Introduction

Pablo Pérez Navarro, Ana Cristina Santos, Ana Lúcia Santos, Joana Brilhante, Mara Pieri and Pedro Fidalgo

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Electronic version

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/eces/8782

DOI: 10.4000/12uzj

ISSN: 1647-0737

Publisher

Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra

Electronic reference

Pablo Pérez Navarro, Ana Cristina Santos, Ana Lúcia Santos, Joana Brilhante, Mara Pieri and Pedro Fidalgo, "Introduction", *e-cadernos CES* [Online], 41 | 2024, Online since 05 December 2024, connection on 14 March 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/eces/8782; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12uzj

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are
"All rights reserved", unless otherwise stated.
# Introduction

In short, who, I ask you, would agree to call himself abject, subject of or subject to abjection?

JULIA KRISTEVA, *THE POWERS OF HORROR*

The thematic issue “Monstrous Genealogies: Reclaiming Queer Lives and Embodiments”* arises from our desire to continue the debates initiated at the III Monster’s Summer School, held from September 18th to 22nd, 2023, at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, Portugal. It brings together a series of contributions from the Summer School participants, including both students and speakers, as well as articles received in response to an open call. In retrospect, we realize that this heterogeneity reflects an essential aspect of the relationship between monstrosity, as a thematic concern, and academic production, as a critical problem.

Our proposal engages with the processes of reconciliation with the figure of the monster as an abject other, while rejecting its reduction to a mere rhetorical figure. Instead, our call was intended to be an invitation to speak about the monster, with the monster, and from the perspective of the monster, always remembering that they know little about historical reparations. The monster neither negotiates nor waits for dignified resolutions. Instead, it erupts, disrupts, and aches.

Paradoxically, monstrosity also serves as the veil that power casts over the suffering of the other.

Bearing these ambivalences in mind, how might we approach the monster without reproducing the power hierarchies that govern our immediate surroundings? Not only between students and educators, but also in the relationship between the formal spaces of learning and the world beyond them. Particularly when these hierarchies are entangled

<footnote>* This thematic issue was developed with support from various research projects, including TRACE – Tracing Queer Citizenship over Time: Ageing, Ageism, and Age-Related LGBTI+ Politics in Europe (TRACE, ERC-2021-COG, Grant No. 101044915), funded by the European Research Council; REMEMBER – Recording Experiences of LGBTQ Elders in Post-Dictatorship Portugal (1974-2020) (Ref. PTDC/SOC-ASO/4911/2021), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; and TRIALOGUES – Emerging Biopolitics of Gender, Kinship, and Reproduction: Trialogues from the South (Grant No. 894643), funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program of the European Commission.</footnote>
with the institutional inertia that tends to reproduce unequal relationships between
subjects and objects of knowledge.

After all, what would “school” be if we were still afraid of monsters?

# 1. OF MONSTERS

Historically, monsters symbolize the dangers of deviations, inversions, and unspeakable threats to the social order. They were portrayed as messengers announcing catastrophes – storms and other dramatic events that were difficult to explain. Only good behavior, submission to the rules, or faith in a higher entity – such as magic, witchcraft, or religion – could prevent societies from being touched by monsters (Santos, 2023). Natural, political, and moral monsters alike illustrate how this figure has been used to demonize both internal and external abjections (Giuliani, 2021).

Linking us to a past that reveals itself in the present, monstrosity continues to erupt in liminal spaces, in the interstices of ontology where the comforting premises of identity collapse. Manifesting in the blurred boundaries between subject and object, sanity and madness, desire and repulsion, life and death, the monster is the threshold that connects us to what we most seek to distance ourselves from. Kristeva's rhetorical question – “who would agree to call himself abject?” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 209) – invites only one possible response: I, we, never, not ever. The monster is always an Other, a paradigm of alterity that finds its place in representation by being precisely that which erupts at the margins of visibility, audibility, and intelligibility – presenting itself, at the very edge, as the unrepresentable.

