Abstract
One of the highlights of my undergraduate days was when I had the pleasure to take a class on “Horror and Gender” in the Women’s Studies department. It was, indeed, a protoscholar’s dream—my two favorite academic obsessions together in one class: gender and genre, queerness and horror. In the discussion the day after watching Brian DePalma’s Carrie, the class examined the abject monstrousness of Carrie White as she annihilated the student body in her high school gymnasium. One by one, the students publically registered their disgust. To my fellow classmates, Carrie was a monster, on par with Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Leatherface. Finally I raised my hand and asked, meekly, “Didn’t anyone else feel sorry for her? I mean, didn’t we all want her classmates to die?”
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Notes
Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 37.
Ellis Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34.2 (1993): 138.
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary—A Non-Fiction Account, with Commentaries, of Three Days and Nights in the Sexual Underground (New York: Grove Press, 1977), 28– 30, 300.
For more, see W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and Haunting (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014) and Satan in America: The Devil We Know (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).
Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, “The Gaze Revisited, Or Reviewing Queer Viewing,” in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London: Routledge, 1995), 46.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 55–68.
Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous- Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996 ), 56.
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2. For more on the problem of horror and lesbian visibility, see Patricia White’s Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Ellis Hanson, “The Undead,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 324–40.
Robin Leach, “For Once, the Devil Can’t Make Linda Blair Do It: This Year, She’s Going to Horse Around,” People Weekly 11 (July 1977): 40.
Shirley G. Streshinsky, “How Much Affection Should Two Girls Show?” Seventeen, July 1974, 78.
Michael O’Sullivan, “Have They Paid Too Much for Their Stardom?” Rona Barrett’s Gossip, September 1978, 12.
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© 2015 Andrew Scahill
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Scahill, A. (2015). Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend. In: The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481320_4
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