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List of contents
1. Mother, (m)Other
2. Mother (of) Monsters
3. Meet Your Makers
4. It’s a Monster (Baby)
5. The Post-Human Family
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Dr. Sunny Hawkins hold a PhD in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA and has served as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana and Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA. Currently, she is the Director of Peer Tutoring and Writing Across the Curriculum at Butler University in Indianapolis, where she teaches seminars on Gender and Horror Film. Her work on horror film has appeared in the interdisciplinary journal Reconstruction and was presented most recently at the Midwest Popular Culture Association’s 2018 Annual Conference.
Summary
Applying Deleuze’s schizoanalytic techniques to film theory, Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror demonstrates how an embodied approach to horror film analysis can help us understand how film affects its viewers and distinguish those films which reify static, hegemonic, “molar” beings from those which prompt fluid, nonbinary, “molecular” becomings. It does so by analyzing the politics of reproduction in contemporary films such as Ex Machina; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Mad Max: Fury Road; the Twilight saga; and the original Alien quadrilogy and its more recent prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
Author Sunny Hawkins argues that films which promote a “monstrous philosophy” of qualitative, affirmative difference as difference-in-itself, and which tend to be more molecular than molar in their expressions, can help us trace a “line of flight” from the gender binary in the real world. Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror demonstrates how the techniques of horror film – editing, sound and visual effects, lighting and colour, camera movement – work in tandem with a film’s content to affect the viewer’s body in ways that disrupt the sense of self as a whole, unified subject with a stable, monolithic identity and, in some cases, can serve to breakdown the binary between self/Other, as we come to realize that we are none of us static, categorizable beings but are, as Henri Bergson said, “living things constantly becoming.”
Foreword
Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror takes a Deleuzian perspective on motherhood, mothering, and mothers in contemporary horror film, outlining a monstrous philosophy of both embodied film analysis, examining how film changes its viewers and affirms sexual difference, ultimately offering hope for a 21st century post-human family.
Additional text
Sunny Hawkins’ excellent book is a valuable addition to the growing areas of Deleuze and feminist film theory and Deleuze and the horror film. Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror returns to some important feminist critiques of the concepts of Woman, the feminine and sexual difference and recasts them using Deleuze’s nonbinary understanding of difference. Hawkins’ discerning and nuanced schizoanalytic readings of sexual difference, motherhood and the feminine in the horror film bring to life affective, molecular and rhizomatic film viewing experiences.
