Emily McAvan
Abstract: In this paper I will discuss the coming together of different orders of being and the ways in which the Stranger Things depicts a sacred dimension of otherness bleeding through into 1980s small-town America. Whilst the metaphor of the upside down can be seen to situate otherness in gender, race and sexuality, it can also be fruitfully read as an engagement with the religious dimensions of otherness. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, I will argue that Stranger Things, in its portrayal of the upside down, shows us a prelinguistic maternal space that Kristeva would call semiotic. Mothers and their prepubescent children in Stranger Things possess the capacity to communicate wordlessly, in significant ways. This maternal mediation between the semiotic and the linguistic (what Kristeva would call the symbolic) can be seen as a form of what philosopher of religion, Mercia Eliade calls a hierophany. Eliade says “the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities.” Whilst Stranger Things lacks the overtly religious iconography employed in many of the horror texts it references – such as Carrie or The Exorcist – the series nevertheless manifests the deeply religious sensibility that underpins small-town America and indeed, the horror genre itself.
Introduction
“Does a specifically feminine sacred exist?” – Julia Kristeva
In this paper I will discuss the coming together of different orders of being in the Netflix TV series Stranger Things (2016-present). Stranger Things tells the story of a young boy named Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who vanishes into a supernatural realm termed the “Upside Down.” This is an alternative universe that adjoins our own; it is depicted as a kind of womb-like space—fibrous enveloping. However, it is also populated by monsters—in particular a monster nicknamed the “Demogorgon” by Will’s friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), who search for Will. They are joined by a strange girl, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who has psychokinetic superpowers and has escaped a nearby research facility before being befriended by the group. At the same time, the town’s Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is also searching for Will using more conventional means, until he is persuaded by Will’s mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder), to search in the Upside Down. In the second season of the show, we see the lingering effects of Will’s time in the Upside Down, as he becomes controlled remotely by an entity called the Shadow Monster or Mind Flayer.
It is my contention that Stranger Things can be productively read to illuminate contemporary aesthetic, ethical and religious concerns. I have elsewhere argued that fantasy, science fiction and horror texts of the past forty years can be seen as a form of “postmodern sacred” that pastiches together fragments from different religious traditions for popular culture pleasure.[1]In its numerous references to texts from the 1980s from Spielberg’s E.T. (1982)to the Aliens franchise,Stranger Things can certainly be considered a postmodern pastiche in the sense famously described by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism (1991), at a time in which postmodern aesthetics are increasingly unfashionable. Indeed, many critics of Stranger Things have read the text as a form of nostalgia for the Reagan years in its pastiche of 1980s popular culture texts. There is little doubt that much of the pleasure of the show is in its intertextual referencing (and perhaps one can even see the text as a nostalgia for postmodernism itself ).
And yet, it is not in pastiche that Stranger Things engages in the religious. There are few explicit references to traditional religious tradition in the text. Conventional criticism of the relationship between religion and horror has tended to see the genre as reviving a pre-Enlightenment belief in the supernatural, and in particular in the demonic (which I will argue we do see in the text). We see in numerous fantastic or horror texts the portrayal of the Christianity of pre-Enlightenment Europe—Catholicism. As Regina Hansen has put it,
even when Catholicism is not in itself the subject of the film, Catholic rites and beliefs can be seen as subtext in numerous films with fantastic themes – such as the ever-growing vampire and zombie corpus, in which eternal life is promised through the literal consumption of flesh and blood (4).
This is clearly not the case with Stranger Things, which has little interest in the accoutrements or iconography of Catholicism in its invocation of a fantastic horror world. Similarly, the other major religious pre-occupation of American horror—Puritanism—is absent from Stranger Things.[2]While we can see the Puritan roots of American horror clearly in the work of New Englander Stephen King, for instance, the setting of Stranger Things in Indiana suggests little interest in the imagery and concerns of the early Puritans.
