Haunting and Crimson Peak

We have discussed the Gothic extensively in this class, but this week focused specifically on the concept of the spectre. Themes of hauntings, ghosts, and supernatural entities are a recurrent in horror. Not all Gothic fiction features the literal haunting of a ghost, but the genre does typically deal with issues of being haunted by the past.

In “Reviewing the Female Gothic Heroine: Agency, Identification and Feminist Film Criticism,” Helen Hanson discusses the conventions of the Gothic .[1]  One of the key elements of the genre, according to Hanson, is that it exists in a “tension between progress and atavism.” It is a mode with the ability to constantly renew itself, yet still “plays on a fraught relationship to the past.”[2] Characters are unable to escape from their past, sometimes suffering for the sins of previous generations.

Like most horror, the Gothic tends to blur boundaries between masculine and feminine, good and evil, death and sex, the repulsive and the attractive. By marrying these concepts, Gothic has the potential to challenge existentialist thinking. Therefore, Gothic, with all its ambiguity, can be used as critique of social mandates. As Hanson states,  its “retrogressive narration” not only highlights issues about gender and identity, it tends to reveal toxic elements of our culture in general.

Hanson also mentions the visual and stylistic similarities between Gothic women’s writing and Film Noir. Both Noir and Gothic converse with shifting gender roles. However, while Noir tends to express anxieties over women empowerment and their inclusion in the public sphere, the Gothic “reflects women’s fears about losing their unprecedented freedoms and being forced back into the homes after the men returned from fighting to take over the jobs and assume control.”[3] Considering Film Noir is a mode predominantly written and directed by men, it is not surprisingly that it is typically associated with prestige and quality. Gothic, on the other hand, with its association with emotionality, is often “relegated to the margins.”[4]  

Colin Davis, in “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” discusses the trend in critical and psychoanalytical literature which explores the figure of the ghost as an “wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world.”[5] The ghost is a figure that is neither living or dead, and which presence makes us question what we claim to know. The ghost represents “undisclosed traumas of previous generations” that disturb the “lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes.”[6]  Seeing that the ghost rarely communicates with the haunted directly, it signifies a secret which “is unspeakable.”[7] According to Colon Davis, hauntology is “a place where we can interrogate our relation to the dead, examine the elusive identities of the living, and explore the boundaries between the thought and the unthought.”[8]

Crimson Peak, obviously heavily inspired by the Gothic genre, deals with characters being haunted by the past. On the surface, the ghost in the story is attempting to warn Edith about Thomas and Lucille’s past murders. However, there is deeper level of haunting of the characters.  One of things I found so interesting is how the film plays with our expectations of gender roles. Thomas, who is clearly meant to be gender ambiguous, is emasculated by his inability to make his estate productive.  In the typical period pieces, the woman is often placed in the role of having marry for power. In a reversal of that trope, Thomas is forced to use his sexuality to gain power and wealth. The uncanniness of the Sharpe family is their inability to produce. Their incestial relationship does not permit them to have children, but they are also unable to produce capital.  

[1] Helen Hanson, “Reviewing the Female Gothic Heroine: Agency, Identification and Feminist Film Criticism,” in Hollywood Heroines:  Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007).

[2] Ibid., 35.

[3] Ibid., 47.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Colin Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” French Studies 59, no. 3 (July 1, 2005): 373–79, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni143.

[6] Ibid., 374.

[7] Ibid., 379.

[8] Ibid., 373.

The family and Nightmare on Elm Street

The slasher flick has historically been perceived as shallow and beneath dignity for academic study.  However, as Carol Clover states in “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” because these films are so popular, they actually give “us a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes, at least among the segment of the population that forms its erstwhile audience, than do the legitimate products of the better studios”[1] Making a connection between horror and pornography, Clover states that these two “sensation genres” are specifically devoted to the arousal of the body. In both cases, the body is the target, the “witnessing body.”

Stating that the quality of a horror film lies in the ways it delivers the cliché, Clover states that the basic structure of the horror film rarely changes. Although there are certainly exceptions to the rule, Clover argues that auteur criticism is irrelevant in explaining horror, for the horror critiques goal is to analyze why these narratives are crucial enough to pass along. What makes horror “crucial enough to pass along,” is engagement of “repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings,” argues Clover.  

One of the conventions of the horror genre which Clover discusses is the “final girl” trope. Popular in the 70s and 80s, this trope features a female heroine who defeats the infantile masculine monster. Usually this character is portrayed as gender ambiguous (a tomboy) who has not yet been “deflowered.” Her strength is derived from her embrace of masculine tendencies. For Clover, the final girl is not a feminist figure. It is important to note that slasher is very conservative. However, Clover states the final girl has feministic value. Considering the horror film audience (typically framed through a masculine lens) watches as the final girl defeats the masculine monster, the male audience is forced to identity with the final girl which complicates the idea of the male gaze. This is what Clover calls “bisexual identification,” or a crossing over the own body identification as males.

Horror films are products of American culture and are often in conversation with public discourse. During times when both the media and experts are declaring that the American household is under attack from threats of advancements in technology, rampant drug use, and illegal immigration, these anxieties manifest in the depiction of the monster. Racism has always played a part in fear of the “nonfamilial intruder,”  as Roddey Reid states in “Death of the Family.”[2] “Expressions of alarm over the decline of The Family having always been a tactic for reinscribing and protecting the so-called normative “humanity” of (straight) uppermiddeleclass whites through stigmatizing social others for lack of ‘family.’”[3]  However, as Reid states, sometimes the “them” ( or repressed Other) is portrayed as lurking within “us.” Therefore, the family is always constructed as in “need of constant nurturing, surveillance, and public and private intervention.”[4]

Nightmare on Elm Street plays with these fears. Freddie Krueger’s victims are all white middle-class teens living in the suburbs. They are caught in a vulnerable state of adolescence, a time when they are more corruptible and experimenting with their sexuality,  Usually a safe place for families, the suburbs exists to create a boundary between the “family space” and the outside dangers of the city. Krueger invades and disrupts this space. His supernatural abilities allow him to enter their homes, bedrooms, and even their minds.

    [1] Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” in Dread and Difference, 2015, 69.

