American Monsters (20 page)

The presence of wasps in this novel, especially in terms of the vagina dentata and monstrous births, is telling in that the queen wasp produces an “evil” brood of millions whose goal in life, to us, is to sting and hurt. Jack makes the point that wasps are “deadlier” than bees because they can sting multiple times, whereas bees only can sting once (p. 133). Because of the quite typical horror theme of monstrous broods, the wasp’s defining action, the sting, takes on new meaning. The idea of a stinger penetrating a body has been coded as masculine because of how sex is constructed in American society. The man penetrates, the woman is penetrated. The wasps mainly sting Jack and Danny, the two males in the hotel. The fact that they were “penetrated” by the insects is parallel to Jacks possession/penetration by the house. Women’s bodies are presented as abject, penetrable, etc. But men’s bodies have always been considered somewhat sealed off, impermeable to outside forces. In penetrating the male body, the wasps again revise the phallic connotations of stingers and re-genders them female.

The Overlook further unsettles our notions of stability and sanity as random things come to life. The topiary of animal hedges, in attacking both Danny and Jack assumes the female “power” of the house in self-animating. Again we see the monstrous birth as hedge animals, previously safe and enjoyable for visitors, attack, claw, and bite. There is even a clock on page 319 whose “round black hole” begins to “swell.” The clock then produces a horrific display of Danny’s father murdering him with a croquet mallet. The monstrous female energy of the house that bears these grotesqueries plays with notions of family stability and towards the end as Jack becomes less and less human, it begins feeding off of the humanity that dies in him every moment he remains in the house. Because Danny is the “battery” for the house, the ghastly sights can be re-read as a monstrous birth from a young boy, who is the catalyst for incredible terrors, all of which root within the horrific of the female body.

Though the Overlook needs Danny to remain alive and trapped inside “her” womb, she still threatens Danny on many occasions, one of the most frightening being the man in the dog costume. Again, as described with the fire hose, the dog man speaks to him and reminds him of how he will be bitten and eaten by him, “And I think I’ll start with your plump little cock (p. 350).” King doesn’t even disguise the vagina dentata here because, really, for a man, what would be scarier? The hotel seems to thrive on fear and by scaring Danny it probably would make his power, his “psychic battery” stronger. By explicitly stating castration by mouth, this particular scene is where all of the other scenes I have discussed are leading. Emasculation and engulfment are what the Overlook do best, both physically and metaphysically.

The vagina dentata, the embodiment of the monstrous feminine, is alive and well in The Shining. My contention is that horror is gendered, and the horrific is gendered female. It is representative of the misogyny of American culture that exploits, abuses, disrespects, and as both cause and result, fears women and their bodies. As Andrea Dworkin writes in her book
Intercourse
, “Sadism and death, under male supremacy, converge at the vagina: to open the woman up, go inside her, penis or knife. The poor little penis kills before it dies,” (p. 190) The Overlook, constructed as feminine and ultimately destroyed for its engulfing tendencies is a product of a patriarchal America. Even though the misogyny that is present in this novel can be written off as being “fictional,” the fantastical can give us a place to begin discussing taboo issues of gender, sexuality, and the male fear and disgust of women in this country. It seems odd to me that an entire genre can be based on the male perception of female loathsomeness without people realizing its presence. That speaks to the fact that the abuse and exploitation of women and their bodies is acceptable by greater American society. Though I mainly focused on The Overlook as a site of the vagina dentata and the monstrous female form, I would like to point out that these themes underscore every occurrence in this novel and resonate past it into the way women are treated outside of King’s world. Of course, this is all very taboo and unspeakable as the patriarchy does attempt to control women’s bodies and position within society, all the more reason to re-read and re-vise the masculinist theories evident in most horror medias. The Shining as a horror novel and cultural text allow us to recognize how women are fetishized as monstrous, and thus Stephen King, (knowingly? unknowingly?), like the horror genre, supports a culturally acceptable and very American male dominance. When asked what horror means I would have to reply that it is representative of a patriarchal society having met the enemy, and she is Woman.

Note: This is the final exam essay that allowed me to graduate from university with Honors and Distinction.

