Uncontrollably Herself: Deleuze's Becoming-woman in the Horror Films of Michael Almereyda

The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari chose the term Becoming-woman to signify our desire to continually and productively transform ourselves as well as an ever-evolving, contingent world. They picked this particular term because women's possibilities have not been completely territorialized in an aesthetic or philosophical sense (even when they're codified in a bourgeois sense). Becoming-woman is thus radically different from most mainstream, filmic portrayals of both men and women's possibilities. In this article, I flesh out how the two female protagonists from the horror films Nadja (1994) and The Eternal (1998), both written and directed by Michael Almereyda, self-create their own powers of Becoming-woman for transformative personal as well as cultural effects.