My Apron is a Chainsaw: Leatherface and His Family Beyond the Masculine Proletariat

October 2024 marks fifty years since audiences were first terrorized by one of the inaugural slasher monsters, Leatherface. According to the critics' consensus, Leatherface and his family of unemployed slaughterhouse workers represent a disenfranchised proletariat in an age of mechanization and deindustrialization. With this premise comes the assumption that Leatherface's form of terror converges with masculine violence, and this seems to be supported by his many brutal attacks on women throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM). However, here I want to explore how Leatherface's gender ambiguity disrupts this narrative and helps us rethink the gendering of class antagonism in a period of capitalist crises, transforming technologies, and shifting class composition.

TCM is a low budget horror film made in 1974, helmed by director Tobe Hooper, and is often seen as one of the first slasher movies. It depicts the journey of five young adults, including sister and brother Sally and Franklin, to investigate an ancestral grave in rural Texas that has been bizarrely desecrated. On their way home the young people pick up a manic hitchhiker who relays with pride that his family were once skilled workers at a slaughterhouse, and we can see from "Hitch's" violent, crazed behavior that the loss of this profession has driven him to madness.

After this ominous encounter, Sally and her friends are in a hurry to get out of town. However, they are unable to find gas, a situation reflecting ongoing oil crises during this moment of stagflation, foreclosures, outsourcing, redundancy, and capitalist crisis, as Chuck Jackson argues.1 While waiting for a gas station to receive supplies they visit their grandparents' estate, which was once luxurious but now appears as a shambling skeleton, again pointing to shifting class markers and capitalist crises. Still imagining himself to be entitled to resources, one of the group, Kirk, brazenly enters a neighbors' house without being invited in. There, he is quickly disabused of this sense of privilege when Leatherface, wearing a hideous human mask, slaughters him as if he were an animal. Leatherface will continue his slaughterhouse-styled massacre of the young people, but he will also prepare, cook, and serve their bodies for dinner. As he does so, he will wear three masks. The first — the "killing mask" or "slaughterhouse mask" or "rage mask" — appears to be male, but the second and third, (which some have called "old lady mask"/"comfort mask" and "pretty woman mask," respectively) point to his gender ambiguity.

Conventionally, these female masks are read as signs of Leatherface's gender dysphoria or analyzed according to a psychoanalytic model of gender and abjection. Additionally, we might read Leatherface's female masks as a simple homage to Ed Gein, the killer who this monster was partially modeled on. And, of course, Leatherface could be read in the long and horrible tradition of transphobically-rendered monsters. However, because of this film's particular emphasis on the themes of class and labor, I think special attention should be given not only to the ways that Leatherface wears female masks, but also how he performs the feminized labor of preparing food and serving food to his family. This behavior troubles conventional categories in ways that do not allow us to disentangle gender and class.

This ambiguity both builds on and challenges Carol Clover's framing of class and gender in slasher films. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Clover discusses TCM  as an example of urbanoia, the encounter between what she calls "the threatening rural other" and urban middle class people.2 This encounter, she argues, embodies the guilt and revulsion felt by the middle class when faced with their dependence on the impoverishment of "others." Clover notes that this dichotomy is almost always gendered, with the middle class seen as soft, feminized victims, and the rural working class characterized as masculine and aggressive as well as backward and undesirable.  

This sense of the class and gendered dynamics of slasher films is affirmed by Mark Steven who discusses this dynamic as a place where the aesthetics of conventional heteronormative pornography converge with the proletarian revenge narrative. Here, the "money shot" is of a masculine proletarian "monster" penetrating his bourgeois female victim, providing the audience with the pleasure of class insurgency, but only in terms that favor heterosexual, masculine urges. Steven's example is a proto-slasher film, Blood Feast, where Ramses, a figure who appears as a working-class immigrant, chooses only victims who are "beautiful bourgeois women."3 Steven's argument also pertains to Leatherface's wielding of a large phallic chainsaw as he endlessly pursues Sally through the last half of TCM.

