Horror and the Arts of Feminist Assembly

We live in an era of what Lauren Berlant has called "genre flail." Amid the floods, famine, and fire of accelerating climate disaster, worsening refugee crises, unbounded global war, mass incarceration, femicides, the resurgence of white supremacist movements, and the crushing burden of work and debt, the aesthetic and social forms people share are no longer sufficient to sustain them in the face of the "violence of the world," and so we fumble around for new imaginaries that might hold us together and propel us toward the possibility of just and livable life.1 Across the globe, the "genre flail" has produced women's experiments with new forms of assembly. In Poland in 2016, women wore black to protest the criminalization of abortion, repurposing their history of wearing black to grieve Poland's lack of national independence during the partition years to mourn instead their impending loss of bodily autonomy.2 In the United States, the huddles that emerged from the Women's March turned into sit-ins at the Capitol, block-walking for midterm candidates, and bird-dogging Congress-people in restaurants and elevators. March 8, 2019 marked the third International Women's Strike, where women all over the world again refused to work out of the house or in it, an action driven initially by the Polish women's Black Monday protests and Latin American feminist movements' demonstrations against femicide.3

One of the most important of these experiments has been taking place in Argentina, where the feminist movement has reinvented the genre of the strike. This work has been led by the efforts of Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), a collective founded in 2014 in reaction to an upsurge in femicides in Argentina.4 In 2016, Ni Una Menos began coordinating open assemblies that brought together Argentine women from all walks of life, "taking seriously," as Verónica Gago, scholar-activist with Ni Una Menos, describes, "all that radical heterogeneity in a practical exercise of the composition of bodies and voices, of trajectories and expectations."5 This organizing resulted in Argentina's first national women's strike later that year; in the International Women's Strikes in March of 2017 and 2018; and in recent mass mobilizations in support of legalizing abortion. The new Argentine feminist strike form, along with the international women's strike that it helped shape, enables activists to break with the constraints of what Gago identifies as the tradition of masculinist "trade-union activism (with its economy of visibility, legitimacy, and recognition)" along with the affirmative violence of neoliberal multiculturalism.6 Feminists don't use or inherit the "tool" of the strike, Gago argues, but rather "appropriate" and "overflow" it, so that it might "account for multiple labor realities that escape the borders of waged and unionized work," especially the labor of social reproduction.7

This reworking of the strike form is routed through a long transnational history of socialist feminist thought and organizing, but especially through Ciudad Juárez, one site of the ravages of what Sayak Valencia names "gore capitalism."8 Gago describes how the exploitative working conditions and murderous brutality wielded against young migrant maquila workers in Juárez felt familiar to the activists of Ni Una Menos, as did those women's determined pursuit of their autonomous lives and desires. This feeling of connection produced one of the insights that drives the strike: "the body as a territory is today the object of new colonial conquests, which allows us to connect an archive of feminist struggles to fights for territorial autonomy."9 This insight manifests a transnational and trans-temporal link between neoliberal racial capitalism's violent exploitation and disposal of women's laboring bodies, especially those of women of color and Third World women; indigenous peoples' struggles against plundering multinational corporations to protect their land, water, and sovereignty; and the old Wages for Housework Campaign adage "every miscarriage is a workplace accident" that neatly summarizes the demand to treat the work of social reproduction as women's dangerous labor rather than love selflessly given.10

In Gago's writing and Ni Una Menos's manifestos, the "gore realities" of capitalist and neocolonial cruelty flash up in the blunt language of horror: they describe "gory femicides," the victims "raped and impaled to death," "who only come into our vision as a sequence of cadavers surrounded by horror, in repeated anonymity," and "homes that turn into hells," as well as the terror and rage these conditions produce.11 But that fear, Gago writes, "translates not into victimization but into strategic ability"12 and collective force, a coming-together that also emerges in the register of horror, as in Gago's description of 2016 Argentine women's strike:

The sound of vibrations, not the sound of words, was what brought together the massive, vibrating collective body under the rain.... It was the kind of cry that's made by a blow to the mouth. A howl from a herd. With a warrior disposition. In a conspiracy of pain. In a quagmire that disorganizes the body and moves it. A cry at once very old and brand new, connected to a way of breathing.13

Against the physical violence visited on women's bodies by neoliberalism, through the mutilating dismembering fracturing forces of settler colonial racial capitalism, a movement emerges, a "vibrating collective body." In Ni Una Menos' call for the 2018 International Women's Strike, the movement's collective breath takes the form of a swift-moving infectious contagion, "We began circulating a form of power that disseminates as a virus, and it grows," "it explodes in our protests and our beds."14

