Constructing the Femme Fatale in Kerala culture; Reading Subversive Monstrous Femininity in Love (2021) and Krishnankutty Pani Thudangi (2021)

Name of Author : Basanth Thomas Babu

Abstract: Malayalam cinema has traditionally and historically read the femme fatale in the horror genre as an ‘Other’ that should be tamed, contained, exorcised or made passive by the climactic end. The monstrous femininity of the femme fatale was always de-activated and made vile by patriarchal appropriating discourses that construed a fractured idea of female gender based on sexual repression. This paper reads Khalid Rahman’s Love (2021) and Sooraj Tom’s Krishnankutty Pani Thudangi (2021) through Juliva Kristeva’s theory of Abjection and Barbara Creed’s Monstrous Feminine to argue that the femme fatales in these visual narratives subvert patriarchal discourses of heterosexual home, family and female gender roles by acquiring agency and problematizing the self-same values that construe these monstrous femininities.

Keywords : Femme Fatale, Femme Castratrice, Subversive Monstrous Femininity, Female Sexuality, Heterosexual Home, Abjection, Castration

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