Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Woman?: on the affective and queer potential of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary performance

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates how the negatively considered stereotype of the monstrous-feminine holds an affective and queer potential in contemporary performance. The monstrous-feminine is a concept that has been established by film scholar Barbara Creed in the 1990s, analysing the portrayal of woman-as-monster in the horror film genre. Looking at abjection and sexuality, for which Creed has been informed by Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud, the monstrous-feminine is established as based on negative connotations of the feminine to sexuality, ambiguity, animality, and motherhood. In this research, I demonstrate that the monstrous-feminine is a stereotype that has its roots in patriarchal ideology, by which monstrous-femininity is considered horrifying, disgusting, and fearful. Balancing between version and subversion, this research emphasises the ambiguity of the monstrous figure – as simultaneously horrifying and fascinating – and proposes how this ambiguity creates a queer potential. Drawing on affect theory, in relation to the work of Sara Ahmed, and on queer studies, referring to Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and José Esteban Muñoz, this thesis establishes how the monstrous-feminine holds an affective and queer potential when employed in performance. By drawing on these discourses, this thesis works to embrace the established association of emotions with women and looks for ways to employ the negative in a subversive way. Additionally, I provide a critique on the binary way of looking at the monstrous-feminine and, to organise this, I do not focus on the gender essentialist elements of monstrous-femininity but rather on how the monstrous-feminine might be employed in artistic contexts as a tool that holds a feminist potential. The monstrous-feminine is a concept that has hardly been studied in the realm of performance, despite the monstrous-feminine’s prevalent and continuing presence in contemporary discourse and culture. Following Mieke Bal’s notion of concepts that travel, I do explore the monstrous-feminine in contemporary performances, namely in TANZ (2019) by Florentina Holzinger, JEZEBEL (2019) by Cherish Menzo, and HATE ME, TENDER (2019) by Teresa Vittucci. Based on the analysis of the presence of the monstrous-feminine in these case studies, I argue that these performances hold a subversive potential that queers the negative affects that have been attached to the monstrous-feminine. By embracing the queerness and negativity of monstrosity through strategies of exaggeration and alienation, expressed through ownership and humour, these performances put forward a way to rethink monstrosity through their employment of subversive affect.