‘A Walking Study in Demonology’: Postfeminism and Popular Misogyny in Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Abstract

This article analyses the 2009 horror-comedy directed by Karyn Kusama, Jennifer’s Body. I describe how this female-centred horror film critiques the postfeminist or neoliberal feminine subject from an angle that aligns most comfortably with antifeminist sentiments and arguments from the centre-right and right. I discuss how a gendered neoliberal discourse of individualism, and the idea that the individual must be ultimately bear responsibility for their own biography, renders the titular character as an illegible subject of sexualised violence. I argue that the film naturalises threats of sexual violence, attributes blame to the violated female body, and renders her illegible as a victim or as person worthy of sympathy and support. I demonstrate how the film is prescient of secular forms of exclusion, specifically popular misogyny and conforms to some of popular misogyny’s circulated myths and philosophies regarding female sexuality.