Popular thinking is that women scream in horror films because it is an inherently misogynistic media genre – that women are screaming because they are being terrorized. But this reading de-politicizes an inherently political act. While women do scream because they are afraid, they also scream in anger, grief, or simply to be heard. A component of my public humanities dissertation, this video essay looks at what these screams – most notably silent screams – have to tell us about cultural misogyny and the importance of performance.
The dissertation itself — Lehigh University’s first of its kind — examines how the female scream in horror film operates as an oppositional act of defiance against cultural norms that seek to silence and render women invisible. By expanding the historical record through the lens of film, my hope is to recover an intersectional array of stories that mark significant socio-political shifts for women within the United States, thus collapsing the borders that exist between academia and public scholarship.
When the Woman Screams is not a dissertation about women being victimized. It is a dissertation about women surviving. I hope you’ll scream with me.
