Following in the footsteps of Judith Halberstam, Harry Benshoff, and Bernadette Marie Calafell, this paper will combine queer and monster studies in order to explore the ways in which monstrous figures have been used to represent queer marginalities from the Middle Ages to the present day. Central to this discussion will be an examination of how queer people have, in a twentieth and twenty-first-century context, reclaimed “the monstrous” as a means of navigating and expressing queer identity in opposition to heteronormative and cisnormative cultures.
Though instances of this type of reclamation are varied and widespread, encompassing creative efforts as diverse as Lady Gaga’s role as “Mother Monster” to a largely queer fanbase, as well as the emergence and popularity of gay werewolf erotica, this paper proposes to consider the unlikely figure of the zombie, and its development from the medieval Norse tradition of the draugr, to the use of the zombie as a means of articulating queer identities in the BBC television series, In the Flesh (2013-14). Beginning with an examination of how queer bodies were constructed as monstrous in medieval taxonomies such as the Liber Monstrorum, this discussion will go on to compare the liminal status of both categories of embodiment, with particular emphasis on the liminal status of Norse revenants as beings existing at the threshold of life and death. The paper will argue that, through a withholding of the category of “human” from queer bodies such as those presented in the Liber Monstrorum, queer people have historically been denied both personhood, as well as the status of truly “living.” In the 2013-4 television show In the Flesh, the figure of the revenant embodies queer experiences of isolation, dehumanization, and social control. In the context of the series, zombification is a treatable (though not curable) state, which allows its central characters to “pass” as human with the help of medical treatment, and copious makeup. It is only by “passing” that the show’s zombie characters are tolerated by the human characters, despite that the zombies no longer pose a threat to the humans. As the show’s central character is both an ex-zombie and a gay man, In the Flesh draws clear parallels between the experience of being queer, and that of being monstrous. The repression of queer culture, and queer performativity, is symbolized by the characters’ normatizing transformation from revenant to human. Throughout the show’s two seasons, themes of posthumanism and monstrosity are partnered with an extended discussion of queer representation, that allows the narrative to question the nature of whether it is better to embrace, reclaim, and transform the figure of the monster, or to conform to cis and heteronormative standards of presentation.
In the spirit of the panel, this paper aims to showcase the “afterlife” of two embodied experiences constructed as monstrous in the medieval context: the queer, and the revenant. By demonstrating the ways in which the two intersect in a modern narrative context, this paper will highlight how monstrous traditions are being reshaped to express queer realities.
About the presenterEli Mason
Elliot Mason is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on monsters and the monstrous, particularly as they relate to issues of marginalization and community construction. He holds MAs in Russian Literature, Medieval Studies, and Religious Studies.