Abstract
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed drew on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to explore misogyny in the construction of Hollywood cinema’s female monsters. Two decades later, Creed has identified a counterattack: a global ‘new wave’ in which feminist protagonists wield markers of abjection to disrupt patriarchal and anthropocentric violence. Though Creed acknowledges mixed sex characteristics in several of these abject avengers, her interpretation of the new wave remains largely dualistic: female monsters confront patriarchal males. Textual analysis of one new wave film reveals the limitations of such a binaried model. In Hatching (Hanna Bergholm, Finland, 2022), the enforcer of a cruel, cisheteropatriarchal order is female, and the film’s monstrous becoming presents sex and speciation as fluid and relational – impossible to assimilate within essentialised conceits. This transfeminist analysis explores the unacknowledged echoes of trans activist practices in Creed’s concept of ‘radical abjection’. It also identifies opportunities for trans theory, particularly engagements with abjection and ecology, to enhance our understanding of the feminist new wave.
Keywords: Transecology, feminist new wave, abject, transcorporeality, tranimal, tradwife
Margaret White: Say it! ‘The raven was called sin.’
Carrie White: No, Momma! ... ‘And the raven was called sin.’
- Carrie (Brian De Palma, USA, 1976)
In Hatching’s (Hanna Bergholm, Finland, 2022) final sequence, a middle-aged woman raises her tearstained face to meet the gaze of a defiant adolescent who has just uttered the word ‘Mother’. The speaker is not the woman’s daughter, but a doppelgänger who began life as a raven’s chick. Hatching is among the most lauded and widely distributed Nordic horror films of the decade (Bergholm 2022a; Lemercier 2022). (1) (2) In the Finnish canon, its nearest relation may be The White Reindeer (Erik Blomberg, 1952), in which the merging of human and nonhuman forms results from suppressed emotion. Many Anglophone critics have instead drawn parallels with Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). In this film, as in Hatching, a controlling mother stabs her sympathetic daughter, who had harboured a destructive secret fuelled by repressed rage (Bergholm 2022b; Billson 2022; Lui 2022). (3) (4) (5)
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed proposed that Carrie’s mother and daughter – like Hollywood’s other monstrous female forms – reflect misogynist fears of the female body and psyche as threateningly liminal and impure. (6) Her analysis drew on Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the abject as that which ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’, and ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). (7) Visual signals of abjection thus include hybridity of sex or species, morphological transformation, and liquids associated with the inchoate or reproductive body, such as blood and slime. Films featuring monstrous-feminine forms, Creed writes, stage an opposition between the male representative of the patriarchal symbolic order – the putative order of logic and propriety – and the female who threatens to defile it. Thus, the ‘central ideological project of the popular horror film’ is to confront the monstrous female and correctively ‘redraw the boundaries’ to secure the patriarchal order (1993:14).
Kristeva wrote that identity is defined and maintained through defence of the boundary between the self and other, the proper and improper. Anyone who threatens these boundaries must thus be excluded as abject (Kristeva 1982: 11). This process of ‘abjecting’ establishes criteria of purity and taboo and justifies marginalisation. By rendering others abject, ‘identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification’ (Phillips 2014: 19). (8)Thus, a society that upholds heterosexuality and binaried, essentialised sex as defining criteria of humanity – a cisheteronormative regime – ‘abjects’ anyone whose sex or gender it deems ambiguous or transgressive.
The year of The Monstrous-Feminine’s publication, trans historian and activist Susan Stryker gave a landmark performance, furiously articulating what Creed would later term ‘radical abjection’. In My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage, Stryker adopted the role of a speaking ‘monster’ to reject cisheteronormative exclusion of trans people from the realm of the natural, declaring, ‘I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face and redefine a life worth living’ (performed 1993, published 1994: 250). (9) Then, as now, transphobic discourse and representation had used tropes of monstrosity to construe trans people as a threat to the ‘natural’ cisgendered order (Daly 1978; Raymond 1979; Koch-Rein 2014: 134). (10) In response, trans academics, artists and activists continue to reclaim monstrosity as a constructive and disruptive force, ‘rejecting the abjection of bodily mixture, celebrating multiplicity and hybridity, and reorienting rage [...] to imagine new possibilities for critical thought and social change’ (Sharp 2020: 80; see also Preciado 2021; Wagner 2015). (11) (12) (13)
At the same time, posthumanist scholars have recognised the systemic and politically opportunistic dehumanisation of trans people as an opportunity to explore interrelatedness with nonhuman life. A 2020 collection of essays established ‘transecology’ as a branch of scholarship that joins concerns of ecocriticism and trans theory to question how sex, gender, and ‘the natural’ are co-informing. Transecology conceives of the body as a site of ongoing negotiations and cohabitations that transgress colonially and racially enforced dualisms such as nature/culture, human/animal and male/female (Bedford 2020: 7). (14) The field is informed by transcorporeality, a concept introduced by Stacy Alaimo in 2008, which understands human embodiment to be continually redefined through material exchanges with the nonhuman. (15)
As Alaimo admits, corporeal permeability readily suggests visions of horror (2001). (16) It is at the intersection of horror, ecocriticism and reclaimed abjection that Creed locates a new wave of feminist film – though she does not acknowledge the influence of trans theory or activism in these approaches. It is this oversight that this essay seeks to address. Using Hatching as a case study, I will demonstrate that the feminist new wave swells with the force of trans thought and practice as it celebrates the radical power of embodied hybridity, motility and opacity.
In Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, Creed describes an intergeneric range of films in which heroic protagonists ‘challenge the concept of fixed, unchanging forms [...] that are central to the mythology of the patriarchal symbolic order’ (2022: 5). (17) Inspired by the ‘feminist goals of social justice and empowerment of the Other’, these figures expose and avenge patriarchal violence, including systemic assaults on nonhuman life (2022: 3). The bodies of new wave avengers often undermine ‘the rigid boundaries between species which patriarchal ideology constructs primarily to justify the definition of human as exceptional and separate from the nonhuman’ (2022: 113). One year later, in a revised edition of The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed introduced the term ‘radical abjection’ to describe the embracing of abjected forms and qualities at the heart of the new wave’s rebellion.
She identifies several protagonists whose physiognomy ‘undermines the conventional association between sex and gender’, to upend oppressive, ‘one-dimensional notions of the body’ (2023: 177). (18) Yet Creed’s broader conception of the new wave reinscribes these characters within a sexed binary. The genre’s defining feature, Creed writes, is a confrontation between the ‘male symbolic order’ or ‘the abject male’ and ‘new forms of [the] female monstrous’, particularly ‘the female nonhuman protagonist’. The new wave ultimately signifies, for Creed, that the ‘sharper edge of the sword has fallen into the hands of man’s nemesis – woman’ (2023: xiv).
Recognising Hatching as a new wave text, Creed commends its ‘critique of the myth of the proper feminine body and happy suburban womanhood through the monstrous figure of the nonhuman’ (2023: 184). As I will argue, the film’s human and nonhuman protagonists disrupt both the myth of essentialised womanhood and bi-gendered valence of Creed’s vision. In Hatching, the enforcer of a cisheteropatriarchal and anthropocentric visual order is a woman. The hypocrisy and violence of her imposed order are conveyed in the emotional and physical trials of her adolescent daughter. The film’s explicit ‘monster’ transgresses the bounds of sex and species, at once visualising transecology’s destabilised frameworks of embodied identity and contesting anthropocentric and cissexist essentialism.
