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120148224
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A reading of Ginger Snaps in relation to feminist theory and queer theory

"Female violence is a specific brand of ferocity. Its invasive. A girlfight is all teeth
and hair, spit and nails a much more fearsome thing to watch than two dudes
clobbering each other. And the mental violence is positively gory. Women
entwine." -- Gillian Flynn, I Was Not A Nice Little Girl
Something's wrong with you. More than you being just female. Brigitte
Fitzgerald, Ginger Snaps
"Lycanthropy: transformation from witch to wolf" Oxford Dictionary, cited in
Ginger Snaps presskit

The first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer aired in March 1997. The opening scene
shows a pretty, blonde teenage girl dressed like a soft-porn version of a Catholic
schoolgirl breaking into a dark classroom with her well-built male companion. Shes
visibly reluctant and nervous, jumping at unidentified noises, and he reassures her that
theyre alone before kissing her. She finally relaxes, reciprocates.Then she morphs into a
vampire and rips his throat out. Roll title sequence. This misdirection works and is
fundamentally unsettling because it utilizes and articulates an old, deep, often
subconscious collective uneasiness about women, especially teenage girls, violence,
monstrosity, power, and sex. Buffy, already the subject of many critical essays itself,
paved the way for a renewed interest in horror tropes in the context of the teen movie
archetypes that became part of the cultural lexicon in the 1990s. One of the most
interesting examples of this sub-genre is the Ginger Snaps trilogy, centring around
teenage sisters and lycanthropy in Canadian suburbia. Ginger Snaps is a rarity, in that it
is a successfully feminist horror film (horror is a genre often disturbingly concerned
with punishing young women for having sex, and equating women in pain with the
viewers voyeuristic pleasure) without resorting to easy Girl Power clichs.
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It is a story about teenage girls, where the same characters embody heroines, victims,
and monsters. This is fundamentally a film about women, about what women do to each
other and, in a perverse way, about becoming a woman. Its fundamental argument is
that coming of age as a girl is enough of a horror story in its own right everything else
is set dressing. The films opening montage of the girls staged fake death photography
establishes the films primary themes immediately they are creating their own
tableaux of gorily dead women, both parallel and opposed to the beauties [] waiting
for their princes to come and wake them up. In their beds, in their glass coffins, in their
childhood forests like dead women
1
that populate fairytales, and they are occupying
the roles of voyeur, subject and object concurrently. They are aestheticizing their own
potential victimhood, and in doing so removing the male gaze entirely. This
performative element also destabilizes the film it frames by drawing attention to the
genres inherent artificiality.
Ginger Snaps' primary concern is specifically body horror, horror of the body, horror of
sex, horror of uncontrollable blood. Jancovich argues that this emphasis on bodies in the
horror genre is the result of a supposedly postmodern collapse of distinctions and
boundariesthe monstrous threat is not simply external but erupts from within the
human body
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. It's gory in an intrinsically feminine way, and the commonplace horror of
menstruation is a running theme. In light of this, the choice of a werewolf as the
monster is striking werewolves are completely about out of control, uncontrollable
bodies, pure instinct, a senseless desiring-machine. The subconscious terror of not being
in control of the body is also potentially liberating when it gives women the freedom to
fully inhabit that body at the start of the film, Ginger dissociates strongly from her own

1
Helene Cixous, Sorties: Out and Out in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Richard J. Lane (Oxon:
Routledge, 2013), pp. 653 664 (p. 656)
2
Mark Jancovich, Introduction in Horror: The Film Reader. (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1- 8
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body, viewing the start of her menstrual cycle as a betrayal (kill yourself to be different,
and your own body screws you
3
), and this initial disconnect, followed by becoming
completely tied to her physical self when she becomes a wolf, mirrors Cixous assertion
that woman will return to the body that has been confiscated from her, which has been
turned into the uncanny stranger on display the ailing or dead figure, which so often
turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions.
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The body is
inherently both politicized and problematized, becoming an emblematic territory that
girls must battle to maintain control of when it has been confiscated by the pervasive
influence of the male gaze, and the lycanthropy as it is represented in Ginger Snaps
becomes the ultimate act of self-destructive self-sabotage, both total reclamation and
total surrender of the confiscated body. Consider that fiction about specifically feminine
monsters tends to take pains to present them as alluring, their sexuality a weapon that
nevertheless makes sure they are never undesirable. It is notable that girl monsters are
often pale, languorous vampires, nubile succubi. Ginger Snaps subverts those tropes -
Gingers body has made boys start to pay attention to her, and she is uncomfortable
with it, and she eventually transforms into something truly monstrous, untouchable,
unassailable. She becomes a monster with hair and muscles and blood on her muzzle,
something fierce and strong and utterly unlovable.
Subconscious childhood terrors are an elemental part of the horror genre, and as such
often privileges inherently misogynistic Freudian concepts of the uncanny and
frightening when it presents the monstrous-feminine. The fears and fraught incumbent
sexuality of girlhood are less explored, as author Gillian Flynn writes "these childhood
rites of passage the rough-housing, the precocious sexuality, the first bloom of power

