Monster Menstrual: Women, Girls, and Queer Horror in Stranger Things

Abstract

The 2016 Netflix series Stranger Things is a calculated homage to the 1980s; in addition to its period setting and the inclusion of star Winona Ryder, it further incorporates tropes and references from popular 1980s’ films including Stand By Me, E.T., and The Goonies. But the series does not only draw from stories about young boys coming of age in America; it also calls back to Stephen King’s Carrie and other science fiction and paranormal images marked by the fear of female sexuality. Stranger Things’ slimy passages, alien umbilical cords, “demogorgon” vaginas dentata, and liminally gendered and sexualized characters all speak to long-standing fears about the monstrous feminine, and further invoke the monstrous queer. Stranger Things is a contemporary take not only on 1980s’ cinema but on classical feminine body horror, and this analysis interrogates the series’s positioning as a feminist text.