Hatching takes place in a white house that gleams within a dark forest. Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is an earnest 12-year-old who struggles to qualify for a gymnastics tournament to win her mother’s approval. Mother (Sophia Heikkilä) is an enthusiastic vlogger at pains to portray her family as pristine and successful. One morning, Mother’s filming is interrupted by a loud crack at the window. Tinja opens it, and a raven bursts into the room, shattering its ornaments and fixtures. Only Tinja can contain the bird, but before she can release it, Mother beckons and snaps the bird’s neck with a smile. That night, hearing agonised cries, Tinja discovers the wounded bird in the neighbouring woods. She kills it in mercy, only to realise that it had been guarding an egg. Guilt-ridden, the girl nestles the egg in her bed.
Soon, Tinja learns that Mother is having an affair and preparing to abandon the family. As Tinja’s grief and sense of betrayal build, she turns to the egg for comfort, and it expands in response to her touch and tears. One night, an enormous raven’s chick hatches. The distraught and lonely girl cares for the chick, whom she names Alli. It undergoes a long, messy transformation, gradually adopting human traits and coming to resemble Tinja, and a psychic link is revealed – the creature responds to the girl’s suppressed sorrow and rage by attacking their causes. In the film’s final sequences, Mother discovers Alli and lunges to stab it, but Tinja intervenes and is killed. Blood from her mouth trickles into the creature’s and it seems to fully adopt Tinja’s form. Yet when Alli rises and speaks the word ‘Mother’, its voice is incongruously aged and masculine. It is unclear whether Mother will acknowledge this defiant and unclassifiable doppelgänger as her child or admit to having killed the real Tinja.
Through character studies of Mother, Alli, and Tinja, I will explore Hatching’s engagement with transecology and its transcendence of a binaried vision of the feminist new wave. I will first examine the film’s critical treatment of Mother’s cisheteropatriarchal ‘tyranny of looking’ (Creed 2022: 13). Next, I will describe Hatching’s celebration of intimate co-becoming in the liminal figures of Alli and Tinja. In alignment with the film, I will employ a transfeminist approach informed by shared aims of trans and (some) feminist scholarship: the deconstruction of gender essentialism and its resultant hierarchies and exclusions (Enke 2012: 2). (19)
MOTHER
The central rebellion in the feminist new wave, Creed writes, is often a revolt against ‘a [patriarchal] social order locked into the visual’ (2022: 13). As she films her family, issuing directions and critiques, Mother maintains a visual order that permits no deviation. She has selected her family’s clothing and decorated the home. An abundance of sharp, fragile, easily smudged surfaces ensures that the family moves with discipline to avoid damage and injury. The atmosphere of control extends to representations of nonhuman life, which are bi-gendered through colour and rendered explicitly artificial; beyond an abstract metal sculpture of a tree is a garish carpet of pink petals. Pink blossoms overwhelm the wallpaper of Tinja’s and Mothers’ bedrooms, designating feminine space. Father and Tinja’s brother have identical, conservative hairstyles, glasses and blue and khaki clothing, masculine colours reiterated throughout their rooms. Overall, the stylistic bi-gendering of the home and family is so emphatic that it parodies a cisheteronormative conception of gender as essentialised, presocial and coterminous with nature (Keegan 2018: 34). (20)
Whiteness also dominates Mother’s visual realm. Chalky statues of female forms loom from corners. Mother’s videos feature herself and Tinja in white dresses, wearing white garlands, grinning blankly into bleaching light. Her camera filter gives her dyed blonde hair and white skin a halo that obscures blemishes and frown lines. Creed writes that ‘for the body to represent the [patriarchal] symbolic order, it must be unmarked’ (1993: 11) and Hatching locates this aspiration in Mother alone. When her son runs to embrace her, Mother resists, then harshly criticises the boy for staining their clothes. Richard Dyer has observed that in hegemonic ideation, white people are thought to be distinguished by ‘a light within’, yet ‘this light, which is white, is dirtied (“stained”) by blood, passion, movement – which is to say, isn't it, life’ (1997: 208). (21) In Mother’s images, whiteness, bi-gendering and the commodification of nonhuman life are condemned by association with a cold absence of feeling.
Mother’s selection of white dresses for her daughter underlines an aesthetic of purity – an essential mechanism of control over the female body (Bedford 2020: 5). Discourses of purity, dominion over ‘Nature’ and domesticated femininity have long sustained exclusionary ideals of white womanhood. Mother’s videos reflect a contemporary iteration of these ideals – they evoke ‘tradwife’ vlogs, a global anti-feminist and white nationalist social media phenomenon conceived by alt-right influencers. ‘Trad’, or traditional, wives celebrate heterosexual marriage and binaried gender as biological and instinctual, preserved from an imagined past (Zahay 2022: 173). (22) (Conceptions of femininity are locally formed and transitory. Yet the approach of the tradwife functions, as Zahay has observed, across cultural contexts by promoting shared or translatable visions of white femininity. The tradwife movement has particularly strong Nordic currency; journalists such as Miranda Christou have traced its inception to a Swedish blogger who urged followers to reduce open expressions of misogyny and consider new methods of enlisting women in the cause of white nationalism. He later confirmed that tradwife content had achieved this purpose. In February 2020, between the end of Hatching’s shooting and the beginning of post-production, the Twitter account of a Finnish nationalist broadcaster cited widespread interest and called for ‘a #tradwife model rooted in Finnishness’. I do not suggest that the film offers a derisive response to this call, but that Hatching’s evocation of a contemporary social media phenomenon bears consideration.)
Like most tradwife influencers, Mother never articulates ideological grounding. Instead, ‘the sign of “femininity” functions as an ideological shorthand’, while algorithms link viewers to more explicit content (Zahay 2022: 171). Using terms such as ‘everyday’ and ‘traditional’, tradwife vlogs contain ‘populist messaging that frames feminism as an elitist threat to the “real” femininity of everyday women’ (Zahay 2022: 170). Mother’s vlog conveys this appeal in its title, Lovely Everyday Life, and its claims to showcase the ‘ordinary Finnish family’. This content is further evoked in Mother’s resolutely bubbly delivery, as well as her clothing, decor and enthusiastic displays of monogamous heterosexuality. Kissing Father chastely as her children look on, Mother introduces herself to viewers as ‘a woman with two children and one man’.
As a new wave film, Hatching exposes the violence and corruption of the patriarchal order through markers of abjection – in patriarchal antagonists as well as feminist avengers. Creed describes the antagonist of the feminist new wave as an ‘abject male’ who transgresses ethical bounds through hypocrisy, deceit or treachery. He often robs others ‘of their identity and right to self-determination’ and displays ‘aggressive phallicity’ (Creed 2022: 5–11).
In a genderqueer twist, it is Mother who embodies every quality of ‘male’ abjection. Tinja discovers that Mother is not ‘a woman with one man,’ she is abandoning her family to live with a lover and showering the lover’s daughter with the affection that Tinja struggles painfully to earn and rarely receives. The girl’s grief, jealousy and rage are expressed in Alli’s attacks, but Mother’s hypocrisy, treachery and deceit are the origin of the bloodshed.
As an abject ‘male’, Mother doubly impedes Tinja’s self-determination. While the girl longs to make friends, Mother encourages discipline, pressuring the girl to mirror her own childhood success at a feminised sport. At the same time, Mother appropriates elements of Tinja’s identity, wearing a dress that matches Tinja’s when she introduces the girl to her lover, as if to assert her own youthful purity, and speaking of her nerves ahead of the tournament as if she herself were competing.
Aggressive phallicity, the final marker of male abjection, is represented in Mother’s sharp, four-inch nails, her spike heels, and her choice of weapon, a long kitchen knife. Before she uses the knife to kill, Mother mercilessly crops imperfect figures from footage and critiques Tinja’s comportment and appearance. In a particularly painful sequence, she orders Tinja to repeat her gymnastics routine – never noticing, or perhaps not caring, that her daughter’s palms have begun to bleed. It is deliciously ironic that Mother’s phallic coding disrupts the cisheteronormative visual order that she strives to project. At the same time, her embodiment of ‘male’ abjection undermines Creed’s conception of the gender of the patriarchal adversary.
