So we returned home and immediately began to suffer from another bout of COVID (the first time was at the end of 2021; hopefully never again). It’s hard not to read this as a punishment for a failure in vigilance, but I know it’s more likely the result of being on public transportation in Nice – which is a resort town sandwiched between Monaco, where there was an F1 Race, and Cannes, where I’m given to understand there was some kind of film festival (I kid, of course, but I somehow didn’t think that we’d end up in that kind of tinned human situation).

I’m out of work for a bit, due to the semester ending, but Edgar has had to get right back to it. Which means I’ve had the freedom to really wallow in things. As such, my thoughts turn to abjection, which is only a stone’s throw from monstrosity.

Not, currently, available from Bookshop.org in the US, as it turns out.

In recent months, I’ve been periodically listening to the Digital Folklore podcast, and doing a bit of follow-up research on what’s covered there. One of the more interesting things, in my opinion, is Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theories on monsters, contained specifically in the chapter “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” from the book Monster Theory: Reading Culture from University of Minnesota Press. My job gives me access through JSTOR, and I’m probably going to order a copy of this book over the summer, but I’m fascinated by the mirror image of Monster Theory and Queer Theory that goes on here.

Let me summarize the former, gloss over the latter, and then talk a bit about the overlap between the two.

The seven theses that Cohen discusses are as follows:

“The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body”.
“The Monster Always Escapes”.
“The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis”.
“The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference”.
“The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible”.
“Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire”.
“The Monster Stands at the Threshold...of Becoming” (sic).

Fundamentally – it is somewhat more complicated than this, of course – the idea is that for something to qualify as a “monster” in folklore, a being needs to fundamentally be a paradoxical clashing of the two halves of a dichotomy that is seen as inviolate, and it needs to be a productive clashing. Generally speaking, there is a bit of a palimpsest quality here: multiple things overlaid upon one thing but all pointing in different directions in a way that still has some kind of unity.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if animated skeletons qualify as monsters in anything but a meta sense, given all of this. Clearly, they are undead, but they’re just…silly.

The classic monster is the vampire, the most popular sort in our culture. It is a confusion of the states of death and life (one could point to other entities, like the zombie or ghost for this same thing. We’ve got a category of monsters for this, the “undead” – and this was coined by Bram Stoker for Dracula.) With the vampire there are also elements of deviant sexuality (which is...fairly common...with vampires) and foreignness. This is not present for the zombie, which has a different freight that can be understood by looking at the philosophical usage of that term: a philosophical zombie is something that behaves as if it is aware but is not. So the zombie isn’t just the tension of life and death, but the tension of aware and inert, which is close to alive and dead, but distinct.

On a completely different page, werewolves are about category confusion between animal and human. How do you know that your neighbor is really a person? Perhaps, meeting him upon a darkened road, he would fall upon you and attempt to rend you with his teeth like a wolf.

The similarity of monsters across unconnected cultures – there is a similarity between the vampire, the ghoul, the strzyga, the jiang shi, the vetala, the Skadegamutc, not because this necessarily refers to something real, but because the anxieties are similar and similar processes produced them.

Pictured: the actual chart used by homeland security to give warnings after 9/11. It never actually went below yellow, I don’t think.

The premier monster of the 21st century is the Terrorist. We can see this by examining the seven theses and giving it some thought.

To start with “The monster’s body is a cultural body”, which Cohen explains by saying “the monster is born at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence”. The “terrorist” of the post-9/11 moment was always male, always vaguely “middle eastern” (despite the fact that most Americans didn’t understand that there were many ethnic groups and cultures in that region). In the post-2016 era, this has evolved into the tattooed white supremacist, but in both cases it’s been constructed (falsely) as an obvious outlier.

The second thesis “The monster always escapes” brings to mind the number of times that al-Qaeda’s number two – always referred to as such – was killed in a lightning raid or a drone strike. Far from being comforting, this simply gave the comical impression that the same man was being killed again and again. What it meant, of course, was that the organization continuously refilled its gaps and had a fluid enough structure to carry on.

Things begin to get interesting with the third thesis: “The monster is the harbinger of category crisis”. Cohen writes that “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.’” The terrorist is thus the monster of the post-cold-war moment: now that the long war of the 20th century is over, the dichotomy moves inside, becoming the dichotomy between soldier and civilian. Now, we have the civilian who kills like a soldier, the soldier that blends into the civilian population: we have a third thing that partakes of both terms in the dichotomy, becoming an unexpected and unwelcome dialectical synthesis between them. Likewise, because they confuse the category of soldier and civilian, they do not target soldiers, they target other civilians. This erodes the category of civilian, and helped eliminate the distinction between soldier and civilian that has led to so many other morbidities within our culture.

It may be hard to see how the fourth thesis “the monster dwells at the Gates of Difference” is different from the category crisis thesis, but that’s because three naturally leads into four. It isn’t simply that the monster – or the entity-constructed-as-monster – confuses our categories, it’s that they reveal those categories as culturally constructed. We behave as if war is a thing that unfolds between nation states according to rules, but the terrorist belies that, erasing the magic circle and revealing that the game is not a game: it is a deadly serious altercation, and it is the sort of situation that rewards first movers. All of a sudden, the liberal international order is revealed to be a farce and something new has taken its place.

The fifth thesis may feel dodgy, but it is becomes clear with some thought: “the monster polices the borders of the possible”. Cohen writes “whereas monsters born of political expedience and self-justifying nationalism function as living invitations to action, usually military . . . the monster of prohibition polices the borders of the possible, interdicting through its grotesque body some behaviors and actions, envaluing others”. How many times in those early days after September 11 did we hear some variation on the theme of “you must do this or the terrorists win” – you had to shop, you had to buy, you had to consume so that the economy was strong enough for war. This thesis isn’t about a self-conscious exercise of coercive power, this is the bogeyman principle. Do this or the monster will get you. Do this or the terrorists will win.

Headline from WSJ. Reminds me of a quote from Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash*: “Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

Things get weird and psychosexual in the sixth thesis: “fear of the monster is really a kind of desire”. Cohen writes that “the same creatures that 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. The simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the monster’s composition accounts greatly for its continued cultural popularity . . . We distrust and loathe the monster a the same time that we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair.” It would be easy enough to talk about the proliferation of pornography centered around middle-eastern (and supposedly middle-eastern) women after September 11. This is neither interesting nor useful for my purposes. Instead, I think a much more enlightening thing to do is to look at the number of people that wish that they were present during a terrorist attack. They say that they want to fight back, to stop it (to suffer, most likely, the same fate as those who died on United Flight 93.) What they are looking for is to be placed in a personal state of exception: to be liberated from the constraints of everyday life and be free to exercise the violence that they “know” they are capable of, because many of them have absorbed countless hours of film and television about everyman characters suddenly sprouting a godlike capacity for violence. Rationally, most of them know that the most horrible thing they’ve been involved in is perhaps a drunken fight in the parking lot of a dive during college, but they believe that they have a badass inside of them. This is the desire, for the “default” man, of the terrorist-as-monster.

Finally, we reach the last thesis “The Monster stands at the threshold...of becoming” (sic). The monster is something that is always-already returning, a horror out of history or prehistory, and encountering it leads to a kind of enlightenment. Not a comfortable or desirable kind of enlightenment, but an awareness of how the universe works and how it is ordered that those who encounter it cannot look away from. The attacks on September 11 did not come out of nowhere, they were the logical progression of historical forces. They were foreseen and predicted, and our failure to preempt them is likewise a failure that could be foreseen, predicted.

Now, you might wonder, what’s the point of all this? Do I have something important to say about terrorism?

Not in the least. Nor do I feel like focusing on 9/11 as a historical event (as a millennial, I allow myself to do that, but mostly around the anniversary of the event). No, I’m doing this to walk you through a quick-and-dirty application of an analytic tool, because such things are useful and can be enlightening, and can help explain things that are happening. Moreover, as a writer, I tend to love writing monsters, which means that this is all very fascinating to me.

