The Inevitable Intersection of Violence and Horror: An Introduction
The complex and diverse nature of horror, sex, and gender studies coincides with the curiously violent disposition of our society and diverse culture. The impact of society’s unyielding grasp on our understanding and naivety towards gender evidently saturates every crack and crevice of who we are and what we do. It seeps into our everyday lives and subtly influences the actions and functions of our communities, both small and large. Violence, like gender, also dictates our lives, and coupled with power, it works to influence and manipulate the things we think and do. Horror films and television shows portray thrilling and terrifying stories which often work to play off of realistic or relatable aspects of human life. They use direct and indirect forms of violence to frighten their audiences and reinforce norms established by society. The horror genre presents itself as the quintessential model for analyzing the myriad of violent forces that present themselves in film as well as reality. These acts of violence and formulaic phenomena presented in horror films showcase and emphasize the way society influences and feeds off of itself to generate the tools necessary to police and effectively normalize the people within it. Through the analysis of Ridley Scott’s Alien, as well as a combination of theories concerning politics, power, violence, and gender, I mean to deconstruct the ways in which the horror genre manipulates and introduces nuanced details of our societal structure to reinforce the normal and punish the abnormal.
Violence, Power, and Justification
Firstly, before dissecting their occurrences in film, it is important to adequately understand the structures of violence that are apparent within our society. These forms of violence are presented within the horror genre to demonstrate the everyday occurrences of stereotyping and the abuse of structural systems to ostracize and harmfully target identities that fall short of what is perceived as normal. Violence and power play a critical role in developing the societal guidelines by which identities are viewed as abject or monstrous, deeming them worthy of criticism or punishment by methods of self-policing. Violence is deeply intertwined with the structure and function of our culture and society, and horror movies hold a fascinating role as the entertainment sphere of violence in action for our viewing (dis)pleasure.
Violence is one of the most basic components or units of our society without which we would not function or live in many of same ways that we do today. As described by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung in “Violence, war, and their impact: On visible and invisible effects of violence”, violence is any harmful force that limits people’s options (Galtung 10-13). Types of violence can be further differentiated by dividing it into three categories, which Galtung collectively refers to as the triangle of violence (see figure 1). Observed as visible violence, direct violence is the product of rooted invisible violence, or the cultural and structural violence that we may not physically see. Galtung describes these roots as (1) a “culture of violence (heroic, patriotic, patriarchic, etc.), and (2) a structure that itself is violent by being too repressive, exploitative or alienating; too tight or too loose for the comfort of people” (Galtung 5). It is in these ways that violence serves to limit the choices of individuals within a society. Through the manipulation and usage of violence, individuals or systems can gain the defining feature of control and exploitation: power.
Figure 1. The Triangle of Violence (Galtung 4)
Political scientist Michael Taylor in his book Community, Anarchy, and Liberty argues that, through the manipulation and control of incentives, threats, offers, and throffers (which refer to the combination of a threat and an offer), power is the ability to limit or extend the actions of others (Taylor 11-13). Power utilizes violence as a tool, thus altering the choices and actions that individuals can perform. In exercising direct violence, both physical or verbal, limitations can be expressed that change the way an individual uses their body. In certain contexts, it can also forcefully influence how one perceives themselves or others, affecting them in ways beyond their physical body (ie. emotional, psychological harm). Direct violence is often linked to an existing form of structural violence and/or reinforced by cultural violence, both of which have their own unique means of limiting the abilities of individuals affected by them. A plethora of examples displaying structural violence can be observed by viewing the role and functions of the state in relation to its people. Laws and regulations can be put into place that unjustly limit the choices of individuals under the state’s rules of law and practice. A model case of direct violence that stems from an instance of structural violence are drug regulations and the criminalization of illegal substance users, exercised by the government’s implementation and enforcement of legal law. Cases of direct violence occur perpetually around the globe in correspondence with a state’s praxis of power which is exerted through their application of systematic violence and support of violent structures. This provides a basis for understanding the relationship between direct and structural violence.