Mother’s cruelty recalls a misogynist trope that Creed identified in her early analysis of Carrie: that of the castrating woman. She may be a mother who ‘takes back the life she once created’ (1993: 82) or who disempowers by enforcing the proper feminine role (1993: 132). Yet what Hatching renders horrific is not Mother as such, but the discourse of power in which she participates to her detriment. As we witness Mother performing retakes to correct her appearance and delivery, failing to cover bruises and tear stains with makeup and editing footage late into the night, Hatching exposes the labour and self-curtailment required to convey supposedly ‘natural’ femininity. Director Hanna Bergholm explains that Mother’s sense of self is entirely dependent on the approval of her social media followers (2022c). (23) She is frequently framed in mirrors and other surfaces that refract or reverse her image, suggesting an unstable, contingent identity (Hughes 2002: 12). (24) The presence of social media in Hatching thus projects Mother’s standards into the public sphere. It is not her body or psyche that is villainised but the strictures required to achieve a cisheteropatriarchal ideal of womanhood.
By the film’s conclusion, Mother has ‘transed’ from one gendered realm of abjection to another. The use of this verb has a rich history in trans theory and conveys de-essentialising movement across unstable borders (Straube 2020: 56). After fatally stabbing Tinja, Mother drops her knife and falls into a foetal position. Bloodied slime from an encounter with Alli drips from her mouth, and snot and sooty tears streak her face. Mother is left awash in signifiers of ‘female’ abjection, and Creed’s conception of an unmarked male antagonist is again upended. By situating a tradwife with mixed-gender coding as a patriarchal adversary, Hatching disengages the new wave from a simplified feminism that opposes women and men. In the figure of Mother, it instead encourages a reevaluation of the manifold manifestations of patriarchal oppression.
Alli
As Emily Skidmore observes, ‘The ideological power of white womanhood (and the bi-gender system that it supports) rests in large part on the exclusive nature of its construction’ (2011: 294). (25) In Hatching, everything Mother attempts to exclude from her patriarchal order reasserts itself with a vengeance. The original raven leaves a streak of blood and a black feather against the expanse of white-curtained window. When Mother retaliates, her visual order is again invaded – by a much larger raven who trails black feathers indoors and drips bloodied slime onto Mother’s and Tinja’s faces. Alli acts on the unphotogenic feelings that Mother forces her family to repress. In an ultimate intrusion, it takes on the form of Mother’s supposed protégé.
While Mother subjects her family to strict bi-gendering and physical discipline, Alli refutes any such containment. Its expanding egg bursts through the chest of a pink teddy bear. Hatched, the creature erupts through wardrobe doors and out of windows. In its elaborate and ongoing transformation, marked by shredded skin, cheeks studded with teeth, and effusions of hair and feathers, Alli is liminality incarnate. Creed observes that the tactility and texture of the natural world serve to ‘[undo] the rigidity of the socially constructed feminine gender role’ (2022: 113). By contrast with Tinja’s anxious whispers, Alli is riotously expressive, issuing screeches, hisses, gurgles and mews that are endearing as well as fearsome. Like other new wave films, Hatching ‘invites the spectator to identify and respond to otherness – human and nonhuman’, by presenting nonhuman animals as subjects (Creed 2022: 147). Alli and its parent raven receive isolated central framing and closeups that capture expression. With most of the film’s point-of-view sequences conveying Alli’s perspective, the framing of this unruly avenger encourages both empathy and shared embodiment.
Alli begins life as a foetal chick, and its origin in ‘everyday’ ecology is unique – most new wave protagonists are creatures of fantasy, such as trolls, or they believe they are human until they develop markers of hybridity. In Hatching, by contrast, the adoption of human traits makes a creature monstrous, beginning when the egg’s shell absorbs Tinja’s tears and blood. Alli’s transformation thus demonstrates a tenet of transcorporeality: ‘[B]odies take meaning through their interactions with other bodies’ (Estok 2020: 34). (26) The unusual direction of the film’s transformation – from egg to oversized raven to indeterminate humanoid through contact with human materiality – makes Hatching an especially valuable site of ecocritical investigation.
Gigantism and hybridity are central qualities of the grotesque, a term that first referred to half-human forms (Kriel 2015: 22). (27) It is defined by opposition to the harmonious proportions of Classical aesthetics, including the idealised feminine figure: ‘all pristine surface – sealed-off, clean, sleek, smooth, and carefully contained’ (2015: 25). The grotesque thus threatens categories by which humans make sense of the world (Kriel 2015: 23; Kayser 1981: 184). (28) The film’s hatching sequence, the breach of a supposedly ‘pristine surface’, is prolonged and visceral. The egg pulses ominously, framed against pink-blossomed wallpaper. A growing crack reveals a veined inner membrane through which a black claw suddenly erupts. As fragments of shell fall away, bloody foetal fluids seep into Tinja’s pale duvet. The exposed creature darts toward Tinja and emits an ear-splitting shriek, having already imprinted. With its dripping beak and ragged feathers, Alli is disturbing, but it is still, at this stage, an ordinary chick rendered large. The sequence conveys that the ‘natural’ world is replete with qualities that a patriarchal order has abjected: transgressive, staining fluids, inchoate, unexpected forms and unabashed attachment. The juxtaposition of this birth and Tinja’s bedroom reveals the curated environment to be fragile and artificial; the feminised domestic realm is ‘unnatural’ by contrast.
Through further contact – tender touch and the consumption of seed that Tinja obligingly regurgitates – Alli’s body comes to resemble Tinja’s. Yet it rejects participation in feminisation. In an exemplary sequence, Alli and Tinja sit in a closet filled with dresses. On the creature’s head, strands of blonde hair sprout among ragged black feathers. Tinja attempts to tame the hair with a pink brush – a gift from Mother – and fixes a pink flowered clip to one side. The results render these efforts crude and bizarre. Tinja holds up a mirror, but the creature refuses to look. It likewise resists when Mother, believing it to be Tinja, attempts to brush its unmanageable hair. While Tinja’s comportment is strictly disciplined under Mother’s watchful lens, Alli crouches, leaps, and lumbers, refuting feminine bearing. When Alli finally speaks, after fully adopting Tinja’s form, its voice is startlingly deep and weathered, discordant with the presumed sex of Tinja’s body. Closing with a closeup on Alli’s defiant, unyielding gaze, Hatching celebrates wildness as Jack Halberstam describes it: ‘a challenge to an assumed order [...] on behalf of things that refuse and resist order itself’ (2020: 3). (29)
Alli’s fluid and indeterminate sex and species evoke a recent development in trans and animal studies. In a 2015 essay, Eva Hayward, Jami Weinstein and others introduced the term ‘tranimalities’ to acknowledge the joint exclusion of trans people and nonhuman animals from humanist discourse and to propose new understandings of embodiment. (30) Tranimality, or transanimality, has come to describe figures like Alli, who transgress borders of species and sex. The field draws on research from biologists and social scientists such as Bruce Bagemihl (1999), Joan Roughgarden (2004) and Myra Hird (2008), who have demonstrated that a static two-sex model does not apply to most life forms on Earth (Hird: 2008: 236). (31) (32) (33) Investigations of tranimality thus explore how departures from anthropocentric perspectives can inform understanding of human sex and transitioning. Though it emerged earlier, tranimal theory may be understood as a strand of transecology, as it shares the aim of decentring the cisgendered human subject and the imposed binaries that support its exceptionalism. In its indecipherability, Alli refutes animal/human, male/female and self/other dualities. Like any new wave figure of revolt, it is ‘an indigestible element of [cishetero]patriarchal society, and as such, a powerful threat’ (Creed 2022: 8). Yet Alli’s indeterminate sex would preclude its categorisation as a ‘female nonhuman protagonist’. By showing sex and speciation to be mutable and co-created, Hatching foregrounds transecological representation within the feminist new wave. Echoing a legacy of trans art, scholarship and activism, the film claims the ‘natural’ for the transing body so often excluded as abject.
Tinja
While Alli blurs bounds of sex and species, and Mother displays mixed gendered coding, Tinja’s embodied ‘impurity’ is the first suggested. In Hatching’s opening sequence, aerial images of the family’s home are scored by the sound of flapping wings. These images are intercut with a closeup of bones protruding through taut fabric. A wider shot shows Tinja in a leotard, extending her arms like wings as she attempts to stretch, hemmed in by furniture. The initial closeup estranges Tinja’s body, while the crosscutting suggests a parity between avian and human forms, one flying freely, the other constrained. After Tinja opens the window and the raven enters, cross-cutting and eyeline matches suggest a wordless exchange. An avian quality is also evoked in Tinja’s gymnastics. She leaps and flips from high wooden bars but lands clumsily, like a chick unaccustomed to flight. Ann Chisholm has observed that by mastering gravity and centrifugal force, female gymnasts seem to defy natural laws, while their feats of contortion and acquisition of a V-shaped ‘male’ physique suggest physiological deviance (2002: 423). (34) Tinja’s implied hybridity is extended to the viewer; in five sequences, she closes her eyes and can see through Alli’s. We see from the creature’s perspective, underscored by Tinja’s anxious breathing. Staging, framing, sound and editing techniques thus combine to suggest posthuman impurity in even the most ‘cultivated’ young person.
Impurity is likewise conveyed in Tinja’s painful internalisation of Mother’s standards. When Mother accuses her of not taking her training seriously, Tinja does sit-ups late into the night to compensate. When Mother sneers, ‘You smell’, the girl scrubs her skin raw in the bath. She criticises her own gymnastics pose and is rewarded with a rare caress. It is the recognition of a similar mimetic strategy in the newborn chick that endears it to Tinja. When the creature hatches, Tinja hides her face in her hands. After a moment of silence, she peers through her fingers to find Alli making the same gesture. It extends its arm to show Tinja a wound – like her, it requires care. From this moment on, Tinja dotes on the creature, offering Alli the physical warmth and verbal affirmation she herself craves. Tinja, whose feelings are blithely ignored by her parents, listens attentively to the chick’s pulse. As she cares for this disruptive creature who embodies everything that Mother opposes, Tinja’s tenderness is an act of rebellion.
Creed writes that the heroine of the new wave initiates ‘new and different kinds of relationships and connections’ (2022: 19). Intimacy is likewise a focal point of transecology, building on feminist new materialists’ interest in human and nonhuman entities fostering each other’s emergence through affective encounters (Bedford 2020; Straube 2020; Thorsteinson and Joo 2020). (35) (36) Alli and Tinja express intimacy inside a closet and under a bed, stroking one other and lovingly watching the other sleep. Only beyond the disciplining gaze, in traditional sites of terror, each darkly at odds with the bleaching light of Mother’s videos, can Tinja experience connection at home.
Among the forms of revolt in the feminist new wave, Creed includes ‘forging a new identity’ (2022: 4). For Hatching’s monstrous avengers, this revolt is explicitly articulated in the film’s final sequence. When Mother lunges to stab Alli, Tinja protests, ‘But I hatched it’, acknowledging ethical and corporeal ties before she darts to intercept Mother’s blade. By taking a knife for Alli, who now closely resembles her, Tinja ensures that the most unruly, unabashedly abject vision of herself survives. This rebellion is articulated in her final expression: as Tinja looks at Mother for the last time, her customary imploring gaze becomes the heavy-lidded stare of the defiant teenager, an expression Alli adopts as it rises.
By killing Tinja, Mother liberates Alli from one relational web – it no longer acts on the anger and sorrow of another. Yet when Alli rasps, ‘Mother’, it claims belonging in her family, recalling Susan Stryker’s assertion of trans belonging within the realm of the natural (1994). The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin verb ‘monere’, ‘to warn’. Hatching’s final image, a 10-second closeup on Alli’s insubordinate gaze, evokes Stryker’s warning: ‘I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself’ (1994: 241). Like Stryker, Hatching recognizes every identity as a patchwork collaboration. Mother constructs herself and her family – explicitly by cutting and assembling footage – for the approval of others. Tinja struggles with internalised maternal standards, while Alli takes on Tinja’s form and feelings. The tradwife is doubly a composite being, embodying male and female markers of abjection.
As in Stryker’s landmark articulation of transgender rage, the pursuit of purity, of embodying essentialised ideals, is revealed to rest on hypocrisy, cruelty and violent transgressions upon the selfhood of others.
Hatching counters Mother’s aggressive cisheteronormativity by celebrating the abject, inchoate and unruly – in Alli’s embodied refutation of fixed categories, in Tinja’s suggested hybridity and in her rebellious tenderness. By championing abjection and revealing all bodies to be at once ‘impure’, transgressive and worthy of care, the film urges viewers to question what and whom they crop out, closet, and otherwise exclude. As such, Hatching poses a challenge to the very act of othering.
Conclusion
This essay is a collection of beginnings. Two branches of trans theory I have identified in Hatching, transecology and tranimality, have emerged in the past decade, and this essay is among the first to link them. It is also the first academic investigation to centre this tender horror film. Impressively, Barbara Creed has catalogued a new wave of cinema in two books over just two years. This text is among the first to offer dedicated engagement with her analysis. Creed’s work, as always, is immensely valuable. Combining textual analysis with feminist and posthumanist theory, she offers incisive critiques of the patriarchy’s joint subjugation of women and nonhuman life as she indexes intergeneric visions of rebellion.
This essay, like Creed’s texts, is also haunted by the past. Creed recognizes the monstrous-feminine as the central figure of the feminist new wave. This affirms the continued value of her work from earlier decades, but it also helps to confine the new wave within a dualistic framework in which female avengers oppose patriarchal male aggressors. I suggest that a bi-sexed conception of the new wave does a disservice to the genre’s protagonists, whose resistance to disciplining classification is what makes them valiant. Hatching is a powerful entry in the feminist new wave, not because it opposes female monsters with patriarchal males but because it challenges the dualisms of species and sex that underlie cisheteropatriarchal and anthropocentric violence. The feminism of the new wave, Creed writes, ‘explores the nature of radical alterity’ and ‘is open to all, regardless of their sex or gender’ (2022: 19). Hatching transcends a binaried understanding of the new wave to articulate the inclusivity of this feminism.
Hatching is not unique – as Creed acknowledges, several new wave protagonists refute conventions of sex or gender (2023: 177). Because the genre’s defining form of revolt, radical abjection, evokes a tactic long employed by trans artists and activists, this group of films is an enticing field for transfeminist analysis. Hatching is likewise not alone in foregrounding representations of transecology. For bodies that transgress the bounds of sex and species, new wave films such as Border (Ali Abbasi, Sweden, 2018) claim the natural, relish the impure, and showcase intimacy and belonging (Bedford 2020: 13).
Like other analyses of feminist horror, this essay is limited by centring a narrative of white adolescence produced in the Global North. Filmmakers throughout the world continue to explore the capacity of radical abjection to test patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemonies. Films such as Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze, Georgia, 2017), I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, UK/Zambia, 2017), Scales (Shahad Ameen, Saudi Arabia/UAE/Iraq, 2019) and Black Milk (Uisenma Borchu, Germany/Mongolia, 2020) present compelling avenues of further research.
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed drew on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to explore misogyny in the construction of Hollywood cinema’s female monsters. Two decades later, Creed has identified a counterattack: a global ‘new wave’ in which feminist protagonists wield markers of abjection to disrupt patriarchal and anthropocentric violence. Though Creed acknowledges mixed sex characteristics in several of these abject avengers, her interpretation of the new wave remains largely dualistic: female monsters confront patriarchal males. Textual analysis of one new wave film reveals the limitations of such a binaried model. In Hatching (Hanna Bergholm, Finland, 2022), the enforcer of a cruel, cisheteropatriarchal order is female, and the film’s monstrous becoming presents sex and speciation as fluid and relational – impossible to assimilate within essentialised conceits. This transfeminist analysis explores the unacknowledged echoes of trans activist practices in Creed’s concept of ‘radical abjection’. It also identifies opportunities for trans theory, particularly engagements with abjection and ecology, to enhance our understanding of the feminist new wave.
Keywords: Transecology, feminist new wave, abject, transcorporeality, tranimal, tradwife
Margaret White: Say it! ‘The raven was called sin.’
Carrie White: No, Momma! ... ‘And the raven was called sin.’
- Carrie (Brian De Palma, USA, 1976)
In Hatching’s (Hanna Bergholm, Finland, 2022) final sequence, a middle-aged woman raises her tearstained face to meet the gaze of a defiant adolescent who has just uttered the word ‘Mother’. The speaker is not the woman’s daughter, but a doppelgänger who began life as a raven’s chick. Hatching is among the most lauded and widely distributed Nordic horror films of the decade (Bergholm 2022a; Lemercier 2022). (1) (2) In the Finnish canon, its nearest relation may be The White Reindeer (Erik Blomberg, 1952), in which the merging of human and nonhuman forms results from suppressed emotion. Many Anglophone critics have instead drawn parallels with Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). In this film, as in Hatching, a controlling mother stabs her sympathetic daughter, who had harboured a destructive secret fuelled by repressed rage (Bergholm 2022b; Billson 2022; Lui 2022). (3) (4) (5)
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed proposed that Carrie’s mother and daughter – like Hollywood’s other monstrous female forms – reflect misogynist fears of the female body and psyche as threateningly liminal and impure. (6) Her analysis drew on Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the abject as that which ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’, and ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). (7) Visual signals of abjection thus include hybridity of sex or species, morphological transformation, and liquids associated with the inchoate or reproductive body, such as blood and slime. Films featuring monstrous-feminine forms, Creed writes, stage an opposition between the male representative of the patriarchal symbolic order – the putative order of logic and propriety – and the female who threatens to defile it. Thus, the ‘central ideological project of the popular horror film’ is to confront the monstrous female and correctively ‘redraw the boundaries’ to secure the patriarchal order (1993:14).
Kristeva wrote that identity is defined and maintained through defence of the boundary between the self and other, the proper and improper. Anyone who threatens these boundaries must thus be excluded as abject (Kristeva 1982: 11). This process of ‘abjecting’ establishes criteria of purity and taboo and justifies marginalisation. By rendering others abject, ‘identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification’ (Phillips 2014: 19). (8)Thus, a society that upholds heterosexuality and binaried, essentialised sex as defining criteria of humanity – a cisheteronormative regime – ‘abjects’ anyone whose sex or gender it deems ambiguous or transgressive.
The year of The Monstrous-Feminine’s publication, trans historian and activist Susan Stryker gave a landmark performance, furiously articulating what Creed would later term ‘radical abjection’. In My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage, Stryker adopted the role of a speaking ‘monster’ to reject cisheteronormative exclusion of trans people from the realm of the natural, declaring, ‘I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face and redefine a life worth living’ (performed 1993, published 1994: 250). (9) Then, as now, transphobic discourse and representation had used tropes of monstrosity to construe trans people as a threat to the ‘natural’ cisgendered order (Daly 1978; Raymond 1979; Koch-Rein 2014: 134). (10) In response, trans academics, artists and activists continue to reclaim monstrosity as a constructive and disruptive force, ‘rejecting the abjection of bodily mixture, celebrating multiplicity and hybridity, and reorienting rage [...] to imagine new possibilities for critical thought and social change’ (Sharp 2020: 80; see also Preciado 2021; Wagner 2015). (11) (12) (13)
At the same time, posthumanist scholars have recognised the systemic and politically opportunistic dehumanisation of trans people as an opportunity to explore interrelatedness with nonhuman life. A 2020 collection of essays established ‘transecology’ as a branch of scholarship that joins concerns of ecocriticism and trans theory to question how sex, gender, and ‘the natural’ are co-informing. Transecology conceives of the body as a site of ongoing negotiations and cohabitations that transgress colonially and racially enforced dualisms such as nature/culture, human/animal and male/female (Bedford 2020: 7). (14) The field is informed by transcorporeality, a concept introduced by Stacy Alaimo in 2008, which understands human embodiment to be continually redefined through material exchanges with the nonhuman. (15)
As Alaimo admits, corporeal permeability readily suggests visions of horror (2001). (16) It is at the intersection of horror, ecocriticism and reclaimed abjection that Creed locates a new wave of feminist film – though she does not acknowledge the influence of trans theory or activism in these approaches. It is this oversight that this essay seeks to address. Using Hatching as a case study, I will demonstrate that the feminist new wave swells with the force of trans thought and practice as it celebrates the radical power of embodied hybridity, motility and opacity.
In Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, Creed describes an intergeneric range of films in which heroic protagonists ‘challenge the concept of fixed, unchanging forms [...] that are central to the mythology of the patriarchal symbolic order’ (2022: 5). (17) Inspired by the ‘feminist goals of social justice and empowerment of the Other’, these figures expose and avenge patriarchal violence, including systemic assaults on nonhuman life (2022: 3). The bodies of new wave avengers often undermine ‘the rigid boundaries between species which patriarchal ideology constructs primarily to justify the definition of human as exceptional and separate from the nonhuman’ (2022: 113). One year later, in a revised edition of The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed introduced the term ‘radical abjection’ to describe the embracing of abjected forms and qualities at the heart of the new wave’s rebellion.
She identifies several protagonists whose physiognomy ‘undermines the conventional association between sex and gender’, to upend oppressive, ‘one-dimensional notions of the body’ (2023: 177). (18) Yet Creed’s broader conception of the new wave reinscribes these characters within a sexed binary. The genre’s defining feature, Creed writes, is a confrontation between the ‘male symbolic order’ or ‘the abject male’ and ‘new forms of [the] female monstrous’, particularly ‘the female nonhuman protagonist’. The new wave ultimately signifies, for Creed, that the ‘sharper edge of the sword has fallen into the hands of man’s nemesis – woman’ (2023: xiv).
Recognising Hatching as a new wave text, Creed commends its ‘critique of the myth of the proper feminine body and happy suburban womanhood through the monstrous figure of the nonhuman’ (2023: 184). As I will argue, the film’s human and nonhuman protagonists disrupt both the myth of essentialised womanhood and bi-gendered valence of Creed’s vision. In Hatching, the enforcer of a cisheteropatriarchal and anthropocentric visual order is a woman. The hypocrisy and violence of her imposed order are conveyed in the emotional and physical trials of her adolescent daughter. The film’s explicit ‘monster’ transgresses the bounds of sex and species, at once visualising transecology’s destabilised frameworks of embodied identity and contesting anthropocentric and cissexist essentialism.
Hatching takes place in a white house that gleams within a dark forest. Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is an earnest 12-year-old who struggles to qualify for a gymnastics tournament to win her mother’s approval. Mother (Sophia Heikkilä) is an enthusiastic vlogger at pains to portray her family as pristine and successful. One morning, Mother’s filming is interrupted by a loud crack at the window. Tinja opens it, and a raven bursts into the room, shattering its ornaments and fixtures. Only Tinja can contain the bird, but before she can release it, Mother beckons and snaps the bird’s neck with a smile. That night, hearing agonised cries, Tinja discovers the wounded bird in the neighbouring woods. She kills it in mercy, only to realise that it had been guarding an egg. Guilt-ridden, the girl nestles the egg in her bed.
