[Commlist] Call For Papers: The Body Without Limit: The "Monstrous-Feminine" in Spanish Cinema

*Call For Papers Nº 25 (Winter 2025)*
*The Body Without Limit: The "Monstrous-Feminine" in Spanish Cinema***

https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/227


The publication of the seminal /The Monstrous-Feminine/, first in 1986 
as an article for the journal /Screen /and then in 1993 as a book, was a 
turning point in the film of film horror studies. Through it, Australian 
professor Barbara Creed appropriated the advances achieved by feminism 
in the seventies and eighties andput them into dialogue with 
psychoanalysis, thus reinterpreting the symbolic value that women 
fulfill in horror film narratives. Women had always been considered as 
victims of the monster, but Creed, starting from Julia Kristeva’s notion 
of the “abject”, considers that they could become monstrous themselves. 
In this way, women cease to be a passive subject in order to take 
control of the patriarchal fear of castration, despite the fact that, 
according to Creed herself, the image of a “monstrous-feminine” cannot 
be immediately identified as a feminist or liberated image, as it “tells 
us more about masculine fears than about feminine desire or 
subjectivity” (Creed 1993, 7). The diverse incarnations of this 
“monstrous-feminine”—the archaic mother and the castrating mother, the 
woman as vampire, woman as possessed monster,the medusian woman and the 
/vagina dentata—/are translated into the analysis of their corresponding 
film horror classics, such as /Carrie /(Brian De Palma, 1976), /Alien 
/(Ridley Scott, 1979), /The Exorcist/ (William Friedkin, 1973) or /The 
Brood/ (David Cronenberg, 1979), titles in which the female body and its 
transformations occupy the center of the discourse.

It is not surprising that Creed’s theory remains as relevant today as it 
was three decades ago. The fourth wave of feminism, the proliferation of 
intersections between gender studies, queer theory and the film essay, 
the consolidation of a horror cinema that channels its ideas about 
identity through the excesses of the body, and the incorporation of a 
significant amount of female directors to the genre has allowed Creed’s 
theory to maintain its vitality. Her insights have not only enjoyed 
explicit reconsiderations in collective editions such as /Re-reading the 
Monstrous-Feminine /(Chari, Hoorn y Yue 2019) and have influenced many 
of the reflections expressed in essays by Patricia Pisters (/New Blood 
in Contemporary Cinema. Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror, 
/2020) and Xavier Aldana Reyes (/Contemporary Body Horror, /2024), but 
they have also given birth to a sequel signed by Creed herself, /The 
Return of the Monstrous-Feminine. New Feminist Wave /(2024). In this 
text, on the one hand, the theorist brings the “monstrous-feminine” into 
dialogue with a new wave of female-directed horror movies, and, on the 
other, she widens her scope to address films that explicitly depart the 
genre (such as /Carol/, by Todd Haynes [2015], or /Nomadland/, by Chloé 
Zhao [2020]) and that star women who “do not shed blood or participate 
in acts of physical violence, but who are nonetheless considered 
monstrous by the patriarchal symbolical order in that they undermine the 
dictates of the patriarchy and its designation of appropriate female 
behavior” (Creed 2020, 8). There has been a significant change between 
the “monstrous-feminine” of the seventies and the one from the 21st 
century: now women exercise agency over their own destiny, which is none 
other than to destroy the patriarchal order of law and language, seeking 
abjection “where sense collapses” (Kristeva 1980, 2).

It is curious that the success of Creed’s theory in dissecting the 
female body and its metamorphosis in Anglo-Saxon audiovisual production 
has been so unfruitful when confronted with Spanish cinema. The 
historical context of said cinema involved a dense repressive apparatus 
that was deployed onto female subjectivity during the Francoist regime, 
and that was then dismantled in the democratic transition and permeated 
by an array of contemporary dissidences and ruptures that go far and 
beyond the horror film genre, thus laying fertile ground for developing 
links and tensions with Creed’s “monstrous-feminine”. These links and 
tensions are what issue 25 of /Comparative Cinema /aims to shine light 
on, opening the reception of articles that can address the concept of 
the “monstrous-feminine” through the particularities of Spanish cinema, 
considering perspectives, themes and research lines such as:

