• Thesis
  • A monster is anything different that threatens to challenge what is accepted as "normal"
    • Even ourselves
• Monsters are the side humans try to hide
• Monsters are the imaginary embodiment of our fears/the unexplained that works to "be normal"
  • We created them
  • Subconscious?
• Monsters are outside of what is considered "normal"
• Monsters are part of us
  • Transcends cultures

?

• (not physical)
• Imaginary embodiment of what we fear
  • Unknown
  • Different
• We make monsters to explain the unexplained
• Created by "others" to control
• Warning to conform
  • Keeps them hidden
  • Keeps them controlled
• Id, ego, superego

King

• We're all mentally ill
  • Those of us outside of asylums only hide it better
• Hysterical fear
• Re-establish our essential normality
• Simplicity, irrationality, outright madness
• Emotions at free rein... or no rein at all
• Potential lyncher in all of us
• Has to be let loose occasionally
• Our emotions and fears form their own body
• Anti-civilization emotions
• We share an insanity of man
• The worst in us
• Base instincts
• Nastiest fantasies
• It keeps them from getting out

Chance

• Inversion of ideal (cultural)
• Blurs the sexual and social categories of roles
• Flaws in civilization
• Parodic inversion
• Unnatural behavior
• Contrasts with ideals
• Ironic contrast
• Fulfills wrong duty
• Mystery/danger of female sexuality run rampant
• Sexual role behavior
• Perversion of the sexual roles signals an equally perverse spiritual state
• Antitypes

Beal

• We understand the monster
• The voice of the monter is the audacious voice of theodicy
• The monster stands for terrifying religious uncertainties
• His questions pry at cracks in the worlds foundations that open into the abyss of unknowing
• In but not of the world
• Paradoxical personifications of otherness within sameness
• Threatening figures of anomaly within the accepted order of things
• Represent outside that got inside
• Threatens one's sense of "at homeness:
• Freud - home = human consciousness
• "At-homeness"
  • may refer to one's confidence in the meaning, integrity, and well-being of oneself as a subject
  • one's confidence in the meaning, integrity, and well-being of one's society or culture
  • ones confidence in the meaning, integrity, and well-being of the entire cosmos
• that which invades one's sense of personal, social, or cosmic order and security
• the other within / that which is in the house but cannot be comprehended by it or integrated into it
• Personifications of the unheimlich
• Stand for what endangers one's sense of at-homeness
  • They make one feel not at home, at home
• Figures of chaos and disorientation within order and orientation
• Reveal deep insecurities in one's faith in oneself, one's society and one's world
• A threat not only to our order but also to the order of the gods or God
  • threatens us and our world
  • enemy of god
• Reveals a deep sense of ambivalence about the relation between the monstrous and the divine
• Monster derives from mostrum/_Monstrare_ (show or reveal) and monere (warn or portend)
• horrifically unnatural and horrifically supernatural
• An encounter with mysterious otherness that elicits a vertigo-like combination of both dear and desire, repulsion and attraction
• encounters with something simultaneously awesome and awful
• something inherently wholly other
• culturally specific
• A force of chaos that threatens our sacred order
• They keeping coming back
  • Because they still have something to say
  • Or show us
    • about our world and ourselves

