Envisioning a New Monster Studies: Resisting Global Discourses of Exclusion

Michael Chemers
Performance, Play, and Design
UC Santa Cruz

Renee Fox
Literature
UC Santa Cruz

This working group brings together UC faculty from the humanities, arts, social sciences, and engineering to investigate how studying monsters can expose and challenge political and cultural ideologies of intolerance. Building on the work of the new UCSC Center for Monster Studies to think in interdisciplinary and intersectional ways about the relationship between monstrosity and social injustice across different historical moments and geographies, the group will examine how monsters in global literature, performance, arts, and media both reinforce and resist gendered, racialized, and nationalist discourses of dehumanization and exclusion. Its aims are simultaneously scholarly, public facing, and curricular, as it seeks both to develop new reparative paradigms for analyzing monstrosity and to make these paradigms part of a wider conversation about the proliferation of monsters in contemporary popular culture.

Image credit: Neil Rosenstech.