  * The evolution of classical archetypes of the “monstrous-feminine” in
    Spanish fantasy cinema: vampire women (/Las vampiras /[Jesús Franco,
    1971], /La novia ensangrentada/ [Vicente Aranda, 1972]), possessed
    women (/Exorcismo /[Juan Bosch, 1975], /La endemoniada /[Amando de
    Ossorio, 1975], /Venus /[Jaume Balagueró, 2022]), witches
    (/Akekarre/ [Pablo Agüero, 2020], /Las brujas de Zugarramurdi/ [Álex
    de la Iglesia, 2013])…
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and maternity (/Furtivos /[José Luis Borau,
    1975], /Mater amatísima /[José Antonio Salgot, 1980], /La piedad
    /[Eduardo Casanova, 2022], /Salve María/ [Mar Coll, 2024])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and sexuality (/Una vela para el diablo
    /[Eugenio Martín, 1973], /La petición /[Pilar Miró, 1976], /La
    criatura /[Eloy de la Iglesia, 1976], /El jardín secreto /[Carlos
    Suárez, 1984], /Creatura /[Elena Martín, 2023])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and queerness (/Las crueles /[Vicente
    Aranda, 1969], /Pieles /[Eduardo Casanova, 2017])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and posthumanism (/Eva /[Kike Maíllo,
    2011], /Una ballena /[Pablo Hernando, 2024])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and insanity (/Al otro lado del espejo
    /[Jesús Franco, 1973], /El techo de cristal /[Eloy de la Iglesia,
    1971], /Magical Girl /[Carlos Vermut, 2014], /Los renglones torcidos
    de Dios /[Oriol Paulo, 2022])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and television seriality (/La Mesías
    /[Javier Ambrossi y Javier Calvo, 2023])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and old age (/La abuela /[Paco Plaza, 2021])
  * The “monstrous-feminine” and star-studies. The body of the actress
    as a performative field for the monstrous. The monstrous as a way of
    being in the world through body, gesture and voice.
  * The Other facing Otherness: reactions and transformations of
    masculinity when faced with the “monstrous-feminine”
  * The society before the monster: the monstrous woman as
    dissident,protestor, pariah, relegated to ostracism… Is there a
    political dimension to the “monstrous-feminine” in Spanish cinema?

/Comparative Cinema/ invites contributors to submit articles that 
analyze and reflect on the concept of the “monstrous-feminine” from the 
context of Spanish cinema, and from a comparative methodology. In 
writing the article, /Comparative Cinema/ recommends authors follow a 
structure that includes an introduction to the topic, a theoretical 
framework and objectives, as well as adapting to the comparative 
methodology promoted by the journal, developing the proposed hypothesis, 
drawing up conclusions and a list of bibliographical references.

Complete articles—with an extension between 5500 and 7000 words—must be 
presented following the style guidelines of the journal through the RACO 
platform: https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema 
<https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema>. Prior presentation of 
proposals to the editors ((comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu) 
<mailto:(comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu)>) is not mandatory, but it is advised.

/Comparative Cinema /is an Open Access journal that accepts articles 
written in English, Catalan and Spanish. Authors must not pay the 
journal any fees for the submission or processing of their manuscript.

*Important dates***

Submission of full text: May 30, 2025

Acceptance or rejection notifications: June 10, 2025

Peer-review process: June-July, 2025

Submission of final revised version of the text: September, 2025

Issue publication: Winter 2025

Contact: (comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu) <mailto:(comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu)>

https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema<https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema>

*Recommended bibliography***

Abdi, Shadee and Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2017. “Queer utopias and a 
(Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity 
in /A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night/”. /Critical Studies in Media 
Communication/ 34(4): 358–370. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1302092 
<https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1302092>

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2024./Contemporary Body Horror./ Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Baena Cuder, Irene. 2015. “Women as the Devil: Demonic Possessions in 
Contemporary Spanish Horror Film”. In /Perceiving Evil: Evil Women and 
the Feminine, /edited by David Farnell, Rute Noiva and Kristen Smith, 
99–107. Berlin: Brill.

Barranco, Mario and Sergi Sánchez. 2022. “La mujer monstruo”. In /El 
deseo femenino en el cine español (1939-1975), /edited by Núria Bou y 
Xavier Pérez, 120–135. Madrid: Cátedra.

Barranco, Mario y Sergi Sánchez. 2022. “Helga Liné”. In /El deseo 
femenino en el cine español (1939-1975), /edited by Núria Bou and Xavier 
Pérez, 318–331. Madrid: Cátedra.

Chare, Nicholas, Jeannette Horn and Audrey Yue. 2019./Re-reading the 
Monstrous-Feminine/. London: Routledge.

Creed, Barbara. 1986. “Horror and the Monstrous Femenine”. /Screen/ 
27(1); 44–71.

Creed, Barbara. 2015. /The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, 
psychoanalysis/. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Creed, Barbara. 2022. /The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine. New 
Feminist Wave/. London: Routledge.

Deleyto, Celestino. 1997. “The margins of pleasure: Female monstrosity 
and male paranoia in ‘Basic Instinct’.” /Film Criticism/ 21(3): 20–42. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44018885 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/44018885>

Grant, Barry Keith. 1997. /The Dread of Difference: Gender and the 
Horror Film./ Texas: University of Texas Press.

Harrington, Erin. 2018. /Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film. 
Gynaehorror./ London: Routledge.

Jancovich, Mark. 2001. /Horror, the Film Reader/. London: Routledge.

Lee, Sohyun. 2017. “Monstrous (Re)productions. Mothering Patriarchy on 
the Spanish Horror Screen”. In /Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror 
Cinema and Television, /edited by Jorge Marí. New York: Routledge.

Lowenstein, Adam. 2022. /Horror, Film and Otherness. /Nueva York: 
Columbia University Press.

Pisters, Patricia. 2020. /New Blood in Contemporary Cinema. Women 
Directors and the Poetics of Horror./ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Useros Rodríguez, Silvia. 2021. “El monstruo femenino y la violencia 
liberadora en /A girl walks home alone at night/”. /Estudios 
Humanísticos: Filología/ 43: 107–122. 
https://doi.org/10.18002/ehf.v0i43.7054 
<https://doi.org/10.18002/ehf.v0i43.7054>

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