The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

Kaspar J. SaxenaIndependent ScholarThis paper addresses questions about the fundamental differences and similarities between mythical creatures and monsters; how do they theyoriginate and what subsequent roles they play in different historical moments? Anyone who has set out to make a serious study of mythicalcreatures and monsters is bound to find themselves eventually caught up in the underbrush of their meanings, in time, geography, disciplineand context. There are key problems, questions and principles arising when building taxonomies of mythical creatures and monsters whileaddressing multiple paradigms, including traditional, colonial, social, scientific and popular culture frameworks. Although discussing theseframeworks systematically would obviously be beyond the scope of this paper, I will be using a variety of frameworks to approach thesetaxonomies dynamically to discuss specific principles. I am developing core theories, concepts or principles that have assisted me my ownnavigation and research between these paradigms, and I believe would be of help to others who might be trying to make sense of thesecreatures. Using an image-based approach, I will be using several examples of mythical creatures and monsters in time, place and culture thatfocus on origination, meaning and changes in meaning in different contexts to illustrate the discussion.38. (F) Monstrous Sexuality Captiva BChair: Veronica SchanoesQueens College – CUNYFrom Rape to Metamorphosis: The Paranormal Evolution of a Romance TropeJessica JerniganCentral Michigan UniversityFor more than two decades starting in the 1970s, the rape of a virginal heroine was a standard component of the historical romance genre. Thehuge success of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower—a novel that reinvented the romance genre with its graphic eroticism—demonstrated that romance fans of the late twentieth century were ready and eager for love stories shot through with rough, explicit sex, butneither publishers nor writers expected readers to react sympathetically to sluts. Rape solved that problem, in that it allowed the femaleprotagonist to succumb to sex without any suggestion of wantonness. Readers approaching the genre from the outside, however, havesuggested that, while rape-as-a-plot device might solve one problem, it raises a host of other issues, and romance fans themselves have grownweary—if not disgusted—with this trope. Romance has evolved—albeit slowly. Rape has all but disappeared, and heroines with sexual historieshave become an unremarkable feature of the genre. However, author Lilith Saintcrow has made the intriguing suggestion that the narrativedynamic of rape has reappeared in the paranormal subgenre as involuntary transformation—such as when a vampire turns his victim with abite. I touched on Saintcrow’s idea in a recently published article on the selkie novels of Virginia Kantra, but I feel that this concept meritsfurther, more sustained investigation. Using Saintcrow’s thoughts on unwilling transformation as a starting point, I would like to take a closelook at how Kantra uses sex and shapeshifting in three of her novels: Sea Lord, Sea Fever, and Forgotten Sea. I would examine how Kantraadopts and adapts the evolving tropes of romance, and I would also consider the—in my opinion, very sophisticated—relationship betweenKantra’s selkie novels and the folklore that gives them their distinctive shape. Like the paper I presented at last year’s meeting, this essayshould be of interest to scholars who study folklore and the fantastic in popular culture, as well as students of genre studies.Troubling Feminism: Monstrous Desire for the Monster in Romantic FantasyRobert von der OstenFerris State UniversityFeminism faces troubling times. As Kathleen Rowe Karlyn points out, the discourses of feminism today are being re-written across mediaculture. McRobbie, Levy, Tasker, Negra and others argue that much popular culture presents a form of postfeminism that construes the earlygoals of feminism for career opportunity and equality as having been principally achieved and reconstructs female liberation in terms ofconsumer individualism. The other feminist discourses critiquing an entire value system are marginalized. Feminist struggle becomes absorbedinto a neoliberalism which places its emphasis on the power of the individual in the market place rather than in a sustained community basedideological struggle. Tasker and Negra even argue that “the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist politicsfrom the popular, even as aspects of feminism seem to be incorporated within the culture.” Instead, of seeing feminism as being the politicalmovement that promotes future female advancement and cultural transformation, achievement becomes based on “female individualism”(.McRobbie). Central to the generational problem of feminism are many key struggles. One Projansky identifies is the perceived conflictbetween feminism and femininity, explored in variations of girl power. Another tension Ariel Levy describes “explores the formulaic femalesexualities of a culture in which (most often young) women enthusiastically perform patriarchal stereotypes of sexual servility in the name ofempowerment,” as in strip tease aerobics, an activity that split my campus into fierce generational camps. These shifts are tied to a presumedmove away from second wave feminisms potentially generalization of “being a woman,” already critiqued by Judith Butler and others, and sopart of a community struggle, to an emphasis on individual life style choices; as McRobbie puts it, a shift from “we to she,” that also attempts toreclaim traditional markers of femininity and heterosexuality in a range of lifestyle choices, while negotiating the anxieties latent in the feministposition for young women. Within the context of this struggle, it is important to consider the extensive and burgeoning literature that I wouldcall Romantic Fantasy by writers such as Patricia Briggs, Illona Andrews, Faith Hunter, Michelle Sagara and others. These are works, especiallythe works of Briggs, Andrews, and Hunter, that focus on independent and powerful women who act violently for sanctioned reasons againstdeadly enemies but who also struggle with desires, marked as problematic and even monstrous, for men who are physically “monsters” andwho enact what can only be seen from a second wave feminist point of view as a monstrous patriarchy. As Radway had pointed out, even intraditional romances the “love story” was always about patriarchy. The drive of these works is for a resolution of these conflicts in sexualgratification and marriage or mating that negotiates the complex spaces of feminist and postfeminist discourses. These works seem consistentwith the traditional gothic romances explored by Radway which also focused on independent women who struggled in morally ambiguoussituations until they achieve heteronormative, patriachial sexual gratification. However, we should also, with Radway, avoid so quickly