AustLit

'Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.' (Publication abstract)

'One imagines that thumbtacked to the pinboard above H C Gildfind’s writing desk (or perhaps tattooed on the top of her dominant typing hand) are the words, ‘Happiness is repetition.’ If they hadn’t been quoted midway through the penultimate story of her debut collection The Worry Front (or perhaps misquoted: is this a reduction of Milan Kundera’s well-known ‘happiness is the longing for repetition’? then I’d have been forced to pencil them into the text myself.'  (Introduction)