1MONSTER CULTURE (SEVEN THESES)
JeΩrey Jerome Cohen
WHAT I WILL PROPOSE HERE by way of a first foray, as entrance into this book of monstrous content, is a sketch of a new modus legendi: a
method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender. In doing so, I
will partially violate two of the sacred dicta of recent cultural studies: the com-
pulsion to historical specificity and the insistence that all knowledge (and hence
all cartographies of that knowledge) is local. Of the first I will say only that
in cultural studies today history (disguised perhaps as “culture”) tends to be
fetishized as a telos, as a final determinant of meaning; post de Man, post Fou-
cault, post Hayden White, one must bear in mind that history is just another text
in a procession of texts, and not a guarantor of any singular signification. A move-
ment away from the longue durée and toward microeconomics (of capital or of
gender) is associated most often with Foucauldian criticism; yet recent critics
have found that where Foucault went wrong was mainly in his details, in his min-
ute specifics. Nonetheless, his methodology— his archaeology of ideas, his his-
tories of unthought— remains with good reason the chosen route of inquiry for
most cultural critics today, whether they work in postmodern cyberculture or in
the Middle Ages.
And so I would like to make some grand gestures. We live in an age that
has rightly given up on Unified Theory, an age when we realize that history
(like “individuality,” “subjectivity,” “gender,” and “culture”) is composed of a
37
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38 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth epistemological wholes. Some frag-
ments will be collected here and bound temporarily together to form a loosely inte-
grated net— or, better, an unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body. Rather than
argue a “theory of teratology,” I oΩer by way of introduction to the essays that
follow a set of breakable postulates in search of specific cultural moments. I oΩer
seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear.
Thesis I: The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body
Vampires, burial, death: inter the corpse where the road forks, so that when
it springs from the grave, it will not know which path to follow. Drive a stake
through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at the fork, it will haunt that place
that leads to many other places, that point of indecision. Behead the corpse, so
that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body.
The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodi-
ment of a certain cultural moment— of a time, a feeling, and a place.1 The mon-
ster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic
or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous
body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to
be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,”
a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signi-
fies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits
the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which
it is received, to be born again. These epistemological spaces between the mon-
ster’s bones are Derrida’s familiar chasm of diΩérance: a genetic uncertainty
principle, the essence of the monster’s vitality, the reason it always rises from
the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed and vanishes into the
night.
Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes
We see the damage that the monster wreaks, the material remains (the foot-
prints of the yeti across Tibetan snow, the bones of the giant stranded on a rocky
cliΩ), but the monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear some-
place else (for who is the yeti if not the medieval wild man? Who is the wild man
if not the biblical and classical giant?). No matter how many times King Arthur
killed the ogre of Mount Saint Michael, the monster reappeared in another heroic
chronicle, bequeathing the Middle Ages an abundance of morte d’Arthurs.
Regardless of how many times Sigourney Weaver’s beleaguered Ripley utterly
destroys the ambiguous Alien that stalks her, its monstrous progeny return, ready
to stalk again in another bigger- than- ever sequel. No monster tastes of death
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 39
but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the form of the vam-
pire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns. And
so the monster’s body is both corporal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity
to shift.
Each time the grave opens and the unquiet slumberer strides forth (“come
from the dead, / Come back to tell you all”), the message proclaimed is trans-
formed by the air that gives its speaker new life. Monsters must be examined
within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary- historical)
that generate them. In speaking of the new kind of vampire invented by Bram
Stoker, we might explore the foreign count’s transgressive but compelling sexu-
ality, as subtly alluring to Jonathan Harker as Henry Irving, Stoker’s mentor, was
to Stoker.2 Or we might analyze Murnau’s self- loathing appropriation of the same
demon in Nosferatu, where in the face of nascent fascism the undercurrent of
desire surfaces in plague and bodily corruption. Anne Rice has given the myth a
modern rewriting in which homosexuality and vampirism have been conjoined,
apotheosized; that she has created a pop culture phenomenon in the process
is not insignificant, especially at a time when gender as a construct has been
scrutinized at almost every social register. In Francis Coppola’s recent block-
buster, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the homosexual subtext present at least since the
appearance of Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian lamia (Carmilla, 1872) has, like the red
corpuscles that serve as the film’s leitmotif, risen to the surface, primarily as
an AIDS awareness that transforms the disease of vampirism into a sadistic (and
very medieval) form of redemption through the torments of the body in pain. No
coincidence, then, that Coppola was putting together a documentary on AIDS at
the same time he was working on Dracula.
In each of these vampire stories, the undead returns in slightly diΩerent
clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a spe-
cific, determining event: la décadence and its new possibilities, homophobia and
its hateful imperatives, the acceptance of new subjectivities unfixed by binary
gender, a fin de siècle social activism paternalistic in its embrace. Discourse extract-
ing a transcultural, trans- temporal phenomenon labeled “the vampire” is of rather
limited utility; even if vampiric figures are found almost worldwide, from ancient
Egypt to modern Hollywood, each reappearance and its analysis is still bound in
a double act of construction and reconstitution.3 “Monster theory” must there-
fore concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that
always threatens to shift; invigorated by change and escape, by the impossibility
of achieving what Susan Stewart calls the desired “fall or death, the stopping”
of its gigantic subject,4 monstrous interpretation is as much process as epiphany,
a work that must content itself with fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth,
shadows, obscured glimpses— signifiers of monstrous passing that stand in for
the monstrous body itself ).
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40 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Thesis Ill: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis
The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization. Of the night-
marish creature that Ridley Scott brought to life in Alien, Harvey Greenberg writes:
It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution; by turns
bivalve, crustacean, reptilian, and humanoid. It seems capable of lying
dormant within its egg indefinitely. It sheds its skin like a snake, its carapace
like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp. . . . It
responds according to Lamarckian and Darwinian principles.5
This refusal to participate in the classificatory “order of things” is true of mon-
sters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bod-
ies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the
monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash
distinctions.
Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at
times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes—
as “that which questions binary thinking and introduces a crisis.”6 This power
to evade and to undermine has coursed through the monster’s blood from classi-
cal times, when despite all the attempts of Aristotle (and later Pliny, Augustine,
and Isidore) to incorporate the monstrous races7 into a coherent epistemological
system, the monster always escaped to return to its habitations at the margins
of the world (a purely conceptual locus rather than a geographic one).8 Classical
“wonder books” radically undermine the Aristotelian taxonomic system, for by
refusing an easy compartmentalization of their monstrous contents, they demand
a radical rethinking of boundary and normality. The too- precise laws of nature
as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the
monster’s body. A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on
hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a “system” allowing
polyphony, mixed response (diΩerence in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and
resistance to integration— allowing what Hogle has called with a wonderful pun
“a deeper play of diΩerences, a nonbinary polymorphism at the ‘base’ of human
nature.”9
The horizon where the monsters dwell might well be imagined as the vis-
ible edge of the hermeneutic circle itself: the monstrous oΩers an escape from
its hermetic path, an invitation to explore new spirals, new and interconnected
methods of perceiving the world.10 In the face of the monster, scientific inquiry
and its ordered rationality crumble. The monstrous is a genus too large to be
encapsulated in any conceptual system; the monster’s very existence is a rebuke
to boundary and enclosure; like the giants of Mandeville’s Travels, it threatens to
devour “all raw & quyk” any thinker who insists otherwise. The monster is in this
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 41
way the living embodiment of the phenomenon Derrida has famously labeled the
“supplement” (cedangereux supplément):11 it breaks apart bifurcating, “either/
or” syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to “and/or,” introducing what
Barbara Johnson has called “a revolution in the very logic of meaning.”12
Full of rebuke to traditional methods of organizing knowledge and human
experience, the geography of the monster is an imperiling expanse, and therefore
always a contested cultural space.
Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference
The monster is diΩerence made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function
as dialectical Other or third- term supplement, the monster is an incorporation
of the Outside, the Beyond— of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as dis-
tant and distinct but originate Within. Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across
(constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous dif-
ference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.
The exaggeration of cultural diΩerence into monstrous aberration is famil-
iar enough. The most famous distortion occurs in the Bible, where the aboriginal
inhabitants of Canaan are envisioned as menacing giants to justify the Hebrew
colonization of the Promised Land (Numbers 13). Representing an anterior cul-
ture as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination by rendering the
act heroic. In medieval France the chansons de geste celebrated the Crusades by
transforming Muslims into demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of human-
ity was readable from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing “Saracens”
as “monstra,” propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of
the East by the West. This representational project was part of a whole diction-
ary of strategic glosses in which “monstra” slipped into significations of the fem-
inine and the hypermasculine.
A recent newspaper article on Yugoslavia reminds us how persistent these
divisive mythologies can be, and how they can endure divorced from any ground-
ing in historical reality:
A Bosnian Serb militiaman, hitchhiking to Sarajevo, tells a reporter in all ear-
nestness that the Muslims are feeding Serbian children to the animals in the
zoo. The story is nonsense. There aren’t any animals left alive in the Sarajevo
zoo. But the militiaman is convinced and can recall all the wrongs that Mus-
lims may or may not have perpetrated during their 500 years of rule.13
In the United States, Native Americans were presented as unredeemable savages
so that the powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny could push westward
with disregard. Scattered throughout Europe by the Diaspora and steadfastly re-
fusing assimilation into Christian society, Jews have been perennial favorites for
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42 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
xenophobic misrepresentation, for here was an alien culture living, working, and
even at times prospering within vast communities dedicated to becoming homo-
geneous and monolithic. The Middle Ages accused the Jews of crimes ranging
from the bringing of the plague to bleeding Christian children to make their Pass-
over meal, Nazi Germany simply brought these ancient traditions of hate to their
conclusion, inventing a Final Solution that diΩered from earlier persecutions
only in its technological e≈ciency.
Political or ideological diΩerence is as much a catalyst to monstrous repre-
sentation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm. A political figure
suddenly out of favor is transformed like an unwilling participant in a science
experiment by the appointed historians of the replacement regime: “monstrous
history” is rife with sudden, Ovidian metamorphoses, from Vlad Tepes to Ronald
Reagan. The most illustrious of these propaganda- bred demons is the English
king Richard III, whom Thomas More famously described as “little of stature, ill
fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right,
hard fauoured of visage. . . . hee came into the worlde with feete forward, . . .
also not vntothed.”14 From birth, More declares, Richard was a monster, “his
deformed body a readable text”15 on which was inscribed his deviant morality
(indistinguishable from an incorrect political orientation).
