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Monstrous difference tends to be:

  • cultural
  • political
  • racial
  • economic
  • sexual

...to bear witness to the fact that it could have been constructed Otherwise.

•The Monster is Difference made Flesh

The monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—

of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct

but originate Within.

The monster seeks out its author to demand a raison d`etre (the most important reason or purpose for someone's existence)...

Holocaust 1933-1945

Bosnia 1992-1995

Monsters are created through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which elements are extracted from various forms and then reassembled as monsters.

Political or Ideological differences are a catalyst on the micro level

Manifest Destiny/Slaughter of the Native Americans in the 1800s

Difficulty of constructing and maintaining gender identities elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture.

Deviant sexual identity is similarly susceptible to monsterization.

Monica Lewinski

Wilt Chamberlain

Boundaries between personal and national bodies are blurred

Ishtar

Lilith

The woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender role risks becoming exiled and monstrous

Exaggeration of cultural differences become monstrous aberration

One kind of difference becomes another

Representing an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination

The master/slave dialect naturalizes the subjugation of one cultural body by another by writing the excluded body from personhood and agency as in every way different

Narratives of miscegenation

Gender, sexuality, national identity, ethnicity, slide together in a Venn Diagram, abjecting from the center that which becomes the monster

Africa early became the West’s significant other, the sign of its ontological difference simply being skin color.

  • Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice, rather than the sun
  • Dark skin associated with fires of hell.
  • Perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite

8 Stages of Genocide

  • Classification
  • Symbolization
  • Dehumanization
  • Organization
  • Polarization
  • Preparation
  • Extermination
  • Denial

Race has been almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gender, and sexuality.

Rwanda 1994 Genocide

Between Monster and Man the disturbing suggestion arises that this incoherent body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well be our own.

History itself becomes a monster

Defeaturing,

self-destructive, always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind it to its disparate elements into a single, unnatural body.

"He came to bear witness to sexual norms…He embodied the punishment earned by those who violate sexual taboos.”- Bruno Roy,

Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality

hermaphroditic cynocephalus

Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffery Jerome Cohen

Thesis 4: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference

The embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference from the world of its creators

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