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From the 'Monster of Ravenna' to the 'Elephant Man', Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of 'real', human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance. Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is 'normal' and what is not.
The epic conclusion of The Jake Helman Files! For two years, private investigator Jake Helman has battled powerful supernatural forces at great physical and emotional cost to himself. He’s stopped a serial killer who collected the souls of his victims, destroyed a mutant octopus god, battled zonbies on a Caribbean island, and stood toe to toe with angels and demons. If Jake has learned one thing, it’s that he can’t run from his past. New York City lies in ruins in the wake of Jake’s battle with Lilith, the storm demon. Jake wants nothing more than to lead a normal life with NYPD detective Maria Vasquez, but that is not yet possible: one of his closest allies has betrayed him, and he must locate her before she uses his secret files to unleash unholy hell on earth. In his most pulse-pounding life-or-death adventure yet, Jake tackles adversaries who have aligned to destroy him. He must solve a mystery, destroy a hive of monsters, and confront the most diabolical minds he has ever encountered—to save his own soul.
Existing research on monsters acknowledges the deep impact monsters have especially on Politics, Gender, Life Sciences, Aesthetics and Philosophy. From Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ to Scott Poole’s ‘Monsters in America’, previous studies offer detailed insights about uncanny and immoral monsters. However, our anthology wants to overcome these restrictions by bringing together multidisciplinary authors with very different approaches to monsters and setting up variety and increasing diversification of thought as ‘guiding patterns’. Existing research hints that monsters are embedded in social and scientific exclusionary relationships but very seldom copes with them in detail. Erving Goffman’s doesn’t explicitly talk about monsters in his book ‘Stigma’, but his study is an exceptional case which shows that monsters are stigmatized by society because of their deviations from norms, but they can form groups with fellow monsters and develop techniques for handling their stigma. Our book is to be understood as a complement and a ‘further development’ of previous studies: The essays of our anthology pay attention to mechanisms of inequality and exclusion concerning specific historical and present monsters, based on their research materials within their specific frameworks, in order to ‘create’ engaging, constructive, critical and diverse approaches to monsters, even utopian visions of a future of societies shared by monsters. Our book proposes the usual view, that humans look in a horrified way at monsters, but adds that monsters can look in a critical and even likewise frightened way at the very societies which stigmatize them.
Multi-disciplinary in approach & cross-European in scope, this volume explores links between the political & the monstrous in Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. These essays stress the continual reinvention & polemical applications of the monstrous.
An official guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer describes the mythology and influences behind the monsters, ghouls, and characters through interviews with the creators and details of the episodes.
How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us. “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative. In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.
Psychoanalysis for Intersectional Humanity considers both the vast realm of sexual diversities emerging under capitalism and outlines what a psychoanalytic clinic that considers these diversities should be like. Ricardo Espinoza Lolas explores these themes hand in hand with the Marquis de Sade, exploring the monstrous side of our existence – not as a negative aspect of humanity, but as a part of us that strives for a freer and more inclusive life. Espinoza Lolas explores aspects of psychoanalysis, feminism, critical theory, philosophy, history, politics and the arts in considering how human determination can be torn from ego and neurosis. The book concludes with a disarticulation of the categories of neurosis, psychosis and perversion of psychoanalysis and the suggestion of a new clinic and a new politics. Psychoanalysis for Intersectional Humanity will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, Lacanian clinicians and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy and critical theory.