Abjection & the Monstrous Feminine
By KATHERINE LUO ‘27
The Horror of Abjection
The central goal of horror media is to make the consumer fear. To do so, creators must exploit the fundamental triggers of the human mind, evolutionary traits that permit human survival back in the age of sticks and stones. A prime example found in horror media is the recently popularized concept of the ‘uncanny valley.’ That feeling of uneasiness, disgust, paranoia, and at its core, primal fear is what the industry capitalizes on; that is the feeling horror enjoyers so masochistically crave.
The “uncanny valley” is the phenomenon where the human brain feels threatened by things that resemble a human in appearance, sound, and behavior, but aren’t quite there. Something feels off, a wrongness that twists one’s guts into knots. This unknown thing is not human but pretends to be, thus the human mind responds with fear: fear of the unnatural, fear of the unknown, fear of the other.
The theory of abjection is similar in its essence rooted in that aversion of the other. However, abjection and the uncanny valley differ in the fact that abjection is not only a fear of the other, but also of that blurring of the line between the self and the other. Abjection is an alienation of the self, a sickness of its physicality, a disgust of its functions that fall into societal taboos. A common trigger of abjection is bodily fluids and wastes such as blood, vomit, feces. Take the feeling of observing a corpse: a repulsion of the human physical form once the consciousness (or the soul) has left. Though the cadaver has just been mere moments ago a living human, accepted and validated in society, it is now rejected and abjected by the same beings that it once walked among. It disgusts what it once was. In the same way, humans abject bodily fluids such as blood that were once inside them, once made up them, once what they physically were. Abjection is the forceps of an embalmer, ready to peel back the layers of guts of horror consumers and tuck into their bone marrow a chilling fear.
Abjection of the Female Form
“Hell is a teenage girl.” says Needy Lesnicky, the protagonist of controversial and provocative comedy horror movie “Jennifer’s Body.” Indeed, the horror movie industry does substantiate the claim, portraying in various tropes the terror that is the feminine. Furthermore, the industry seems to have an obsession with contorting female bodies or feminine forms into something monstrous. A pervasive theme of the genre is perhaps the frightening body horror of all: female puberty.
The marker of female puberty, menstruation, is often utilized in horror to invoke a sense of abjection. Menstruation has around it an air of discomfort and hushness, as if period blood is more putrid, more disgusting than blood from any other area of the body despite the opposite making more sense in theory; menstrual blood is the only type that comes from a natural bodily process. Other blood suggests harm, while regular period blood indicates good health. Perhaps, in addition to pre-existing societal stigma, the period is abject because of its inability to be controlled. The mind cannot simply stop the blood flow by will, and that in itself is terrifying, that one’s mind cannot control the functions of its own body.
Carrie, the arguably monstrous protagonist of the iconic film “Carrie” (1976), possesses the supernatural power of telekinesis. And yet, though she will develop the ability literally to control objects with her mind, she falls into a fit of horror upon discovering her first period in a locker room shower. This is a new type of cruelty: to feel as if the body has betrayed the mind, the self. The scene evokes a feeling of disgust as audiences watch Carrie smear the menstrual body on herself, the tiled floor, and other girls as she tries to grasp for help. This scene especially aims to disgust male audiences, who have not gone through such an experience. There is no sense of understanding, of empathy that passes through them, and therefore, the abjection is amplified.
Horror media is no stranger to capitalizing on male fear of what the female body experiences. Take the largest example: pregnancy and childbirth. “Alien” (1979) tells of parasitic extraterrestrials that literally implants alien embryos into humans, male and female, through their mouths. The iconic monster Facehugger violates its hosts and forcefully impregnates them with horrors beyond human comprehension. How terrifying and putrid is it, to not know what disgusting, horribly foreign thing is growing within one’s own body, to unwittingly and unwillingly nurture it, to become its sanctuary, its egg that it will one day violently hatch from? “Alien” took this originally purely female fear and made it available to all, all the more horrifying to men who’ve never known this threat before.
Not only does the horror genre explore the male fear of the female experience, it also explores the very male fear of females. Hate and fear are closely related emotions. Both severe and volatile, they can extremely easily flip between one another given the right trigger. Women have been the subject of hate for much of history, and this subtle ‘flipping of emotions’ unsurprisingly accompanied it. Take the Salem Witch Trials for example, a period where misogyny and gynophobia became one and the same. Though females were not the only target in this bedlam, they were the primary focus. Take, too, the psychologist father of misogyny, Sigmund Freud. In his iconic and controversial theory of ‘Penis Envy’, he claims that young females experience a stage of psychosexual development where they experience anxiety and anger that they do not have a penis. Paired with Penis Envy is the theory of Castration Anxiety, where young males experience overwhelming fear and paranoia of losing their penis, the ultimate act of emasculation. The two theories converge in horror to the concept of ‘Vagina Dentata,’ where a vagina has teeth, therefore causing harm to the male during intercourse. This horror motif is shown in “Teeth” (2007), where protagonist Dawn O’Keefe is eventually empowered by her Vagina Dentata.
(Of course, it’s not the goal of the horror industry or this article to claim all males are misogynists and for that reason respond fearfully to horror movies with female monsters. Nor is it the goal of this article to substantiate the problematic theories of Freud.)
The Feminism of “Jennifer’s Body”
Despite its original failure at release, “Jennifer’s Body” (2009) starring Megan Fox as Jennifer has become a widely acclaimed feminist cult classic horror film. At first, the film was wrongly marketed to young men because of the actor Megan Fox’s apparent reputation as a ‘sex symbol.’ Truly, this audience overlooks the feminist genius of writer Diablo Cody; when met with something more than just Fox’s sex appeal, scenes that develop her character Jennifer’s complex personality and relationships, they were outraged. Now, however, the film has had time to be discovered by Cody’s intended audience, feminists. Now, the film is being watched through the ‘Female Gaze.’ Yet, Jennifer seems to be at odds with this idea of anti-sexualization of female characters. Jennifer is no doubt meant to be attractive and is treated as such in the movie by other characters (the film is called “Jennifer’s Body” after all), but she is different in the fact that she is not only more than her body, she also becomes in control of her own sexuality. Though not necessarily to do good, Jennifer is empowered by her sex appeal, and as such her man-eating ways are comparable to Dawn’s Vagina Dentata.
Oftentimes in the horror genre, females who embrace or are comfortable in their sexuality are one of the first victims of the villian. Meanwhile, the pure, innocent ‘Final Girl’ is spared at the end, saved by some male savior that swoops in at the last minute. “ Jennifer’s Body” challenges the ‘Final Girl’ trope in a multitude of ways. Jennifer is chosen as the victim in the start of the film because of her claimed virginity, but survived throughout the film because of her sexuality; Jennifer the virgin is the first victim, while Jennifer the sexual is the ‘Final Girl.’ There is no final male savior in the film.
“Jennifer’s Body” finds power in what has been used to remove power from females for so long, what has been used to shame, to belittle, to punish; for that reason, it is a feminist cult classic.
