Desublimating monstrous desire
The Horror of Gender in New Extremist Cinema
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3638908 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lisa Coulthard (University of British Columbia, corresponding author), Chelsea Birks (University of British Columbia) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 461-476 |
| Publication date | 2016-07-03 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Gender Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0958-9236 • E-ISSN: 1465-3869 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09589236.2015.1011100 |
| OpenAlex | W2015807654 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 12 |
Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre (1998), Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence. Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror
Aesthetics · Art · Film genre · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Uncanny · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · German legal, social, and political studies · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
| Citations per year | 0.38 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |