Exploring Bodily Autonomy on ‘American Horror Story: Coven’

This is a guest post by Gaayathri Nair.

The horror genre is not commonly kind to women. It has a tendency to rely on violence against women for cheap thrills and is notorious for positioning women as passive objects. Ryan Murphy and Brian Falchuk have claimed that American Horror Story: Coven is an explicitly feminist season of American Horror Story. Previous seasons of American Horror Story have attempted to address sexism and misogyny in the horror genre. However, both American Horror Story: Murder House and American Horror Story: Asylum relied heavily on both the objectification of and violence against women as a plot device.

There are definitely cool things about Coven. The core cast is made up entirely of women, and each one of them is richly developed and three-dimensional. Overall, the show is deliciously complex and there are many plotlines that attack certain issues in an interesting way. One of the key concerns of Coven appears to be bodily autonomy, both in terms of gender and race, and many of the storylines can be read as explorations of the issues surrounding bodily autonomy. I think that the first episode of Coven serves as a great microcosm for how the show handles these issues so I will focus my analysis on that while bringing in content from later episodes where relevant.

Coven opens in 1834 New Orleans in the house of Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a real historical figure. She is having a dinner party and over the course of the dinner party we are introduced to the fact one of her daughters has her eye on Bastian, a house slave. Later that night, La Laurie’s nighttime ablutions are interrupted by her husband telling her that during the dinner party her youngest daughter Pauline had sex with Bastian. What follows next is horrifying. La Laurie abuses Pauline physically and verbally and then says, “You know what we’re gonna say? We’re gonna say that he took you by force like the savage he is.” Bastian pleads his innocence stating that “Pauline came on to me and I told her I belong to someone else.” Bastian is a helpless victim in a power game being carried out by two white women. Bastian is taken upstairs to La Laurie’s torture chamber where she says, “Bastian, if you want to act like a beast then we’re gonna treat you like one.” She then proceeds to place a bull’s head over his own and turns him into a Minotaur, the literal embodiment of racist assumptions about black men–part man part beast. The whole scene is thick with imagery that calls to mind the myth of the black buck or brute .

The scene works well at subverting the myth as Bastian’s clear innocence is juxtaposed with LaLaurie’s depravity. The other slaves in the attic have been horribly tortured and when one of them asks her, “Why are you doing this to us?”  La Laurie flippantly replies, “Because I can,” once again reinforcing the power structures at play. It is thought that between 1865 and 1895 approximately 10,00 black men were lynched, ostensibly for the crime of raping white women, although only about one third of these people were actually accused of rape and those who were, were mostly in consensual relationships with white women. Bastian has no bodily autonomy; he is completely at the mercy of the white women who own him. Pauline uses his body because she can and Delphine dehumanises him because she can. It illustrates the truth about the destructive racist myths that surround black men that they are just that–myths. Black men have much more to fear from whiteness than the other way round.

From the get go, female sexuality in Coven is positioned as dangerous, sometimes deadly and something that people will try over and over again to control.  In the first episode, a young witch, Zoe Benson, comes to the knowledge of her powers by accidentally killing the boy she chooses to have her first penetrative sexual encounter with, one of the few fully consensual sex acts we see on Coven. She literally kills a man with her vagina. The message that female sexuality is dangerous if not deadly is hammered home with the language Cordelia uses to welcome Zoe to the school for witches. The other girls claim that Cordelia wants them to suppress their witchy powers, and she responds, “Not suppress–control.” She expresses the idea that their powers are dangerous unless they are strictly controlled.  This is not a subtle metaphor for the repression and control of women’s bodies and sexuality.  She emphasises that the world they live in is dangerous and they must protect themselves as best they can by only using their powers in tightly controlled situations.

Coven’s exploration of the repression and control of female sexuality falls down for me later on in the episode where there is a graphic depiction of a drugging and gang rape of one of the young witches. Madison Montgomery is a character who appears to be modeled on Lindsay Lohan–a once successful film star whose career has become overshadowed by substance abuse problems and her eccentric behaviour is drugged and gang raped by frat boys who film the attack on their phones. This is obviously meant to call to mind the Steubenville case.

Madison sizzles on the screen; she is sexy, confident, and aggressive. It is unsurprising, from an analytical perspective, that she is the one who is raped. The manner in which it happens and her interactions with the instigator before the fact, where she commands him to go get her a drink, makes it seem like she is being punished for her confidence and sexual availability by being drugged and raped by a pack of frat boys. This ultimately serves to support rape culture narratives. I cannot see anything subversive about this story arc. Madison gets her revenge when the frat boys try to escape on their bus by using her telekinetic powers to flip it over–killing most of them. I think the writers view this as the ultimate feminist payback fantasy, especially as Madison is the quintessential imperfect rape victim, one who would be unlikely to ever see justice through the court system.

