Puzzle Box: Queer Collisions and Subjective Finitude in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Open Access

Abstract

At the core of this thesis lies the queer subject-other positionality of the Cenobites in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. The Cenobites’ freedom, and their queerness, is found in their continued illegibility. Though they are trapped at one’s fingertips, always summonable through the iconic puzzle box, they are ephemeral: specters discernible only in discrete collisions with the mortals who summon them. By illuminating the intertwined relationship between perceived interior (the home) and exterior (the sadistic hellscape of the Cenobites), the thesis rejects the premise of an outside and presents alterity as a disruption within the Foucauldian grid. Hellraiser’s Frank Cotton becomes the site of such a disruption through his summoning of the Cenobites, but his refusal to relinquish subjectivity bars him from becoming queered. Frank thus finds himself dragged between forces as the film unfolds—agonized by continued visibility, yet trapped within the grid he sought to transcend. Queerness is thus not a stable and generalizable state, one which can be adopted as identity, nor is it transgressive in the sense that it crosses a boundary of normality into the ecstasy of an outside. Queerness is an ontological paradox: it is other, brought into existence through its definition against the subject; and yet it is an inexorable presence, even when the very flesh is inverted by forces which act upon it, and thus rendered illegible to the gaze which defines it. 

Table of Contents

Preface..................................................1

Plot Summary..........................................2

Chapter Zero: Introduction...........................3

On the Psychoanalytic Approach to Horror. On the History of Hellraiser. On Queer Negativity.

Chapter One: A Domestic Hellscape..............18

X X X x

Chapter Two: The Body of the Condemned......39

Frank. Them. You.

Bibliography..........................................64 

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	GLBT Studies Philosophy
Keyword	Foucault film studies queer theory queer negativity horror
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Lynne Huffer, Emory University
Committee Members	Daniel LaChance, Emory University Samantha Wrisley, Emory University

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