Gilmore

• The mind needs monsters
  • Monsters embody all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination
  • People have invented fantasy creatures on which their fears could safely settle
• Monsters are not confined to a single tradition
• Monsters live in the periphery of the universe
• Identical ideas among disconnected peoples, revealing some deep human thread
• Imaginary monsters provide a convenient pictorial metaphor for human qualities that have to be repudiated, externalized, and defeated, the most important of which are aggression and sexual sadism
  • Id forces
• Monsters are sources of identification
  • They serve as vehicles for the expiation of guilt and aggression
• The monster is an incarnation of the urge for self-punishment and a unified metaphor for both sadism and victimization
• Monsters arise with civilization - with human self-consciousness
• Supernatural, mythical, or magical products of the imagination
• Grotesque hybrids
• Imaginary embodiments of terror
• Large size and deformity
• Inherent evil
  • Unmotivated wickedness toward humans
• Dangerous objects of fear
  • The primal fear of being eaten
• Eating human beings is as critical an aspect of monsterhood as bigness, physical grotesqueness, and malice
• Explodes standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct
• Reshuffled familiarity
• Belongs solely to the realm of human imagination
• Big enough to be overwhelmingly powerful
• Malevolent
• Teras - warning or portent
• Monstrum = prodigy or portent
• Monere - to show or warn
• Directing attention to deviations from the true path in symbolic or allegorical form
• Spiritual meaning beyond just frightfulness
• Our foulest mental creation and our most awesome achievement
• Enemies of culture heroes
• A metaphor for all that must be repudiated by the human spirit
• Embodies the existential threat to social life, the chaos, atavism, and negativism that symbolize the destructiveness and all other obstacles to order and progress
  • All that which defeats, destroys, draws back, undermines, subverts the human project - the id
• They observe no limits, respect no boundaries, and attack and kill without compunction
• The monster is the spirit that says yes to all that is forbidden
• Monsters live in borderline places, inhabiting an "outside" dimension
  • Apart from but parallel to and intersecting the human community
• political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy
  • The outcaste, the revolutionary, the pariah
• Symbolizes human threats to Western bourgeois society
  • threatening to the prevailing political order
• Impulse to create monsters stems from the need of the majority to denigrate those who are different
  • lower classes
  • foreigners
  • marginalized deviant groups
• Projection of some repressed part of the self
• A dreamlike manifestation of id forces
  • sexual sadism
• Projections of inner conflicts
  • repressed desire
  • guilt
  • awe
  • dread
• Repetition compulsion, expiation, paranoia, nemesis
• may represent an autonomous instinct or drive
• an incarnation of the punishing supergo and id forces
• represents an amalgam of opposing psychic energies
  • an alliance between the id and superego
• challenge the moral and cosmological order of the universe
• they undermine basic understandings
• a threat to cultures very integrity as an intellectual whole
• expose the radical permeability and artificiality of all our classifactory boundaries
  • highlighting the arbitrariness and fragility of culture
• Represents all that is beyond human control
  • the uncontrollable and the unruly that threaten the moral order
• Culture is founded on the repression of instinct
  • rituals and rites perform the function of relieving tensions in pre-industrial societies
• creating monsters frees humans from their day-to-day location in the world of common sense
• The monster is never created out of nothing
• symbolizes evil in order to cleanse the society of its own guilt and terror
• a psychological model for ritual scapegoating
• First attribute that stands out is great size
  • Monsters are vastly, grotesquely oversized
  • To express present emotions of fear, awe, and dread, such as felt by a small, weak child in a world of giants, the psyche dredges up perpetual residues of the time when such feelings of danger were experienced in pictorial terms
  • Feelings that can only derive from fantasies of parental omnipotence
• Colossal mouth as organ of predation and destruction
  • Yawning, cavernous mouths brimming with fearsome teeth, fangs or some other means of predation
• gobble people up often whole so that the miraculous escape from the belly is possible (!)
• Monsters are almost by definition also man-eaters
• Freud and followers = cannibalism is the ultimate form of sadism and human aggression as it is the original form
• Children shortly after weaning = sadistic destructiveness reaches maximal intensity
  • this stage never fully is extinguished in the mental apparatus of the adult
• conflates the entire range of conflicts comprising the unconscious
• people do not always act out their impulses, which nevertheless represent a mixture of wishes and fears percolating just beneath the surface
• repressed wishes
• pure affect in nonverbal form
  • like figures in dreams
• primary organization of the time before speech
• a metaphor for retrogression to a previous age and time
• reflect primary process thinking and the oral sadism of the human neonate
  • the return of the individual to prior states of development
• suggests that every human carries within them the entire primitive past of the species as a set of undying fantasis and that humans are all alike in this regard
• monsters challenge and reshuffle the very foundations of our known world
  • challenging our cosmological assumptions and perceptions
    • cognitively as well as physically challenging
• facilitate thought and encourage us to confront deep fears
• many revered culture heroes have qualities that are unsettlingly similary to those of the monsters they fight
• children invent the monster to drive it into the unconscious

