Contemporary Body Horror

This Element explores body horror, a horror subgenre transformation, loss of control, and the human body's susceptibility to disease. It highlights its growth and ethical implications due to feminist, queer, and anti-racist practitioners' progressive vision, incorporating celebratory liberation and fantastic metamorphoses.

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'Body horror', a horror subgenre concerned with transformation, loss of control and the human body's susceptibility to disease, infection and external harm, has moved into the mainstream to become one of the greatest repositories of biopolitical discourse. Put simply, body horror acts out the power flows of modern life, visualising often imperceptible or ignored processes of marginalisation and behavioural policing, and revealing how interrelations between different social spheres (medical, legal, political, educational) produce embodied identity. This book offers the first sustained study of the types of body horror that have been popular in the twenty-first century and centres on the representational and ideological work they carry out. It proposes that, thanks to the progressive vision of feminist, queer and anti-racist practitioners, this important subgenre has expanded its ethical horizons and even found a sense of celebratory liberation in fantastic metamorphoses redolent of contemporary activist movements.