Soon, Tinja learns that Mother is having an affair and preparing to abandon the family. As Tinja’s grief and sense of betrayal build, she turns to the egg for comfort, and it expands in response to her touch and tears. One night, an enormous raven’s chick hatches. The distraught and lonely girl cares for the chick, whom she names Alli. It undergoes a long, messy transformation, gradually adopting human traits and coming to resemble Tinja, and a psychic link is revealed – the creature responds to the girl’s suppressed sorrow and rage by attacking their causes. In the film’s final sequences, Mother discovers Alli and lunges to stab it, but Tinja intervenes and is killed. Blood from her mouth trickles into the creature’s and it seems to fully adopt Tinja’s form. Yet when Alli rises and speaks the word ‘Mother’, its voice is incongruously aged and masculine. It is unclear whether Mother will acknowledge this defiant and unclassifiable doppelgänger as her child or admit to having killed the real Tinja.
Through character studies of Mother, Alli, and Tinja, I will explore Hatching’s engagement with transecology and its transcendence of a binaried vision of the feminist new wave. I will first examine the film’s critical treatment of Mother’s cisheteropatriarchal ‘tyranny of looking’ (Creed 2022: 13). Next, I will describe Hatching’s celebration of intimate co-becoming in the liminal figures of Alli and Tinja. In alignment with the film, I will employ a transfeminist approach informed by shared aims of trans and (some) feminist scholarship: the deconstruction of gender essentialism and its resultant hierarchies and exclusions (Enke 2012: 2). (19)
MOTHER
The central rebellion in the feminist new wave, Creed writes, is often a revolt against ‘a [patriarchal] social order locked into the visual’ (2022: 13). As she films her family, issuing directions and critiques, Mother maintains a visual order that permits no deviation. She has selected her family’s clothing and decorated the home. An abundance of sharp, fragile, easily smudged surfaces ensures that the family moves with discipline to avoid damage and injury. The atmosphere of control extends to representations of nonhuman life, which are bi-gendered through colour and rendered explicitly artificial; beyond an abstract metal sculpture of a tree is a garish carpet of pink petals. Pink blossoms overwhelm the wallpaper of Tinja’s and Mothers’ bedrooms, designating feminine space. Father and Tinja’s brother have identical, conservative hairstyles, glasses and blue and khaki clothing, masculine colours reiterated throughout their rooms. Overall, the stylistic bi-gendering of the home and family is so emphatic that it parodies a cisheteronormative conception of gender as essentialised, presocial and coterminous with nature (Keegan 2018: 34). (20)
Whiteness also dominates Mother’s visual realm. Chalky statues of female forms loom from corners. Mother’s videos feature herself and Tinja in white dresses, wearing white garlands, grinning blankly into bleaching light. Her camera filter gives her dyed blonde hair and white skin a halo that obscures blemishes and frown lines. Creed writes that ‘for the body to represent the [patriarchal] symbolic order, it must be unmarked’ (1993: 11) and Hatching locates this aspiration in Mother alone. When her son runs to embrace her, Mother resists, then harshly criticises the boy for staining their clothes. Richard Dyer has observed that in hegemonic ideation, white people are thought to be distinguished by ‘a light within’, yet ‘this light, which is white, is dirtied (“stained”) by blood, passion, movement – which is to say, isn't it, life’ (1997: 208). (21) In Mother’s images, whiteness, bi-gendering and the commodification of nonhuman life are condemned by association with a cold absence of feeling.
Mother’s selection of white dresses for her daughter underlines an aesthetic of purity – an essential mechanism of control over the female body (Bedford 2020: 5). Discourses of purity, dominion over ‘Nature’ and domesticated femininity have long sustained exclusionary ideals of white womanhood. Mother’s videos reflect a contemporary iteration of these ideals – they evoke ‘tradwife’ vlogs, a global anti-feminist and white nationalist social media phenomenon conceived by alt-right influencers. ‘Trad’, or traditional, wives celebrate heterosexual marriage and binaried gender as biological and instinctual, preserved from an imagined past (Zahay 2022: 173). (22) (Conceptions of femininity are locally formed and transitory. Yet the approach of the tradwife functions, as Zahay has observed, across cultural contexts by promoting shared or translatable visions of white femininity. The tradwife movement has particularly strong Nordic currency; journalists such as Miranda Christou have traced its inception to a Swedish blogger who urged followers to reduce open expressions of misogyny and consider new methods of enlisting women in the cause of white nationalism. He later confirmed that tradwife content had achieved this purpose. In February 2020, between the end of Hatching’s shooting and the beginning of post-production, the Twitter account of a Finnish nationalist broadcaster cited widespread interest and called for ‘a #tradwife model rooted in Finnishness’. I do not suggest that the film offers a derisive response to this call, but that Hatching’s evocation of a contemporary social media phenomenon bears consideration.)
Like most tradwife influencers, Mother never articulates ideological grounding. Instead, ‘the sign of “femininity” functions as an ideological shorthand’, while algorithms link viewers to more explicit content (Zahay 2022: 171). Using terms such as ‘everyday’ and ‘traditional’, tradwife vlogs contain ‘populist messaging that frames feminism as an elitist threat to the “real” femininity of everyday women’ (Zahay 2022: 170). Mother’s vlog conveys this appeal in its title, Lovely Everyday Life, and its claims to showcase the ‘ordinary Finnish family’. This content is further evoked in Mother’s resolutely bubbly delivery, as well as her clothing, decor and enthusiastic displays of monogamous heterosexuality. Kissing Father chastely as her children look on, Mother introduces herself to viewers as ‘a woman with two children and one man’.
As a new wave film, Hatching exposes the violence and corruption of the patriarchal order through markers of abjection – in patriarchal antagonists as well as feminist avengers. Creed describes the antagonist of the feminist new wave as an ‘abject male’ who transgresses ethical bounds through hypocrisy, deceit or treachery. He often robs others ‘of their identity and right to self-determination’ and displays ‘aggressive phallicity’ (Creed 2022: 5–11).
In a genderqueer twist, it is Mother who embodies every quality of ‘male’ abjection. Tinja discovers that Mother is not ‘a woman with one man,’ she is abandoning her family to live with a lover and showering the lover’s daughter with the affection that Tinja struggles painfully to earn and rarely receives. The girl’s grief, jealousy and rage are expressed in Alli’s attacks, but Mother’s hypocrisy, treachery and deceit are the origin of the bloodshed.
As an abject ‘male’, Mother doubly impedes Tinja’s self-determination. While the girl longs to make friends, Mother encourages discipline, pressuring the girl to mirror her own childhood success at a feminised sport. At the same time, Mother appropriates elements of Tinja’s identity, wearing a dress that matches Tinja’s when she introduces the girl to her lover, as if to assert her own youthful purity, and speaking of her nerves ahead of the tournament as if she herself were competing.
Aggressive phallicity, the final marker of male abjection, is represented in Mother’s sharp, four-inch nails, her spike heels, and her choice of weapon, a long kitchen knife. Before she uses the knife to kill, Mother mercilessly crops imperfect figures from footage and critiques Tinja’s comportment and appearance. In a particularly painful sequence, she orders Tinja to repeat her gymnastics routine – never noticing, or perhaps not caring, that her daughter’s palms have begun to bleed. It is deliciously ironic that Mother’s phallic coding disrupts the cisheteronormative visual order that she strives to project. At the same time, her embodiment of ‘male’ abjection undermines Creed’s conception of the gender of the patriarchal adversary.
