A master thesis from Aalborg University
Good Girls Conform; A feminist inquiry into the representation of women as monstrous in contemporary fiction
Author(s)
Term
4. term
Education
Publication year
2017
Submitted on
2017-05-30
Pages
79 pages
Abstract
Using Barbara Creed’s theory on the monstrous-feminine and supplementing it with selected terms from Homi K. Bhabha’s brand of postcolonial theory and Naomi Wolf’s beauty myth, this thesis sets out to investigate how women are construed as monstrous outside of the horror genre. The focus is on four main texts – Queen of the Damned (2002), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), Game of Thrones (2011-) and Gone Girl (2012). The women of this thesis are all construed as monstrous because of their gender. They are all construed as Other and share some specific ties to the abject. Otherwise, they have diverse ties to the abject, they transgress different borders and some defy the beauty myth. This thesis also discusses the possibility that the monstrous-feminine becomes a way of silencing women, but that the use of the monstrous-feminine in fiction might also allow us to see more clearly how we treat women who defy gender norms.
Documents
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