Gothic and Labour

This chapter focuses on two contemporary horror ‘texts’ – the American HBO series Sharp Objects (2018) and the South African film Mlungu Wam (2022) – both of which gothicise the domestic sphere in ways that usefully focalise the manifold forms of exploitation and appropriation upon which global capitalism depends. By addressing their deployment of gothic to showcase how the world-system exploits the household, I hope to reframe traditional conceptions of the domestic gothic to illustrate the dependence of global capitalism on the unpaid work of nature’s metabolic energies and women’s social reproduction. In so doing, I argue for a new understanding of the domestic gothic through espousing a world-gothic method that not only productively opens the door for comparisons between gothic ‘texts’ from different regional locations in the same world-system but which also casts a searchlight on a series of intersecting exploitations that both hidden from view and typically thought of in isolation.