The Sexual Politics of Dismemberment

This is a video essay from the Gutter Studies Vault, exploring three movies that seem to confirm the worst fears of radical feminism.

Fair warning: it’s one of my most challenging and provocative essays on horror so far, drawing on some of the most grisly themes and images in the genre. The essay reads the graphic and disturbing nature of these films alongside the complex and controversial radical-feminist theory of Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Carol J. Adams, as well as the post-Lacanian feminism of Luce Irigaray. As you’ll see, the feminist theorists of the 1980s were themselves incredibly dark and morbid, and it’s interesting to observe that their work was roughly contemporaneous with the trend of films discussed here.

This essay works as a tie-in to the subject matter covered in part 3 of our Goth Renaissance series: