A modest plea for a Chestertonian reading of The Monstrosity of Christ

Review of John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009

Monstrous Mobility in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula

This thesis explores Late Victorian Gothic texts that are central to theories on monstrosity in terms of mobility by examining Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula. The goal of this project is to survey the ways in which two exemplary monsters, Mr. Hyde and Count Dracula, promote mobility for others and themselves as an inherent part of their monstrosity. The variety of this mobility is demonstrated by examples showing how monsters move and encourage movement in ways that are social and transformative as well as physical. Because social mobility is essential to these movements, this study also considers the societies these monsters enter and interrupt. The gentleman bachelors of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula\u27s Crew of Light and the women they seek to protect are presented as monolithic groups that the monster joins, transforms, and spurs into movement. By identifying mobility as one of the main attributes of monstrosity, this argument seeks to not only add to the copious amount of scholarship already done on these works but also to reconcile some of them since many of the most critically controversial aspects of these texts are rooted in the monster\u27s mobility. A study focused on movement not only adds something that is missing from the existing discussion on these seminal monsters but also provides a new framework through which to discuss constantly evolving theories of monstrosity

Gender monstrosity

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts

At the Edge of Monstrosity: Melville, Shelley, and Crane’s Monsters in 19th-Century Literature

What is a monster? For contemporary readers, monsters conjure images of things from horror films. My capstone addresses the question of whether monsters, the monstrous, and monstrosity are inside the human or elsewhere. I argue that monsters, when compared side-by-side in literature, are fundamentally the same with some exceptions: evil behind a human body. Through close-reading and theoretical analyses of 19th-century texts, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Stephen Crane’s The Monster, I examine how their authors create monsters as a response to societal anxieties and fears. My capstone expands on passages where human characters surrender to their internal monsters to prove an authorial need to mirror a monstrous society. By exploring themes of obsession and knowledge, I claim that textual monsters are mere manifestations of who we are in reality. I have divided my capstone into chapters that take turns surveying what it takes to become a monster. I conclude with a brief, but broader discussion of contemporary monsters to bridge 19th-century literature to its modern-day counterpart. In the end, I ultimately posit that we are no less monstrous than monsters on the page

Lady Gaga as (dis)simulacrum of monstrosity

Lady Gaga’s celebrity DNA revolves around the notion of monstrosity, an extensively researched concept in postmodern cultural studies. The analysis that is offered in this paper is largely informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of monstrosity, as well as by their approach to the study of sign-systems that was deployed in A Thousand Plateaus. By drawing on biographical and archival visual data, with a focus on the relatively underexplored live show, an elucidation is afforded of what is really monstrous about Lady Gaga. The main argument put forward is that monstrosity as sign seeks to appropriate the horizon of unlimited semiosis as radical alterity and openness to signifying possibilities. In this context it is held that Gaga effectively delimits her unique semioscape; however, any claims to monstrosity are undercut by the inherent limits of a representationalist approach in sufficiently engulfing this concept. Gaga is monstrous for her community insofar as she demands of her fans to project their semiosic horizon onto her as a simulacrum of infinite semiosis. However, this simulacrum may only be evinced in a feigned manner as a (dis)simulacrum. The analysis of imagery from seminal live shows during 2011–2012 shows that Gaga’s presumed monstrosity is more akin to hyperdifferentiation as simultaneous employment of heterogeneous and potentially dissonant inter pares cultural representations. The article concludes with a problematisation of audience effects in the light of Gaga’s adoption of a schematic and post-representationalist strategy in the event of her strategy’s emulation by competitive artists

The monster and the police: Dexter to Hobbes

On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former officer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, and murdering the rapper The Notorious B.I.G. In his statement to the court he pointed out that above the threshold of doors that lead to CRASH offices there are philosophical mottos such as ‘Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall’ and ‘We intimidate those who intimidate others’. Perez commented: ‘To those mottos, I offer this: “Whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.”

Howling (and Bleeding) at the Moon: Menstruation, Monstrosity and the Double in the \u3ci\u3eGinger Snaps\u3c/i\u3e Werewolf Trilogy

