The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

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Upright citizens on all fours
In recent times, the Gothic has been read primarily as a discourse
about identity and/or subjectivity, a reading that has emerged from a
theoretical focus on the ways in which the Self is constructed through
processes of ‘Othering’. Such theoretical work has represented a convergence
of Enlightenment and romantic concerns; on the one hand,
the focus on identity formation maintains an Enlightenment emphasis
upon the individual’s relationship to society and community; and on
the other, the focus on subject formation perpetuates the romantic emphasis
on inner experience. Within this body of scholarship, however,
the sociological category of ‘identity’ and the psychological category
of ‘subjectivity’ are frequently conflated, a circumstance which makes
it difficult to ascertain how the two categories are related.
The werewolf is uniquely positioned to describe and clarify this
relationship, because it is implicated in processes of identity formation
and subject formation. In the first place, like other Gothic monsters,
the werewolf has been thoroughly constructed as an alien ‘other’ threatening
the social body; the negative of a normalized social identity.
As Judith Halberstam puts it, ‘the Gothic monster represents many
answers to the question of who must be removed from the community at