There are some positives; for example, it is made exceedingly clear that it is the frat boys who are at fault. However the damage is done, regardless of intention the show reinforces, not subverts the myth that only “bad girls,” i.e. girls that have sex on their own terms and dress provocatively, are the ones that get raped. This flies in the face of the truth about rape–that it is something that can happen to any woman regardless of her dress or demeanour. The show does get one thing right: drug-facilitated rape is one of the most common forms of rape, but that type of rape doesn’t just happen to sexually aggressive beautiful girls.

Rape culture positions women generally (because of the impossible standards) but “bad women” in particular as being deserving of or asking for their assaults. While we know that it is the frat boys who are at fault, the juxtaposition of Madison’s actions with the rape creates a certain subtext. If only she was nicer, if only she wasn’t so rude and arrogant, this would have never happened to her. The lead frat boy clearly wanted to take her down a peg.  At its core, the whole story arc serves to reinforce rape culture tropes. Furthermore, the depiction of the gang rape is deeply disturbing, cutting between Madison’s point of view and the rapists. It is fundamentally objectifying and serves to glamorise violence against women.

These lessons about female sexuality are followed through in later episodes, particularly episode three where Queenie, the only fat and black witch that lives in the house, attempts to seduce the Minotaur that has been sent by Marie Laveau, the voodoo practitioner, to attack the witch school in episode three. She winds up being attacked; we don’t know exactly what happens to her but it is severely debilitating. Once again a woman who was, perhaps problematically, trying to own her sexuality is punished for it. Queenie also equates herself as a fat black woman as something analogous to Bastian the Minotaur–society sees them both as something monstrous. I can’t decide if presenting this actually subverts or supports the idea. Fat women generally and fat black women in particular are constantly dehumanized in our society and this scene could be read as purely reinforcing that; at the same time it holds up an uncomfortable mirror to the world we live in. Queenie is not being mocked or used for laughs, she is expressing her sadness at the way the world sees her. The fact that the words are coming from Queenie’s own mouth makes them a powerful indictment of a world that treats women like her as less than human. At the same time, Queenie is just another sad fat chick reinforcing dominant narratives about fatness. At least Queenie is not a “sassy black woman” a trope that confines most fat black women in pop culture.

Another way in which Coven explores bodily autonomy and sexuality is in how ageing affects women. It speaks to the way in which women of a certain age are made invisible in our society.  Jessica Lange’s character, Fiona, is the supreme, the most powerful of all the witches and therefore their leader. Over the course of the season we learn that a new supreme is rising and that means her power is waning. In the first episode we are treated to the sheer desperation she feels. She pays a doctor to give her experimental treatments that have never been used on humans, and her anxiety is more pronounced with each moment she is on screen. When the injections do not work she resorts to sucking the life force out of the doctor and killing him. This gives her what she craves for about a minute. Delphine La Laurie also goes to extreme lengths to preserve her youth using blood and pancreases harvested from her slaves to make a poultice to keep her young.

The portrayal of these two women is very much wrapped up in the male gaze. A large part of what is making Fiona unhappy is that she no longer gets the attention she craves, especially from men, and in Delphine’s case her need to keep the roving eye of her husband is reinforced throughout the season. These women reveal the obsession with youth and beauty that is forced upon women, but Coven fails to truly capture the ways in which these are societal expectations–not ones that are innate to women on their own. Delphine and Fiona are evil or morally complex in their own ways and the dire lengths they go to for youth and beauty are just another expression of their ruthless natures. The idea of the “vain sorceress” is as old as Snow White and I was a little disappointed to see it play out in Coven. A fixation on youth and beauty is not something that makes women evil; it is something that is pushed on to women by a culture that only values women for their youth and beauty, no matter what other qualities they might have. Women’s bodily autonomy is constrained by the narrow social roles that are enforced upon us.

The failings of Coven are unsurprising considering it is a mainstream television show in the horror genre. I think that a pro-woman intention has tangled with the male gaze to create a product that both supports and subverts misogyny and is as objectifying as it is empowering. I have to give Murphy and Falchuk credit for creating a vehicle for so many talented women and giving them interesting and nuanced storylines. My hope is that things only get better from here.

________________________________________________

Gaayathri Nair is a freelance writer and feminist activist. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and on twitter as @A_Gaayathri.