In this essay, I explore the radical reframing of the traditional werewolf narrative with respect to the figure of the double and the abject female body in the Ginger Snaps werewolf trilogy. Notable theorists discussed herein include Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, Julia Kristeva, April Miller and Robin Wood. Throughout both its folkloric and cinematic history, the creature of the werewolf has been constructed almost invariably as a male monster suffering within a Jekyll and Hyde-like narrative of the double. An otherwise exemplary member of Robin Wood’s society of surplus repression, the male lycanthrope is doomed to endure a monthly transformation into monstrous, murderous beast, the Other that challenges normality through its very existence. The agony of the male werewolf, therefore, is generally believed to exist only with regard to the regret he feels for the previous night’s violent excesses. However, it is actually the male lycanthrope’s bodily alignment with the female Other that causes his distress. Forced to confront an abject body tied to a monthly lunar cycle, the male werewolf is feminized. Not only does the sufferer’s body not respect the boundary between human and animal, but the tentative boundary between male and female is also violated, and it is this transgression that accounts for the true agony of the classic male werewolf. The Ginger Snaps werewolf cycle challenges this narrative by situating lycanthropy within the lives of female teenagers Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald. Following the subgenre’s typical trajectory, Ginger is bitten by a werewolf, thus becoming a werewolf herself, and her younger sister, Brigitte, attempts to save her. However, by transmuting the werewolf narrative from the male to the female, the implications of the doppelganger narrative must change. By virtue of her abject female body, Ginger is already marginalized and constructed as Other in the suburban world in which she lives. There is no monstrous double for Ginger, for as a menstruating female she has always been this monster. As a result, Ginger eventually embraces her lycanthropy and in doing so also embraces her identity as a woman. She becomes the “goddamn force of nature” of her teenage dreams, and unlike the male werewolf, whose monstrosity is a nightmarish shadow of his own normality, Ginger’s monstrosity is her own reflection, an unwavering look at a fantastic self otherwise unattainable to her in the world she lives. Yet Ginger Snaps is still a doppelganger narrative. It is Brigitte who suffers under the agony of Ginger’s transformation, for in losing Ginger, Brigitte loses her identity as well. Brigitte longs for the reconciliation of her and her sister, but as the two have become two distinct persons in Ginger’s monstrosity, this is impossible. Coded as Carol Clover’s Final Girl figure, Brigitte destroys her sister, thereby coming to stand for the symbolic order she resists so enthusiastically at the start of the film. However, despite their radically different engagements with monstrosity, both Ginger and Brigitte are punished. It appears that as subversive as the Ginger Snaps films are in respect to the werewolf narrative, they also reflect a deep cultural ambivalence about female identity. It is only together that the girls can triumph, making the Ginger Snaps cycle a powerful statement on the power of relationality between females in the construction and maintenance of self

Republican Monsters: The Cultural Construction of American Positivist Criminology, 1767-1920

This dissertation examines the history of and cultural influences on positivist criminology in the United States. From Benjamin Rush to the present day, the U.S. has produced an extensive corpus of empirical and theoretical studies that seeks to discern an objective, scientifically-grounded basis for criminal behavior. American positivist criminology has drawn on numerous subfields and theories, including rational choice / economic theory, biology, and psychology, but in all cases, maintains that a purely scientific explanation of offending is possible. This study proceeds from the perspective that divisions between scientific and non-scientific thought are untenable. Drawing on scholarship in literary criticism and sociology, I argue that positivist criminology confronts an inherent contradiction in purporting to develop a purely scientific account of phenomena that are defined by the moral and cultural sentiments of a society. I thus hypothesize that positivist criminology is in fact reliant on the irrational and fictive cultural tropes and images of crime that it claims to exorcize. The dissertation proceeds by reviewing the literature on the history of criminology, developing a set of functional types or tropes for character analysis, and then examining four separate periods in the development of scientific criminology: eighteenth century studies of rational action, nineteenth century studies of defective reasoning, early twentieth century studies of race and crime, and the development of scientifically informed criminalistics programs. Each of these cases captures a different period and focus in the development of scientific criminology. In threading continuity between these cases, I show how criminological positivism is consistently reliant on culturally informed tropes and characters to render itself sensible and coherent

Taming Augustine’s Monstrosity: Aquinas’s Notion of Use in the Struggle for Moral Growth

In Book VI of his Confessions, Saint Augustine offers a detailed description of one of the most famous cases of weakness of will in the history of philosophy. Augustine characterizes his experience as a monstrous situation in which he both wills and does not will moral growth, but he is at odds to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s action theory offers important resources for explaining Augustine’s monstrosity. On Aquinas’s schema, human acts are composed of various operations of intellect and will, and thus are subject to disintegration. In order to capture the gap in human action between making choices to pursue particular goals and translating those choices into behavior, Aquinas distinguishes between two operations of will that he calls choice and use. I apply hisdistinction between choice and use to Augustine’s case, arguing that Augustine’s moral weakness is a result of will’s failure to use its choices. The central thesis of this paper is that Augustine’s monstrosity is a bona fide case of weakness of will that is best explained as a failure in use at the level of will

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