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Session 13a: Reflecting on Monstrosity
Chair: Kevin Stewart

Gay Man as Byzantine Monster
Stephen Morris
Independent Scholar, New York, USA

No abstract is presently available

Monstrous Belles and Grotesque Mothers: Contemporary Autobiography in Northern Ireland and the American South
Taura Napier
Wingate University, North Carolina, USA

Contemporary writing by women in Northern Ireland and the American South is often effected through the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque. Through fantasy and masquerade women writers in Ireland and the South disrupt the inflexible dichotomies of acceptable gender roles and sectarian identities in their cultures. Their preoccupation with death and memorial, surveillance and secrecy, the grotesquery of the physical body and the gothic use to which it is put show that their writing encompasses both adherence to and purgation of the sinister nature of their ostensibly Christian cultures. In their emphasis on violence and religious witness, these cultures recall the crusader societies of medieval Europe, inferring postcolonial issues of religious purity and accepted gender and racial behaviors. The gothic and grotesque are means for these writers to identify themselves within their highly structured and embattled traditional cultures.
The carnival depictions of death and violence in Mary Costello’s autobiographical narrative Titanic Town and the macabre, aberrant narratives of Linda Anderson in her prose work “Blinding” interpret experience through the use of gothic devices. Yet these methods differ from conventional gothic tropes. Anderson uses the subject of violent blindings both to horrify and to engender new and extreme dimensions of sight. Costello’s tales of the bodies of executed IRA informers trussed in church vestries for safekeeping, her mother’s reading of inspirational romances in the midst of sniper fire, and her enormous, bleached-blonde, Pearse-quoting, chain-smoking neighbor who instigates mob violence in her estate, illuminate the monstrosity of contemporary Northern Ireland in a way that intensifies the aberrant without denying its carnival humour. Confessions of women in the American South who have breached the South’s rigid parameters of femininity and female purpose have created the identity of the monstrous belle: a southern woman who adheres to the accepted standards of her culture while her psyche is deformed to the point of depravity. Autobiographers such as Rita Mae Brown, Florence King, and Celia Rivenbark explore identity as inherently monstrous—although often humorous as well—for women in Southern culture.

The Politics of Pornographic Pleasure in the Legend of the Overfiend Saga
Shelley Smarz
Communications, Popular Culture, and Film, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Anime, the Japanese abbreviation for animation, is a global phenomenon. Over the last ten to fifteen years, it – and its static, graphic form, manga – have gained popularity outside of its native Japan and have become a popular cultural phenomenon in North America. Anime relies on the same genres to classify narratives as live-action cinema does – such as romance, comedy, action, horror, science fiction, and pornography. However, animation is markedly different from live-action films. It creates, what Napier calls, “a unique aesthetic world. . . . [that] is more provocative, more tragic, and more highly sexualized . . . and contains far more complicated story lines than would be in the case in equivalent American popular culture offerings” (10). By extension, anime pornography is more creative and inventive than the contemporary, live-action, hardcore pornography films found in the Western world.
Tentacle sex – also known as monster porn, tentacle porn or tentacle rape – is an example of the innovative and fantastic pornography that is produced within anime. It depicts female characters being penetrated by tentacled, demonic, or monstrous creatures. Using Linda Williams to inform my analysis of the most famous (and infamous) saga of films in the genre, the Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend) saga, I will argue that monster sex speaks to the current Japanese cultural anxieties surrounding pornographic sex, social gender, and the body. The increasing popularity of all anime, including tentacle porn, in North America indicates that the genre speaks to similar sensibilities here as it does in Japan. Ultimately, these narratives are concerned with the connection of power and pleasure to the postmodern condition, or the fluid nature of identity and the fragmented society.

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