American Monsters (19 page)

I would argue that women all over the world are participating in the deepest cultural play as their lives are in danger from the men that may be around them. Their remaining in the situation suggests to me institutionalized deep play for women, play that very few emerge from unscarred. As Dworkin writes, “Individuals rarely escape forced sex in a lifetime.” (p.171). I would argue that women in the rave are risking this very same deep play in the name of values that exist only to trick women into trusting a space used for violations and exploitation, especially of girls younger than eighteen.

Horror demonstrates an intersection between “normal” and “monstrous,” creating an odd borderspace whereby these two seem to exist simultaneously. These cultural constructions emerge as a fear of women’s bodies and sexualities. After reading theories of horror and revisiting old favorites in films and books, I was appalled by how much women seem to be hated in America, and I wanted my own revenge for things in the past that were never brought to justice.

Laura Mulvey, in her groundbreaking “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” discusses theories of the gaze and how it relates to women’s fetishization within narrative films. Mulvey explicates how women’s bodies are put on display for the pleasure of men. The politics of the gaze involve the Subject-object continuum. Men are always Subjects and thus when narrative films are made, it is the male gaze that is catered to. Women as objects do not have enough power to have a gaze, and thus are left as the objects of inquiry.

Fatimah Tobing Rony does an incredible analysis of the gaze and anthropology in her chapter “King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema.” She discusses the history of Anthropology as a science that began with racial and gendered hierarchies already built into the system. Rony argues that ethnographic films have been pivotal in creating an image of the monstrous Other. Teratology, the study of monsters, emerged as an attempt to classify those who exist outside the Western scientific framework. As she states, “Teratology was an important aspect of early anthropology: the ‘monster,’ like the Primitive Other, was of keen interest because it could be used to study and define the normal.” (p. 160). The “ethnographic monster” that Rony discusses using King Kong as a metaphor emerges as the monstrous-other (or monstrous-feminine) who becomes the recipient of the anthropological gaze.

If one reads views films as cultural texts, believing that the themes expressed in the film can say something about the culture that produced it, then the gaze is turned around onto the formerly omniscient “maker” or “looker” of the film. Cameras are power, and there are specific reasons for who holds the camera and who is watched through it. This is the same type of power relation Dworkin discusses with regards to sexual intercourse, so I will posit that the person holding the camera occupies the same position as the one in control of the “fucking.” The “fucked” are in no position to even speak.

The camera in my ethnography is a play on some of these anthropological issues of the gaze. Being a woman of color, a racially hybrid “freak,” does change my position “behind” the camera, as Trinh T. Minh-Ha discusses in “Outside In/Inside Out.” My goal with this paper was to produce an alternative to the academic voice, and having a camera capture the events is not just a play on the popular Blair Witch Project films, but is also a commentary on how we chose our voices and the many possibilities that exist within heteroglossia. My paper attempts to displace the “I” through the second person narrative and my use of a video camera to capture images, though my voice is still very present throughout the anecdotes.

No matter what anybody says about raves, drugs are the main function. In theory it is lovely to say that the rave is about music and dance, yada yada yada. In real life, raves are about drugs, and the experiences that most ravers have will happen while they are on one synthetic substance or many.

Ecstasy is a conflicted drug for many people. The sensations of euphoria and incredible peace and happiness can be dangerous in most situations. The most recent raves I have been to have showed me how vulnerable women are to predation, especially in situations where trust is taken for granted in the spirit of a “movement” and the drugs are good enough to keep people coming back. The euphoric sensations of ecstasy can make it difficult to discern a comfortable situation versus a possible violating situation. For example, recall the Random Guy that appeared and sat down with the circle of women in “The Carnival of Carnage.” This is an extremely common occurrence at raves and many times the young women are too out of it to know when personal boundaries are being overstepped. In essence, ecstasy is the perfect drug for a male-dominated society as it makes a “victim” comfortable in situations they would usually think twice about, thus leaving them mentally incapable of judging a particular set of events.

None of the theorists writing about raves or youth cultures devote any time to this topic, though it is of great importance to the women who participate in scenes such as the rave. It is possible that things have changed since people such as Sarah Thornton, Matthew Collins, Simon Reynolds, and Jeremy Gilbert did their field research. But from recent experiences, raves are no longer safe places to go. They are getting more and more violent in the United States and possibly in the rest of the world, though there is nothing published on this subject.

