The Female Grotesque

The cultural associations with the grotesque are deeply embedded in western consciousness and culture. In "The Female Grotesque", Mary Russo interrogates a vast and impressive array of theoretical, visual, autobiographical and performance texts. Russo argues that the "female grotesque" is less of a category than it is an operation through which genders and identities are both constituted and de-constituted, excluded or not. Drawing upon Bahktin and Kristeva, Freud, and Zizek, Russo traces the salient connections between abjection, the uncanny and the grotesque. She focuses on the double logic of the grotesque in the works of Angela Carter, David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers), and Georges du Maurier's Trilby, adroitly illuminating the grotesque as a process through which differently gendered bodies are deployed in interesting, new and possibly transformative ways.