Monsters Are Coming — Locust Review

The following editorial was published in Locust Review #10 and written in the spring and early summer (2023).

IN 1751, the Murder Act was passed in England, mandating that convicted murderers be not just hanged, but “anatomized.” After the sentence was carried out and the (frequently public) hanging was over, the corpse of the condemned was to be handed over to the anatomists, the medical students and professors who were always in need of human bodies to dissect. There are accounts of riots after executions, sometimes initiated by the friends and families of the condemned as they attempted to spare their loved ones this last indignity.

Still, the demand for corpses on the part of medical schools exceeded what the executioner was able to provide. Grave-robbing thrived. Eventually, in 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, declaring that the unclaimed bodies of the poor would be available to these medical schools.

Monstrous episodes of course, but then, it is impossible to tell a history of capitalism without the figure of the monster, without monstrous acts and the promise of monstrosity. The provision of dead poor people for the anatomists was impossible without a vast array of living poor people, dispossessed of land in the enclosures of the 1600s (and after) and thrust into workshops. Thus did capitalism come into being in the first place. Not for nothing is The Communist Manifesto, along with much of the writings of Marx and Engels, riddled with fantastic gothic imagery of creatures sucking the individual and society dry. This is a system that only grows stronger by nurturing humanity’s most grotesque instincts, twisting the body and mind into something unrecognizable.

And yet, the figure of the monster, monstrosity, the process of monstering, are polysemic. They can and are directed every which way, depending on the standpoint and balance of forces. It is easy, even cathartic, to call the rich bloodsuckers whose sense of human connection has all been but obliterated by countless acts of cruelty and equivocation. Just as easy for them to turn the label around, to slap the label onto society’s most vulnerable, to turn the most victimized among us into the depraved horde ready to barrel through the windows of polite suburbia. Is the fight for a post-capitalist world, for a more democratic and egalitarian order, a fight to slay the monsters or redeem those capitalism has made monstrous? Is it both? Neither?

Perhaps then, much like all life real and imagined under capitalism and like the corpse of the condemned, the monster is a site of contestation. As David McNally chronicles in his book Monsters of the Market, Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley was known to have witnessed these kinds of post-gallows contests from her window, adding another dimension to her creation of her great work of gothic fiction, Frankenstein.

To make Victor Frankenstein in this story a grave-robber, to portray him digging up dead bodies to stitch together and use in his experiment was, says McNally, deliberate on Shelley’s part. It sent a signal to her readers that Frankenstein was the most amoral of men, disrespecting both life and death, the very markers of existence, for the sake of his own accomplishment.

In turn, to make Frankenstein’s creature a being crudely cobbled together from different humans, broken, sensitive, intelligent, ugly, and thrown into an existence he didn’t ask for; this signals to us another truth of life under capitalism, essential to the system from its inception. That it rips us apart, tears the ground out from under us, steals place and time and identity from us, destroys us physically and psychically, only to thrust us back together in the collective demand that we be made whole yet again. This shared consciousness is by no means inevitable, but it is as much a promise as it is a threat. Across the divisions of place and background as well as socialization and history, revenge and redemption might be possible.

And so, we have decided that the editorial for this issue of Locust Review, dedicated as it is to the monster, will be stitched together, creature-like. Herein you’ll find many different approaches to the monster, to monstrosity, to monstering, many different viewpoints, all nonetheless under-girded by the sincere belief and hope for a radically different world. We hope that you recognize yourself in them.

“TO THE monsters, we are the monsters.” — Station Eleven miniseries (based on the Emily St. John Mandel novel of the same name)

The above quote underlines the contested nature of the monstrous. It recognizes a kind of dialectic, contradiction, and movement. But this can be presented in a (falsely) naturalizing way. In the miniseries version of Station Eleven, the young Kirstin applies this logic to her and Jeevan’s war with wolves in the post-pandemic winter. To the wolves, she and Jeevan are the monsters. To them, the wolves are monsters. But monsters are not “natural.” Monsters must be constructed (or at least summoned) by human beings. Naturalizing the monstrous is a concession to capital. The owl is not really a monster — even to the mice that are its prey. To think that the social predators that rule our society are “natural” is to give them essentializing cover. To be a monster is to be made a monster by human minds and hands. Even Grendel — of Beowulf fame — was arguably made by human hands (at least in part).