[2] Roddey Reid, “‘Death of the Family,’ or, Keeping Human Beings Human,” in Posthuman Bodies, 1995, 177–202.

[3] Ibid., 186.

[4] Ibid.

Surplus repression and Psycho

Robin Wood, in “Introduction to American Horror,” provides a useful blueprint in which to define the horror genre.[1] Not only does the horror film typically deconstruct the boundaries between between normal and abnormal blurry, it often complicates notions of predator and prey.

As Wood states, most horror films put the monster at the emotional forefront. The audience spends time with the monster, sometimes framing the spectator through its point of view and allowing us to experience its inner turmoil. In some cases, the monster is portrayed as the victim of an oppressive system. By humanizing the monster, or at least giving it a backstory, the spectator is forced to question what it means to be the “ideal inhabitant of our culture,” argues Wood.  Considering the monster has traditionally been depicted as racially ambiguous (like King Kong), coded as sexually deviant (like Buffalo Bill), or framed as a feminine monster (like the Xenomorph in the Alien franchise), Wood suggests that the genre is inherently suited to allow for conversations about cultural anxieties and to question what we consider to be normal.  

In a marrying of Freudian and Marxist concepts, Wood suggests the use of both repression and oppression to describe the representation of the monster in the horror film. Although both are oppressive constructs, there is an important distinction between the two. As Freud would argue, repression is not accessible to the conscious mind (a fully internalized oppression) where all our anxieties of the Other are buried in the subconscious. Oppression, on the other hand, is caused by the many external forces in our society.

Robin Wood goes one step further and defines a concept called “surplus repression.” Whereas repression has a degree of universality, surplus repression is “specific to a particular culture and is the process whereby people are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles with that culture.”[2] Considering surplus repression is determined by the norms of a particular society, that would explain why horror films from country to country possess their own distinct styles and monster types. Although the repressed fears of the Other tend to appear in all horror film regardless of country of origin, the manifestation of surplus repression looks different from an American horror to a Korean horror film.

Wood discusses how sexual energy is repressed in American culture. Seeing that the monster is often represented as a sexually deviant or promiscuous, the introduction of the monster is a threat to the “’norm’ of sexuality as reproduction and restricted by the ‘ideal’ family.”[3] Usually surplus repression manifests in seemingly gratuitous excesses. As Linda Williams states, repetitive displays of primal emotions or “sensations of overwhelming pathos” frequently appear in the horror film. [4]

Typically, the “body genre” hinges on the spectacle of the female body and feminine victimization. For example, in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Norman Bates’ restrained sexuality, of not living up to the heterosexual-white-male ideal, erupts in the gruesome murder of Marion Crane.

[1] Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, 1978.

[2] Ibid., 197.

[3] Ibid., 198.

[4] Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (July 1991): 2–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.

The Lesbian Vampire

So far, this class has covered an array of monster types: the zombie, the cannibal, the man ape. Considering monsters represent anxieties over changing sociocultural conditions, each monster film is tied to its historically moment.

For example, King Kong (1933), released at the height of the ethnographic film craze, represents a desire for filmmakers to discover “the visual evidence of the pathological” and exotic indigenous person. King Kong is allegory for racist fears over interracial relationships and the changing landscape brought by progress and modernity.  

Therefore, is not surprising that the figure of “the lesbian vampire” became popular during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. These films appear to be inspired by reactionary discourse which described women empowerment as a destruction of the family unit. Bonnie Zimmerman states that a public awareness of feminism led to a popularity of films with man-killing woman. Stating that the lesbian vampire myth expresses a male anxiety over female bonding that excludes men and threatens male supremacy, Zimmerman argues that feminist potential exists in the lesbian vampire film. These films could be interpreted as a desire for separation from the patriarchy. Zimmerman states that although the purpose of the standard lesbian vampire myth is to soothe the sexual anxieties of men and also provide a justification for women’s suppression, Daughter of Darkness accentuates that anxiety instead.  When the typical woman is forced into the bonds of marriage, the lesbian vampire is an “attack on male power, a revenge fantasy, and a desire for separating from the male world.”[1] Lesbianism is portrayed as attractive whereas heterosexuality is depicted as abnormal and ineffectual.

 In the article “Phantom and Reel Projections: Lesbians and the (Serial) Killing-Machine,” Camilia Griggers discusses a similar monster, that of the lesbian serial killer.[2] This trope, like the lesbian vampire, often appears during times of contention with women over abortion practices and combat status in the military. Therefore, the idea of the murderous woman has entered the public consciousness. When public discourse is concerned with women leaving the protection and morality of the domestic sphere, directly lead to the appearance of the lesbian killer in cinema. Providing examples of Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct, these films center around women who threaten to step beyond the bounds of heterosexual exchange.

The man-killing female or castrating feminine monster has existed in many forms and labeled with different terms: black widow, vagina dentata, Lilith myth, to name a few. Considering gender norms are continually being challenged, these feminine monsters seem destined to resurface. However, it is often unclear whether to interpret these films as feminist or reactionary. The science film Ex Machina, for example, centers around a female android using her sexuality to escape the confines of her prison. Although one could certainly see this as perpetuating the black widow trope (she kills both male characters), one could also interpret Ex Machine as a tale of female liberation, a prison-break from the patriarchy.  

[1] Bonnie Zimmerman, “The Lesbian Vampire on Film,” Jump Cut 24, no. 1 (1981), 435.

[2] Camilla Griggers, “Phantom and Reel Projections: Lesbians and the (Serial) Killing-Machine,” in Posthuman Bodies, 1995.

Hannibal and the Home

The house has become a popular site for the horror film. Threats to the home often signify threats to the family. The house can also be a metaphor for our fragile consciousness. While the living room is meant to be a space that we open to the public, the attic and basement signify the spaces where our repressed fears exist. It is not surprising that these are the spaces in which monsters or ghost invade the home in horror films.

