About the Project | When the Woman Screams

About this Project

Meet the Host

In 1986, Linda Williams penned the landmark essay “When the Woman Looks,” a critique of how the female gaze in horror films reflects the woman’s cultural status of subordination and her association with monstrosity. This dissertation addresses what comes after that moment of identification: the female scream.

When the Woman Screams challenges the idea of screaming as an inherently feminine act fueled by terror by suggesting that the scream acts as a disruptor to the male gaze, not least by shifting audience focus to (and in potential alignment with) the female survivor. Functionally, the scream is as transgressive as the monster’s violence. When a woman screams in horror, she is occupying a space of competing cultural categories of acceptable behavior. These vocalizations, whether stemming from fear, anger, grief, or a combination of emotions, resist cultural frameworks that have historically equated “good” womanhood with silence. The substantial narrative power that underlies female horror screams arises as a disruptor of this silence– highlighting inequitable power structures– and it is in this spirit of disruption that When the Woman Screams reimagines the format of the dissertation.

Inspired by the nontraditional dissertation work of Anna Williams and Amanda Visconti, When the Woman Screams is a multimodal project comprising four parts. Housed on a dedicated website, these parts may be consumed independently or in conversation with one another. The podcasts represent my interest in the blending of cultural history and narrative storytelling. They are designed to center the orality of screams within horror films and to connect those screams to a broader historical context. Here, mode is important for capturing the mechanics of the scream (tone, roughness, pitch) and separating the scream from its performance, such that the screams exist as auditory markers of on-going American cultural conversations.

Conversely, the video essay exploring silent screams highlights the performance aspect of screaming and demonstrates the ways in which gender norms are being reflected or challenged. Because these screams lack verbal cues, audiences must rely on the visuals of the performance to contextualize meaning. Film, then, provides a mode for elucidating how perceptions of the bodily movement of women are not fixed but culturally fluid. A third part of this project – dedicated blog entries providing close readings of select films – democratizes scholarly discourse by making complex argumentation publicly accessible to a global audience. Rounding out the project are its citations. By placing scholarly literature and popular literature in conversation with one another, these citations serve as a way of dismantling perceptions of what constitutes legitimate data. To this end, the experts I engage with come from inside and outside of the academy, offering both important objective and personal insights. Taken as a whole, these components reflect my intention to represent a model of scholarship that encourages critical engagement where academic insights can circulate freely.

When the Woman Screams is not a dissertation about women being victimized. This is a dissertation about women surviving and I hope you'll scream with me.

Elizabeth Erwin was raised on a steady diet of ABC soap operas, Sweet Valley High books, and 1940s horror. This left her with an affinity for big hair and dramatic monologues. Over the course of her career, she spent time as a pub crawl performer, a freelance writer, a public librarian, an oral historian, a seriously terrible law student and a slightly better-than-average competitive debater. Through it all, horror films remained a consistent presence in her life and she is thrilled to be able to share her appreciation of the genre via When the Woman Screams.

A former blogger for Entertainment Weekly, she has presented her research at various fan and academic conferences and she is currently working on a project exploring the intersection of gender and trauma in fandom cosplay. Holding an MLIS in Library Science and an MA in American Studies, she is now working toward a PhD in English at Lehigh University. Her research interests include American horror film, serialized storytelling, LGBT+ media representation, and digital literacy.

Elizabeth writes extensively on horror films and popular culture and she is co-creator of Horror Homeroom, a website/podcast that examines horror narratives from an academic perspective. She is the co-editor of The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland & Company, 2018) and her writing has appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review. She is currently working on a new podcast exploring nostalgia and cultural capital in retro television.

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