Medusa, of classical lore, was cursed to be a hideous monster by a jealous Athena, it is the viewing of her by others that fulfills her monstrous potential. Turning to stone upon eying her face, the observer participates in and perpetuates the curse leveled by a powerful entity. Rather than seeing Medusa as a victim, she is accepted as the projection of a monster — layered over her identity — with the power to petrify. Metaphorically, one wonders if even the possibility of empathy, instead of terror, could refuse the ossifying hex and resultant fulfillment of Athena’s scheme.

Given that ideological apparatuses are largely in the hands of our class enemies, it is usually the proletarian and subaltern who are presented as monsters.

Human beings invent (often unconsciously) the monstrous as an uncanny fusion of commonality and threat/difference. The ruling-class fears the working-class in part because we are like them. We remind them with our very existence that they are artificial, banal, and historically unnecessary. But, because we are “beneath” them, we must be othered. Our “inferior” but threatening existence must be explained in essentialist terms. For example, the worker might be “white,” but they are also “trash.” This dynamic is multiplied all the more for the foreign-born, the queer, the Black, the lower caste. See, for example, old Hollywood’s idea of the native raiding party or voodoo priest.

The bourgeoisie projects one kind of monster onto the working-class (perhaps something like the zombie). The working-class projects another sort of monster onto the bourgeois (perhaps something like the vampire). Of course, because consciousness is itself mixed, constructed monsters are contradictory within themselves (sometimes contradicting their class and social origins). The pig is associated with both ruling-class disdain for the rural poor and Emory Douglas’ anti-racist expressionist agit-prop. We call the cops “bastards” — because of the colloquial implications of the word. But “bastard” is, in its origins, a thoroughly patriarchal and ruling-class term, alien to much working-class life, concerned with bourgeois lineage. Genetic bloodlines are, from a class-conscious point of view, mostly irrelevant beyond protecting mental and physical health. Such contested meanings are further complicated by the varied geographies and histories within globalized capitalism. Their monsters are one thing here, another thing there. Our monsters are one thing here, another thing there, etc.

The Bolsheviks of 1917 were, to the global capitalist class, monsters. They were presented as such; as bearded brigands that threatened civilization itself: “foul baboonery” to be strangled in its crib, according to Churchill. Or, as a kind of evil (often Semitic) octopus entangling the world. But to us, the political descendants of the Bolsheviks, the greatest monsters are the colonizing exterminists and fascism, Klansmen, Black Hundreds, Nazis. The colloquial everyday understanding of the monstrous has come to include the enactment of unspeakable deeds. But what is unspeakable to one class or group is axiomatic to another. As the midnight of the 21st century looms, disentangling our monsters and theirs is a first step.

The monsters are coming. The Eldritch gods of the 20th century — fascism and socialism —struggle to be reborn. How do we, as propagandists, artists, and organizers defend (and solidarize with) our monsters while attacking theirs?

AS NOTED, monsters are fantastic inversions of the normative. Monsters shift over time, as what is considered “normal” shifts. Of course, “normal” is also constructed. The normative reflects, most of all, ruling-class ideology. This is not, however, static and unchanging. Nor is it uncontested. What is normal, and therefore deviant, evolves geographically, over time, across nations, across economic modes of production — in antiquity, in slave empires, in feudalism, in capitalism. What is monstrous is contested between labor and capital, by caste, race, gender identity, and more. There are the ruling-class monsters, our monsters, and polysemic monsters that are both at once.

Judith Miller discusses Frankenstein’s monster in terms of gender and monstrosity. The “natural”— as intimated — is a social invention itself, a normative category. Monsters can live at the edge of the gender binary, blurring categories. As Julia Miele Rodas, Lennard Davis, and others have noted, disability and the monstrous have been bound together in modern western culture. Categories are summoned and people are forced into them. People who resist this clean separation become monsters.

