Monsters: Disability and Narratives of Embodiment

“Here’s what I think: the only reason I’m not ordinary 

is that no one else sees me that way.”

Wonder
RJ. Palacio

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Course Description and Outcomes

Why are monsters so ubiquitous in literature and art? How do they, and other literary villains and anti-heroes, reinforce cultural values and anxieties? Who or what are the monsters of our own cultural moment? In this seminar, we will explore the history and representation of monsters in western culture. Using J.J. Cohen's Monster Theory, as well as other texts from disability and post-colonial studies, we will examine monsters not merely as otherworldly creatures, but as figures that stand in for a wide range of "undesirables" and "others." Readings and films for this class will be drawn from the distant medieval past up to modern horror and fantasy films, and will feature the monsters said to live on the edge of the known world, mystical visionaries, sideshow freaks, hallucinatory apparitions, witches, and even a few vampires and werewolves.

In particular, this seminar will focus on the constructions of disability from the medieval period until the current day through narratives of embodiment. Within the genre of monster stories, disability is conceptualized as a material state and social state. Over time, these states are supposed to derive from God, nature, individual or community acts of will. Utilizing crip and monster theory which understands each as "cultural bodies," these premises and their subjects will be examined to determine (1) how the narratives use tropes, frames, and signs to establish certain assumptions about embodied difference, (2) what ethical problems exist within this use of cultural power, and (3) how these narratives might be resisted or changed to more ethically empower those marked as the monsters and the disabled.


Course Objectives (Reflecting SAGES Learning Outcomes)

By the end of the course you will be able to T.E.A.C.H. on a range of ethical, historical, and aesthetic subjects:

• THINK critically on the rhetorical and ethical value of cultural narratives 
• ENGAGE respectfully across perspectives alongside and opposing your own 
• ARGUE dialectically with thesis driven claims that actively engage existing debates 
• COMPOSE collaboratively using evidenced-based research and peer-review 
• HONOR differences with nuance, complexity, and sympathy

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Selections from the Reading List

Monsters and Disability is structured around J.J. Cohen's "Monster Theses" and divided into two main parts: medieval and modern narratives. The first half of the seminar will focus on disability and monstrosity as cultural bodies, beginning with "medieval monster narratives" (Mandeville's Travels, The Knight of the Cart, and Bisclavret) augmented by critical disability and transgender studies, then ending with "medieval embodiment narratives" (de Cartagena, Kempe, and Hoccleve) as informed by Arthur Frank's Wounded Storyteller. The second half of the seminar will address the ways in which culture desires disability and monstrosity even as it uses them to marginalize difference. This sections begins with "modern monster narratives" (Animal's People) and films (Beloved, New Moon, Split) that associate disability with dangerous mental illness and animality. This section and the seminar ends with "modern embodiment narratives" (Exile and Pride, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, Wonder, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) focused the movement from isolation towards liberation by youths with disabilities.

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Part 1: How to Make a Monster

“The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body”

Medieval Monster Narratives

(The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference)

J.J. Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

J. Mandeville, The Travels
R. Garland-Thompson, How We Look

C. de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart
A. Solomon, Far From the Tree, “Dwarf”

M. de France, Lais, “Bisclavret”
S. Stryker, GLQ, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”

Medieval Embodiment Narratives

(The Monster is a Harbinger of Category Crisis)

A. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 

•  “Illness as a Call for Stories” 
• “The Restitution Narrative” 
• “Chaos Narrative”
• “Quest Narrative”

T. de Cartagena, Grove of the Infirm
T. de Cartagena, Wonder at the Works of God
M. Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

T. Hoccleve, Complaint

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Part 2: How to Love a Monster

“Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire”

Modern Monster Narratives

(The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible)

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People
J. Demme (dir.), Beloved (1998)
S. Myer, Twilight: New Moon (2009)
M. Night Shyamalan, Split (2017)

Modern Embodiment Narratives

(The Monster Always Escapes)

E. Clare, Exile and Pride
M. Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
R.J. Palacio, Wonder
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

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Thinking Objects: Working with House, M.D.'s Balls

"It's his process. 
That ball saves lives"

House, M.D.