Instead, it is in the dimension of otherness bleeding through into 1980s small-town America that I will argue the show engages with the sacred. Whilst the metaphor of the Upside Down—another dimension which mirrors our own, only monstrous—which drives the plot can be seen to situate otherness in terms of gender, race and sexuality, it can also be fruitfully read as an engagement with the religious dimensions of otherness. Drawing on the work of feminist psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva, I will argue that Stranger Things, in its portrayal of motherhood and the Upside Down, shows us a prelinguistic maternal space that Kristeva would call “semiotic.” Mothers and their prepubescent children in Stranger Things possess the capacity to communicate wordlessly, in ways that pose significant questions for the study of text and religion. As religious scholar Mircea Eliade influentially argues, “the sacred always manifests as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural realities” (10) —in other words, otherness interrupts the order of the same.
Kristeva and the semiotic
Structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy has long had an interest in otherness, with one of the key exponents being the Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), her pioneering fusion of linguistics and psychoanalysis, Kristeva puts forth a two-part theory of language. Revising Jacques Lacan, she argues that language can be divided into the semiotic and the symbolic.[3]She defines the semiotic as a “psychosomatic modality of the signifying process” (28). Noelle MacAfee summarizes this schema concisely when she says that “the semiotic could be seen as the modes of expression that originate in the unconscious whereas the symbolic could be seen as the conscious way a person tries to express using a stable sign system (whether written, spoken or gestured with sign language)” (17).
Kristeva defines the semiotic as “distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engaged or witten sign, imprint, trace, figuration” (Revolution 25). McAfee notes that the semiotic does not obey the usual rules of grammar. Instead, “the semiotic [. . .] is the extra-verbal way in which bodily energy and affects make their way into language. The semiotic includes both the subject’s drives and articulations. While the semiotic may be expressed verbally, it is not subject to regular rules of syntax” (17).
The semiotic is a “psychosomatic modality of the signifying chain” (28) which Kristeva associates with the union between mother and child. Revising Plato’s theory of the chora of pre-matter, she says:
The mother’s body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity and death (28).
Or as Kristeva puts it elsewhere, body and language are united, for “language is not divorced from the body; ‘word’ and ‘flesh’ can meet at any moment, for better or for worse” (In the Beginning 6). Kristeva’s project can therefore be seen as an attempt to re-think the pre-Oedipal body “and the speaking subject, the feminine-maternal and language” (Margaroni 10). For Kristeva, it is most of all the meeting between maternal body and child that creates a semiotic linguistic exchange, and we can see this most clearly in Stranger Things in the relationship between Joyce Byers and her son Will.
Joyce and language
Whereas Hopper, the town’s loveable police chief, initially searches for Will in conventional ways, from the start Joyce is attuned to a supernatural origin for Will’s disappearance. In episode two, “The Weirdo on Maple Street,” Joyce receives a strange phone call in which she hears heavy breathing. Hopper suggests it is a prank call, but Joyce argues with him that the call was from Will, saying, “you think I don’t know my own son’s breathing?” Right from the beginning of the show, there is a supernatural connection between mother and son that includes but ultimately also exceeds language. Here we see another side of the semiotic in Stranger Things —the somatic, the bodily. The body of the child is intimately connected with that of the mother, even postpartum. Will and Joyce remain linked in a semiotic fusion between their two bodies, in an intracorporeal and intercoporeal relationship that challenges the apparent separation between mother and son.[4]Indeed, only Joyce (and Eleven, who I will discuss shortly) has the ability to sense Will’s presence in the Upside Down.
In some of the most poignant scenes of the first season of Stranger Things, we see Will’s mother Joyce try to communicate with her lost son using lights (1.03). At first, this is done through a kind of Morse code – one flash for yes, two for no – but then Joyce threads Christmas lights across her lounge room wall with a letter of the alphabet written for each light so that Will can communicate short messages to her. Joyce and Will’s mother-child relationship is invoked through lights and electricity, with a kind of coded relationship to language that recalls Kristeva’s semiotic in the way it relies on sensation as much as signifiers. While it occasionally veers into written language, it does not obey the usual rules of syntax. Instead, light becomes a signifying system, ephemeral, not quite linguistic, not quite not. We can see the Christmas light communication between Joyce and Will as somewhere in between the written and spoken word—written through letters but caught up in a temporal method of interpretation in which each letter is lit up then disappears for the next one to take its place. We can see this as a kind of coded linguistic phenomenon bound up in time, easily erased and only possible through the communicative bond between mother and son.
