Political Gutting, Crushed Life and Poetic Justice

Abstract

This chapter will return to Woolf’s Three Guineas and political agency and look at Butler’s Kindred and Parable of the Sower. Thechapter has three sections, each addresses different types of political horror. First there is a return to racial and colonial terror in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989), Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Then the chapter takes us to the outcasts and powerful lost souls in man-eat-men environments in The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2016), Tigers are not Afraid (Issa Lopez, 2017) and Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Chloé Zhao, 2015). In Atlantics (Mati Diop 2019) the sea off the coast of Senegal raises many ghosts from the past and the present. The chapter concludes with a section of eco-horror through the eyes of female directors: Spoor (Agnieska Holland 2017) is an allegory of the feminist backlash in contemporary Poland, wrapped in a hunting tale. Little Joe (Jessica Hausner 2019) and Glass Garden (Shin Sue-won 2017) are contemporary Frankenstein stories with idiosyncratic female scientists.