RELS 2317

This course takes for granted that monstrous bodies are revelatory and aims to uncover what they communicate about us. Students in the course explore foundational texts in monster theory and horror (film and literature), to consider how monstrous bodies are inextricably connected with existential, religious, and spiritual impulses. Other topics include how monsters and the monstrous are used to construct and police "otherness," and how the monstrous in art can create spaces of liberation, freedom, and subversion of constructed norms in cisnormative, heteronormative, ableist, white supremacist, imperialist, patriarchal society.