The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

poles of Ms. Windsor and Laing abjures traditional or simple feminist readings. Instead, the neo-archetypes of the women in the wake of Laingand Ms. Windsor’s tension create a more nuanced and complex view of womanhood.Love (or Not) in Androgynous Spaces: Binaries and Identities in “Day Million,” “Closer,” and “Androgynous”Mary LongFlorida Atlantic UniversityStrict binary systems don’t just maintain the separation between mind/body, male/female, and natural/technical; strict binaries confuse theprocess of identity construction because identities are more complex than opposing sets of 1s and 0s or XXs and XYs. Identities are asperformative as Judith Butler says gender is. ln “Closer,” by Greg Egan, and “Day Million,” by Frederik Pohl, strict binaries reinforce traditionalmale/female performances, even though some traditional boundary lines have been blurred. In the song “Androgynous,” by TheReplacements, androgyny is positioned as a space to refute the male/female binary. Out of these works, the most successful relationship is theone based on symbiotic identity constructions that work together to challenge an oppressive dominant binary system. Using gender theory byJudith Butler and touching on transgender findings by Dr. Az Hakeem, the relationships between: Sian and Michael of “Closer”; Don and Doraof “Day Million”; and Dick and Jane of “Androgynous” can be analyzed in lieu of their attempts at deconstructing gender binaries andconstructing relationships based on non-traditional gender identities. Androgyny, while not a perfect solution to a binary gender system, offersa way to play with identity and reorder potentially limiting relationship roles. In “Day Million” and “Closer,” couples are offered technologicalinnovations that allow extremely androgynous behavior; however, this behavior is not necessarily successful in refuting binary coercion due tothe relocation of gender from body to mind in each work. Ultimately, the kinds of repetitions enacted in a song like “Androgynous” and theexploration of the short-comings of gender reconfigurations that are located in body only like those in “Closer” and “Day Million” add to theways in which we see how binary gender systems can negatively impact identity and relationship constructions.11. (FTV) Posthumanism and Monstrosity PalmChair: Susan A, GeorgeUniversity of California, MercedIt's Not the Monsters Who Scare Us Anymore: Stitching and Cutting to Posthumanism in Martyrs and The Human Centipede (First Sequence)Tiffany FrostFlorida Atlantic UniversityThe incorporation of medical discourse into horror films often functions to relocate healing, sickness, and death to a space that is subverted tofocus on mutilating, infecting, and playing with the borders of human and nonhuman existence. In two popular horror films, Tom Six’s TheHuman Centipede and Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, the lead characters are subjected to surgical mutilation by a character who has the culturalpower and physical environment to create a living experiment as a testament to humanity’s intelligence and possible metaphysicaltranscendence. In both films, the objects of vivisection are young people who appear as relatively average. One way to approach the monstrousHuman Centipede that is made by sewing three bodies together and connecting the mouth to the anus of the person in front of them would beto dismiss this film as unnecessarily violent, gratuitous, and, thus, filth. And one way to consider a film like Martyrs might be to engage in howdemeaning the film is to the female human body. Another avenue that is worth exploring is how coprophagia, physical torture, and thesubversion of medical procedures are situated in these films as tools of the ideology of monstrous humanism that has been so vehementlychallenged by the scholarship of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe. This essay considers how these films negotiate the bordersof humanity, animality, and monstrosity by the silencing of the human voice, the consumption of feces, victim suicide, and the distortion ofnonhuman animal voices and bodies within the scope of posthumanism.You're So Cute, You Could Just Eat Me Up: Cuteness, Monstrosity and Posthuman SubjectivityAaron KashtanGeorgia TechThis paper examines the parallel operation of cuteness and monstrosity in contemporary American and Japanese popular culture, using HayaoMiyazai's My Neighbor Totoro (1989) and Spirited Away (2001) and Pete Docter's Monsters, Inc. as case studies. For Sianne Ngai, the cute objectevokes destructive impulses: “the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer's sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as hisor her desire to cuddle.” This suggests that monsters can't be cute (their threatening, destructive impulses are directed toward us rather thanvice versa) and that cute objects can't be monstrous (they lack the necessary threateningness). Yet Ngai observes that “it is possible for cuteobjects to look helpless and aggressive at the same time.” Conversely, cute creatures labeled as monsters appear with surprising frequency inpopular culture. In this paper I attempt a preliminary explanation of these paradoxes by observing that cute things and monsters both occupy aposition of alterity relative to the human subject. The cute object affects us by its position of inferiority and vulnerability relative to ourselves;the more an object resembles the adult, rational human subject, the less cute it gets. Similarly, the monster affects us by its difference from thehuman. The figure of the cute monster is therefore a natural combination of two categories that are defined by their disturbing difference fromthe human. This makes the cute monster an intriguing figure for the posthuman subject – that which we recognize as having subjectiveinteriority, but which we cannot reduce to a human subject position. While Pixar's film tries to defuse the subversive potential of the cutemonster, Miyazaki's films embrace the power of the cute monster to question the traditional understanding of the human as the privilegedform of subjectivity.