When I first began my research, I felt the theoretical model of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic body without organs most applied to rave culture. I now believe that greater cultural practices, be they the exploitation of women or the focus on capitalistic modes of production, will permeate microcosms of society, such as the rave. I now feel that raves are yet another opportunity for men to violate young women who, due to chemical substances they ingest of their own volition, are out of their minds.

Though there are issues of race and class that I have not focused upon, I would like to mention in these concluding notes that the rave is as lax in its gender relations as it is with racial politics and class consciousness. I saw incredible amounts of racism at raves as on entering a dance floor, one side would be populated with white ravers, the other side containing Asian ravers. Very rarely was there mixing between these two groups. There are so few African-American ravers and not many of Hispanic descent. In terms of class politics, whites and Asians occupy a higher class position in the U.S. than do blacks and Latinos, which of course, could be argued depending on which theoretical school one works from.

Because I do consider my work to be Feminist Anthropology, drawing from a huge body of feminist story-telling literature, the politics I chose to pursue had to do with the role of women. I found this important because I am a woman that was duped by values of the rave I actually believed existed, and ended up in deep play situations that I am surprised to have emerged from, scarred, but healing.

Part of my politics also involved how women are taught to speak within academia, a voice that I wholly object to. I refused to present my findings in such an inappropriate manner. As Karen Brodkin delightfully put it, a feminist anthropology should refuse to “speak boy.” Both the format of the stories as well as the lack of capitalization are examples of my resisting this “boy’s” voice. I am not a boy, and I am not sorry for that either, as much as Freudians would like to think I’m still looking for my missing penis. This attempt at a cyber-ethnography, based on the ideas put forth by Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century,” gave me peace of mind for the things that have happened and that through it all, I never sold out my vision or experiences.

This paper consists of stories and sights, not just mine but of the many people I have been in touch with over the last two and a half years. I dedicate this to the women who are stuck in America’s deep play and I hope that when the revolution begins, they will be the first to turn their vagina dentatas against the oppressive forces.

April 2001

Los Angeles, California

“One must keep open the wound where he or she who enters into the analytic adventure is located - a wound that the professional establishment, along with the cynicism of the times and of institutions, will soon manage to close up.”

-Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (p.27)

The “analytic adventure” of horror begins in many different places for horror writers and theorists. Stephen King, arguably the most popular horror writer in the world, sees horror as having its finger on “national phobic pressure points” that can detail political, economic, and psychological fears of the time. Feminists critique horror for its gross and misogynistic treatment of women’s bodies and sexualities in creating monstrous Others that are shortly murdered, mutilated, and otherwise bloodily placed on display. Barbara Creed in her book
The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis
places at the root of horror the deadly vagina dentata, while Rosi Braidotti claims in her articles “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences” and “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines” that the pregnant female body is an embodiment of the freakishly monstrous (feminine) Other. Because horror does capitalize on the destruction of the female body or a focus of a (female) gendered monster, I will argue that American misogyny, as represented in the horror genre, specifically relates to theories of the body and female spectatorship/readership, especially in terms of Stephen King novels. These theories of phobic pressure points, vagina dentatas, and monstrous female bodies will culminate in an analysis of Stephen King’s
The Shining
as it exemplifies and expresses many of these cultural horrors, while examining gender roles within the horrific.

The Vagina Dentata, which I believe to be the root of the horror genre, is based on a revision of Freudian theories of sexuality that transform the idea of woman as castrated to a notion of woman as castrating. Freud has claimed that young boys’ confusion about their mother’s bodies stems from a realization that their mother is castrated. As Barbara Creed details in her essay “Little Hans Reconsidered: or ‘The Tale of Mother’s Terrifying Widdler’“ the confusion a young boy feels upon seeing his mother naked for the first time stems not from his realization that she is castrated, but his fear of her “hidden” penis that he then assumes may emerge from the seemingly castrated space to become a tool of castration. The relationship between a woman’s vagina and her mouth, hence the deadly toothed vagina, is a result of the displacement of the young boy’s shock upon viewing his mother’s lack of a penis to her mouth, which he then will remember upon thinking of her genitals. The infamous case of Little Hans, a boy deathly afraid of his mother’s “widdler,” has been re-read by Creed as an example of the deadly vagina dentata, especially in considering that Hans’ family had many horses, and Hans’ idea of his mother’s “deadly widdler” may have also come from his seeing a horse’s enormous penis emerge from inside its body, much like how he pictured his mother’s widdler to emerge from the “castrated” space. Where Freudian theory attempts to construct the female body in terms of a lack of male genitals, Creed re-writes the narrative to detail a scary place that is not castrated but instead evokes a fear of castration as the widdler, or the unknown of the inside of the vagina, can be considered an area where men lose sight and control of their own penises and worry (wonder) if they’ll get it back in one piece.

