the filmography to include horror films created by women to augment the ways in which the monstrous-feminine functions deliciously as patriarchy’s retribution.

Barbara Creed examines Carrie and T he Exorcist, and critiques the way in which they represent adolescent young women as ‘possessed’ or ‘demonised’ during puberty and menstruation. By reinstating the repressed mother and "femme castratice in classic Freudian theory, and by extending Julia Kristeva's discussion of horror and abjection to fresh critical objects, Barbara Creed accessibly and convincingly demonstrates the relevance and productivity of psychoanalytic theory for cultural analysis. In the beginning of this piece, she discusses The Matrix (1999) and Strange Days (1995) in relation to the concept of ‘jacking-in’, that is the use of technology to alter reality and experience life in other people's minds much like virtual reality.