My article “Torture Born: Representing Pregnancy and Abortion in Contemporary Survival-Horror” has been published in the online version of Sexuality & Culture (print version to follow).
Here is the abstract:
In proportion to the increased emphasis placed on abortion in partisan political debate since the early 2000s, there has been a noticeable upsurge in cultural representations of abortion. This article charts ways in which that increase manifests in contemporary survival-horror. This article contends that numerous contemporary survival-horror films foreground pregnancy. These representations of gravidity reify the pressures that moralistic, partisan political campaigning places on individuals who consider terminating a pregnancy. These films contribute to public discourse by engaging with abortion as an individual, emotional matter, rather than treating abortion as a matter of political principle or a political "means to an end." This article not only charts a relationship between popular culture and its surrounding political context, but also posits that survival horror - a genre that has been disparaged by critics and largely ignored by scholars - makes an important contribution to sexual-political discourse. These films use horror to articulate the things we cannot say about abortion.
I draw on case studies including Dark Corners (dir. Ray Gower, 2006), Frontier(s) (dir. Xavier Gens, 2007), The Hills Run Red (dir. Dave Parker, 2009), Inside (a L’interieur, dirs. Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, 2007), Madness (dirs. Sonny Laguna, David Liljeblad and Tommy Wiklund, 2010),Resurrection County (dir. Matt Zettell, 2008), Timber Falls (dir. Tony Giglio, 2007), and The Wreck (dir. James K. Jones, 2008).
The article is available here (subscription only): http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12119-014-9260-3
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