a feminism of the monstrous

[sqbr]

Following on from my post about monster women and again via the_school_of_philosophy: the seam of skin and scales, in which a trans woman refuses to be see her body as a trap.

She doesn't mention disability explicitly, but almost everything she says rang very true for me, and trans people and disabled people are both very much left on the outskirts of white-young-feminist ideas about "loving your body". (In different ways of course, and I don't mean to flatten out the differences, especially since my disabilities are frequently invisible)

I am having a very interesting discussion with capriuni on a post she made about disability and monstrousness, and realised it may not be entirely a coincidence that I felt like drawing monster girls shortly after starting to go out more in my wheelchair and having to deal with the way that makes people look at me (and the way it makes me look at myself).

Comments

[yalovetz]

Slightly different from what you're talking about here, and you may have seen it already, but there's a post here on disability and sexuality. Some of the discussion touches on points of intersection between queerness and disability, which I found interesting.

[shehasathree]

I've been interested to note the Critical Disability Studies critique of this post/blog.

[sqbr]

Yes? What does it say?

[shehasathree]

I *love* that post.

[jesse_the_k]

I don't want to flatten the differences neither, but some of the trans people I've met are "invisibly" different as well: until they decide to explain how their gender is atypical, there's no evidence.

(I'm chuffed you & capri0mni have shared thoughts, because I'm mind-zero about monsters (don't know anything at all). Y'all figure it out and explain to me :,)

[sqbr]

Hmm. I was going to say "but they know" but I guess if they've had surgery etc they really can fit the typical expectations of physical appearance for their gender reasonably well. Though there's that knowledge that if people knew they were trans they would get looked at funny, which I don't have to deal with. Still, good point.

[kaz]

Ooh, thank you! I'd seen that post before and was amazed and promptly lost the link, but I read it before I started questioning my gender so it's more powerful on reread.

And, yeah, I get sooo frustrated about white-young-feminist "loving your body" stuff. Mostly on other people's behalfs, but I'm nonbinary and relations between me and certain bits and pieces are kind of fraught.

[sqbr]

Yeah it excludes a lot of people :/

[capri0mni]

I've been meaning to share this link with you, but I keep getting distracted...

Anyway back in March, spiralsheep sent me a link to a recently-written Master's thesis Google-cached on the Web (This is a TinyUrl version of the link): When a Knight Meets a Dragon Maiden: Human Identity and the Monstrous Animal Other ("dragon maiden" is a human woman -- often a princess -- trapped in a dragon's body by an evil spell... most often, she will either become fully human [happy ending] or fully dragon [tragic ending] by the conclusion).

http://tinyurl.com/knight-meets-dragonmaiden

I've not read the whole thing, yet... But I've read the beginning, and skimmed the contents for the rest. And even though the author does not make one conscious mention of Disability as a theme,* everything she does say about the Medieval Chivalric literature is similar to what I've read in Disability-Centered Lit-crit., especially in how the role of the monster in these stories is to reveal the true nature and honor of the Human hero (switch out "Disabled" and "Able-bodied" and there you go). What I found interesting is that one sign that the dragon is really a princess under a spell is that the dragon will still have human eyes and/or lips -- two of the hyper-gendered features in modern art... some 1,200+ years later. *sigh*

Also, early in her Introduction, she lists the twelve different categories of monster as codified by Isidore of Seville (seventh century archbishop of Spain); He listed "Hermaphrodites" as category #11...

*She is examining the intersections Monster Theory (a branch of literary/art criticism) and Animal Theory (a branch of Ethics)

[sqbr]

Ah, that is quite interesting, thanks! I didn't manage to read it all either but what I did read was interesting :)