Feminist/Monster Theory Meets Ginger Snaps

Edgy Un/Intelligibilities: Feminist/Monster Theory Meets Ginger Snaps Caelum Vatnsdal (2004), in his history of Ca- Heather Tapley, Associate Professor of Gender Studies nadian horror cinema entitled They Came from With- at the University of Victoria, researches and teaches in in, credits Ginger Snaps (2000) for giving some “bad- the areas of queer, feminist, and monster theories. Her ly needed” relevance to the words “Canadian horror scholarship has been published in Sexualities, Feminist movie” in the twenty-first century. The werewolf film, Theory, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Canadian Re- according to Vatnsdal, is “good, solid, intelligent en- view of American Studies. tertainment” that also “redress[es] the vast gender im- balance in the Canadian horror field” (222). The film Abstract focuses on the teenaged Fitzgerald sisters who reside in This article analyzes the Canadian werewolf filmGinger Bailey Downs—a fictitious Canadian suburb in which Snaps (2000) through various feminist lenses at the in- neighborhood dogs are being eviscerated by an un- tersection of sex, gender, and sexuality. While academic known creature that prowls at night. One evening, after scholarship on the film at this particular intersection is the sisters ignore parental advice to stay inside, a were- extremely limited, articles that read Ginger Fitzgerald’s wolf attacks and bites Ginger, the eldest who has recent- transformation into werewolf and menstruating female ly begun to menstruate. Her sister Brigitte frightens off as empowering dominate the field. The following, how- the creature with a flash from her Polaroid camera, and ever, moves to trouble such structural readings based the werewolf runs onto a nearby road and is then killed in identity-politics and offers, in addition, a reading of by Sam, a local marijuana dealer who hits the creature political possibilities generated from poststructural ap- while driving his van. The remainder of the film focuses proaches to monstrosity. on Ginger’s linear transformation into a werewolf, Sam’s and Brigitte’s attempts at curing Ginger, and the alter- Résumé ations in the sisters’ relationship that ultimately ends Cet article analyse le film de loup-garou canadien Gin- with Brigitte stabbing and killing Ginger once she has ger Snaps (2000) par le biais de différentes optiques fully transformed. féministes à l’intersection du sexe, du genre et de la sex- “With Ginger Snaps, which was directed by John ualité. Bien que la recherche universitaire sur le film à Fawcett, a man, but written by Karen Walton, a woman,” cette intersection en particulier soit extrêmement lim- notes Vatnsdal (2004), “at least a strong female point of itée, les articles qui dominent le domaine interprètent view is getting a look in” (222). While Vatnsdal does not la transformation de Ginger Fitzgerald en loup-garou elaborate on this apparent female gaze, the film most et en femme menstruée comme donnant un sentiment obviously features two sisters—Ginger and Brigitte Fitz- de pouvoir. Ce qui suit, toutefois, cherche à déranger gerald—and focuses predominantly on their intimate ces lectures structurelles ancrées dans la politique iden- relationship after Ginger is bitten by the Beast of Bailey titaire et offre, en outre, une lecture des possibilités ju- Downs and is infected with a werewolf virus. Humor- dicieuses générée des approches post-structurales à la ously, Ginger reads her body’s linear alterations, such as monstruosité. the hair that grows from her attack wound followed by her aggressive sexual desire, as effects of menstruation. Indeed, it is Ginger’s bleeding female body that enables the comic relief generated out of the parallel between both “curses”—that of the werewolf and that of menstruation. Ginger Snaps, then, represents a necessary 122 Atlantis 37.2 (2), 2016 www.msvu.ca/atlantis feminist intervention into what Vatnsdal refers to as a mutability at the site of the monstrous body, an empha- genre dominated by “adolescent-boy miasma” (222). sis generated at the intersection of feminist poststruc- Ginger’s menstruating body accentuates female rather turalism and monster theory. Ginger Snaps, after all, is than male adolescence, and, in the process, her female not simply a film with discernable girl/woman charac- anatomical maturation acts, at least superficially, as the ters at its center; it is a werewolf film—a genre with an foundational axis of the werewolf film. expectation of instability and transformation at the site Modern feminist readings of Ginger Snaps that of the body. It seems strange, then, to focus on the re- expose and emphasize the gendered and sexed gap in covery of any static identity (or even identities) as the the predominantly male-centered werewolf film, how- essence of such a monstrous ontological liminality. By ever, tend also to repeat the practice of exclusion so far the most cited scholar of monster theory, Jeffrey Co- inherent in any identity-based reading. Like any sign, hen (1996), argues that, historically, discursively-pro- an identity, regardless