Barbara Creed

At the University of Melbourne in 2013, Creed established the Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network.

In 2006 Creed was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is on a variety of worldwide editorial panels.

Barbara Creed's ‘Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality’ explores the impact of media and technology on subjects such as the self, identity, sexuality and representation in the public sphere. She includes a definition of "Matrix" in the book's introduction, which she describes as a, "womb; place in which thing is developed", which closely relates to her discussion of the monstrous feminine. In the beginning of this piece, she discusses The Matrix (1999) and Strange Days (1995) in relation to the concept of ‘jacking-in’, that is the use of technology to alter reality and experience life in other people's minds much like virtual reality. Creed argues that the development of technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has allowed people to experiment with reality and time, and disassociate one's self from their own reality, as well as challenge ideas of "fixed personal identity". Media Matrix also examines the role of media and news in the modern era, with a particular interest to how an overwhelming majority of fiction showcases the horrific, evokes fear, and the abject. Creed defines this "crisis TV", wherein news reporters focus on disasters to provoke anxiety and immediacy, and bring the abject into reality.

Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) investigates the types of monsters that women are portrayed as in horror films, particularly examining archaic mothers, and mythological adaption's of characters. Creed analyses women as monstrous through their roles in horror movies playing witches, vampires, archaic mothers, possessed monsters and mythical creatures, such as Medusa. In her discussion of the many "faces of the monstrous-feminine", she draws on Kristeva's concept of abjection to describe how the patriarchal society separates the human from the non-human, and rejects the "partially formed subject".

Barbara Creed has published a multitude of material on gender and horror, including: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism. Psychoanalysis (1993), Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality (2003), Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (2005) and Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (2009).

Creed first considers women as Vampires in such films as Dracula (1992) and The Hunger (1983), wherein she discusses the image of the ‘archaic mother’ with the female vampire being ‘mother’ and her lover or victim as ‘child’ whom she promises eternal life to. Creed also interrogates at the portrayal of desire and lesbianism in the horror film the Hunger (1983), arguing that when the two female vampires kiss there is an eruption of blood in the women's mouths, which represents how lesbian relations are deadly and consequential.

In her 1987 paper, "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism", Creed's approach to understanding the monstrous male figure also draws on Kristeva's notion of abjection. Creed examples that in examples where the monster is clearly defined as male, its status as male identifies it with a lack, and hence defines it as feminized. In this, "lack" signifies the female, wherein male monsters are identified as abject, lacking; ultimately feminine.

Julia Kristeva is one of Creed's major feminist influencers, as she studied Kristeva in great depth, particularly with her examination of the abject. Creed wrote an essay on Kristeva and film in 1985 for the British Film Journal. Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine was published in 1993 and clearly draws inspiration from her earlier work on Kristeva.

Creed places emphasis on this idea of the monstrous-womb, as the maternal body has been considered a source of anxiety to the male gaze. Creed argues that a woman's deep connection to natural events such as reproduction and birth is considered ‘quintessentially grotesque’. Creed reflects back to the Renaissance where the uterus is depicted in connotation with evil and the devil. The reproductive system within horror movies is often depicted as monstrous, for example, the 1979 film Alien clearly depicts this theory. These ideals are clearly imbedded within phallocentric philosophy. Creed's ideology of the woman's reproductive system is similarly analyzed within the works of Kristeva.

Barbara Creed FAHA (born 30 September 1943) is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.