Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma x the Gaze
We simply could not pass up an opportunity to discuss queer filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's latest horror, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. To make sense of the film and its engagement with sex, identity, femininity and transness, we dig into the history of gender representation in slasher films and spend most of the episode thinking through The Gaze, a concept coined by English art historian John Berger (in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing) that was later picked up by feminist film theorists. Hannah and Marcelle consider how cinema, and the experience of both watching and being watched, reinforces and potentially destabilizes sex differences — and further, ask how Schoenbrun's work as a trans filmmaker plays with that relationship in ways previously sidelined by theorists and other artists, alike.
If you haven't seen Camp Miasma, no worries! There are no spoilers in this episode. All you really need to know is that the movie stars bicons Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder and that is probably 90% of the reason our team was really into it.
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Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (1987): 187-228. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928507.
Doyle, Jude. “Notes on Camp: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026).” The Jude Doyle Newsletter Experience 29 August 2026. https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/notes-teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-jane-schoenbrun-2026/.
“Jane Schoenbrun.” Wikipedia. Accessed 1 September 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Schoenbrun.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
“Ray Blanchard.” Wikipedia. Accessed 1 September 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Blanchard.
Steinbock, Eliza. “Towards Trans Cinema.” In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Kaplan, and Patrice Petro. New York: Routledge, 2017. 395-406.
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Music Credits:
“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020
Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.
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