monstrous

In a key scene it is established that once Caitlyn’s politics became monstrous, her personal life would inevitably follow.

But there has undeniably been a recent movement among marginalized people to identify as monstrous—or at least to identify with the monstrous—as a way to celebrate stepping outside the borders of acceptability.

Many popular and influential stories center the marginal figures who were previously banished to the monstrous borderlands—and some of them look back on the former center and go, “What the hell was happening there?”

To call them weird, to banish them to the monstrous hinterlands, is to claw back the ability to define whether behavior is prosocial or antisocial, to determine what principles we should be conforming to.

This is why, in addition to revisiting old stories to recontextualize the villainy of the monstrous characters, we’ve also increasingly seen new stories that show white supremacy, patriarchy, and other elements of the dominant culture as the monstrous figures they’ve really been all along.