This “monstrous-feminine,” as coined by Creed, is also detailed by Rosi Braidotti in her discussion of teratology (the study of monsters), motherhood, and the embodiment of gendered differences. Braidotti argues that part of what makes monsters uncontrollably frightening is their ability to escape the boundaries of nature which should remain stable and unchanging. Male bodies are constructed as the norm, as a valued concept of the un-monstrous in that it is bound and unchanging, easy to predict. The monstrous female body, though, constructed in opposition to the static male body, cannot be controlled or bounded as it bleeds, expands, ejects various different objects and fluids in such a way as to blur the line between the inside and outside, and the boundary of skin and flesh cannot contain the various (monstrous) births the female body performs. Julia Kristeva in her incredible
Powers of Horror
calls this fear of penetrated boundaries a horror of the abject, which is a transgression of bodily borders in the form of bleeding, cuts, secretions, excretions, etc, which contribute to an impure version of the body. Since male bodies do not have the same secretions, or even as many, as women, their bodies are placed in a more pure and less abject ground than the woman whose bleeding and expulsions pollute both her and those around her, thus a monstrous Other. The womb, like the vagina dentata, is a place of defilement and dirt. As Rosi Braidotti says: “Woman as a sign of difference is monstrous.” (p.65) Though the woman is where life begins, because of the masculinist construction of society and its ensuing dichotomous oppositions, these natural female cycles of life are considered monstrous in their unpredictability and their presence in horror texts is multivalent, as I will discuss a bit later.

Stephen King, though one of my favorite writers, is guilty of this same masculinist Othering of “monstrous” women. His main view of horror is that it manages to pinpoint the fears of the time and thus by destabilizing the narrative with horror and terror, some semblance of normalcy returns upon culminating the story. I would argue that Stephen King, possibly unconsciously, taps into the fear of women within a misogynistic American culture that accepts the gross mistreatment and abuse of women as acceptable and encouraged, especially if she is sexually active. Women are punished for their theoretical vagina dentatas and monstrous births within most Stephen King novels, though his awareness of strong female characters has improved greatly in his last few novels, Rose Madder and Bag of Bones being notable for their incredibly strong women. In looking at horror as representative of greater fears and culture, I would like to note that Stephen King as a male horror writer, capitalizes on these very pointed gender dynamics in his construction of monstrous femininities. In an attempt to detail these theories of gendered and horrific female bodies, I will examine King’s novel
The Shining
and how it can be used to exemplify male fears of female sexuality as well as male desires to exist inside the female sex. This attraction/repulsion of the female, as I will discuss, begins poking at a response to what horror means in terms of mirroring gender relations and culture through a fictional story.

Suspend your disbelief for a few more moments so that I may take a few liberties in applying these theories to the events and locales of The Shining. As I have previously stated, there are numerous theories of what horror means and how it frames the world we experience. In terms of my position as a woman, feminist, and anthropologist, the links that hold the most weight in terms of horror’s universality is its treatment of the feminine, and this is exceedingly present in the construction of the Overlook hotel in The Shining. Before we even receive an image of the hotel itself, we meet the “squatting” boiler in the basement that, like a vintage car, is talked about with the female pronoun, referred to as an “old whore,” and is stated that she “creeps” if you don’t keep an eye on her. This close scrutiny of a feminized machinery leads me to construe that female machinery must be man-ually tuned in order to prevent a horrible explosion. That horrible explosion could be the power of a female sexuality, the “old whore” out of control with the power of destroying all that lies in her path. As the caretaker further explains to Jack Torrance how to deal with her freezing bouts, the sexualized description of, “...You just unstrap the insulation when you find the ice plug and put the heat right to her,” (p. 33) recalls women in sexual situations where their behavior can be coded as “frigid” and the men are more than happy to provide the “heat” of their loins. Since the caretakers have always been men in The Shining’s narrative, the treatment of the house like a woman takes on new meaning as the metaphor is developed.

In her article “Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed: King’s The Shining as Dark Carnival,” Linda J. Holland-Toll refers to the “seductive” and “siren-like” song of The Shining. She is assuming that the house is feminine in its engulfment of its many visitors. Since I have already discussed the central controlling mechanism of the Overlook, the toothy boiler, as encoded feminine, I would also like to posit that this gendered dynamic could connect the labyrinthine maze of the Overlook to a womb that calls its “children” home to participate in its bleeding death rituals. As King writes, “This inhuman place makes human monsters,” as if the reproductive and supernatural powers of the house are actually giving birth to these bloody murderous occurrences.