We might think the monster only threatens the physical integrity of a community or individual. From this point of view, a wild animal, a hurricane, or a virus could be seen as paradigms of monstrosity. This intuition is not without merit, as monstrosity always carries an organic dimension. That is why even a spectral figure like Maupassant's *The Horla* creates a disturbance in the air around it. As Maupassant elaborates: “all that we meet without clearly distinguishing it, has a rapid, surprising and inexplicable effect upon us and upon our organs, and through them on our ideas and on our heart itself” (1887/2005, p. 45). Indeed, the material dimension of monstrosity, far from anecdotal, is constitutive of its nature. Hence, the connection underlying Kristeva's well-known discussion of abjection and substances that blur the boundary between the body's interior and exterior – from excrement to menstrual blood (Kristeva, 1982).

The tentacled horrors of pulp fiction's sci-fi aliens, and archetypal movie monsters like the formless threat in *The Thing* (Carpenter, 1982) all exemplify this. The confusion of boundaries between human and animal, as in the mythical transformation of *The Wolf Man* (Waggner, 1941) or between human and alien, from *Invasion of the Body Snatchers*
(Siegel, 1956) to the *Alien* saga (starting with Scott, 1979), all exploit the confusing material constitution of the monstrous to unsettle our notions of identity and otherness, along with the army of viscous monsters populating twentieth-century literature and cinema.

## 2. BEYOND THE MATERIAL: THE ETHICAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF MONSTROSITY

However, the territory of the monster is not solely material or corporeal in the broadest sense. If there exists – and always has existed – an organicity within the figure, it is because the disturbances of this materiality are inseparable from disturbances of a particular moral, ethical, and even political order. This capacity to bridge the material threat with the moral one is well known, at least, since Mary Douglas's influential anthropological analysis of how dirt and "merely" material disorder disrupts the normative boundaries of what a community perceives as dangerous (Douglas, 1966).

In this context, the affects of abjection, as discussed by Sara Ahmed (2014), play a crucial role in contemporary politics: the monster endangers us by threatening to dissolve the categories – whether racial, sexual, or bodily – through which we organize life in community. It is there that the monster's capacity to reveal the fragility of the categories and principles that underpin the social order's legitimacy lies. In other terms: the monster is a complex material, moral and political embodied process, taking place in the interstices where the threats to the dissolution of the body's boundaries disturb the surfaces of the political body (Pérez Navarro, 2021).

It is in this transition between bodily life and communal life that the monstrous disrupts the seemingly fixed boundaries between innocence and guilt, liberation and condemnation, identity and difference, encounter and distancing. The monster is always already a biopolitical artifact, therefore announcing the dangers that result from defying the hegemonic norms that serve to organize, interpret, and tame the most basic and fundamental processes of bodily life, such as reproduction, care work, disease, or death. Summing up, the monster is always already there whenever a given historical formation of culture negotiates its relationship with norm and exception, good and evil, in relation to the living and, therefore, vulnerable body.

That is why Gothic literature, as Jack Halberstam (2008) has convincingly argued, became such a proliferating catalog of sexual and racial alterities: the horror literature of the century where the "power of normalization" (Foucault, 1999/2003, p. 42) reached a multifaceted historical importance, hand in hand with the goals of emerging capitalist societies. From this perspective, emblematic monsters such as Bram Stoker's *Dracula* (1897) materialize the reverse of Victorian morality – the Other, therefore, of heterosexuality, monogamy, and cisnormativity. And that is also why the genealogy of
monstrosity is so tightly bound to the unattainable moral imperatives of whiteness and
the colonial project, in which the perfectly ordered, binary bricks of the bourgeois nuclear
family – as decolonial feminists Maria Lugones, Rita Segato, Lélia Gonzalez, and others
have greatly helped us to understand – served as a solid anchor for a civilizational
enterprise, distinguishing the properly human from the dispensable bodies of the
colonized world.

3. THE MISSION OF MONSTERS

Yet, it would be a mistake to think that the function of the monster is merely to silence,
erase, or exclude – to expel the Other from the realm of the intelligible. On the contrary,
the monster has a seemingly productive mission. Let us consider, for example, the
construction of the figure of the homosexual as interpreted by Michel Foucault
(1976/1978, p. 43): in the century of normalization, the homosexual ceased to be a
“relapse” and became “a species”. Foucault viewed the construction of the homosexual
category as a transformation of the human, into something alien or animal. In doing so,
he framed the monstrification of the perverse body as a productive task with civilizational
implications:

