As you find yourself stumbling deeper into this world of monsters there may be some terms you’re not familiar with – This list comprises the major concepts and we’ll be touching on in our presentations and papers as a way to help guide you through this journey into the abject.
- The Gaze– Also referred to more specifically as “the male gaze,” the gaze is a feminist theory, popularized by the film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Utilizing psychoanalytic theory to evaluate depictions of women in film, Mulvey argues that the female body has been made into a site of male consumption. By depicting women as passive, voyeuristic objects of desire, the viewing pleasure of heterosexual men is placed above the humanity of their female counterparts and influences the way women are seen in reality, as well as fiction.
- The Mirror Stage– The mirror stage is the second step in Jacque Lacan’s theory of psychosexual development. Taking place during the first 6-18 months of an infant’s life, the mirror stage describes the point at which a child develops the ability to identify with their own image. In this stage, the subject will begin to conceptualize the “ideal I”– a perfect version of the self, towards which one will perpetually strive. According to Lacan, the mirror stage limits a person’s sense of self while also giving rise to narcissistic fancies.
- The Abject – First proposed by Julia Kristeva in her groundbreaking work Powers of Horror, the abject has in the years since become a term central to the conversation about monster theory. The concept of the abject is neither subject or object, it serves as an in-between, as a tool for mediating our understanding of the distinction between the two. It is the combination of fascination and dread, the dead body you can’t help but look at at, the scary scene you peek at through your fingers. The abject separates us from the self, it complicates our desires and confronts us with thoughts about the world that we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. It is through our draw to the abject that we learn the rules of our world, how else would you understand the boundaries between human and animal if not for the werewolf lurking outside?
- Panopticon– The term Panopticon refers historically to the late 18th century english prison in which prisoners were kept in visible cells with a guard in the center, allowing for a constant feeling of being observed by both the guards and the other inmates. Michel Foucault famously coined the phrase panopticism to further elaborate on the importance and impact of this idea of multiple perspective surveillance. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that for a person existing under this system of multiple views “he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”(pg. 203) In this course in particular our focus on the use of the panopticon was in understanding its role in scenes of horror, both looking at viewpoints within texts and our own role as consumers of the abject.
- Postcolonial Theory – A difficult to pin down concept, post colonial theory shares a radical revisioning of our world and texts similar to the way postmodernism differs from modernism. Drawing focus to what is often not explicitly stated in the text postcolonial theorists in their analysis often look at the way characters interactions between one another, map and reveal aspects about the history of colonialism and imperialism. In postcolonial theory the body often becomes a metonym for the historical landscape, as we saw especially highlighted in our study of Indra Das’ book The Devourers.
- Posthumanism – First coined by Ihab Hassan, this term refers to the potential future reality wherein humans and advanced technologies/information systems become one and the same, through artificial intelligence, consciousness uploading, etcetera. In the posthumanist view, humanity is defined less by appearance and biological imperatives and more by whatever can think, feel, and understand like a human does.
- Lycanthropy – Named after King Lycaon, a figure from Greek myth who was turned into a wolf by Zeus, lycanthropy refers to either those humans who can supernaturally turn into wolves or those humans afflicted by a false belief that they can turn into wolves. Commonly referred to as werewolves today, tales of the lycanthrope have existed throughout cultures and time over the past two millennia.