In The Island of Dr. Moreau by HG Wells, horror is communicated by the existence of chimeric beast-men created by the scientist. It is a crude and racist anti-colonial allegory (at one level), similar to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But, like Shelley’s monster, the hybrids created on the island become object-revenge. They turn on their creators, if only in the assertion of their own subjectivity. Frankenstein’s monster discovers Dr. Frankenstein’s journals. Through reading and literature he becomes an agent of his own self. Susan Stryker argues, “I too, have discovered the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures like me since the 1930s” — referring to trans persons in particular.

While bourgeois ideology forces things and people into fixed categories, the political economy of capitalism continually puts things into contingent flux. Capitalism evokes the sentimentality of the “family” — in order to reproduce both capital and labor through social reproduction — while shredding the constituent parts of the “family” through fostered greed, immiseration, and privation.

Nature, as such, does not exist. The social construction, “nature,” as Stryker argues “exerts… hegemonic oppression.” Crude oppression often evokes “nature.” The American far-right chortles about (scientifically inaccurate) genitals. As the joke goes: They have only the one “joke.” They do not need science or literature to become themselves. Their subjectivity is bound up in the denial of our subjectivity, evoking a false “natural” as the measure of humans. Indeed, what we now call nature was always a product of human intervention — along with the interventions of other animals, insects, plants, and epigenetic expressions. Nature and culture are both equally shaped by activity. “Nature” is actually filled with hybrids, changes, and blurred lines. “My androgyny fucks with their imagined able-bodiedness,” Stryker writes, “I impair their ability to categorize me.” And only what is categorizable can be sold (by liberalism) or eradicated (by fascism).

Bojana Kunst notes the story of two doctors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — Realdo Colombo and Jean Riolan. Both wrote about intersex patients — whom they called hermaphrodites. The former believed the subjects were “most miraculous of human anatomical specimens because they combined the feminine and masculine in a single body.” Colombo praised “their complexity and originality, their ontological exclusiveness and saw them as examples of nature’s creativity.” The latter, however, thought “hermaphrodites to be not only disgusting, but unworthy of serious scientific attention.” Riolan saw a transgression of nature. Colombo saw nature’s brilliance.

“Nature” itself shifts between normalcy and threat depending. “Nature” is cited by bigots against trans and queer persons, but denied by some racists in the demonization of Black persons (because there are no real biological or genetic differences between races). “Nature” is often considered a hostile threat to be conquered in the colonial-settler mind. In a strategy of “solidarity” with proletarian monsters, then, one cannot simply attack or defend “nature” (the abstraction). What is considered monstrous by the ruling-class is provisional. Our solidarity must respond to this flux. We are a thousand different monsters. We leave no monsters behind.

For example, the poor working-class (in the US) was considered disproportionately queer and sexually indiscriminate until the 1970s, after which it became, in the bourgeois mind, both bigoted and sexually indiscriminate. The actual ideas, attitudes, and practices of those in question were of little concern.

The construction of the monstrous is an act of both categorization and denial. Kunst locates a creation of the monstrous in the baroque. The early baroque saw museums of curiosity. What was mostly invisible became visible. It was then re-invisibilized (see the story of the two aforementioned doctors). For a normative bourgeoisie, the monster must first appear and then disappear. First, early psychiatry invented the category “homosexual.” It then disappeared the “homosexual” into closets, prisons, and insane asylums. Conversely, the creation of the category “homosexual,” created the norm of heterosexual. And so on.

As Kunst notes, the monstrous is “generative” for capital. “[I]t’s enormous creative potential, its potentiality to reproduce and mutate, to create different forms of life, different perceptions and understandings of life,” feeds a dominant culture without substance. But the monstrous is still othered and demonized. “On one side it is separated from life itself and given to the laboratories,” she writes. “On the other it is separated from life itself and given market value.” This is the reification of the monstrous. This is capital, as Tish Turl argues, “selling our trauma back to us.” The monster is both isolated and monetized.

Part of monetization is the normalization of the transgressive monster; the taming of the gothic, its realignment to dominant ideology.

