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

A MANIFESTO FOR WEREWOLVES
In such contexts, the extent to which a story sympathizes with the
werewolf’s point of view has become a point of reference for lycanthropy
enthusiasts, as evidenced by several entries in Focus on Lycanthropy, a
comprehensive website bibliography of werewolf stories and other tales
of transformation. The site’s review of Stephen Jones’s compilation The
Mammoth Book of Werewolves (1994), for example, states: ‘Not a lot
of stories told from the werewolf point of view, but still worth seeking
out.’ 10 The implication here is that stories which facilitate identification
with the werewolf are preferable. Since the early 1990s, role-playing
games which require participants to adopt the persona of a vampire,
werewolf or other such entity have furthered the possibilities for positive
identification with Gothic monsters. 11 New communications technologies
that allow users unprecedented freedom in the construction
of their own subjectivities have also encouraged this trend; the usenet
newsgroup alt.horror.werewolves, for example, was set up in 1992 to
facilitate the discussion of horror films and books about werewolves,
but quickly attracted a number of individuals claiming to be werewolves
and other kinds of shape-changers. 12 Such identifications have
proliferated on the web, as exemplified in more recent contexts such
as the ‘Anonymous Werewolf’ blog, which documents the ‘Musings
and Rantings of a Fun Loving College Girl Afflicted with the Curse of
Lycanthropy’, who has ‘an unfortunate habit of turning into a werewolf
and occasionally devouring human flesh’. 13
A widespread identification with hybrid icons such as the cyborg
and the werewolf has become a hallmark of postmodernity; as Haraway
herself noted over a decade after the publication of her ‘Manifesto’,
‘Cross-overs, mixing, and boundary transgressions are a favorite theme
of late-twentieth-century commentators in the United States.’ 14 Certainly,
it has become common practice among theorists to appropriate
figures from genre fiction in order to explore alternative models of
selfhood. Yet, although the genres of horror and science fiction are
regularly featured in this discursive project, representations derived
from fantasy, the ‘other’ genre of speculative fiction, are conspicuously
absent. This is in spite of the fact that, as an appraisal of literature
featuring the figure of the werewolf can amply demonstrate, fantasy
133