Barbara's Body: Final Girls, Saints, and Sex
-Kate Sidley
“Here is the patience of the saints...”
-Revelation 14:12
1. Hagiography
hagiography (n.)—biography of saints or famous persons
Heyshlee Burbara is a call in Lebanese: “Run Barbara.” On Eid il-Burbara (Dec. 4), Lebanese Christians don masks and go door-to-door, repeating the call for Saint Barbara to run, the mask symbolizing her disguise as she flees from the Romans.
Barbara runs from death, her sentence the crime of being a woman who defied a man.
The final girl.
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My middler (2nd) year of Seminary, I took a class on religion and sacrifice in film.
The professor had a fascination with the concept of sacrifice. We read a lot of Girard, talked about the circle of violence done unto marginalized people, and watched movies that either portrayed this cycle or subconsciously encouraged it.
On the first day of class, the professor showed a clip from the beginning of the film Halloween. I saw it years earlier but I didn't remember much of my original viewing from as I was on a date with a cheerleader. Football may have been a dysphoria cope but it had its perks.
At any rate, the clip involves soon-to-be serial killer Michael Myers at age six remorselessly stabbing his teenage sister to death while she showered. Maybe it was the context of the class but the scene made me uncomfortable. Not just because of the obvious but also the unnamed...I had this buried fear that such violence could happen to me.
Where did that fear come from?
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In 2026, All Saints Sunday fell on the traditional observation of All Saints (November 1) and it felt fitting to celebrate on the actual day. I wish the church observed October 31-November 2 (Hallow’s Eve, Saints Day, Souls Day) like we do the Triduum. I think we'd learn more about the cycle of death and life in those days than we do on Holy Week.
Consider if you will the mystical power of All Hallow's Eve: the veil between heaven and earth is lifted. We are in a thin space where the spirits come to dwell with us and while we can don masks to fight the horrors, we can also embrace such a powerful presence. On a day when we celebrate kids instead of sacrificing them, we can look outward with wonder and reverence at who surrounds us. What would a Christian mystic practice of Halloween look like? It doesn't matter because the church tries to run contra to culture in ways that are, as my kid tells me I am, cringe.
Halloween is less a fascination with death and more an embrace of it. We are with those who died. In the church, we honor the holy ones the next morning (Saints) we grieve the rest the following day (Souls). Three days to remind us of who left, what's coming, and in faith, what we may look forward to. Is that not better than the orgiastic violence of Good Friday? Isn’t living more fun than dying?
2. Final Girl
The Director: There must be at least five (for the sacrifice). The whore…the athlete…the scholar…the fool…leaving the last to live or die as fate decides: the virgin.
Dana: Me? Virgin?
The Director: We work with what we have.
-The Cabin in the Woods
I was many things this Halloween. My original costume, Chappell Roan d’Arc, only got used for a town parade. My family costume, Raven from Teen Titans Go!, was the easiest to use on Halloween in terms of makeup and fuss.
For the gays and theys, I was Grace in Ready or Not.
In Ready or Not, a satirical horror film, Samara Weaving plays Grace, a former orphan who marries into a wealthy family. On the night of her wedding, she discovers she is supposed to be the sacrifice to satisfy whatever supernatural power keeps the family rich and thus has to try to survive until the sun comes up.
Needless to say, she does not take this lying down.
For me, the enduring image of Samara Weaving in Ready Or Not is her looking at herself in the mirror and taking the Lord's name in vain. I didn't flinch as I often do when that happens. In fact, I went along with the humor of the moment. Grace, her appropriately named character, has a sleeve of bullets across her chest and a rifle in her hand. She's prepared to kill-or-be-killed. And as she stares in the mirror, movie star that she is, she's reflecting on the absurdity of the situation.
Jesus.
Because yes, the intent to harm the female body is many things and absurd is a common sentiment. The justification for violence is often absurd. The men, their disposition, an absurd one.
Staring at myself in the mirror as I tried to mimic Samara's look for a party, I found a comfort in what I saw, if temporarily. Mocking the absurdity of it all. But there was also something else. Iconic, but not as how the word is used today…
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The Final Girl trope — that the last survivor in a slasher horror film has to be a woman who is attractive in a girl-next-door way, virginal and unsullied by the killer's knife which is a symbolic stand-in for a phallus — is a popular one. It's rife with the kind of misogynistic, patriarchal sexual politics that smarter people than I have pulled apart.
And it's another reason why I don't do a lot of horror. To say nothing of the fact that I hate jump scares, I don't find death entertaining. I've watched people die. It's not fun. The notion of indiscriminately killing others has always made me uncomfortable, even in a past life. It's not something to which I can turn my brain off and just enjoy.
As I learned years ago when watching Michael Myers' sister get slashed to death in the shower for reasons known only unto men: it is not enough to sacrifice a person but to do so in a manner that calls to mind no gods but the patriarchy, no creators besides sexism, no thought but destruction. It is a ritual done to sustain power with no divinity behind it, even if reverence for one is often feigned.
Jesus.
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Being raised Lutheran, hagiography was a hot stove we weren't allowed to touch. Luther went to war with the most powerful people on the planet over whether or not it was okay to pray to Jesus' mother (among many other things).
But I always had a curiosity about the saints, mostly because there's a certain queer element to it all: the icon art, the drama, the over-the-top martyrdom. It's theater kid stagecraft come to life, a fun mythology to engage with outside the rigidity of Biblical interpretation.
Yet my issue with the cult of the saints is my issue with the cult of Final Girls: murder murder murder death death death prove your love with blood, etc.
Yeah they died as we all die but the saints also lived, right? It doesn't have to be all bludgeonings, beheadings, and inverted crucifixions. What is the love they put into the world? How did they live their faith before death?
