Carol Jeanne Clover (born July 31, 1940) is an American professor of Medieval Studies (Early Northern Europe) and American Film at the University of California, Berkeley. Clover has been widely published in her areas of expertise, and is the author of three books. [2] Clover's 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film achieved popularity beyond academe. [3] [4] Clover is credited with developing the " final girl" theory in the horror genre, which has changed both popular and academic conceptions of gender in horror films.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws - Google Books

Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000530 Openlibrary_edition She describes the slasher film a a pre-technological genre because of its attachment to weapons like chainsaws, daggers, and knives, the absence of guns, as well as the consistent failing of technologies like elevators, phones, cars, etc. She also notes how these sorts of weapons satiate audience’s taboo curiosity to see the inside of the human body. Telling Evidence in Njáls saga", in Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller, ed. by Kate Gilbert and Stephen D. White, Medieval Law and Its Practice, 24 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp.175–88 doi: 10.1163/9789004366374_011. In her reading of both particular horror films and of film and gender theory, Clover does what every cultural critic hopes to: she calls into question our habits of seeing. ---Ramona Naddaff, Artforum Jones knows horror and he often uses expectations of the genre to his full advantage. There is a Christine-like car haunting going on here (this is a story where the less you know going in the better so I won’t spoil much) that makes you question if the haunting is real or only in Jenna’s head. Knowing it is horror, you kind of play along but there are a few moments where you can feel him winking at the reader like, oh have I fooled you, or is there more to come? It was delightful. It’s also always satisfying to read a revenge tale against an abusive asshole, so that was fun.In her reading of both particular horror films and of film and gender theory, Clover does what every cultural critic hopes to: she calls into question our habits of seeing."—Ramona Naddaff, Artforum Clover makes a convincing case for studying the pulp-pop excesses of ‘exploitation' horror as a reflection of our psychic times."—Misha Berson, San Francisco Chronicle A] brilliant analysis of gender and its disturbances in modern horror films. . . . Bubbling away beneath Clover's multi-faceted readings of slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films is the question of what the viewer gets out of them. . . . [She] argues that most horror films are obsessed with feminism, playing out plots which climax with an image of (masculinized) female power and offering visual pleasures which are organized not around a mastering gaze, but around a more radical "victim-identified' look. ---Linda Ruth Williams, Sight and Sound

Men, Women, and Chain Saws - De Gruyter Men, Women, and Chain Saws - De Gruyter

Carol Clover's compelling [book] challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture. . . . She suggests that the "low tradition' in horror movies possesses positive subversive potential, a space to explore gender ambiguity and transgress traditional boundaries of masculinity and femininity."—Andrea Walsh, The Boston Globe

the new prominence of women is the structural effect of a greater investment in the victim function… modern horror seems especially interested in the trials of everyperson, and everyperson is on his or her own in facing the menace, without help from the authorities…it is not only in their capacity as victims that these women appear in these films. They are, in fact, protagonists in the full sense: they combine the functions of suffering victim and avenging hero. (17)

Men, Women, - JSTOR Men, Women, - JSTOR

Fascinating, Clover has shown how the allegedly naïve makers of crude films have done something more schooled directors have difficulty doing - creating females with whom male veiwers are quite prepared to identify with on the most profound levels"— The Modern Review not to mention that she establishes young, heterosexual men as the primary audience for low-brow horror through anecdotal evidence from movie-theatre employees and video store clerks, which is weirdly weak evidence on which to support such an academic book. but we'll keep it pushing.)

Chapter 1: Her Body, Himself

the “certain link” that puts killer and Final Girl on terms, at least briefly, is more than “sexual repression.” It is also a shared masculinity, materialized in “all those phallic symbols”- and it is also a shared femininity, materialized in what comes next (and what Carpenter, perhaps significantly , fails to mention): the castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer at her hands. The Final Girl has not just manned herself; she specifically unmans an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with. By the time the drama has played itself out, darkness yields to light (typically as day breaks) and the close quarters of the barn (closet, elevator, attic, basement) give way to the open expanse of the yard (field, road, lake-scape, cliff). With the Final Girl’s appropriation of “all those phallic symbols” comes the dispelling of the “uterine” threat as well. (49) Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female. Abject terror, in short, is gendered feminine, and the more concerned a given film is with that condition- and it is the essence of modern horror- the more likely the femaleness of the victim. It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swiftly or offscreen, and that prolonged struggles, in which the victim has time to contemplate her imminent destruction, inevitably figure females. Only when one encounters the rare expression of abject terror on the part of a male… does one apprehend the full extent of the cinematic double standard in such matters. (51) urn:lcp:menwomenchainsaw0000clov:epub:f632b596-4b8a-4a76-8f20-76d2c54b2873 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier menwomenchainsaw0000clov Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2r33pj0vph Invoice 1652 Isbn 0851703313 Hildigunnr's Lament: Women in Bloodfeud." In Structure and Meaning. Ed. Gerd Wolfgang Weber, et al. Odense Univ. Press, 1987. And yeah, the Freudian stuff is completely exhausting. Of course there’s a lot to be said about the sexual subtext of many horror films. But wow, I never knew there were so many ways to subconsciously symbolize genitalia. Penises and vaginas and metaphorical sex as far as the eye can see! And this focus on phalluses really brings the bio-essentialist perspective to the forefront, which makes it all even worse.