Monster Culture in the 21st Century

A Reader

Marina Levina, Diem-My T. Bui, Marina Levina, Diem-My T. Bui

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441178398
• eBook ISBN: 9781441185372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty.
The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century.
The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.

Monster Culture in
the 21st Century

A Reader

Edited by Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui

To Dmitry, Alia, and Paul – our favorite monsters

Contents

Figure list

About the contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a comprehensive monster theory in the 21st century

Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui

1 Ontology and monstrosity

Amit S. Rai

PART ONE Monstrous identities

2 Heading toward the past: The Twilight vampire figure as surveillance metaphor

Florian Grandena

3 Playing alien in post-racial times

Susana Loza

4 Battling monsters and becoming monstrous: Human devolution in The Walking Dead

Kyle W. Bishop

5 The Monster in the mirror: Reflecting and deflecting the mobility of gendered violence onscreen

Megan Foley

6 Intersectionality bites: Metaphors of race and sexuality in HBO’s True Blood

Peter Odell Campbell

7 Gendering the monster within: Biological essentialism, sexual difference, and changing symbolic functions of the monster in popular werewolf texts

Rosalind Sibielski

PART TWO Monstrous technologies

8 Abject posthumanism: Neoliberalism, biopolitics, and zombies

Sherryl Vint

9 Monstrous technologies and the telepathology of everyday life

Jeremy Biles

10 Monstrous citizenships: Coercion, submission, and the possibilities of resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas

Roy Osamu Kamada

11 On the frontlines of the zombie war in the Congo: Digital technology, the trade in conflict minerals, and zombification

Jeffrey W. Mantz

12 Monsters by the numbers: Controlling monstrosity in video games

Jaroslav Švelch

13 Killing whiteness: The critical positioning of zombie walk brides in internet settings

Michele White

PART THREE Monstrous territories

14 Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary

Michael S. Drake

15 The monster within: Post-9/11 narratives of threat and the U.S. shifting terrain of terror

Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo

16 The heartland under siege: Undead in the West

Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

17 When matter becomes an active agent: The incorporeal monstrosity of threat in Lost

Enrica Picarelli

18 Monstrous capital: Frankenstein derivatives, financial wizards, and the spectral economy

Ryan Gillespie

19 Domesticating the monstrous in a globalizing world

Carolyn Harford

Index

Figure list

12.1 Shooting necromorphs in Dead Space 2. © 2011 Electronic Arts, Inc.

13.1 – brian cameron –, “Frizzy-haired Zombie Bride.”

13.2 vanBuuren, “kiss the bride.”

13.3 ian, “Kissing Zombie Brides.”

13.4 halfgeek, “Mr. & Mrs Zombie.”

13.5 sebastien.barre, “Zombie Walk – Saratoga Springs, NY – 07, Sep – 30.”

16.1 The quintessential Western saloon, as illustrated in It Came From the West.

16.2 Billy Drago as the menacing Sheriff Drake in Seven Mummies.

16.3 The zombie lawman from Undead or Alive—leading citizen in a community made up entirely of the undead.

About the
contributors

Jeremy Biles holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (Fordham University Press, 2007). He teaches courses on religion, philosophy, and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has appeared in such places as Culture, Theory and Critique, Archaevs, the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, the Chicago Review, and the Journal of Religion, as well as in edited volumes including Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (Routledge, 2009). He has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs for the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, where he has also done curatorial work.

Kyle William Bishop is a third-generation professor at Southern Utah University, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture, film studies, and fantasy literature. He has presented and published a variety of articles on popular culture and cinematic adaptation, including Night of the Living Dead, Fight Club, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawn of the Dead, The Birds, and Zombieland. He received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona in 2009, and his first book, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, is available from McFarland.

Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, has taught and published in the areas of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, post-9/11 discourse and cultural production, and contemporary continental political philosophy. In addition to numerous journal articles, Bloodsworth-Lugo is author of In-Between Bodies: Sexual Difference, Race, and Sexuality (2007). Joint books by Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo include: A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality, editors (2009); Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children, also with C. Richard King (2010); and Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship (2010).

Diem-My T. Bui is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include transnational feminist media studies, critical cultural studies, ethnic studies, popular culture, and film. She focuses on cultural production, cultural memory, and embodiments of difference in racialized and sexualized representations of Asian Americans in popular culture. She is the author of essays on Vietnamese Americans and media, authoethnography, performativity, and war discourse published in journals and edited collections.

Peter Odell Campbell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and a Graduate College INTERSECT Fellow in “Cultures of Law in Global Contexts” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Peter is completing a dissertation on judicial arguments concerning race and sexuality in U.S. constitutional law, and he teaches courses in argumentation, public policy communication, sexuality and public culture, and gender and women’s studies. Peter’s work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Michael S. Drake is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Hull, U.K. He is author of Problematics of Military Power: Government, Discipline and the Subject of Violence (Cass Routledge, 2001) and Political Sociology for a Globalizing World (Polity, 2010). He has also published on the war dead and the body politic, on the representation and contention of social identity, and on power and resistance. Work on literature includes a contribution to the forthcoming (2013) Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences (eds Drake, Jacobsen, Keohane, and Petersen).

Megan Foley is an assistant professor of Communication at Mississippi State University. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Public Advocacy from the University of Iowa in 2008. Her work interrogates the articulation among speech, violence, and justice in both classical rhetorical theory and contemporary political controversies. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Symplokē, and the Journal of Communication Studies.

Ryan Gillespie is an assistant lecturer, Ph.D. candidate, and Annenberg Fellow in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southe...

Table of contents

• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figure list
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a comprehensive monster theory in the 21st century Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui
• 1 Ontology and monstrosity Amit S. Rai
• PART ONE Monstrous identities
• 2 Heading toward the past: The Twilight vampire figure as surveillance metaphor Florian Grandena
• 3 Playing alien in post-racial times Susana Loza
• 4 Battling monsters and becoming monstrous: Human devolution in The Walking Dead Kyle W. Bishop
• 5 The Monster in the mirror: Reflecting and deflecting the mobility of gendered violence onscreen Megan Foley
• 6 Intersectionality bites: Metaphors of race and sexuality in HBO’s True Blood Peter Odell Campbell
• 7 Gendering the monster within: Biological essentialism, sexual difference, and changing symbolic functions of the monster in popular werewolf texts Rosalind Sibielski
• PART TWO Monstrous technologies
• 8 Abject posthumanism: Neoliberalism, biopolitics, and zombies Sherryl Vint
• 9 Monstrous technologies and the telepathology of everyday life Jeremy Biles
• 10 Monstrous citizenships: Coercion, submission, and the possibilities of resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas Roy Osamu Kamada
• 11 On the frontlines of the zombie war in the Congo: Digital technology, the trade in conflict minerals, and zombification Jeffrey W. Mantz
• 12 Monsters by the numbers: Controlling monstrosity in video games Jaroslav Švelch
• 13 Killing whiteness: The critical positioning of zombie walk brides in internet settings Michele White
• PART THREE Monstrous territories
• 14 Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary Michael S. Drake
• 15 The monster within: Post-9/11 narratives of threat and the U.S. shifting terrain of terror Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo
• 16 The heartland under siege: Undead in the West Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
• 17 When matter becomes an active agent: The incorporeal monstrosity of threat in Lost Enrica Picarelli
• 18 Monstrous capital: Frankenstein derivatives, financial wizards, and the spectral economy Ryan Gillespie
• 19 Domesticating the monstrous in a globalizing world Carolyn Harford
• Index
• Copyright