Female Monstrosity

In the Victorian society, the fallen woman was identified with the monstrous Other as in the case of George Eliot's Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede as well as the author herself. Both Eliot and her Hetty were monsters of their society as they violated the Victorian norms. Through the tragic story of Hetty Sorrel, Eliot depicts how the victimized female becomes a monstrous Other. This paper asserts that Eliot creates Hetty as her double to reflect her own unrest and anger in the conservative Victorian society. The paper also examines how, as a product of Eliot's complex mind, Hetty takes two polar opposite roles throughout the novel: a monster who contravenes the Victorian rules and a monstrous Other who is the victim of Victorian ethics and principles. Accordingly, Hetty becomes Eliot's madwoman who mirrors her own wrath and dilemma between the traditional role attached to woman and her rebellion against patriarchy.

This article examines examples of the monstrous-feminine in the form of abject maternal monsters in a selection of commercially successful and critically acclaimed mainstream video games using conceptual frameworks and textual analysis methods established in the work of Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed. The Broodmother from Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and the Mother from Dragon Age: Origins—Awakening (2010) are considered as problematic examples of the abject monstrous-feminine which fall into a long tradition in horror media of framing the female body and the birthing process as something horrific and repulsive. Kerrigan from the StarCraft series (1998–2017) is examined as a possible counter-example, demonstrating that the monstrous-feminine can exist in a playable and potentially empowered form, though she is problematically empowered within a violent, militant framework. Overall, this article critically analyses the ways in which video games remediate tropes of gendered monstrosity and reinforce the misogynist norms and values of hegemonic heteropatriarchal ideology by forcing players to enact symbolic violence against transgressive female bodies.

The essay outlines a “critical genealogy” of the notion of resemblance which structures the hierarchical relationship between the impeccable Original (Man, the source text) and its ultimately imperfect, failed copy (woman, translation). I examine the analogy between translation and the female that has prevailed in modern scholarship, and reveal its other, subversive side. The displacement of meanings in this repetitive
analogy clarifies the relationship between the source and the target text in the light of the Butlerian notion of “critical mimesis”: a subversive play of meanings that takes place in the performative continuum of cultural translation.

The article proposes a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) through some of her feminine or feminized figures, in order to suggest, in dialogue with authors such as Halberstam, Mellor, Riskin and Haraway, an interpretation of monstrosity, in the novel, as a feminine type capable of threatening the scientific project of conquering nature.

Chimera is one of the Federico García Lorca´s three brief dramatic Dialogues. Chimera, in classical mythology, is a hybrid monster, however, over time the word “chimera” acquires another, metaphorical meaning, that of the desire of the impossible, the illusion. The aim of this paper is to uncover how the play´s title is connected to its essence, as well as whether it refers to the mythological monster or the secondary, abstract meaning. Firstly, the monster´s characteristics that could be applied to the feminine element of the play are analysed, as well as the rest of the classical references featured throughout the dialogue. Then, the chimeras, in other words, the impossible, unreachable desires that distress the play´s entire family are examined. In that way, the chimeric figure´s and characteristics´ reception are studied in one of Lorca´s theatrical plays and what is intended to be established is a meaning of the word which includes both the mythological and the metaphorical sense.

Drawing from the mainly Bakhtinian theories of the grotesque and its further readings by Kristeva, Foucault, and Bhabha, the present paper tends to examine the representation of “feminine grotesque” in one of the less discussed novels of Post-millennial Muslim diaspora, Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015). Written in response to the Islamophobic aftermath of the 9/11 and London bombings, Aboulela’s postmillennial fiction is often read as an instance of Islamic Postcolonialism, in the shade of which the story’s manifestly corpographic quality is mainly neglected by the critics. An offspring of miscegenation between a Muslim African and a white non-Muslim Russian, Aboulela’s female protagonist Natasha Hussein reconfigures diasporic hybridity as seminally “monstrous,” and accordingly proposes a synthesis between the feminine abject and Muslim monstrosity. The Bakhtinian grotesque is exemplarily revitalized in Natasha’s abject body at different strata, which turns her body mass from a definite individual figure to a becoming political body in a network of sociocultural and religious forces. In her struggle to adjust with space through the Sufi practice of zikr, she is both metamorphosed and proposed to the West as an alternative model of embodied Muslim subjectivity which is more willing to tolerate and to negotiate.

