Table of Contents

1. Mother, (m)Other 2. Mother (of) Monsters 3. Meet Your Makers 4. It’s a Monster (Baby) 5. The Post-Human Family Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror takes a Deleuzian perspective on motherhood, mothering, and mothers in contemporary horror film, outlining a monstrous philosophy of both embodied film analysis, examining how film changes its viewers and affirms sexual difference, ultimately offering hope for a 21st century post-human family.

About the Author

Sunny Hawkins is the Director of Peer Tutoring and Writing Across the Curriculum at Butler University in Indianapolis, USA, where she teaches seminars on Gender and Horror Film. She holds a PhD in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and has served as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana and Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA. Her work on horror film has appeared in the interdisciplinary journal Reconstruction.

Reviews

This is a cutting-edge, truly significant work. In her unique and compelling application of Deleuzian “schizosophy” to modern horror, Hawkins claims to “push the embodied unthinking of the gender binary further in the field of feminist film theory, for the sake of both film theory and feminism itself,” and indeed she does. Hawkins reminds us that we are “misshapen, half-formed creatures, full of desire,” and convinces us that we need not experience that as a negative thing but rather as the beginning of our liberation from the repressive molar-ized world of modernity. Truly a triumph!
*Kimberly Jackson, Professor of English, Florida Gulf Coast University, USA*

Situating her work on motherhood in the "interstitial" current moment when gender roles have been complicated and troubled but with no alternatives as yet articulated, Sunny Hawkins employs Deleuzian schizoanalysis to examine motherhood in horror films. Her work is provocative and useful for film and gender scholars, and her readings of specific films such as Alien, Frankenstein, Twilight, and Underworld give them new life.
*Ann C. Hall, Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Humanities, University of Louisville, USA*

Sunny Hawkins’ excellent book is a valuable addition to the growing areas of Deleuze and feminist film theory and Deleuze and the horror film. Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror returns to some important feminist critiques of the concepts of Woman, the feminine and sexual difference and recasts them using Deleuze’s nonbinary understanding of difference. Hawkins’ discerning and nuanced schizoanalytic readings of sexual difference, motherhood and the feminine in the horror film bring to life affective, molecular and rhizomatic film viewing experiences.
*Teresa Rizzo, Academic Coordinator, SAE Qantm: Creative Media Institute, Australia*