3
Ginger Snaps, Karen Walton (dir. John Fawcett) (WHV, 2000)
4
Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, Signs, Vol.1, No.4 (1976) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239>
[accessed 12 January 2014] p.890
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plays really dont make it into the oral history of most women. Men speak fondly of
those strange bursts of childhood aggression, their disastrous immature sexuality. They
have a vocabulary for sex and violence that women just dont."
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Ginger Snaps is an
attempt to articulate something which is largely inarticulable because there exists no
popular cultural lexicon for it, for the childhood which men have so much trouble
making women forget (Cixous, Sorties, p. 658), no mode of expression for the
interiorities of the walled-in [] little girls with their bad-mannered(p. 658) bodies.
Women, they claim, are preserved, safe from themselves and intact, on ice, Frigified (p.
658), yet there is always unrest down there (p. 658).
The girls in Ginger Snaps are emphatically not typically nice, in the sense that niceness
is coded as an expression of feminine submission and sweetness. The sisters themselves
are vicious enough without supernatural intervention (see Brigittes summation of
Trina as typical cum bucket-y date bait), and Ginger instinctively recoils from the
overtly feminine, stating wrists are for girls. Im slitting my throat" and expressing
repulsion and fear at the idea of menstruating ("Ive got the curse"). Both sisters dress
in oversized clothes that conceal their femininity. However, as Gingers lycanthropy
becomes more severe, she begins to "perform" femininity more explicitly, dressing a
tight crop top and walking confidently down a high-school corridor like its a catwalk.
This transformation could be linked to Judith Butlers assertion that Gender [is] an act
[] which is both intentional and performative
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, and makes a link between the process
of becoming a woman, and becoming monstrous, therefore problematizing Gingers
increased sex appeal, because it is intrinsically dangerous to those she attracts.

5
Gillian Flynn, I Was Not A Nice Little Girl, Powells, <http://www.powells.com/essays/flynn.html> [accessed
2 January 2014]
6
Judith Butler, From Interiority to Gender Performatives, in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by
Richard J. Lane (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 581-587 (p.585)
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Traditional gender performance in Butlers theories is coded as violent - to force the
body to perform in a way adhering to a strictly codified gender binary is an act of
violence, both self-inflicted and societal, and this undercurrent is completely present in
Gingers parallel transformations from girl to woman, and girl to monster. The central
crux of the film, in my reading, lies in the line I get this ache, and I - I thought it was for
sex, but its to tear everything to fucking pieces. The expectation placed upon teenage
girls to behave sexually in a way that is compliant with the desires of teenage boys is
replaced with a destructive and nihilistic urge to commit senseless acts of bestial
violence.
Ginger Snaps also engages with the Final Girl trope prevalent in horror films, itself a
problematic archetype from a feminist point of view, as it rewards the most virtuous
and sexually innocent young woman with survival after she has suffered enough. When,
towards the end of the film, Sam tells Brigitte she cant subdue Ginger by herself, the
astute viewer knows that the conventions of the genre demand that she does. Contrary
to Gingers aesthetic transformation and embracing of her sexuality, Brigitte remains in
dark, bulky layers of clothing, and this final battles for dominance could represent
Brigitte battling with her obvious repulsion and fear of feminine sexuality. In my
reading, Ginger Snaps has a lot in common with Lars Von Triers Antichrist, itself based
on an exploration of horror tropes, which shows that historical fear, hatred, violence
and gynocide against women (for example, witch trials) gives them the power to access
primordial, chaotic violence and darkness themselves. The main female character in
Antichrist comes to accept that women are inherently evil, which manifests in
committing acts of bloody violence before being brutally murdered herself and joining
the faceless mass of dead women who populate the films terrible Eden. I think Ginger
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Snaps deals with the same ideas. The girls frequently hint at a belief that women are
wrong somehow, that the feminine body is an intrinsically unsafe and dark space.
The men in the film, from the older drug dealer who tries to assist Brigitte to the
popular boy to the girls father, are almost comically incidental. For instance, when the
girls mother discovers Trinas body, she is immediately supportive, suggesting they
burn the house down, abandon their father, and start again. This lack of substantial
male characters means it is also ripe for queer readings about sexuality as well as
gender performance Ginger murmuring you know, we're almost not even related
anymore to her sister almost flirtatiously, and the genuinely unnerving moment where
the sisters are hauling the body of a popular classmate to a hiding place and Ginger asks
lightly do you think shes pretty? and Brigitte, alarmed, snaps back if I wasnt here,
would you eat her?. Well, yes, probably, and desire and hunger have already been
linked and complicated lexically within the film. Chrysanthi attempts to redefine
lesbianism as a queer identity in a state of constant flux and shifting, a becoming-
lesbian, a schizophrenic process that constitutes a rupture, an eruption, a break-
through [] desire whose excess (rather than lack) violates strict definitions and
exceeds linguistic meaning
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, a fluid definition that mirrors the process of losing control
and operating outside strict binary definitions of sexuality and gender represented by
the violent irruption of lycanthropy. Nigianni argues for a critical definition of
schizophrenia that is positive, because what is threatening about the schizophrenic is
his/her inherent instability, his/her stubborn resistance against any form of identity,
his/her incapacity to conform to any category of being, even that of the self. And it is
precisely these incapacities that provide the schizophrenic with a revolutionary

