Monster Culture in the 21st Century A Reader

by Levina, Marina; Bui, Diem-my T.

• ISBN13: 9781441178398
• ISBN10: 1441178392
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-05-23
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica,and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century.The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.

Author Biography

Diem-My T. Bui is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, US. Marina Levina is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis, US.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century by Marina Levina and Diem My Bui1. Ontology and Monstrosity by Amit S. RaiPart I: Monstrous Identities 2. Heading Towards the Past: The Twilight Vampire Figure as Surveillance Metaphor by Florian Grandena3. Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times by Susana Loza4. Battling Monsters and Becoming Monstrous: Human Devolution in The Walking Dead by Kyle W. Bishop5. The Monster in the Mirror: Reflecting and Deflecting the Mobility of Gendered Violence Onscreen by Megan Foley6. Intersectionality Bites: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in HBO’s True Blood by Peter Campbell7. Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts by Rosalind SibielskiPart II: Monstrous Technologies 8. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics and Zombies by Sherryl Vint 9. Monstrous Technologies and the Telepathology of Everyday Life by Jeremy Biles10. Monstrous Citizenships: Coercion, Submission, and the Possibilities of Resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas by Roy Osamu Kamada11. On the Frontlines of the Zombie War in the Congo: Digital Technology, the Trade in Conflict Minerals, and Zombification by Jeffrey W. Mantz12. Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games by Jaroslav Švelch 13. Killing Whiteness:The Critical Positioning of Zombie Walk Brides in Internet Settings by Michele WhitePart III: Monstrous Territories 14. Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary by Michael S. Drake15. The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror by Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo16. The Heartland Under Siege: Undead in the West by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper17. When Matter Becomes an Active Agent: The Incorporeal Monstrosity of Threat in Lost by Enrica Picarelli18. Monstrous Capital: Frankenstein Derivatives, Financial Wizards, and the Spectral Economy by Ryan Gillespie19. Domesticating the Monstrous in the Globalizing World by Carolyn HarfordAbout the Contributors Index