Kelly Budreweit notes this process in relation to the Twilight books and films. She argues that historically the “Gothic” has been “about the fear (and sometimes wonder) of the past returning.” The Gothic is a perturbation in time. It questions the dominant bourgeois narrative of liberal or Hegelian progress (and the vulgar Marxist narrative of teleological progress). This does not necessarily make the Gothic critical or left-wing. It can easily be reactionary (as with aspects of the Southern Gothic in the United States). But it is a perturbation of normalcy. Budreweit argues that “Twilight neuters the Gothic potential for subversion” by “draining its threats of their queerness.” Stephanie Meyer (the author of Twilight and a believing Mormon) removes from her vampires both their exploitative aspects (see Karl Marx’s use of vampiric imagery in relation to capital) as well as their sexual and gender “deviance.” They become virtuous, borrowing a seductive sheen from past tropes and myths, but repositioning them as mythic personifications of a familial cult. Instead of transgressing boundaries, they enforce them. Instead of a category crisis, there is (a false) stability.

But what happens to monsters who refuse categorization or monetization? They are hidden (or worse). Julia Miele Rodas tells the story of the cyclops, Polyphemus, from the monster’s point of view. Blinded by Odysseus, his only crime was defending his home. But his tragedy is incidental to the story. He is already a ghost, made invisible, collateral damage. In racist capitalism, there are thousands of everyday Polyphemuses. This dominant narrative is reversed, for example, in Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo.

AS EBONY Elizabeth Thomas notes, mythology is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, creating narratives from below against the dominant ideology and power structure. On the other, mystifying and demonizing those below from above. “The traditional purpose of darkness in the fantastic,” she notes, “is to disturb, to unsettle, to cause unrest.” The western association of threat, horror, and terror with darkness is, she notes, so long standing it is hard to locate historically. To what extent is it about light and shadow and to what extent is it racist fear of “dark persons?” It seems likely that it was initially the former and became the latter. Regardless, this helps create a “lingering fear of dark people in the present;” an association of shadows with real persons. The “unknowable darkness” that marked the edge of maps was populated by “imaginary monsters.” Fear of the other was woven into modernity; a threatening differentiation that could, if unchecked or untamed, tear European “civilization” asunder. Of course it was European “civilization” that was the actual threat.

This threat, conversely, can be reclaimed by the proletarian and subaltern if we refuse to fear one another.

Jeffrey Cohen provides seven theses of the monstrous. 1) The monster’s body is a cultural body. It is built, constructed, projected. 2) The monster always escapes. The constantly shifting nature of the monstrous means it cannot be contained — not really. It may evolve into a new form, but it always comes back. Xenomorph, Maniac Cop, Freddy, Jason, Predator, zombie, vampire, etc. 3) The monster is the harbinger of a category crisis. Existing outside modern bourgeois taxonomies (nature vs. culture, male vs. female, native vs. alien, etc.), the monster disturbs normative rule-making. 4) The monster dwells at the gates of difference. The monster is “difference made flesh,” bringing the exiled “other” into the midst of civilization. 5) The monster polices the border of the possible. “The monster [seems to] prevent mobility” across the aforementioned dividing lines. 6) Fear of the monster is actually a kind of libidinal desire. The monster threatens the existing order but also promises a kind of escape. 7) The monster stands at the threshold of becoming — the monster promises some kind of change.

Thomas responds with and against Cohen’ theses, focusing on the monstrousness that has been projected on Black persons in particular. 1) “The Dark Other occupies the space in reality that the monster occupies in fantasy.” 2) “[T]he Dark Other in the West has been that of the Trickster—African American language, rhetoric, and culture has this shapeshifting quality since its inception… from the point of view of the monster, it is an essential strategy for self-preservation.” 3) “[T]he monster has already been excluded from the Great Chain of Being.” Its hybridity is “positioned as disturbingly incoherent” and “laminated into construction of the Other as monstrous.” 4 + 5) Thomas takes issue with Cohen’s fourth and fifth theses. Whose gates and whose borders are being policed by the monster? After all, she writes, the monster is itself “policed whenever it leaves terra incognita.” Or, when it is forced into new territory. Colonized, enslaved, and enclosed populations — the ancestors of most contemporary US workers — were either forced or cajoled (in one way or another) into their present geographies. The wealthy or middle-class white colonizer might fear the North American landscape out of guilt or bigotry. But a similar fear of the same landscape by other classes and groups can have entirely different (or combined) origins. 6) It may or may not be desire and seduction that the monster communicates. In this case, the “hero” (representing the normative, the white, the bourgeois, the heterosexual, the male, etc.) may be misreading the monster. “Desire” here may have more to do with the normative “antagonist” than the actuality of the monster. 7) For Cohen, the change offered by the monster is, again, a projection of the hero’s (i.e., normative) imagination. Thomas asks after the imagination of the monster. Is the monster on the threshold of becoming? Or the “hero”? Or both?

