Monsters and Monstrosity

doi:10.1017/9781009071550.015

12 - Monsters and Monstrosity

from Part II - Genres

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022

Dawn Keetley

Edited by

Stephen Shapiro and

Mark Storey

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Stephen Shapiro: Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Mark Storey: Affiliation:
University of Warwick

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Summary

This chapter maps out the central paradigms for conceptualizing the monsters of American horror, marking their inextricability from politics and moving toward identifying the principal forms of monstrosity in the early twenty-first century. Monstrosity has been defined as impure and abject, existing on borders, not categorizable; the incarnation of “otherness,” typically racial, gendered, sexual, or class; and a terrifying reflection of the “self,” as the monster has increasingly become an avatar of “normality” rather than what threatens it, embodying dominant rather than marginalized social structures and ideologies. Most recently, monsters are being generated by scientific explorations that insist on the thoroughgoing entanglement of life, the ways in which the “human” is not singular, not exceptional, but rather symbiotically entwined with nonhuman life. This form of horror is adeptly exploited in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, about an entangled fungus and a colonial family.

Keywords

monster horror otherness abject impurity entanglement nonhuman Silvia Moreno-Garcia Mexican Gothic

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror , pp. 183 - 198

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071550.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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