Violence, Empowerment and Agency in Danish Representations of Gender and Race: Othering, Motherhood and Monstrosity

The Danish 2017 film “En Frygtelig Kvinde” (A Horrible Woman) marks one of, if not the most extreme gender-examples thus far in Danish film history, of a tendency that has carried through generations of Danish filmmaking; othering through monstrosity. In this article, mother-daughter scholars Mira C. Skadegård and Tess Skadegård Thorsen explore the filmic and mediated function of monstrosity as a tool for othering, offering both a historical view and current analysis of the performance and design of monstrosity on screen in Denmark and beyond. The article argues, that monstrosity becomes symbol of power and violence, and the authors exemplify this through a correspondence with shifting analyses of (m)otherhood in film, transference of female characters from passive to aggressive, and the role of monstrosity in othering others. Finally, the article argues for a different consideration of monstrous othering, negotiating through reparative reading, in Sedgwicks terms, might aid in a more reflexive and nuanced negotiation of monstrosity, where there is potential for empowerment
and agency being connected to the oppression that might initially and typically be ascribed to monstrous (m)others.