Black Masculinities and Postmodern Horror: Race, Gender, and Abjection

Abstract

In this study, I employ Kristeva’s (1992) theories of affect and abjection to analyze two postmodern horror films (i.e., Night of the Living Dead, 1968, and Candyman, 1992). These films were selected for their incorporation of images of abjected Black male bodies, including visual references to lynching. Although feminist film scholars (Clover, 1996; Creed, 1993; Halberstam, 1995) have remarked on the pervasive cultural fears of gendered and sexual difference addressed by Hollywood horror films, genre explorations of historical violence attributed to racial difference are relatively less common. I address this gap in the context of the historical over-determination of Black masculinities in U.S. visual culture through a critical textual analysis of two films, and suggest alternate readings that complicate mediated racial tropes of Black male bodies as either abjected victims or hypersexualized monstrous Others. In conclusion, I caution against inscribing abjected bodies with familiar racial and gendered signifiers and raise possibilities for abjection to exceed and disrupt the social and cultural exclusions that reinforce and sustain such significations.