Book Launch & Film Screening: MONSTROUS BITCH by Eleanor Johnson

The Twisted Spine is so excited to welcome back one of Columbia University’s most popular professors, Eleanor Johnson (Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism)!

Eleanor returns to The Twisted Spine to celebrate the release of her newest book, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women, a history of women (supposedly) behaving badly. Following the lecture and conversation, there will be a signing and a screening of The Witch (2016).

About Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women:

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.