Johanna Isaacson

Stepford Daughters (eBook, ePUB)

Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson explores an emerging wave of horror films that get why class horror and gender horror must be understood together.

In doing so, Isaacson makes the case that this often-maligned genre is in fact a place where oppressed people can understand, navigate and confront an increasingly ugly and horrifying world. Films like Hereditary and The Babadook show women coming apart at the seams as the promises of both the family and waged work fail them. In Get Out, we see how poor women and women of color perform the invisible labor that holds up our society, experiencing domestic work as a kind of possession. In coming of rage films such as Assassination Nation and Teeth, we see the ways social reproduction leads to a futureless horizon. Robbed of their dreams but not their power to resist, these heroines emerge as the monsters and avengers we need.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Common Notions
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Oktober 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781942173809
• Artikelnr.: 64759850

Autorenporträt

Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books, has published widely in academic and popular journals, and runs the Facebook group, "Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films."

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: "Class Horror is Gender Horror"
Combining Marxist and feminist analysis, it makes a case for social
reproduction feminism as a theory that understands that capitalist logic is
always gendered. 
Chapter One: "It's Coming from Inside/Outside the House: Horror as Care
Strike" 
Discusses the horror genre as a place that doesn’t see the home as a
protection from “the other,” but as itself a source of horror. For example,
using the film Hereditary, which illustrates the family as a source of
terror, it discusses the resurgence of a call for “family abolition.” 
Chapter Two: "It's Coming from Inside the Boss’s House: Horror and the
Domestic Worker"
This chapter explores social reproduction and horror through looking at
waged domestic work. Looking at films including Housekeeping, Get Out, and 
La Llarona, it makes the case that while reproductive labor is often
personified by the bourgoise housewife poor and women of color domestic
workers and surplus populations are the most exploited and diagnostic
categories of social production. 
Chapter Three: "It's Coming from Inside the Telltale Managed Heart: Service
Labor and Emotional Labor in Horror" 
This chapter looks at the ways that the contemporary boom in service work
leads to the expansion of emotional labor as a key element of social
reproduction. Horror movies in which figures such as personal assistants
and sex workers appear, give us a way to understand the problems when love
becomes labor, or when a person becomes alienated from her own smile.
Chapter Four: "Girls Gone Wild: Coming of Rage into the Futureless Future" 
This chapter explores the crisis of social production as it produces a
sense of futurelessness–the contemporary girls of horror are monstrous in
the sense that they threaten the social order as we know it. They are
utopian in that the carry a hope that witches and final girls will not give
into passivity, but fight for a new, unimaginable world. 
Conclusion: "Violent Femmes against Rape Economies"
The book concludes with the film American Mary and a consideration of
questions in feminism about rape culture and how these questions connect to
theories of social reproduction.