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Due to pressing engagements in the month of August,

including comprehensive exam preparation, conferences, and articles

a lot of writing has been happening but activity on the blog slowed.

I will conclude the month with a look at the processes of writing itself.

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Thinking About Objects

In 2011, I delivered a talk at a National Writing Conference entitled "Haunted Spaces: Occupying, Objects, and Orientation." During my brief remarks, I invited those present to consider one object in their writing and/or teaching space that significantly affects their process in that space. In the conversation afterwards, people came up to me with stories about clocks, computers, plants and pieces of art work that continually draw their attention without them actually attending to them. 

The various actors listed orient the space's occupants without themselves becoming present to the thought-processes of the writers, teachers and students. These spaces were effectively haunted by the invisible (unacknowledged) work of these things. Once everyone began to answer the challenge to "think about objects" they suddenly couldn't stop. Things came alive all around them. The objects turned from specters into co-occupants in the space. Objects are co-workers in the process of thinking, writing, and teaching.

All of this came to my mind, to little avail, as I stood in front of my partner's children asking if they were done playing with my special blue bouncy-ball, so I could have it back. I needed it to write. The rhythmic tossing kept my mind and body just interrupted enough to allow my thinking to jostle into other parts of my brain. It was the perfect size for throwing and catching, rolling in my hand, or balancing on my finger-tips. The girls thought so too earlier in the day when they asked to borrow it. Now they were collapsed on the couch watching Cartoon Network. Looking up from the TV, they responded with with distracted, half-conscious expressions, "What ball?" 

As I stood there looking into their enchanted four and eight year old eyes, the subtle dynamics of my object-oriented writing process was being flatlined by their frustratingly candid memory-lapse. After some jostling (helped by pausing the DVD they had been watching) they remembered the conversation with me about borrowing the ball but not what they did with it or where it might be currently. They remembered me, but not the ball. Subjects but not objects. Despite the toy's momentary allure for them hours earlier, they struggled to think about objects. 

Children are certainly not alone in misunderstanding or under-appreciating the process of writers. For some, they struggle to see intellectual labor as on par with physical or social labor. It certainly looks different. Things and people are moved or changed as a result. The heavy lifting or theatrical presentations provide visual evidence for those who judge labor based on performative signs of exhaustion. Writers and academics on the other hand can spend minutes upon hours staring at screens, books, note-pads, or off into space. Certainly the mechanical act of bouncing a ball against a wall only compounds the apparent likeness between intellectual labor and leisure.

Yet even for those who consider contemplation to be a valuable form of work, credit for the productivity will largely (if not exclusively) be given to the person over the environment. Great thinkers are held up in society like minds-in-vats without considering the critical role that the social influence of spaces and objects can have on the thought process. This is not only inattentive to the network of relations that produce intellectual laborers but potentially threatening to their quality of life. The inability to think about objects can lead to a lack of support for the material circumstances of thinkers: denying office space, cutting budgets, or taking away our balls.

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Thinking With Objects

In the 2008 season five episode of House, M.D., "Let Them Eat Cake," Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) finds his balls taken away by his Chief-of-Medicine and love-interest, Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) after a destructive hostage crisis ruins her office leaving her to share space with the man responsible for antagonizing the perpetrator. Occupying the same space intensifies their lust-fueled conflict as they get into each other's faces and thinking processes. At the height of the battle over the office and its objects, House's over-sized tennis balls become the material metaphor for House himself.

"My balls. Have you seen my balls?" shouts House, interrupting Cuddy's phone call, "the giant one and the red one?" At this point, the balls are still on the table but House is attempting to embarrass Cuddy by playing on the pun for listeners who already may be suspecting an erotic affair going on between boss and employee. While temporarily being pressured out of the space, Cuddy exits with a remark over the phone that "I had to explain [to House] that I had his balls and he is not getting them back." 

