Hell is a Teenage Girl

Fantastika Journal

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
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Podcast by: Sarah Michelson (@sarah_michelson)
Hell is a Teenage Girl:
Monstrous Bodies in Jennifer's Body and Ginger Snaps

Content warnings: eating disorders, sexual violence, menstruation, bullying
Early 21st century film is full of monstrous teenage girls, some figurative (for example, Regina George from Mean Girls), but others rather literal, such as Ginger Fitzgerald (Ginger Snaps) and Jennifer Check (Jennifer's Body). In his essay "Monster Culture: Seven Theses," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen famously writes that the monster is the harbinger of category crisis and that the monster polices the borders of the possible. Teenage girls, too, have an inherent sense of liminality, as children on the threshold of adulthood who are trying to make meaning out of their own physical and emotional instability. This is not helped by a culture that heavily polices teenage girls and makes them feel uncomfortable in their own skin— it isn't hard for a teenage girl to feel like a monster. This paper analyses the body horror of Ginger Fitzgerald and Jennifer Check through the lens of abjection and monster theory, considering Ginger as a werewolf and Jennifer as a kind of vampire. It considers these characters' context within other teenage girl media of the era, and within a greater lineage of monsters. What do Ginger and Jennifer's monstrous bodies, and their monstrous hungers, say about the teenage girl experience?

About the Author: Sarah Michelson recently completed her M.Phil in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies at Trinity College Dublin, where she wrote a dissertation on 1980s gendered body horror. In addition to horror scholarship, Sarah also writes short fiction.
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