Redefining the Monstrous-Feminine: Applying a Postfeminist (Eco)Gothic Reading to Horror Video Games (2025)

"Uncanny, Monstrous, and Sublime" ecoGothic Transformations in Horror Video Games

Aeternum: The Journal Of Contemporary Gothic Studies, 2023

Ecohorror video games, analyzed through a feminist ecoGothic lens, offer a critical opportunity for scholars to examine the impact of the environmental crisis in popular culture as well as the reasons why this "villainous" nature is still so frequently depicted as female. Like the nature they inhabit and/or represent, the monstrous-feminine characters in ecohorror video games cannot be controlled. Female monsters that have become hybridized in some way with nature-whether through flora, fauna, fungi, or by contagion which they then spread to others-are central to the ecohorror narrative. Using the games Blair Witch and Resident Evil VII: Biohazard/Resident Evil Village, I investigate how anxieties surrounding both gender and ecology intersect, seeking the ways in which these female characters' transgression of categories interrogate the artificial dichotomy between humanity and nature. I argue that despite storylines seemingly embedded in ecophobia, it is possible to analyze ecohorror video games as narratives empowering both monstrous-feminine characters and the ecology that spawns them by using a feminist ecoGothic lens.

Shrieking, Biting, and Licking: The Monstrous-Feminine in Video Games

This article examines examples of the monstrous-feminine in the form of abject female monsters in a selection of critically acclaimed and commercially successful video games. Various female monsters from CD Projekt RED's The Witcher series (2007-2015), and Santa Monica Studio's God of War series (2005-2013) are considered as examples of the abject monstrous-feminine which fall into a long tradition in horror media of making the female body and body movements into something horrific and repulsive. These female monsters use shrieking, biting, licking, and spreading disease as weapons against the male protagonist, who must slay them to progress in the games. This article concludes that these games contribute to a long popular culture tradition of framing the empowered female body as monstrous and threatening, and calls for more scholarship on female monstrosity in games.

The Broodmother as Monstrous-Feminine: Abject Maternity in Video Games

Nordlit, 2019

This article examines examples of the monstrous-feminine in the form of abject maternal monsters in a selection of commercially successful and critically acclaimed mainstream video games using conceptual frameworks and textual analysis methods established in the work of Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed. The Broodmother from Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and the Mother from Dragon Age: Origins—Awakening (2010) are considered as problematic examples of the abject monstrous-feminine which fall into a long tradition in horror media of framing the female body and the birthing process as something horrific and repulsive. Kerrigan from the StarCraft series (1998–2017) is examined as a possible counter-example, demonstrating that the monstrous-feminine can exist in a playable and potentially empowered form, though she is problematically empowered within a violent, militant framework. Overall, this article critically analyses the ways in which video games remediate tropes of gendered monstrosity and reinforce the misogynist norms and values of hegemonic heteropatriarchal ideology by forcing players to enact symbolic violence against transgressive female bodies.

Dark forests and doomed adventurers: an ecocritical reading of horror roleplaying games

Generation Analog 2021 Proceedings, 2023

This paper explores the ecological potential of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) through a close reading of contemporary horror games. I argue that these games go beyond representing and mediating anxieties around ecological disaster. Instead, I propose that they offer a generative mode of collaborative worldbuilding in a time of climate crisis. I interrogate the ethics of TTRPGs through the lens of ecocriticism, identifying tensions between game texts and game play. These tensions exist between the expression of ecophobia—which tends to position nature as an antagonist—and the attribution of moral considerability and agency to the more-than-human world. Such tensions are productive and play out through collaborative storytelling techniques and ludic mechanics that invite players to reflect on the interrelationship between humans and the worlds in which they are embedded.

Who Hearkens to the Monster's Scream? Death, Violence, and the Veil of the Monstrous in Video Games

Alternative blood is a practice in video games in which on-screen characters bleed green or other off-coloured blood when killed. The practice, intended to minimise in-game violence and reduce the depiction of gore, has become common since the release of Carmageddon (1997) and can be deployed as a means of either placating ratings boards and censors or offering players greater in-game choice, as in the case of Serious Sam 3 (2011). This article suggests that alternative blood and the more general depiction of on-screen targets as ‘monstrous’ as currently deployed in video games often serves to dehumanise the familiar and limit the presentation of death. Instances from video games in the horror, Western and war genres are examined and placed in a context that considers the history of these genres and of thematically related propaganda. This analysis suggests that the justification of deaths through alternative blood and monstrousness may not dampen the impact of violence in the way that developers and moral guardians might assume. Ultimately, this article argues that the desire to minimise the impact of in-game deaths by rendering victims as ‘monsters’ enacts a type of cultural violence by dehumanising them. This aesthetic dehumanisation of in-game victims echoes propaganda strategies used to justify historical violence and may have negative social consequences and should be further studied.

Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games

Routledge, 2021

This book investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics. This book will appeal not only to scholars working in game studies, but also to scholars of horror, gender studies, popular culture, visual arts, genre studies and narratology. https://www.routledge.com/Immersion-Narrative-and-Gender-Crisis-in-Survival-Horror-Video-Games/Nae/p/book/9780367894115

When girls turn into men and boys into women : a postfeminist reading of The Last of Us and BioShock

2016

This study explores the ways in which certain societal anxieties regarding femininity and masculinity surface in post-apocalyptic video games BioShock (2007 2K Games) and The last of us (2013 Naughty Dog). A postfeminist perspective is employed in order to explore the privileging of so-called ‘masculine values’ in late neo-liberal societies, and the subsequent negation of the (seemingly) binary opposite of stereotypical femininity. This explorative study is situated within a broad framework of postfeminism, and focuses on providing alternative understandings of the representation of gender in video games. By considering video games as a medium that is firmly rooted in traditional masculinity, I argue that anxieties regarding the subordination of so-called ‘feminine values’ in society as a whole, manifest visually in BioShock and The last of us, in both the gameplay as well as in narrative structure. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of how these anxieties surface, I explo...

Villains and Vixens: The Representation of Female Vampires in Videogames

Oceánide, 2020

Vampires populate our culture and have become a recurrent presence in fiction and the media. In all cases the inclusion of the vampire has given voice to "socio-culture issues faced in particular times and places; issues that may otherwise remain repressed" (Dillon and Lundberg 2017, 47). This socio-cultural subtext is complicated when the vampire is female, for she is now doubly othered by her gender. Her monstrosity is seen as twofold: as a vampire and as a transgressive woman. While many studies address female vampires in popular culture, their portrayal in videogames has been recurrently overlooked. Games potentially help shape gender attitudes in thousands of players; therefore, it is particularly relevant to examine the varied representations of these monstrous or othered female figures and to understand how they adhere to or challenge misogynistic readings of women and their bodies. In light of this, and interpreting videogames as a narrative medium, this article provides an analysis of significant vampiric videogames and discusses the female vampire in relation to violence against women and postfeminist agendas, following a narrative rather than ludology approach.

'Forgive Me Father, for I have Sinned': The Violent Fetishism of Female Monsters in Hollywood Horror Culture

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2018

In the generic gothic cornucopia, the figure of the female 'victim' becomes merely a physical signifier of the disembodied, biopolitics of violence that underlies the hyperrealistic, reiterative function of the visual body, which is to enact aggression in a vicious unending loop. It is a form of violence that is written on carefully choreographed, gendered bodies, which are manipulated as objects of graphic male fantasies. Since then, popular representations of femininity in the Hollywood gothic culture have remained mostly trapped within the finite, stunted constructions of the infantile, virtuous 'good' woman, the carnal/ cold femme fatale and the monstrous Other-terms that are subsumed in a pervasive categorical insulation, which does not allow for much mobility when it comes to their metonymical boundaries. This paper investigates the visual politics and polemics of our cultural engagement with monsters in popular films, which occupies an impressively broad range-"from movie monsters to psychotic killers, from the abusive family member to the horrific politician". (Baumgartner and Davis 2008) Attempting a conjunction between Kristeva's conception of the Abject, Laura Mulvey's postulations on narrative cinema and voyeurism, and Barbara Creed's theories on feminism, film and femme castratrice, I seek to examine the qualitative scope, evolution and appropriation of the 'monstrous-feminine' (Creed) in Hollywood horror/ thriller genre and negotiate the possibility of a female heroine/ anti-heroine whose performative value can disrupt and overhaul the castration complex and sexual anxiety of the classic cinemas of terror.

Female Monsters: Figuring Female Transgression in Jennifer's Body (2009) and The Witch (2013)

Humaniora Vol 30, No 1, 2018

This paper aimed to examine the depiction of the monstrous feminine in two horror films, 2009's Jennifer's Body and 2015's The Witch, by investigating how horror films confront transgression through the construction of woman as a monstrous figure in the story. The theory of abjection proposed by Julia Kristeva and of the monstrous feminine by Barbara Creed were used in the analysis. The main data were taken from these two films, focusing on the characterization and narrative aspects. It was found that the depiction of the monstrous feminine in both films was through the use of monstrous acts and images. The way in which these films constructed monstrosity indicates female transgression of patriarchal boundaries, specifically on the issue of gender identity and religiosity. The transgression emphasizes that there is no absolute identity, and thus boundaries are disrupted due to this fluid identity.