Why can't the Final Girls just live? Why can't Sidney Prescott move on with her t girl life without being chased by a knife-wielding creep in a mask? What do Final Girls do when they walk away from the haunted house? What does Janet say to Brad on the drive home?
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My favorite Final Girl remains Saint Barbara.
Yes, an actual saint.
The legend of Saint Barbara goes that her pagan father was furious at her conversion to Christianity because she was incredibly beautiful and thus, a prime target for an arranged marriage. So he saw fit to her lock her in a tower. She escape with the help of the Holy Spirit. He went to kill her and was eventually successful but not before Barbara called down thunder from the heaven to kill him for his insolence.
As I wrote about her on IG back in December...
I was reading @tourmaliiine’s excellent Marsha P Johnson bio last night and came across a section on Marsha and Sylvia Rivera’s time at the STAR house. I knew Sylvia lit candles and prayed but I didn’t know until I read in the book that it was to Santa Barbara, who has an outsized place in Spanish queer culture...Being imprisoned in a tower by a man because of her gender and finding freedom in God is very relatable.
If I’m going to die a brutal death, at the very least I get to die as who I am, as Barbara did.
But I would also like a world in which realizing my gender does not put me under the looming specter of death.
3. F-ck or be f-cked
Kris: This is the part that's transphobic
Billy: Shuttup
-Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
I have been reading and watching and...I guess cosplaying... a lot of Final Girl media since seeing Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma* back in August.
If hagiographies of virginal female saints and movies like Ready or Not and Cabin in the Woods play with the virginal Final Girl stereotype, Camp Miasma is a repudiation. It dares the viewer to clear the patriarchal nonsense out of their poisoned head and find the desire they seek, even if it makes them uncomfortable or weird by worldly standards. And let's face it, when we are horny, we are uncomfortable and weird. It's a weird feeling to express what you want to do to someone else! Or that you want to do nothing at all.
But there's joy to be found if it's done correctly, with consent and understanding, or with knowledge that a lack of desire is not a crime. We have to navigate the sense of shame we feel to access that joy.
The church has often yoked this work to the feeling of shame. Many of us raised in male-dominant faith practices feel it, self included. But biologically — and I would argue spiritually — speaking, understanding your body and gender is natural work. It's holy work. If there is a ghost in the machine, this is how she created the body: as an instrument to be self-discovered. Once your mind and conscience are liberated from the need to perform for society, you can feel empowered to do what you want with your own body. A seeking of pleasure or a content non-need of it is a grave threat to the powers that be; patriarchal religion, white male culture makers, the world writ large.
Adéla's Nicole Kidman is everywhere now and I think the poor girl is sick of her own song but I keep coming back to my favorite lyric...
Should I wear Louboutins or Jimmy Choos?
Try em in the mirror fully nude...
Adéla's observation and joy at the beauty of her own naked body is an empowering one, one that allows the body to be what its owner wants it to be: sexual or asexual, virginal or sluttish, holy or profane. Or some binary-busting combination of whatever. No one gets to gaze but the person and those they wish to share it with.
There’s no man mentioned in Nicole Kidman, or even the act of sex. Our girl is gonna rock some burlesque like a ten and then split to do what she does. That’s her business. But in the meantime, she looks and sees “Nicole,” a femme sexuality pushed to its maximum. And she loves it herself. She doesn’t love “it,” with “it” being the Life of a Star or the attention it draws** but she loves her body. Her personhood.
Talia Bhatt wrote about this power of feminine sexual self-love in her excellent essay on Camp Miasma...
Feminism’s alleged fixation on policing desire is the result of the policing of women’s desire as a whole, the result of women being equally envied and pathologized and celebrated and abhorred for being desired, being sexual, being sex. Put a mirror in her hand and call it “vanity”—but what is someone, who knows that the sum of her worth is in the eyes of others, supposed to be but vain? How is she to disentangle the Gordian knot, wade through the toxic miasma of wanting to be at once desired and freed from the shackles of desire? What does it mean to want and be wanted in a world where wanting is anathema, and being wanted the very source of our confinement?
...
So I’m glad to see a love story between a woman and her mirror, for once. To let myself get lost in the primal, libidinal experience of admiring your own reflection, of liking what you see so much you can’t help but want to sink into her. I love women, including myself, though I love the woman I see reflected in my lovers’ eyes most of all.
More of you should try it. It fucking rules.
4. Iconic
We should look in the mirror, covered in blood or wedding night pure, and just see us. We will not see the killer, the man. Nor do we need to care about his motivations. But our own selves. Selves we can love even as we are remaking them.
The depictions of the saints, often with ridiculous Anglo-Saxon features (Saint Barbara, if she existed at all, was Turkish or Lebanese), are called “icons.”
We do not need a renaissance artist and a fictive history to become an icon.
Go to the bathroom, look and behold. Make yourself your own saint. Fashion yourself into an icon. Wear what you want or nothing at all.
Write your own hagiography with the blood of men who tried to kill you.
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You will die. You are dying as you are reading this. It's 70 degrees in New York City in November. The planet will die.
The world will remember you how it wants to. You have little control over this. Mold your own body to remember it how you want. The killer might not get us but death will sooner or later.
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I didn't see Samara Weaving in the mirror. Or a beautiful Lebanese martyred saint. I saw myself, Allison Whitney. Being silly and sexual, a trans femme saint rejecting the sin of male gaze, ready to have some fun on her own terms for All Hallow’s Eve. An icon I had fashioned on my own, with God's help.
Jesus.
*An aside: I love Jane Schoenbrun as much as the next trans lesbian but can they please get someone to help them name their movies?
**…get your pictures cuz I’m not gonna stay for long. I’ll say ‘hi’ (I’m gone), bye-bye, pop out…
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