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2nd Global Conference
Monsters and the
Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil
Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May
2004
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 6: Monsters Miscellaneous
Chair: John Cussans
Vengeful Virgins in White: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema
Colette Balmain
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns
UC, High Wycombe, United Kingdom
This paper argues that "monsters" are mythic
products of their cultures, and whilst the figure of the female monster
in the [mainstream] American horror film is usually defined as "monstrous" as
a consequence of her sexuality and gender [Barbara Creed's "the
monstrous-feminine], vengeful women in Asian cinema connote specific
cultural myths around female power and presence which cannot be [re]located
within the feminist paradigm's [via Mulvey et al] generally applied to
American cinema.
In this paper, I consider four such representations. The
figure of Eun-Suh in The Ring Virus (Mauricio Dortona and Dong-bin Kim,
South Korea:1999); Chae Su-Yeon in Tell Me Something (Yoon-Hyun Chang,
South Korea: 1999); the "unnamed" cult leader in Double Vision
(Shuang tong, Kuo-fu Chen, Taiwan) and Asami Yamazaki in Takashi Miike's
Audition (Japan / South Korea: 2000). In these films female monstrosity,
does not merely articulate male fears around female empowerment [in either
a psychoanalytical or historical sense], but connotates cultural beliefs
around the transformative and fluid nature of the world / universive,
as contained with Buddhist and Taoist belief systems. Using Deleuze
and Guattari's discussion of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus, and Deleuze's
work on the time-image in Cinema 2: The Time Image; I suggest that the "vengeful
virgin in white" epitomises the connectivity between the cosmic
and the everyday which is central to Asian culture and articulate sites
of alterity and becoming which cannot be contained within traditional
feminist paradigms through which gender is understood in the horror film.
Little Mermaids Swimming in the Patriarchal Seas
Nur Ozgenalp
Istanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Communication,
Sisli Istanbul, Turkey
This essay will comparatively analyze the different
narrative styles of the fairy tale Little Mermaid (literature) and the
Disney film based on the same story (media). My goal is to understand
how the patriarchal communities guide the children in becoming adults;
using fairy tales, especially The Little Mermaid which the protagonist
in the story metamorphoses both physically and spiritually.
The two different
narrations of the same story do not only show the changes between the
narrative styles and form, but also show the differences occurred by
the temporal and spatial evolutions. These evolutions lead to changes
in both the quality of the works and the society that interacts with
these works. It is a relationship that creates the popular culture which
effects the society's comprehension of good and evil, beautiful and ugly...
The
fairy tale Little Mermaid is written in Denmark in 1837 and has the characteristics
of that era and geography. On the other hand, the Disney cartoon film
has met its audience in the United States in 1989. They are both the
productions of Western Culture, but they are also consumed by people
from other countries, such as Turkey which is not a part of the Western
Culture.
I will apply Film Theory and Feminist Theory to find out the
relation between the evolution of societies and media related regulatory
bodies. This mechanism will be questioned in terms of its impact for
how patriarchal orders rule the society.
Download Full Conference Paper - 
Monsters in the Roman Sky: Heaven and Earth
in Manilius’ Astronomica
Dunstan Lowe
The Astronomica of Manilius, composed at the
end of Augustus' reign and with explicitly political overtones, is a
poetic manual for reading (and respecting) the organisation and influences
of the heavens. However, the Stoic agenda Manilius sets himself - of
revealing the universe as the ultimate pattern of logic – is continually
confronted by the paradox that among the constellations that control
this ‘logic' are beasts and
monsters, entities that exist to challenge order and civilisation. I
argue that Manilius' inability to reconcile myth as poetry with astrology
as science is a conscious performance of the mutual disruption of monstrousness
and rationality, and that just as the stars are a divine mechanism, the
earth is the spawning-ground of messy, hyper-corporeal agents of confusion.
Inconsistencies within the science of Manilius' poem undermine in themselves
its emphasis on the symmetry and stability of the cosmological order,
while discord is acknowledged as a stellar influence on earth, with such
disturbing results as human violence and monstrous births. Catasterism
is the key image timeless perfection fused with ephemeral bestiality.
The earth is both source of individual monsters, and elementally monstrous,
as emphasis on the ferociousness of the ocean demonstrates. The single
extended mythic episode of the poem, that of Perseus' battle with Cetus
(the Whale-snake), which has the same vital function as that of Aristaeus
in Vergil's Georgics, develops Cetus as a paradigm of the elemental
monster, while the heroine Andromeda becomes a serene, starlike figure.
Perseus acknowledges his affinity with the earth, through seawater and
Ceto's blood, in order to attain his celestial reward. I suggest that
Perseus' quest is analogous to Manilius' own poetic project, in which
acknowledging the monstrosity of myth and mythographer is necessary in
learning to recognise the flawed majesty of a divine clockwork built
to malfunction.
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