Anthony Vidler, in Unhomely Homes, employs the Freudian terms of uncanny and unheimlich to describe the affect generated by the horror film.  Admitting that is it often easier to describe what uncanny is not rather than what it is, Vidler calls uncanny an “an aesthetic category” that falls within the boundaries of “sinister, disturbing, suspect, strange; it would be characterized better as “dread.”[1]

Unheimlich is the quality of not being homely, or foreign. The unheimlich is the direct opposite of the heimlich. Everything that does not belong to the home or family, everything that is strange and insecure is unheimlich. Therefore, the home (linked to domesticity) is integral to a “sentiment of security and freedom from fear”[2]

Hannibal plays with both the uncanny and unheimlich. First, his kitchen (a space that the audience is frequently shown) is pristine to the point of being sterile. When most kitchens flow into the rest of the home, Hannibal’s kitchen is isolated and closed off. It is deliberately meant to resemble a morgue. There are few spaces of Hannibal’s home that the viewer sees, and it is those hidden spaces that truly disturb us. We are left to assume that something truly dark exists in those private spaces.

Describing Hannibal as a revamped version of classic romantic gothic literature, Evan Hayles Gledhill examines the show as a case study to explore concepts of homosexual romance.[3] Gledhill states that gothic romance narratives permit the audience to understand and empathize with both the monster and their victims. Usually the genre focuses on the romantic relationship between two characters, the monster and the virtuous. Gledhill argues that although NBC’s Hannibal shares many characteristics of romantic gothic literature, it also diverges from the conventions in many significant ways. For one, the monster does not relinquish his masculine powers for love.

On the surface, Hannibal’s identity as a queer cannibal is what gives this character his monstrous quality.  However, Gledhill argues that what truly makes him monstrous is his choice to abuse the “normative assumptions of wider society rather than to act in an entirely oppositional manner.”[4] Hannibal continually abuses his position as a psychiatrist, using the confidential information from his patents to his advantage. The audience is left to wonder why the characters are so quick to trust him. Considering Will is often coded as feminine, the series could be interpreted as commentary on the imbalance of power between genders.  

[1] Anthony Vidler, “Unhomely Houses,” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, 1997.

[2] Ibid., 25.

[3] Evan Hayles Gledhill, “Tumblr and the Romantic Sentiment Album: Bricolage and the Culture of the Margins,” ed. Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and Louisa Ellen Stein, Transformative Works and Cultures 27 (2018), https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1213/1763.

[4][4] Ibid., 88.

Hannibal and Queer Ethics

In the horror genre there appears to be two predominant tropes regarding queerness. First, gay-coded characters are often the first to die (the “bury your gay” trope). Second, the monster or villain is often given characteristics and behaviorally tendencies associated with queerness. 

As Harry M. Benshoff states in “The Monster and the Homosexual,” the concept of “the monster” and “the homosexual” share many of the same “semantic charges” which can arouse the same fears about sex and death.[1]  Considering that both the homosexual and the monster are threats to the binary definition of patriarchal heterosexism, the monster is often characterized as the antithesis of normalcy. Alfred Hitchcock often coded his male villains as either sexually repressed (Psycho) or homosexual (Rope). Othering these characters was a way of  tapping into society’s homophobia, giving the monster an “uncanny” quality. As Benshoff states, “queerness disrupts narrative equilibrium and sets in motion a questioning of the status quo and, in many cases within fantastic literature, the nature of reality itself.” [2] These characters were frightening because they were not normal. 

Unfortunately, by coding the villain as gay, this also perpetuates negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality. Although queerness is becoming more culturally acceptable and visible in American society, sexual desire outside heteronormative boundaries is still often painted as unnatural, indecent, and outside the ideologically status quo. Patricia MacCormack states that the monster’s hybridity allows it to signify many of society’s anxieties towards difference without concretely representing one threat. That is why the monster is often coded as an “exotic” (nationality, sexual orientation, and race). The main function of horror, according to McCormack, is to introduce a sense of chaos that disrupts fundamental distinctions found in our culture.  

The monster is not entirely repulsive in the horror genre. In fact, it has a seductive quality. The audience is seduced by the very anxiety created by its presence. Therefore, the monster is both terrifying and simultaneously liberating, for it shows the transgression possibilities of existing outside a heteronormative society. McCormack argues that queer theory could be described as monstrous for it emerged as a response to the rigid polarity of sexual identity.[3]  MacCormack advocates for a “monstrous queer ethics.” Rather than an ontological naming of certain subjects as aberrant, monstrous queer ethics is “a form of activism as well as an experiment and expression of desire.”[4] Stating that fluid and formless sexuality is more ethical because it encourages joy and passion, MacCormack is pushing for a shift in which monstrosity is celebrated for “the potentialities of future experiments in flesh and subject but will not forget or ignore the history of oppression that has constituted the category at all.��[5]

  Hannibal features a Sherlock Holmes like characters, William Graham, who suffers with a mental illness. However, he uses his handicap as a technique to read criminal behaviors.  He is often characterized (and called by others) as a sociopath, constantly on the verge of losing it. Just like the Sherlock series which plays with erotic potential of the relationship between Sherlock and his nemesis Moriarty, Hannibal adopts that same homoerotic formula. Not only does the show subvert the boundaries between hero and villain, it disrupts the boundaries between normal sexual desire and perversion. William Graham’s ability to read serial killers is often painted as uncanny, an unnatural ability that flirts with deviancy.  Hannibal shares many qualities with Rope. Both feature a monster passing in plain sight. The audience is aware of the monster that lies beneath the surface and the suspense lies in us waiting for the characters to find out. 

NBC’s Hannibal also explores and disrupts traditional genre boundaries. It is a show which plays with the conventions of the police procedural and the “monster-of-the-week” format style. However, when the typical procedural is designed to reinforce normativity, with a narrative structure easy to follow, Hannibal disrupts expectations with jarring jump cuts and loose ends.

[1] Harry M. Benshoff, “The Monster and the Homosexual,” in The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f.

[2] Ibid., 119.

[3] Patricia MacCormack, “The Queer Ethics of Monstrosity,” in Speaking of Monsters, 2012.

[4] Ibid., 264.

[5] Ibid., 259.

Race, Gender, and Night of the Living Dead

The zombie has become a pervasive trope of contemporary horror cinema. It seems we have been given every rendition of the zombie monster: slow zombies (Night of the Living Dead), fast zombies (World War Z), zombies that are signifiers for consumerism (Night of the Living Dead), zombies that represent terrorism (28 Days Later), sexy zombies (Warm Bodies), funny zombies (Shaun of the Dead), dumb zombies and smart zombies (I am Legend).   The zombie has been used to represent many things. It’s origins, however, centered around the slow of freedom and individualism.

