The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity

Russo sets out to relate the grotesque body to “spatial and temporal dimensions of modern spectacle” (6) and to explore the possibilities of the grotesque for a feminism she characterizes as too concerned with appearing mainstream (12). While her analysis draws on various theoretical traditions, Russo largely builds on Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s argument that “the grotesque returns as the repressed of the political unconscious, as those hidden cultural contents which by their abjection had consolidated the cultural identity of the bourgeoisie” (8–9). ¹ She foregrounds the interdependence of the grotesque and the normal and argues that the grotesque body provides “room for chance” within “the very constrained spaces of normalization” (11), incorporating “female exceptionalism” and the “monstrous and lacking,” taking in both “high” and “low” bodies (22–23). Crossing centuries, national borders, and genres, her cultural-studies inquiry suggestively juxtaposes grotesqueries from Amelia Earhart’s stunt flying to Georges du Maurier’s serial novel Trilby and David Cronenberg’s gynecological nightmare Dead Ringers. Russo contests traditional readings of these bodies as victimized and powerless, arguing that “the assumption of death, risk, and invisibility may be the price of moving beyond a narrow politics of identity and place” (48). Risk is “not a bad thing to be avoided” (10), but neither should feminists normalize the figure at risk as “a safe woman” (29).

Russo uses the grotesque as an intriguing model for alternative communities that would tolerate heterogeneity. Her analysis of the wedding feast in Tod Browning’s Freaks argues that the celebration is characterized by “a sense of solidarity and community [that] emerges from the participants’ collective differences” (90). The grotesque body does not necessarily point the way to a utopian spaceÑfor Russo’s purposes, Freaks is marred by a “normalizing narrative of sexual relations” (93)Ñbut she poses the interesting question of whether and how the female grotesque can model new kinds of relationships. If a society modeled on the classical body leaves “irregular bodies behind,” then the female grotesque might indicate how to achieve “a state of intimacy without oneness” (11Đ12).

The project, however, has real limits, some of which are endemic to cultural studies. Russo’s definition of the grotesque and selection of examples are “avowedly personal and somewhat idiosyncratic” (13), and the book lacks cohesion as a result. The grotesque becomes so encompassing a category that it covers any female body that is not average, from acrobats to fetishized body parts. ² Analyses of disparate bodies are suggestive, but challenging questions about the connections between them are unaddressed.

The Female Grotesque also exemplifies what Stefan Collini identifies as a typical weakness of cultural studies: a tendency toward reductiveness in representing the “dominant” culture. ³ Russo opens with the contestatory claim that “feminism in the 1990s has stood increasingly for and with the normal” and accuses this “normal” feminism of “disarticulating” itself “from the strange, the risky, the minoritarian, the excessive, the outlawed, and the alien” (vii). Given that the proliferation of feminist work around the globe is too diverse to align with one “prevailing standard” (vii), this characterization of “feminism”Ñinstead of the now common “feminisms”Ñis problematic, not to mention the fact that in quite a few locales feminism certainly falls within the category of the grotesque by Russo’s definition. Russo also reifies “the cultural identity of the bourgeoisie” (9, emphasis mine), reducing complex and historically specific processes of identity formation to a one-size-fits-all model; her grotesque is interesting as an oppositional space of diversity and change, but such representations oversimplify the interaction between the abject and the “mainstream.”

Russo’s lack of attention to historical detail, the most serious limitation to this study, prevents her from providing a model of the grotesque truly useful to feminism, a central aspect of her project. Her analysis of Trilby asserts that the novel created a community of young women who subversively mimed the fetish of Trilby’s famous foot, but Russo doesn’t present enough...