As Mascia-Lees and Sharp argue in “The postmodernist turn” James Clifford and the Writing Culture enterprise involved a group of men, who, like explorers, happened upon the theoretical school of postmodernism, a position from which feminists had been working for a long time. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe discuss Clifford’s reasoning in excluding female and feminist voices from the Writing Culture book was that women had not made as many innovations in the ethnographic enterprise as men have. He goes on to cite Marjorie Shostak’s ethnography of the Nisa as a key example of this new type of ethnography, while maintaining that women had nothing to do with the production of this “new” postmodern viewpoint. Because anthropological history is clouded with issues of the colonialistic and imperialistic projects of anthropologists, the idea of a feminist ethnography is fraught with contradictions, the co-optation of feminism into postmodernism and the subsequent erasure of women as innovators in this field speaks to the unequal gender politics within anthropology as a discipline. I would argue that because of the inherent contradictions between feminism and the anthropological project of ethnography, there can’t be a feminist ethnography per se, but at Abu-Lughod details in her essay “Can there be a feminist ethnography,” the possibilities of what this can be should be explored.

The problematic invention of postmodernism is interesting because it incorporates feminist methodologies of multiple voices, reflexivity, rhetorical strategies, and overall an unsettling of the traditional academic voice. The difference between postmodernism and feminism lie in that feminism unapologetically claims a politics, while postmodernism is critiqued for its apolitical content. This issue is a driving force in why there cannot be a feminist ethnography, as male academics co-opt these strategies and maintain the scientific rigour of objectivity in denying the presence of politics in postmodern issues. For example, since postmodernism relies heavily on alternate modes of expression, therein still lies an effort to construct an ideal of ethnographic authority. Vincent Crapanzano’s “Hermes’ Dilemma” is an incredible example of how postmodern (feminist) strategies manage to reproduce the typical stereotypes of writing as a phallic enterprise, along with the recycling of notions of feminized cultures meant to be penetrated and exposed to the world. Though this article is considered and valued as postmodern, the erasure of politics and gender theory actually make Crapanzano’s argument a severe backtracking within the anthropological effort. Feminism attempts to subvert these masculinist views, and I find it shocking that these men so blatantly steal from feminism and then claim it as their own after erasing those things (most importantly, the political questions) that make the study worthwhile. As Judith Stacey argues, there can’t be a feminist ethnography, but there are ways of applying feminist theory and methodology to ethnographic work. Part of what needs to happen in order for there to actually be anything like feminist ethnography would be for these male postmoderns to accept the history of feminism and how it has shaped modern theory.

In terms of theory itself, George Marcus does an extensive study of changes within the canons of many different disciplines. But, much like the Clifford school of feminist erasure, Marcus only touches upon the idea that feminists have been shaping these changes within discourses, but he does discuss how postmodernism is seen as a threat to the academic canon. Catherine Lutz speaks to this issue of the academic canon in her essay “The gender of theory” whereby she deconstructs the act of theoretical writing as specific to men and values of objectivity and masculinity. She also discusses the idea of the canon as another masculinist opportunity to deny alternate voices a place within formalized academia. Though women like Zora Neale Hurston had practiced a feminist ethnography (and postmodernism in Clifford’s sense) way before feminism (and postmodernism) was even an issue, she has been marginalized from the anthropological canon. Lutz sees theory as gendered male, and thus promotes the theoretical intellectual (white) male dominance over other voices within academia. Men writing postmodern theory are, in essence, cross dressing as the thematic issues of postmodern representation have been a feminist project for some time now. It would be difficult to write a “feminist ethnography” when the idea of ethnographic writing itself is a male enterprise. It is a contradiction in terms to link these two theoretical ideas of feminism and ethnography, the former of which politics is key and the latter of which “butterfly collecting” (i.e. trapping cultures into static representations and objectification) seems to be the main purpose.

I would liken this issue to post-colonial critic C.L.R. James and theoretical issues of cricket and coloniality. James’ belief was that in order for Caribbean peoples to emancipate themselves, they had to prove their worth by beating the British at their own game. The problem with this is that by becoming better at the colonizer’s game, the colonized submitted and somewhat naturalized the process of colonization. By writing a feminist ethnography using the language of theory is performing this same submission to the dominant male voice, as an attempt to legitimize the practice of feminist ethnography. If there is to be a feminist ethnography we would have to completely reconfigure what our notions of ethnography would be as feminists, and we would have to call it something completely different from its other anthropological counterparts. But again, the issue is problematized when working within an academic situation that constantly erases and devalues the work of women, to call a feminist ethnography something else would further marginalize the issue of having a feminist oriented ethnographic practice.