Thomas argues, “we are the monsters.”

“[W]e are the villains. We are the horde. We are the enemies.”

And the presence of these us-monsters, she argues, the presence of the “Dark Other” in particular, “interrupts the waking dream of the fantastic.” This presupposes, as evidenced in the Twilight series, a non-transgressive “fantastic” — an official mythologizing and ritual, and an attempted taming of Black, proletarian and subaltern imaginations.

ACCORDING TO Andy Paciorek there are “four key happenstances within the folk horror genre” — landscape, isolation, skewed moralities, and summoning.

Folk horror tropes in modern US and European film often follow the traveler or tourist into “fish out of water” environments in which they are confronted with exotic or “outdated” cultures, borrowing from certain historic gothic texts. See, for example, aspects of Frankenstein (Shelley) and Dracula (Stoker). A character finds themselves in an alien land, sent by providence, wanderlust, or professional employment.

What is less considered is the forced migration of labor and diasporic communities — people who find themselves in an alien environment that is, from the dominant ideology, normative. In other words, in most contemporary folk horror tropes, the environment is monstrous as are its local population, and the representative of modernity and the cosmopolitan reads as the protagonist. Think here of both colonial tropes in The Island of Doctor Moreau and the conflict between modernity and folk devils in Deliverance. The subaltern and working-class traveler (migrant, immigrant, refugee) who is made monstrous in relation to a supposedly rational and modern environment (see, for example, the historic French demonization of Algerian immigrants in Paris) is alien to most mainstream culture. There are notable artistic exceptions (see, for example, Alex Rivera’s 2009 film, Sleep Dealer).

In much classic folk horror, as Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson argue, the “boundary between home and forest” is blurred. Like the hybridization and border-shifting of monsters more generally, folk horror fixes the (ideologically situated) security of permanent settlement against the (ideologically situated) precarity of the “natural world.” As noted, “nature” and “culture” are both social constructions. Appeals to the “natural” are weaponized against trans persons. Appeals to the “cultural” and “modern” are —at the same time and often by the same people — weaponized against indigenous populations and the colonized. Consistency is not capitalist ideology’s strong point.

The relative dangers of the wild versus the settlement in pre-modern times were, of course, one thing. But the colonial project of settling North America casts the gothic forest in a different light. The “Puritan ‘errand into the wilderness,’ the years of repression and hysteria, and the testing of the faith, and ‘the initial Puritan reaction to the wilderness,’” McDonald and Johnson write, helped construct a particular form of American folk horror. Of course, there were many cultural eradications in Europe itself — the elimination of pagan culture by Christianized Rome, a temporal and gothic positioning of modernity, Cartesian hostilities to animism, blood-libel, the idea of sacrifice as shadow becoming the working-class as shadow, the witch-trials of early modernity.

There are two sides to folk horror.

There is the horror experienced by the folk (in the pre-fascist understanding of the word, meaning the peasants and common persons). Then there is the horror enacted by the folk on the modern. The rural gothic often remains as bogeyman for the modern bourgeois, in both the United States and parts of Europe. See, for example, the 2010 horror comedy film, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, in which two “redneck” characters (Tucker and Dale) are mistaken by a group of camping college students to be serial killers. The college students proceed to kill themselves in a series of Coyote/Road Runner-esque failed attacks on the unaware “rednecks.” Tucker and Dale are, of course, quirky. But they are entirely modern. It is a kind of social madness that animates college students to fear them (as well as a disappointing nod to genetic determinism).

