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Grotesque Body Analysis

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Although Bakhtin does not gender the grotesque body, he subconsciously establishes a mutual liaison between the grotesque and the female body. These laughable hags are associated with grotesque imageries of the female body such as “copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation” which make it perceived as “the ever unfinished, ever creating body” (26). To explain more, the female body has a close affinity to the process of reproduction; it is ready for fertilisation, gets pregnant, conceives children, experiences the proximities of life to death in giving birth/death throes and gives birth to children and becomes a consuming body. Mary Russo consolidates this connection between the pregnant hang and …show more content…

She points to the deficiency of the Bakhtinian theory that fails to establish dialogism between the grotesque body and the female one. While explaining that although he relates the grotesque body to the images of womb, pregnancy and childbirth, he fails to recognize their close affinity to “to social relations of gender” (The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity 63). She condemns the Bakhtinian contradictory treatment of the female body, which simultaneously celebrates its generative and subversively debasing potential and abbreviates it to be a mere vessel to give new birth (RW 240). While trying to explain what “remains repressed and undeveloped” in her male counterpart, Russo points to the subversive potential of the female grotesque to overthrow the normative constraints on female actand look (Russo 63). “[D]efined […] in relation to the ideal, standard, or normative form” of the twentieth century, this work tends to argue that the female grotesque in contemporary age still has the power to create horror as it plays a fundamental role “to identity formation for both men and women as a space of risk and abjection” (Russo 12, Miles

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