 As Chris Valis states, the origin of the zombie can be traced back to the U.S occupation of Haiti in 1915.  Although imperialism (which “ingests another country without allowing it to become a valid part of the national culture”) seems to speak to the zombie film, Valis argues that the early Zombie genre reflects a societal discomfort with colonial labor and imperialism.[1] However, the zombie film also  dehumanizes the victims to the point in which audiences could not identify with their plight.  As Valis states, “the figure of the zombie functions symbolically to put Haitians back in chains, not as the singing, carefree objects of the paternalist imagination, but as emasculated objects of pity.”[2]  Therefore, these films are not entirely reactionary or progressive.  One of the earliest (if not the earliest) zombie films, White Zombie, plays with the theme of exploited labor. However, it is the white characters who lose their freedom. Considering both Blacks and whites are represented as interchangeable and equally exploited, the real horror is racial leveling, posits Valis.

 Robin R Means Coleman states that the monster has historically resembled racist caricatures.[3] Usually defeated by “white science,” these creatures represent an Other which has no place in civilized society. Typically, the horror scene depicts the “white man’s burden” to cast out the creature, to send it back where it belongs. The ultimate sin of these monsters, according to Coleman, is picking the “white woman” as their victim, threatening to unsettle the boundaries of interracial romance. However, Coleman sees George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as an outlier. Calling zombies as metaphors for Whiteness, Coleman states that Romero’s film flips the strip on this narrative. Night is not only a critique of consumption and consumerism; it is a critique of white supremacy. This film features a black man as lead protagonist. Rather than relying on Black stereotypes (prominent during the 1960s), Night cast the characters “outside of racial hierarchies and other dominant norms.”[4] The ending of the film, which sees Ben murdered by cops mistaking him for a zombie, paints a bleak picture of humanity. The hero is not killed by the cannibalistic monsters, but by white supremacy and racism. The imagery of a black man being shot in his home is still powerful and relevant today.  

 Barry Keith Grant interprets Romero’s films as progressive, attacking both capitalism, materialism, and the ideology of masculinity.[5] The first Night of the Living Dead focuses on racial injustice, the 1990 remake is an attempt to reclaim the horror genre for feminism. The true monster, according to Grant, is the monstrosity of the patriarchy. Grants sees the Barbara (the main protagonist) as a “corrective to the narrowness of ‘masculine’ professionalism.”[6]

The horror genre allows for critique of the dominant ideology by disrupting the boundaries between good and evil, monster and hero. Manifestly, it may seem that the zombies are the monsters, yet Romero’s films make that distinction murky when compared to some of the supposed “heroes” and the the “civilized society” they are attempting to protect.  

[1] Chris Valis, “The Origin of the Zombie in American Radio and Film: B-Horror, U.S. Empire, and the Politics of Disavowal,” Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, 2012, .

[2] Ibid., 46.

[3] Robin R Means Coleman, “Black Invisibility, White Science, and a Night with Ben,” in Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, 2011.

[4] Ibid., 115

[5] Barry Keith Grant, “Taking Back the Night of the Living Dead: George Romero, Feminism, and the Horror Film,” in Dread and Difference, 2015.

[6] Ibid., 236.

White entitlement and Candyman 

As Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai argue, in “’How Much Did You Pay For This Place?’ Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose's ‘Candyman,’” being frightened is a privileged experience in the horror genre.[1] Over the past several decades the traditional horror victims have been suburban white residents in “middle-class routines” of celebrating holidays, going on vacations, or moving to new homes. Therefore, the horror film suggests that being frightened is a sign of empowerment. Arguing that horror narratives “establish anxiety as a form of emotional property,” Briefel and Ngai posit that the experience of fear found in the horror genre is often tied to the threat of property and home ownership.[2] Therefore, not only is the relationship between the haunted and haunter at stake in the horror genre, but so is the question of proprietary rights.  Briefel and Ngai argue that “the struggle we see in the horror film is not only a struggle over property, but a struggle over who has the right to be afraid.”[3]

Briefel and Ngai focus primarily on the 1992 film Candyman. Helen, a graduate student obsessed with getting her work published, is researching an urban myth in the housing project of Cabrini-Green. Helen, who believes Candyman is a myth meant to repress the violence of the projects, is drawn to this space and sees it as a means to propel her career. One of the main themes of Candyman is the crossing of a racialized barrier. Cabrini-Green is coded as a decaying and dangerous “Black” space. The protagonist, whose whiteness entitles her to being afraid, enters this space. As Briefel and Nagi state, Helen is not only attempting to be part of the project’s literary canon but wants to appropriate the fear of the residents of the projects.  Helen exits in a liminal state, flirting with the fear of the projects. Her privileged position as a white woman allows her to ignore systematic racism. I find it interesting that Helen could be interpreted as “monstrous.” Her position as a white woman entering a “Black” space could be perceived as threatening and terrorizing. In fact,  Anne-Marie tells Helen and Bernadette that white people only come to the projects to bring trouble.

Although Helen is punished for entering a space she does not belong (being framed for the murders) she is still ultimately portrayed as the hero, sacrificing herself to Candyman to save a child’s life. In many ways, this film is haunted by ethnographic cinema. Helen’s academic credibility is tied to the “exotic” nature of her research. The space of Cabrini-Green is portrayed as uncivilized, lawless, and dangerous. 

The manipulation of boundaries appears to be the primary fuel of excitement and terror generated by the horror genre. As Fatimah Tobing Rony states, this genre is appealing “because the audience is fascinated by the monster's impurity, its hybridity, and because it is curious to get at the heart of this unknowable: the audience follows the narrative until it discloses all the secrets of the monster.”[4] Rony discusses the classic 1930s film King Kong. Connecting the film to ethnographic cinema, Rony states that early ethnographic cinema was always interested in the “monstrosity” of distant worlds. The “Primitive Other” was of keen interest to audiences at the time. Therefore, King Kong, similar to ethnographic cinema, is haunted by a racist desire to capture the “link between the ape and the white man.”[5]  The use of African Americans as extras to play the role of indigenous islanders was a deliberate choice meant to signify savagery. Additionally, King Kong, according to Rony, represents a monstrosity of hybridity (he is neither human nor ape). Considering Kong is obsessed with abducting Ann, the film is playing with the taboo of interracial sex.  Therefore, the monster’s existence not only threatens the lives of the characters in the film, it threatens cultural boundaries. However, the film itself is both a hybrid of scientific expedition and fantasy genres. As Rony states, visual appropriation elevates the film to “monstrous.”