Mother’s cruelty recalls a misogynist trope that Creed identified in her early analysis of Carrie: that of the castrating woman. She may be a mother who ‘takes back the life she once created’ (1993: 82) or who disempowers by enforcing the proper feminine role (1993: 132). Yet what Hatching renders horrific is not Mother as such, but the discourse of power in which she participates to her detriment. As we witness Mother performing retakes to correct her appearance and delivery, failing to cover bruises and tear stains with makeup and editing footage late into the night, Hatching exposes the labour and self-curtailment required to convey supposedly ‘natural’ femininity. Director Hanna Bergholm explains that Mother’s sense of self is entirely dependent on the approval of her social media followers (2022c). (23) She is frequently framed in mirrors and other surfaces that refract or reverse her image, suggesting an unstable, contingent identity (Hughes 2002: 12). (24) The presence of social media in Hatching thus projects Mother’s standards into the public sphere. It is not her body or psyche that is villainised but the strictures required to achieve a cisheteropatriarchal ideal of womanhood.
By the film’s conclusion, Mother has ‘transed’ from one gendered realm of abjection to another. The use of this verb has a rich history in trans theory and conveys de-essentialising movement across unstable borders (Straube 2020: 56). After fatally stabbing Tinja, Mother drops her knife and falls into a foetal position. Bloodied slime from an encounter with Alli drips from her mouth, and snot and sooty tears streak her face. Mother is left awash in signifiers of ‘female’ abjection, and Creed’s conception of an unmarked male antagonist is again upended. By situating a tradwife with mixed-gender coding as a patriarchal adversary, Hatching disengages the new wave from a simplified feminism that opposes women and men. In the figure of Mother, it instead encourages a reevaluation of the manifold manifestations of patriarchal oppression.
Alli
As Emily Skidmore observes, ‘The ideological power of white womanhood (and the bi-gender system that it supports) rests in large part on the exclusive nature of its construction’ (2011: 294). (25) In Hatching, everything Mother attempts to exclude from her patriarchal order reasserts itself with a vengeance. The original raven leaves a streak of blood and a black feather against the expanse of white-curtained window. When Mother retaliates, her visual order is again invaded – by a much larger raven who trails black feathers indoors and drips bloodied slime onto Mother’s and Tinja’s faces. Alli acts on the unphotogenic feelings that Mother forces her family to repress. In an ultimate intrusion, it takes on the form of Mother’s supposed protégé.
While Mother subjects her family to strict bi-gendering and physical discipline, Alli refutes any such containment. Its expanding egg bursts through the chest of a pink teddy bear. Hatched, the creature erupts through wardrobe doors and out of windows. In its elaborate and ongoing transformation, marked by shredded skin, cheeks studded with teeth, and effusions of hair and feathers, Alli is liminality incarnate. Creed observes that the tactility and texture of the natural world serve to ‘[undo] the rigidity of the socially constructed feminine gender role’ (2022: 113). By contrast with Tinja’s anxious whispers, Alli is riotously expressive, issuing screeches, hisses, gurgles and mews that are endearing as well as fearsome. Like other new wave films, Hatching ‘invites the spectator to identify and respond to otherness – human and nonhuman’, by presenting nonhuman animals as subjects (Creed 2022: 147). Alli and its parent raven receive isolated central framing and closeups that capture expression. With most of the film’s point-of-view sequences conveying Alli’s perspective, the framing of this unruly avenger encourages both empathy and shared embodiment.
Alli begins life as a foetal chick, and its origin in ‘everyday’ ecology is unique – most new wave protagonists are creatures of fantasy, such as trolls, or they believe they are human until they develop markers of hybridity. In Hatching, by contrast, the adoption of human traits makes a creature monstrous, beginning when the egg’s shell absorbs Tinja’s tears and blood. Alli’s transformation thus demonstrates a tenet of transcorporeality: ‘[B]odies take meaning through their interactions with other bodies’ (Estok 2020: 34). (26) The unusual direction of the film’s transformation – from egg to oversized raven to indeterminate humanoid through contact with human materiality – makes Hatching an especially valuable site of ecocritical investigation.
Gigantism and hybridity are central qualities of the grotesque, a term that first referred to half-human forms (Kriel 2015: 22). (27) It is defined by opposition to the harmonious proportions of Classical aesthetics, including the idealised feminine figure: ‘all pristine surface – sealed-off, clean, sleek, smooth, and carefully contained’ (2015: 25). The grotesque thus threatens categories by which humans make sense of the world (Kriel 2015: 23; Kayser 1981: 184). (28) The film’s hatching sequence, the breach of a supposedly ‘pristine surface’, is prolonged and visceral. The egg pulses ominously, framed against pink-blossomed wallpaper. A growing crack reveals a veined inner membrane through which a black claw suddenly erupts. As fragments of shell fall away, bloody foetal fluids seep into Tinja’s pale duvet. The exposed creature darts toward Tinja and emits an ear-splitting shriek, having already imprinted. With its dripping beak and ragged feathers, Alli is disturbing, but it is still, at this stage, an ordinary chick rendered large. The sequence conveys that the ‘natural’ world is replete with qualities that a patriarchal order has abjected: transgressive, staining fluids, inchoate, unexpected forms and unabashed attachment. The juxtaposition of this birth and Tinja’s bedroom reveals the curated environment to be fragile and artificial; the feminised domestic realm is ‘unnatural’ by contrast.
Through further contact – tender touch and the consumption of seed that Tinja obligingly regurgitates – Alli’s body comes to resemble Tinja’s. Yet it rejects participation in feminisation. In an exemplary sequence, Alli and Tinja sit in a closet filled with dresses. On the creature’s head, strands of blonde hair sprout among ragged black feathers. Tinja attempts to tame the hair with a pink brush – a gift from Mother – and fixes a pink flowered clip to one side. The results render these efforts crude and bizarre. Tinja holds up a mirror, but the creature refuses to look. It likewise resists when Mother, believing it to be Tinja, attempts to brush its unmanageable hair. While Tinja’s comportment is strictly disciplined under Mother’s watchful lens, Alli crouches, leaps, and lumbers, refuting feminine bearing. When Alli finally speaks, after fully adopting Tinja’s form, its voice is startlingly deep and weathered, discordant with the presumed sex of Tinja’s body. Closing with a closeup on Alli’s defiant, unyielding gaze, Hatching celebrates wildness as Jack Halberstam describes it: ‘a challenge to an assumed order [...] on behalf of things that refuse and resist order itself’ (2020: 3). (29)
Alli’s fluid and indeterminate sex and species evoke a recent development in trans and animal studies. In a 2015 essay, Eva Hayward, Jami Weinstein and others introduced the term ‘tranimalities’ to acknowledge the joint exclusion of trans people and nonhuman animals from humanist discourse and to propose new understandings of embodiment. (30) Tranimality, or transanimality, has come to describe figures like Alli, who transgress borders of species and sex. The field draws on research from biologists and social scientists such as Bruce Bagemihl (1999), Joan Roughgarden (2004) and Myra Hird (2008), who have demonstrated that a static two-sex model does not apply to most life forms on Earth (Hird: 2008: 236). (31) (32) (33) Investigations of tranimality thus explore how departures from anthropocentric perspectives can inform understanding of human sex and transitioning. Though it emerged earlier, tranimal theory may be understood as a strand of transecology, as it shares the aim of decentring the cisgendered human subject and the imposed binaries that support its exceptionalism. In its indecipherability, Alli refutes animal/human, male/female and self/other dualities. Like any new wave figure of revolt, it is ‘an indigestible element of [cishetero]patriarchal society, and as such, a powerful threat’ (Creed 2022: 8). Yet Alli’s indeterminate sex would preclude its categorisation as a ‘female nonhuman protagonist’. By showing sex and speciation to be mutable and co-created, Hatching foregrounds transecological representation within the feminist new wave. Echoing a legacy of trans art, scholarship and activism, the film claims the ‘natural’ for the transing body so often excluded as abject.