However, it is simplistic to reduce Leatherface to a prototype of the masculine proletariat as it is a reach to see Sally, a drifter youth, as a bourgeois woman. Both characters are slippery enough to allow a counterintuitive reading of TCM, in which Leatherface—who is an abused, androgynous figure and whose home is invaded by frightening strangers—inhabits the place of the final girl. As Carol Clover notes, Sally's role in TCM marks the debut of this "final girl" figure, and thus TCM marks a tectonic transformation wherein modern horror films cease focusing on the detective plot (as in Psycho) and begin to seize on the hero plot "of tale and epic," with the twist that the hero is generally female.4

Sally ambiguously inhabits this inchoate trope. As Clover lays out:

She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending  A) or to kill him herself (ending B)... The sequence first appears in full-blown form (ending A) in Texas Chain Saw I with Sally's spirited self-defense and eventual rescue.5

Despite this significant role TCM had in developing the final girl, however, her qualities do not fully gel until the arrival of Laurie in Halloween (1978), who marks the transition from the final girl's "passive to active defense."6 With Laurie, we encounter the crystallized final girl who is "the Girl Scout, the bookworm, the mechanic," an overtly intelligent and resourceful, boyish, and virginal young woman.7 None of these qualities can be attributed to Sally, and this porousness renders her relationship to Leatherface symbiotic rather than purely antagonistic.

This nebulousness is generative. As Clover complains in a preface to the 1992 Princeton Classics edition of Men, Women, and Chainsaws, over the years the image of the final girl has been stripped of her complexities and left as a simple strong female lead. Perhaps in TCM, when she is most unformed, the final girl is best able to capture the confusions of gender and class identification during the post-industrial, crisis riddled era into which she was born.

Sally's inchoate status mirrors that of Leatherface who is not the lone slasher we will see cemented later in the genre, but a domestic, sometimes sympathetic, figure, who is part of a group.8 As a monster, in the sense that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen maps out in his well-known Monster Culture (Seven Theses), Leatherface will always escape easy categorization. Rather than affirming a reflexive conflation of masculinity and the proletariat, Leatherface maintains a gendered incoherency that forces us to question this common sense. This aligns with Cohen's insistence that "the monster is dangerous, . . . suspended between forms that threaten[] to smash distinctions," and that its "very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure."9 Or as Jack Halberstam insists, "Monsters are meaning machines. They can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body."10 For Halberstam, monsters function as "narrative technologies that produce the perfect figure for negative identity. Monsters have to be everything the human is not . . . [in order to] make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual."11 As monster, then, there is no possibility for Leatherface to constitute a class threat without also challenging gender and genre boundaries.

Crucially, Cohen argues that the monster appears in times of crisis "as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes."12 One of the key crises that began to be recognized in the 1970s, when TCM was released, is over the iconography of workers. The commonsense concept of the proletariat as a muscled, blue collared, white man was no longer even superficially tenable as deindustrialization, the rise of information and service jobs, as well as surplus unemployed populations and outsourcing expanded. As Michael Denning notes, we need to adjust our understanding of what the "typical" dispossessed subject looks like:

[Rather than a] bread-winning factory worker as the productive base on which a reproductive superstructure is erected, [we should more appropriately] imagine the dispossessed proletarian household as a wageless base of subsistence labor — the "women's work" of cooking, cleaning and caring [ . . . ] We must insist that "proletarian" is not a synonym for "wage laborer" but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market.13

Although he might not be our first association with this sketch of the feminized, neoliberal proletariat, on closer examination Leatherface fits this description.

Like Denning's "dispossessed proletarian household," Leatherface's household is a "wageless base of subsistence labor" where he assumes the position of the housewife, preparing the food and serving it to his male relatives (albeit that food is human meat). Not only does Leatherface receive no financial compensation for his labors, but he is also threatened with domestic abuse when he fails in his duty, as we see in a moment where his brother chases him and beats him, yelling harsh remonstrances for not properly fulfilling his domestic duties. More, if we are to give credence to Carol Clover's canonical reading of Leatherface and his family, they should not only be seen as stand-ins for class resentment, but as "rednecks," who she argues are coded to represent "indigenous peoples on the verge of being deprived of their native lands."14 As such, they come to signify "land and genocide guilt," she says. Leatherface, in Clover's reading, is an encompassing signifier of abjected bodies and labor that have been treated by capital as natural resources, rife for primitive accumulation, or what David Harvey has referred to as ongoing accumulation by dispossession.15

This expropriation of "nature," or what has been seen to be external to capitalism, has been linked by feminist theorists of social reproduction to so-called "women's work." We can thus go further and recognize in Leatherface's deeply othered status, the exploitation and secretion of reproductive labor: that is, traditionally feminized work that is not done at the point of production but is still essential to all production. Since capitalism's onset, production and reproduction have formed a gendered binary that may be separated spatially but is theoretically and operationally united. While reproductive labor has been seen as natural or less-important work, it is an essential means to replenish the traditional male worker and society as a whole. Despite his phallic weapon, Leatherface's activities more closely correspond to this reproductive activity than to that of the masculinized productive worker. In fact, his erect chainsaw may be an attempt to compensate for this reality.