[1] Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, “‘How Much Did You Pay for This Place?’ Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 1996.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 72.

[4] Fatimah Tobing Rony, “King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema,” in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, 1996, 170.

[5] Ibid., 163.

What makes a horror film...scary? Is it the suspense, hideous monsters, or jump scares? Many horror studies scholars would argue that here is something deeper. Eric Savoy, in “The Face of the Tenant,” discusses the concept of allegory in relation to the gothic and horror genre. Arguing that allegory is “a fluid tendency rather than a discrete literary ‘mode,’” Savoy implies that allegory is an attempt to repress something unspeakable.

The horror trope of personifying an object (for example a haunted house) provides a face to a “disembodied Other.” This is perhaps why the scariest horror films rarely show the monster. Nothing is more terrifying than nothingness because it gives the unconscious the opportunity to fill in its own phobias.  Therefore, like Freud’s uncanny, allegory represents the threat of repression returning to the surface.  Savoy discusses a “chasm” created by “gothic signification” whereby the “specter of Otherness that haunts the house of national narrative” is compelled to “shadow forth.” [1]

In “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” Linda Williams examines the form and function of three types of film: horror, melodramas, and pornography. Although these may seem to have nothing in common, they are all “jerkers,” according to Williams, or “films marked by ‘lapses’ in realism, by ‘excesses’ of spectacle and displays of primal, even infantile emotions.”[2] These “body genres” deal with the “unseemly” and the “gratuitous.” The audience is meant to mimic what is seen on the screen. While watching pornography, for example, the viewer watches people in sexual gratification and becomes aroused just like the characters. “The body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen,” states Williams.[3] That is a primary reason why Williams does not include comedies in the category of the body film. Although the comedic film is intended to elicit a affective responsive, the spectator is not always mimicking what the characters are doing on the screen. We are not laughing because the characters are laughing. In fact, we are often amused by a character’s misfortune or pain in physical comedy films.

Although Williams admits that these three body genres typical hinge on the spectacle of a female body, they are not always purely masochistic fantasies of the domination of the female body. There is always a component of either power or pleasure for the woman victim. Williams states that a “bisexual oscillation” occurs between passivity and activity in the female characters in these types of films.  

The blurring boundaries of the horror genre has been a constant theme in the readings this semester. Many scholars of horror studies discuss the potentially liberating or transgressive qualities of the horror genre.

The horror film, with its tendency to blur boundaries, could be interpreted as a temporary escape from the bounds of sadomasochistic culture. As Williams states, “the cultural law which decides that some girls are good and others are bad is not defeated but within its terms pleasure has been negotiated and ‘paid for’ with a pain that conditions it.”[4]

The film The Wind plays with both Savoy’s allegory and William’s bisexual oscillation. For example, The Wind features a monster which does not does manifest in a physical form.  The villain is literally the wind. However, this villain represents a repudiated Other. It is telling that the only two characters that the wind physically possesses (and truly threatens to harm Lizzy) are two male characters. The haunting of a Reverend is deliberate choice by the director. As a symbol of patriarchal Christianity, the Reverend represents the oppressive structure which is pushing back against Lizzy’s rejection of the faith.

It might be too simplistic to argue that the wind is allegory for oppressive patriarchy. However, the film is set during the era of manifest destiny, when rigid gender roles are prominent. You could interpret the film as a women’s liberation film for she escapes this oppressive structure. If the horror genre hinges on the “pleasure of masculine subject positions punishing or dominating feminine objects,” then The Wind breaks that cycle.  Although there is a consequence, Lizzy may eventually escape the wind, but ends up dying in the end.[5]

[1] Ibid., 14.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Ibid., 4.

[4] Ibid., 8.

[5] Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (July 1991): 6, https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.

Heterotopia and Snowpiercer

The science fiction and horror genres share many similar conventions. In fact, you could argue that there is only one slight distinction between the two. Science fiction often reflects society’s anxieties of the future, while horror reflects current socio-cultural anxieties. In some films, however, the sci fi/horror boundary is less definitive. For example, the film Alien (1979) could easily fit in both categories. The film is set in a distant future but also centers around a murderous monster. Through a psychoanalytic lens, the xenomorph (or abjection) could be interpreted as a manifestation of both the current anxieties over changing gender roles and a potential dystopia future.

However, one motif that is often overlooked in both the horror and science fiction genre is the tension created by the use of space. As Michel Foucault states, anxieties can also be generated by the blurring of spatial boundaries. When the distinction between public and private, external, and internal are complicated, a tension is created. Calling these heterotopias, Foucault describes these places as “in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”[1]Foucault provides several possible types of heterotopias, including cemeteries, bars, brothels, gardens, and fairs as worlds with worlds.  Opposed to an “utopia,” which Foucault calls a “placeless place,” Heterotopias exists as a complicated layer of meaning and relationships. Not only do heterotopias exist as separate spaces but they may also be “linked to slices in time.” Providing the example of the honeymoon, Foucault states that this tradition requires the couple to consummate the marriage by traveling to an exotic location. The couple is meant to be removed from the rest of the population and return when the deed is done.

Both the horror and science fiction genre play with heterotopias. In fact, Briohny Doyle incorporates the term heterotopia in her analysis of the postapocalyptic film. This popular subgenre focuses on “decay, disaster and ruin” and centers around characters attempting to survive in the ruins of contemporary society.[2] Doyle states that the postapocalypsic film fits slightly into the horror genre for it is “haunted by memories of the pre-catastrophe world.” This subgenre exists simultaneously in both the science fiction and horror genre for it “becomes a site to express polyvalent critiques of the present and explore fears and fantasies about the future.”

