FEMINIST LYCANTHROPY

‘the worst loup-garous that one can meet’: Reading the werewolf in the Canadian “wilderness”

Kaja Franck

Ginger Snaps (2000) has been recognised as an exemplary example of feminist horror, yet the sequels have received little attention. The final film in the trilogy, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), answers the concerns regarding the ending of the first film – Brigitte kills her sister Ginger, the werewolf of the title − whilst drawing on earlier Gothic traditions. Set in the nineteenth century, the two sisters are trapped in an isolated fort surrounded by frozen forest and attacked by werewolves. This setting echoes another Canadian werewolf narrative, Henry Beaugrand’s ‘The Werwolves' (1898). Beaugrand’s story opens with a group of hunters, woodsmen and militia spending the Christmas period in Fort Richelieu, Quebec. Surrounded by forests, the fort acts a point of civilisation for these frontiersmen. This location evokes North American fears, and the representation of the wooded wilderness within American Gothic literature as full of wild beasts and wild men that surrounded European-American settlements. Beaugrand collapse the ‘wild beasts’ and ‘wild men’ into one hybrid monster: his werewolves are indigenous people. ‘The Werwolves’ reflects racist and colonial attitudes towards the indigenous population. Moreover, the central werewolf of Beaugrand’s narrative is also female.

Using an ecoGothic approach, this paper argues that Ginger Snaps Back challenges the racist and sexist elements of Beaugrand’s earlier text and, in doing so, reacts to the idea that the wilderness is a threatening space. Though the gender of the werewolf remains the same in the film, the werewolf is white. This, and the depiction of the white inhabitants of the fort, uncovers the truth that, rather than being a symbol of civilisation battling against barbarism, the fort symbolises the fear and hatred towards the people and natural world that European settlers believed they found in North America.


PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature no. 7, 2010
One Wolf Girl Battles Against All Mankind
The New Breed of Female Werewolf as Eco-warrior in Contemporary Film and Fiction

Jazmina Cininas

Introduction

As perennial boundary riders of the Culture versus Nature dichotomy,werewolves in Western narratives have always fluctuated between social integration and transgression, serving as barometers of all that exists beyond the parameters of“civilised” society. The hybrid, metamorphosing, bestial werewolf, with its susceptibility to “the call of the wild”, has consistently been designated less-than-human. While the male of the species has enjoyed the greater celebrity, a survey of werewolf film and literature reveals no shortage of female werewolves amongst the shape-shifting population, and there are definite signs that the she-wolf’s “moon” is in the ascendant. The women’s magazine Bust advertised Girls Gone Wild: The New Crop of Female Werewolves on the cover of its Fall 2003 issue, recognising the rising oestrogen level in recent werewolf film and literature, and 2004 saw internet giant Amazon add Beauty Is the Beast: Female Werewolves and Vampires (with subheadings Look at That Tail:Fem Werewolf Movies and That Time of the Month: Fem Werewolf Fiction ) to their So You’d Like To…guides. Indeed, it might be argued that cultural constructions of women share much in common with figurations of the loup garoux, both groups enduring long histories on the “wrong” side of the Self/Other, mind/body, human/animal and culture/nature divides. Ecological feminists argue that patriarchal models of hierarchical thinking, which rank “others” as “closer to nature” and conceptualise the land as “woman”, have been used by Western societies to justify the oppression of women, indigenous populations, minority groups and the nonhuman world throughout the ages. Further, the perception that “closer to nature” equates to “lesser than (white,Western) man” has been essential to the creation and maintenance of harmful environmental ethics that have led to the current ecological crisis, and which now threatened dire consequences for all of the planet’s inhabitants – human and nonhuman alike.Literary ecofeminists suggest that by reimagining nature, and the possible relationships (including metaphorical and conceptual relationships) between humans and the nonhuman world, one might contribute to the “elimination of institutionalised oppression on the basis of gender, race, class, and sexual preference and [in doing so] aid in changing abusive environmental practices.”

As greater concern for the nonhuman world enters the popular consciousness and human/nature and human/animal dichotomies are re-evaluated, depictions of the female werewolf are beginning to shift, reflecting a parallel evaluation of feminine alignment with the natural world. This paper surveys the rise of ecological concerns and shifting evaluations of the culture/nature hierarchy in recent feminist theory, and the opportunity this presents for the female lycanthrope to be re-invented as champion of the wilderness in contemporary film and fiction


Beware the Full Moon: female werewolves and ‘that time of the month.’

Jazmina Cininas

Abstract

 Lycanthropy and moon-induced lunacy share a long history,however it wasn’t until cinema favoured the full moon as a lycanthropic trigger that the werewolf was subjected to a regular, monthly cycle. This, inturn, has given rise to arguably one of the most significant developments in recent werewolf lore, the situating the lycanthrope firmly within the feminine domain by linking it to that other, ‘notorious’, monthly cycle.In the 1980s, Sadie Craddock made British tabloid headlines when she had her charge reduced from murder to manslaughter, pleading diminished responsibility due to severe PMS. Presented in her defence were years of diaries and institutional records indicating that her violent behaviour followed a cyclical pattern, supporting her claim that PMS caused her to act out of character by turning her into a ‘raging animal’ each month. Feminist Groups remain ambivalent about the use of PMS as a defence in court,nervous about resurrecting deep-seated notions of women as inherently hysterical and unstable. Nevertheless, the 28-day cycle is becoming a regular fixture in cinematic werewolf iconography, directly inspiring Jacqueline Garry to create Frida, the heroine in her deliberately ambiguously titled film

The Curse, who was bitten at a lingerie sale and thereafter becomes a werewolf whenever she experiences PMS. A werewolf attacks Ginger Fitzgerald (title character in the Canadian cult film, Ginger Snaps) on the night she gets her first period, while “Once in a Blue Moon”, the Charmed episode in which the three witches become werewolves, opens with the premenstrual sorceresses bemoaning the trials and tribulations of PMS. A  conspicuous dormitory effect has taken hold on female lycanthropy.This paper surveys the menstrual cycle as an increasingly frequent motif in female werewolf film and television and its debt to the cultural history of the moon as a specifically feminine phenomenon.

Battling Demons with Medical Authority. 
Werewolves, physicians and rationalization
History of Psychiatry 24 (2013), 341-355, 2013
Nadine Metzger
Werewolves and physicians experienced their closest contact in the context of early modern witch and werewolf trials. For medical critics of the trials, melancholic diseases served as reference points for medical explanations of both individual cases and werewolf beliefs in general.
This paper attempts to construct a conceptual history of werewolf beliefs and their respective medical responses. After differentiating the relevant terms, pre-modern werewolf concepts and medical lycanthropy are introduced. The early modern controversy between medical and demonological explanations forms the main part of this study. The history of werewolves and their medical explanations is then traced through to present times. An important point of discussion is to what extent the physicians’ engagements with werewolves can be characterized as rationalization.

Publication Date: 2013
Publication Name: History of Psychiatry 24 (2013), 341-355