The Horror of Other Bodies

Some bodies are a horror to other bodies

November 18, 2024

One sub-genre of gothic or horror stories I particularly enjoy is (informally) called “body horror.” Wikipedia defines it as basically anything horror + body + gross:

Body horror, or biological horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature. These violations may manifest through aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body. Body horror was a description originally applied to an emerging subgenre of North American horror films, but has roots in early Gothic literature and has expanded to include other media.

But I think that’s a vague simplification of a potentially useful term. Personally, I think of it as stories that involve bodies behaving strangely or unexpectedly. Obviously, this lends itself well to explorations of difference and thus, disability (are most of my movements “unnatural movements of the body”? Whose “natural”?). But it also can, for example, show men what it’s like to be a woman. [Insert Alien pop-out GIF here!]

This October, along with other spooky books, I read three short story collections that I could call ”body horror”: The Complete Short Stories of Leonora Carrington, The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, and Out There by Kate Folk. As you may notice, they’re all written by women! (We could easily add Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties to this list — it’s right in the title — and argue that Frankenstein was an early entry.)

I started writing this post before Election Day. It felt less scary then. As Republicans continue to encroach on women’s right to choose, more women will die of miscarriages, like Josseli Barnica, and other pregnancy complications. Body horrors, rather than bodily differences we might learn from, will be actual horrors. If that makes these stories less appealing to you, especially right now, I get it.

What I, a man, am doing here

I’m not a woman, but I am interested in how women deal with a world that is in a number of ways made by/for men (see: Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern).

My thesis is that this discrepancy been their bodies and the (built) world that women face, and its resultant emotions/anger, is not dissimilar to the conditions faced by disabled men like me. (What this means for disabled women is beyond me!)

I suppose the books I’m actually after are body horror in regard to disability, and the ones I have found have all been favorites of mine: Walking Practice by Dolki Min, The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, Impatience of the Heart by Stefan Zweig and Address: Centauri by F. L. Wallace to name a few.

(Architecture and urban planning also intersect with disability in similar ways that gender does: see The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access by David Gissen and What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren.)

Daintier kidneys

Of the three books, Folk’s felt the most modern (and easiest for me to recommend). You can read two of my favorite stories online: “Heart Seeks Brain” and “Out There”. Here’s how the former starts:

At happy hour, my coworker Sarah and I bond, in the way of women, by cataloguing the flaws of our internal organs. We discover we have a lot in common. Our carotid arteries are of similar diameter, thicker than the feminine ideal. Both our spleens are mildly engorged. We both have always wished our small intestines were a few feet longer, like those of the world’s top fashion models. We have longed also for smaller, daintier kidneys. Sarah tells me about her high school rival, Betsy, whose kidneys were the size of a toddler’s fists and perfectly shaped. Betsy was the darling of all the renal boys, who in Sarah’s school were the cutest.

Like Mad Libs for body parts! A simple but effective way to show how arbitrary things are. (Spoiler alert: Folk’s heroines also tend to do this thing where they give in to the horror by the end, which I find to be another fascinating critique of the status quo.)

Unstitching

Camilla Grudova takes an eerily similar look inside women’s bodies in her story “Unstitching”, which begins:

One afternoon, after finishing a cup of coffee in her living room, Greta discovered how to unstitch herself.

Her clothes, skin and hair fell from her like the peeled rind of a fruit, and her true body stepped out. Greta was very clean so she swept her old self away and deposited it in the rubbish bin before even taking notice of her new physiognomy, the difficulty of working her new limbs offering no obstruction to her determination to keep a clean home.

And later, in case the metaphor wasn’t clear enough: “It brought great relief to unstitch, like undoing one’s brassiere before bedtime or relieving one’s bladder after a long trip.” Both sides of the metaphor stay within the body!

A facing-eating hyena in heels

One of the more disturbing passages in Leonora Carrington’s short story collection came from the introduction by Kathryn Davis. It reads like the setup of one of these types of stories.

Leonora was nineteen, Max [Ernst] was forty-six and on his second marriage… Leonora was the femme enfant every male Surrealist dreamed of having for his very own, the woman-child whose naive soul might provide a conduit to the unconscious.

Carrington “Self Portrait” (1937/38)

One of Carrington’s stories I had read before was “The Debutante”, in which a reluctant debutante recruits a hyena from a zoo to take her place at a ball held in her honor. Naturally, an early hurdle in the ruse is the hyena learning to walk in high heels.

In my room, I brought out the gown I was supposed to wear that evening. It was a little long, and the hyena walked with difficulty in my high-heeled shoes. I found some gloves to disguise her hands which were too hairy to resemble mine. When the sunlight entered, she strolled around the room several times—walking more or less correctly.

I think all of these stories brilliantly use surrealism to critique the (socially) idealized female body.

It’s probably not a coincidence that plenty of gothic tales start with a woman scorned by society, or at least living on the edge of it (geographically/economically/socially/morally). Witches! (See: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici for more on witches and the invention of capitalism.)

Here we can play with the idea that gender as a social construct, which, at least, helps would-be rebels. Fighting a social construct is generally easier than fighting against something that you’re told is “natural.” Thus, step one might be to de-naturalize an idea. Plenty of lessons for the fight against ableism here as well!

Becoming orchestras

One of my favorite “body” short stories I’ve ever ever read is still “Our Sleeping Lungs Opened to the Cold” by Elizabeth Tan, which is about mermaids living in a water tank to entertain customers. Eventually, the mermaids (or their bodies) rebel.

Our bodies were not so fragile: they thickened in glory. Collarbones sank beneath the luxurious swell of flesh. We liked the way the water held us, our new presence within it; we were increasing in corporeality and palpability, more vowel than consonant; we became orchestras. Our scales, which formerly terminated at our hips, began to multiply on our waists, then our stomachs, then our breasts, then our arms. The webbing between our fingers slid closer to the tips; our pupils fattened beyond the grasp of our eyelids… What delighted us was each other, our turning into something less hollow.

But it’s the story’s last sentence that hits hardest for me: “This loving body, unspooling from the harness of manmade meaning.”

Do you have favorite stories or books that fit this genre/vibe? Have you unstitched or unspooled recently?