The film Snowpiercer is incorporates the anxiety of heterotopias. The film takes place in one impossibly long train. Each cart exists in its own world, with its own ecosystem. This train, which is meant to be a space where people exist temporarily, is a permanent prison for the characters. The train is the monster of the film, a man-made abomination.  Chris Evan’s character (the convention “nomad” characters) becomes a deterritorialized figure who penetrates and disrupts the order of the train.

Questions:

What public space is not a heterotopia?  Foucault provides examples of these types of spaces but what spaces falls outside the heterotopic? Obviously, the home (which is private), but doesn’t every public space count as heterotopia?  Considering media complicates the public vs private dichotomy, doesn’t every space have the potential to be heteroptic? 

Hybridity and The Lure (2015)

A constant theme found in the horror genre is the monstrosity of hybridity. The genre often presents its monsters in a liminal state of female/man, native/foreign, animal/human. This tension is disturbing, uncanny, and often must be resolved (usually through the destruction of the monster) by the end of the film. As Judith Halberstam states in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, “monsters not only reveal certain material conditions of the production of horror, but they also make strange the categories of beauty, humanity, and identity that we still cling to.”[1]

One film that plays with hybridity is The Lure (2015). The structure of the film flirts with many genres (musical and horror) which speaks to the promiscuous nature of the horror genre itself. The film often jumps between grotesque imagery of mermaids eating flesh to very corny musical numbers. This creates an unsettling feeling in the audience. Our expectations are continually jostled.  The supermarket scene is almost surrealist in nature.  Obviously meant to speak to celebrity culture and consumerism, the crowds dance and sing around Golden and Silver in uniformity.  

The scenes that I find most fascinating, however, are the more horrific examples; including those that feature the “tails” of Golden and Silver. I would argue that these tails are intentionally designed to resemble a penis. Rather than the standard PG dolphin-like tail, Golden and Silver possess an oddly color, unseemly, phallic-shaped appendage. In one of the first scenes, when the tails are first shown, the transformation almost resembles the process of an erection. It’s truly a disturbing transformation, two very attraction young girls growing phallic-like tails.

Obviously, the ending could be interpreted in many ways. Manifestly, this film could be interpreted as a tragedy. A woman with the power of the immortality, unconfined to the stringent and oppressive standards of human society, willingly gives her power to a man who rejects her. Silver, who falls in love, loses her phallic power forever. Golden, on the other hand, is free to punish men for eternity.

You could also interpret this film in another way. Silver offers her immortality willingly. She does not appear to enjoy the mermaid lifestyle as much as her sister. The ending could be interpreted as one woman choosing to free herself from the limits of her own body. That is what Donna Haraway was advocating for in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Embracing fluidity and the unbodied, Haraway expressed the need to transcend our socially constructed, and inflexible, human bodies. The confusion of boundaries found in the horror genre could be interpreted as liberating. Generating a world that is closer to the “utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender.”[2]

[1] Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 1995, 6.

[2] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, 2006, 292.

Abjection and The Witch

Julia Kristeva offers a useful concept in describing what draws people to the horror genre. Describing abject as “something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.”[1] Kristeva states that abject exists in a liminal space between two binaries, easily punctured and gross. Using the imagery of “milk skin,” Kristeva describes abjection as something “that does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.”[2] Abjection is distinct from the previous Freudian concept of “uncanniness.” Kristeva calls it “more violent” and “a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory.”[3]

 In other words, the abject is something that does not conform to normative standards. The abject is unseemly, hedonistic, uncivilized, queer. Discomfort usually follows the abject, creating a tension between repulsion and attraction. This unresolved tension usually manifests in the horror genre. Considering the horror genre often reflects social anxieties, women, children, and people of color are often used as devices to signify these tensions.

While Kristeva focuses primarily on horror literature, Barbara Creed extends the concept of abjection in her analysis of horror film. Stating that horror films “construct and confronts us with the fascinating, seductive aspect of abjection,” Creed states that there is a pleasure in “breaking the taboo of filth” or “pleasure in perversity.”[4] (46)

 The horror film The Witch provides a useful case study to explore the concept of abjection. Although the film possesses a monster (the witch that eats children), the true tension (or discomfort) comes from the father’s inability to control and protect his family. Willingly exiled, the father continually preaches of the importance to be pure and a godly family. Yet, he continually fails to live up to his own standards. The father is losing the battle against the monstrous-feminine both internally and externally.  Not only is he unable to conquer nature (which is clearly feminized through the extension of the witch), he is unable to control the threats to his authority from within his own family. Clearly, the use of a pre-American puritan family (who live by the most stringent and self-deprived standards of what is good and evil) was a deliberate choice.  The ambiguity of who truly is the monster forces Thomasin to make a choice, she ends up choosing to leave freely with the witch.

[1] Julia Kristeva, “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,” trans. Deborah Linderman and Leon S. Roudiez, SubStance 13, no. 3/4 (1984): 140, https://doi.org/10.2307/3684782.

[2] Ibid., 2.

[3] Ibid., 7.

[4] Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in Dread of Difference (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).

Edward Scissorhands and the Uncanny

The “uncanny” is a popular term used to by horror scholars to describe the strange sensation felt when watching a horror film. Borrowed from Sigmund Freud’s article by the same name, this affect is generated by a liminal state that fluctuates between unfamiliarity and familiarity. Freud defines the “uncanny” as a “class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”[1] Freud also states that the uncanny represents “something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light.”[2]

Sarah L. Higley extends the concept of the uncanny in her analysis of the film Edward Scissorhands. The film by Tim Burton is a great example of the blurred boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar; normal and abnormal. The character of Edward, a contemporary Frankenstein, is removed from his castle to join a white suburban society. He is both masculine and feminine, human and nonhuman. The scissors he has for hands does not allow him to contribute to the labor force, except for hairdressing. He is a monster not by his grotesque features, but by the very fact that he does not fit in (even when the characters desperately attempt to make him conform). He represents a “perversion of nature,” because he exists in a liminal state outside the clearly defined boundaries created by society. As Higley states, “Edward is a walking reminder of castration and indeterminacy; he is incapable of doing a man’s work, expect barbecuing, and is not clearly a man, not clearly an adult, not even clearly human.”[3]

To me, the uncanniness of Edward Scissorhands is generated not merely by the addition of an eccentric character with scissors for hands, but the white suburbia created by the director. The neighborhood is both familiar and unfamiliar. We recognize the standard arrangement of a classic suburban neighborhood, but there is something “off” about both the characters and the places they live.  Besides a few exceptions, everyone is wearing bright pastel colors, the sky is always a miraculously blue or pitch black. The women in the film are aggressive and predatory; the men oblivious to what is happening around them. The resident’s conversations are so vanilla, so devoid of meaning, that they feel inhuman to me. The “creepiness” comes move from the residents of the town not from the “monster.”

