Horror and the monstrous-feminine An imaginary abjection

"Something covered with an old blanket": Nancy and other dead mothers in Oliver Twist.

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject's primal, psychological relation to the mother. In this essay, I show how these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which I call the "abject response." Applied to literatu...

The Story of Monsters and Women: Canada's Interrogation of Hollywood's Horror

Rachel Gunn explores the indigenization of Hollywood genres, specifically the adaptation of the horror genre in a Canadian contest. Conflicts of nation intersect with those of gender as Gunn discusses the ways in which both John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000) and David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988) invert the traditionally masculine horror genre by interrogating the concept of the monstr...

Domestic abuse as a transgressive practice: understanding nurses' responses through the lens of abjection.

Domestic abuse is a worldwide public health issue with long-term health and social consequences. Nurses play a key role in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse. Yet there is considerable evidence that their responses are often inappropriate and unhelpful, such as trivializing or ignoring the abuse. Empirical studies have identified several reasons why nurses' responses are sometimes wan...

"She's Not a Real Monster": Orphan Black's Helena and the Monstrous-Feminine

Stephanie Melvin “No Death Deserves its Own Lament”: Collective Lamentation and Transgressions of Genre and Gender in Bellum Civile VII Overcome with horror at the bloody climax of the battle of Pharsalus, Lucan's narrator threatens

Overcome with horror at the bloody climax of the battle of Pharsalus, Lucan's narrator threatens to derail his own epic project by wishing tears would perish, and claiming he will stay silent. This assertion – immediately disregarded – illustrates a paradox in Lucan’s text: his work is epic, both in its martial content and its meter, but the nature of civil war disrupts the narrative by provoki...