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- Title
Torture Born: Representing Pregnancy and Abortion in Contemporary Survival-Horror.
- Authors
Jones, Steve
- Abstract
In proportion to the increased emphasis placed on abortion in partisan political debate since the early 2000s, there has been a noticeable upsurge in cultural representations of abortion. This article charts ways in which that increase manifests in contemporary survival-horror. This article contends that numerous contemporary survival-horror films foreground pregnancy. These representations of pregnancy reify the pressures that moralistic, partisan political campaigning places on individuals who consider terminating a pregnancy. These films contribute to public discourse by engaging with abortion as an individual, emotional matter, rather than treating abortion as a matter of political principle or a political 'means to an end.' This article not only charts a relationship between popular culture and its surrounding political context, but also posits that survival-horror-a genre that has been disparaged by critics and largely ignored by scholars-makes an important contribution to sexual-political discourse. These films use horror to articulate the things we cannot say about abortion.
- Subjects
ABORTION research; POLITICAL debates; PREGNANCY; POPULAR culture; MOTION pictures
- Publication
Sexuality & Culture, 2015, Vol 19, Issue 3, p426
- ISSN
1095-5143
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12119-014-9260-3