Cultural violence is just as prominent as its related forms and the understanding of how it presents itself is essential for applying it to the lense of analysis we will later use when discussing the horror genre. Cultural violence directly relates to the ideologies held by the population of a given culture, implying that cultural violence changes and is divergent based on which culture you are observing. It can be assumed from this point forward that when I discuss the word or allude to the idea of culture, I speak of western civilization and more specifically the culture of the modern American society. Examples of cultural violence in America stem from beliefs in ideas similar to and including that of militarism, patriotism, isolationism, racism, sexism, methods of parenting, educational priorities, etcetera. The multitude of attitudes held within a society inevitably complicate our understanding of how they may limit the available actions or choices of members outside and within the society itself. Due to the comprehensively expressive nature of violence, I find it incredibly challenging to digress from violence as the root of our culture’s inevitably oppressive normative disposition.
The most important characteristic of cultural violence is that it is a motivator and a legitimizing factor for other forms of violence. It provides individuals and the society itself with justifications for violent and harmful actions, and in tandem with structural violence, it gives rise to the systems of oppression we experience in our culture today. Conflict resolution theorist William Hathaway asserts that this type of violence provides a society with “feelings of superiority/inferiority based on class, race, sex, religion, and nationality” and these things are “inculcated in us as children and shape our assumptions about us and the world” (Hathaway). This instilling of beliefs through development will be discussed further in combination with theories of gender. As the model of Galtung’s triangle of violence suggests, direct, structural, and cultural violence are never isolated in their effects. Cultural violence serves to provide a context for both systematic oppression as well as direct and physical harm. There is both a visible and invisible cycle of violent reinforcement that hides beneath the bed of culture, pulling the strings that dictate how we develop, act, and think, constantly influencing our interactions with the world. These things are inseparable from our identities; they are intertwined with our understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender, and in turn, we are forced to view the world through an often invisible, violent, and oppressive lense.
Perception of Identity
Before intersecting violence and power with an analysis of sex and gender, I feel it is essential to distinguish the important differences between what is sex and what is gender. There is a precise and arguable separation between the sex and gender of a character, specifically in the context of film and media, and even more importantly, those categorized within the horror genre. Consequently, this divide allows for horror films to tinker with and manipulate the gender of a character while maintaining a purposeful lack of change in the sex of that same character. Sex is often referred to and understood as the biological identification of the individual in question, typically either male or female, and it is generally understood that film does not traditionally change these features. The sex of a character is most often determined by the audience through presumption because the actor playing the character is typically assumed to be either male or female. In contrast to this, horror films allow room for the gender of a character to be altered and this change commonly deviates from our society’s accepted norms. When we think of sex and gender, the most quintessential model that society provides is that of the male/masculine and female/feminine sex and gender combinations. These combinations form the foundation for countless stereotypes and social standards that saturate everyday life, of which we as a society work tirelessly to perpetuate and self-enforce through various expressions of violence.
The separation of gender and sex are significant for two defining reasons. Firstly, as a society, we consistently allow the stereotyping and normative policing to occur within both gender and sex. It can be observed that they are often intertwined, such as that of the weak and timid female/feminine stereotype, which may be influenced by concepts of femininity and the female body. To clarify, this is not about whether or not the individual fulfills this stereotype, but rather the apparent discourse between the gender or sex of the individual and society’s interpretation and premeditated function for said individual’s gender and sex. Secondly, sexuality is undeniably related to biological sex, however it is much more important to look at the gender in relation to sex rather than focusing on only one of the two aspects. For instance, an individual with the identity of female/masculine or male/feminine gender-sex combination may be stereotyped as a different sexuality than one that coincides with heteronormative society. In other words, straying too far from the normal gender and sex relations may bring into question an individual’s sexuality. These identities cannot be reasonably separated when analyzing their implications because they may complicate one another’s individual effects. Again, regardless of whether the individual in question meets those stereotypical qualities, it is important to question society’s role in determining those standard features in relation to the gender and sex of the individual. These ideas of sexuality and social policing provide the next step for understanding the relationship between sex, gender, and violence.