So too were all those minor perverts whom nineteenth-century psychiatrists
entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing's
zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder's auto-monosexualists; and later,
mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and
dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was
overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing
*more species*, even where there was no order to fit them into. The machinery of
power that focused on *this whole alien strain* did not aim to suppress it, but rather
to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies,
slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and
intelligibility, established as a *raison d'être* and a natural order of disorder.
(Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 43; emphasis added)

From this perspective, the pathologization of perversions in the nineteenth century
did not limit itself to describing or cataloging pre-existing bodies and desires; it
coproduced – alongside Gothic literature itself – an array of sexual monsters that would
disturb the dreams of subsequent generations. Furthermore, far from limiting itself to
discussing sexuality, gender *avant la lettre*, kinship, or reproductive practices *per se*,
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

nineteenth-century psychiatry energetically invested its normalizing enterprise in the colonial imaginary, specially, when it came to explaining the reasons for danger.

Let us consider, as a paradigmatic example, Krafft-Ebing's *Psychopathia Sexualis* (1886/2012), and the way he related the dangers of homosexuality with a plethora of images of civilizational decadence imbued with racial anxieties that include, paradigmatically, the fall of Babylon and Nineveh while offering monogamy and Christianity as an antidote (pp. 5–7). In the end, the monsters of Western culture function like a Moebius-strip linking the perceived inner threats to the imperial projects of Europe to the familial and, at the same time, different body of the Arab Other, the Black body, and the Indigenous body.

We are not talking here – nor do the authors of this thematic issue intend to discuss – the monster as a relic of past moral norms, perhaps recent but now overcome. The monster is a living figure, in constant process of rewriting – a mutant figure where the renegotiation of the constitutive exclusions that shape the social order in each community, nation, and historical moment takes place. The monster mutates and does not always appear under the recognizable mask of past monsters. The monster is always subjected to an intense process of coding and recoding gender, sexual, and racial norms governing the social intelligibility of the body. This is what makes it a key figure not only for literary or film criticism, but for cultural critique, sociology, political philosophy, and even international relations.

This last point should not be surprising, considering that the monsters of the present have a literally geo-strategic reach. This is convincingly argued by Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai (2002), whose conjunct analysis expose the continuities between the sexual monster, the racialized monster, and the exploitative use of the Islamic terrorist figure in Western media; helping us understand that the monster is, ultimately, the manufactured creature without whose impact on public opinion neither the declaration nor the perpetuation of war, settler colonialism, or genocide, would be possible.

Quite the opposite: it is in relation to war that monstrosity reveals its greatest productive capacity. Even accepting Hannah Arendt's (1963/2006) well-known reading of the banality of evil – that Adolf Eichmann (a high official of the Nazi Party) was a bureaucrat before he was a monster – it is crucial to remember that only the productive role of the figure of the Jewish, homosexual, disabled, Romani, or lesbian monster made the horrors of the Holocaust possible, ultimately. Monstrosity is the apparatus that severs the bonds that connect us to each other to form community. In the same way, only the threat of contemporary mediatic monsters allows for the normalization of otherwise intolerable forms of imperialistic and (post)colonial violence, such as the indefinite
detention in Guantanamo, the demonization of migrants trying to reach the shores of Europe, or the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

## 4. EMBODYING THE MONSTER

Far from being a figure of the past, as we said, the cultural and media industry of monstrosity enjoys a state of fantastic health. Its versatility proves this. Ultimately, focusing on the figure of the monster allows us to glimpse the threads connecting the apocalyptic rhetoric of the “war on terror” with that directed against migrant populations, the rights of trans people and gender variant minors, alternatives to monogamy, the queering of reproductive practices, or sex work, to mention just a few fronts where, all too often, new far-right movements and trans-exclusionary and abolitionist feminist rhetorics align. These discourses rely upon the production of a plethora of moral monsters to justify any attack, any denial of rights, any disallowing of life “until the point of death”<fnref n="1" /> (Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 138): the justification of the killing function inscribed in all biopolitics.

But what happens when we invert the scene of interpellation? When the question arises from the outside, from the unnamable space reserved for the monster? What happens when the monster is the contagious body weakened by AIDS, screaming within the walls of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York, to break a complicit and genocidal silence? When the monster is Susan Stryker's trans body, ascending the stage in "genderfuck drag" to interrupt the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (Stryker, 1994)? Or when the body is that of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, describing it as a "TV'd massacre" to her London audience (in Sternchenproductions, 2011)? When we write and read, with Donna Haraway, "from the womb of a pregnant monster" (Haraway, 2004, p. 63)? When the monster is the one "speaking to you" (Preciado, 2021)? When they are us? Is it possible to make monstrosity a refuge, a trench, a home?

