#monster thesis

[sarahscritfail]

okay something that has upped my writing for dnd by far has been the Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jefferey Jerome Cohen. If you’re a dungeon master, game runner, or a creative fiction writer I highly highly recommend reading the whole thing but I’ll summarize the big points here~ (p.s. this is religious studies theory but it is so important in implementing for your own writing)

The monsters body is a cultural body

the monster is a reflection of the society itself. It is all fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy. It is both “that’s which reveals and that which warns”.

The monster always escapes

This doesn’t mean that once you kill it it’s not gone in the form it took. Maybe it evolves. “For who is the yeti if not the medieval wild man? Who is the wild man if not the biblical and classical giant?”

The monster dwells at the gates of difference

Represents an object / creature that is outside of normal ways of thinking about the world as duality (monster is ambiguous). Because the monster is neither animal / creature human or land animal. Things that are called monsters are projections of societies indifference or disgust

The other thesis are phenomenal, they’re not intended to craft writing but rather as a reflection for how monsters have been used societally. But highly recommend the read.

[stormqueen280]

I'm on a high

I don't even know whether my professor will approve my final draft, but I just feel I can take over the world right now. Boring meeting? Piece of cake? Let's learn Spanish? I'll put that for Thursday.

I need a cold beer so much it's not even funny. I need greasy food and wine and dancing all night. I want chocolate, I want absinthe. I wanna run a mile.

You guys got any idea how happy I am right now?

[fuckitfireeverything]

it occurs to me that, despite all my promises, I never put my final English thesis up on tumblr so here it is!!

[fuckitfireeverything]

So your thesis sounds super interesting to me, just the whole concept of relating change in vampire portrayal to societies view of gays... It just seems really cool. I was wondering if there was any way I could read it once you're finished? Only if you want to share it, of course. Figured there wasn't any harm in asking, and I'll come off anon if you need me to. Good luck with it and any other work you have. :)

Yeah! I’m going to put it up here as soon as it’s done  and turned in so anyone who wants to read it can :)

[fuckitfireeverything]

vampires #originalgays #sogaythey'renotstraight am I right?

my good buddy foss

[fuckitfireeverything]

Though Claudia and Louis left in hopes of finding the origin of vampirism, what they have found is something else. The Théâtre is a place of performance that breaks down the opposition between life and art: what the audience believes to be a performance of vampirism is actually true vampirism. However, the Théâtre is also a space that reveals itself as a space of, as Judith Butler would argue, performativity. As Louis and Claudia come to learn from the breakdown of theatrical artifice that accompanies the performance of vampirism on stage is that vampirism is not something one is, but something one does, “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . . [so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity . . . which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Butler 140-141). As Ken Gelder notes of the Théâtre, “they show it to have been (always?) a mode of representation, a sign of vampirism, a style or a posture. To be a vampire is, in other words, to act like a vampire” (Gelder 112). What Louis and Claudia learn of their nature from Armand and his troupe is exactly that it is not natural. Vampirism is not an essentialist identity; it is the performative repetition of a learned behavior meant to indicate vampirism, a mimetic behavior that they have learned from Lestat. Without a model of this behavior, they would become like the vampires who remain, isolated and alone, in Eastern Europe — “mindless, animated corpse[s] . . . dead” (Interview 190-191).

[fuckitfireeverything]

Because of their peculiar, liminal positions at the boundaries of culture — boundaries which are permeable and permutable — monsters are culture; culture is inscribed onto the monstrous body, and the monstrous body itself becomes culture and becomes “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment — of a time, a feeling, and a place” (4). To read culture through the body of the monster, then, is to read culture against the delimited spaces that lie outside of culture itself: the marginal, the alienated, the abject. The monstrous body exists as a grotesque reflection of the culture that creates it and the culture that rejects it as monstrous; the monstrous body is “pure culture” (4). To read the monster constitutes a dual process of using the culture to understand the monster and using the monster to understand culture. It is, simultaneously, a temporal process in which not only do we read the monster against the culture that created it, but also against our own culture, the culture in which we read it.

[fuckitfireeverything]

As the vampire has learned to sublimate its desire, it has become domesticated and homonormalized. No longer is the vampire a threat to heterosexual norms; instead, it is a pet. The assimilation of the vampire into human culture denies its radical queer roots and instead bolsters anti-queer, heteronormative hegemony.