The Framework of Performativity
Gender and feminist theorist Judith Butler provides a unique perspective with which we may view and decipher the role gender plays in our lives. Her questioning of a theoretical “gender hierarchy” and its potential role in creating a heterosexual hegemony is compelling to consider alongside her critical theory of gender performativity, of which she outlines in her book Gender Trouble. To understand the theory of performativity, it is important to distinguish between gender performativity and gender performance, as Butler herself has made note that they are significant enough to differentiate. To say gender is performative is to say that we act with the assumption of truth in our role. We behave in accordance with the dominant societal boundaries and structures that adhere us to cultural norms. In other words, when we act as a man or a woman, we act as if society’s concept of what a man or a woman is is who we are. To say that gender is a performance is to simply say that we act our gender, similar to that of a role in a play or a movie, saying and doing things that are decided, influenced, and judged by a hegemonic normative society. Butler emphasizes the notion of acting, saying “performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (Butler xv). She theorizes that the performance of a gender is not something an individual does or can terminate, as implied by the action of performance, but instead, the performance of our gender creates the individual (Butler). I believe that our perception of gender is limited to the context of our physical bodies; it is learned and experienced over the duration of our lifetimes to become a fundamental characteristic of our identities, and in combination with the complexity of biology, is developed and enforced by our society through various systems and applications of violence.
Following her theories of gender and sexuality, Butler discusses violence in relation to her own experiences and through the observation of others. She explains the difficulty of bringing the view of violence into the conversation of gender at the time of her development “precisely because gender was so taken for granted at the same time that it was violently policed. It was assumed to be a natural manifestation of sex or a cultural constant that no human agency could hope to revise” (Butler xxi). It is noteworthy to consider the historical context of gender in America as well as the believed linkage between gender, sexuality, and biological sex. Gender could be considered a paradigmatic system that moderates and formulates our functions as a society. There is a clear connection between the idea of gender as a natural manifestation of sex and how that notion may be used to violently police individual’s genders to adhere to norms. Invisible violence, both cultural and structural, contribute to the active policing and construction of what it means to be normative, and in turn what it means to be created and defined by the performance of gender.
A Horrifically Violent Disposition
Turning to horror films, it cannot be ignored that Butler’s theory of performativity overlaps with the analysis of films in the way that we perform gender much in the same way that an actor performs a role in a film. We play a role in our society, written and directed by the application of norms through violence and social pressures, applied by both visible and invisible powers. Horror films, almost universally assumed to be the most violent film genre, create a canvas for the analysis of violence through the lense of projection and fear within our own culture. The analysis of gender in horror films allows for a deeper understanding of the real life parallel that gender assumes within our culture outside the theater. The brutal displays of direct violence and sometimes not-so-subtle acts of social or structural violence provide a framework for investigating the relationship between our culture’s adverse attitude towards the abnormal or conflicting realities that question hegemonic normativity. Galtung’s theories of violence provide a vast amount of insight into the layers of society that construct the presence and roles of gender and sex and how those constructs are maintained through a vicious cycle of performance and violent self-enforcement. Judith Butler provides us with an understanding of how gender is performed and policed, carefully narrating our behavior to subdue the abnormal. Horror films present us with specific examples with which we can observe these phenomena function from afar, from the safety of our couches with popcorn and friends, allowing us to analyze the relationships between the powerful roles gender and violence play in society.
To showcase some of these examples, I chose the 1979 science-fiction horror film Alien. The film begins by panning the camera through the ominous and empty halls of the Nostromo, a commercial space ship carrying seven crew members. The ship’s computer, named Mother, awakens the crew members from stasis in order to investigate a transmission received from an alien vessel. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) deciphers the transmission to be a sort of warning, not a distress signal. While searching the alien ship, one of the crew members, Kane, becomes host to a volatile creature that penetrates his space suit. When the search crew attempts to return to the Nostromo to seek medical attention for Kane, Ripley refuses to let them on board because it violates quarantine procedures. The crew’s science officer, Ash, ignores Ripley and lets them in, giving the creature, now attached to Kane’s face, time to develop. The creature (resembling an enormous parasitic organism) is found to be impossible to remove without killing Kane but is discovered detached and dead shortly after. Then, before returning to stasis, the crew witnesses a small alien creature erupt from within Kane’s chest, killing him and escaping into the maze of hallways aboard the ship. The creature grows incredibly quickly and develops an intelligence capable of hunting down and killing most of the crew members, leaving Ripley to dictate the survival of the remaining crew. The film concludes with Ripley as the only and final survivor, forced to fight the alien to the very end.