Symbolically taking House's balls, Cuddy asserts control over the doctor's masculinity, sexuality and intellectual labor by literally claiming hold of his tennis balls. While the essence of House's identity and power is supposed to be centralized in his mind (see award winning series episode, "House's Brain"), evidently the doctor's agency is more decentralized across a network of actors, including his team, his office, and his balls. By occupying a space among all three of them, Cuddy effectively claims a corner of House's mind.

Appreciating both the material and symbolic stakes of the conflict, House's best friend Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) approaches Cuddy to negotiate the release of his balls by questioning her intentions in occupying House's things over other doctors. During their exchange, Cuddy's bias against House's intellectual labor is evident. "Other doctors actually use their offices for crazy things like seeing patients," she argues, "not throwing a ball against the wall and calling it work." As Chief-of-Medicine, Cuddy understands management and the needs of social labor, as well as the physical labor of doctors who need space and tools to help their process. House's work, however, runs closer to an academic type of labor that is nonetheless material despite often being invisible.

The intellectual labor of House's balls can be visually demonstrated for the performance-oriented Cuddy by their effects. "It's his process," Wilson defends, "that ball saves lives!" Despite rarely interacting with patients, House proves himself every week to Cuddy (and the audience) by solving the puzzle of his patient's mysterious symptoms. While remaining largely unseen, House saves lives. The visible proof of invisible workings. Viewers of the show however witness the social interactions that go on behind the scenes, including differential diagnosis that brings together office space, House's team of doctors, white-boards, pranks, drugs, metaphors and balls.

By calling attention to House's process and balls, the scene effectively argues the show's thesis: while he seems to be a lone mind, Dr. House is dependent on the material agency of a community of people, places, and things. The tension between the image of the stoic, masculine doctor's interiority and the reality of his distributed power produces instances to display the frustrated desire and vulnerability that makes the character of House compelling.

Furthermore, as a longtime co-worker of House, Wilson knows how dependent his friend is on their relationship to live and work and can help Cuddy develop the emergent romantic relationship that plays out throughout season five. By demystifying House's process by breaking up the myth of the Great Man into an array of actors (moving the focus from the Man to his balls), Wilson may make him less attractive in certain respects but does so to show Cuddy possibilities for her to integrate herself into his life. He may appear to not need anyone or anything, but his balls testify against him. The great intellectual labor on which he builds himself up is not the result of him alone but include often unseen, uncited contribution of his thinking objects. 

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Thinking Objects

Like unappreciated workers on strike, the disappearance of critical thinking objects can halt intellectual labor. In the case of my blue ball, like House's in the hands of Cuddy, its absence interrupted my writing that day. While I would like to claim that the girls losing my toy did not affect my ability to think, it was a persistent distraction as I tried to compensate by throwing around other small objects from my work space (keys, etc). Thinking objects to such material actors but is dependent on them.

In my case, the protest of my missing ball caused me to break from my work and begin an extensive search. As I crawled around the house looking for my ball, my thinking was opened up for others to reveal the critical role of objects occupying a place within it, much like how at the crisis of his balls House was opened up to show all the things he contains. Coming to see the importance of material community for House, "Let Them Eat Cake" concludes with Cuddy surrendering his balls and thinking space when she leaves for her refurbished office in a moment of tenderness. Likewise, seeing my dedicated investigation for my missing object, the older of the two girls to disappeared briefly from the play room to suddenly reappear with my ball.

While the delay was frustrating, the ball's momentary invisibility served as an object lesson on the workings and workers of intellectual labor. The girls saw the material dependencies of thought, developing in them an appreciation for the writing process and got them to think about objects.

Raising awareness of the stakes of safe and helpful environments for intellectual labor one of the reasons that I am taking a break from other writing in order to compose this blog-post, sharing scenes of thought's objects, the role of thinking objects, and the objections of thought. While academics, writers, and teachers (to name a few) can be very end-product driven, often hiding the messy dependencies of our work in our offices like Dr House, by laying open our process to others we can better demonstrate that mental work has material needs of its own. This is a critical point to keep making as universities and public opinion turns against teachers, taking away the necessary tools, office-space, and financial support that allow us to do our work. 