One of the typical figures used to construct monstrosity in terms of gender is that of the witch and, probably, one of the best well-known portrayals of these women appears in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Written at the beginning of the seventeenth-century, soon after James I became king of England, this theatre play echoes contemporary beliefs on witchcraft and portrays the weird sisters as the characters that set in motion all the events in the play. The witch is understood as an abject figure and gender becomes a key element in this construction of monstrosity. Accordingly, Geoffrey Wright's adaptation to the screen, uses the mythological figure of Circe as a basis for this contemporary representation of femininity, stressing not only witches' threatening potential but also the danger their highly erotized nature poses. Resumen Tradicionalmente se ha utilizado la figura de la bruja para construir el concepto de monstruosidad en términos de género y probablemente una de las más conocidas representaciones de estas mujeres aparece en la obra de Shakespeare, Macbeth. Escrita a principios del siglo XVII poco después de que Jacobo I se convirtiera en rey de Inglaterra esta obra de teatro refleja las creencias de la época sobre brujería y presenta a las tres brujas como los personajes que desencadenan todos los acontecimientos de la obra. La bruja se entiende como una figura abyecta y su género se convierte en un elemento fundamental en la construcción de esta monstruosidad. La adaptación cinematográfica de Geoffrey Wright utiliza la figura mitológica de Circe como base para esta representación contemporánea de feminidad que pone énfasis no sólo en la amenaza que suponen las brujas sino también en el peligro que su naturaleza erótica representa.

Die Idee des »neuen Fleischs« durchkreuzt herkömmliche Grenzziehungen, welche die Domänen Natur und Technik klar voneinander unterscheiden. Was sagen uns die gleichermaßen verstörenden wieverführerischen Körperbilder in den Filmen David Cronenbergs über die Bewertung vonKulturtechnologien?Bettina Papenburg fokussiert in diesem Buch auf den grotesken Körperund eröffnet darüber einen frischen Blick auf Cronenbergs geladeneVisualisierungen von Körpermetaphern. Im Mittelpunkt der close readingsausgewählter Sequenzen aus den Filmen »The Brood«, »Crimes of theFuture«, »Videodrome«, »eXistenZ« und »Crash« stehen Darstellungen vonFragmentierung, Heterogenität und Exzess, sowie von Unschärfen undÜbergängen innerhalb unseres Kategoriensystems.

First, don't let the table of contents mislead you. This is a massive issue, featuring an impressive cohort of articles. The editors and the technical team set up the contents so that the headings will direct you to the papers that relate to each of the listed themes. So, you will find some papers multiply listed as you scan the full roster of more than a dozen essays and several photo essays. The central theme, obviously is the body and the ways that they are culturally portrayed as threatening. As the editors put it, "This collection examines how various bodies are both a threat to and simultaneously threatened by the institution of heterosexuality, gender stability, racialized identities, colonial projects, the nation-state, capitalism, and the reproduction of the family." Although the editors started with a post-9/11 perspective, given the recent events in Texas and in the UK (today, 28 June 2013, actually) surrounding abortion, reproductive rights and IVF, this issue (like many this journal has produced in its history) cannot be described as anything but prescient!

The legend of the Countess Erzsebet Bathory presents a unique case in which the fictional elements of vampire and witch folklore combine with true historical facts to create the quasi-mythical figure of the Bloody Countess. Alejandra Pizarnik wrote the short story “La condesa sangrienta” (“The Bloody Countess”) based on the historical figure of the Countess Erzsebet Bathory as compiled in the socio-historical text “The Bloody Countess: Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory” by Valentine Penrose.
Working with the aforementioned texts and the film “Eternal” (Canada, 2004) I propose to examine how the “monstrous” character of the Bloody Countess is a product not only of her murdering over 600 virgins but also of her various sexual perversions and psychopathic madness. The weaving and inter-weaving of history, fiction and popular culture will be key to examining how the “monstrous” characterization of Bathory is linked predominantly to her sexual deviance: her suspected lesbianism, her marital infidelities and an overall deviation from the proscribed role for women in her society and culture.