The monsters depicted in horror films are often unique and entertaining hosts for expressing violence and punishment towards rejected behaviors and identities. Film theorist Stephen Scobie entertains the idea that “monsters of horror fiction are embodiments or manifestations of inner, psychic forces” (Scobie 80-81). The horrific monster is both a vessel for producing violence as well as a manifestation of societal abjection (ie. the “other”). In Alien, the creature attaches itself to Kane, the executive officer of the Nostromo. This means that when Ripley refuses to let them on board, citing quarantine procedures, she is the acting officer and the crew member with the most power in the context of the hierarchy of officers in charge of the Nostromo. Despite this, Ash ignores her and opens the door to the ship anyway. In this scene, the monster acts as a catalyst for the power dynamic to shift towards the normative role, masculinity, giving Ripley the authority to give orders but also Ash to ignore them. The assumption that Ash has the greater authority because he is a male character who is implied to know better than the female character is an instance of cultural violence justifying the refusal to accept Ripley as a competent authority. Ripley assumes masculine gender traits to assert herself as a commanding officer, but is trumped by Ash’s male/masculine identity in-line with normative gender roles.
The monster as a representation of societal abjection is perfectly captured in Alien. Despite the impossibility of determining its gender as one would with human characters, Scobie asserts that “the beast is primarily coded as male,” which is problematic (Scobie 82). This is because monstrosity in horror analysis is almost always unmistakably female “and [is] explicitly identified with motherhood” (Scobie 82). The creature in Alien is unmistakably associated with characteristics of childbirth and reproduction. The problematic nature of this is understood by realizing that these characteristics code the monster as male/feminine, prominently displaying aspects and qualities that society deems abject, identifying the alien creature as the “other”. The male/feminine identity is arguably the most monstrously depicted gender-sex combination in the horror genre. It embodies the aggressive and intelligent male identity while combined with the abject feminine characteristics of reproduction and motherhood. The creature violently terrorizes the crew members and brutally kills them, leaving Ripley as the only surviving crew member of the film. This can be seen as a metaphor for the abject qualities manifested in the monster threatening and disrupting normative social functions.
Another example of the monster serving as a threat to normativity is when Kane is killed and unintentionally releases the monster into the ship. Kane, as an executive officer, serves almost as a patriarchal authority when it comes to taking action in the film. His curiosity initiates the investigation of the alien ship where he is eventually attacked by the monster and forced to “give birth” to the monstrous “other” that kills most of the crew. The monster begins its life by impregnating a male authority figure in a position of power, and then continues to impregnate the mothership with the help of Ash ignoring Ripley’s orders. Kane, as a male/masculine character, is to perform his role as a authority figure much like any other male in a patriarchal system. Because of this, his role is threatened and he is killed by the monster, violently forcing him to give birth to a cycle of more direct violence. The genre’s use of direct violence demonstrates that the hegemonic normativity of the patriarchy is aggressively and violently threatened by the existence of the abnormal.
Horrifying Reality
Through the perspectives and theories provided by Galtung and Taylor, we can view violence and power as tools for reinforcing normativity and rejecting the abnormal. Butler’s theories of gender and the relationship between sex and gender give key components to comprehending how those tools are used in film as well as reality. When applied to the context of horror films, violence and gender theory construct a curious and powerful narrative that explores the ways in which horror manipulates aspects of society considered to be abject and threatening to hegemonic normativity. Ridley Scott’s Alien, while not the only nor perfect example of these qualities, provides an introduction to deciphering the violent methods used by the horror genre to punish the abnormal and reinforce and support normativity. Though fiction, horror films give us a foundation for analyzing and studying methods used to police the abnormal and relate them to the reality they are based upon.
Citations
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Galtung, Johan. "Violence, war, and their impact: On visible and invisible effects of violence." Polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy. Vol. 5. 2004.
Hathaway , William T. “Varieties of Violence: Structural, Cultural, and Direct.” TRANSCEND Media Service, www.transcend.org/tms/2013/10/varieties-of-violence-structural-cultural-and-direct/.
Scott, Ridley, director. Alien. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1979.
Scobie, Stephen. “What's the Story, Mother?: The Mourning of the Alien.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, pp. 80–93. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4240216.
Taylor, Michael. Community, anarchy and liberty. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