It is not enough to let the collapse of education and departments speak for itself, because the blame will often fall on the "Great Minds" as management boards remain unaware of the critical role that of all the material components played in producing writing, thinking, and teaching. Once things are taken away, it may be too late.

To illuminate this point, I will share one more instance of my ball's absence. A couple weeks after the girls lost and found my thinking object, I was back in Chicago staying with my mother, looking around her house trying to solve its repeated disappearance. Again, my search produced no results until my mother came home and I explained to her what I was looking for and why. Suddenly her eyes dropped to the ground. "I think I might have thrown it away," she admitted. "Why?!" I exclaimed. "I was collecting random things to throw into the trash and I didn't think it was important."

In this case, as with the girls and Dr. Cuddy, my ball was again saved by people gaining appreciation for thinking objects. My mother disappeared and reappeared with the ball. Fortunately the trash had not yet been collected and it stood on top of a pile of refuse. Washing the ball off, I got back to work with it, tossing it against the wall along with my thoughts. This second instance of loss, however, was a near miss. While it is very possible to recover from a ball being thrown away, the event is emblematic of wider social needs and the attitudes that often work counter to intellectual labor. In all of these cases, it is not the under-appreciation of intellectuals or their work that poses the threat, but the danger posed to the environments that help create the critical conversations and culture that we all share.

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Click to explore more about the critical work of objects.

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Dollification: Transforming Lives with Sex & Silicone

"I am planning to become 100% silicone girl
...completely dollified."*

SiliconePleasure
(Dollification.com)

*Note: if you are a church member or search committee,
please, actually ready the scholarship and don't jump to conclusions based on visuals.
The thesis of the argument is about thinking critically and not judging on first glance.

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In 2012, I began the "Feminine Products &  Queer Objects" Project

examining a series of trans-human matters including

Estrogen, Saline, Mercury, Sugar, Heat, Music, & Bra-Straps.

Among them, Silicone received the most hits,

standing today as the 2nd most read post on this blog.

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Objectification

Dollification is an international practice of transforming a human body into a "Living Doll." Practitioners use make-up, special eye-lenses, clothes, surgery and prosthetics to modify body parts to appear more artificial. Some base their aesthetics on specific icons like Barbie or Lolita, while others model their new look on mannequins or sex dolls.

Most "dollers" are only part-time. For many, becoming a living doll is part of sex play. The prosthetics function as temporary modifications of the body. While the process of procuring and putting on silicone, rubber or latex body-suits may require a substantial investment of time and money, these are able to be removed.

The transition from human to doll is envisioned as a loss of subjectivity and self-control. While BDSM and Sub/Dom play frequently employ "objectification" as a mode of suspending the power of parters, dollers attempt to take this to a particular extreme by becoming literal non-human objects.

For those who decide to become a full-time doll, the distinction between human & non-human objects break down. The consistent use of make-up or clothing associated with dolls draws on how women, children & other human categories share (or can be forced to share) properties with objects that are regarded as inanimate, thoughtless & worthless.

People can be -- and enjoy being -- affirmed as objects, even while consent agreements, civil rights and an insistent humanism protects their subjectivity. The social responsibility to act, think and be a human subject in the world can build up a lot of tension from which tactical dollification & objectification can provide release.

Ariadne, from Dollification.com, testifies to joys of objectification, as part of power-play with sexual partners:

"The mental removal of who and what I am, no choices, no emotions, no thoughts, no conscious reactions to stimuli, nothing more than a still and silent toy for my owner to use, abuse, display and adore. Probably an extreme extension of our O/p relationship, it gives me absolute freedom from human feelings and responsibilities whilst at the same time pleasing my owner, giving him even greater control than normal and ability to increase his sadistic capacity."

It is critical that this form of objectification comes as a "removal." It presumes that the process is contingent on the powers of choice and enjoyment being established, even as they are set aside or suppressed. We can imagine that as an "extreme extension" of an Owner-Property (O/p) relation that power exchanges are contingent on the context of a  "safe, sane, and consensual" environment.

