Monster Studies

This essay presents a new approach to read the concept of trans monstrosity proposed by Susan Stryker in "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix" in 1994. Her work, in an emergent context of transgender studies, establishes a literary dialogue with Frankenstein’s creature, thus offering a groundbreaking view from which to criticize transmedicalism and the reification of hegemonic gender identities. Still, the post-structuralist framework in which the text was written limits its political possibilities beyond the discursive denaturalization of the gendered body. Hence, in light of contemporary transgender Marxist thought, new conceptual tools are offered to bring to fruition the counter-hegemonic politics that lied in the monstrous seams and sutures originally theorized by Stryker.

En mi comunicación pretendo hacer precisiones de índole teórica sobre la naturaleza del monstruo en los géneros no miméticos –lo fantástico, lo maravilloso y la ciencia ficción, sobre todo–, así como en otra modalidad que suele recurrir a elementos imposibles o sobrenaturales para articular sus historias, pero que no necesita de ellos para conformarse como discurso ficcional: el terror. Es mi voluntad rastrear qué rasgos del concepto monstruo se hacen imprescindibles o son definitorios de esta figura en cada uno de los géneros aludidos. Dado que la noción de monstruosidad es abordable desde diferentes prismas –desde el estético al ético, pasando por el político, el mitológico, el cultural, el filosófico y el propiamente teratológico–, los planteamientos presentarán una apariencia multiforme, capaz de dar cuenta de la complejidad del elemento monstruoso. Lo que se busca es deshacer ciertas asunciones, problematizar lugares comunes y arrojar luz sobre un panorama que, con frecuencia, se muestra confuso o inespecífico. El resultado de mi reflexión –necesariamente aproximativa– habrá de ser, en el mejor de los casos, de utilidad para futuros asedios a obras concretas y, en general, para entender la naturaleza y el funcionamiento de los géneros concernidos. Dialoga, en este sentido, con las propuestas existentes sin desautorizarlas: simplemente tratando de matizar puntos que se antojan oscuros o dados por supuesto, empezando por el significado y las implicaciones de la otredad, tantas veces traída a colación a propósito de este asunto.

In this chapter, I look at monstrosity from the perspective of social justice as a spectre and conundrum to be encountered. I do so by reflecting on my ongoing ethnographic practice, which concerns a parasitical and monstrous fish that is flourishing in Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Given that monstrosity is a socially constructed state that nevertheless refers to some (repulsive) materiality, the question this chapter grapples with is: are we allowed, from an ethical and epistemological perspective, to construct monsters as we pursue a politics of equality? Is it permissible for social justice movements to fabricate monster-figures against which to mobilise notions of goodness and communitarian responsibility? Do revolutions need negative monsters in order to claim their identity as the rightful one? I argue that monsterising for social justice movements constitutes an aporia: it is both a dangerous endeavor that can lapse into witch-hunting and monstrous self-becomings and a necessity to be mobilised tactically against unjust practices.

Este trabajo está sujeto a la licencia de Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional de Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

El propósito de este estudio es explorar cómo las representaciones vampíricas en los relatos «A cadena perpetua» y «Criaturas de la noche», de la escritora mexicana Gabriela Rábago Palafox (1950-1995), fungen como mecanismo para tematizar, respectivamente, la homosexualidad y la violencia de género, proveyendo una postura crítica contra la discriminación y estigmatización social en torno a las mismas. Para lograr esto, se analizará la esencia transgresora del vampiro en medio de la tensión entre sus raíces literarias en la Europa del siglo xviii y su reescritura en un contexto latinomaericano y contemporáneo, ilustrando
cómo las funciones trangresivas del horror literario pueden reflejar posiciones exteriores a un discurso hegemónico, convirtiéndose en potenciales herramientas valiosas para dar voz a grupos marginalizados.

Palabras clave: vampiro; marginalidad; homosexualidad; violencia de género; Gabriela Rábago Palafox.


Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore how vampiric representations in Gabriela Rábago Palafox’s short stories «A cadena perpetua» and «Criaturas de la noche» function as a mechanism to adress, respectively, homosexuality and gender violence, providing a critical stance against discrimination and social stigmatization around these issues. To achieve this, the transgressive essence of the vampire will be analyzed amidst the tension between its literary roots in 18th century Europe and its rewriting in a Latin American and contemporary context, illustrating how the transgressive functions of literary horror can be utilized to express
positions outside hegemonic discourses, becoming potentially valuable tools to provide a voice to marginalized groups.

