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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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Dorothy Roberts ' Killing the Black Body confronts racial injustice in America by tackling the historical and ever-present assault on Black women 's procreative freedom and reproductive autonomy. It emphasizes the significance of including Black women 's experience with issues such as perceived promiscuity and eugenics, and the struggle to control their own bodies in the study of the birth control and reproductive liberty movement. Roberts centralizes her arguments on four central themes, which include how "Regulating Black women 's reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America,… how the control of their reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America,… that we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression,… and that reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice" (Roberts, 6). Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, that "It was as a Mother that woman was fearsome: it is in maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved". She appropriately described how in Motherhood, a woman 's identity can be devalued.

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More specifically, the protagonist recalls herself as a young girl being held “by the hand” by a “woman with Kool”, who purchases for her a “Mason Mint” subsequently takes her to a cabin but abandons her, being “nowhere to be seen” at the moment of the young girl’s experience with the harrowing symptoms of presumed oral sex, therefore allowing for the assumption of her mother (the “woman with Kool”) being the person prompting her to partake in unpleasant sexual encounters at a tender age. Furthermore, the metaphor that she feels devoid of “arms or legs” lying in the cabin, in concert with the reference mentioned previously of her feeling like a girl in a sideshow (essentially like a puppet), fortifies this idea of her having no agency over herself, of being controlled and exploited by her

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This is suggested by Helen Simpson who stated that Carter centralises ‘latent content of fairy-tale’ is that women are objects of male desire hence patriarchal discourse establishes male supremacy to which Carter does this to challenge contemporary perspectives on the place of women by revealing the oppression that society inflicted. The Marquis is an overt example of male ownership of female bodies. Similarly, where Atwood exposes the harsh realities of oppressive patriarchy through the female body, Carter utilises the construct of the Marquis in the eponymous story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as a grotesque embodiment of patriarchal control. In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey coined the feminist term ‘male gaze.’ She argues that men are the audience and women are to embody the male perspective of women as objects of satisfaction.

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In her feminist film theory essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to criticize and scrutinize the fetishism, scopophilia, and eroticism in Hollywood mainstream cinema. What Daughters of the Dust executes impeccably roots from radically abandoning the cultural conventions that depict women as subservient and submissive to patriarchal

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Their bodies exemplify their hunger and thirst for blood—a hunger that never ends, leaving them with a heavier physique, thus Dominguez-Rues idea that they have a “monstrous female anatomy” (Dominguez-Rue 301). Explaining that their bodies are “monstrous” (Dominguez-Rue 301)—meaning that they are average or possibly over weight which makes them seem terrifying—sheds light on their overall ability to scare others. The fact that they are round and/or over weight can be associated with the word “monstrous” because of how threatening and strong they may seem because of their size. This body type ultimately contributes to the lust that characters, such as Harker who was entranced by a female vampire as shown above in the first quoted passage. His sexual desires formed with the sight of her body and mouth, have for

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When analyzing Kristeva’s essay on abjection one must first understand what abjection is (especially in terms of horror films). Abjection, from my understanding, is a mental state of deep and repulsing horror that one may experience when we see a rotting corpse, blood, or infected flesh or when a person commits crimes against children. And it is not just the existence of disgust in horror, but it is whole body, mental and physical suffering we encounter From what I understood Kristeva is attempting to delve into how abjection relates to horror, especially in a patriarchal society. Kristeva begins with what she calls a "phenomenological" examination of the abject. Kristeva uses her personal experience to try and give the reader a better understanding

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“Not Your Incubator” illustrates conflict theory by showing how the macroaggression of systemic misogyny relates to the governments regulation of a women’s sexual and reproductive health, as well as the objectifying nature of debating the legality of a woman’s physical autonomy. “Not Your Incubator” is a political illustration that uses contrasting themes of objectification and ownership. It is inspired by “Riot Grrrl” feminism, a subset of third wave feminism. It invites the audience to use sociological imagination to evaluate how misogyny affects a woman’s relationship with her body. While limited by its narrow scope, “Not Your Incubator” provides context for Conflict Theory by relating a large societal conflict to the lives of everyday citizens.

