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

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Creed’s argument contests Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference to offer a provocative rereading of classical and contemporary horror.

She currently works within the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne where she is a professor of Cinema Studies. On the other hand, women depicted as villains are portrayed as innately evil, and their monstrosity is connected to their reproductive bodily functions. I have used the term “monstrous-feminine”’, she wrote, ‘as the term “female monster” implies a simple reversal of “male monster”’. Although a projection of male fears and paranoid fantasies, the monstrous-feminine is nonetheless a terrifying figure. The Monstrous-Feminine as Avenging Zombie: The Girl With All The Gifts (2016), The Dark (2018), Atlantics (2019).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. Point by point, Barbara Creed has shown that the faces of the Monstrous Feminine as seen in the horror film, are based in the actual psychology of the developing child in the early experiences of childhood and infancy. Her argument that man fears woman as castrator, rather than as castrated, questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts. Julia Kristeva is one of Creed's major feminist influencers, as she studied Kristeva in great depth, particularly with her examination of the abject.

This opening session traces the history of monstrous women, through the gorgons and sirens of Greek mythology to Early Modern witch hunts and 21st-century media narratives, before turning to two enduring archetypes: the witch and the mother. In Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema, Barbara Creed examines the uncanny through Charles Darwin's works regarding sexual selection and origins. This updated edition, which includes entirely new chapters, interrogates the concept in contemporary contexts through a range of diverse films directed by women, and through the exploration of recent progressive social movements. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.In her discussion of the many "faces of the monstrous-feminine", she draws on Kristeva's concept of abjection [9] to describe how patriarchal society separates the human from the non-human, and rejects the "partially formed subject".