It also loves Carol J. Clover’s 1987 essay 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,' (Representations [Number 20: Fall 1987, pp. 187-228] - later included by Clover in her hugely influential book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1992]), which was the first work to coin the resonant phrase 'Final Girl' to name climactic female survivors of slasher/horror/fantasy-sci-fi-horror films.
Clover's essay asked the following, rather fascinating, question: why, in these films which are supposedly principally aimed at male spectators, are the surviving heroes so often women characters?
It's a question that has been frequently addressed, since, in film, television, and now videogame studies, many of them freely available online. So here's Film Studies For Free's not-so-weak-and-feeble list of terribly-brave-and-resilient links to open-access "Final Girl" Studies, beginning with Clover's key essay, and then proceeding in an orderly alphabetical direction, by author surname:
- Carol J. Clover, 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film', in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, e-Book, Edited and with a New Introduction by R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 continues here and here
- Holly G. Barbaccia, 'Buffy in the “Terrible House”', Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies, 1.4, December 2001
- Arial Yuan-Jie Chou , 'On Horror Films: A Psychoanalytic Approach On A Nightmare On Elm Street Series' E-Thesis Providence University July 2006
- Celestino Deleyto Alcala, 'Masochism and Representation in Modern Horror: The Case of Alien 3' , Atlantis VVIII (1-2) 1996
- Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
- Elizabeth Ezra, 'Resurrecting the Alien Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Hollywood', Stirling Online Research Repository, originally published in New Cinemas volume 1, no. 1 (2002): 54-60
- Robert Genter, 'Imagining murderous mothers: male spectatorship and the American slasher film', Studies in the Humanities, June 1, 2006
- Sara M. Grimes, '"You Shoot Like A Girl!”: The Female Protagonist in Action-Adventure Video Games', Digital Games Research Association - Level Up Conference Proceedings, November 2003
- Andrew Grossman, 'Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part One)', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 47, February 2005
- Andrew Grossman, 'Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part Two)', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 50, November 2005
- Tamiko Southcott Hayter, 'Perverse Pleasures: Spectatorship, The Blair Witch Project,' E-Thesis, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2005
- Lacy Hodges, '"Scully, what are you wearing?": the problem of feminism, subversion, and heteronormativity in The X Files', e-Thesis University of Florida, 2005
- Irene Karras, 'The Third Wave's Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer', Thirdspace, Vol. 1, Issue 2, March 2002
- Mikel J. Koven, 'The Terror Tale: Urban Legends and the Slasher Film', Scope, May 2003
- Jenni Lada, 'Feminizing the Final Girl', Cerize Magazine, October 2007
- Colin Le Sueur, 'Misogynism and the Macabre: An Analysis of the Representation of Women in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses', Film Fortress, June 9, 2006
- Uel McMahan, 'The Alienation of Ripley and the Maturation of the Final Girl', Wiggledog's Song, June 21, 2008
- 'Mittens', 'Feminist Horror Film Theory', Everything2, [date unknown]
- Victoria Newsom, 'Young Females as Super Heroes: Superheroines in the Animated Sailor Moon', Femspec, ('Girl Power' Issue) 5.2
- Marc Ouellette, '"When a Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification in Action-Adventure Video Games', Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
- Iva Radat, 'Haute Tension: Lesbian Audience and the Slasher Film', Transgressing Gender Conference, Zagreb, Croatia, 2005 (scroll down to page 20/262)
- David Robinson, 'The unattainable narrative: identity, consumerism and the slasher film in Mary Harron's American Psycho', CineAction, January 1, 2006
- Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, 'Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: "I'm Not My Mother", Genders Online Journal Issue 38 2003
- Steven Jay Schneider, 'Introduction - Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film', Senses of Cinema, July 2001
- Shweta Sharma, 'The Killer Father and the Final Mother: Womb-Envy in The Cell' Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 1, No 2 (2007)
- Elizabeth J. Silas, Abstract Themes of Awakening in Mainstream Films: Female Subjects and the Lacanian Symbolic, E-Thesis, Miami University, 2005
- Anneke Smelik, 'Feminist Film Theory', from Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink, (eds), The Cinema Book, second edition. London: British Film Institute, 1999, pp 353-365
- Ashley Lorrain Smith, 'Girl Power, feminism, girlculture and the popular media', E-Thesis, University of North Texas, August 1999
- Donato Totaro, 'The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror', Offscreen Journal, January 31, 2002
Catherine, I'm incredibly in awe of your obviously monumental website. It's a wonder. And I'm so glad my considerably less academic website is included in your webroll; I'm an expert, but I don't write like one always, so I'm overjoyed that I have a presence here. I do have one piece of advice: my computer often crashes when I visit, and I think that might be because you include too many posts on your settings. I think you need to reduce your settings to showing only 10-20 postings at a time. I'd love to visit more often, but it can often be more than my computer can chew. Would you look into this? Again, FILM STUDIES FOR FREE is a fantastic addition to the artform, and I thank you so much.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dean. Sorry to have frozen your (and anyone else's) computer. I've been playing with the number of posts on the page for ages, but reduced it down again today - thanks for the tech advice which is always welcomed. I am trying to investigate ways of listing all the posts in the right hand column - this template in Blogger doesn't appear to let me do that, but if I can find a way, I will be able to reduce the number of posts on display permanently. Film Studies For Free is meant to be a treasure trove - so a little bit 'messy' is OK - but the site does need to load properly! So thanks again.
ReplyDeleteGotta see Drag Me to Hell! Thanks, as always, for all this. There goes time.
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