New Book Announcement

My partner and I would like to announce the publication of our new book from Lexington: Possessed Women, Haunted States: Cultural Tensions in Exorcism Cinema.

This monograph contains our research into the horror film subgenre of exorcism cinema. In this research, we examine the history of these films and suggest that they primarily concern themselves with the oppression of marginalized identities, mainly women, people of color, and the non-heteronormative. While the state of being possessed empowers such marginalized individuals, the act of exorcism removes this power and returns them to an oppressed state, thereby restoring the powers of a patriarchal, heteronormative and colonial state.

From The Exorcist to the spate of movies released recently, this traditional exorcism narrative appears largely unchallenged in over 100 movies. In the book, we consider reasons for the preponderance of this traditional exorcism narrative in our analysis of key texts from different historical periods.

The book is currently available from the publisher: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498519083/Possessed-Women-Haunted-States-Cultural-Tensions-in-Exorcism-Cinema#