The Rise of the Vulva Monster: The Petrifying Pussies, Voracious Vaginas, and Othered Orifices of Posthuman Futures

The film and television industries are no stranger to terrifying gendered monsters. Pulling from iconic and diverse folklore, the genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy have enunciated long-standing human fears in myriad gendered ways. In this thesis, I focus specifically on nonhuman monsters whose mouths, or “maws,” resemble human vulvas. While these monsters have elicited extensive pop-culture scrutiny, there appears to be no overview or systematic mapping of this phenomenon. This thesis enters as a way to explicate and map the unique variabilities as well as the commonalities of what I call vulva monsters. Using textual analysis, I examine the narratives and bodies of eight vulva monsters from western film and television over the last 60 years. I situate them in a typological structure to build an argument for their considerable theoretical potential as a trope and a posthuman figuration. I use the monstrous-feminine and the motif of the vagina dentata as a starting point to both analyze and problematize this common reading and open up space for posthuman irruptions. Specifically, I argue that the bodies of these monsters fall into three typological categories related to corresponding posthuman theory: 1) The Alien Body 2) The Animal Body and 3) The Trans Body. Through this approach, the vulva monster proves to be entangled with essentializing and binary associations of the vulva (like those explained by the monstrous-feminine) and with the complexities of multiple othered bodies. The vulva unites these creatures—through metaphor, representation and materiality—and that opens up for an unhinging of the monstrous from the materially feminine, but not from the not-quite-human. In this way, the vulva monster trope becomes a useful tool for gender theory by providing a way to analyze multiplicity and the more-than-one othering that is at stake for these posthuman boundary creatures