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

Jessica Baker Kee

Jessica Baker Kee Penn State University

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.

Author Biography

Jessica Baker Kee, Penn State University

Jessica Baker Kee is a Ph.D. candidate in Art Education at Penn State University, and holds an M.A. in Art Education from East Carolina University and a B.A. in Art History and Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She has worked as a public and private school art teacher, a federal disaster relief agent, and an educational research consultant. Her narrative ethnographic research explores constructions of identity and trauma in pedagogical contexts, examining the impacts of institutional education policy on the lived experiences of students of color, particularly in relation to the "achievement gap" and the school-to-prison pipeline. She is currently conducting arts-based participatory inquiry with middle and high school students in New Orleans as part of her dissertation research. Her research ultimately seeks to develop arts-based curricular models employing aesthetic and spiritual epistemologies of the African diaspora. For correspondence, Jessica Baker Kee can be reached at jcb399@psu.edu.