The almost obsessive descanting on Richard from Polydor Vergil in the
Renaissance to the Friends of Richard III Incorporated in our own era demon-
strates the process of “monster theory” at its most active: culture gives birth to
a monster before our eyes, painting over the normally proportioned Richard
who once lived, raising his shoulder to deform simultaneously person, cultural
response, and the possibility of objectivity.16 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. At the same time Rich-
ard moves between Monster and Man, the disturbing suggestion arises that this
incoherent body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well
be our own.
The di≈cult project of constructing and maintaining gender identities elic-
its an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus
to teratogenesis. The woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender role
risks becoming a Scylla, Weird Sister, Lilith (“die erste Eva,” “la mère obscuré”),17
Bertha Mason, or Gorgon.18 “Deviant” sexual identity is similarly susceptible to
monsterization. The great medieval encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais describes
the visit of a hermaphroditic cynocephalus to the French court in his Speculum
naturale (31.126).19 Its male reproductive organ is said to be disproportionately
large, but the monster could use either sex at its own discretion. Bruno Roy writes
of this fantastic hybrid: “What warning did he come to deliver to the king? He
came to bear witness to sexual norms, . . . He embodied the punishment earned
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 43
by those who violate sexual taboos.”20 This strange creature, a composite of the
supposedly discrete categories “male” and “female,” arrives before King Louis
to validate heterosexuality over homosexuality, with its supposed inversions
and transformations (“Equa fit equus,” one Latin writer declared; “The horse
becomes a mare”).21 The strange dog- headed monster is a living excoriation of
gender ambiguity and sexual abnormality, as Vincent’s cultural moment defines
them: heteronormalization incarnate.
From the classical period into the twentieth century, race has been almost
as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gender, and sexual-
ity. Africa early became the West’s significant other, the sign of its ontological
diΩerence simply being skin color. According to the Greek myth of Phaeton, the
denizens of mysterious and uncertain Ethiopia were black because they had been
scorched by the too- close passing of the sun. The Roman naturalist Pliny assumed
nonwhite skin to be symptomatic of a complete diΩerence in temperament and
attributed Africa’s darkness to climate; the intense heat, he said, had burned the
Africans’ skin and malformed their bodies (Natural History, 2.80). These diΩer-
ences were quickly moralized through a pervasive rhetoric of deviance. Paulinus
of Nola, a wealthy landowner turned early church homilist, explained that the
Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice rather than by the sun, and the
anonymous commentator to Theodulus’s influential Ecloga (tenth century) suc-
cinctly glossed the meaning of the word Ethyopium: “Ethiopians, that is, sinners.
Indeed, sinners can rightly be compared to Ethiopians, who are black men present-
ing a terrifying appearance to those beholding them.”22 Dark skin was associated
with the fires of hell, and so signified in Christian mythology demonic provenance.
The perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite of monsters generally was quickly
a≈xed to the Ethiopian; this linking was only strengthened by a xenophobic
backlash as dark- skinned people were forcibly imported into Europe early in the
Renaissance. Narratives of miscegenation arose and circulated to sanction o≈cial
policies of exclusion; Queen Elizabeth is famous for her anxiety over “blacka-
moores” and their supposed threat to the “increase of people of our own nation.”23
Through all of these monsters the boundaries between personal and national
bodies blur. To complicate this category confusion further, one kind of alterity is
often written as another, so that national diΩerence (for example) is transformed
into sexual diΩerence. Giraldus Cambrensis demonstrates just this slippage of
the foreign in his Topography of Ireland; when he writes of the Irish (ostensibly
simply to provide information about them to a curious English court, but actually
as a first step toward invading and colonizing the island), he observes:
It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than
all other nations of the first principles of faith. . . . These people who have
customs so diΩerent from others, and so opposite to them, on making signs
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44 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
either with the hands or the head, beckon when they mean that you should
go away, and nod backwards as often as they wish to be rid of you. Likewise,
in this nation, the men pass their water sitting, the women standing. . . . The
women, also, as well as the men, ride astride, with their legs stuck out on each
side of the horse.24
One kind of inversion becomes another as Giraldus deciphers the alphabet of
Irish culture— and reads it backward, against the norm of English masculinity.
Giraldus creates a vision of monstrous gender (aberrant, demonstrative): the vio-
lation of the cultural codes that valence gendered behaviors creates a rupture that
must be cemented with (in this case) the binding, corrective mortar of English
normalcy. A bloody war of subjugation followed immediately after the promulga-
tion of this text, remained potent throughout the High Middle Ages, and in a way
continues to this day.
Through a similar discursive process the East becomes feminized (Said) and
the soul of Africa grows dark (Gates).25 One kind of diΩerence becomes another as
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. This violent foreclosure erects a self- validating,
Hegelian master/slave dialectic that naturalizes the subjugation of one cultural
body by another by writing the body excluded from personhood and agency as in
every way diΩerent, monstrous. A polysemy is granted so that a greater threat can
be encoded; multiplicity of meanings, paradoxically, iterates the same restrict-
ing, agitprop representations that narrowed signification performs. Yet a danger
resides in this multiplication: as diΩerence, like a Hydra, sprouts two heads where
one has been lopped away, the possibilities of escape, resistance, disruption arise
with more force.
