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Session 7: Fashionable Monstrosity
Chair: Phil Fitzsimmons

Monstrous Makeovers: Transforming ‘Monsters’ Into Beauty Queens
Peri Bradley
Department of Film Studies, University of Southampton/ Southampton Solent University, Southampton, United Kingdom

Each culture and each era creates its own monsters that embody and express the fears and anxieties specific to the environment of that particular generation. Contemporary culture has produced the phenomenon of ‘Transformation TV’, including Extreme Makeover (Living TV), The Swan (Living TV), Ten Years Younger (Channel 4)and Change My Life (Channel Five).  This new form of Reality TV deals with notions of everyday ‘monsters’ whose physical appearance transgresses the ‘normal’ boundaries that are established and maintained by the power of the media. This paper proposes to examine and analyse the process by which contemporary culture initially creates and eventually mutates these monstrous ‘marks’ of difference. These programmes employ signifiers that have accumulated meaning from the horror genre, in order to construct monsters within the domestic sphere. In a transformation process reminiscent of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde in reverse, transgressive bodies are sculpted into culturally acceptable clones. This process is long and arduous, resembling a rites of passage journey into the hierarchy of the glamorous and the beautiful, and it is utilised in various ways to construct various meanings.  Employing and updating the theories of Foucault and the body as structure of power, Jason Jacob’s theory of the ‘morbid gaze’, looking at the juxtaposition of morbidity and glamour in depictions of the medical world, and Mulvey’s theory of ‘the look’ and woman as site of spectacle, these ‘Monstrous Makeovers’ will be deconstructed so as to reveal the nature and meaning of these present-day monsters.

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Fashion Monsters, Fashion Slaves: Surrealism, Fashion, and Monsters
Jean-Philippe Imbert
Department of French and Comparative Literature, Dublin City University, S.A.L.I.S. Intercultural Studies Section, Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland

In this paper, I want to show how the metaphor and meaning of fashion were at the heart of Surrealist visual language, and offered a natural correspondence to the physical properties of disfigurement that became apparent in Surrealism.
We shall see how Surrealism’s traffic between the interior and the exterior worlds was not diminished by the role of apparel in art; rather, the substantive participation of fashion in the definition of Surrealism and Surrealist style - the insinuation of fashion’s tissue between the naked and the profane, the nude and the profound – yielded a delicate membrane of vibration between Surrealism’s abiding antipodes of art and life.
Looking in a first part at the interface where fashion meets surrealism, I am going to see how the clothing that embraced the naked concept of Surrealism became the inevitable signifier of the concepts it dressed and addressed.
In a second part, I will turn towards the monster’s den, the department store, the opening of the cave, the shop-window, and the monster’s toys, its mannequins and see how the interaction between money and art generated further monstrous surrealist artefacts.
Finally, I will analyze the relationship between the monster, the model, fetishism and fashion, from a surrealist point of view.

Feast Your Eyes! Glut Your Soul on my Accursed Ugliness!’ The Visuality of Gothic/Horror
Elizabeth McCarthy
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

When aesthetic theory makes the eye the pre-eminent organ of truth, where can the unbelievable and impossibly monstrous spectacle stand? John Ruskin wrote “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one”, but what if our clear vision falls upon sights so inconceivably hideous that our rational mind revolts at the profanity of the poetry, prophecy and religion offered? And why should we consciously seek out such intellectually and emotionally disturbing sights? The latent paradox of a vision that is attracted to the monstrous and repulsive is an issue returned to time and again by critics of the Gothic/Horror genre, most particularly those critics whose focus is on the horror movie. However, the issue of visuality in the Gothic/Horror genre is as old as the genre itself. In this paper it is my aim to explore this visuality, placing it within a socio-historical, as well as a theoretical, context, and by doing so I hope to make the visual attraction of the horrifically repulsive a little less of the anomaly it appears to be, and a little more a part of a natural progression, which the genre itself invites. While such an exploration will not answer the question why we look, it will make the apparent straightforwardness of such questions far more problematic.
Using the figure of the monster and the monstrous as its pivotal focus, the paper will place the main topics of discussion in the following groups, although they will overlap considerably. Firstly, I will look at the visualising and mutative qualities of Gothic/Horror writing’s context and content, followed by a consideration of the importance of illustration in Gothic/Horror work and its reception. I will then focus on the visuals in dramatic stage interpretations of the genre. The key role of vision in the late Victorian era will then be explored, followed by a consideration of that era’s great invention; the cinema, with all its horrific mutations and startling self-reflexivity. And in conclusion, having explored these topics, I would like to return to the basic issue of vision, as a whole, and the nagging question of why the horrific and monstrous visual image is so compelling a sight.

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