vagina dentata

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English

Etymology

First attested 1908, from Latin vagina + dentata (“toothed”); popularized chiefly by Sigmund Freud.

Noun

vagina dentata (plural vaginae dentatae or vagina dentatas or vagina dentata)

  1. The mythical toothed vagina; often related to castration anxiety.
    • 2005, Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny, Melbourne Univ. Publishing, →ISBN, page 86:
      This notion also associates the vampire more directly with the primal uncanny. The long quotation that Moretti uses from Marie Bonaparte's writings on Edgar Allen Poe includes reference to the mythical vagina dentata, the ‘strange’ notion that the vagina ‘is furnished with teeth, and thus a source of danger in being able to bite and castrate’.
    • 2006, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek (actor):
      My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they are disgusting. Just imagine. Aren't these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vaginas threatening to swallow you?
    • 2013, B. Fahs, M. Dudy, S. Stage, The Moral Panics of Sexuality, Springer, →ISBN:
      Perhaps one of the most recognizable and acknowledged contemporary images of vagina dentata appears in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). […] Indeed, Gieger himself wanted the creature to be an embodiment of the fear of rape, making it a perfect match for the film.

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