Cohen

• The monster's body is a cultural body
• Born only at this metaphoric crossroads
• an embodiment of a certain cultural moment
• incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy
• pure culture
• A construct and a projection
• Exists only to be read
• monstrum - that which reveals/that which warns
• monster signifies something other than itself
• always rises from the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed and vanishes into the night
• the monter turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else
• no monster tastes of death but once
• the anxiety can be dispersed temporarily but the revenant by definition returns
• the monster's body is both corporal and incorporeal
  • its threat is its propensity to shift
• Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations that generate them
  • social, cultural, literary-historical
• transgressive
• compelling sexuality
• self-loathing appropriation
• undercurrent of desire surfaces in plague and bodily corruption
• Homosexuality
• apotheosized
• the undead returns to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event
• new possibilities
  • acceptance of new subjectivities unfixed by binary gender
• strings of cultural moments
• always threatens to shift
  • change and escape
• harbinger of category crisis
• monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization
• disturbing hybrids
• externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration
• the monster is dangerous
  • a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions
• notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes
  • questions binary thinking and introduces a crisis
• evade and undermine
• habitations at the margins of the world
• too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster's body
• resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition
• resistance to integration
• offers and escape from its hermetic path
• an invitation
  • new methods of conceiving the world
• scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble
• the monster's very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure
• dwells at the gates of difference
• difference made flesh
• come to dwell among us
• an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond
• distant and distinct but originate within
• monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual
• political or ideological difference is as much a catalyst to monstrous representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm
• a monster is a readable text on which is inscribed deviant morality
  • indistinguishable from an incorrect political orientation
• culture gives birth to a monster before our eyes, painting over to deform simultaneously person, cultural response, and possibility of objectivity
• history itself becomes a monster: defeaturing, self-deconstructive, always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind its disparate elements into a single, unnatural body
• oversteps the boundaries of gender
• deviant sexual identity is similarly susceptible to monsterization
• He came to bear witness to sexual normes
• embodied the punishment
• race has been almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gender, and sexuality
• perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite
• he boundaries between personal and national bodies blur
• inversion
• the violation of the cultural codes that valence gendered behaviors creates a rupture that must be cemented
• the normative categories of gender, sexuality, national identity, and ethnicity slide together like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram, abjecting from the center that which becomes the monster
• scapegoat
• monsters are never created ex nihilo
• marginalized social groups
• the political-cultural monster
• the embodiment of radical difference
• threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators
• threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed
• the monster seeks out its author to demand its raison d'etre
• polices the borders of the possible
• monster resists capture
• stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demenses
• declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded
  • one is better off safely contained within one's own domestic sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state
• prevents mobility
• monsters function as living invitations to action
• the monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together the system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot - must not - be crossed
• Primarily these borders are in place to control traffic in women or more generally to establish strictly homosocial bonds
  • the ties between men that keep a patriarchal society functional
• a kind of herdsman
• lack of hierarchy and of a politics of precent
• dissociation from community leads to a rugged individualism that can only be horrifying
• live without a system of tradition and custom
• the monster embodies those sexual practices that must not be committed or that may be committed only through the body of the monster
• enforced the cultural codes that regulate sexual desire
• anxieties that monsterized their subjects in the first place
• monster arises at the gap where difference is perceived as dividing a recording voice from its captured subject
• the monster's destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness
• threatens to reveal that difference originated in process, rather than in fact
• monster most often arises to enforce the laws of exogamy
• expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict notion of group sameness
• the actual circumstances of history tend to vanish when a narrative of miscegenation can be supplied
• monster is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker
• repressed
• always returns
• really a kind of desire
• continually linked to forbidden practices
• to normalize and enforce
• also attracts
• evokes potent escapist fantasies
• linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint
• simultaneous repulsion and attraction
• seldom can be contained in a simple, binary dialectic
• we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair
• through the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and permanently liminal space
• when contained, the monster can function as an alter ego, an alluring projection of an Other self
• the monster awakens one to the pleasures of the body, to the simple and fleeting joys of being frightened, or frightening - to the experience of mortality and corporality.
• We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film because the cinema is a temporary place
• Safe realm of expression and play (Halloween)
• monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of other genders, other sexual practices, and other social customs can be explored
• beckon from the edges of the world, the most distant planets of the galaxy
• the monster's eradication functions as an exorcism and when retold and promulgated, as a catechism
• lesson in morality
• retains a haunting complexity
• will always dangerously entice
• the monster is the abjected fragment that enabled the formation of all kinds of identities
  • personal
  • national
  • cultural
  • economic
  • sexual
  • psychological
  • universal
  • particular
• the monster of abjection resides in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous
• do monsters really exist?
  • surely they must, for if they did not, how could we?
• Stand at the threshold of becoming
• monsters are our children
• they can be pushed to the farthest margins, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind
• monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place
• ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of differences, our tolerance toward its expression
• they ask us why we have created them