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Can the Monster Desire?
Societal expectations, gender work, and a wolf, oh my!
Last autumn I wrote about body horror. I’ve still been thinking about what makes one person seem monstrous to others. Back then, I hypothesized that bodies behaving strangely or unexpectedly inspired something called body horror. Which of course presupposed a normalized (white, male, hetero, able) body.
This fall, I ended up reading a numbers of books about outsiders, characters who didn’t necessarily look monstrous or even different, but who for some reason were rebelling against societal expectations.
For fun, let’s test the hypothesis that, rather than rely on aesthetics to convey or symbolize monstrosity, these stories seem to focus more on the (lack of social acceptability of the) desires of the “monsters.” When we call gender “a cage,” what else should we calls those banging on the walls?
When the convenience store has everything you need
Sayaka Murata in a Tokyo convenience store similar to the one where the main character in her novel works. Credit Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata explores the social pressures on Japanese woman to progress in their career and/or find a partner and get married, amid hand-wringing about a declining birth rate.
Keiko has worked the same job at a convenience store in Japan for 18 years, and has seemingly remained single that entire time. If you haven’t caught on to the conflict already, I’ll just quote from this Times piece to give you a gist:
In the novel, Keiko’s friends and family are mortified on her behalf, urging her to find a man and settle down or move to a more professionally fulfilling job. Keiko observes their anxiety with head-cocked bemusement. “Here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn’t,” she thinks, after a reunion with a group of married high school classmates who seem appalled by her nonexistent love life.
Ms. Murata said she wanted to write from the perspective of someone who defied conventional thinking, particularly in a conformist society where people are expected to fulfill preordained roles.
“I wanted to illustrate how odd the people who believe they are ordinary or normal are,” said Ms. Murata…
(“Ms.”!)
From the perspective of her “normal” friends and family, Keiko becomes monstrous through her non-pursuit of conventional goals/pleasures.
That her friends and family expressed relief and gave increased social acceptance when she told them she was living with a man was fascinating. That the man is taking advantage of her financially (and socially, for his own purposes) doesn’t matter — they ask precious few follow-up questions, quietly filling in the blanks themselves —, its her desire for, her orientation toward a partnership and domesticity, that matters. She has finally become socially legible and thus not a critique or reminder of how things might be otherwise.
Highly recommend this one — a 5-star read for me. If you need further convincing, try this profile of Murata by Elif Batuman, another one of my favorite authors.
Can the monster speak (to the psychoanalysis establishment)?
On 17 November 2019, Preciado gave a speech before the École de la Cause Freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause)—a society of Lacanian psychoanalysts—in which he described his life as a trans man and challenged the precepts of psychoanalysis. Preciado claims that he faced booing and heckling, and was only able to read a quarter of his prepared speech before he was told his time had run out. The complete text of the speech was later published as a small book.
I can’t understand French, but I’m guessing this is a video of the speech in question. (FWIW I didn’t hear much booing?) But it’s pretty clear the small book is Can the Monster Speak? by Paul B. Preciado.
Preciado describes the book as a “speech given by a trans man by a non-binary body” — that this is a mouthful is probably evidence that our current language is insufficient to describe the human bodies of today. And they are indeed picking a fight.
One might say that the contemporary patriarchal-colonial subject expends most of their psychic energy producing a normative binary identity: anxiety, hallucination, melancholy, depression, dissociation, opacity, repetition... are only the psychological and social costs that result from the dual extraction process of the force of production and the force of reproduction. Psychoanalysis is not a critique of this epistemology, but the therapy needed for the patriarchal-colonial subject to continue to function despite the extraordinary psychic cost and the inexpressible violence of this regime.
Clearly Judith Butler is an influence — the book is dedicated to them; though Preciado is almost describing the taxing work of doing gender. And I think we can see some Fanon here as well in the use of “colonial subject.”
Preciado rebels against this regime, contrasting “monstrosity” to heteronormativity, as we predicted above: monstrosity as desire (or desire-orientation?) rather than aesthetic.
