Emerging from darkness, daring to take form and become something more than the Other, monsters stalk these pages, shifting form in true monstrous fashion as they inhabit literature and film, history and parallel communities modelled after our own. They become enmeshed in popular music, run rampant through cities, take androgynous form to rally for their own identities, their own futures, and their own families, and they hold up mirrors while we are caught shattering our sense of Self. Both the past and the future are rich fodder for the evil that monsters do, and from freak show to homunculus to serial killer to cyborg, they remind us that they are never far from sight - and that we cannot look away even if we wish to. Monstrosity from the Inside Out takes as the paradox that monsters are simultaneously impossible and very much a part of what it means to be human.

By challenging masculinity, these poems speak to the rejection of traditional societal values in favor of being yourself.

'Good God, where did this wise-beyond-his-years 25-year-old critic's voice come from? His breath of proudly putrefied air is something to behold. Finally, a new Parker Tyler is on the scene. Yep. Mr. Fox is the real thing.' -- John Waters, New York Times This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called 'monsterhood'. Ready or not, here they come...

Taking Mary Shelley's novel as its point of departure, this collection of essays considers how her creation has not only survived but thrived over 200 years of media history, in music, film, literature, visual art and other cultural forms. In studying monstrous figures torn from the deepest and darkest imaginings of the human psyche, the essays in this book deploy the latest analytical approaches, drawn from such fields as musicology, critical race studies, feminist studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis. The book interweaves the manifold sounds, sights and stories of monstrosity into a conversation that sheds light on important social issues, aesthetic trends and cultural concerns that are as alive today as they were when Shelley's landmark novel was published 200 years ago.

Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody’s edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences. Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.

Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. Horror is a space of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes the complexities that arise when boundaries – of taste, of bodies, of reason – are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of ‘gynaehorror’: films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause. Some of the themes explored include: the intersection of horror, monstrosity and sexual difference; the relationships between normative female (hetero)sexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; embodiment and subjectivity in horror films about pregnancy and abortion; reproductive technologies, monstrosity and ‘mad science’; the discursive construction and interrogation of monstrous motherhood; and the relationships between menopause, menstruation, hagsploitation and ‘abject barren’ bodies in horror. The book not only offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces of productive, radical and subversive monstrosity within a mode of representation and expression that has often been accused of being misogynistic. It therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new insights in the broader area of popular culture, gender and film philosophy.

"A comprehensive modern-day bestiary."--The New Yorker

In Sublime Failures, David Martyn argues that a return to Kant's latent "Sadianism" helps to confront the unresolved question of agency -- or how to formulate an ethic after the deconstruction of the subject -- in cultural studies theory. Acknowledging allegations of Kant's "empty formalism" and even of his proximity to a certain Sadianism, Martyn argues that Kant's ethics are valid not despite but because of their similarity to those of Sade. In close readings that address the historical and material conditions of the composition of their work, Martyn argues that the efforts of Kant and Sade to totalize systems -- of ethics, philosophy, pleasures, crimes -- must fail, but that the failure leads to important insights about ethics. The book offers philosophical and rhetorical analyses of the two authors' major works, and focuses on two related thematic fields: the economy of the gift and the materiality of writing. Stories of giving and thievery in Sade are read in tandem with Kant's elaborations about what is and is not "given" to us in the phenomenal world, and Kant's digressions on the challenges of writing a critique of pure reason are correlated with Sade's depictions of the crime of writing. A reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime then allows for an alignment of these two paradigms by showing how writing and the "gift" invalidate the teleological premises of traditional ethics. The book concludes with a critique of Lacan's essay, "Kant with Sade, " which provides an occasion to assess questions of gender, "race, " and cultural alterity.