Abstract
This chapter explores transgressive horror: a type of horror that crosses the boundaries that shape social order, not to destroy them but to critically interrogate them. It focuses on American transgressive horror of the 1990s, a decade during which horror studies, as well as gender and queer studies, gained prominence as academic disciplines. Not coincidentally, transgressive horror uses the violated body as a metaphorical space to interrogate the boundaries between high and low culture, mind and matter, and fiction and reality. Authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z. Brite, and Mark Z. Danielewski use familiar horror tropes, including the serial killer, the vampire, and the haunted house to analyze gender and sexuality as social constructions and draw connections between mainstream and margins.
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Notes
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This chapter cannot possibly cover all authors who explore transgression in their work, even when restricting itself to the 1990s, but readers might want to explore authors such as J.G. Ballard, Clive Barker, Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Homes, Chuck Palahniuk, and Irvine Welsh.
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According to Auerbach, “[t]he AIDS epidemic, widely publicized by the early 1980s, infected the decade’s already stricken vampires … Once the etiology of AIDS became clear, blood could no longer be the life; vampirism mutated from hideous appetite to nausea” (1995, p. 175).
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Apart from Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), important texts in this field include bell hooks’s Outlaw Culture (1994), Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw (1994), R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (1995), and Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998).
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d’Hont, C. (2018). Boundary Crossing and Cultural Creation: Transgressive Horror and Politics of the 1990s. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_29
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