From here more people can begin to appreciate the enjoyment of coming to occupy the position of a sex-doll or mannequin. The release from normal social rules that comes with playing with a toy or facsimile rather than a fully enfrancished "human," allow for a whole range of forbidden pleasures. 

This liberation may be checked by the impossibility of ever fully escaping the human-subject position, but as the uncanny resemblance between human and living doll demonstrate, neither do we ever fully escape our object position. The joy then is not in obeying or destroying these distinctions but by playing at their shifting intersection.

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Trans-Formation

The process of becoming-object, particularly in cases where surgery & implants are employed, demonstrates the temporal essence of human beings. We are not "born this way" but transform this way. From Judith Butler (Gender Trouble) to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), scholars of the body argue that as subjects or objects, we are always "becoming" rather than merely "being." 

Discomfort with transformation (an insistence on "being" over "becoming") explains stigmas around "plastic" surgery and "artificial" or "fake" breasts. Society insists on "real" beauty, or the random lottery of properties a body was born possessing. Some liberty is given to "malformed" or "broken" bodies to help bring them into the norm, but there remains little candid public affirmation of changing bodies that already occupy a fixed place in the order of things.

At this point, if not already, we can see why "dollification" is critically engaged with Trans-politics. Access to the tools of transformation & radically new visions of what it means to be or become a thing are at stake for Dollies & Trannies alike. This is especially evident when dollification includes gender-transition.

Inaugerated Guy, from Dollification.com, narrates how becoming-object for him was linked with becoming-woman.

"I've always had a bit of a thing for cross-dressing, and finally told [my girlfriend] about it recently, this promptly encouraged her to tell me she has allways wanted to transform a boy into a sexy little dolly girl."

The trans relevance to this instance of gender transition is not as the affirmation of an eternal identity category (i.e. transgender) but the insistence of a perpetual change. He has "always had a bit of a thing for cross-dressing," meaning that what is persistent here is not the occupation of identity but the crossing. 

He is and has a "thing" here which allows for a new form of relation and identification to open up between him and his girlfriend. She "always wanted to transform a boy into a sexy little dolly girl." Like her partner, her desire is not for a fixed body but for a trans-forming body.

Several stores, like 2nd Skin, are available online for Dollification, many of which also market their wares explicitly to a variety of Trans bodies. A customer can buy just a pair of silicone breasts or else a full-body suit complete with a prosthetic vagina, ass, and face. Whether the desire is to "pass" as a born-this-way woman or else flaunt the process of objectification that comes with becoming a woman, many of the materials are the same.

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Valeria Lukyanova featured on Likes.com

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Materialization

As discussed in previous posts, silicone exists at the fraught intersection between living and non-living matter. Resembling our carbon-based flesh in many key properties, silicone allows for us to transform bodies by materializing a wider range possible forms. We can transform things with silicone in places that flesh limits us.

Silicone helps our eyes see new things (as contact lenses), feel new things (as personal lubrication), express new things (as make-up), possess new things (as breast implants), & fuck new things (as sex toys & sex dolls). We transform silicone into a variety of gendered & sexualized things, and in turn, these products change our bodies.

Stepping into a full-body silicone suit, a person becomes a living doll. The body becomes identified with the Real Doll sex dolls that they resemble. Laying totally still, a Living Doll and a Real Doll can be difficult to differentiate. Both are silicone covered bodies. Both may be passive to the actions and penetrations of others. 

Both fulfill the desire of owners to possess a silicone body that they are free to use & abuse. The Living Doll becomes so like an object so as to be treated like one and the Real Doll is so like an subject so as to be desired like one.

SiliconePleasure, at Dollification.com, describes how his desires materialize as a longing to have and be silicone:

"I am planning to become 100% silicone girl with a beautiful silicone face, tight small silicone hands with cute fingers, sweet silicone vagina, very tight silicone ass, and insert in myself some deep silicone rectum...completely dollified"

In this Doller's testimony, the beauty of a silicone face is inextricable from the material from which it is formed nor from the power of transformation it provides. The addition of a silicone vagina is "sweet" and the insertion of a silicone rectum goes "deep" into the body. Joy and identification flow together, materializing a new thing between subject and object, sex and silicone.