Keywords: vampire; marginality; homosexuality; sexual violence; Gabriela Rábago Palafox

This project examines disability in the Renaissance in conduct books and treatises, travel writing, and wonder books. The cross-section of texts is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Its methodology takes a formal and philosophical approach to pre-modern formulations of monstrous bodies, spaces, and narratives, which continue to shape our understandings of disability today. My work discerns the norming of early modern bodies in the discourse of the ideal and the natural, and it discovers alternative representations of embodiment that allow for variation and vulnerability. It overturns the assumption that “monstrosity” was relegated to the margins of the world from antiquity to the Renaissance, and it questions grand narratives propounding a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen. I contend that these categories coexist and intersect, and that we can better understand early modern productions of disability by attending to the rich variety of monstrous bodies, spaces, and narratives that populate Renaissance texts.

Since the second half of the twentieth century we have been witnessing an overwhelming proliferation of monster narratives in contemporary art and visual/textual culture. With prime time TV shows like Dexter, True Blood or Hannibal, this trend peaked at the beginning of the new millennium when wider audiences completely succumbed to a fascination with monsters, horror,  grotesque,  serial  killing  and  bodies  turned  inside  out.  Although  monstrosity  entered popular culture as early as at the end of the eighteenth century, a consolidated critical discourse on the topic appeared only with the emergence of cultural studies of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Today  monster  studies  present  themselves  as  that  which  transcends  academic,  national  and disciplinary  boundaries,  merging  biology,  evolutionism,  disability  studies,  Marxism, psychoanalysis, material culture studies and media studies, while treating ‘high art’ of Oscar Wilde as structurally no different from a performance of Lady Gaga. The main premise of the monster  studies  in the  last century  was  that  the marginal  is  the ‘constitutive outside’ of an identity, that  the monster populates ‘zones  of uninhabitability.’ But what happens with these studies when the monster stops dwelling on the margins, and enters the very core of identity, like in aesthetics of Lady Gaga?  What happens with the monster studies when the monster stops being an abject and becomes a subject, like in so many contemporary narratives?

The paper has two distinct intentions: 1) to present the academic underground called the ‘monster studies,’ that, like mycelium, spreads its object of study across contemporary cinema, literature, and material art; 2) to suggest that this conglomerate of ideas, academic disciplines and  objects of study reflects (or responds  to) contemporary  practices (needs and  desires) of globalization and consumerism.

This book is full of wonders. Not only do Asa Mittman and Susan Kim present a diplomatic edition of the British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius Wonders of the East (famously included with Beowulf), they also provide two translations: a close one printed under their Old English transliteration and an idiomatic one. But the stunner is the color plates of all the folios of the Wonders, further replicated in black and white to accompany the second translation, along with color plates from the Cotton Tiberius Marvels, the Hereford, Cotton, and Psalter maps, and other illuminations. The Wonders of the Nowell Codex has never been the subject of a single monograph, much less one that includes the illuminations, and Inconceivable Beasts re-unites these signifying systems that work together. The authors defend these pictures, which have been compared unfavorably to the more sophisticated ones in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 614 and London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. They refute Kenneth Sisam’s perception of the Vitellius Wonders as “debased,” and reject E. V. Gordon’s and other editors’ emendations, offering an uncorrected transliteration that preserves line breaks and abbreviations.

In this chapter, I consider notions of the sentient landscape from a philosophically inspired anthropological perspective, specifically, Edward Casey’s postulation that places ‘gather’. I provide a narrative portrait of the subject of my analysis: a triangular valley in central Australia bordered by ranges on two sides and a storm water drain at its base, crisscrossed by paths and tracks, vegetated by prickles, grasses, and small bushes, and inhabited by insects, small reptiles including poisonous snakes, birds, rock wallabies, and the occasional kangaroo and dingo. To the south, The Triangle is directly bordered by the affluent Alice Springs suburb of Eastside. To its north lies ‘the bush’, stretching for well over a thousand kilometres to the sea. I focus on how The Triangle ‘gathers’ in regards to the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic, and relate this through three case studies: (1) Nature and culture: The Triangle is all that stands between Eastside and ‘the bush’, and its body (‘scarred’ by paths and weed poising, exuding seeds, snakes, and sand) literally constitutes the threshold between the built environment and a perceived untamed nature. (2) Wildness and domestication: During recent drought-like conditions, dingoes flocked to the triangle and began killing the pets of Eastsiders. Critically, the latter often are part-dingo ‘camp dogs’ from Aboriginal communities, adopted by Eastsiders employed in the ‘Aboriginal Industry’. (3) Interwoven history: The Triangle’s neocolonial Indigenous/non-Indigenous entanglements are layered on top of its heritage WW2 site history, and its past as an Arrernte camping and hunting ground adjacent to a major sacred site. The central aim of my chapter is to develop a Triangle-centric narrative from which to consider questions pertinent to the relationship between monstrousness and geography: Can the Triangle express or experience monstrousness, or is monstrousness inscribed on and through it?