The aesthetic of these manifestos resonates with the recent resurgence of horror in feminist literary fiction in Argentina, but also in the United States, in texts ranging from Samanta Schweblin's 2017 novel Fever Dream (Distancia de Rescate) to Mariana Enriquez's 2017 short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (Las Cosas que Perdimos en el Fuego) to Carmen Maria Machado's 2017 short story collection Her Body and Other Parties to Ling Ma's 2018 novel Severance. This resonance continues the long tradition Mark Stevens traces in which "anti-capitalist critique inspires a concomitant aesthetic program"; "a critique of [capitalist] horror," he suggests, "produces horrific forms."15 In this sense, the energy and aesthetics of the Argentine and international feminist remaking of the strike against capitalism's "gore realities" are infusing, and perhaps being infused by, the feminist horror boom. These works repurpose horror conventions in order to confront the entangled forces of environmental destruction, financialization and extraction, and the exploitation of women's labor, viscerally rendering the "intersectionality of problematics" that Gago locates at the heart of the strikes and their "non-identitarian popular, communitarian, indigenous, slum feminisms."16 Like the financial-crisis horror films Annie McClanahan analyzes, these texts reject the "cathartic conservatism" and conventional closure of the horror genre.17 In their refusals, they capture something of the way the Argentine feminist and international women's strikes are reusing old materialist feminist theory and pressing it into an embodied anticolonial, anticapitalist, vitalist, ecofeminist project, one that connects the violence of extractive capitalism and the corporate pollution of the earth to sexual, economic, and toxic violations of women's bodily sovereignty, without re-naturalizing women's bodies as the site of reproductive labor.

Enriquez's title story, which imagines a collective militant response to femicides, is perhaps the most direct allegory for Argentina's feminist insurgency. It opens with "the subway girl" on a Buenos Aires subway, asking her fellow passengers for money for rent and food. No one will hire her because her face is badly scarred; she sustained "deep extensive burns" when her husband poured alcohol on her face while she slept and lit it on fire. Her only recourse is her "audacious" method of soliciting money — she kisses each passenger on the cheek, provoking the passengers' horror at their intimacy with her "lipless mouth," the "hollow of skin" that gapes from her missing eye, the "maroon mask" of her face "crisscrossed by spiderwebs."18 As burnings spread all over the country, women begin to die, and women of all ages congregate in the streets with the subway girl, carrying signs painted with the slogan "WE WILL BE BURNED NO MORE."19 They soon perform more radical acts, staging ceremonies where women run into bonfires. "Burnings are the work of men," explains one of the older women activists, Maria Helena, to the story's point-of-view character Silvina, "They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we're not going to die; we're going to flaunt our scars."20

These fictional women, as does Ni Unos Menos from their reading of Silvia Federici, understand the femicides as "the new witch hunts," recapitulating for neoliberalism the violence against women that secured the transition from feudalism to capitalism by forcibly "subjugating women's labor and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force."21 "We recognise ourselves in these witches," Ni Una Menos member Cecilia Palmeiro writes, "and we adopt their knowledge, knowledge of the body, the control of our health and reproduction"; "we will not let ourselves be burned," Ni Una Menos adds collectively elsewhere, "because this time the fire is ours."22 In Enriquez's story, the horror and power of the Burning Women arises when they choose to walk into the fire that is theirs, and adopt the witches' healing power to survive their acts of self-immolation, setting up secret healing hospitals in old estates and houses. Their actions are guided by the subway girl's provocative response to the femicides: "If they go on like this, men are going to have to get used to us. Soon most women are going to look like me, if they don't die. And wouldn't that be nice? A new kind of beauty."23 The Burning Women thus mount their insurrection against not only the propertizing violence of the femicides, but also the deadening visual regime identified by Laura Mulvey as passive feminine "to-be-looked-at-ness"; they labor instead to make a "longed for world of men and monsters."24 Silvina carries doubts about this appropriation of witch burning, and this annihilation of the visual order, but the story's witches and monsters nonetheless exude the strike's energy, the drive "to form a body together."25

Schweblin's novel Fever Dream makes horror the genre of anticolonial materialist ecofeminist thinking in a slightly different key. Fever Dream opens with a boy murmuring in a woman's ear: she lies stricken and dying in the bed of an emergency clinic. Amanda can't move, but she's talking, engaged in a dialogue with the boy, David, who tells her the source of her condition is "the worms": "we have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being," he tells her, "Because it's important, important for us all."26 David's persistent questioning leads Amanda to recount the past few days of her life, which prove to be an archetypal encounter with what Carol Clover calls the horror genre's "threatening rural Other": Amanda arrives with her daughter Nina to their vacation house in the country; there she meets David's mother Carla, who reveals that something has gone terribly wrong with her son.27 Six years ago, he was poisoned by drinking polluted water, and in her panic, Carla took him to the local healer, who told Carla the only way to save him was for her to perform a "transmigration": to remove part of his spirit into another body, and "to bring an unknown spirit in the sick body," in order to dilute the poison.28 After the transmigration, David was different: his skin covered in spots, he spent his time communing with and burying terminally ill animals. And he is not the only sick child in this rural town: there is a little girl with hydrocephalus at the general store; twenty-eight graves outside Carla's window; and thirty-three "deformed children" with "very pink" "scaly" skin and missing eyebrows and eyelashes who spend their days in the emergency clinic.29 David's questions inexorably push Amanda towards the revelation that might explain these things, as well as her own predicament: he leads her to a moment where she sits with her daughter in the grass outside the soybean farm where Carla works, watching men carry barrels of agrochemicals and pesticides: they stand up, "soaked." "It's not dew," David says.30 In growing horror, Amanda realizes that not only have they been poisoned, but Carla has taken Nina to the local healer in order to endure a transmigration of her own, and there's nothing she can do to stop it.