7
Chrysanthi Nigianni, Butterfly Kiss in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Richard J. Lane (Oxon:
Routledge, 2013), pp. 611 624 (p. 612)
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force.(p. 613). Lesbianism, according to Nigianni, also represents a rejection of the
privileging of male desire, as it is a desire free from fixed subjectivity and complete-
object representations (p. 613), and so this reading runs parallel to the idea of feminine
monstrosity as a way to escape and subvert the male gaze and male sublimation of
feminine desire and self-expression.
The space teenage girls occupy in a patriarchal society is fraught with tension, derision,
and an overwhelming sense of expectation. Trina says why don't you get your slut-
bitch sister a leash, and Ginger herself points out a girl can be a prude, a slut, or the
virgin next door. This weight of sexual expectation and with it, reduced complexity and
autonomous potential, enables the girls to literally get away with (accidental) murder
but is also a burden - Luce Irigaray, questioning the misogyny underlying Freuds rigid
psychological separation of male and female qualities and phallocentrism, argues that
no male organ is set forth in derision like the clitoris [] that penis too tiny for
comparison to entail anything other but total devaluation, complete decathexization
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and concludes that in Freuds view, the act of intercourse itself fundamentally
subjugates the female by reducing her role to one of passivity, an anonymous worker,
the machine in service of the master-proprietor (Irigaray, The Blind Spot, p.650). In this
context, Cixous suggests that the worst thing [is], really, woman is not
castrated?(Cixous, Sorties, p. 658) - that is, from a patriarchal perspective, the worst
thing is the realization that women are not inherently wrong, or less, and therefore
cannot be made subservient through sex. Women engaging in sex actively and for their
own pleasure, therefore, is inherently threatening. This fear is exploited to arresting
effect in Ginger Snaps inextricable entangling of sex with feminine violence for

8
Luce Irigaray, The Blind Spot of an Old Dream in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Richard J. Lane
(Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 643 - 652 (p. 650)
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instance, Ginger snarling "No, you lie back and relax and slamming the popular boy
shes making out with into the back seat of a car, truly aggressive rather than flirtatious,
and hes frightened of her, for a second, of the violence of her desire. Desiring instead of
desired, his pleasure utterly sublimated to hers, shes using him and doesnt particularly
care if hes into it or not. Cixous claims that they [men] say there are two things that
cannot be represented: death and the female sex. Because they need femininity to be
associated with death: they get a hard on when you scare their pants off! For their own
sake they need to be afraid of us. (Cixous, Sorties, p. 658). An example of this is found in
the same sex scene, which shows Ginger pulling up her shirt and revealing that her
physiology is becoming more bestial (she has extra nipples, like a nursing wolf) and it is
jarringly framed as perversely titillating. Reducing girls, and girl monsters, to objects of
perverse desire is in itself an attempt to control, to limit, and at the end of the film
Ginger explodes out of this prescribed patriarchal narrative when she compares the act
of killing (it is worth noting that she only ever intentionally kills men Trinas death is
genuinely accidental) to masturbating. The previously inarticulable act of feminine
violence is explicitly linked to autonomous sexual climax, a clear progression from the
conflation of sexual and violent aggression in the preceding sex scene, and a total
rejection of both idealized and compulsory heterosexuality (Butler, Performatives,
p.582) and the fairytale idea that women must be Beautiful, but passive; hence
desirable (Cixous, Sorties, p. 656). Hands, sharp nails and mouth covered in blood, face
lit up and glowing, she breathes It feels so... good, Brigitte. It's like touching yourself.
You know every move... right on the fucking dot. And after, you see fucking fireworks.
Supernovas. I'm a goddamn force of nature. I feel like I could do just about anything..
Cixous suggests that masturbation, totally independent feminine sexuality, is a source of
guilt (as soon we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty about it (Cixous, Medusa,
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p. 877) but here Ginger is unrepentant, monstrous, radiant. Its immensely significant
that this is the most triumphant the film allows her to be. Briefly, she can do just about
anything.
















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Bibliography
Helene Cixous, Sorties: Out and Out in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by
Richard J. Lane (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 653 664
Mark Jancovich, Introduction in Horror: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 1- 8
Karen Walton, Ginger Snaps (dir. John Fawcett) (WHV, 2000)
Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, Signs, Vol.1, No.4 (1976)
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239> [accessed 12 January 2014] p.890
Gillian Flynn, I Was Not A Nice Little Girl, Powells,
<http://www.powells.com/essays/flynn.html> [accessed 2 January 2014]
Judith Butler, From Interiority to Gender Performatives, in Global Literary Theory: An
Anthology, ed. by Richard J. Lane (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 581-587
Chrysanthi Nigianni, Butterfly Kiss in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by
Richard J. Lane (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 611 624
Luce Irigaray, The Blind Spot of an Old Dream in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology,
ed. by Richard J. Lane (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 643 - 652