Donna Haraway works towards this new ethnography by discounting the validity of science in linking it with the feminist practice of storytelling, thus claiming science as a myth. She also discusses the prospects of cyber-ethnographies that would combine issues of women, representation, fiction, and feminist methodologies within a new framework for ethnographic encounters. Her critical and respectful deconstruction of scientific objectivity opens new areas for feminist oriented ethnography as the idea of objectivity has been used by past and current anthropologists to make false statements about their positions in relation to their research. Since science and feminism are not easily reconciled and since anthropology would like to think of itself as a science, the idea of a feminist anthropology is further problematized. Haraway notes how human behaviours are displaced onto non-human primates, and she uses this to explicate how science is in fact biased in its supposedly objective views. Unsettling the notion of scientific truth is one step closer to a feminist ethnography in that it challenges the basic scientific presumptions of what we can know as truth.

Though I know that feminist ethnography must be accepted as it is in anthropology in order to change the marginalized position of women, it is incredibly problematic for feminists to align themselves with a practice that has in fact perpetuated stereotypes of femininity and the masculine right to power and phallic domination. Much like the issues surrounding the Women’s Studies/Gender Studies major at Occidental, having a department dedicated towards women marginalizes their status in all other disciplines. I don’t think there is any way to reconcile the intense discrepancies between feminism as a political project and ethnography as a colonialist enterprise (even now). But, as Abu-Lughod describes in her conclusion of the feminist ethnographic question, there are possibilities of a feminist ethnography and it is time for us to figure out how these possibilities can be presented and accepted into academia.

It has been a decade since I first began work on this novel, and eight years since I finished writing it in Los Angeles, California, known to me as Hell On Earth. In the interim, I carried a bound copy of the manuscript from Los Angeles to Berkeley, then Geneva, Switzerland, France, Spain, Turkey and now Prague, where finally I brushed off the dust.

At first I hesitated to change anything. The story came from such specific and raw places of pain from my American experience, namely my experiences as a “raver” and witnessing my good friend Wendy Soltero’s violent and untimely death. While I am pretty sure that this novel would have been the same had Wendy not died in my presence, I also tend to think there might have been more hope and positivity if I hadn’t been so terribly traumatized.

When I read the book now, I am shocked by the Quentin Tarantino-esque level of violence that almost has no place in anything but a Stephen King novel or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I look back and wonder how I could have been so angry. At times as I went through it during the final editing process, the brutal grotesqueness of my visions even made me laugh. I would like to think that means I’ve moved beyond, well, something of the pain, or, something else profound: That I could find humor in things I once took so seriously. Then again, I don’t know. I’m really not sure. Part of me still understands where this kind of rage has a place, another part thinks it’s absurd to hold so much hatred inside. In the moments when I finally began writing this story all those years ago, it was indeed therapeutic in a way nothing else could have been.

And actually, this book is still unfinished. Each of the chapters and stories was meant to include quotes from the relevant theories that sparked the violent inspiration. Quotes from Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Stephen King, Margaret Mead, Joyce Carol Oates, Julia Kristeva, and countless others who can be found listed in the appendices. Wendy’s death took place just as I was beginning to write and it became too ambitious a project with everything else that was on my plate. Testifying in court, the immediate symptoms of acute post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, flashbacks, bouts of crying that would last for days, and on top of it all an impending university graduation. It would have been fantastic to have included those juicy tidbits, I am a great compiler in that sense. But now, as I ready for publishing, I realize it must have been for a reason. Do you know how expensive it is to get the rights to reprint even a two-line quote? Trust me, it’s a lot. This story would have cost a fortune, and in the end I don’t think the quotes are all that necessary. I suppose it’s enough for you to know that each story is rooted in and inspired by some academic theory relevant to women and horror.

This book wasn’t really about all of that. It was about speaking back to the violence I saw all around me in America, the violence that has overwhelmed the core of my being even now. Albeit my speaking back to violence tended to reproduce that same violence I was protesting, but hey, I was only nineteen. Give me a break.

The one thing that continues to strike me about this novel, and all the life and book research that went into it, is how I still see these same themes within so many facets of modern life: the news, magazines, films, music and behavior. And no, I’m not looking for it, it always smacks me upside the head and screams, “LOOK!” Fear of women and violence against them still permeates American society and the world at large. Subtle, blatant, it’s there in how the media talks about female politicians, it’s in the new genres of horror that have emerged, it’s in over-sexualized music videos featuring children masquerading as adults, and so on. The American monsters in my novel are everywhere. And America, sadly, continues to breed them. In its war on terror, its judicial system, its racism, at home and abroad. In its films and its daily lives. This is a big reason in why I ultimately left the States and haven’t lived there since. America’s monsters became too much for me. What a great release to finish and close these chapters of my life, move forward.

And so, Dear Reader, I will bid you adieu. Until next time, that is.

February 2, 2010

Prague, Czech Republic

P.S. The list of my written and visual inspirations follows, should that interest you.