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Session 6: Erotic Monstrous (Joint session with Erotic Conference)
Chair: Richard Tilbury

Of Monsters, Masturbators, and Markets: Autoerotic Desire, Sexual Exchange, and the Cinematic Serial Killer
Greg Tuck
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

Of all the sexual behaviours to gain cinematic visibility since the end of the Hays Code and the subsequent ‘liberalisations’ of the 1960s and beyond, masturbation seems to have taken the longest to establish itself.  However, rather than this increased visibility simply indexing a relaxation of attitudes towards the practice, many representations continue to adopt and promote a negative attitude to masturbation, one informed as much by the anti-masturbation hysteria of the eighteenth and nineteenth century than by more contemporary attitudes to the practice.  In particular, in films such as Silence of the Lambs, Quills, The Eye of the Beholder and the remake of Psycho, representations of masturbation are employed to demonstrate the perverse sexuality of the serial killer, a lone individual who is caught in a spiral of ever increasing insanity, social separation, sadism and masturbation.
Crucially, masturbation is not simply a ‘solitary vice’ in these representations, but an activity that still requires an other, an abused and often murdered other, who is reduced to a mere masturbatory prop or pornographic object by these monstrous masturbators.  For these texts, to masturbate is neither simply an abuse nor a pleasuring of the self, but always a perversion of an intersubjective sexual act.  What seems particularly monstrous is the total consumption and objectification of the victim by the serial killer is merely an activity that facilitates a consumption of the self.  A reading of the behaviour of Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Nofrio) the serial killer of The Cell (Tarsem Singh, USA, 2000) who masturbates while body suspended over the corpse of his victims, will be presented, which maps the alienated and monstrous autoeroticism of the serial killer.  It will suggest however, that rather than ‘exceptional’, these masturbating serial killers are merely an ‘extreme’ metaphorisation of a more general anxiety regarding the autonomy of the lone individual of both modernity and the market economy.  In particular they reflect concerns regarding the potentially ‘monstrous’ interrelationship between sexual and economic conceptions of the individual.  In these representations masturbation stands as a concrete materialisation or demonstration of the moment when freedom conceived as a property of truly monadic individuals, becomes isolation and the logic of individual (sexual) consumption outside a system of (erotic) exchange cannot but invert into worthlessness.

George Bataille’s Story of the Eye: The Monstrous as Sacred Text
Dianne Bunch
Department of English, Alcorn State University, Alcorn State, Unites States of America

My paper will argue that George Bataille’s pornographic novel Story of the Eye reveals how the absolute monstrous, taboo-breaking, grotesque works to point us toward an understanding of the sacred. Bataille’s uses stock pornographic characters, Simone and the narrator, to depict a world of complete licentiousness. The narrator enables Simone to seduce other characters until their final act is the seduction and murder of an angelic young priest.
Banned at its time of publication and devalued by feminists in the United States , Bataille’s Story of the Eye has remained an unassimilable text of horror still capable of frightening and disgusting the reader in the 21 st century. I will argue that the text has great value when one understands Bataille’s theories of the sacred and the necessity for understanding the monstrous to glimpse the truth of the sacred.

The Monstrous and Gender: Attack of the Female Monster-Hero
Julie Miess
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

My paper will deal with new versions of the werewolf (formerly known as a legendary male coded shape-changer) and the serial killer (formerly known as a legendary male coded ”human monster”). I will talk about texts that seem to bring in a new female monster generation. The choice of texts includes the Canadian werewolf-film Ginger Snaps (2000) and the serial killer-thriller Die Hirnkönigin (‘the brain queen’, 1999) by the German writer Thea Dorn.
Why are these two new female monsters so exceptional? How can they help to deconstruct conventional divisions of gender? Does a monster even have a gender?
My starting point is that the text of Gothic horror is a condensed version of something larger than fiction – the monstrous cultural imaginary. At the same time, each contemporary horror text bears the blueprint of the 18 th century English Gothic novel. Thus, the monstrous imaginary is still saturated with traditional constructions of ”male” and ”female”. The archetypal roles of monster/culprit and victim – (male) ”gothic villain” and ”damsel in distress” – for example, are still valid in contemporary slasher film: the male white ”serial killer” and the ”scream queen”.
Even the female monsters we know do above all appear to be ”male fantasies”. Monstrous beings such as the ”femme fatale” are thus seen as embodiments of a frightening ”female Other”. Similarly, a transgender figure like Silence of the Lambs’ serial killer Buffalo Bill above all appears to display the horrors of suppressed male homosexuality. To sum up: monsters generally seem to be representations of a male coded perspective.
The female werewolf can be seen as a new kind of monster in that it undermines the classic femme fatale-scheme. Its furry appearance makes it difficult to see it as an object of desire. The female serial killer challenges the idea of the dark, yet fascinating male gothic villain. The new monster generation may represent a shift from ”female victim-hero” (Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chainsaws [1992]) to ”female monster-hero” – and offer a shift of perspectives as well as new possibilities of identification.

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