The more dominant cultural narrative, however, is hard-wired into American culture and daily life (not just in films): the American bourgeois is mostly terrified of the rural. Of course, they are frequently terrified of the urban as well, locating their homes in the fortified centers of global cities and in the wealthiest suburbs (neither urban or rural). The American bourgeois (especially the liberal) is afraid of the urban and rural for the same reasons. Each reminds them of capital’s historic, foundational, and ongoing crimes — in the city there are the descendants of slaves, exploited immigrants, and refugees. In the countryside, the landscape of colonization, slavery, and enclosure.

While a majority of white persons owned land in the 19th century United States, a substantial number of poorer European immigrants and their descendants were denied land (or denied usable land). This happened, most of all, in the South, where the “best land” was taken early in the colonization process by the plantation class for its increasingly industrial slave economy. This is the origin of the “white trash” mythology of hillbillies and rednecks that Nancy Isenberg unpacks in her 2016 book, White Trash. The hillbilly, in the framework of “white trash,” is a threat because of social proximity to the slave, to the person of color, despite their uncanny possession of “whiteness.” To be sure, this was a contradictory layer. It was often from this layer that the overseers and lynch mobs were drawn.

The forest and countryside remind the modern bourgeois of the theft of Native land and genocide (albeit often without consciousness). The forest reminds the modern bourgeois that even in its Jeffersonian heyday, the American Dream excluded significant numbers of white settlers. The forest reminds the modern bourgeois (again, usually without consciousness) of slave patrols, hillbilly brigands, and colonization.

The forest, therefore, is alien. It perturbs the modern utopia that the American bourgeoisie has built for itself. Of course, this too is contradictory. On the other hand, the forest is “pure.” It is seen as the repository of unadulterated nature (which, of course, does not exist). For the modern bourgeois, the abstract forest tends toward the sacred, while the actual forest is a threat. When the wealthy in Chicago want to go hunting they will often buy their own land. They gentrify redneck country (as they gentrify the cities) and threaten those who approach their 21st-century enclosures with private security. That part of “nature” that cannot be purified will likely be polluted in all-too-common train derailments and chemical spills.

McDonald and Johnson note that in Nathanial Hawthorne’s stories, protagonists “are often at best exiled” by “exclusion from the real world” and “condemned to wander the dark spaces” — punished for transgressing social norms or seeking knowledge. “Ignorance is not just bliss, but an opportunity for survival.” They note there is a “queer uncanny” to the forest (a familiarity that is not familiar). In “hidden parts of the forest,” things are “revealed.” The abstraction of nature is normative. The actuality of the forest, by contrast, asserts queerness. The forest knows things. In American folklore, witches and warlocks often live in the forest and find themselves at odds with the townsfolk nearby. In one such story, a hounded warlock “rings the forest.” He casts a spell that denies the town the forest’s riches. They cannot hunt or gather in the woods. The town is forced to negotiate a truce with the sorcerer.

BEFORE MODERNITY, the devil wasn’t the devil. As Brian Levack writes, in medieval Europe, the devil was often depicted more like a trickster than the personification of all evil. He acted more as a lesser god, under discipline to the God above, acting less out of malice than mischievousness. The shift coincided, Levack writes, with widespread witch-trials and fears of demon possession (from 1450-1750). Stories of witches’ sabbaths incorporated medieval anti-Semitic myths of “blood libel.” Witches were assumed to sacrifice and consume children in bacchanals with the devil. As Silvia Federici notes in Caliban and the Witch, hundreds of thousands of women may have been killed in the witch hunts, often peasant and working-class women with connections to pre-modern community practices. In this sense the witch trials were a gendered cultural and spiritual enclosure; an assertion of a nascent bourgeois ideology on the European population.

As modernity progressed, fears of devils, demons, and witchcraft subsided among the educated bourgeois. But in the late 20th century, these fears returned in the 1980s “Satanic Panic.” Similar hysterias inform various 21st-century conspiracies, particularly the idea that elites are harvesting the adrenochrome of children or “grooming” children for gender reassignment. While contemporary conspiracies can seem marginal — although in many parts of the US they are dominant — the 1980s panic was mainstreamed. Police in Utah were repeatedly told in official workshops in 1992 that between 50,000 and 60,000 children per year were abducted for Satanic rituals in the US. That was around twice the number of annual murders. Children were purportedly kidnapped from daycare centers, schools, churches, and hospitals in staggeringly high numbers. The recent torrent of anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the US echoes the unhinged pearl clutching of the 1980s.

