Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Whitney Porter UPDATED MA THESIS.pdf (7.45 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Monstrous Reproduction: The Power of the Monstered Maternal in Graphic Form

Porter, Whitney
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1493050047052178

Abstract Details

2017, MA, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
Patriarchal anxieties about and resistance to women’s embodied power has pushed women into the margins with the monsters. Through psychoanalytic perspectives on womb envy (Catherine Silver; Sigmund Freud) and abjection (Julia Kristeva) we can delve into the dark space of the monstrous maternal. This space is illuminated in a number of comics and other modes of visual narrative from the 20th and 21st century. These beings unveil the longstanding rhetoric of control that patriarchal social structures depend upon in order to police the possibilities of not only women’s bodies in terms of personal agency, but also of sexuality and reproduction of nonhuman bodies. I investigate how this connection to and identification with monstrosity influences cultural discourses about reproduction, identity, and agency in both. Not all of the stories I investigate are explicitly about women. However, the presence of what Barbara Creed aptly defines as the “monstrous feminine” and explicit images of reproduction and the womb are present and essential in each of the texts I discuss. Ultimately, when viewed from a psychoanalytic feminist perspective, monstrous representations of the maternal and of the womb offer generative spaces to rethink and resist structures of control over bodies.
Vera Camden (Advisor)
Tammy Clewell (Committee Member)
Sara Newman (Committee Member)
67 p.
Ecology; Literature; Psychology; Womens Studies
womb envy; feminism; psychoanalysis; film studies; comics studies; comics; monstrosity; pregnancy; women; power

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Porter, W. (2017). Monstrous Reproduction: The Power of the Monstered Maternal in Graphic Form [Master's thesis, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1493050047052178

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Porter, Whitney. Monstrous Reproduction: The Power of the Monstered Maternal in Graphic Form . 2017. Kent State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1493050047052178.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Porter, Whitney. "Monstrous Reproduction: The Power of the Monstered Maternal in Graphic Form ." Master's thesis, Kent State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1493050047052178

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1493050047052178
2,422
© 2017, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.