René Girard has written at great length about the real violence these debasing
representations enact, connecting monsterizing depiction with the phenomenon
of the scapegoat. Monsters are never created ex nihilo, put through a process
of fragmentation and recombination in which dements are extracted “from vari-
ous forms” (including— indeed, especially— marginalized social groups) and then
assembled as the monster, “which can then claim an independent identity.”26 The
political- cultural monster, the embodiment of radical diΩerence, paradoxically
threatens to erase diΩerence in the world of its creators, to demonstrate
the potential for the system to diΩer from its own diΩerence, in other words
not to be diΩerent at all, to cease to exist as a system. . . . DiΩerence that exists
outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its
relativity, its fragility, and its mortality. . . . Despite what is said around us
persecutors are never obsessed with diΩerence but rather by its unutterable
contrary, the lack of diΩerence.27
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 45
By revealing that diΩerence is arbitrary and potentially free- floating, mutable
rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual mem-
bers of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is
constituted and allowed. Because it is a body across which diΩerence has been
repeatedly written, the monster (like Frankenstein’s creature, that combination
of odd somatic pieces stitched together from a community of cadavers) seeks out
its author to demand its raison d’être— and to bear witness to the fact that it could
have been constructed Otherwise. Godzilla trampled Tokyo; Girard frees him
here to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private
body to the public world.
Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible
The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but it is
something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular. From its position at the
limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its
uncertain demesnes. The giants of Patagonia, the dragons of the Orient, and the
dinosaurs of Jurassic Park together declare that curiosity is more often punished
than rewarded, that one is better oΩ safely contained within one’s own domestic
sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state. The monster pre-
vents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces
through which private bodies may move. To step outside this o≈cial geography
is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous
oneself.
Lycaon, the first werewolf in Western literature, undergoes his lupine meta-
morphosis as the culmination of a fable of hospitality.28 Ovid relates how the pri-
meval giants attempted to plunge the world into anarchy by wrenching Olympus
from the gods, only to be shattered by divine thunderbolts. From their scattered
blood arose a race of men who continued their fathers’ malignant ways.29 Among
this wicked progeny was Lycaon, king of Arcadia. When Jupiter arrived as a guest
at his house, Lycaon tried to kill the ruler of the gods as he slept, and the next day
served him pieces of a servant’s body as a meal. The enraged Jupiter punished
this violation of the host– guest relationship by transforming Lycaon into a mon-
strous semblance of that lawless, godless state to which his actions would drag
humanity back:
The king himself flies in terror and, gaining the fields, howls aloud, attempt-
ing in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accus-
tomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter.
His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf, and
yet retains some traces of his former shape.30
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46 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
The horribly fascinating loss of Lycaon’s humanity merely reifies his previous
moral state; the king’s body is rendered all transparence, instantly and insistently
readable. The power of the narrative prohibition peaks in the lingering descrip-
tion of the monstrously composite Lycaon, at that median where he is both man
and beast, dual natures in a helpless tumult of assertion. The fable concludes
when Lycaon can no longer speak, only signify.
Whereas monsters born of political expedience and self- justifying national-
ism function as living invitations to action, usually military (invasions, usurpations,
colonizations), the monster of prohibition polices the borders of the possible,
interdicting through its grotesque body some behaviors and actions, envaluing
others. It is possible, for example, that medieval merchants intentionally dis-
seminated maps depicting sea serpents like Leviathan at the edges of their trade
routes in order to discourage further exploration and to establish monopolies.31
Every monster is in this way a double narrative, two living stories: one that
describes how the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what
cultural use the monster serves. The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate
the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call hor-
rid attention to the borders that cannot— must not— be crossed.
Primarily these borders are in place to control the tra≈c in women, or more
generally to establish strictly homosocial bonds, the ties between men that keep
a patriarchal society functional. A kind of herdsman, this monster delimits the
social space through which cultural bodies may move, and in classical times
(for example) validated a tight, hierarchical system of naturalized leadership
and control where every man had a functional place.32 The prototype in Western
culture for this kind of “geographic” monster is Homer’s Polyphemos. The quint-
essential xenophobic rendition of the foreign (the barbaric— that which is unin-
telligible within a given cultural- linguistic system),33 the Cyclopes are represented
as savages who have not “a law to bless them” and who lack the techne to produce
(Greek- style) civilization. Their archaism is conveyed through their lack of hier-
archy and of a politics of precedent. This dissociation from community leads to
a rugged individualism that in Homeric terms can only be horrifying. Because
they live without a system of tradition and custom, the Cyclopes are a danger to
the arriving Greeks, men whose identities are contingent upon a compartmen-
talized function within a deindividualizing system of subordination and control.
Polyphemos’s victims are devoured, engulfed, made to vanish from the public
gaze: cannibalism as incorporation into the wrong cultural body.
The monster is a powerful ally of what Foucault calls “the society of the
panopticon,” in which “polymorphous conducts [are] actually extracted from
people’s bodies and from their pleasures . . . [to be] drawn out, revealed, isolated,
intensified, incorporated, by multifarious power devices.”34 Susan Stewart has
observed that “the monster’s sexuality takes on a separate life”;35 Foucault helps
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 47
us to see why. The monster embodies those sexual practices that must not be
committed, or that may be committed only through the body of the monster. She
and Them!: the monster enforces the cultural codes that regulate sexual desire.
Anyone familiar with the low- budget science fiction movie craze of the 1950s
will recognize in the preceding sentence two superb films of the genre, one about
a radioactive virago from outer space who kills every man she touches, the other
a social parable in which giant ants (really, Communists) burrow beneath Los
Angeles (that is, Hollywood) and threaten world peace (that is, American con-
servatism). I connect these two seemingly unrelated titles here to call attention
to the anxieties that monsterized their subjects in the first place, and to enact
syntactically an even deeper fear: that the two will join in some unholy miscege-
nation. We have seen that the monster arises at the gap where diΩerence is per-
ceived as dividing a recording voice from its captured subject; the criterion of
this division is arbitrary, and can range from anatomy or skin color to religious
belief, custom, and political ideology. The monster’s destructiveness is really a
deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that diΩerence originates in process,
rather than in fact (and that “fact” is subject to constant reconstruction and
change). Given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly
European and male, women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves
repeatedly transformed into monsters, whether to validate specific alignments of
masculinity and whiteness, or simply to be pushed from its realm of thought.36
Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in patriarchal
society, but when they threaten to mingle, the entire economy of desire comes
under attack.
As a vehicle of prohibition, the monster most often arises to enforce the
laws of exogamy, both the incest taboo (which establishes a tra≈c in women by
mandating that they marry outside their families) and the decrees against inter-
racial sexual mingling (which limit the parameters of that tra≈c by policing the
boundaries of culture, usually in the service of some notion of group “purity”).37
Incest narratives are common to every tradition and have been extensively docu-
mented, mainly owing to Lévi- Strauss’s elevation of the taboo to the founding
base of patriarchal society. Miscegenation, that intersection of misogyny (gender
anxiety) and racism (no matter how naive), has received considerably less criti-
cal attention. I will say a few words about it here.
The Bible has long been the primary source for divine decrees against inter-
racial mixing. One of these pronouncements is a straightforward command from
God that comes through the mouth of the prophet Joshua (Joshua 23:12Ω.); another
is a cryptic episode in Genesis much elaborated during the medieval period,
alluding to “sons of God” who impregnate the “daughters of men” with a race of
wicked giants (Genesis 6:4). The monsters are here, as elsewhere, expedient rep-
resentations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict
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48 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
notion of group sameness. The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of iden-
tity that produce stories like the Genesis episode are strong, and they reappear
incessantly. Shakespeare’s Caliban, for example, is the product of such an illicit
mingling, the “freckled whelp” of the Algerian witch Sycorax and the devil. Char-
lotte Brontë reversed the usual paradigm in Jane Eyre (white Rochester and luna-
tic Jamaican Bertha Mason), but horror movies as seemingly innocent as King
Kong demonstrate miscegenation anxiety in its brutal essence. Even a film as
recent as 1979’s immensely successful Alien may have a cognizance of the fear
in its under- workings; the grotesque creature that stalks the heroine (dressed in
the final scene only in her underwear) drips a glistening slime of K- Y Jelly from
its teeth; the jaw tendons are constructed of shredded condoms; and the man
inside the rubber suit is Bolaji Badejo, a Masai tribesman standing seven feet tall
who happened to be studying in England at the time the film was cast.38
The narratives of the West perform the strangest dance around that fire in
which miscegenation and its practitioners have been condemned to burn. Among
the flames we see the old women of Salem hanging, accused of sexual relations
with the black devil; we suspect they died because they crossed a diΩerent
border, one that prohibits women from managing property and living solitary,
unmanaged lives. The flames devour the Jews of thirteenth- century England,
who stole children from proper families and baked seder matzo with their blood;
as a menace to the survival of English race and culture, they were expelled from
the country and their property confiscated. A competing narrative again impli-
cates monstrous economics— the Jews were the money lenders, the state and its
commerce were heavily indebted to them— but this second story is submerged
in a horrifying fable of cultural purity and threat to Christian continuance. As
the American frontier expanded beneath the banner of Manifest Destiny in the
nineteenth century, tales circulated about how “Indians” routinely kidnapped
white women to furnish wives for themselves; the West was a place of danger
waiting to be tamed into farms, its menacing native inhabitants fit only to be dis-
possessed. It matters little that the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son
did not rape and butcher his employer’s daughter; that narrative is supplied
by the police, by an angry white society, indeed by Western history itself. In
the novel, as in life, the threat occurs when a nonwhite leaves the reserve aban-
doned to him; Wright envisions what happens when the horizon of narrative
expectation is firmly set, and his conclusion (born out in seventeenth- century
Salem, medieval England, and nineteenth- century America) is that the actual cir-
cumstances of history tend to vanish when a narrative of miscegenation can be
supplied.
The monster is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker;
and so the monster and all that it embodies must be exiled or destroyed. The
repressed, however, like Freud himself, always seems to return.
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 49
Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire
The monster is continually linked to forbidden practices, in order to normalize
and to enforce. The monster also attracts. The same creatures who terrify and
interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the
forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from
constraint. This simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the mon-
ster’s composition accounts greatly for its continued cultural popularity, for the
fact that the monster seldom can be contained in a simple, binary dialectic (the-
sis, antithesis . . . no synthesis). We distrust and loathe the monster at the same
time 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 lim-
inal space. Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens
to overstep these boundaries, to destroy or deconstruct the thin walls of category
and culture. When contained by geographic, generic, or epistemic marginaliza-
tion, the monster can function as an alter ego, as 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 mortal-
ity and corporality. We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film because
we know that the cinema is a temporary place, that the jolting sensuousness of
the celluloid images will be followed by reentry into the world of comfort and
light.39 Likewise, the story on the page before us may horrify (whether it appears
in the New York Times news section or Stephen King’s latest novel matters little),
so long as we are safe in the knowledge of its nearing end (the number of pages
in our right hand is dwindling) and our liberation from it. Aurally received narra-
tives work no diΩerently; no matter how unsettling the description of the giant,
no matter how many unbaptized children and hapless knights he devours, King
Arthur will ultimately destroy him. The audience knows how the genre works.