The strangeness of monsters – or their positioning as strangers to an imagined “us” – reflects a cultural narrative that oversimplifies what we define as human, reinforcing binary divisions between good and bad, “man” and animal, hetero and homo, cis and trans, silencing everything that exists in between these dichotomies. Ultimately, speaking about monsters today brings us face to face with the necessity of rethinking what it means to be human and who is considered human in a world hostile to bodies that deviate from the norms of heterocentrism, cisnormativity, whiteness, and the ever-failing standard that attempts to embody itself in “us”.

<footnote n="1">¹ In the original French: "rejeter dans la mort".</footnote>
## 5. THE MONSTERS ISSUE

As in the III Monsters Summer School, this thematic issue embraces monstrosity for its potential to deconstruct binaries and celebrate bodily differences. Our goal was to engage with some of these questions to trace, remember, and reclaim monsters through a queer perspective. Taking up this challenge, the articles in this dossier cross boundaries between various fields of knowledge, offering critical engagements with monstrosity, abjection, and the dissolution of normative categories, each contributing to the discussion of how the monster challenges and disrupts regimes of intelligibility, identity, and humanity.

The issue opens with a collective piece by Moniq Muyargas, Lara Bochmann, Bart Bloem Herraiz, and Lorena González Ruiz, participants of the already mentioned Summer School. Their contribution, inspired by Line Henriksen's workshop on Monster Writing, explores the “monster” as a critical concept in research methodologies, challenging dominant paradigms of cis-heteronormativity, ableism, and colonial frameworks.

Next, two articles from the guest speakers of the Summer School address – from different points of view – the abjection and exclusion of dissident genders and sexualities.

Eduarda Ferreira explores the evolving concepts of “woman” and “lesbian”, critiquing rigid identity politics and advocating for more fluid, inclusive perspectives. In doing so, she offers a criticism of trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses with a special focus on the Portuguese context.

Daniela Ferrández offers a comparative analysis of how Spain and Portugal criminalized sexual dissidence during their dictatorships, highlighting shared narratives of oppression across the Iberian Peninsula. This analysis helps us understand how the prosecution and criminalization of gender and sexual dissidence contributed to constructing a heteronormative moral order anchored in the prosecution of various forms of sexual otherness.

Following these, the next contributions – from participants of the Summer School as well as other researchers who responded to the call – delve deeper into queer and trans experiences.

Bart Bloem Herraiz presents his concept of “trans-ecologies” through a nomadic methodology, focusing on trans experiences in outdoor environments and drawing inspiration from embodied feminist methodologies to ground his own queering of research methods.

Lorena González Ruiz bridges historical conceptualizations of trans* identities with the work of trans* activist and photographer Mar C. Llop, drawing from Miquel Missé's
critique of the biomedical paradigm in trans* body ethics, offering an expanded epistemological framework for understanding trans* and gender-dissident identities.

Yvonne Wechuli addresses the ethical and epistemological challenges of writing about emotional othering in the context of disability, drawing on affect theory and Kristeva's discussion of abjection.

Moniq Muyargas reflects on queering research methodologies within the Filipino LGBTQ+ aging context, exploring the limits and potential of reclaiming “queer” from a non-identitarian, decolonial lens.

Vera Pereira, João Manuel de Oliveira, and Teresa Joaquim examine the relationship between the historical construction of monstrosity, liminal subjects, embodied positions, and the gender binary. They present the life history of Ariel, an intersex woman, to deepen the understanding of the tension between forced or inadequate medicalization and dissident gender life trajectories.

Antônio João traces the medical and legal discourses that framed homosexuality as a disease and crime in Portugal, analyzing how these narratives were perpetuated through the Estado Novo regime. His analysis complements that of Daniela Ferrández, focusing on the opposition between “activity” and “passivity” in sexual practices and its effects in the exclusionary construction of the categories of “men” and “women.”

Lastly, Bruno Latini Pfeil questions the universal concept of humanity, reflecting on monstrous bodies and colonial constructions of otherness by reclaiming the figure of the chimera, drawing on the works of Jacques Derrida, Grada Kilomba, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, and Ailton Krenak.