of its representative marginal- duced monstrous bodies including the werewolf’s actu- ized status, gains its meaning through difference, or ally “resist attempts to include them in any systematic through what it is not. Signification, then, intrinsically structuration” (6). Judith Halberstam (2006) contends excludes and tends to sustain individuation and a di- as well in her analysis of the Gothic that “monsters are vide-and-conquer logic. Scholarship that focuses spe- meaning machines” that have been reduced to and sub- cifically on representations and readings of “woman” sumed by identities of sexuality and gender only since in Ginger Snaps, while recovering a sexed/gendered the early twentieth century (21). As all identity signs of presence formerly neglected in the werewolf genre, also marginalization gain meaning through difference and tends to sidestep such problematic dimensions of iden- lose value through the binary logic so foundational to tity formation. This article, then, first maps feminist Western thought, the following argument moves away scholarship on Ginger Snaps that shares a specific focus from recovering a litany of static identities of Other, on woman/female embodiment at the site of the were- including that of “woman,” at the site of the werewolf wolf. Such identity-based readings are significant in in Ginger Snaps. After all, according to Cohen (1996), that they reveal the erasure of women as central, agen- monstrous bodies represent “harbingers of category tial characters in a genre dominated historically by hy- crisis” (6). Offered up in the following pages, then, is an per-masculinity (Oswald 2013). The article then moves edgy reading of the werewolf in Ginger Snaps, a map- to consider the complications that result from reading ping of the un/intelligible as both threatening and po- the film with such a specific, exclusionary focus. litically productive in its liminality, its focus not on the While feminist identity-based readings work to Other but on the modern subject-viewer. recover female presence and empowerment, they also tend to stabilize identity as the core of subject-being. Identity Lost and Recovered Feminist poststructural theory, however, has decon- With regard to identity-focused readings of the structed the identity “woman” since the 1990s, arguing film, there is little doubt that one of the primary rea- its instability as an identity sign as opposed to its recov- sons Ginger Snaps generates scholarship based in the ery at the center of feminist politics. Significantly, this identity of woman is its hard-to-miss focus on female feminist theoretical approach to meaning production adolescence, specifically Ginger’s menstruation. While parallels the werewolf itself; with its emphasis on slip- the horror genre tends to include blood as a staple, this pery signification, feminist poststructuralism like any particular bleeding body, of course, is not the every- monster is “dangerous” in that both threaten “to smash day-body that bleeds in horror films. Rather, through a distinctions” and reject “any classification built on hi- feminist lens, Ginger’s body can be read as an example erarchy or a merely binary opposition” (Cohen 1996, of Julia Kristeva’s (1982) concept of the abject in were- 6-7). Moving away from identity-based readings of wolf form. The abject, for Kristeva, consists not of the Ginger Snaps that rely on systemic binary logic, the fol- Other, but of that which consistently haunts the mod- lowing argument delves into a survey of distinct histor- ern subject’s apparent stability and autonomy, both of ical shifts in feminist theory that enable readings of the which are dependent on the negation of the maternal film that emphasize not only variability, but necessary (bleeding) body in psychoanalysis. Kristeva’s feminist 123 Atlantis 37.2 (2), 2016 www.msvu.ca/atlantis theory mapped in Powers of Horror (1982) represents Complementary to the sisters’ refusal to be contained a critical commentary on the mother-child relation- by maps of normality, according to Miller (2005), is the ship discursively produced as necessarily nullified in deluge of discourse regarding menstruation that runs the pursuit of subjectivity, particularly according to the throughout the film, various references that actually ex- theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. pose not only blatant contradictions and inconsistencies Probably the most influential feminist interven- regarding menses, but the fact that no single narrative tion into the horror genre, Barbara Creed’s (1993) the- can contain the meaning of such a transformation. Not oretical concept of the “monstrous-feminine,” of which unlike the lycanthrope that bites Ginger and sends Bri- Kristeva’s abject is foundational, refers to the collapse gitte and Sam in search of a cure, no single discourse— of the cinematic monster and the bleeding female body not werewolf folklore, not biology, nor Hollywood cine- as a visual embodiment that threatens the stability of ma—works to contain Ginger’s werewolf virus.

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