As Tithi Bhattacharya argues, there is no truly "non-economic" sphere of the capitalist system. That which is viewed as non-economic must be understood as conditioned by the economic; both are essential components of a totality which shifts with historical transformations.16 Without so-called "non-economic" activities — such as raising children, caring for elders, and sustaining households and communities — capitalism would have no human subjects, no society, no culture, no social bonds. And yet, these crucial services are mostly unwaged, and instead rewarded, as Nancy Fraser argues, "In the coin of 'love and virtue.'"17 In TCM we see what these activities would look like if the mask of love and idealized sentimentality surrounding the family was discarded, and the raw meat of economic expropriation and patriarchal hierarchy below was exposed. Devoid of the tender mercies of the "angel of the household," TCM's family of cannibal monsters exhibit an unadulterated peek into what Jordy Rosenberg calls the "hiddener abode of reproduction."18

Attending to social reproduction allows us to pierce beyond the surface of TCM, which would seem to depict women as simply disposable bodies to be hunted, hammered, hooked, frozen, sawed, and eaten or as embodiments of middle-class obliviousness. The mixed gender group of hapless young people consisting of Sally and Franklin Hardesty and their friends are shown to be incrementally more "civilized" than the murderous Sawyer family, but beyond the superficial differences, there are many parallels between the two clans. Like the Sawyers, these teens are also unemployed and adrift. Unlike the hippie youth of the 1960s, the previous decade, they see no horizon of hope. Instead, they peruse horoscopes and highways for meaning, but find only death. In this sense, they too are wearing masks. They look like the middle-class victims of "the monstrous rural other," but, like the Sawyers, they are also facing obsolescence, even before they are attacked. In other words, everyone in this universe is feminized and precarious, despite their varied outward appearances.

Neither the Sawyers nor the Hardestys and their friends experience unwaged life as leisure. TCM shows that the out-of-work Sawyers never stop working. After losing their jobs, they engage in full time unpaid social reproduction; like many unemployed people, they must fall back on the inadequate resources of the family for survival. In films that are considered more elevated, family relations are often romanticized to the point where they do not appear as sites of labor. In the case of the Sawyers, though, no idealism of this institution is possible. Rather, shared blood leads to bloodshed — the structure of the family is bared to reveal its reliance on the threat of violent domination. This continues the tradition of the American western in which homosocial family structures show the family deprived of its "social sense and social meaning, while leaving its strength of primitive loyalties largely untouched," as Robin Wood puts it.19

Although the Sawyer family consists of only three brothers and a barely alive grandfather, they take on the roles, as Peter Cullen notes, of a traditional gendered family made monstrous, with Grandpa taking the patriarch's seat at the head of the table and Leatherface dolled up as a servile wife.20 What's more, even though the entire family is involved in stages of food preparation, including killing, preparing, and serving — cooking, the task most readily identifiable as "feminized," is still degraded. Cook, the oldest brother, tries to assert his authority, but Hitch insults and dismisses his specialization. "He's nothing, just a cook," Hitch says. "Me and Leatherface do all the work." This denigration of reproductive labor maintains hierarchy in the family even when every other aspect of "civilization" is cast aside, including the taboo against cannibalism. As Mark Steven observes, the Sawyer men have been made obsolete by modernization and capitalist transformations but "for a few minutes their dining room is transformed into the slaughterhouse."21 This is not only emblematic of their desire for an industrialized past, but of the ways that deindustrialization leads to a blurring between public and private spheres of work. 

The film's treatment of these male monsters illustrates our contemporary landscape of exploited social reproduction. They are examples of the new reality for most women and men. Both are looped into a Sisyphean cycle of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor. And yet, instead of solidarity there ensues a stark war for domination, along with what Jason Read calls "negative solidarity" among men, which is "the weak bond orienting isolated and competitive individuals against those who are [seen to be] failing to work or bear their share of austerity."22 This is grotesquely exemplified by the long torturous scene where the Sawyer brothers try to coax their desiccated grandfather into killing Sally with a hammer despite his clear physical inability to do so. This feat, they believe, will reassert his skill and prowess at a job that no longer exists, and thus redeem the whole family's masculine pride.

