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Session 4: Monstrous Legalities
Chair: Tom Murphy

Herculine Barbin: Human Error, Criminality, and the Case of the Monstrous Hermaphrodite
Jessica Kate Webb
Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Discovered by Michel Foucault in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, Herculine Barbin’s diary documents her experiences as a hermaphrodite. Classified as a girl at birth, she develops into an extremely isolated, bewildered and sexually charged female only to be re-classified as a man in her early twenties. On the face of it, Herculine’s erotic diary is concerned with an ill-fated love affair, her own medical reclassification and social scandal. And yet, when examined in relation to various manifestations of monstrosity, the narrative is packed with allusions to her position as human mutant; brought in from the arctic cold where Frankenstein’s creature was left wandering, she represents a new variety of monstrosity that is absolutely central rather than peripheral in the text. 
My paper will examine the subtle, complex and roundabout ways in which Herculine’s battle with her own gender exposes a worryingly dangerous threat of monstrous criminality: ‘possessed by feelings…my imagination was ceaselessly troubled by the memory of the sensations that has been awakened in me, and I came to the point of blaming myself for them like a crime’. A new type of creature is shown to emerge; contrary to the gothic mummy, vampire or witch, this monster comes from within polite society.
Identity is a monstrous process. Although she is aware of her own fragmented identity, Herculine maintains a sexual relationship with Sara transforming the hermaphrodite lover into a kind of criminal sexual predator. This principal figure is literally and figuratively between bodies. My paper, then, suggests that monstrosity and its position in Herculine Barbin’s diary is far from straightforward; it draws attention to things – particularly in the area of criminality, sexual deviancy and the mutant female body – that contemporary society would have preferred to ignore, and, as such, insidiously but insistently disrupts the overt, central narrative.

Structured Like A Monster: Understanding Human Difference Through a Legal Category
Andrew Sharpe
School of Law, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, United Kingdom

This article will argue that the legal idea of the monster offers to inform contemporary thinking in relation to outsiders. Drawing on the work of Foucault it will be contended that the process, whereby at least some human beings are positioned as outsiders, is structured like a monster. That is to say, at least some constructions or representations of human difference, both legal and non-legal, are informed by the monster category. The article will think through and unpack Foucault’s idea of the monster, and his sufficient and necessary conditions of monster production. In the process, the article will identify two contemporary figures that bear the legacy of this legal category. These are the figures of Foucault’s abnormal individual and the human/animal hybrid of genetic medicine, figures that can neither be reduced to products of law or disentangled from its domain. An emphasis on the importance of the template of the monster in understanding these contemporary figures points to its relevance to legal scholarship within fields such as gender, sexuality and race, and bioethics respectively.

Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas: Black Man as Racial/Sexual Monster
Saundra Liggins
Department of English, SUNY Fredonia, Fredonia, New York, USA

Nearly since the first encounter between Europeans and Africans, the black male has been a source of racial and sexual anxiety.  Music, art and history, have served to respond to assumptions about African American males either by perpetuating myths or countering stereotypes of the black male as threat.  In literature, Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son offers one of the most trenchant examinations of the social and economic causes and effects of this racial animosity. The most striking element of Wright’s novel may be the creation and development of his protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as a (perceived) sexual monster.  Bigger Thomas, a rapist and double-murderer, signifies to the citizens of Chicago, where the novel is set, the sexual and racial apprehensions and terrors associated with the black male.   But Bigger is only aggressively sought after because of his perceived threat to the white community, and to white women in particular.  Although Bigger Thomas kills twowomen in the novel – the white Mary Dalton, seemingly accidentally, and his black girlfriend Bessie – he is only being pursued -- hunted, actually -- for the death of the white female.  Influenced by Gothic literature and the horror films that were popular in the 1930’s, the resultant furor that surrounds the capture of Bigger – particularly the mob screaming for his blood outside the courthouse -- is reminiscent of the scenes involving the attempted capture of such other literary Gothic monsters such as Frankenstein and Dracula.  When the conclusion of the novel is reached, the question that the reader, and Bigger himself, is left to ask is what is it that has created the “monster” that Bigger has become? The answer must be found, Wright posits, at least in part, in society itself.

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