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Camp Horror And The Gendered Politics Of Screen Violence: Subverting The Monstrous-Feminine In Teeth (2007), Casey Ryan Kelly
Camp Horror And The Gendered Politics Of Screen Violence: Subverting The Monstrous-Feminine In Teeth (2007), Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal mythologies undergirding the gendered logics of both screen violence and cultural misogyny. The film chronicles Dawn’s post-sexual assault transformation from a passive defender of women’s purity to an avenging heroine with castrating genitals. First, I illustrate how Teeth intervenes in the gendered politics of spectatorship by cultivating identification with a violent heroine who refuses to abide by the stable binary between masculine violence/feminized victimhood. This subversive iteration of rape-revenge cinema is assisted by …