Tinja
While Alli blurs bounds of sex and species, and Mother displays mixed gendered coding, Tinja’s embodied ‘impurity’ is the first suggested. In Hatching’s opening sequence, aerial images of the family’s home are scored by the sound of flapping wings. These images are intercut with a closeup of bones protruding through taut fabric. A wider shot shows Tinja in a leotard, extending her arms like wings as she attempts to stretch, hemmed in by furniture. The initial closeup estranges Tinja’s body, while the crosscutting suggests a parity between avian and human forms, one flying freely, the other constrained. After Tinja opens the window and the raven enters, cross-cutting and eyeline matches suggest a wordless exchange. An avian quality is also evoked in Tinja’s gymnastics. She leaps and flips from high wooden bars but lands clumsily, like a chick unaccustomed to flight. Ann Chisholm has observed that by mastering gravity and centrifugal force, female gymnasts seem to defy natural laws, while their feats of contortion and acquisition of a V-shaped ‘male’ physique suggest physiological deviance (2002: 423). (34) Tinja’s implied hybridity is extended to the viewer; in five sequences, she closes her eyes and can see through Alli’s. We see from the creature’s perspective, underscored by Tinja’s anxious breathing. Staging, framing, sound and editing techniques thus combine to suggest posthuman impurity in even the most ‘cultivated’ young person.
Impurity is likewise conveyed in Tinja’s painful internalisation of Mother’s standards. When Mother accuses her of not taking her training seriously, Tinja does sit-ups late into the night to compensate. When Mother sneers, ‘You smell’, the girl scrubs her skin raw in the bath. She criticises her own gymnastics pose and is rewarded with a rare caress. It is the recognition of a similar mimetic strategy in the newborn chick that endears it to Tinja. When the creature hatches, Tinja hides her face in her hands. After a moment of silence, she peers through her fingers to find Alli making the same gesture. It extends its arm to show Tinja a wound – like her, it requires care. From this moment on, Tinja dotes on the creature, offering Alli the physical warmth and verbal affirmation she herself craves. Tinja, whose feelings are blithely ignored by her parents, listens attentively to the chick’s pulse. As she cares for this disruptive creature who embodies everything that Mother opposes, Tinja’s tenderness is an act of rebellion.
Creed writes that the heroine of the new wave initiates ‘new and different kinds of relationships and connections’ (2022: 19). Intimacy is likewise a focal point of transecology, building on feminist new materialists’ interest in human and nonhuman entities fostering each other’s emergence through affective encounters (Bedford 2020; Straube 2020; Thorsteinson and Joo 2020). (35) (36) Alli and Tinja express intimacy inside a closet and under a bed, stroking one other and lovingly watching the other sleep. Only beyond the disciplining gaze, in traditional sites of terror, each darkly at odds with the bleaching light of Mother’s videos, can Tinja experience connection at home.
Among the forms of revolt in the feminist new wave, Creed includes ‘forging a new identity’ (2022: 4). For Hatching’s monstrous avengers, this revolt is explicitly articulated in the film’s final sequence. When Mother lunges to stab Alli, Tinja protests, ‘But I hatched it’, acknowledging ethical and corporeal ties before she darts to intercept Mother’s blade. By taking a knife for Alli, who now closely resembles her, Tinja ensures that the most unruly, unabashedly abject vision of herself survives. This rebellion is articulated in her final expression: as Tinja looks at Mother for the last time, her customary imploring gaze becomes the heavy-lidded stare of the defiant teenager, an expression Alli adopts as it rises.
By killing Tinja, Mother liberates Alli from one relational web – it no longer acts on the anger and sorrow of another. Yet when Alli rasps, ‘Mother’, it claims belonging in her family, recalling Susan Stryker’s assertion of trans belonging within the realm of the natural (1994). The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin verb ‘monere’, ‘to warn’. Hatching’s final image, a 10-second closeup on Alli’s insubordinate gaze, evokes Stryker’s warning: ‘I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself’ (1994: 241). Like Stryker, Hatching recognizes every identity as a patchwork collaboration. Mother constructs herself and her family – explicitly by cutting and assembling footage – for the approval of others. Tinja struggles with internalised maternal standards, while Alli takes on Tinja’s form and feelings. The tradwife is doubly a composite being, embodying male and female markers of abjection.
As in Stryker’s landmark articulation of transgender rage, the pursuit of purity, of embodying essentialised ideals, is revealed to rest on hypocrisy, cruelty and violent transgressions upon the selfhood of others.
Hatching counters Mother’s aggressive cisheteronormativity by celebrating the abject, inchoate and unruly – in Alli’s embodied refutation of fixed categories, in Tinja’s suggested hybridity and in her rebellious tenderness. By championing abjection and revealing all bodies to be at once ‘impure’, transgressive and worthy of care, the film urges viewers to question what and whom they crop out, closet, and otherwise exclude. As such, Hatching poses a challenge to the very act of othering.
Conclusion
This essay is a collection of beginnings. Two branches of trans theory I have identified in Hatching, transecology and tranimality, have emerged in the past decade, and this essay is among the first to link them. It is also the first academic investigation to centre this tender horror film. Impressively, Barbara Creed has catalogued a new wave of cinema in two books over just two years. This text is among the first to offer dedicated engagement with her analysis. Creed’s work, as always, is immensely valuable. Combining textual analysis with feminist and posthumanist theory, she offers incisive critiques of the patriarchy’s joint subjugation of women and nonhuman life as she indexes intergeneric visions of rebellion.
This essay, like Creed’s texts, is also haunted by the past. Creed recognizes the monstrous-feminine as the central figure of the feminist new wave. This affirms the continued value of her work from earlier decades, but it also helps to confine the new wave within a dualistic framework in which female avengers oppose patriarchal male aggressors. I suggest that a bi-sexed conception of the new wave does a disservice to the genre’s protagonists, whose resistance to disciplining classification is what makes them valiant. Hatching is a powerful entry in the feminist new wave, not because it opposes female monsters with patriarchal males but because it challenges the dualisms of species and sex that underlie cisheteropatriarchal and anthropocentric violence. The feminism of the new wave, Creed writes, ‘explores the nature of radical alterity’ and ‘is open to all, regardless of their sex or gender’ (2022: 19). Hatching transcends a binaried understanding of the new wave to articulate the inclusivity of this feminism.
Hatching is not unique – as Creed acknowledges, several new wave protagonists refute conventions of sex or gender (2023: 177). Because the genre’s defining form of revolt, radical abjection, evokes a tactic long employed by trans artists and activists, this group of films is an enticing field for transfeminist analysis. Hatching is likewise not alone in foregrounding representations of transecology. For bodies that transgress the bounds of sex and species, new wave films such as Border (Ali Abbasi, Sweden, 2018) claim the natural, relish the impure, and showcase intimacy and belonging (Bedford 2020: 13).
Like other analyses of feminist horror, this essay is limited by centring a narrative of white adolescence produced in the Global North. Filmmakers throughout the world continue to explore the capacity of radical abjection to test patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemonies. Films such as Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze, Georgia, 2017), I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, UK/Zambia, 2017), Scales (Shahad Ameen, Saudi Arabia/UAE/Iraq, 2019) and Black Milk (Uisenma Borchu, Germany/Mongolia, 2020) present compelling avenues of further research.
Footnotes
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Additional Sources
Christou, M. (2020) #TradWives: Sexism as gateway to white supremacy. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/tradwives-sexism-gateway-white-supremacy/ (Accessed 27 February 2024).
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