ABSTRACT

As Creed’s own work in relation to the archaic mother (“the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end”) has demonstrated, the monstrous-feminine when linked with older women as witches suggests more than an abject tradition and helps us reinterpret a long and dreary history in world cinema and culture. Recent films made by Bulgarian women directors are a case in point. For example, Iglika Trifonova: A Letter to America (2001) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDBDvVKFAc" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDBDvVKFAc and Zornitsa Sophia’s Mila from Mars (2004) https://jeni-bg-kino.com/en/zornica_sofia.php" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://jeni-bg-kino.com/en/zornica_sofia.php depict a curious cult of the grandmother to suggest a further and unexpected semiotic resonance where there appears to be new respect for their abilities to survive and read the (hard) times. In both her paintings and her written work, Leonora Carrington also helps us rethink this category of abjection, particularly her novel The Hearing Trumpet (from which my title is taken). My chapter will use these examples and others to re-imagine the ways in which this particular category of monstrous femininity might be re-imagined. The conceptual framework (apart from Creed’s legacy) will include my recent work in affect theory that requires it to be more reflexive about the translation involved in its dependency on European traditions for its alleged universalism: https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2016/07/decolonising-theories-of-the-emotions/" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2016/07/decolonising-theories-of-the-emotions/