A key highlight is Gaia Giuliani's contribution. In her text, presented as a reflection on her work in monster studies, Giuliani critiques Western imaginaries of natural disasters, migration, and terrorism, linking these fears to colonial and capitalist logics. We are happy to include this piece as a complementary showcase of the interdisciplinary and ongoing work conducted at CES in this crucial field for the understanding of contemporary forms of exclusion, abjection, and the criminalization of otherness.

Finally, the issue concludes with a poetic contribution and two insightful reviews, featured in the @cetera section of *e-cadernos CES*.

Veronica Sousa's poem *Monstra Disfarçada* offers an intersectional reflection on living with disability in a world that demands constant productivity. Following this, Daniel Morais reviews Georgina Orellano's *Puta Feminista*, a key work symbolizing the struggles and activism of sex workers in Argentina. Joana Matias closes the section with a review of *When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader*, offering a critical engagement with Stryker's influential work in the field of trans theory.
Together, these pieces create a rich dialogue on monstrosity that we hope will
contribute to opening up new avenues for research and activism in a world that sustains
power hierarchies – some new, some archaic – by producing monsters. Ingenuously so,
for monsters are not easily contained within the expected limits of the frames that depict
them as such.

Edited by Scott M. Culp

PABLO PÉREZ NAVARRO

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: pabloperez@ces.uc.pt
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7612-9148

ANA CRISTINA SANTOS

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: cristina@ces.uc.pt
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9597-7150

ANA LÚCIA SANTOS

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: analucia@ces.uc.pt
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5683-3886

JOANA BRILHANTE

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: joanabrilhante@ces.uc.pt
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9839-7007

MARA PIERI

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: marapieri@ces.uc.pt
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5864-7972

PEDRO FIDALGO

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal
Contact: pedrofidalgo@ces.uc.pt
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7729-122X
REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. (2014). Queer feelings. *The Cultural Politics of Emotion*, 144–167.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372

Arendt, H. (2006). *Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil*. Penguin Books.
(Original work published 1963)

Carpenter, J. (Director). (1982). *The Thing* [Film]. Universal Pictures.

Douglas, M. (1966). *Purity and danger. An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo*. Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1978). *The History of Sexuality – Volume I, An Introduction* (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976)

Foucault, M. (2003). *Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975* (G. Burchell, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1999)

Waggner, G. (Director). (1941). *The Wolf Man* [Film]. Universal Pictures.

Giuliani, G. (2021). *Monsters, catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A postcolonial critique*. Routledge.

Halberstam, J. (2008). *Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters*. Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2004). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others.
*In The Haraway Reader* (pp. 63–124). Routledge.

Krafft-Ebing, R. von. (2012). *Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal study* (C. Gilbert Chaddock, Trans). Forgotten Books.

Kristeva, J. (1982). *Powers of horror: An essay on abjection*. Columbia University Press.

Maupassant, G. de. (2005). *The Horla* (C. Mandell, Trans.). Melville House Publishing. (Original work published 1887)

Pérez Navarro, P. (2021). Ordem e perigo: Superfícies do corpo político. *Trans/form/ação: Revista de Filosofia*, 44(1), 327-346. https://doi.org/10.1590/0101-3173.2021.v44n1.24.p327

Preciado, P. B. (2021). *Can the monster speak? Report to an academy of psychoanalysts* (F. Wynne, Trans.). Semiotext(e). (Original work published 2020)

Puar, J. K., & Rai, A. (2002). Monster, terrorist, fag: The war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots. *Social Text*, 20(3), 117–148. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/31948

Santos, A. C. (2023). Embodied queer epistemologies: A new approach to (a monstrous) citizenship. In A. C. Santos (Ed.), *LGBTQ+ intimacies in Southern Europe* (pp. 77–98). Palgrave Macmillan. https://hdl.handle.net/10316/103935

Scott, R. (Director). (1979). *Alien* [Film]. 20th Century Fox.

Siegel, D. (Director). (1956). *Invasion of the body snatchers* [Film]. Walter Wanger Productions.

Sternchenproductions (2011, November 13). *Rafeef Ziadah – ‘We teach life, sir’, London, 12.11.11* [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM

Stoker, B. (1897). *Dracula*. Archibald Constable and Company.

Stryker, S. (1994). My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing transgender rage. *GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies*, 1, 237–254.