Here the semiotic communication between Will and Joyce risks being taken as psychosis. Joyce says to Jonathan, “I know it sounds crazy. I sound crazy. But I heard him, Jonathan, he talked to me” (1.04). Lonnie, one of the numerous inadequate (or outright evil in the case of Eleven’s “Papa”) fathers in the text—whose inadequacy renders him unable to guarantee meaning or the Law–tells Joyce “all this is in your head” and “talk to a shrink” (1.05). But in Stranger Things it is not the language of the Father that dominates—and it is certainly not the language of the scientific represented by a shrink that dominates. Indeed, the corrupted governmental institution that imprisons Eleven uses language to dissemble, faking documents (in the form of a false AV club pamphlet) and even Will’s death. Stranger Things has a characteristically American ambivalence towards its own government (inherited perhaps from the conspiracy theories of The X Files [Fox/20thCentury Fox Television 1993-2002], another key intertext), which is reflected in the kinds of language usage that are endorsed. Though paternal authority is never completely discarded – Jim Hopper is too important to the text for that – by and large the show endorses a more embodied, more maternal and feminine form of the linguistic.
Eleven and the semiotic
It is not merely in Joyce and Will’s relationship that the maternal semiotic is explored in Stranger Things. We can see in Eleven’s (Jane’s) arc a vexed relationship to language, the maternal and paternal. When Mike, Dustin and Lucas first find Eleven in the woods, she doesn’t know a great deal of English; the boys teach her words such as “friend.” This relationship is preeminent in the boys’ relationship with Eleven, especially Mike, with the catchphrase “friends don’t lie.” Indeed, Dustin’s fidelity to the “rule of law” for The Party is a fidelity to symbolic law.
Eleven’s handler at the facility is called “Papa” by her, but he is a bad father figure, one who illegitimately uses masculine power. In not naming Eleven properly, Papa makes her not quite human—for as Lacan’s idea of the Name-of-the-Father suggests, giving a child a patronym marks their entry into language and culture (by contrast, Mike’s act of nicknaming her “El” does the opposite—the diminutive humanizes). Papa’s use of language therefore fails to situate her squarely in the societal-symbolic order, instead keeping her in the semiotic.
In “The Monster” (1.06), Eleven is able to hear Will through the radio, tuning in to his thoughts. Here again semiotic language can be seen as a kind of broadcast that only women can access. In another example in season two, Eleven receives communication from her mother Terry Ives in the form of pre-linguistic images—“Breathe. Sunflower. Rainbow. 450. Breathe” (2.5). From this, Eleven is able to decode the story of her birth by going to her version of the Upside Down where she sees the C-section that brought her into the world, her mother’s attempt to find her, and finally Terry’s being strapped down and tortured by electroshock. Her mother’s spoken language is not comprehensible to anyone; it is only through Eleven’s link to the non-verbal that she is able to access her history. Here the roles are reversed—the child interprets the mother. Terry’s apparently incoherent ramblings condense a traumatic history of dispossession of her body and her baby’s and show that without her baby—and the paternal function of language to organize those images—both she and Eleven remain largely in the realm of the semiotic. In contrast to a masculine ordering of language that moves from start to end, Terry’s narrative is circular, “it just kept repeating, like a circle showing the same image over and over” (2.07). As Freud’s pioneering work on trauma has shown, trauma repeats.