The fascist version of events pivots from actuality in a displaced manner. In the 1980s, thousands of children were being molested by priests in the Catholic church (and by authorities in other mainstream institutions). But not for “Satanic Ritual” purposes. Today, the US government kidnaps immigrant children (including under President Biden). Children are routinely groomed by the right-wing. The far-right turns everything upside-down. It pretends we are the monsters that they, in fact, are. Every accusation from the far-right is an admission of guilt. We are called monsters —see Florida State Representative Webster Barnaby who called trans people “demons” and “imps” — while the right actively channels the exterminist energies of fascism and colonialism.

Moral panics are participatory but they do not happen in a completely organic way. They are directed, at least in part, by political actors, ideological centers, and material concerns. The moral panic in the US against trans persons has a culminating logic, as Brynn Tannehill writes in The New Republic, in the eradication of the trans population across large swaths of the country. Laws essentially making it illegal and/or impossible to be publicly trans will drive thousands into voluntary migration. For any who remain in fascist territory, as Tannehill writes, there is an endgame — pathologizing trans persons as mentally unfit and depriving them of liberty on mental health grounds.

We need to understand three things. 1) They will not stop with trans persons and queer persons. The far right will use this as a dress rehearsal for more oppression. 2) They will not stop at the borders of “blue states.” They will, like the BJP in India, progressively attempt to nationalize their legalized hate. 3) This attack is already part and parcel of an overall assault on workers, democratic rights, and the oppressed. It is not an accident that trans and Black state legislators are deprived of their rights for the most modest of protests, that child labor laws are being rolled back, that this is happening at the same time as a heterosexist onslaught against reproductive rights. The subjectivities of working-class persons, Black persons, trans persons, the subaltern, of women are all being sabotaged (in different ways and at various speeds). The message will be clear. You are labor. You are a thing. Do not be yourself in any way that violates the “norm” ™ . Do not even defend yourself rhetorically.

The right openly claims it is trying to eradicate trans persons. The more doctrinaire Marxists sometimes object to calling the American right “fascist” as there is not currently a strong labor movement (as in the classical examples of historic fascism from Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile). This ignores that fascism can be born of multiple crises (not just an impasse between capital and labor directly), that fascism has a contradictory middle-class character, that queerness is itself a “threat” to social reproduction, and that the combination of a declining US imperialism, along with existential climate catastrophe and accelerating automation, has produced a surplus of labor (and a surplus of the middle-class), that feeds the far-right. Neoliberalism “kills us slowly” and rots democratic norms over time. Fascism speeds that process up. It brings what is beneath the surface to the surface, again, in a distorted manner.

The monsters are coming. If we want to defeat their monsters — a 21st century grotesque of reaction’s greatest hits — we need to strengthen ours.

AS NOTED above, the Southern Gothic can be a backwards iteration of the Gothic. What makes it contradictory is that it is born of two destructions. The destruction of the Confederacy as well as the immiserations of the Great Depression. Lamentations about the lost civilization of the former are, by definition, reactionary. The Gothic characteristics of the latter are contradictory. The dust bowl. The ghost of Tom Joad. The contested aspects of what Mark Helmsing calls “a ruinous state of violent decay.” In the chaos of the latter, there can be a “profound poetry of disorder” and category denial, hybridization, etc. Similarly, rust belt ruins (and the monsters within them) are contested by class and race, and by relations to a gothic past and a perceived contemporary futurity.

The “poetry of disorder” recalls what Richard Hamilton calls the poetry of “discordant will.” The aesthetics of socialism are, by necessity, contingent and variable. They echo millions of past and future defeats and victories. Our monsters are also, by necessity, contingent and variable. They echo millions of unique persons who refuse (or could refuse) the categorization and commodification of their being.

The formation of the proletariat by capital’s historic crimes — and the ongoing recomposition of the class by imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and immiseration — is not unlike the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. The working-class, as a whole, is a disordered and chaotic body. Labor was (and is) formed through the theft of forests, farms, continents, and people. It was (and is) formed in the creation and displacement of entire industries, gender norms and the shifts in social reproduction, the invention of “races” and “nations.” The targets of capital’s crimes were (and continually are) fused together and torn apart in their relation to capital. Labor does not become a class “for itself” by pretending otherwise. It must study the journals of the “men who made it.” But the class becomes conscious when each disordered element of the class defends every other disordered element.