Times of carnival temporally marginalize the monstrous, but at the same
time allow it a safe realm of expression and play: on Halloween everyone is a
demon for a night. The same impulse to ataractic fantasy is behind much lavishly
bizarre manuscript marginalia, from abstract scribblings at the edges of an ordered
page to preposterous animals and vaguely humanoid creatures of strange anatomy
that crowd a biblical text. Gargoyles and ornately sculpted grotesques, lurking at
the crossbeams or upon the roof of the cathedral, likewise record the liberating
fantasies of a bored or repressed hand suddenly freed to populate the margins.
Maps and travel accounts inherited from antiquity invented whole geographies
of the mind and peopled them with exotic and fantastic creatures; Ultima Thule,
Ethiopia, and the Antipodes were the medieval equivalents of outer space and
virtual reality, imaginary (wholly verbal) geographies accessible from anywhere,
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50 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
never meant to be discovered but always waiting to be explored. Jacques Le GoΩ
has written that the Indian Ocean (a “mental horizon” imagined, in the Middle
Ages, to be completely enclosed by land) was a cultural space
where taboos were eliminated or exchanged for others. The weirdness of this
world produced an impression of liberation and freedom. The strict morality
imposed by the Church was contrasted with the discomfiting attractiveness
of a world of bizarre tastes, which practiced coprophagy and cannibalism; of
bodily innocence, where man, freed of the modesty of clothing, rediscovered
nudism and sexual freedom; and where, once rid of restrictive monogamy
and family barriers, he could give himself over to polygamy, incest, and
eroticism.40
The habitations of the monsters (Africa, Scandinavia, America, Venus, the Delta
Quadrant— whatever land is su≈ciently distant to be exoticized) are more than
dark regions of uncertain danger: they are also realms of happy fantasy, horizons
of liberation. Their monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the pos-
sibilities of other genders, other sexual practices, and other social customs can be
explored. Hermaphrodites, Amazons, and lascivious cannibals beckon from the
edges of the world, the most distant planets of the galaxy.
The co- optation of the monster into a symbol of the desirable is often accom-
plished through the neutralization of potentially threatening aspects with a
liberal dose of comedy: the thundering giant becomes the bumbling giant.41
Monsters may still function, however, as the vehicles of causative fantasies even
without their valences reversed. What Bakhtin calls “o≈cial culture” can trans-
fer all that is viewed as undesirable in itself into the body of the monster, per-
forming a wish- fulfillment drama of its own; the scapegoated monster is perhaps
ritually destroyed in the course of some o≈cial narrative, purging the commu-
nity by eliminating its sins. The monster’s eradication functions as an exorcism
and, when retold and promulgated, as a catechism. The monastically manufac-
tured Queste del Suint Graal serves as an ecclesiastically sanctioned antidote to
the looser morality of the secular romances; when Sir Bors comes across a castle
where “ladies of high descent and rank” tempt him to sexual indulgence, these
ladies are, of course, demons in lascivious disguise. When Bors refuses to sleep
with one of these transcorporal devils (described as “so lovely and so fair that it
seemed all earthly beauty was embodied in her”), his steadfast assertion of con-
trol banishes them all shrieking back to hell.42 The episode valorizes the celibacy
so central to the authors’ belief system (and so di≈cult to enforce) while incul-
cating a lesson in morality for the work’s intended secular audience, the knights
and courtly women fond of romances.
Seldom, however, are monsters as uncomplicated in their use and manufac-
ture as the demons that haunt Sir Bors. Allegory may flatten a monster rather
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 51
thin, as when the vivacious demon of the Anglo- Saxon hagiographic poem Juliana
becomes the one- sided complainer of Cynewulf’s Elene. More often, however,
the monster retains a haunting complexity. The dense symbolism that makes a
thick description of the monsters in Spenser, Milton, and even Beowulf so chal-
lenging reminds us how permeable the monstrous body can be, how difficult to
dissect.
This corporal fluidity, this simultaneity of anxiety and desire, ensures that
the monster will always dangerously entice. A certain intrigue is allowed even
Vincent of Beauvais’s well- endowed cynocephalus, for he occupies a textual space
of allure before his necessary dismissal, during which he is granted an undeni-
able charm. The monstrous lurks somewhere in that ambiguous, primal space
between fear and attraction, close to the heart of what Kristeva calls “abjection”:
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being,
directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or
inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It
lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, fasci-
nates desire, which, nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive,
desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. . . . But simultaneously, just the same,
that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting
as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of
summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.43
And the self that one stands so suddenly and so nervously beside is the monster.