The Upside Down as semiotic
As we have seen from Joyce’s pre-linguistic exchanges with Will, the Upside Down is arguably a semiotic realm. But its link to the maternal is not just in terms of communication, but in the way creator/directors the Duffer brothers have staged the Upside Down scenes. The Upside Down is dark but inarguably organic. Most of all it resembles a womb, capacious and enveloping. At times it leaks out into the regular world, recalling blood. This is undoubtedly a maternal space of the kind analyzed by feminist theorist Barbara Creed in her book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), which saw the Nostromo, the spaceship in Alien (Scott 1979), as a kind of womb-like space. Postmodern nostalgists to the core, the Duffer brothers have in all likelihood constructed the Upside Down in part as a homage to Alien.
Creed has argued that “when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions” (7). Stranger Things ’ feminine-coded Upside Down is arguably abject in the sense described in Kristeva’s most famous work outside of France, Powers of Horror (1982). In this book, Kristeva writes about the ways in which the female body in particular is figured as disgusting and even threatens the formation of the self and its place in the world. She asks the pertinent question, “why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent—like a metaphor that would have become incarnate—the objective frailty of symbolic order?” (70). Eleven bleeds every time she uses her supernatural powers, a clear suggestion of menarche for the pubescent girl that breaks down the symbolic order of the “real” world of Hawkins. Furthermore, at one point in “The Body” (1.04), Joyce talks to Will through a red, translucent part of the wall—recalling perhaps a vaginal wall or amniotic sac.
As well as menstrual blood, the Upside Down is strongly related to water, which as French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray has argued, is semantically linked with the female in Western culture. She says, “there is no peril greater than the sea. Everything is constantly moving and remains eternally in flux” (37). The metaphysics of presence, as Jacques Derrida has called it, privileges solid over liquid, land over sea. As Eleven is immersed in water in one of Papa’s experiments to reach the Upside Down (1.05), we hear a cacophonous sound of language, too much speech to follow. When she is in the Upside Down, she meets a man talking Russian—a legacy of the show’s Cold War setting to be sure, but also a sign of her own disconnection from intelligible masculine language. The floor of the Upside Down that Eleven visits is itself covered by a smattering of water, reinforcing the connection between this plane of existence and the maternal.
The semiotic and the sacred
In exploring the relationship between the religion and maternal language, we might ask ourselves the question: how is Kristeva’s semiotic, which is a mode of language that she argues that we are all constituted in and by, related to the sacred? Kristeva’s later work on the Virgin Mary may point us towards an answer. In In The Beginning Was Love (1987), Kristeva discusses a maternal union between mother and child in Christianity. She states that:
in reading about famous mystical experiences, I felt that faith could be described, perhaps rather simplistically, as what can only be called a primary identification with a loving and protective agency. Overcoming the notion of irremediable separation, Western man, using “semiotic” rather than “symbolic” means, reestablishes a continuity or fusion with an Other that is no longer substantial and maternal but symbolic and paternal (24).
It would seem here that God the Father, the uber patriarch, is equated with the realm of religion, that Christianity can be seen solely as an “overcoming” of maternal union with a paternal God who takes on those loving and protective roles.
And yet for Kristeva, the sacred is not necessarily straightforwardly masculine. She discusses St Augustine, who compares Christian faith to an infant’s feeding from its mother. She says: “what we have here is a fusion with a breast that is, to be sure, succoring, nourishing, loving, and protective, but transposed from the mother’s body to an invisible agency located in another world” (24). The sacred for Kristeva is not purely symbolic; it retains clear links to the maternally-derived realm of the semiotic. She argues that “this is perhaps what Christianity celebrates in divine love. God was the first to love you; God is love: these apothegms reassure the believer of God’s permanent generosity and grace. He is given a gift of love without any immediate requirement of merit” (25). She suggests that “This fusion with God, which [. . .] is more semiotic than symbolic, repairs the wounds of Narcissus, which are scarcely hidden by the triumphs and failures of our desires and enmities” (25).
In other words,
In order for faith to be possible, this ‘semiotic’ leap toward the other, this primary identification with the primitive parental poles close to the maternal container, must not be either repressed or displaced in the construction of a knowledge which, by understanding the mechanism of faith, would bury it. Repression can be atheist; atheism is repressive (26).
