This chapter looks beyond the recurrent trope of jealousy to examine the dynamics and limits of power and intimacy in scenes when white women act violently against enslaved women. The chapter begins with salacious representations of women in pulp novels, which helped popularize depictions of plantation violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Surveying a variety of novel covers in the Falconhurst series and Dragonard series, the chapter argues that mediated violence inflicted by white women with instruments of torture in pulp novel cover artwork maintains violence as a tool of social separation. As such, a scene of violence on a paperback cover of Edgar Mittelhölzer’s novel Children of Kaywana distances audiences from social critique. The chapter then continues to examine stereotypical depictions of women in Richard Fleischer’s exploitation film Mandingo (1975). Though Mandingo is not revolutionary, it provides a sense of how characters perform power, thereby exposing some of the fault lines of sadistic violence. Finally, the chapter provides a counterpoint to exploitative stereotypes via Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013). Here, the woman who enslaves increases her power on the plantation by manipulating the system’s corrupted intimacies through briefly employing violent skin-to-skin touch.
This chapter examines how depictions of women’s violence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century settings literalize the grotesque social legacies of plantation slavery. This chapter thereby mobilizes Julia Kristeva’s and Barbara Creed’s theories of abjection and horror to reframe the grotesque nature of US and Caribbean societies through various imaginings of the “monstrous-feminine.” To do this, the chapter begins with more obvious performances of women as abject monsters, such as in the third season of the television show American Horror Story (“Coven” 2013–14). Then, the chapter demonstrates how the novels Unburnable by Marie-Elena John (2006) and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas (1996) use the vocabularies of abjection to show how such violence is symptomatic of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial societies at large. All these texts use the vocabularies of abjection as horror to depict violence between women as rivals or lovers, and each text draws on narratives about popular monstrous figures, such as witches, voodoo practitioners, zombies, and vampires.
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