Blood-Red Relations In and Out of Place : Women’s Self-Harm and Supernatural Crime in The Moth Diaries

In Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (a Canadian/ American/Irish co-production), exploring adolescent girls’ friendships and self-harm in a boarding school setting, blood is out of place. It drips from the protagonist’s father’s wrist artery, willingly shed in suicide; involuntarily tarnishes her nightgown as menstrual blood; falls on the school director’s china figurines as nosebleed; and pours in the school library as a vampire-invoked rain. Moth uses blood to manifest the suicide contagion that Rebecca fears she has inherited from her artist father. Blood also signifies her resistance and recovery, enabled by her difficult relationship with her schoolmates, erstwhile best…

Kirja-arvio teoksesta Murha joka ei ollut rikos: Historiaa isku iskulta

Lectio Praecursoria: Sukupuolitettu ja tartuntavaarallinen itsemurha : tabu ja biovalta omaehtoista kuolemaa käsittelevissä englanninkielisissä nykyelokuvissa

Heidi Kosonen väitteli 2.10.2020 Jyväskylän yliopistossa.Vastaväittäjänä oli yliopistonlehtori FT Leena Maija Rossi Helsingin yliopistosta ja kustoksena professori emerita Annika Waenerberg Jyväskylän yliopistosta. Väitöskirja on luettavissa verkossa osoitteessa https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/71870. nonPeerReviewed

From Visceral to the Aesthetic

We recoil at the thought of eating rotten meat or moldy strawberries and feel uncomfortable with the bad breath of a person we do not specifically like. We may feel disgusted when Divine, one of the protagonists of John Waters’ film Pink Flamingos (1972) eats dog feces – or when Akwaeke Emezi, in her debut novel Freshwater (2018), describes how the protagonist, in veterinary school, mutilates cadavers, separates skin from muscle, and lifts “delicate sheets of fascia” with the scalpel (Emezi 2018, 41). Disgust is, alongside surprise, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and contempt mentioned in the list of so-called universal emotions (Ekman 1970). It is often visualized as a wrinkled nose. Acc…