Faith as Kristeva describes problematizes the easy distinction between male and female, with the semiotic (which she usually associates with the maternal) remaining the key impetus behind religious practice.
Stranger Things and the Sacred
As I have noted, Stranger Things has little overt religious iconography. And yet, the text also asks serious questions with religious implications. Film critic Douglas Cowan has noted that, “though often derided by critics both popular and academic, horror films, literature, and participative media demand that we ask ‘religious’ questions—and questions of religion itself—in ways that simply do not obtain in other cultural forms” (134). Or as philosopher of religion Mark C Taylor has put it pithily, “religion is most interesting where it is least obvious” (1).
So though it may appear secular to the casual eye, Stranger Things is not altogether absent of religious ideas and imagery. The maternal mediation between the semiotic and the linguistic can be seen as a form of what philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade calls a hierophany. Eliade says that we become “aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane” (11). The sacred can be found in the natural world, say in the form of a sacred tree or stone, but it is notable for the way that interrupts the natural world with an otherness of another order of being. In Stranger Things, we see an intrusion of the sacred into the profane in provocative and compelling ways. So whilst Stranger Things lacks the overtly religious iconography employed in many of the horror texts it references—such as Carrie (de Palma 1976) or The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973)—the series nevertheless manifests the deeply religious sensibility that underpins small-town America and indeed, the horror genre itself.
We can therefore see the (pre)linguistic fusion between mothers and their children as not only a sign of the text’s interest in the semiotic, but an intrusion of other dimensions of being into the “real” world of Hawkins. The Upside Down exists as a parallel world, exactly matching ours geographically, albeit inverted. The Upside Down bleeds into real life, just as the body’s drives in Kristeva’s work bleed into language from semiotic to symbolic. The Upside Down therefore collapses the transcendent, otherness, with the immanence of the self, for the Upside Down is mediated in and through bodies. The semiotic is a kind of sacred in Stranger Things.
We can see in the Upside Down a provocative exploration of the religious. Given that it is populated by monsters, it is arguable that the Upside Down can be seen as a form of hell. Hell is, after all, in Christian iconography, a world beneath ours–upside down. We can see the Upside Down therefore as an abjected terrain in the sense described by Kristeva in Powers of Horror, in which she argues that
Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) in monotheistic religions, Judaism in particular, but drifts over to more “secondary” forms such as transgression (of the Law) within the same monotheistic economy. It finally encounters, with Christian sin, a dialectic elaboration, as it becomes integrated in the Christian Word as a threatening otherness—but always nameable, always totalizeable (17)
The otherness of the Upside Down threatens the coherence of the self, its self-containment. It interrupts the ease of the self-inhabited in the symbolic, it shows how that self always already is in relation to otherness. As another order of being, its emergence into the “real” world of Hawkins is a clear hierophany of the sacred, but an abject one.
This abjection can be seen in the way Stranger Things imagines gender expression and transgression. So if the Upside Down can be seen as an abjection characterized by transgressions of symbolic law, then it is clear that this is a transgression of the laws of heteronormative patriarchy. Will is queered right from the start of the series, with Joyce noting that his father “Lonnie used to say he was queer, call him a fag” (1.01). Barbara, too, can be seen as queer in some sense, an antagonism to Nancy’s heterosexual coupling with Steve. Finally, Eleven, who is able to traverse between the Upside Down and the real world, is initially mistaken for a boy with her shaved head – “her head’s shaved, she doesn’t even look like a girl” (1.07). Judith Butler has noted the cultural monstrosity of “those abjected beings who do not appear properly gendered; it is their humanness which comes into question” (xvii). While Kristeva is largely disinterested in the gendered and sexual transgression of queer and transgender bodies, we can follow Butler (who has written extensively on queer and trans issues[5]) here into seeing a kind of potential from the abjected queerness of Eleven.
