Speaking Of Monsters

Employing a range of approaches to examine how "monster-talk" pervades not only popular culture but also public policy through film and other media, this book is a "one-stop shop" of sorts for students and instructors employing various approaches and media in the study of "teratologies," or discourses of the monstrous.

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a "mentally ill person" suffering from "gender dysphoria," Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's "Report to an Academy," in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. Speaking from his own "mutant" cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era--an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

Collects the opinions and comments of teenagers about topics including teen-adult relations and the causes of school violence, molestation, and self-destructive behavior.

The Blair Witch Project meets Imaginary Girls in this story of sisterhood turned toxic, imaginary monsters brought to life, and secrets that won't stay buried. Sixteen-year-old Skye is done playing the knight in shining armor for her insufferable younger sister, Deirdre. And moving across the country seems like the perfect chance to start over as someone different. In their isolated new neighborhood, Skye manages to fit in, but Deirdre withdraws from everyone, becoming fixated on the swampy woods behind their house and building monstrous sculptures out of sticks and bones. Then Deirdre disappears. And when something awful comes scratching at Skye's window in the middle of the night, claiming Skye's the only one who can save Deirdre, Skye knows she will stop at nothing to bring her sister home.

Trick or treat? With nods to Tim Burton, Edward Gorey, and Neil Gaiman, this humorous picture book about a Victorian boy obsessed with monsters presents a dark and appealing world, created by debut author/illustrator Sam Streed. In the graveyard, between stone monuments for forgotten souls, lurks the Black Shuck. . . . Its one blood-red eye burns with an undying rage. After reading about the slimy Nixie, the angry Black Shuck, and the creepy Lantern Man in his beloved Book of Monsters, Alfred decides to invite the monsters to teatime with his crusty old aunty, who thinks monsters are an improper obsession for a respectable young boy.

Wes Williams explores the place of monsters in the early modern imagination, charting the migration of the monstrous from natural history to moral philosophy, from descriptions of creatures found in the external world to the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. At its centre are readings of major works of French literature.

Perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark! A shiver-inducing collection of short stories to read under the covers, from a breadth of American Indian nations. Dark figures in the night. An owl's cry on the wind. Monsters watching from the edge of the wood. Some of the creatures in these pages might only have a message for you, but some are the stuff of nightmares. These thirty-two short stories -- from tales passed down for generations to accounts that could have happened yesterday -- are collected from the thriving tradition of ghost stories in American Indian cultures across North America. Prepare for stories of witches and walking dolls, hungry skeletons, La Llorona and Deer Woman, and other supernatural beings ready to chill you to the bone. Dan SaSuWeh Jones (Ponca Nation) tells of his own encounters and selects his favorite spooky, eerie, surprising, and spine-tingling stories, all paired with haunting art by Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva). So dim the lights (or maybe turn them all on) and pick up a story...if you dare.

In contrast to other figures generated within social theory for thinking about outsiders, such as Rene Girard’s ‘scapegoat’ and Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘stranger’, Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law suggests that the figure of ‘the monster’ offers greater analytical precision and explanatory power in relation to understanding the processes whereby outsiders are constituted. The book draws on Michel Foucault’s theoretical and historical treatment of the category of the monster, in which the monster is regarded as the effect of a double breach: of law and nature. For Foucault, the monster does not simply refer to a particular kind of morphological or psychological irregularity; for the body or psyche in question must also pose a threat to the categorical structure of law. In chronological terms, Foucault moves from a preoccupation with the bestial human in the Middle Ages to a concern over Siamese or conjoined twins in the Renaissance period, and ultimately to a focus on the hermaphrodite in the Classical Age. But, although Foucault’s theoretical framework for understanding the monster is affirmed here, this book's study of an English legal history of the category ‘monster’ challenges some of Foucault’s historical claims. In addition to considering this legal history, the book also addresses the contemporary relevance of Foucault’s theoretical framework. Structured around Foucault’s archetypes and the category crises they represent – admixed embryos, conjoined twins and transsexuals – the book analyses their challenge to current distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and the idea of the ‘proper’ legal subject as a single embodied mind. These contemporary figures, like the monsters of old, are shown to threaten the rigidity and binary structure of a law that still struggles to accommodate them.