Friday, May 27, 2016

We lurk in the margins (and the gutters)

“Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by the female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male." -Aristotle
Art by John Buscema, property of Marvel

"Monsters of course show themselves in many different and culturally specific ways, but what is monstrous about them is most often the form of their embodiment. They are, in an important sense, what Donna Haraway (1992a) calls 'inappropriate/d others' in that they challenge and resist normative human being, in the first instance by their aberrant corporeality." -Margrit Shildrick
"The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization... This refusal to participate in the classificatory 'order of things' is true of Monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions." -Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
"The habitations of the monsters (Africa, Scandinavia, America, Venus, the Delta Quadrant– whatever land is sufficiently distant to be exoticized) are more than dark regions of uncertain danger: they are also realms of happy fantasy, horizons of liberation. Their monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of other genders, other sexual practices and other social customs can be explored." -Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
"I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." -Donna Haraway 

Monstrous Women in Comics: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Women in Comics and Graphic Novels, May 25–27 2017, University of North Texas, Denton 
REGISTER NOW!