Eleven’s initial androgyny shows her distance from the symbolic and proximity to a pre-sexual difference semiotic, which she enters through the feminine-coded water. Indeed, her increasing feminization across the two series of the show thus far suggests a kind of humanization that parallels her entry into the societal-symbolic order through learning social codes. These include, not unexpectedly, heterosexual desire for Mike in the public rite of passage that is a school dance and her naming by Hopper, in which she takes his surname on her legal documents rather than that of her mother Terry Ives, in “The Gate” (2.09). And yet, it is in the abjected realm of the Upside Down most of all that we can find forms of communication, most especially between mothers and their children, that have a transcendent element to them. There is a distinct aura of otherness—a wholly other order of things, as Eliade suggests—that is enabled by the space of the Upside Down.
The study of otherness has been explored by numerous scholars of religion. Scholars of religion at least as far back as Rudolph Otto in the early twentieth century have seen the co-mingling of awe with terror in religious experience. Literary critic Edward J. Ingebretson, for instance, has argued that “fear and dread, of course, are traditional markers of divinity. In this, monsters are more like angels than not” (xiii). Here we can see the Demogorgon as a monster that signals to the divine. It certainly inspires fear and dread for those who face it, and its arrival in Hawkins clearly signifies the town’s movement from a mundane everyday American small town to a battleground between good and evil fraught with metaphysical significance. As queer theorist Jack Halberstam[6]has put it, “monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of the human, make way for the invention of the human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (22). My argument is that this normative model of the “human” in Stranger Things —which we can see mostly clear embodied in the form of the symbolic Father of the show, police chief Jim Hopper—is interwoven from the start with an interest in the maternal semiotic which destabilizes easy binaries between sacred and profane, self and other.[7]
Of course, we must remember that monsters are “meaning-making machines” (22) as Halberstam has put it, culturally significant in what they represent. The Demogorgon takes its name from a monster in the Dungeons and Dragons game that the boys play and is thus already intertextual, embedded in the text. Its creators also were clearly inspired by the alien from the Alien movies, especially in the way that the monster’s eggs are represented in the Upside Down. This is, as I have argued, a profoundly feminine image.
But the show’s monsters are not uniformly maternal or feminine. The Shadow Monster (also known as the Mind Flayer) introduced in Season Two can be seen as a kind of monstrous God or demon, with ambivalently masculine overtones. His influence on the “real” world of Hawkins is a kind of corruption of matter, the destruction of creation. We can see this in the rotting of the pumpkin fields; again, crucially, the influence of the Upside Down is from beneath. This arguably recalls that most contemporary of concerns—climate change—but it is also an apocalyptic image of the kind familiar from the Jewish and Christian traditions (albeit one without a messianic redeemer). The earth itself is becoming corrupted, unable to sustain life anymore. Arguably, the Shadow Monster is a demonic force, who seeks to destroy the natural world, replacing it with a disgusting and disturbing world—an abject one.
Moreover, the Shadow Monster communicates with Will through a kind of non-verbal method of understanding. This, too, is transcendent in the text, but in a way that terrorizes rather than comforts and clarifies (as both Joyce’s and Eleven’s semiotic links mostly do). Will becomes increasingly distressed and is eventually sedated to prevent the Shadow Monster from spying on his friends and family. As the Shadow Monster is emphatically coded as male (Will always refers to “him” rather than the more usual “it” for a monster), it is arguable that the text positions this communication as illegitimate, as an impossible and undesirable male form of the semiotic. In a grotesque twist on the maternal, Will incubates a Demogorgon, spitting it out in the bathroom on Christmas Day. It’s not hard to see the religious implications of that day–but it is the monstrous that is born in Hawkins, not a messiah. Will’s body is queered again, blurring the boundaries between male and female. And yet, this too is abject, and transcends the everyday.