However, I tend to believe that our counterparts on the political right are likewise fascinated by monsters, but not in the interesting and productive way that fans of horror fiction are. No, I think that they manufacture monsters on the regular, because the right wing playbook for the past eighty years has been to invent new monsters when the old one stops hitting and use a moral panic to make everyone line up.

There are interesting overlaps between monster theory and queer theory: both of them deal with the confusion, collapse, and transcension of categories. If someone is the kind of person that is invested in categories, there might not seem to be all that much a difference between the two.

How, in the contemporary conservative imagination, is a drag queen or a transgender person, not a monster? I’m not saying that these individuals are, mind you – I do not agree with the point of view that I am discussing – but if you understand the mindset you can predict some measure of the tactics employed. If you look at queer theory, you can see it mirrors monster theory.

Both Drag Performers and transgender people are avatars of category confusion – that between male and female, which they view as stable, immutable categories that are simultaneously natural and must be constantly policed. Both are also the object of desire from those who hate them: not simply in the sense of confused attraction, or because they desire to do violence to them, but because they cannot decide which it is that they want to do. Many of their repressive plans against transgender student athletes claim to be fore the purpose of protecting children from sexual abuse, but do so by canonizing that sexual abuse into a legally mandated procedure.

And what leads to this? What is the bogeyman here? Education. The more educated you get, the more likely you are to turn out like these people. So you better ignore every new piece of information you come across and just worship your high school football team between voting for the republicans every election cycle. Or perhaps it’s simply openness. The end result is the same.

Of course, there is an enlightenment here, it’s a silver lining in this particular shit pipe, and it’s not necessarily that good: the more they push and try to make these categories legally stable and unchanging, the more it becomes apparent that this is not the case. The more they shore the categories up, they faster they fall down.

Which, long term, is probably good. Short term, it leads to a rather awful situation for everyone.

Let’s change gears a little bit.

Part of me wonders if these theses could be turned around and used, productively, to create a new monster that not only captures the imagination but suggest an approach to the world. This, for me at least, brings to mind what Sam Keeper (of Storming the Ivory Tower) wrote about cryptids in the essay collection Who Killed the World? Solarpunk after the Apocalypse, in the essay “You’ve Got To Throw Your Zombies on the Gears” (I like the whole collection, but a good portion of the essay I’m referring to is in the free preview.)

Of course, this is somewhat different from what I’m talking about: Keeper is discussing appropriating and inserting already-existent monsters that have an appropriate thematic valence for a particular genre (I’m leaving aside whether solarpunk is real. It feels a bit like something ordered out of a catalogue and people keep trying to make it happen. I’m not opposed to it happening, but it’s not happening yet and a lot of people seem to think that calling for an aesthetic to be made more of a thing is the same as inventing a genre.) This of course brings with it the baggage of what the monster already means.

For clarification on the thematic valence of the undead, watch *Carnival of Souls*. It’s in the public domain, so do that if you’ve got an hour and a half.

Zombies tend to work in Steampunk for two reasons: both are artifacts of the late-aughts/early-tens political and cultural moment – on the one side, zombie movies made a lot of money, The Walking Dead had appeared on television, but hadn’t yet strip-mined the enthusiasm for the genre. On the other side, it was a prime moment for Firefly nostalgia and the goths had discovered the color brown but hadn’t yet gotten embarrassed by gluing gears to vintage clothing (there’s also probably something to be said about a boom in crafting and DIY after the financial crisis, but I don’t know enough about that, and that would be getting a bit far afield.) But there is a resonance between the undead and retrofuturism: a mockery of life returned to a dead body, existence returned to a long-lost future; there’s this whole grappling-with-the-weight-of-history-and-the-human-cost-of-modernity thing going on.

Perhaps the strange, moth-winged angel that portends doom is a fitting monster to serve as an emblem for stories grappling with climate change. Perhaps there is a better one out there.

Regardless, This has gone on for two and a half thousand words and my fever is leading me to wander more than usual. I’m not sure it’s a terribly useful set of ideas, but still, I’m glad to lay out this tool for future use if I come back to it later.

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Notes on Monstrosity