"Monstrous" women: subversive, attractive, and necessary

BarcelonaGothic literature became popular in the late 18th century and spread nightmares among readers for much of the 19th century, with well-known examples such as Frankenstein (1818), by Mary W. Shelley, Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë, The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson and Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker. Two centuries later, Núria Gómez Gabriel (Barcelona, 1987) and Ingrid Guardiola (Girona, 1980), writers, university lecturers and art curators, have set out to revive Gothic "anachronistically and queer to speak of those feminine emanations of a supernatural, morbid, mysterious, tremendous, and even abject character, which have resisted opprobrium, defamation, or extreme violence". The protagonists of the essay they have written on the subject four-handed, Gothic feminism (H&O Editorial, 2026), are writers like Virginie Despentes, Mariana Enriquez, Dolors Miquel, Mónica Ojeda and Samanta Schweblin, but also filmmakers like Sofia Coppola and Julia Ducornau and artists like Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego and Remedios Varo.

"One of the elements that the authors we discuss in our book share is that they all propose literary, cinematographic, or artistic works in which women appear who, instead of being victims of the horror scene, as happens in many gothic novels, become monstrous protagonists –comment Núria Gómez Gabriel and Ingrid Guardiola–. Hence we have wanted to create the neologism "show to mark that, historically, from patriarchal heteronormativity, the social role of women has been eroded through this word, which has become a way to pigeonhole dissident bodies, but also to take away their voice and punish them". Gothic feminism describes this show polymorphic and challenging from about twenty categories, such as the spectral (where we find the absence of a mother in No home movie [2015], by Chantal Akerman), the possessed (with the rereading of the witch by photographer Bego Antón), the famished (which analyzes the cannibalistic impulse of the protagonist of Cross [2016], by Julia Ducornau) and the abject (which, in the section dedicated to maternity, develops the case of the saga of Alien, inaugurated by Ridley Scott in 1979).

The strength of eccentric subjectivities

"In the book we propose three feminist axes for analyzing reality –they explain–. The first is the cruel optimistic feminist, in which emancipation desires are captured by self-care, success, or self-sufficiency. The second, the lucid optimistic feminist, which does not renounce hope and transforms it into a critical practice, stripped of triumphalism and promises of immediate reparation. The third is gothic feminism, which we develop, and which does not aim to resolve or normalize situations: it is content to inhabit contradiction, fragmentation, and spectrality, it makes structural violence visible and imagines eccentric, deviant, and resistant subjectivities". Núria Gómez Gabriel and Ingrid Guardiola situate the beginning of the narrative that attacks women in Greek mythology. "Mutations and bestializations, which were part of the cultural discourse of the time, already attacked them –they affirm–. Many years later,Hélène Cixous, who along with Barbara Creed and Julia Kristeva has been one of the theoretical references of our essay, turned the situation around: if women have always been placed alongside nocturnality, animality, and irrationality, what happens if they live and deviate through these three categories?"

In The Laughs of the Medusa (1975; in Catalan by Edicions 62, translated by Arnau Pons), Cixous argued that the mythological figure of Medusa is not a monster dedicated to punishing anyone who dares to look her in the face by petrifying them. "Sigmund Freud linked Medusa's head with the representation of female genitalia – say the authors of Gothic Feminism–. The myth of Medusa would therefore be a narrative about female sexuality as a difference rooted in monstrosity, which petrifies the male viewer for fear of castration". Cixous, on the other hand, emphasizes Medusa's beauty and laughter: "Most women who do not fit the stereotype of order and norm have often been accused of being monsters and have been seen as sick. The monster asserts and reaffirms herself by singing, writing, painting, and bringing forth something new".

Gothic feminism addresses numerous "overflows of normality" by women such as the metamorphic protagonist of The Passion According to G.H. (1964), by Clarice Lispector –available in Catalan from Club Editor, translated by Josep Domènech i Ponsatí–, various incarnations of "artificial woman by Scarlett Johansson that threaten patriarchal order and tranquility" –from the computer operating system she voices in Her (2013), by Spike Jonze, to the cyborg-human hybrid she plays in Ghost in the Shell (2017), by Rupert Sanders–, the example of saints who deprived themselves of food such as Wilgefortis of Portugal, known as the bearded saint, and the obsessive and comforting relationship with food by the writer and professor Roxane Gay, detailed in Hunger: A Memoir of My Body (2017; in Spanish by Capitán Swing). It also studies the rereading of the concept of barbarian from the Mexican Dahlia de la Cerda in the stories of Medea me cantó un corrido (Sexto Piso, 2025) and the essay Staying Barbaric, by Louisa Yousfi (Manifest / Anagrama, 2024).

Reclaim "white horror"

"On the white and luminescent surface there are also disturbing elements that, when shown, can be terrifying," explains Núria Gómez Gabriel, and Ingrid Guardiola recalls that "Gothic feminism is not limited to exploring darkness." In apparently safe and comfortable spaces, "white horror" suddenly erupts. This happens, for example, in The Virgin Suicides, a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides that Sofia Coppola adapted for cinema in 1999 and which tells the story of five sisters who, despite living in a well-off environment, make the drastic decision to end their lives. Or in the novel Mandíbula, which Mónica Ojeda published in 2018, in which a teacher at an Opus Dei school kidnaps one of the most popular students in her class. "White horror is presented more as an experience of revelation than of concealment, an atmosphere of constant anguish that appears with excessive clarity," comments Gómez Gabriel.

At the other extreme is the blackness of outer space and the omnipresent shadows of Alien, which blends in with the shapes of the spaceship where it travels. "The entire saga proposes a philosophical approach to the other, to the monster, which is the alien mother – says Ingrid Guardiola, who admits her fondness for the four films–. The monster is an abject mother, a vagina that salivates to procreate through human hosts. When it is born, it tears their bodies apart and kills them. The character of Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, goes through all the stages of mutation around the idea of motherhood, to the point that in Alien 3 [David Fincher, 1992] she ends up pregnant with the egg that contains the beast".

Gothic feminism also dedicates some pages to the necessary claims of insurgent women such as Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to move from her bus seat to give it up to a white passenger, defying the racial segregation laws of the United States, and the revolutionary Russian feminist and Marxist Aleksandra Kollontai, who wrote in an autobiographical essay dated 1921: "When I was a child, my mother was very worried about my tendency not to live like everyone else. I understood the household staff, I sided with the maids [...], I defended my independence, I read with passion and lived in a world apart created within me, to which adults were forbidden entry. As a child I liked to write, but they took away my paper and pen by force. Above all, however, what outraged me was injustice and social inequality."

A century later, the numerous Gothic feminist referents studied by Núria Gómez Gabriel and Ingrid Guardiola stand out in a world marked by the "politics of fear executed by strong and unbridled men who accumulate power and sow violence around them," they assure before citing Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Javier Milei. "The alt-right and techno-reactionary right-wingers are reclaiming the imaginary of the dark and decadent, such as the tragic hero, the end of civilization or the return of order, to aestheticize the loss of male or white privilege – they warn –. Reactionary Gothic confronts Gothic feminism by exhibiting darkness as a nostalgia for lost power. The far-right has learned to narrate unease. It has sublimated hurt into identity, precarity into pride, and rage into aesthetics."