But at the same time, I am not entirely sure that the house itself is responsible for “birthing” monsters as Jack Torrance is an incredibly troubled and violently abusive man previous to contact with the Overlook, evident in the scenes where he breaks his son’s arm and hits one of his students. As we find out towards the end of The Shining, the house was not so much interested in Jack as it was in using Danny Torrance (who, born with a caul over his face could be seen as a witch-like entity) as a “psychic battery” to resurrect the ghosts residing within The Overlook’s walls. The Overlook can also be seen as a haunted womb that will do anything to trap her “child” inside. If Jack had killed his wife and child, like Delbert Grady the caretaker before him, the house may have been able to autonomously exist through time and space as its own womb-like being. But, as is the case in most Stephen King novels,
It
and
Misery
being two of the most striking, the womb and all its monstrous minions must be destroyed, and is at the end of The Shining as her “creeping” boiler explodes. The occurrences in the Overlook can also be read as menstruation as the house seems to thrive upon murder and bloodshed, these things happening periodically within the hotel.

The overwhelming presence of blood in Stephen King novels leads me to agree with Rosi Braidotti’s claim that menstruating and pregnant women are a major part of the construction of horror. The dead woman in Room 217 is a good example of the monstrous female body. Though she is not menstruating or pregnant, King’s descriptions of her suit the horror-full woman theme. First of all, she is an older woman having an affair with a younger man, who, according to Dick Halloran, leaves her. Subsequently, she slits her wrists in the Room 217’s bathtub. Numerous people in the hotel have had contact with this apparition and have been threatened by her. When Danny finally enters Room 217 he sees her “bloated” dead body in the bath tub, “her purple lips pulled back in a grimace.” Dick Halloran had told Danny that the apparitions couldn’t hurt him, yet her long dead fingers reach around his neck, bruising him. Being bloated in the water is an obvious link to monstrous pregnancy, in that if something were to puncture her body, I would imagine the foulest matter would issue forth. Plus, bodily decay is linked to pregnancy in terms of Kristeva’s idea of abjection in that they are both evidence of the collapsed boundaries between inside the body and outside, life and death, pure and impure. A pregnant body goes through stages of physical change just as a decaying body does, which would follow Braidotti’s notion of monstrously changing female bodies. There is a popular phrase from male bathroom stalls that goes: “Never trust anything that bleeds for four days without dying.” In terms of the Ghost in Room 217, she has been lying in that bathtub, bleeding, for years. Dead, but not dead enough because she ends up wounding young Danny. Like the menstruating woman, the ghost has been bleeding in the bathtub for more than four days, and she’s still “alive” in her physical presence. This distrust of the female and her body are evident in that you can’t “trust” a woman to follow the male standards of bodily display. A woman bleeds for days once a month and doesn’t die. She can expel a living creature from her body. These are masculine “phobic pressure points,” to use King’s own words, in that men fear what to them is the inconstancy of the woman’s body, because their body does not perform these same activities.

Further evidence of the vagina dentata within The Shining would be in the frightening presence of things with scary mouths that threaten to bite. Because part of the vagina dentata theory depends on the displacement of the male gaze from the female genitals to her mouth, there develops an interesting tension/dynamic in their reactions to biting beings. The fire extinguisher down the hall from Room 217 demonstrates its dentata-esque qualities as Danny is convinced that it will bite him. On page 185 the word red is used to describe the fire extinguisher tank and the background of the emergency axe sign. There are direct references to blood and biting with regards to the fire hose. The hose becomes a scary snake, which traditionally has been considered a phallic symbol, but in this case I would like to pose a revision: What makes a snake frightening is not its shape, but its fanged mouth. The horror of the snake is not that it looks like a penis, but that, like the vagina dentata, it has the power to either poison or remove parts of your (man’s) body. In this particular scene, Danny likens this hose to the wasp nest that brutalized the family earlier in projecting: “ Don’t worry. I’m just a hose, that’s all. And even if that isn’t all, what I do to you won’t be much worse than a bee sting. Or a wasp sting. What would I want to do to a nice little boy like you...except bite.....and bite....and bite?” This fear of the mouth, of being bitten is related to the displacement of the vagina dentata onto the mouth, thus constructing it as a scary place that has the ability to hurt....and hurt....and dismember.