Presenter(s): Ryan Cooper—English
Faculty Mentor(s): Priscilla Peña Ovalle
Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!
As a film genre, horror is infamously known for its complicated construction of gendered bodies on the screen, from its culturally informed grotesque depictions of the monstrous to the often-fearful reactions and movement of its protagonists from frame to frame . Feminist film critics like Carol Clover (author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 1992) and Barbara Creed (author of The Monstrous Feminine, 1993) have previously worked to name the phenomena that underline these depictions of gender in horror films, yet they do so primarily through a heteronormative, binary feminist lens . By focusing on bodies in this way, they fail to consider what depictions of gender outside the binary might look like, refusing to address the varied manifestations of bodies on the screen . Through
a nonbinary feminist lens, this project will investigate how gender is constructed and received
in contemporary horror films such as Neil Marshall’s The Descent (2005) and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) in order to understand the mechanics of nonbinary expression in the genre . Along with close reading and analyzing these films, I will take up a dialogue with scholars like Clover and Creed as well as queer studies works like Riki Wilchins’ GenderQueer (2002) and Cáel M . Keegan’s Cinematic/ Trans*/Bodies Now (2018) in order to consider the social attitudes and cultural significance of
these constructions . Ultimately, this project argues that the ways we view, express, and construct bodies in horror films are varied and complicated, but that as readers and critics, we have a social responsibility to consider the texts we read and watch both in and outside the gender binary . By conducting this research, it is my goal to address these social implications in order to urge my readers to pursue textual analyses of films that challenge traditional theory within the horror genre .