Here Be Monsters

Shannon Heffernan traces the renewed visibility of monsters in politics, popular culture, and her young daughter’s imagination to ask what makes something monstrous. Monster studies, now a growing academic field, treats monsters as ways to read a culture: they give shape to anxieties and desires, unsettle categories, and mark the boundaries of who belongs. The field grew from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 1996 “Monster Culture,” written as a call for scholarly company when monster research seemed academically disreputable. Its scholars now face both rising student interest and conservative attacks on humanities disciplines, criticized as economically useless and as entangled with feminism, queer studies, disability studies, and critical race theory.

At a conference in Santa Cruz, Heffernan finds that monster study can also reshape how people understand themselves. One queer, neurodivergent researcher describes embracing “monster” as a way to reject the demand to be normal or palatable. A keynote by philosopher David Livingstone Smith turns to the deadly consequences of monstering others: propaganda has depicted Jewish people as rats and Black people as bat-winged creatures, while contemporary political figures have called immigrants or opponents animals. Smith’s point is that these images often combine human and animal features, creating impossible hybrids that violate familiar categories. The essay links this dehumanization to the conference’s broader question: monsters reveal who is cast outside humanity, and why.