‘Being a horror fan and being a feminist are often a conflicting business’: Feminist horror, the opinion economy and Teeth’s gendered audiences

Abstract

Horror has long been understood as a ‘bad object’ in relation to its audiences. More specifically, this presumed relationship is a gendered one, so that men are positioned as the genre’s natural audience, while women’s engagement with horror is presented as more fractious. However, those horror films framed as feminist require a reorientation of these relations. This article foregrounds the critical reception of a ‘conspicuously feminist’ horror film in order to explore what happens to the bad object of horror within an opinion economy that works to diagnose the feminism or its absence in popular culture. Reviews of Teeth (2007), a ‘feminist horror film’ about vagina dentata, illustrate the push and pull of gendered power attached to feminist media, where empowerment is often understood in binary terms in relation to its gendered audiences. The assumed disempowerment of male audiences takes precedence in many reviews, while other narratives emerge in which Teeth becomes an educational tool that might change gendered behaviours, which directly empowers female audiences or which dupes women into believing they have been empowered. Finally, Teeth’s reviews expose a language of desire and fantasy around vagina dentata as an automated solution to the embodied experiences of women in contemporary culture. Teeth’s reviews, I argue, offer a valuable case study for interrogating the tensions in discourse when the bad object of horror is put to work for feminism.

‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps?)’: Critiquing representations of women throughout the 1980s in Fangoria magazine

“…Indeed, there are complex nuances in the relationship between feminism and horror that therefore makes straightforward critique without 'political interrogation' inadequate (Clover 1992: 18). Inspired in part by Farrimond's (2020) discussion of feminist horror and the opinion economy, this article offers a retrospective insight into responses to and representations of women in 1980s horror culture. With a focus specifically on the (re)production of gendered discourse(s) by critics, creators, journalists and fans, I seek to explore the relationship between horror-as-culture and the political-economic currents in the 1980s through the lens of lifestyle journalism.…”

“…The 'privileged place [of women] in horror film', specifically, is arguably one of their 'social, political and philosophical othering' (Harrington 2018: 1). In the general, women are variably represented as -inter alia -victims of punishment for their dangerous sexuality (Trencansky 2001) or monstrous sites of reproductive and sexual horror (Harrington 2018;Farrimond 2020). These archetypes of women in horror mirror perceptions of women in other real-world contexts, more widely (see, for example, King, 2015).…”