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8 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
(as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have characterized this vision
of masculinity) has competed with imagery of the ‘beast within’ in
Western characterizations of masculinity, and in such contexts the
werewolf has often been positioned as a source of positive identification
that recognizes the connections between manhood and primal nature.
Western masculinity is thus marked by the careful policing of the
boundaries between nature and culture, a project that the werewolf
has been well positioned to represent.
As Chapter 5 explores, feminists have also experimented with the
revaluing or ‘valorization’ of the feminine, nature, the unconscious,
and other categories that have constituted the negative, ‘othered’ poles
of key oppositions. In keeping with feminist critiques (following de
Beauvoir) of the ways in which women have been excluded from ‘universal’
subjectivity, such an approach envisions a more inclusive understanding
of selfhood, one that is less reliant on the construction of ‘self’
through the exclusion of ‘others’. Fiction about female werewolves,
especially by authors sympathetic to feminism, has exemplified this
process, by celebrating lycanthropy as an ability that enriches rather
than undermines the conscious experience of reasoning subjectivity.
In such texts, the access to nature, embodiment and the unconscious
that emerges through lycanthropy is configured as a powerful resource
for self-development. Ultimately, however, such representations have
not posed a challenge to dualistic subjectivity, because, despite the
revaluation of certain poles, they reiterate the oppositional logic that
has structured Western thought since the Enlightenment.
Postmodernist (and especially postmodernist feminist) approaches
to subjectivity have pursued the speculative dimension of such work
by seeking to theorize alternative or ‘better’ ways of being, but have
also sought to avoid the modernist recapitulation of oppositional frameworks.
Donna Haraway’s celebration of the ‘hybrid’ subjectivity of the
cyborg has been highly influential in this regard, and has led to the
celebration of monsters and cyborgs as examples of subjects who refuse
to be constrained by the limitations imposed upon and by the dualistic
modernist self. This focus has led to extensive critical engagement with
the genres of horror and science fiction, which have been scoured for