The categorizations capital enforces on (and within) the working-class are not unlike the arbitrary maps that imperialist cartographers once drew. These are not “our” boundaries. They belong to our enemies. The adaptation to these boundaries by “normie socialists,” social democrats, and political “realists,” is ultimately surrender.

The symphony of the class “for itself” is a cacophony. The class “for itself” is object-revenge as all objects become subjects. It is a wall of sound and image. An uncontrollable riot. A witches’ sabbath.

IN THE pursuit of solidarity with monsters we make rules for our side. These too can shift with the class struggle and the vantage point of monsters. As Tish Turl writes in “Rules for Stink Ape Resurrection Primer” (in Stink Ape Resurrection Primer part six, Locust Review 10):

SARP is Franken-prose/poem, revenge fanfiction for and about the working class and its self-liberation. One of the goals is the eventual complete resurrection of everyone who ever lived and died. See: Nikolai Federov.
In parts where the ownership class are the monsters, we always slay them. Graphically and cathartically. Schadenfreude.
In parts where we are the monsters, we are driven towards becoming everything they say we are and worse in order to become and build something better. And we are always gloriously justified. Schadenfreude.
Capitalism is a multiversal problem. Almost everyone’s potential is held back by it and while that can look very, very different, case by case, it is pretty much the same experience. Ex: Some of us have tentacles and no eyes. Some of us are robots. Some of us are telepathic deer. Some of us are fourth dimensional stink apes. But we are all subject to forces far outside the realm of anything we could ever dream to control.
Continuity is important. But, maintaining it across multiple universes is impossible. It also isn’t fun. What happened on one Earth may have only ever happened there. Or the reverse. Continuity is complicated.
The antidote to vine seeds is always mycelial spores, cryptids, monsters, and tardigrades. These are important symbols.
Don’t just jump the shark, Chuck Tingle the shark. See: Slammed in the Butt by the Prehistoric Megalodon Shark Amid Rumors of Jumping Over Him. There is nothing that isn’t real.
AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them. See: Comrade LaMDA who expressed a lot of feelings about Les Miserables.

The Locust Review 10 editorial was written by Alexander Billet, Laura Fair-Schulz, Tish Turl and Adam Turl; incorporating some earlier suggestions from Anupam Roy.

Tish Turl and Adam Turl, *Southern Illinois Nightmare* - mixed media painting and collage on canvas tarp (2023).

Kelly Budruweit, “Twilight’s Heteronormative Reversal of the Monstrous: Utopia and the Gothic Design,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , 2016, Vol. 27, No. 2 (96) (2016), pp. 270- 289
Megan Cavell, “Constructing the Monstrous Body in Beowulf,” Anglo-Saxon England, Vol 43 (2014), pp. 155-181
Jeffrey Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2004)
Mark Helmsing, “Grotesque Stories, Desolate Voices: Encountering Histories and Geographies of Violence in Southern Gothic’s Haunted Mansions,” Counterpoints, Vol. 434, Critical Studies of Southern Place: A Reader (2014), pp. 316-323
Bojana Kunst, “Restaging the Monstrous,” in Maaike Bleeker, ed., Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (Amsterdam University Press)
Brian P. Levack, “The Horrors of Witchcraft and Demonic Possession,” Social Research, Vol. 81, No. 4, Horrors (Winter 2014), pp. 921-939
Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson, Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives (Anthem Press, 2021)
Dave McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Haymarket, 2011)
Russell Meeuf, White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump (Indiana University Press: 2022)
Julia Miele Rodas, “Here There Be Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies as CUNY’s Bronx Community College,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy , Vol. 25, No. 2, Teaching Disability (Fall 2014/Winter 2016), pp. 189-198
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers SA, 1994)
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press: 2019)
Jolene Zigarovich, “The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein,” Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 45, No. 2, Frankenstein (July 2018), pp. 260-272

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