Conference presentation
This bloody mess: Articulations from the body transformed in American Horror Story: Coven
AHSN Symposium: Transformation (Online - International)
27/10/2024
Abstract
When unrestrained by the conventional ethics or normative values of the broader society in which they are embedded, does a woman’s response to the world become a gateway to liberation, a curse reflecting back, or just something ‘other than’ what it previously was? Does such a woman confront a corresponding compulsion to exult in the consequences of their actions or pay dearly in penance? Bodily transformations that are born from an unleashing of female power in American Horror Story’s third season, Coven, not only change subjective bodies, but they also activate corresponding change within that body’s continuing ability to communicate its newly formed sense of self and meaning in the world. Rewritten, reinscribed, and linguistically mapped to new articulations, the decoupling of language from the transformed body of men, such as we encounter for the characters Kyle Spencer and Bastien, is very different to the coherent and constant voice that becomes nearly all that is left of the transformed body of Delphine LaLaurie. If horror is proposed as a natural idiomatic terrain of female expression, then what can we make of that terrain and a human interfacing with it when embodiment is transformed and the subject’s ‘first-born’ articulations are re-mapped?
Details
- Title
- This bloody mess: Articulations from the body transformed in American Horror Story: Coven
- Authors/Creators
- Ellen J. Greenham (PhD. FHEA) (Author)
- Conference
- AHSN Symposium: Transformation (Online - International)
- Identifiers
- 991005708370107891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Murdoch University
- Resource Type
- Conference presentation
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