The Haunted Ground We Walk on

"The purpose of this work is to analyze haunting narratives in cinematic texts, exploring the significance of gendered and racialized violences on the screen while contending with the normalization of these violences in reality. With this work, I closely examine abstractions of gender and race in horror films which depict hauntings and which re-inscribe socially constructed ideologies of femininity and masculinity as gendered scripts of the body, as well as blackness and whiteness as racial inscriptions, and the ways in which they are defined against one another. I achieve this discussion through connecting social phenomena in our material world with the abject hauntings of gendered and racialized subjects in the supernatural film - ghostly interruptions, unresolvable injustices, and death as possibility for resistance. Inhabiting spaces which are both of this world and the afterworld, these phantasms are the known and unknown, and yet, their ethereal presence is revealing of our earthly ideologies regarding violence, victimization, and injustice."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.