In this thesis I analyzed three different literary works; A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (2020), Bunny by Mona Awad (2019), and Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi (1991) through the perspective of the female killer. The aim of the thesis was to analyze the so called “female rage” and what led the women in these novels to murder men. I also discussed how the female killers were presented and if and how the women were perceived as monstrous. The method I chose to do this was close reading, and the theory I used was queer theory. I mostly used Jack Halberstam’s book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters to contextualize my arguments as well as Judith Butler’s Genustrubbel and Sam Holmqvist’s chapter in Litteraturvetenskap II. The analysis showed that there is a connection between the monster and queerness, and that each of the women I wrote about has both monstrous and queer aspects. The analysis also showed the importance of power and how most of the motivation behind the women killing the men was their lack of power in a patriarchal society.

Denna uppsats har analyserat gestaltningen av det feminina som skräckinjagande i de två gotik- och skräckromanerna Bunny (2020) av Mona Awad och Cackle (2022) av Rachel Harrison. Den metod som har använts har varit en textnära läsning av novellerna och den teori som analysen har utgått ifrån har huvudsakligen varit Maria Margareta Österholms avhandling Ett flicklaboratorium i valda bitar – Skeva flickor i svenskspråkigprosa från 1980 till 2005 (2012) som behandlar Mary Russos begrepp gurlesken och dess olika former, Sandra M. Gilbert och Susan Gubars teori om den internaliserade manliga blicken i deras bok The madwoman in the attic, The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (1979), och Yvonne Lefflers teori om skräckberättelsens förmåga att väcka känslor hos läsaren i hennes bok Horror As Pleasure (2000). Syftet var att undersöka hur romanerna förhåller sig till sammanflätningen av det skräckinjagande och det feminina. Analysen har visat att den internaliserade och objektifierande blicken på kvinnorna är en viktig del i hur de skräckinjagande elementen framställs både groteska och hotfulla – särskilt vid framställningen av det feminina och kvinnomonster. Jag behandlar i den avslutande diskussionen hur det feminint monstruösa i dessa två romaner har förskjutits till ett mittemellanförskap som förhåller sig till förmågan hos publiken att konceptualisera situationerna. / This thesis aims to analyze the figuration of the feminine as something horrifying in the two horror novels Bunny (2020) by Mona Awad and Cackle (2022) by Rachel Harrison. The method is a close reading of the novels and the main theory is based on Maria Margareta Österholms dissertation Ett flicklaboratorium i valda bitar – Skeva flickor i svenskspråkigprosa från 1980 till 2005 (2012), in which she investigates Mary Russo's concept of the gurlesque, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s theory about the internalized male gaze from their book The madwoman in the attic, The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (1979), and Yvonne Leffler’s study Horror As Pleasure (2000), about the aesthetic premises of the horror story and its ability to transform unpleasant feelings into pleasurable horror and aesthetic enjoyment. My thesis aims to investigate how the relationship between the horrifying and the feminine is intertwined in the novels. The analysis has shown that the internalized and objectifying gaze has an important part in the grotesque and threatening aesthetics of the horror story – especially in the depiction of the feminine and female monsters. I argue that the feminine monstrous in these two novels has made a shift into an” in-between-relationship” which behaves differently depending on the audience's ability to conceptualize the situations that arise in the novels.