Monster Culture in
the 21st Century
A Reader
Edited by Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui
To Dmitry, Alia, and Paul â our favorite monsters
Contents
Figure list
About the contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a comprehensive monster theory in the 21st century
Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui
1 Ontology and monstrosity
Amit S. Rai
PART ONE Monstrous identities
2 Heading toward the past: The Twilight vampire figure as surveillance metaphor
Florian Grandena
3 Playing alien in post-racial times
Susana Loza
4 Battling monsters and becoming monstrous: Human devolution in The Walking Dead
Kyle W. Bishop
5 The Monster in the mirror: Reflecting and deflecting the mobility of gendered violence onscreen
Megan Foley
6 Intersectionality bites: Metaphors of race and sexuality in HBOâs True Blood
Peter Odell Campbell
7 Gendering the monster within: Biological essentialism, sexual difference, and changing symbolic functions of the monster in popular werewolf texts
Rosalind Sibielski
PART TWO Monstrous technologies
8 Abject posthumanism: Neoliberalism, biopolitics, and zombies
Sherryl Vint
9 Monstrous technologies and the telepathology of everyday life
Jeremy Biles
10 Monstrous citizenships: Coercion, submission, and the possibilities of resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas
Roy Osamu Kamada
11 On the frontlines of the zombie war in the Congo: Digital technology, the trade in conflict minerals, and zombification
Jeffrey W. Mantz
12 Monsters by the numbers: Controlling monstrosity in video games
Jaroslav Ĺ velch
13 Killing whiteness: The critical positioning of zombie walk brides in internet settings
Michele White
PART THREE Monstrous territories
14 Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary
Michael S. Drake
15 The monster within: Post-9/11 narratives of threat and the U.S. shifting terrain of terror
Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo
16 The heartland under siege: Undead in the West
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
17 When matter becomes an active agent: The incorporeal monstrosity of threat in Lost
Enrica Picarelli
18 Monstrous capital: Frankenstein derivatives, financial wizards, and the spectral economy
Ryan Gillespie
19 Domesticating the monstrous in a globalizing world
Carolyn Harford
Index
Figure list
12.1 Shooting necromorphs in Dead Space 2. Š 2011 Electronic Arts, Inc.
13.1 â brian cameron â, âFrizzy-haired Zombie Bride.â
13.2 vanBuuren, âkiss the bride.â
13.3 ian, âKissing Zombie Brides.â
13.4 halfgeek, âMr. & Mrs Zombie.â
13.5 sebastien.barre, âZombie Walk â Saratoga Springs, NY â 07, Sep â 30.â
16.1 The quintessential Western saloon, as illustrated in It Came From the West.
16.2 Billy Drago as the menacing Sheriff Drake in Seven Mummies.
16.3 The zombie lawman from Undead or Aliveâleading citizen in a community made up entirely of the undead.
About the
contributors
Jeremy Biles holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (Fordham University Press, 2007). He teaches courses on religion, philosophy, and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has appeared in such places as Culture, Theory and Critique, Archaevs, the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, the Chicago Review, and the Journal of Religion, as well as in edited volumes including Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (Routledge, 2009). He has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs for the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, where he has also done curatorial work.
Kyle William Bishop is a third-generation professor at Southern Utah University, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture, film studies, and fantasy literature. He has presented and published a variety of articles on popular culture and cinematic adaptation, including Night of the Living Dead, Fight Club, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawn of the Dead, The Birds, and Zombieland. He received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona in 2009, and his first book, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, is available from McFarland.
Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, has taught and published in the areas of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, post-9/11 discourse and cultural production, and contemporary continental political philosophy. In addition to numerous journal articles, Bloodsworth-Lugo is author of In-Between Bodies: Sexual Difference, Race, and Sexuality (2007). Joint books by Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo include: A New Kind of Containment: âThe War on Terror,â Race, and Sexuality, editors (2009); Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children, also with C. Richard King (2010); and Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship (2010).
Diem-My T. Bui is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include transnational feminist media studies, critical cultural studies, ethnic studies, popular culture, and film. She focuses on cultural production, cultural memory, and embodiments of difference in racialized and sexualized representations of Asian Americans in popular culture. She is the author of essays on Vietnamese Americans and media, authoethnography, performativity, and war discourse published in journals and edited collections.
Peter Odell Campbell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and a Graduate College INTERSECT Fellow in âCultures of Law in Global Contextsâ at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Peter is completing a dissertation on judicial arguments concerning race and sexuality in U.S. constitutional law, and he teaches courses in argumentation, public policy communication, sexuality and public culture, and gender and womenâs studies. Peterâs work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Michael S. Drake is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Hull, U.K. He is author of Problematics of Military Power: Government, Discipline and the Subject of Violence (Cass Routledge, 2001) and Political Sociology for a Globalizing World (Polity, 2010). He has also published on the war dead and the body politic, on the representation and contention of social identity, and on power and resistance. Work on literature includes a contribution to the forthcoming (2013) Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences (eds Drake, Jacobsen, Keohane, and Petersen).
Megan Foley is an assistant professor of Communication at Mississippi State University. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Public Advocacy from the University of Iowa in 2008. Her work interrogates the articulation among speech, violence, and justice in both classical rhetorical theory and contemporary political controversies. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Philosophy & Rhetoric, SymplokÄ, and the Journal of Communication Studies.
Ryan Gillespie is an assistant lecturer, Ph.D. candidate, and Annenberg Fellow in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southe...