Gays, Women, and Chainsaws: Queer Approaches to Characteristion and Identification in Contemporary Slasher Cinema, 1996-2018

The proposed thesis examines how women and gay men are invited to watch contemporary slasher cinema in similar ways, identifying with characters and narratives in accordance to their cultural experiences. This suggests that spectatorship is not necessarily determined by gendered and sexual identity, as film theory assumes. Rather, spectatorship is influenced by the heteropatriarchal discourse that dictates the cultural experiences of women and gay men.

Critiquing the seminal work of Carol Clover (1992) regarding slasher's heteronormative gaze extends later feminist criticism on female audiences and their identifications (Pindeo, 1997; Miller, 2014). This feminist criticism will be extended by examining its relevance to the parascholarship of online blog posts that analyse gay male audiences (Liaguno, 2008; Bingham-Scales, 2017). Subsequently, the thesis develops a conceptual framework that methodologically enhances the criticism of slasher cinema via feminist and queer theory, demonstrating how gay male audiences might identify with female characters. This offers an innovative perspective on characterisation and identification by conceptualising how gay male audiences might identify with screen images when gay representation is absent. This conceptual framework will be evidenced with an online reception study and autoethnographic account, situating the theorisations made in textual analyses.