Female Werewolves

Latoya Peterson has a fantastic article over at Jezebel discussing monstrous female creatures. With the whole Twilight and True Blood phenomenon, she noticed that though vampires are often equally male/female, werewolves are almost always male only. Why, you may ask?

Student Elizabeth M. Clark may have an answer. In the most authoritative document to be found online about representations of female werewolves in pop culture, her thesis “Hairy Thuggish Women”: Female Werewolves, Gender, and the Hoped-For Monster provides the provocative answer: werewolves are specifically coded as masculine, which directly conflicts with the pop culture narrative surrounding women and femininity. She delves into this idea over the course of more than 300 pages, but most interesting are comments from those directly involved in crafting images of women in fantasy worlds.

I thought for a moment about truly monstrous females and only came up with two examples: She-Hulk and the female creation in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Interesting stuff to ponder.