Monsters All the Way Down

Published by Monument Lab | October 31, 2020

From the essay:

The English term “monster” has roots in two Latin verbs: monstrare, to show or reveal, and monere, to warn. [I] Indeed, monstrosity’s most salient tendencies are to demonstrate societal ills and warn of their consequences, especially in times of unrest. Historically, communities have negotiated their own ethical frameworks, political allegiances, existential fears, and cultural desires through monsters. When a monster deviates from normatively privileged codes of behavior, appearance, or belief, it exposes those codes by exceeding their thresholds of tolerability. In labeling a monster, a group excludes it and steeps it in alterity, deflecting its undesired qualities away from themselves. Abusers of power weaponize monstrosity to validate acts of scapegoating, brutality, and disenfranchisement. In turn, subjugated and exploited communities monsterize their oppressors.

In recent months, monsters of all stripes have assembled themselves across a matrix of American cities, publicly voicing struggles for and against shifting vectors of power. While socioeconomic and health crises wrought by the spread of COVID-19 ballooned to catastrophically untold levels and inhibited public gatherings, massive collective uprisings altered shared landscapes, reclaiming civic spaces and dismantling monuments across the country in demands for an end to the deadly structural effects of white supremacy. The intertwining of these conditions within US systems of economic inequity stoked impassioned calls for justice through comprehensive institutional overhaul. Amidst this tumult, age-old questions of how monstrosity inheres in public life emerged anew, demonstrating deeply rooted patterns of violence and warning of their continued repercussions.

[I] Timothy Beal, Religion and its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6-7.

Still from Night of the Living Dead, 1968