Don’t Fear the Reaper: The Haunting as a Tool for Racial & LGBTQ+ Justice

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 10) Markets and Inequalities: Gender, Livelihoods, and Social Justice

Abstract

Supernatural entities like ghosts and demons are often treated as abject in horror films and literature, seen as objects of terror that must be exorcised to preserve the sanctity of the family and to protect the property values of homes owned by middle-to-upper class people. But sociologist Avery Gordon argues that the figure of the ghost can instead be used to imagine the erasure of historically marginalized communities through symbolic and literal violence. Since Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters: Haunting & The Sociological Imagination was published at the turn of the century, the hegemony of cisgender, White, straight men creators in horror cinema and literature has been challenged by new voices in the genre with more radical and revolutionary visions for the ghost that seek to utilize the trope to challenge systems of inequality. This paper will undertake a content analysis of 20 films and 40 books from Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ creators, examining how they use haunting to make the unseen seen and critique intersecting systems of inequality, such as institutionalized racism, imperialism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity.

Author

• Jaime Hartless, SUNY Farmingdale