Dollification cannot be reduced to a desire to becoming object or to become woman. For many there is a joy in becoming a doll, becoming silicone. What on many Real Dolls or other Sex Dolls are features dictated by necessity of the material (open round lips, vacant round eyes, stiff joints, squeaky skin) becomes a critical to living as a Living Doll. Specific prosthetics and work goes into holding the human body in these positions. Silicone life is desired & valued.

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Production

Existing at this intersection of objectification, transformation, desire and silicone emerge a host of contingent lives. Meeting in bedrooms, kink parties, conventions and online Dollers are changing what it means to be human and to have a life. They produce these transformations by coming together as a community of human and non-human things. New possibilities are produced every day out of this dizzying collision of contacts, property exchanges, & shared existence.

Dollification has deepened their internal subjectivity as much as it extended their material relations. K-8 (likely a play on "Kate") blogs on her imaginative journey as she explores her "quirks, kinks and fetishes" as The Thoughts of a Conscious Object. As part of her meditations and networking, K-8 contemplates the role anxiety and depression play in her life in the kink community.

"Currently I'm not on any depression/anxiety meds (the negative side-effects just didn't seem worth it to me) and haven't been for quite some time. And I think I'm doing fairly well without them. What I've come to realize, though, is the effect that the meds have possibly had on the blog at different points.

Sometimes side-effects aren't necessarily negative, and with a few meds I've been on, I've experienced an increased libido. In fact, I think that's partly what led to me starting this blog in the first place...being asexual (or kinksexual), having an increased libido and nowhere to direct it meant increased kinky desires, and an increase in a desire to talk about those desires. In hindsight, it also likely led to some risky behavior on my part, not being as safe as I should have with some of my early experiences exploring bondage IRL."

The psycho-neurological states of anxiety and depression at once propelled her through a series of changes: to experience her body as an anxious object and then to seek meds; to move from being an asexual body to developing her kink life as a conscious object; which in turn brought her to start a blog, meet others & continue a line of thought that led her to then abandon her meds. These changes form the story & material journey of her existence. Each transformation comes at points of contingency: the meeting of thoughts & things, pasts & futures, lives & deaths.

Most recently, K-8 shared a digital eulogy for a member of the kink community that has formed around the production of things like Dollers. Matt from Kink Engineering recently passed away. The bringing together of subjects and objects into master-pieces of kink technology supported Matt's life as an engineer and connected him to a wider community of people, things, and people-things. Matt lived and died at this intersection, as the Kink Engineering Blog explained.

"Matt’s death was a direct result of prolonged neck compression from the neck gasket. The bed he chose to go in had been custom fitted to Archean, who has a much smaller neck. The baro receptors in his internal carotid arteries signaled to his body that his blood pressure was dangerously high, and this sent off a vagal response to slow the heart. Since the signal of high blood pressure could not be relieved, Matt lost consciousness and the vagal response caused his heart to stop completely.

Had there been a person to assist outside the vac bed, they would have been able to get him out at the first sign of trouble or non-responsiveness. All Matt’s safety contingency plans relied on him still being conscious enough to implement them, and thus, they were useless."

The word "contingency" here strikes at the heart. Becoming an object for pleasure required the sustenance of subjectivity; his own and/or others from the community. The result, his death, manifests at a breaking point between his body and these subjectivities. As the engineer of many transformative love objects and as a friend, he continues to act in the world but the specific life that met at the former "contingency" leaves an absence behind.

As a warning of what can happen and as a story of what does happen, Matt's death reminds us that trans-formation (subject & object, Living Doll & Real Doll, past & present, flesh & silicone) does not collapse all things into a chaos where forms have no meaning. Change comes at the crossing or spanning of boundaries, it lives at the point of contingency. Transformation exists only through community.

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Explore more silicone

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MaskOn.Com

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2nd Skin Online

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The Marquis

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