Conclusion
In the way that it imagines communication, especially between mothers and their children, as well as its portrayal of monsters, Stranger Things arguably creates a form of secular sacred—a monstrous sacred that relies on the refiguration of language and the movement of the body’s drives into the linguistic. Secular because it has no ties to established religious traditions or institutions, sacred because it suggests that other orders of being surround even the most everyday of places. This is most especially so in the way it imagines maternal relationships to language, the interconnection between mothers and their children, female bodies and the linguistic. At times this terrorizes, but pleasurably so. The abject destabilizes the syntax of the symbolic, instead suggesting a new, often creative, relationship to the semiotic. The metaphor of the Upside Down in Stranger Things points us towards new ways of understanding maternal relationships to corporeality, the linguistic and the sacred.
In this monstrous sacred, Stranger Things suggests that another world is possible, as is another way of communicating beyond the everyday. In the fear and dread we see in horror texts, we overcome the mundane, and encounter an otherness of quite profound significance. Mothers and monsters (and monstrous mothers) in the Duffers’ pleasurable text provide us with new ways of experiencing alterity and the transcendent. As Eliade observes, “for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as a cosmic sacrality” (12) —and this is doubly true for the supernatural world of Stranger Things.
Works Cited
Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott, 20thCentury Fox, 1979.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993.
Carrie. Directed by Brian de Palma, United Artists, 1976.
Clement, Catherine and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Columbia UP, 2001.
Cowan, Douglas. “The Crack in the World: New Thoughts on Religion and Horror.” Religious Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 4, 2015, pp. 133-139.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, 1959.
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1982.
The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin, Warner Brothers, 1973.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. St Leonards, 1990.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995.
Hansen, Regina. “Introduction.”Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery, edited by Regina Hansen, McFarland, 2011, pp. 3-14.
Ingebretsen, Edward J. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. M.E. Sharpe, 1996.
Ingebretsen, Edward J. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Irigaray, Luce. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982.
Margaroni, Maria. “The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures.” Julia Kristeva: Live Theory, edited by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, Continuum, 2004, pp. 6-33.
McAfee, Noelle. Julia Kristeva. Routledge, 2004.
McAvan, Emily. The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres. McFarland, 2012.
Stranger Things. Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Netflix, 2016-present.
Taylor, Mark C. About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
X-Files. Created by Chris Carter, Fox/20thCentury Fox Television, 1993-2002, 2016-2018.
Biography
Dr Emily McAvan is an Australian academic and writer. Her research centers on the intersection between the secular and the religious, focusing on the aesthetic, gendered and sexual implications of the sacred. Her first book The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture and Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres was published by McFarland in 2012. Her work on religion and culture has appeared in journals such as Literature & Theology, The Bible and Critical Theory, and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
[1]See Emily McAvan, The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres. Jefferson, N.C and London: McFarland, 2012.
[2]For more on the Puritan roots of many American horror texts, see Edward J. Ingebretsen’sMaps of Heaven, Maps of Hell. Ingebretsen argues that Puritan preachers used imagery of hell to chide the faithful towards the straight and narrow – something we can see in the sometimes morally didactic world of horror.
[3]The relationship between Kristeva and Lacan is a far too vexed and complex one to do justice to here. Lacan’s division of the psyche into the tripartite Imaginary, Symbolic and Real has undoubtedly inspired Kristeva, however it is arguable that the semiotic is neither the Imaginary nor the Real. In her groundbreaking discussion of the maternal, Kristeva is far from the “dutiful daughter” of Lacan that Elizabeth Grosz (1990), for instance, imagines her to be.
[4]I take this point from one of the reviewers of this paper.
[5]From the beginning of her writing in the early 90s in Gender Trouble to 2004’s Undoing Gender, Butler has lead the theoretical conversation on queer and (trans)gender) issues.
[6]Transgender scholar Jack Halberstam was formerly known as Judith at the time he wrote Skin Shows. I have therefore referenced his assigned name in the works cited list so that readers might find the work being referred to.
[7]In this sense, we might see the movement from semiotic to symbolic in Stranger Things as marked by a certain kind of loss of the transcendent (disenchantment in Max Weber’s sense).