The monster is the abjected fragment that enables the formation of all kinds
of identities— personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, uni-
versal, particular (even if that “particular” identity is an embrace of the power/
status/knowledge of abjection itself ); as such it reveals their partiality, their con-
tiguity. A product of a multitude of morphogeneses (ranging from somatic to
ethnic) that align themselves to imbue meaning to the Us and Them behind every
cultural mode of seeing, the monster of abjection resides in that marginal geogra-
phy of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly
dangerous: simultaneously “exorbitant” and “quite close.” Judith Butler calls this
conceptual locus “a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility that bounds the
domain of intelligible eΩects,” but points out that even when discursively closed
oΩ, it oΩers a base for critique, a margin from which to reread dominant para-
digms.44 Like Grendel thundering from the mere or Dracula creeping from the
grave, like Kristeva’s “boomerang, a vortex of summons” or the uncanny Freudian–
Lacanian return of the repressed, the monster is always coming back, always at
the verge of irruption.
Perhaps it is time to ask the question that always arises when the monster
is discussed seriously (the inevitability of the question a symptom of the deep
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52 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
anxiety about what is and what should be thinkable, an anxiety that the process
of monster theory is destined to raise): Do monsters really exist?
Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we?
Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold . . . of Becoming
“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins
of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the
forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come
back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history
of knowing our place, but they bear self- knowledge, human knowledge— and
a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask
us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have
attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about
race, gender, sexuality, our perception of diΩerence, our tolerance toward its
expression. They ask us why we have created them.
Notes
1. Literally, here, Zeitgeist: Time Ghost, the bodiless spirit that uncannily incorporates
a “place” that is a series of places, the crossroads that is a point in a movement toward an
uncertain elsewhere. Bury the Zeitgeist by the crossroads: it is confused as it awakens, it
is not going anywhere, it intersects everyplace; all roads lead back to the monster.
2. I realize that this is an interpretive biographical maneuver Barthes would surely
have called “the living death of the author.”
3. Thus the superiority of Joan Copjec’s “Vampires, Breast- Feeding, and Anxiety,”
October 58 (Fall 1991): 25– 43, to Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and
Reality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).
4. “The giant is represented through movement, through being in time. Even in the
ascription of the still landscape to the giant, it is the activities of the giant, his or her leg-
endary actions, that have resulted in the observable trace. In contrast to the still and per-
fect universe of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical
forces.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 86.
5. Harvey R. Greenberg, “Reimaging the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien,” in
Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, Elisabeth
Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 90– 91.
6. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross- Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York
Routledge, 1992), 11. Garber writes at some length about “category crisis,” which she defines
as “a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 53
of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/white, Jew/
Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave. . . . [That which crosses the
border, like the transvestite] will always function as a mechanism of overdetermination—
a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another. An analogy here
might be the so- called ‘tagged’ gene that shows up in a genetic chain, indicating the pres-
ence of some otherwise hidden condition. It is not the gene itself, but its presence, that
marks the trouble spot, indicating the likelihood of a crisis somewhere, elsewhere” (16–
17). Note, however, that whereas Garber insists that the transvestite must be read with
rather than through, the monster can be read only through— for the monster, pure culture,
is nothing of itself.
7. These are the ancient monsters recorded first by the Greek writers Ctesias and
Megasthenes, and include such wild imaginings as the Pygmies, the Sciapods (men with
one large foot with which they can hop about at tremendous speed or that they can lift
over their reclining bodies as a sort of beach umbrella), Blemmyae (“men whose heads/
Do grow beneath their shoulders,” in Othello’s words), and Cynocephali, ferocious dog-
headed men who are anthropophagous to boot. John Block Friedman has called these
creatures the Plinian races, after the classical encyclopedist who bestowed them to the
Middle Ages and early modern period. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art
and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
8. The discussion of the implication of the monstrous in the manufacture of heuristics
is partially based upon my essay “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of
Medieval Popular Culture,” Medieval Folklore 3 (Fall 1994): 1– 37.
9. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Inter-
preters,” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gor-
don Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 161.
10. “The hermeneutic circle does not permit access or escape to an uninterrupted real-
ity; but we do not [have to] keep going around in the same path.” Barbara Herrnstein
Smith, “Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn
1991): 137– 38.
11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
12. Barbara Johnson, introduction to Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xiii.
13. H. D. S. Greenway, “Adversaries Create Devils of Each Other,” Boston Globe, Decem-
ber 15, 1992, 1.
14. Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 2, The
History of King Richard III, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1963), 7.
15. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New
York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988), 30. My discussion of Richard is indebted to
Marjorie Garber’s provocative work.
16. “A portrait now in the Society of Antiquaries of London, painted about 1505, shows
a Richard with straight shoulders. But a second portrait, possibly of earlier date, in the
Royal Collection, seems to emblematize the whole controversy [over Richard’s supposed
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54 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
monstrosity], for in it, X- ray examination reveals an original straight shoulder line, which
was subsequently painted over to present the raised right shoulder silhouette so often
copied by later portraitists.” Garber, 35.
17. I am hinting here at the possibility of a feminist recuperation of the gendered
monster by citing the titles of two famous books about Lilith (a favorite figure in femin-
ist writing): Jacques Bril’s Lilith, ou, La Mere obscure (Paris: Payot, 1981), and Siegmund
Hurwitz’s Lilith, die erste Eva: Eine Studie uber dunkle Aspekte des Weiblichen (Zurich:
Daimon, 1980).
