Jennifer‘s Body (2009) | Episode #54

In this episode, hosts Katherine Troyer and Anthony Tresca discuss the 2009 horror-comedy film Jennifer's Body. 

Episode Highlights: Starting with a look at how this film is now a cult classic (and the ways that it has been claimed by the LGBTQIA+ community), we explore how criticism on this film and its filmmakers focuses nearly exclusively on whether it is good/bad, feminist/not feminist. But we argue that there is so much more interesting about this film than just these limited debates, so we turn to our own analysis of the film through the lens of camp and the ways that this film manages to offer us complicated and messy constructions of (female) identity. 

A Dose of Scholarship: In this episode, we reference Ben Kooyman's 2012 article "Whose Body? Auteurism, Feminism and Horror in Hostel Part II and Jennifer's Body" (in the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture) and Aidatul Chusna and Shofi Mahmudah's 2018 article "Female Monsters: Figuring Female Transgression in Jennifer's Body (2009) and The Witch (2013)" (in Humaniora). We also talked (once again) about camp, which you can learn more about in Susan Sontag's 1964 "Notes on 'Camp'. "

This podcast episode first aired on September 27, 2021.

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