2025 Theses Doctoral

Architectures of Gender and the American Haunted House

Prevas, Christine

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between gender and the figure of the architecturally disturbed haunted house in American literature, cinema, and video games from the 1950s to the present. While most scholarship on the literary and cinematic haunted house understands the haunted house as a metaphor for the individual psyche and/or the gendered body, the house is a material structure that is intimately connected to the construction and maintenance of gender, class, race, citizenship, and other concerns that go beyond the limits of a stable, universalizable subject. Drawing on feminist, queer, and trans theories of architecture and space that illustrate how the architecture of the home contributes to the production of gendered subjectivity, this dissertation asks how the architectural disruption of the haunted house interrupts the production of these subjectivities, rendering their mechanisms visible—and potentially breakable.

Through readings of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy, this dissertation examines several historically specific forms of domestic architecture—the suburban home, the urban apartment, and the plantation and slave cabin—to interrogate how those architectures differentially subjectivate their inhabitants, and how the experimental forms of these novels, films, and video games offer challenges to that process of subjectivation. Through these structural readings of architectural and literary/cinematic form, “Architectures of Gender” both reveals the deep co-constitutive relationship between gender and the built environment, and illustrates how the disruptive effects of horror propose a challenge to these structures, offering avenues for imagining other ways of living beyond the architectures and genders we have inherited.