Leatherface represents this gendered duality as both the wielder of a phallic chainsaw and the wearer of an apron. In his domestic space, Leatherface cowers before Cook's abuse and dedicates himself to servilely feeding his family, all the while wearing the skin-mask of a woman's face over his deformed visage. Yet his gendered humiliation perhaps contributes to the zeal with which he wields his phallic chainsaw.

In this gendered instability Leatherface is mirrored by Franklin, Sally's disabled brother, who is the most marginalized member of the group of youths. Franklin's confinement to a wheelchair is contrasted in the film to the other strong and carefree teens in the group. Like the Sawyers, Franklin is constantly reaching for knives or sausages to compensate for his feelings of castration and emasculation. This grasping of phallic symbols brings Franklin even closer to the Sawyer family when he gnaws on a sausage that turns out to be human meat, making him, like his rural counterparts, a cannibal.

In fact, as Tony Williams argues, Franklin and Hitch become connected through "blood brotherhood" when Hitch slashes his hand and Franklin's wrist, mingling their blood.23 This bond is not only a sign of their outsider status, but of "what will happen when the carriers of living labour power are forced to pursue their work beyond the sphere of industrial producing, a place where they are no longer needed," as Mark Steven argues.24

Another point of gendered equivalence between the two groups is in the depiction of what Carol Clover and Robin Wood call "the terrible house," the horror film's archetypal objectification of toxic domesticity. In this film we see two "terrible houses," the decayed family home of the Hardestys and the macabre corpse-filled house of the Sawyers. Although the teens' familial house once signified prestige and wealth, it is now covered with weeds and completely desiccated. The house is not, then, the symbol of the teens' privilege but of what Robin Wood names as "the dead weight of the past crushing the life of the younger generation," a fate that can be ascribed to the Sawyers as well as the traveling youth.25 This house is both a symbol of the lifeways that have been eradicated by deindustrialization and one that points to the horrors of homemaking for women. As Brigid Cherry notes, the Sawyer house's "sepulchral shrine to the matriarch of the disenfranchised cannibal family" can be seen in relation to the "madwoman in the attic," a key trope in gothic works that undermine myths of domesticity.26

The erosion of the familial home is emphasized by the fact that it is not the Sawyers who penetrate the youth's "safe haven" but the teens who first enter the Sawyers' house without being invited, making the Sawyers the victims of a penetrative assault on their home. At one moment, Jerry temporarily escapes Leatherface's grasp and we can see that what drives Leatherface is not bloodlust but worry and responsibility. The camera focuses on the "monster" as he pensively sits in a chair, internally debating his next move. In his mind, he is the victim of a home invasion and is responsible for converting the unwanted guests to food. Just as the Hardesty house does not protect the kids, Leatherface's house betrays him. Neither is a refuge from the bleakness of poverty and violence, but rather another pitstop on the highway to hell.

As Robin Wood, Mark Steven, and Christopher Sharrett have intimated, only a radically destructive vision can construct an insurrectionary cinema. In TCM's apocalyptic excess we can see more than an elegy for lost working-class culture and solidarity. TCM instead inaugurates a "new left" cinema (one not just belonging to the 70's but to our moment as well) that understands with Mark Steven that the early twentieth century revolutionary figure "has not vanished but has, more precisely, disaggregated into less familiar forms."27 Namely, both the Sawyers and the Hardestys are in danger of becoming part of a surplus population "who subsist only to be managed by police and paramilitaries into prisons, ghettos, camps, and the grave."28

TCM's rough, cheap formal innovations show this surplus population exploding onto the screen with powerful excess. This is more than a lament for the "good old days" of manufacturing employment and the traditional family. The film's apocalypticism points to both the chaotic escalation of capitalist atomization that follows the disintegration of older work regimes and family forms, and the inchoate power of those who have nothing to lose. In the end, Leatherface interminably swings his chainsaw, calling out to a glaring, unforgiving depopulated vista. Meanwhile, Sally, doused in blood, is driven away from the scene laughing maniacally, giving herself over to a triumphant madness beyond language.29 These mirrored, wordless expressions of both power and impotence by the film's two "final girls" and monsters shows the surplus worker and the feminized victim of violence to be intertwined, parallel actors in a world that defies reason, and whose hope lies in a horizon of refusal.

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Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor ofEnglish at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022) from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. Her book What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is forthcoming from Die Die Books. She runs the Facebook group, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films.

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