Film and Media Studies 210: The Monstrous Other: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Horror Media

From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Grimm Fairy Tales to contemporary horror films, monsters have always existed to tell us what happens if we don'92t follow the rules. What does a monster do for a film? For society? This class will investigate widely held ideas about race, gender, (dis)ability and other categories of social differentiation through the lens of (post)/colonial horror film. From Zombie flicks to mummy films to space horror, the monster is often found exactly where '93Western Man'94 is attempting to dominate and colonize. A main focus of the class will be to understand complex notions of subjectivity (who AM I, who ARE we) with the recognition that the monster frames a key component of the dialectic of self/other. There is no '91self'92 without a '91not-self'92 and what more instructive not-self could there be than a big ugly monster. But what happens when that monster is coded as female (Ex-Machina) or native (King Kong) or disabled? What kinds of selves are we asked to induce/produce when our monstrous Other is composed of bits of real-world cultural subjects? This class will use cultural studies, post-colonial and psychoanalytic theory to address notions of self/other, human/inhuman, us/them in the media of horror. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major or minor.