About this Event
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by Eleanor Johnson
For as long as human societies have been telling stories, the patriarchy has felt threatened by women. In this book, Eleanor Johnson provides an engaging cultural history of a figure she calls the “monstrous bitch,” the notorious female who has haunted the patriarchal imagination for centuries, feared for her sexual promiscuity, her exercise of reproductive agency and control, and her outspoken way of contesting patriarchal power.
In a narrative brimming with insight, Johnson traces the origins of female monstrosity to the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia, showing how this infanticidal, hypersexual, loudmouthed monster appears in different guises throughout history. In classical Greece, she reemerges as the sorceress Medea, the child-devouring monster Lamia, and the vengeful Furies. In the medieval and early modern periods, she is an oversexed, baby-slaying, spellcasting witch; in the Romantic and Victorian eras, a vampiress; and in the modern age of psychoanalysis, a mental patient. After this longue durée history, Johnson shows how monstrous bitchery has been challenged and reinterpreted in contemporary cinematic popular culture, becoming an expression of heroism and resistance in films like Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, and The Witch. She demonstrates how deeply embedded the roots of misogyny have become, and why it is more critical today than ever that we expose and address them.
An irreverent look at a pervasive trope that runs through four thousand years of Western culture, Monstrous Bitch reveals that while representations of the powerful woman have evolved over time, the fear and demonization of her remains the same.
About the Author
is the Director of Graduate Admissions and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980); Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England; Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama; and Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve. She is also the Poetry Section editor at Public Books (publicbooks.org).
About the Speakers
is the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has written on Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, the Sidneys, Anne Clifford, Margaret Hoby, and Mary Wroth, as well as on post-Reformation religious culture, the history of reading, and the history of sexuality. Her articles have appeared in Studies in English Literature, English Literary History, Renaissance Drama, PMLA, Early Modern Culture, Huntington Library Quarterly, The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare, The Oxford Companion to Popular Print Culture, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500-1610, and in a wide range of edited collections.
is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and director of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies; he also teaches in American studies. He is the author of Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale University Press; 2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (Schocken Books, 2013); and his newest book, a history of Jewish comedy, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2017.
is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College. She specializes in medieval English literature and book history, especially c. 1100 to 1350. Her current research focuses on the powers and pressures that transitory forms such as rumor and gossip exert on the production and reception of medieval manuscripts and their texts. She is the author of Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England, and is currently at work on a book about medieval wind technology and the circulation of ephemeral culture. Her articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Chaucer Review, Viator, Notes and Queries, Speculum, and elsewhere. She is also a regular contributor to The European Review of Books.
is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature, with a focus in gender and sexuality in contemporary horror media. Their interests range from literature to film to video games, with a particular interest in experimental form and non-traditional and collaborative forms of digital media narrative. Their dissertation "Architectures of Gender in the American Haunted House" utilizes architectural theory to examine the ways in which gender is produced, constructed, or disrupted by the built environment of domestic spaces.
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Event venue & nearby stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
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