Monster Theory at 30
Nearly thirty years after its publication, Monster Theory: Reading Culture remains in print physically as well as electronically, and persists in being widely cited. Nearly three decades on, the edited collection continues to generate vibrant new scholarship within the field of monster studies (a field that it helped to launch). The book’s introduction “Monster Theory: Seven Theses” has had an especially lively reception, thriving in registers as varied as first year writing classes, blogs, podcasts, internet memes, a spur to art, and academic analyses (with thousands of citations listed on Google Scholar for its print and electronic forms). The essay has been translated into multiple languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Hungarian among them. The impact of this essay and the book as a whole has been cross-disciplinary and geographically capacious, inspiring work on periods and cultures as disparate as Jewish biblical tradition, disability and neurodiversity studies, literacy, gender, transsexuality, posthumanism, performance and animal studies, feminism, environmental humanities, music, film, videogames, robotics, nursing, early childhood education, psychology, urban planning, design, surrealism, ethics, critical race studies, postcolonial analysis, religious studies, criminology, folklore, cryptozoology, waste studies, religious studies, queer theory, philosophy of science, blue humanities, sociology, Latin American Studies, political theory, anthropology, media studies, ontology, critical legal studies, and many more fields. Monster Theory released into the world a set of ideas that traveled, mutated, adapted and changed for changing times. These mutations and inspirations show no signs of slowing down as the thirtieth anniversary of the book’s publication approaches.
Considering the success of Monster Theory, and of monster studies more generally, many are surprised when told of the risk that the University of Minnesota Press took in publishing the book. Thirty years ago monsters were not considered sufficiently rigorous subjects for academic work. In his introduction to The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012) – a volume whose title would seem to announce that monster studies is as respectable a field as they come! – Asa Simon Mittman writes of being urged as a graduate student to stop working on “monster stuff” and undertake “real scholarship” instead. Many of us whose work now belongs in this discipline that we could not name when we started have similar tales. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” and Monster Theory came about from a frustration at its editor’s dissertation research not being taken all that seriously -- even by his thesis director. “Monster Culture” was written for a community that he wanted to belong to but which did not yet exist; the essay is a letter to a readerly solidarity that he hoped might someday coalesce. Monster Theory as a book was an attempt to realize that uncertain future by bringing together scholars across disciplines in colloquy. No one owns a monster, and no monster has an exact origin, but by affixing a scholarly mantle to the study of a subject too often thought to be embarrassing, undignified, below consequential regard, the book when published by a respected academic press announced and enabled unapologetic study of the subject. Monster Theory assisted those who wanted to work on monstrous figures to argue that the research and analysis that they undertook in the monster’s company is valuable knowledge, insight that advances how we understand what it means to be human, how to live more humanely in a perilous world. Today the bibliography of monster scholarship is extensive. A scholarly collective called the Société Monstrum de Montréal publishes the academic journal Monstrum. The University of Santa Cruz has a Center for Monster Studies, founded by Michael Chemers (motto: We Take Monsters Seriously).
Among the recurrent terms that keep company with monster studies are other, alterity, boundary, transgression, marginalization, difference, exclusion. Monsters also invite the imagination, elicit dread, open the very doors they are supposed to guard. Creatures that make fear impossible to distinguish from desire, laughter from dread, they are humanity at its limit as well as possible bodies, a summons to perilous play. Although each monster arrives formed or deformed by temporal, cultural, linguistic, and community specificity, monsters together are something of a universal language (so long as that tongue is difference-riven, sometimes incoherent, even a howl). Monsters express and confound stabilities; they are supposed to delimit the lines that demarcate proper gender, race, species, class, but they confound as they embody and express. They are the guest we welcome and the wrecker of homes, the ethical admixtures to challenge the easy lines propriety assumes but cannot sustain, a reaction that is also its confounding opposite, an overwhelming sensation that finds expression only in self-contradictory terms, hybridity that does not offer coherent totalities. If words like astonishing, awesome, terrible, staggering and sublime retained their ability to push the human experience outside of its small parameters these would be exactly the terms within which monstrous would abide. Messenger of the utter contingency upon which stability and identity rest, herald of a freedomterror and desirefear, the monster is the limit of the human but also the limitation of what it is merely to be human. No wonder then that the discipline of monster studies has so far found its subject of study inexhaustible to study: the monster invites us to contemplate the intransigence and even incoherence at the heart of what it means to be human.
The monster is a figure of story – and like all incitements to narrative has no singular beginning. Likewise monster studies did not begin with Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996); monster studies no doubt enters the historical record with monsters themselves, as quickly as the earliest surviving cave paintings, petroglyphs and masks, and in writing with the first clay recordings of financial transactions, famines and floods. The monster was well known in Babylon, and the hero of the Odyssey is one of our best investigators of what monsters mean (as well as a reason that certain monsters have lived long imaginative lives). Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, John Block Friedman and J. R. R. Tolkien are among the many whose work belongs in a field to which they could not give a name. Yet the collaborative project published as Monster Theory, printed by a distinguished university press, gave the discipline an imprimatur, a seriousness that has served as a catalysis. In the three decades since its appearance the volume has invited all kinds of new and intriguing work to roam the world. Its progeny have been unpredictable, challenging and brilliant. What better legacy can a monster own?
Yet despite the vibrancy of the scholarly work within monster studies undertaken so far, much remains to be imagined. The monster beckons for analyses that foreground science and technology studies (especially around climate change, AI, biotech, surveillance, robots, pandemics); global and intercultural work; postcolonial and decolonial analyses; digital and virtual realms; social and remedial justice as well as ethical exploration; environmental and ecological approaches; immigration and border studies; and the deep relation of monstrosity to petty and resurgent nationalisms. The work of the monster continues.
