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Session 9b: Monstrous Music and Literature
Chair: Wendy Bilboe

Nobody’s Meat: Freedom Through Monstrosity in Contemporary British Fiction
Ben Barootes
Department of English, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” Thus spake Angela Carter. On the surface, this statement seems to suggest that a free woman is demonized by her unliberated society. A different reading, however, reveals a deeper truth: in order that a woman may be free within an unfree society, she must first be monstrous. It is her monstrosity – that which separates and distances her from society – that enables the woman to escape her social shackles. As Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil demonstrates, an ugly woman is not bound to a society that values beauty and the helplessness of women. Carter’s fiction, specifically the short stories contained in The Bloody Chamber, addresses how monstrous women – vampires, tigresses, and werewolves – are freed from such bonds as time and sexual characterization. Carter further explores this concept in her novel Nights at the Circus wherein she examines how even the seemingly monstrous female can find not only liberation but also power and control. Jeannette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry warns of those who go too far: a monstrous woman whose expressions of her free will amount to death and destruction. Freedom through monstrosity is not limited to women alone – other marginalized groups and individuals can also achieve sovereignty by embracing their (often imposed) monstrous nature. This is the case for both Saladin Chamcha and the non-Anglo-Saxon youth of London in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Whether the monster is a woman or an immigrant, natural or constructed, these texts all argue that freedom is gained through the acceptance and celebration of one’s own monstrosity.

God Hates Us All: Kant, Radical Evil, and the Monstrous Human in Heavy Metal
Niall Scott
Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom

The recent release of Metallica’s documentary ‘Some Kind of Monster’ and the proclamation of the band’s identity as ‘This Monster Lives’ provides an explicit statement of a familiar theme of monstrosity in the culture surrounding Heavy Metal.
This notion of monstrosity is linked to conceptions and images of human evil evident in lyrics and art work amongst other Metal themes. In this paper I will explore Kant’s conception of radical evil and the evil in human nature in relation to discourses of evil and human nature in Heavy Metal culture. One of Kant’s discussions on evil In Religions within the boundaries of pure Reason alone sees it in terms of a vice in the predisposition to humanity. He describes this as the human inclination to create a worth for oneself in the opinion of others occasioned by the concernful attempts of others to gain a hated superiority of over us”. Recent releases by bands such as Slayer (God hates us All), Deicide Metallica , Hatebreed and Marilyn Manson to name but a few, provide opportunities for an exegesis of Kant’s conception of the evil in human nature as well as a critique of it. I argue that the commitment to the celebration of the monstrous in Heavy Metal lyrics is ambiguous. It can be read as a positive pursuit of human identity, or is dependent on human identity in the religious history of (satanic) evil as well as the desire to depart from it to an existential manifestation of evil, such as that embraced in Anton Zsander Lavey’s Church of Satan.

Monster Mash: Pioneers of the Gothic Element in Rock and Roll
Peter Remington
Faculty of Communication, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagusa, N. Cyprus

As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, long before the contemporary interactivity between Goth culture, (chiefly metal) rock music, vampire role-playing, etc., there occurred a peculiar fusion between low budget Hollywood and comic-book imagery, and the expression of the burgeoning youth culture in rock and roll. Films such as Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) and Ed Wood’s (in)famous Plan 9 from Outer Space (also 1959) demonstrate this mixture of youth, ‘traditional’ imagery derived (via Hollywood) from the European gothic novel, voodoo, and sci-fi horror, a mix most pithily summed up in the title of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt Kickers’ 1962 dance hit, Monster Mash.
My paper celebrates the lives and work of America’s Jalacy ‘Screaming Jay’ Hawkins (1929-2000) and Britain’s Dave ‘Screaming’ Lord Sutch. (1940-1999.) Whilst Hawkins is revered as one of the rock and roll greats, Lord Sutch is perhaps better known as the indefatigable contester of British by-elections and founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Both performers demonstrated offstage personalities as extravagant as their stage personas. Whereas it has become common to associate recent Goth culture with a number of social and social psychological issues concerning contemporary (and particularly postmodern) identity, the predominantly comedic nature of this earlier manifestation of ‘rock Gothicism’ has tended to obscure any serious investigation of it in a similar light. Nevertheless consideration of the anecdotal evidence of Jay Hawkins’ behaviour and early life, and the attribution of bipolar disorder to Lord Sutch in at least one popular source along with the almost universal reporting of his suicide as the probable result of a depressive episode, seems to suggest the possibility that the popularity of these performers may have in some part depended on a form of licensed acting-out of tendencies held collectively by their audience. My paper pursues these issues through analyses of the participatory nature of fandom, the notion of carnival, and work on narrative psychology, in order to investigate the suggestion that there may be greater similarities between contemporary Goth culture and this earlier manifestation of popular gothic than at first meet the eye.

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