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As Freud states in his 1925 essay “Some psychological consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes” that a pervasive fear of the mother exists, as an archaic that threatens to overpower her child and smother the child into her own primal system . Indeed the figure of the monstrous mother is a

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Stigma is a term originated by the Greeks to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Monaghan all study and discuss the emergence of stigma from symbolic interactions, and explains how people come to possess a deviant identity and manage across various social contexts. Erving Goffman highlights the degrading and discrediting aspects of stigma, and suggests that many experience a “social death,” internalizing the shame, as they attempt to “manage” their “spoiled identities.” On the other hand, Mikhail Bakhtin provides an alternative response to stigma, and his concept “carnival of the grotesque” suggests a “re-presenting” of body deviance

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The Feminine Mystique (1963) examines the dehumanizing conditions of middle class American women who were excluded from social and political life to be anchored in their wifely and motherly roles. The book marks the Second Wave of American feminism. Friedan writes, “Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers” (61). This meant that the whole of an American woman’s life was meant to attract and keep her husband and serve his and children’s needs. She deals with this painful ordeal of women and clearly brings out the ennui, unhappiness, and the lack of companionship experienced by women in their marriages.

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Women’s Body The Figuration of the female body is well described in both Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both novels show that the women bodies are not their own and controlled by others which it turned into an object in order to survive. In this paper, I would like to argue how the objectification of the female bodies in both novels resulted in their oppression and sufferings. Moreover, what is the definition of the figuration of a body to both Offred and Firdaus? And is there a way out to survive this tragedy in both novels?

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This common interest of postmodern feminists about women’s bodies and how it serves as a “feminine language” to define identity continues to represent explorations, discovery and opinions of the traditional mind and body dualism, the role of sexual analysis in the development of gender and the self as well as the analytical modes of exploration of the body which all in all defines what it means to discuss about postmodern feminist issues in this twenty-first century. For example, in Mislina Mustaffa’s opinion, the female body directly reflects an artistic subjection to what is considered a norm to women in society today. Nevertheless, the artist disagrees with such manner. The entire discovery of what makes a woman a woman in fact lies in the matter other than the body itself. One route of inquiry along these lines concerns reevaluation of the senses and the conservative materials that are fashioned into forms or ideas that define the identities of women today.

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Julia Kristeva is a psychoanalyst and feminist writer who talks about what she calls the “semiotic” and the “symbolic”; for her, all signification is made up of these two elements. On the one hand, the semiotic element can be associated with Lacan’s pre-mirror stage, understanding the “mirror-stage” as the moment when the child starts to “see himself, to find himself” in the mirror. So according to Kristeva, the semiotic element comes before this moment, it is associated with the maternal body which is, according to professor Kelly Oliver “the first source of rhythms, tones and movements for every human

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However, film critic, Robin Wood, argues that ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognised horror as both American and familial’ he then goes on to connect this with Psycho by claiming that it is an “innovative and influential film because it supposedly presents its horror not as the produce of forces outside American society, bit a product of the patriarchal family which is the fundamental institution of American society” he goes on to discuss how our civilisation either represses or oppresses (Skal, 1994). Woods claim then suggests that in Psycho, it is the repressions and tensions within the normal American family which produces the monster, not some alien force which was seen and suggested throughout the 1950 horror films. At the beginning of the 60’s, feminisation was regarded as castration not humanization. In “Psycho” (1960) it is claimed that the film presents conservative “moral lessons about gender roles of that the strong male is healthy and normal and the sensitive male is a disturbed figure who suffers from gener confusion” (Skal, 1994). In this section of this chapter I will look closely at how “Psycho” (1960) has layers of non-hetro-conforming and gender-non conforming themes through the use of Norman Bates whose gender identitiy is portrayed as being somewhere between male and female

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As stated that “the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey 490), she relates to the fetishistic looking, in which women can be seen as curiously and admirationaly look on; or it is considered as a bust to look fetish/ desired. But Mulvey proved impotent how women can get out of this suffering. She wonders “how to fight the unconscious/ structured like a language, [...] while still caught within the language of patriarchy?” (Mulvey 484).

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