Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters

by J. Jack Halberstam

In this examination of the monster as cultural object, J. Jack Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Moving from the nineteenth century and the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary horror film exemplified by such movies as Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Candyman, Skin Shows understands the Gothic as a versatile technology, a means of producing monsters that is constantly being rewritten by historically and culturally conditioned fears generated by a shared sense of otherness and difference.
Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Horror, Theory, Queer, Gothic, Monsters, Feminism

232 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 1995

About the author

Jack Halberstam (born December 15, 1961), also known as Judith Halberstam, is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature, as well as serving as the Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC. He is a gender and queer theorist and author.

Halberstam, who accepts masculine and feminine pronouns, as well as the name "Judith," with regard to his gender identity, focuses on the topic of tomboys and female masculinity for his writings. His 1998 Female Masculinity book discusses a common by-product of gender binarism, termed "the bathroom problem" with outlining the dangerous and awkward dilemma of a perceived gender deviant's justification of presence in a gender-policed zone, such as a public bathroom, and the identity implications of "passing" therein.

Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures in the United States and internationally on queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film and animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on fascism and (homo)sexuality.

Reviews

[Cru · Rating 5 out of 5]

idea after idea after idea
juicy afffffffffff

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the few truly academic texts that I would recommend to laypeople. It does a excellent job laying out its theoretical framework and presenting a clear, even entertaining argument. Halberstam's connections between depictions of race, gender and sexuality are wonderfully done - they are useful for anyone trying to make similar connections in whatever genre they've chosen for their project. I especially liked how she extended the Gothic not to the overtly gothically-inspired materials of the twentieth-century, instead moving onto to both high and low horror films. Given the role late eighteenth-century Gothic novels had in the literary hierarchy at the time, a connection to the Candyman films is a brilliant continuation.

[Charles Michael Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the finest pieces of scholarship I've ever read. If you're interested in a complex study of the Gothic and Monstrosity written in clear, jargon-free prose, you must read this book.

[Delphine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Jack Halberstam you beautiful intelligent person!

This text feels so tailored to me and everything I’m interested in. Some great insights into the media of horror across time and space. The antisemitism angle is very interesting and something I’ve always subconsciously noticed but very affirming to view on the page.

I really want a movie night with him :D

[J.P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very insightful in regards to cannibalism.

[Rambling Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halbertsam’s training as a literary shines through here via their study of gothic texts and horror film. While Halberstam’s claims about posthumanism here feel a bit underdeveloped or possibly just outdated in an era where posthumanism has a more explicit sci-fi bent, the focus on how Gothic and horror creates Others is fascinating, as are the sections dedicated to skin and the body.

[nadine · Rating 4 out of 5]

soooooo gooood! I felt stuck in the psychoanalysis angle for my thesis because all the material I’ve read thus far is very much anchored in that and Halberstam successfully outlines the possibilities but also limitations of these theories for anything gothic & horror related. very enlightening for me.

4/5

[Michael Benavidez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm gonna preface this whole review with the total fact that I am not a deep intellectual. I have not gone to college or studied or anything. I am dufus with delusions of grandeur and I'm okay with that.
Most of what I know I've learned myself from reading essays like this book.
And really, I did learn a lot. Granted, I've not yet read Frankenstein (though I've consumed so much media about it, adaptations, spoofs, etc.) or The Picture of Dorian Grey (in the process of correcting that now), which are two of the original basis for Gothic that the author uses to deconstruct the genre (the other two being Dracula and Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde.
The essays create multiple ways of seeing the story and what lies beneath. It takes those four stories as the foundation for what we would come to know as Gothic horror, showcase what about them means gothic, as well as giving us the ideas of what the author's intentionally and most times unintentionally put between the lines. The author goes even further at times to display how certain themes can be taken for the world of today, in a world where sexuality and politics are somewhat kinda not really but yes really the same and different. One of the excellent things I found about this was the way the author really went about of connecting these stories into the modern horror of today.
I really want to go a bit more into this, but this is a book I've got to revisit after having read the original Frankenstein and Picture of Dorian Gray (well in my case, listen to.)
Still a valuable read, easy to understand, with ideas galore.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skin Shows is one of those books which landed on my shelves when I was in academia, but which I was so curious about that I kept it around to read (eventually) even after leaving that world behind me. And, truly, I'm glad I did. Although this book is undeniably academic in nature, it's also so accessible and readable that I found myself reading far more in one sitting than I ever would have expected. Halberstam's analysis and discussions of horror, as grouped around both classic literary texts (such as Frankenstein and Dracula) and more recent films (such as Silence of the Lambs and Texas Chainsaw Massacre), range from covering the ground of literary theory on to psychoanalysis, so that an incredible amount of thoughtful commentary is packed into the relatively short book. The ideas are offered with a depth and thoughtfulness that add weight to each discussion of the monstrous and what it entails.

For anyone interested, I'd certainly recommend the book.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure that many wonderful and insightful point were made in this book, but they largely went over my head since I'm not well versed in psychoanalysis (and think that Freud's theories were seriously flawed). The final chapter on slasher films was the best one as it analyzed the use of skin in Texas Chainsaw Massacre Two and Silence of the Lambs and I wish the whole book had been so interesting. I found it curious that in his exploration of the gothic, Jack Halberstam failed to mention Daphne Du Maurier or Shirley Jackson. It was particularly noteworthy since he examined the movie version of The Birds at great length. I just feel like any conversation of the gothic that does not feature the undisputed queens of gothic horror is incomplete. For an examination of gothic horror, the whole thing felt quite dry and bloodless.

[mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book, I think, had already profoundly influenced my relationship to horror before I read it—it was recommended by the professor who taught the queer horror theory class I took 8 years ago. so Skin Shows didn't have the opportunity to revolutionize the way I think about horror upon my finally reading it, but I give it a lot of credit for its treatment of the gothic and the monster. the posthumanist angle towards the end left something to be desired (wasn't as fleshed out as earlier ideas), and I don't love the unnecessary qualifying statements academics insist on using ("In this book, I have been arguing that..."), but Skin Shows was very engaging and readable and compelling overall. I had fun :)

[Sasha Grankin · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible scholarship on Monstrosity and the development of its meaning from classsical Gothic texts 2 postmodern Gothic films. really culminated with the last few chapters on Texas Chainsaw and Silence of the lambs. Also really loved how it thru psychoanalysis under the bus and identified it as working under the same parameters of gothic monstrosity!!! gonna be referencing this book a lot probably.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5?? 3.25??

[Col]

I did read this for school but Jack Halberstam kinda changed my life ngl

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool and thought provoking

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The author makes some interesting observations and arguments for theories about Gothic fiction and modern horror in general, as well as about some specific works. For example: "...while nineteenth-century Gothic monstrosity was a combination of the features of deviant race, class, and gender, within contemporary horror, the monster, for various reasons, tends to show clearly the markings of deviant sexualities and gendering but less clearly the signs of class or race." (p. 3-4) And then: "The fact that monstrosity within contemporary horror seems to have stabilized into an amalgam of sex and gender demonstrates the need to read a history of otherness into and out of the history of Gothic fiction." (p. 6) The author uses anti-Semitism as an example of inspiration for various Gothic monsters, such as Dracula (so Stoker was probably a massive anti-Semite - hate it, but good to know): "Gothic anti-Semitism makes the Jew a monster with bad blood and it defines monstrosity as a mixture of bad blood, unstable gender identity, sexual and economic parasitism, and degeneracy." (p. 91) However, the author did lose me a bit when citing a source that stated that Frankenstein is an allegory for Communism because the monster is literally a collective monster (a collection of parts).

[noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

hoo wee aw shit! this about to be fucking delicious! i had to get me another fucking plate because it was so fucking good! fucking delicious........

have i read this before? yes. did i still have to look over every page 3 times to fully grasp what i was reading? yes. did i care? not in the slightest. halberstam's concept is so straightforward yet so rich in meaning; it's as if he is pointing to something that has been right under our noses this whole time. the film analysis chapters aren't quite as clean as the first half of the book, but they make a compelling case for the implications of halberstam's theory across other fields of study and its reparative potential—i can already imagine how such a reading might apply to art history, for example.

overall an absolute delight to revisit and a must-read for monster-lovers of any sort.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite theory books that I reread and come back to all the time. I think about this book constantly, it changed the way I think about horror. This book has some points of contention that have not aged well, particularly how Halberstam writes off Candyman as irredeemably racist and undeserving of the nuanced analysis he later gives to Dracula or Buffalo Bill. But, there are so many things in this book that are still salient and rare to see even 25 years later, whether it's horror analysis from an LGBTQ perspective, or even the fact that psychoanalysis is insufficient without sociopolitical context. The final chapter on postmodern horror and the way that "the banality of evil" has changed horror and even most fiction (I'm thinking blockbuster superhero movies) is still so relevant today.

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I'm still working on this one and skipping around to different chapters. I was intrigued by reading an excerpt from this in The Gothic/Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art series. So far, Halberstam's analyses are extremely rich with possibility; and I like how she posits the monster as a sort of figure of deconstruction by defining monster-ness by its multiplicity of semiotic interpretations. The only drawback is that I think her writing gets annoyingly punny and indulges in word play that at times dumbs down her arguments. You don't need to close every paragraph with a clever aphorism!

[Rhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Halberstam's writing enters accessibly into complex academic discourse, and is a pure pleasure to read. /Skin Shows/ ties the 19th Century Gothic monster to its corollaries in 20th/21st C. horror and slasher films, illuminating the cheeky comedy of the former, and the philosophical depth of the latter. Halberstam's argumentation of the Gothic is based in an intersectional framework that challenges the readers of this book to avoid universalizing readings of Gothic texts from any period. Come for the chainsaws, stay for the impeccably crafted analysis of both literature and its critics.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Monsters are always with us, and, as Halberstam shows, are part of us. Not always an easy book to read, this literary study does take the reader through many shadowy, Gothic hallways, and shows how much monsters reveal about us. More comments may be found at: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms. Halberstam provides a lucid consideration of the gothic as reflected in classic 19th century fiction and late 20th century horror films. Her theories on the gothic as an expression of community fears and viewership in the horror film are innovative. In addition, her careful research has led me to several other works in the field.

[Linda]

So far a great history of the gothic starting with Mary Shelly and 19th c literature. Halberstam traces the gothic up through contemporary horror films and gives a refreshing and much more open feminist and queer theory reading of the "monster as other".

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complex, well researched, thorough - an example of excellent scholarship. This author inspired my PhD, and this book will be a key source for my own study. A must for students of monstrosity, horror, and the cultural representation of embodied identity.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really helpful cross-disciplinary reading for my project! Monsters! Transgressions! Hybrids!

[Peter North · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would definitely recommend this book. I would read it along side Barbara Creed's "The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis." They are both great writers involved in similar topics. Yet, I had more of a liking towards Halberstam writing. They took more interesting risks and comparisons. Kept me on the edge of my seat. I love LGBT themes in horror and it is nice to get some support in this particular perspective of Horror and Monsters.