Research Journal #1

TAYLOR, R. (2012). Demon(ized) women: Female punishment in the 'pink film' and J-Horror. Asian Cinema, 23(2), 199-216. doi:10.1386/ac.23.2.199_1

Articles Claim: “The rejection of gendered expectations constitutes a positive act of female autonomy and refutes the traditional expectations imposed by a phallocentric society. While female identity is fluid and polymorphous, phallocentricism is rigid in its perpetual decline, a condition exacerbated by feminine rejection of the traditional position of matriarch in favor of individualistic professionalism. The masculine, ‘relegated’ to the female position of domestication following economic disenfranchisement, brutalizes the woman for her (perceived) role in his redundancy and, thus, it is the male that is monstrous”

Paraphrased claim: The relationship between male and female characters in ‘J-horror’(term for Japanese Horror) and ‘pink films’ (‘broad cinematic term used to categorize a wide variety of Japanese films with adult content/soft-core pornography) and how women characters in horror are fighting traditional gender roles.

Summary:

            Historical context is given as to the origins of Japanese cinema, establishing that it was spawned from the transition of Japan from a “militarized male’ figure to a “self-sacrificing maternal figure”(2) after the bombing of Hiroshima. He then flashes forward to 1960’s Japan, where ‘pink films’ were becoming quite popular, mostly because of the attempt to “reassert patriarchal dominance”(4). This leads right into the fetishization of these women, and how these films are showing this women, sometimes literally bound and tortured, and their suffering is only for the sexual gratification of the male audience. In other words, female pain is male pleasure. Taylor moves from there to dissect the 1972 ‘pink film’ Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, a movie about women forced into a male run prison. Taylor uses examples from the movie like the woman’s menstrual blood leading dogs to the hiding place (women are subordinate by nature) and the final act of castration when the female protagonists bites of the male wardens tongue , and finishes him off by stabbing him with a knife (symbolic penetration). Female Prisoner uses the ‘pink film’ genre to not put down women, but instead show the threat they pose towards Japan’s patriarchal society. Taylor finishes the article with examples of ‘J-horror’ like The Grudge and Ringu to render the female sympathetic by “depicting masculinity as oppressive and brutalizing” directly from the female’s perspective. He concludes that though pink films and J-horror are different, they both show that female ascension within society is inevitable.

Quotations: 

"This transition can be interpreted as an embodiment of a recognizable transforma- tion taking place within general society where women began to become more fully integrated into the employment environment and other public spaces. ‘Women were increasingly breaking out of their traditional space as okusan (wives within the home) and entering society for the first time in significantnumbers’ (Standish 2005: 52–53)."

"The pink film was framed by exploitative eroticism and (usually) amalga- mated multiple genres and styles into one narrative, such as soft-core pornog- raphy, erotica and exploitation cinema."

"Much like the pink film, J-Horror shares a central thematic concern for mascu- linity’s attempted domination over women whose rejection of subordination threatens male primacy."

"Through the appropriation of masculine behaviors, the ‘Final Girl’ feminizes her (male) assailants and often penetrates them with knives, bullets, chainsaws, etc. and, in doing so, poses a threat of castration to masculine discourse."

"While female identity is fluid and polymorphous, phallocentricism is rigid in its perpetual decline, a condition exacerbated by feminine rejection of the traditional position of matriarch in favor of individualistic professionalism."

"In doing so, women are presented as sympathetic victimized avengers while men are repositioned as monstrous (the monstrous masculine)."