Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The fantasies of Black Final Girls

2024; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400309.2023.2290429

1740-7923

Jerome P. Dent,

Gender Roles and Identity Studies

This article endeavors to critically examine the popular and enduring trope of the Final Girl and its intersections with race. Coined almost 35 years ago by Carol Clover in the article 'Her Body, Himself', and later explicated in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws, the Final Girl is a figure that Clover theorizes as holding the possibilities of cross-gender identification – possibilities which are conditioned by a combination of narrative and visual cues and desire. This article interrogates the assumptive logics of Clover's Final Girl and of gender permeability, arguing for an excavation of the racial dynamics that are disavowed in the theory. Analyzing Earnest Dickerson's Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and the character of Jeryline as a/the first Black Final Girl, I examine the impact of race, and more specifically Blackness, on gendered figures, narrative tropes, spectatorship, and the limitations of identificatory possibilities within the film itself and horror in general.