18. “The monster- woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransi-
gent female autonomy and thus represents both the author’s power to allay ‘his’ anxieties
by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and simultaneously, the
mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained ‘place’
and thus generates a story that ‘gets away’ from its author.” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Liter-
ary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 28. The “dangerous” role
of feminine will in the engendering of monsters is also explored by Marie- Hélène Huet in
Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
19. A cynocephalus is a dog- headed man, like the recently decanonized Saint Christo-
pher. Bad enough to be a cynocephalus without being hermaphroditic to boot: the mon-
ster accrues one kind of diΩerence on top of another, like a magnet that draws diΩerences
into an aggregate, multivalent identity around an unstable core.
20. Bruno Roy, “En marge du monde connu: Les races de monstres,” in Aspects de la
marginalité au Moyen Age, ed. Guy- H Allard (Quebec: Les Editions de l’Aurore, 1975), 77.
This translation is mine.
21. See, e.g., Monica E. McAlpine, “The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Mat-
ters,” PMLA 95 (1980): 8– 22.
22. Cited by Friedman, Monstrous Races, 64.
23. Elizabeth deported “blackamoores” in 1596 and again in 1601. See Karen Newman,
“‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” in Shakespeare
Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor
(New York: Methuen, 1987), 148.
24. See Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernae [The history and topography of
Ireland], trans. John J. O’Meara (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), 24.
25. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro- American Literature (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1988).
26. René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986), 33.
27. Girard, 21– 22.
28. Extended travel was dependent in both the ancient and medieval world on the
promulgation of an ideal of hospitality that sanctified the responsibility of host to guest.
A violation of that code is responsible for the destruction of the biblical Sodom and
Gomorrah, for the devolution from man to giant in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle,
and for the first punitive transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This popular type of
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 55
narrative may be conveniently labeled the fable of hospitality; such stories envalue the
practice whose breach they illustrate through a drama repudiating the dangerous behav-
ior. The valorization is accomplished in one of two ways: the host is a monster already and
learns a lesson at the hands of his guest, or the host becomes a monster in the course of the
narrative and audience members realize how they should conduct themselves. In either
case, the cloak of monstrousness calls attention to those behaviors and attitudes the text
is concerned with interdicting.
29. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Loeb Classical Library no. 42), ed. G. P. Goold (1916; repr.,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), I.156– 62.
30. Ovid, I.231– 39.
31. I am indebted to Keeryung Hong of Harvard University for sharing her research
on medieval map production for this hypothesis.
32. A useful (albeit politically charged) term for such a collective is Männerbunde,
“all- male groups with aggression as one major function.” See Joseph Harris, “Love and
Death in the Männerbund: An Essay with Special Reference to the Bjarkamál and The
Battle of Maldon,” in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo- Saxon Period, ed. Helen Damico and John
Leyerle (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute/Western Michigan State University, 1993), 78.
See also the Interscripta discussion of “Medieval Masculinities,” moderated and edited
by JeΩrey Jerome Cohen, http://www.george-town.edu/labyrinth/e-center/interscripta/
mm.html (the piece is also forthcoming in a nonhypertext version in Arthuriana, as “The
Armour of an Alienating Identity”).
33. The Greek word barbaros, from which we derive the modern English word bar-
baric, means “making the sound bar bar”— that is, not speaking Greek, and therefore
speaking nonsense.
34. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 47– 48.
35. Stewart, On Longing. See especially “The Imaginary Body,” 104– 31.
36. The situation was obviously far more complex than these statements can begin to
show; “European,” for example, usually includes only males of the Western Latin tradi-
tion. Sexual orientation further complicates the picture, as we shall see.
Donna Haraway, following Trinh Minh- ha, calls the humans beneath the monstrous
skin “inappropriate/d others”: “To be ‘inappropriate/d’ does not mean ‘not to be in relation
with’— i.e., to be in a special reservation, with the status of the authentic, the untouched,
in the allochronic and allotropic condition of innocence. Rather to be an ‘inappropriate/d
other’ means to be in critical deconstructive relationality, in a diΩracting rather than reflect-
ing (ratio)nality— as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domination.”
“The Promises of Monsters,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 299.
37. This discussion owes an obvious debt to Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analy-
sis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
38. John Eastman, Retakes: Behind the Scenes of 500 Classic Movies (New York: Bal-
lantine Books, 1989), 9– 10.
39. Paul Coates interestingly observes that “the horror film becomes the essential form
of cinema, monstrous content manifesting itself in the monstrous form of the gigantic
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56 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
screen.” Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 77.
Carol Clover locates some of the pleasure of the monster film in its cross- gender game
of identification; see Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). Why not go further, and call the
pleasure cross- somatic?
40. Jacques Le GoΩ, “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean,” in Time, Work and
Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 197. The postmodern equivalent of such spaces is Gibsonian cyberspace,
with its MOOs and MUSHes and other arenas of unlimited possibility.
41. For Mikhail Bakhtin, famously, this is the transformative power of laughter:
“Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great inter-
nal censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear
of the sacred, fear of the prohibitions, of the past, of power.” Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), 94. Bakhtin
traces the moment of escape to the point at which laughter became a part of the “higher
levels of literature,” when Rabelais wrote Gargantua et Pantagruel.
42. The Quest for the Holy Grail, trans. Pauline Matarasso (London: Penguin Books,
1969), 194.
43. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1.
44. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 22. Both Butler and I have in mind here Foucault’s notion of an emanci-
pation of thought “from what it silently thinks” that will allow “it to think diΩerently.”
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 9.
Michael Uebel amplifies and applies this practice to the monster in his essay in this volume.
The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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