Obviously, this is a commentary on consumer culture. The uncanniness comes from recognition of ourselves in the monstrous residents of the town.

[1] Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” accessed May 12, 2020, 1-2. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.

[2] Ibid., 13.

[3] Sarah L. Higley, “‘Cunning Work’: Edward Scissorhands and the Topos of Utility,” Christianity & Literature 42, no. 3 (June 1993): 440, https://doi.org/10.1177/014833319304200307.

What makes a horror film a horror film?

“Horrific monsters, this is, embody the notion of a violation of nature. But to have a violation of nature, one needs a conception of nature- one that relegates the beings in question to the realm of the non-natural. And, in this respect, one might want to suggest that the Enlightenment supplied the horror novel with the norm of nature needed to produce the right kind of monster.”[1]

-Noel Carroll

 What makes a horror film a horror film? One defining characteristic of the horror film is the monster, a grotesque figure which threatens to psychologically or physical harm the protagonist.

Many academic scholars (including Noel Carrol, Robin Wood, and Franco Morretti) have disused the horror film monster’s tendency to signify our repressed anxieties. So, in other words, the monster not only threatens to kill but to disrupt the balance of ordinary society, seeking to destroy the moral order. These creatures possess a “horror metonymy” according to Carroll, with the intent of “emphasizing the impure and disgusting nature of the creature-from the outside.”[2]

Carrol states that monsters “embody the notion of a violation of nature” which must be banished by the protagonist.  They possess an unnatural hybridity. In the silent film Nosferatu, for example, the vampire is both alive and dead, animal and man.

Franco Moretti argues that monsters are metaphors for inequalities of race and class in a capitalistic society. These monsters represent deviations from the norm, or “the Other” (immigrants, homosexuals, women, and people of color). The monster, according to Moretti, “makes us realize how hard it was for the dominant classes to resign themselves to the idea that all human beings are—or ought to be—equal.”[3] Nosferatu and other vampire films could be interpreted as a cautionary tale of changing demographics, a xenophobic horror story.

If we are to examine these themes through a psychoanalysis lens, the blurred boundaries of the hybrid monster could signify the boundaries of the unconscious. The horror film brings repressed anxieties to the surface, where they are not supposed to be. Something must stand in for the “real,” for our unconscious minds cannot handle it.  As Wood states, “Nosferatu is the symbol of neurosis resulting from repressed sexuality (repressed nature); when the neurosis is revealed to the light of day it is exorcised, but the process of its emergence and recognition has been so terrible that positive life (Nina) is destroyed with it.”[4] These monsters often exist in weird and liminal spaces (a haunted house, castle, basement, ghost town, etc. ).  As Robin Wood states, these spaces are frightening to the viewer because they are often projections of psychological spaces. The basement of a house represents the basement of the mind, so to speak, where our repressed fears exists.

[1] Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 1990), 57.

[2] Carroll.

[3] Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review, 1982, 70.

[4] Robin Wood, “The Dark Mirror: Murnau’s Nosferatu,” in Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, 2018, 129.

Privacy and Technology

Burman, Pocketing the difference

Burman discusses the socio-cultural characteristics and implications of pockets in the mid-nineteenth-century. The differences in the makeup of pockets highlights the differing roles and expectation between men and women.“A man’s set of integral pockets carried the prerequisites for a day spent in the public world of work,” states Burman. Female pockets on the other hand were less visible and reflected the “concealed body of the respectable woman” (p.463). The article discusses how pockets changed over time and how that reflects the changing expectation of women in “cultural participation.” The pocket was a place of concealment of “treasure communication of a personal nature” (p. 460) and the pocket’s evolution was a response  “to the connection between male pockets, work and power” (p. 458).

Although, labeling pockets as technology may be a stretch, it does show how the evolution of technology causes the boundary between the public and the private to dissipate.  

Gregg, Adultering Technologies

In an examination on how technology, particularly social media and the internet, has changed the boundaries of intimacy for couples, Gregg discusses the obsession with spousebusting services. She argues that “the mundane pedagogy of intimate surveillance reveals less about our capacity to be desirable and more about the changing nature of social belonging” (p. 108). “Anxieties about adultery are always anxieties about security,” argues Gregg, “about understanding who can be counted upon to deliver something that may never remain the same but is expected to be in the absence of more sustaining relationships” (p.108)

Gregg discusses the guilty pleasures of pursuing job-related tasks at home and compares that to the affair woman had in previous centuries to relieve boredom. Creative and rewarding work done in secrecy possesses adulterous characteristics, argues Gregg. Gregg also discusses how online exchanges can iminate domestic intimacy as “virtual friends can alleviate pressure on partners when work and other commitments prevent them from acting as the sole source of intimacy” (p.106)

This reading focuses on the omnipresence of technology and how the use of technology actually negotiations our relationships. Technology, in particular the internet, were originating used as a means to become more intimate with another human being, but we have bypast the other person and are now becoming more intimate with technology. Social media has blurred the lines between work and play, flirting and stalking. Keeping track of our friends, something that should be a fun distraction, shares many of the qualities of keeping up with a job. We don’t want to be intimate with other human beings, we rather have the artificial. Are we changing technology to fit our needs or is technology changing us?

Greshon, Breaking up

Gershon explores the use of technology, in particular media switching, in breakup narratives. Interviewing people over their breakup strategies. Gershon argues that people have “overlapping but not identical media ideologies” (p.396) and are often discovering what “constitutes proper and improper use of new technologies” (p. 391). This ambiguity can sometimes create miscommunication because media of the message strongly influences its meaning and effectiveness. For example, someone who desires to break up over email may not be successful because of the choice of media.

