Monstrous Encounters: Feminist Theory and the Monstrous

Abstract

Nothing is closer to home than the monster: you first encounter it as a child, under the bed or in the closet. (Or, in one intense childhood memory from 1980s Norway, in the toilet; the murky depths of outhouses were said to harbour dodraugen, an undead, watery being with inexplicable tastes in habitat.) Maybe this is why the study of monsters tends to have a faint hanging-on sense of the frivolous and unacademic: by being interested in monsters we are in some ways going back to (regressing to?) our roots. In all their strangeness, monsters are always leading us home.