Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-first-century Horror

Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-First-Century Horror is the first book-length project to focus specifically on the ways that patriarchal decline and post-feminist ideology are portrayed in popular American horror films of the twenty-first century. Through analyses of such films as Orphan, Insidious, and Carrie, Kimberly Jackson reveals how the destruction of male figures and  depictions of female monstrosity in twenty-first-century horror cinema suggest that contemporary American culture finds itself at a cultural standstill between a post-patriarchal society and post-feminist ideology.

Kimberly Jackson is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror (Palgrave, 2013). Her work has been published in such journals as Victorian Literature & Culture, Horror Studies, and Theory, Culture, and Society, as well as numerous edited volumes.

Introduction: The "Post'" - Era: Defining Post-Patriarchy and Post-Feminism
1. Impossible Womanhood and Post-Feminist Hegemony in Bertino's The Strangers and Pierce's Carrie
2. Like Son, Like Father: Tracing the Male Possession Narrative through Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, Koepp's Stir of Echoes, and Wan's Insidious and Insidious 2
3. Family Horror and Media Saturation in Verbinski's The Ring and Derrickson's Sinister
4. Returning to the Archaic Mother: Collet-Serra's Orphan, Muschietti's Mama, and Flanagan's Oculus
Conclusion