Diana Choi - Horror and Disability
Diana is currently back in Koreatown, Los Angeles. She is learning how to love reading again and writing when she has time.
Area of Concentration Courses
Asian American Studies 132AC: Islamaphobia and Constructing Otherness
UGIS 112: Women and Disability
American Studies 101: James Baldwin's America - 1953-1974
English 166: Burn it Down/Build it Up - Protest, Dissent, and the Politics of Resistance
American Studies 110: Readings in Cultural Theory
Thesis
Limits of the Body: Pathology as Metric and Discipline in the American Horror Genre
Diana’s thesis inspects how the Body is constructed in the American horror genre through acting as a meaning-making discourse, in construction and disavowal. There are obvious limitations to inspecting the genre at large: the two films of interest are Psycho (1960) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and these two are linked for their uses of gendered aberration/difference and nonnormative embodiment as transgression and further, as pathology. These constructions and definitions of gender transgression within these films use the armor of “science” to claim pathology and “sickness,” mirroring the cultural and medical systems that historically prescribe aberration and difference to pathologization, isolation, and disavowal.