Today, it is clear to me: had I not been indifferent to the ordered, purportedly happy world of the norm, had I not been thrown out by my own family, had I not preferred my monstrosity to your heteronormativity, had I not chosen my sexual deviance over your sexual health, I would never have been able to escape... or, to be more precise, would never have been able to decolonize, disidentify, debinarify myself. In leaving the cage of sexual difference, I experienced ostracization and social rejection, but none of that was as disastrous, as painful, as the destruction of my life force, which would have been required of me in accepting the norm.
Ultimately Preciado describes a psychoanalytic framework and practice that is outdated and due for a paradigm shift (in the Thomas Kuhn sense) regarding gender and sexuality. The idea that this shift may be eminent — that “science” may soon make room for more monsters — made this book one of the more rebellious and hopeful books about gender and/or disability I’ve read in the past few years. (My therapist was… less enthused by my summary of the book.)
ISO care under Neoliberalism
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova has a spectacular set-up: Grieving mother (Magos) cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son’s lung. Grieving mother nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate.
Eventually the parents strive to have this creature — not quite the son — pass as their son, or a son. Two problems emerge, however: First, Monstrilio has a tail. And two, he craves eating human flesh.
The parents conspire with friend Lena to surgically remove his tail in an effort to help him pass as human. But the cravings are more stubborn. His father in particular tries to get him to stop “indulging” in this habit such that he can pass. The notion that the work of passing requires, at its core, a suppression of desire is interesting to me! Monstrilio learns to fashion this “biting” desire as a sexual kink to explore (consensually) with anonymous men.
But the scenes that have stayed with me involved the mother’s best friend, Lena, a semi-closeted lesbian surgeon. After a heartbreak, she is wracked by insomnia. The only cure she can find is Carmina, a sex worker who Lena instructs to bathe her and then puts her to sleep. Lena feels she can’t tell her best friend Magos about Carmina. When Magos is going through a hard time, Lena offers to bathe her. “I’m not a child,” Magos replies, categorizing the desire as infantile. Lena later resorts to driving around Mexico City in search of Carmina in order to get a full night’s sleep.
Maybe what struck me was that Lena felt ashamed enough by this desire to hire a sex worker, rather than ask a friend or hire a care worker or home aide, as a disabled person might be able to do while staying relatively socially acceptable (not monstrous).1 That even conventionally “natural” desires for human touch and care have become socially shameful (and mediated through cash!) give evidence to Preciado’s point that we may be on the verge of some kind of shift.
Limits of/Issues with the monstrous-by-desire hypothesis
There are obviously some issues with this monstrous-by-desire hypothesis.
If “desire” is interpreted too narrowly, it becomes a facade for questions about kink, kink-shaming, and queerness. Read too broadly — desire as encompassing too much — it can be reformulated as “monsters are defined by how they live/act,” which seems too broad to be helpful.
Everyone has desires they keep to themselves, right? I don’t really think conquering shame should be a lodestar goal of progressive politics? Am I saying anything interesting here?!
Maybe the most useful concept here is just that desire(s) can be a battlefield of social hegemony. And that we should be more focused on the cages and how they rattle, rather than the frustrated creatures within.
More monsters! (Honorable mentions)
Two other books that fit this category that I read this fall would be Grey Dog by Elliott Gish and The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis, though I recommend them less enthusiastically. Though points to Grey Dog for having the saddest passage I’ve read in a long time — all you need to know is that this is from the diary of a rural school teacher who’s having a rough few weeks in 1901:
Caroline Mason said today that Denmark was bound in the south by Greece, such an egregious error that even the smallest children knew to titter. She blushed furiously at their laughter and at my wordless frown. It was the same bright, ugly flush that had made her so suddenly unappealing when I spoke to her, all those months ago, about her behaviour with Arthur.
“I guess that isn’t right,” she mumbled, and her fellow students rustled and tittered again, as drawn to that rush of blood as a shiver of sharks might be.
Ugh! My heart! Protect Caroline!
1 See Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha