The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
a seemingly inert mass into a towering, top-heavy menace; extends its
insidiously telescoping jaws; slithers its tail up the leg of its fear-paralysed
female victim. 70
In … Alien, we are given a representation of the female genitals and
the womb as uncanny — horrific objects of dread and fascination. … The
creature is the mother’s phallus, attributed to the maternal figure by a
phallocentric ideology terrified at the thought that women might desire
to have the phallus. 71
Having demonstrated that Alien is so replete with sexual imagery
as to support such disparate readings, Hurley observes that the film
‘exceeds and resists an interpretation that would contain it within the
field of (human) sexuality’. 72 For Hurley, Alien ‘moves smoothly within
the logic of psychoanalysis … — so smoothly and indiscriminately as
to overload and rupture that logic.’ 73
Here, once again, is a demonstration of the monster’s excess, this
time configured as an excess of Freudian imagery. The ‘non-material
but physical’ surplus that is carried by the body in Slavoj Žižek’s formulation
is in this instance the stuff of psychoanalysis — the gendered
freight of the Oedipus complex and so on. Certainly, as psychoanalysis
has been incorporated into accounts of ‘reality’, its ‘revelatory’ logic
has reproduced increasingly grotesque and extravagant readings of
gendered subjectivity, to the extent that, as Halberstam contends, it
no longer analyses horror — it ‘generates horror’. 74 The experience of
a young male psychiatric patient certainly suggests the capacity of
Freudian logic to generate horror:
When I’m emotionally upset, I feel as if I’m turning into something else. …
I get the feeling I’m becoming a wolf. I look at myself in the mirror and I
witness my transformation. It’s no longer my face; it changes completely.
I stare, my pupils dilate, and I feel as if hairs are growing all over my
body, as if my teeth are getting longer. … I feel as if my skin is no longer
mine. 75
For this man the metaphor of the ‘beast within’ has become literalized,
not least by a psychiatric discourse that provided him with the
diagnosis of ‘lycanthropy’.
In Badley’s view, body horror is the latest instalment of an ‘ongoing
crisis of identity in which the gendered, binary subject of Eurocentric
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