MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Anthology series American Horror Story has confronted viewers with an abundance of provocative body imagery over six seasons. American Horror Story: Coven *(2013), set in New Orleans, held promise of intersectional feminist commentary amidst the obligatory buckets of gore. In my paper, I read *Coven from an anthropological perspective to understand the cultural implications of the ways the show depicts the materiality of the body. Tongues are lost (and found). Eyeballs yield to a melon baller. One witch fights the depredations of age, cancer, and modern medicine; two others are burned at the stake. Characterization is tightly bound to embodiment in Coven. Louisiana swamp mud may have the power to repair broken bodies and ruptured story arcs, but it can’t save the season from devolving into a confounding, convoluted mix of progressive and retrogressive imagery. Some notable local historical figures take fictional form in Coven. Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau and the notoriously sado-masochistic Delphine LaLaurie are reimagined as immortal adversaries. Their story unfolds through extensive antebellum flashbacks - the legacy of slavery is a corporeal wound that bleeds through into the present. Regardless of whether the intent was to shock, titillate or empower, as the season lurched along it trafficked in historically problematic images, such as a recurring storyline in which enslaved black bodies are objects of fetishistic torture. No corporeal being is safe from body horror on American Horror Story and Coven is no exception. Kyle, a blue-collar scholarship student intent on preventing future levee breaks is violently broken and reassembled. As a FrankenKyle, he serves as an embodiment of the post-Katrina Ninth Ward - diminished, damaged, and traumatized. The narrative and symbolic functions of human bodies are legion throughout the six seasons of American Horror Story and the excess of meanings overflowing Coven deserve closer inspection.