Beeler, Karin

This thesis explores the body horror subgenre of film, its creation and rise in popularity during the late twentieth century (1975-1995), and how the subgenre’s grotesque and unsettling examination of the human body, its form, and reproductive processes, allowed body horror filmmakers to tackle societal taboos regarding the human body and one’s sexuality. By comparing and contrasting the body horror subgenre with both its contemporary the slasher subgenre and its thematic sexual origins within Victorian Gothic fin de siècle horror fiction, this thesis will provide evidence that the subgenre makes significant strides within the horror genre to push a more progressive narrative and representation of men, women, and the LQBTQ+ community, through its deconstruction of the human body/form, sexuality, and reproductive processes. Through a detailed breakdown and analysis of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) and The Fly (1986), Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) and Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut (2014), and Roger Donaldson’s Species (1995), this thesis will demonstrate how filmmaking techniques, themes, and narratives of these films, deconstruct previous notions of the human body and sexuality within the horror genre, and encourage audiences to re-evaluate the body, and the roles/positions/pressures society has created around sexuality and perceived sexual taboos and fears.

This thesis explores the relationship between pornography, eroticism, and censorship, focusing on the reception of sexually explicit representations in literature and film by the public and governing bodies in their sociopolitical, cultural, and legal contexts. My comparative analysis of Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1797), its intertextual dialogist, Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954), and their respective twentieth-century screen adaptations, by Jess Franco and Just Jaeckin, attempts to demonstrate changes in attitudes toward what once was considered to be top-shelf cultural production over time. Drawing on the intersection of cultural, feminist, film, sexuality, and pornography studies, my work examines how, and to what extent, Sade, Réage, Franco, and Jaeckin had their fair share of trouble with censorship laws, and the ways they challenge and subvert the accepted sexual norms and, by extension, then current state body politics by propagating the ideas of sexual freedom, freedom of choice, and sexual equality

Divisive political discourse today reflects a need to address issues of oppression in North American society. Accordingly, teachers can help students confront these problems. Linking critical pedagogy and transformative learning theory, this interdisciplinary research examines whether reading and discussing March Book Two, a historical nonfiction graphic narrative written by civil rights activist John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, led students in a British Columbian Adult Basic Education English class to transform their perspectives on social-justice related issues. Qualitative data were collected from student work, classroom observations, and post-semester interviews in an instructor-led action research case study.