The Female Grotesque

"Strange, remarkable, tragic, terrible, diseased, withered, and unruly." The cultural associations with the grotesque are deeply embedded in western consciousness and culture. In "The Female Grotesque, " Mary Russo generates a compelling reading of the "female grotesque" by rigorously interrogating a vast and impressive array of theoretical, visual, literary, autiobiographical, and performance texts.
Whether its the foregrounding of what Russo terms the "aerial sublime" in the work of Wim Wenders and Amelia Earhart or the provocative films of Ulrike Ottinger ("Freak Orlando"), Russo places herself in the critical tradition which recuperats aspects of the grotesque as transgressive. Emphasizing the relationship between gender and grotesque, Russo argues that the "female grotesque" is less of a category than it is an operation through which genders and identities are both constituted and de-constituted, excluded or not. Drawing upon Bahktin and Kristeva, Freud, and Zizek, Russo traces the salient connections between abjection, the uncanny and the grotesque. She focuses on the double logics of the grotesque in the works of Angela Carter, David Cronenberg ("Dead Ringers"), and Georges du Maurier's "Trilby," adroitly illuminating the grotesque as a process through which differently gendered bodies are deployed in interesting, new and possibly transformative ways.