I find this article interesting in its discussion of “media ideologies.” Greshon seems to argue that  different media possesses different norm and etiquette. I am wondering, however, if this article is a little out of date (mentioning Friendster and Blackberries). Considering this article was written in 2010, has the increased presence of technologies and social media created a more uniformed etiquette in the use of technology? Furthermore, Greshon focuses primarily on college students, but It would also be interesting to know what the generational differences are in the use of technology in maintaining relationships.

Audience Reception

Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer

Queer readings aren't "alternative" readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or "reading too much into things" readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along (p. 16)

Suggesting that the word “gay” does not have the same gender-unifying quality it may once have possessed, Doty provides queerness as an ontology to describe “a quality related to any expression that can be marked as contra-, non-, or anti-straight” (xv). Doty argues that narratives which are intended for straight audiences often have potential for encouraging a wider range of queer response than such clearly lesbian-and gay-addressed films.

My thoughts and questions:

When Doty discusses how classic cinema used woman as a way to mediate and diffuse male-male erotics, I couldn’t stop thinking about Frodo and Sam’s journey in the Lord of Rings series. The use of “my Sam” when Frodo addresses Sam could easily be considered queer batting. It isn’t until the final act of the final film when Sam is given a female companion to diffuse the erotic tension.  

If a queer reading is more than just an alternative reading, is it possible for a straight person to have a “queer” experience watching a film?

Patricia White, Female Spectator

Patricia White discusses the horror genre and how ghosts (and more specifically, the haunting) in films tends to have ghostly lesbian overtones. Discussing how this genre “seems to be particularly suited to exploit such questions of visibility,” (p. 63) White argues that Rebecca is a lesbian film for the character “stands for more than self-image and rival or maternal object for the heroine. Rebecca “is the object of the heroine’s desire as well as that of Mrs. Danver’s-and indeed the triangulation is a condition of representability”  (p. 67).  White uses another haunting film, The Uninvited as a case study, comparing the female oedipal narrative and lesbian overtones to Rebecca. White concludes that these two film “oscillate between the two poles of female oedipal desire-desire for the mother and desire for the father” (93).

Thoughts and questions

This article reminds me of a paper I wrote during my Master’s program. Science fiction has traditionally perpetuates the subservient and passive roles of women. Just as White discusses how the horror genre tends to perpetuate the narrative that “the woman is seen to be throwing away her pleasure” when she rejects she traditional gender role, science fiction paints a woman’s rejection of motherly responsibilities as having catastrophic consequences. The narrative in Terminator,  for example, shows the world on a the verge of a dystopia. The only hope comes in the form of the female protagonist being impregnated and having a child. The 2016 film Arrival, the case study I wrote my paper on,  is another example of the female lead having to be reminded of her destiny as mother.

Mark Lynn Anderson, Psychoanalysis and Fandom in the Leopold and Loeb trial

Arguing that the Leopold and Loeb case has inspired many film narrative in North America, Anderson argues that the “filmic reappearance of this story is not a simple repetition, but one that serves different purposes at different historical junctures.”  The repeated cinematic recalling represents present anxieties about human sexuility.   These narratives, argues Anderson, point “to a mythic operation that both constructs a specific homosexual subject who support the criminal through his desire of rhim, and connects the film to other epistemologies and discourse about celebrity identity and mass audience. ” Discussing audience reception of the film Rope, and Compulsion, White states that homosexuality was continually linked with criminal behaviors. Furthermore, fandom of celebrity were thought to be more suited to women and children because of its compulsive nature.

Industry/Fans in digital age

Reading response, Industry/Fans in the digital age

The readings this week focused on ethical concerns in the study of fandom. Busse argues that academics should have standards on retrieving data from fans.

The boundaries between producer and fan is beginning to blur with online fan communities and the embrace of fan labor.

Andrejevic

Andrejevic pushes back on Jenkin’s utopian view of online communities. In an attempt to “elucidate the ways in which creative activity and exploitation coexist” (p. 25) Andrejevic discusses how the “promise of interactivity” (p. 43) between fan and producer found on fan websites promotes a form of free labor.  During a time when consumers are “increasingly required to take on a broad array of interactive responsibilities” (p. 30), states Andrejevic, and the “forms of interactive commerce” (p.33), doubles as audience research. Andrejevic provides evidence that producers then use fan production,fans participate in internet activities, such as fan websites and blogs, as marketing strategy to build viewer loyalty. This interactivity is not entirely one sided for fans, through this labor, enhance the entertainment value of their favorite television shows.  “The show is no longer the final product but rather the raw material to which value is added by the labor—some paid, some free—of recappers and forum contributors” (p. 31)

Question: At what point are we (the critical scholar) becoming too pessimistic or optimistic ?  

Busse, Fan Labor and Feminism

Stating that although positive male geeks are being represented on screen, “female media representations remain few and far between” (p. 111). Busse argues that “fans tend to regard fan labor as a labor of love and as a shared passion-and, in many cases, as paying it forward” (p. 112). Fan labor has become a certain issue for feminist scholars because , according to Busse, it is “particularly vulnerable to being co-opted...because by its very nature, it is based on and driven by love and passion.” (p. 113). Busse argues that traditionally male-dominated fan activities move to create secure monetary remuneration and traditionally female-dominated ones do not” (p. 114).

Melissa Click and Suzanne Scott,  Industry/Fan Relations

In the conversation with three people from the media industry and self-proclaimed fans, discusses how the perception of fans has changed over time. Ivan Askwith, Britta Lundin, and Aja Romano continually reference how during their early work in the industry they were frequently marginalized for being a fan. Many of them use language that is analogous to oppression felt by gays and lesbians in mainstream culture. Britta Lundin states that she remembers feeling  “a lot of anxiety”  ‘coming out’ as a fan on Twitter. She goes on to state that she knew many fans who “work for the army, for instance, who maybe don’t feel so safe being open with their fandom” (p. 366). Doesn’t this seem a bit of an exaggeration? I grew up as a scrawny comic book reader continually fearful of being harrassed by the genetically-gifted jocks, but today the fans have so much consumer power. Superhero films are the biggest blockbusters and San Diego Comic Con is one of the biggest events of the year. It seems clear that fan culture is in transition. The term nerd, which use to be one of ridicule, now has a level of authenticity.