The Monstrous ‘Other’ Feminine: Gender, Desire and the ‘Look’ in the Hindi Horror Genre

Abstract

While the monstrous feminine of Hollywood is available transhistorically over much of cinema across the world, the female monster of Hindi horror cinema remains ignored and merits serious academic exploration. Much of the widely accepted modern art-horror theory as applied to the horror genre is predicated upon Julia Kristeva's notion of the 'abject' and the Freudian notion of the 'return of the repressed'. While Creed (1993Creed ( , 2002 exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the 'Monstrous "Other" Feminine' narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual desire and gaze as the abject 'other'. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. Exorcism becomes the means not only of expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining the female body for unrestrained desire and look.

I am a virtual girl from Tokyo: Virtual influencers, digital-orientalism and the (Im)materiality of race and gender

“…The language used in the second excerpt has xenophobic undertones towards the digital Other and reflects very material concerns: ‘they’re coming for our jobs’ is remarkably close to the rhetoric used against immigrants. Here, distrust towards the Other is both racialised and engendered – the fear expressed towards racialised immigrants; fear expressed towards the monstrous feminine (Creed, 1993) or more aptly the ‘monstrous “Other” feminine’ (Mubarki, 2014) – made material through the immaterial semiotics of meaning that construct Imma. Questioning the validity of Imma’s gender (‘her (its?…”

Out of the Ordinary

“…Much literature, from Aristotle's time to the present, has stated that the monster is that which disrupts categories of taxonomy (Asma 2009, 125). This has, for instance, made the monstrous an often-used ana-lytical lens in gender studies as it allows scholars to gain insight into the western, cultural response to individuals who transgress conventional binary gender categories (Chamberlain 2019, Mubarki 2014. This has also led anthropologists to draw connections between the monstrous and Mary Douglas' analysis of cultural representations of pollution: nature and culture disordered (Kapferer 1983).…”

Book Review: Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies and Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema

“…1.Both authors have also published articles on the topic before, arguments from which have been elaborated for the book (see Mubarki, 2013, 2014, 2015; Sen, 2011; Sen, 2013). …”