![]() An obvious example, very close to the focus of this chapter, is the word mistake, often used in popular media to viciously describe trans bodies as evidence of nature’s wrongdoings. Some of these words-perhaps most of them-are loaded with pejorative connotations. Other words associated with monsters share a strange interconnection, as if an invisible thread drew a line separating “us” from “them”: misfit, odd, eccentric, unusual, peculiar, atypical, dissident, nonconforming, wrong, mistake and error. Later on in this chapter, I will return to this idea of being and/or feeling at home as monsters, but for now I would like to focus on the dominant, shared imaginary that the category “monster” conjures up.Ī simple search for synonyms and definitions of monster leads to the idea of big, massive, enormous, gigantic and colossal. In Pedro’s case, monster appears as a self-chosen category that may offer a symbolic place to feel at home in the world (Ahmed, 2017), at last. The strangeness attached to the non-binary body and experience is enough to yield the label of monster. In addition, more recently, Halberstam ( 2020) elaborated on the multiple connections between the human and the wild that emerge from popular culture regarding monstrous figures. As Stockton ( 2009) reminds us, we speak of children as both wild and monstrous. There are daily and multiple encounters with that which is beyond the human as we know it. This disruption triggers fear, but at the same time familiarity. Because her name is Pedro but that's not enough for her.īased on this piece, the reader of this Portuguese newspaper understands that disobeying gender-based norms such as the gender binary is highly disruptive and risky, eventually leading to dispossession of humanity and a consequential transformation into something else, something new, odd and wild. A genre that goes beyond predefined rules and begins to make itself felt before it makes good use of society, still in its idealized and asexual childhood. None of this, nor anything else in opposition to any of these definitions. Male, female, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer. Finally, the notion of monstrous citizenship will be advanced as part of what I am suggesting be interpreted as an embodied turn in (queer) epistemologies. The second part of the chapter focuses on the notion of citizenship and aims at recuperating its potential in the light of both contemporary queer critiques and evidence-based needs to strengthen formal recognition in times of anti-LGBTQI+ backlash. In that section, monsters will be unpacked against the backdrop of the archetype of the hero. The first part of the chapter explores the notion of the monster, with a particular interest in queer readings of monstrosity. These and other affects attached to monstrosity will be explored in light of queer critiques of the concept of citizenship. monstrous misfits) trigger reactions of both fear and desire. It is a twofold argument, producing different but related results: that monsters are misfits (Garland-Thomson, 2011 Santos & Santos, 2018) and that monsters (i.e. The central argument in this chapter stems from the ambiguity conjured up by the notion of the monster. ![]()
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