Brabon, Benjamin A., and Stephanie Genz, eds. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture.

Brabon, Benjamin A., and Stephanie Genz, eds. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 256 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-230-00543-6. $69.96.

Brabon and Genz's Postfeminist Gothic collects together twelve essays that focus on the intersections of "postfeminism" (variously defined) and the Gothic in literature and popular culture. The work is eminently readable and, unlike many collections of essays, connected in terms of theory from essay to essay. While the writers' work tackles contemporary fiction, film, and television, they also reference the history of the Gothic novel and the Gothic tradition, as well as contemporary critical perspectives on the Gothic--with an obvious emphasis on feminist approaches. Also important to the text is film theory, including theories of the male gaze famously developed by Laura Mulvey, and theories of subjectivity and performativity as found in the work of Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and N. Katherine Hayles. Each of these critics figures in multiple essays, as do contemporary critics of the female Gothic such as Ellen Moers, Helene Meyers, and Diane Long Hoeveler.

The collection is productively introduced with reflections on our current "postfeminist" moment and the debate surrounding the word "postfeminism" itself. Brabon and Genz seek to open up the definition and its implications for contemporary women and culture. They situate the articles in their book within three areas of contention over the potential meaning of Postfeminist Gothic: Post-feminism, Gothic conventions, and then the Postfeminist Gothic. Their introduction ends by emphasizing the usefulness and dangers of "post" terminology by focusing on "new lines of interpretation [...] that continue to broaden and challenge the meanings of ' postfeminist gothic'" (12). In addition to this introduction, two of the essays, Brabon's "The Spectral Phallus" and Fred Botting's "Flight of The Heroine," are similarly linguistically focused on the connotations implied by the terms Postfeminist, Gothic, and Postfeminist Gothic.

Other essays develop individual critics' interpretations of popular culture objects (texts or films) including the novels After You've Gone and Case Histories (in Lucy Armitt's essay), the film Bride of Chucky (in Judith Halberstam's essay), the Witchblade television series (in Rhonda Wilcox's essay), "post-feminist cinderellas" (in Genz's essay), the film versions of Stepford Wives (in Anne Williams's essay), the film Candyman (in Hoeveler's essay), Nalo Hop kinson's fiction (in Gina Wisker's essay), verse drama Beatrice Chancy (in Donna Heiland's essay), the characters Buffy and Drusilla from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series (in Claire Knowles's essay), and the film Star Trek: First Contact (in Linda Dryden's essay).

While each essay interprets its selected primary text in light of the author's understanding of the concept of Postfeminist Gothic, it quickly becomes clear that the understandings of the terms comprising the rubric differ from essay to essay. Several essays quote from the same theoretical works, but they then use the theory in very different contexts to generate a sort of meaning-matrix for the imaginative creations. These readings effectively make the case for the significance and richness of texts easily dismissed by traditional critics as lacking in value.

As it is impossible in a review to do justice to each essay, I have chosen two that exemplify the range of subjects and approaches found in the volume. On the surface, the four Chucky films may appear to be simplistic, bloody, horror films offering little that requires interpretation. However, Halberstam, in her essay "Neo-Splatter: Bride of Chucky and The Horror of Heteronormativity," explores what she dubs "neo-splatter films" in general and Bride of Chucky in particular as attacks on the desirability of heteronormativity. In fact, she convincingly demonstrates that, in that film, Chucky, his bride, and their teenage, human sidekicks Jesse and Jade seek normal heterosexual relationships, marriage, and family. But their violent and bloody path to normative sexuality exposes the destructive force of the classical, heteronormative family. In fact, violence is done to them by an otherwise normal human couple at the quintessential honeymoon destination Niagara Falls, an essential gesture in locating interpersonal violence as normative.

Halberstam's analysis of Chucky's bride Tiffany's behavior is especially revealing as each gesture that Tiffany makes toward rescuing and revitalizing her "man" is rewarded with abuse. Halberstam thus demonstrates the destructive tensions underlying every such relationship, defining Tiffany and Chucky as the ultimate Gothic monsters while at the same time figuring Tiffany as the quintessential Postfeminist woman. I'd never watched any of the Chucky films in its entirety, but Halberstam nevertheless succeeded in convincing me, a very skeptical reader, that the film functions as a powerful cultural form. For example, she notes that Tiffany speaks often in favor of her right to an equitable place in the marital relationship, but she also continually serves as Chucky's favorite victim who in the course of the movie is burned, stabbed, and finally mutilated after death by the birth of Chucky, Jr., out of her dismembered body.

I will also focus here on Dryden's essay on the Borg Queen character in "She: Gothic Reverberations in Star Trek: First Contact." In contrast to the Chucky movies, I am extremely familiar with the entire Star Trek universe and a whole range of Borg episodes that appear in the later TV series, especially the several Enterprise series, but also Voyager and Deep Space Nine. Dryden focuses specifically on the defeat of the Borg Queen by Picard and Data of the Enterprise. I am sure she would have another reading of the Borg Queen's defeat by the female captain, Katherine Janeway, in the Voyager television series. But in making her argument for the Borg Queen as both Gothic and postfeminist, Dryden relies heavily on a comparison with nineteenth-century novelistic forms, focusing especially on H. Rider Haggard's novel Ayesha. While this comparison may raise some questions of generic difference, she is nonetheless effective in exploring the parallel male fear of the powerful female who is a threat to male-male bonding. For example, Dryden notes that She and the Borg Queen both desire domination over the available world, want to reign over subjugated races, have transformed and long-lived bodies, seek to transform the men they wish as lovers, seek sensual pleasure, have a certain kind of terrible beauty, and transgress rules of physical being. And both are perceived as misusing power to create threats to male friendship, whether it is between father and son, captain and subordinate, or simply male companions.

Read in terms of classic views of the Gothic such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, this parallel characterization is compelling. However, Dryden's discussion of the Borg Queen as a powerful challenge to male hegemony is more of a critical stretch. If one identifies the postfeminist as a strict effacement of feminism in a social and chronological progression, then the Borg Queen is postfeminist but not revolutionary. If, on the other hand, one accepts a more expansive definition of postfeminism, the Borg Queen takes on an almost heroic stature as an opening into alternative, non-heterosexual, non-patriarchal forms of relationship and body configuration. She has convinced me that the Borg Queen is Gothic in conception, compares productively with Haggard's character She if one substitutes technology for magic, and she may be postfeminist if that term is defined narrowly. But a feminist hero? I think not.

This work offers an excellent review of a critical history of the female Gothic and on postfeminism and its relationship to both feminism and the postmodern, as well as insightful re-introductions to both historical and contemporary Gothic popular culture. In this sense, it serves to introduce the reader to a range of contemporary debates on popular culture. While I would not recommend that it be the first collection one read on either the Gothic or Postfeminism, each of the authors ably employs both the concepts and the existing critical theory. It is not, however, suitable for casual reading. One must devote serious attention to most of the essays in order to benefit from their analytical gestures.

Janice M. Bogstad