Download Style Sheet 1
(pdf)

Download Style Sheet 2
(pdf)

Download Specimen Chapter
(Word)

Session 8: Ethics of Monsters
Chair: Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

The Patient-As-Monster in Law and Bioethics
Mary Ford
School of Law, Nottingham University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

The Gothic horror literature of the late 18th and 19th centuries emerged in response to the culture of the ‘enlightenment’ and the social change of the Industrial Revolution. Gothic horror explored the sinister, negative side of the societal and cultural changes which were generally perceived as great improvements. Similarly, contemporary bioethics must respond to rapid technological and scientific change (what has been called the “reproduction revolution”).
We can see bioethics emerging as a genre of gothic horror in the judgments of prominent medical law cases and in academic writing. Gothic horror operates within bioethical discourse in two ways. In some cases, illness / incapacity is presented as horror to elicit permissive attitudes to euthanasia, ‘saviour siblings’, etc. (see the cases of Bland, B v An NHSHospital Trust, Pretty v UK, and Hashmi). In other areas, horror imagery and metaphor is utilised in the hope of encouraging restrictive attitudes – e.g. to cloning, xenotransplantation, etc.
The use of horror in bioethics is often covert and implicit; its overt and explicit correlate is the use of arguments such as “X is unnatural”, or “X represents an affront to human dignity”, etc.  In this paper I will explore the interplay between the genres of bioethical discourse and gothic horror by demonstrating the use of horror-imagery in cases and academic commentary, argue that contemporary bioethical discourse presents the patient as intrinsically “monstrous”, and ask how this could shape social and legal responses to bioethical dilemmas.

Download Conference Paper -

Un/Monstrous Criminals - The ‘Gay Gang Murders’: ‘not like us’ and ‘just like us’
Kristen Davis
School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia

During the late 1980s and early 1990s there were a series of murders, disappearances and assaults of (presumed) gay men in the popular Bondi-Tamarama region in Sydney, Australia.  These crimes – dubbed the ‘gay gang murders’ – remained, largely, unsolved for more than a decade when they became the subject of a fresh investigation, coronial inquest, and received sympathetic media attention.  In this paper, I argue that the production of the assailants hinges on a contradiction.  On the one hand, they are presented as ‘gang members’, denoted the ‘Bondi Boys’ – which in contemporary public discourses links them with notions of crime and deviance – and thus operates to symbolically distance them from the broader community.  Yet, on the other, their violence is covertly viewed as an expression of widely held heteronormative values.  The perpetrators may be demonized as an aberrant criminal minority, then, but this scapegoating process operates only to assuage the public of any social or institutional complicity. 
The perpetrators’ killing spree rendered them human ‘monsters’, just as their crimes were read as ‘monstrous’ acts.  However, such readings were problematized with a simultaneous construction of the alleged perpetrators as being ‘like us’.  They are made ‘like us’ in that their sexuality is invisible and unmarked in contrast to that of their victims.  Discursive productions of the ‘Bondi Boys’ – as a unified, homogenous, all-Australian, white, male ‘gang’ – serves to further normalize the group.  In other words, despite the ways in which the so-called ‘gay hate gangs’ are publicly and symbolically distanced, the ways in which they are represented as being ‘just like us’ suggest that their ‘dirty work’ is in fact, to some degree, socially legitimized.

Download Conference Paper -

To Be, Or Not To Be, A Monster
Claudia Lindner Leporda

This paper’s focus is the investigation of two different kinds of texts (The case of Alexina Herculine Barbin (1838-1868), edited by Foucault, and Eugenides' Cal Stephanides in Middlesex (2202)), the representation and perception of hermaphrodites, and their associations with the specific historical period in which they are located.
Hermaphroditism/intersexuality is a category of a bodily “meaning” that has been perceived differently through time. For instance, in the Middle Ages, Teratology, the science of monsters, emerged. It was a discipline occupied with hermaphroditism. Teratology regarded “monstrous births” as omens, predictions or divine warnings. These monstrous beings were often put to death. Only later, in the early modern period, it was possible to explain anomalous beings in terms of variations of normal development. Many historians make this point, which can be called the “domestication of the monster” through natural science. By transferring hermaphroditism and other “monstrosities” from mythology into the category of pathology, the medical discourse and medical practice became the source of judgement. Thus, a social ambiguous bodily condition was altered into a pathological threat that could be classified, categorised and therefore banned through medicalisation.
What is the significance of associating the word 'monster' with the hermaphrodite? On one hand, the terminology simply indicates our culture's oppressive body politics and the emphasis upon clearly distinct sexes/genders. Accordingly, hermaphrodites become tremendously threatening because they blur the social distinction of hierarchical gender roles, which are necessarily to be  upheld in all these ruptures of the ‘order of things’. Hermaphroditism is mainly defined through “deformed” anatomy and clearly connected to transgression of sex/gender boundaries. On the other, it links critically the representations of hermaphrodites with the clinical gaze of the medical establishment. This institution defines a rigid norm and creates 'monsters' from all those who do not fit the pattern. Thus, the intersexed body with its simultaneous lack (small penis) and excess (big clitoris) overspills the boundaries and becomes monstrous. 
As Rosi Braidotti (whose work forms the critical background of my paper) has detailed in her work on monsters and grotesques respectively, 'monsters' and 'freaks of nature' provided science with an 'other' by which to define 'healthy', 'normal' animals.. So-called monsters and freaks were identified, used for experiments, explained and controlled through forms of knowledge which normalised 'correct' or 'proper' bodies.

Download Conference Paper -

© Wickedness.Net 2006