This is a neoliberal extractive capitalist twist on the classic urbanoia or city revenge horror drama, as Clover has taught us to think of it, in which city people face the "rural victims of their own city comforts" without being able to avail themselves of the law or the protection of the state, and the horrifying country attempts to enact revenge on the city that "uses its money to humiliate country people" and to inflict economic and environmental violence.31 When Carla, whose elegant exterior is betrayed by her house's tacky angel ornaments and plastic flowers that speak to her unrealized bourgeois aspirations, takes Nina for transmigration without parental consent, she leaves urbane Amanda to confront the chemical poisoning of rural life, from which the city insulated her, without patriarchal protection from her husband or doctors who might recognize her chemical exposure for what it is.32 But Schweblin's novel indicts not just the city, but the multinational corporation, invoking without naming Argentina's history with Monsanto, the US multinational company that, beginning in the 1990s, sold Argentinians genetically modified soybeans, along with the weed killer glyphosate (Roundup) that enabled the seeds to grow. Since then, glyphosate has leached into the air, water, and food, leaving Argentine communities struggling to cope with miscarriages, respiratory illness, babies born with birth defects, and cancer.33 (Schweblin has called Fever Dream Argentina's first glyphosate novel.34)

The novel poses its critique of this corporate environmental harm — the horror of chemical exposure that is only "a car ride away" — in relation to maternal anxiety.35 As Gustavo Subero has indicated, representations of maternity in Argentine horror are particularly freighted by the nation's veneration of motherhood, reflected by enduring anti-abortion laws the feminist movement is currently fighting. This devotion was secured in part, Subero explains, through the activism of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who during the Dirty War agitated against the dictatorship's kidnapping, torturing, and murdering of their children, using their motherhood to contest the regime's violence without questioning the sexual division of labor. For Subero, this history has shaped the gender and sexual politics of recent Argentine horror films, which he argues punish or make monstrous girls who desire abortions or reject patriotic motherhood or hegemonic feminine conventions.36 But Fever Dream, while suffused with the terror of maternal dread, radicalizes this tradition. The novel's Spanish title, Distancia de Rescate, is a reference to Amanda's ever-present maternal fear: "I call it rescue distance," she tells David, "that's what I've named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should."37 She envisions this maternal vigilance as a "rope," stretching "tight" when Nina is too far, relaxing when she is close, a practice of warding off "something terrible" that she has inherited from her mother and grandmother.38 David responds to this genealogy of maternal care with the devastating observation, "But you always miss the important thing," and later Amanda realizes: "When Nina and I were on the lawn, among the barrels. It was the rescue distance, it didn't work, I didn't see the danger."39

Here the novel draws on conventions of horror to articulate a feminist anti-capitalist environmentalist critique that is of a piece with what Gago calls, thinking with Rosa Luxemburg, "the political thought of the strike."40 The strike, she argues, has "become an invective against the extension of agribusiness, against cuts to state subsidies, against the moralization of our pleasure, against the forms of war that are directed against us every day (by state and parastate actors), and against the privatization of care"; this new "organizational horizon" has required activists "to map the nonrecognized and nonremunerated ways in which we produce value and to develop a diverse collective image of what we call work."41 The novel's terrifying measure of rescue distance and its failure contributes to this practice of mapping. The failure of Amanda's rescue distance indicates the novel's critique of the privatized relation of maternal care and vigilance: it reframes maternal anxiety as a form of labor that ultimately attends to the wrong thing, that cannot see, much less protect children or animals or themselves from the ravages of capitalist and chemical violence.

The novel thus pushes for reformulation of the labor of attention as a means of challenging how the imperative of maternity privatizes reproductive labor and care such that no one can see the systemic causes of illness. This emphasis culminates at the very end of the novel, when Amanda's now-widowed husband drives out from the city to confront Carla's husband, in hopes of discovering what's gone wrong with his daughter. Neither he nor Carla's husband can see what Carla's second desperate act of transmigration has wrought, that Nina's spirit now partially inhabits David's body, much less the multinational capital and chemical exposure at the root of it. When Amanda's husband drives away:

He doesn't look back. He doesn't see the soy fields, the streams that crisscross the dry plots of land, the miles of open fields empty of livestock, the tenements and the factories as he reaches the city. He doesn't notice that the return trip has grown slower and slower. That there are too many cars, cars and more cars covering every asphalt nerve. Or that the transit is stalled, paralyzed for hours, smoking and effervescent. He doesn't see the important thing: the rope finally slack, like a lit fuse, somewhere; the motionless scourge about to erupt.42

This catalog of inattention brings to mind Jennifer Fay's insight that Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze also "speak[s] to an Anthropocene subject position (one that is perhaps masculine, has a sense of visual mastery, and is duped by his sense of control) over and against the planet's to-be-looked-at-ness."43 Against the husband's sense of mastery and control, rooted in the history of colonial and developmentalist visuality, a genre with well-worn enough conventions that it now permits this list of "not-seeing," the end of the novel refigures rescue distance.44 Now broken, the rope of maternal labor and anxiety is no longer a private tie but a communal fuse: the energy of the women's strike and the power of the earth are ready to erupt against the neoliberal and neo-developmentalist extractivist regime that poisons them. The novel's loose reworking of the genre of rape revenge denaturalizes women's bodies as the site of reproductive labor even as it articulates an ecofeminist position, offering, as Gago suggests the remaking of the strike does, "a practical connection between violence against women and defense of the territories and resources of common life," and "other ways of thinking about territory and, in particular, about the body as a territory (body-territory)."45

This improvisation around "body-territory" occurs in Carmen Maria Machado's horror fiction too. But in the United States, while women are organizing — to block pipelines that will destroy indigenous land and water, to abolish the carceral state (and in the meantime, to demand prisons restore heat to the people inside the carceral state treats as disposable), to reunite migrant families separated at the border, to stop police brutality, to end sexual harassment and gender violence, to improve their labor conditions in their classrooms — the practices of intersectional feminist assembly and anti-settler colonial racial capitalist critique are rusty, having been blunted for years by the seductive stranglehold of neoliberal postfeminist ideology.46 Horror in Machado's work picks at these scabs. Less interested than Schweblin and Enriquez's texts in an ecofeminist anti-capitalist anti-essentialist linking of body and territory, Machado's stories enact instead a different "pedagogy of fear," one that might help readers unlearn the neoliberal capitalist habits that imagine as freedom the ruthless disciplining of one's body and move them instead towards creating new parties and assemblies.47

Her story "Real Women Have Bodies," for instance, finds its characters saddled with student debt amidst an economic recession, unable to find employment beyond minimum wage jobs at the mall selling sequined prom dresses or taking children's portraits. They watch as mothers admonish their daughters that pretzels will make them fat and also zip them into dresses, in pursuit of one that will showcase their bodies without giving them "a reputation."48 The narrator remarks that the dress shop where she works "looks like the view from the inside of a casket."49 In a scenario resonant with Enriquez's story about the femicides, as everyone struggles to get by, an inexplicable contagion spreads: women begin "going incorporeal," "fading away," becoming so insubstantial they are see-through, unable to be touched.50 Yet unlike in "Things We Lost in the Fire," there is no national militant uprising; no attempt to reclaim women's bodies from a plague that makes literal the violence of a capitalist culture that often wishes women would shrink until they are only labor, spectacle, commodity; no attempt to imagine the fading phenomenon as the seed of a women's strike. The narrator's gruesome Bluebeard's chamber-esque discovery comes when she goes home with the daughter of the woman who makes dresses for the store, and realizes that the seamstress is stitching the faded women into the dresses' fabric, stabbing her needle through their invisible skin. Instead of using their ghostly disappearance to enact a general strike, the faded women double down on the logics of gore-commodity-fetishism, using their shimmering incorporeal luminosity to increase surplus value: the dresses sell better with women stitched into them. This horror is compounded by the narrator's realization that the faded women seem to choose this course willingly: "they would just fold themselves into the needlework, like it was what they wanted."51

At the end of the story, the narrator breaks into the dress shop to free the faded women; she cuts them loose from the seams that bind them, but they won't leave, in thrall still to the postfeminist myth that the exploitation and commodification of feminine desire and labor constitutes power and freedom. Hope in the story lies elsewhere, in the rumor of some incorporeal women who, like the Burning Women, are moving collectively to a different end. "Getting themselves into electrical systems and fucking up servers and ATMs and voting machines," these women potentially disrupt the chains of debt, the privatized control of basic resources, and the identitarian politics of representative democracy in order to fulfill Gago's alternate translation of the call of the strike: "we want to change everything."52

---

References