Landscapes of Monstrosity

Inter-Disciplinary Press
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2016
 Landscapes of Monstrosity

Edited by

László Munteán and Hans Christian Post

Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
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 Table of Contents

Introduction: Landscapes of Monstrosity vii

Hans Christian Post and László Munteán

Part I Spatial and Corporeal Monstrosities

Psychogeography and Ground Zero 3

Alexander John Bridger

Monstrosity by Monstrous Means: Cambodian Memorial Sites 13

Hans Christian Post

Monsters Take to the Streets! 23

Monstrous Street-Art as Pedagogy of Resistance to
Post-Olympic Regeneration in Hackney Wick?
Rhiannon Firth

Gendered Heterotopias: 39
Creating Space for Menstrual Blood in Contemporary Art
Ruth Green-Cole

Part II Mythical Monsters

Mélusine’s Iconography: 51
Her Legend of Territorial Expansion and Transformation
Zoila Clark

The Dark Side of the Sun: 63

The Great Beast, Monstrosity and Solar Narratives
Cavan McLaughlin

A Plague upon Our Virtual Land 77

Jad Khairallah

Gods and Monsters:

Religious Inquiry and the Monstrous Classroom 87
Joshua Paddison
 Introduction: Landscapes of Monstrosity

Hans Christian Post and László Munteán

As the upsurge of terrorism and natural catastrophes over the past year attests, our
world remains home to a wide array of monstrosities. In April 2015 the fourth
Interdisciplinary.Net conference dedicated to the theme of Monstrous Geographies
was held, this time taking place in the Portuguese city of Lisbon. Ravaged by an
earthquake in 1755, which reverberated all over Europe through the writings of
Voltaire and Leibniz, Lisbon was an eerily apt location to discuss such matters, and
participants came from a variety of countries and disciplines, each representing a
different theoretical and methodological approach to investigate manifestations of
monstrosity in geographical settings. The present volume is a snapshot of this
conference.
The monstrous is, in one way or another, a distorted reflection of what we fear
and against which we define ourselves. Monsters have been with us since time
immemorial. They have been present in the earliest creation myths and today
populate all media of fantasy, horror, action and adventure, as well as science fiction.
Over the past years, scholars have attentively studied the prominent presence of
vampires, zombies, and other monsters in films and TV series that breathed new life
into long-forgotten stories and monstrous characters. Simultaneously, the past
decades have witnessed an increase of public and scholarly interest in space and
place, resulting in what is known in academia as the Spatial Turn, leaving its mark
on fields ranging from geography through literature and cultural memory studies.
The resurgence of interest in monsters and the turn towards space as a cultural and
political entity have been a driving force behind the annual conferences organized
around the theme of Monstrous Geographies over the past four years.
The contributors understand the two words of the conference theme in their
broadest possible senses. The monstrous entails the affective registers of fear,
anxiety, trauma, as well as forms of excess and transgression. Likewise, geographies
are both physical and metaphorical, corporeal and psychological, rural and urban,
real and imagined. Apart from offering an insight into the conference, this book bears
witness to the diversity of approaches to studying the intersections of monstrosity
and geography.
The first cluster of chapters explore monstrosity in the realms of space and the
body. Alexander John Bridger’s chapter takes the reader to Ground Zero of the 9/11
attacks in New York in the form of a psychogeographical mapping of trauma and
practices of commemoration. Similarly, the physical site of violence as genius loci
is crucial to Hans Christian Post’s discussion of visual representations of the
Cambodian Genocide of 1975-79 that expose gruesome details of captivity, torture
and death, which he uses as a platform to critically reflect on well-embedded codes
of reverence, observed in commemorations of European genocides. Space emerges
in a different form in Rhiannon Firth’s chapter, where monstrous shapes in graffiti
viii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
and street art in London give expression to public resentment towards gentrification.
In the first cluster’s final chapter which analyses contemporary art pieces dealing
with and/or employing menstrual blood, Ruth Green-Cole explores how the female
body operates as a site of heterotopia through the tabooization of menstrual blood.
The second cluster of chapters concerns itself with myth, the occult, the virtual,
and concludes with monsters applied to educational purposes. Zoila Clark’s
discussion of the monstrous mermaid-fairy Mélusine, featured in Starbucks’s Logo,
takes the reader onto mythological terrains in order to explore and possibly
reintroduce the critical and disruptive potentials of the figure, while Cavan
McLaughlin’s chapter problematizes the notion of evil in Aleister Crowley’s occult
religion of Thelema. In his discussion of the virtual geography of the image, Jad
Khairallah locates the emotionlessness of the culture of spectatorship as an
‘overwhelming plague’ to contend with. Finally, Joshua Paddison examines the
omnipresence of monsters in popular culture as a rich reservoir of case studies to
investigate interrelations of religion, space, and culture in education.
The landscape that these chapters explore is historical and mythical, physical and
virtual, corporeal and architectural, and textual and visual. They are of the past, as
well as of the present and the future. Featuring a variety of theoretical and
methodological apparatuses, the chapters you are about to read are individual
expeditions into this monstrously fascinating terrain.
 Part I

Spatial and Corporeal Monstrosities

 Psychogeography and Ground Zero

Alexander John Bridger

Abstract
In this chapter I want to discuss a psychogeographical project conducted at the main
site of the horrific and monstrous September 11th 2001 attacks in New York, U.S.A.
I will explain how I drew on the situationist practice of psychogeographical walking
and why the ideas of detournement, spectacle and psychogeography are important.
In recent years in my research, I have connected and considered this work in relation
to the current memorialization of the Ground Zero site, to current political events
(i.e. the on-going war on ‘terrorism’, the banking crisis, Occupy, and more recently
the Charlie Hebdo events) as well as in relation to the question of how my research
in psychology should connect with political practice and social change.

Key Words: Psychogeography, situationists, psychology, qualitative research,

dérive.

*****

1. Introduction
This chapter builds on a larger study that I conducted for my PhD, which was
completed a few years ago. When I started my PhD, I was planning to draw on
discursive and semiotic methods in order to explore how political rhetoric is
represented in speeches, songs, poems and films. 1 However, when the events of
September 11th 2001 took place, I found watching the events unfold on the screen so
horrific and incomprehensible that I wanted to explore my responses to that event
and attempt to make sense of it all. I therefore decided to shift the focus of my
research to representations of war and terrorism in relation to an analysis of political
speeches and British news reports (newspapers and television) from September 11th
2001 and its aftermath. Whilst I was doing those particular analyses, I visited an
exhibition on Tony Wilson at the Urbis Museum in Manchester, where I came across
a book edited by Christopher Gray titled, Leaving the 21st Century: The Incomplete
Work of the Situationist International. 2 I was quite curious about the book and
wondered why it was exhibited in a glass cabinet, and so sought out a copy from a
bookshop. I started reading the book and instantly became interested in the
situationist ideas of psychogeography, spectacle, detournement and the dérive. Then
on a holiday in Prague, my then partner and I visited the Museum of Communism,
and again I was struck by the idea of historical artefacts being placed in exhibition
cabinets. I spoke about these experiences in relation to the commemoration of history
in exhibition spaces, with my then director of studies, who suggested that I read a
book by Sadie Plant, titled The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International
in a Post Modern Age. 3 Whilst reading that book, I became very excited about
4 Psychogeography and Ground Zero
__________________________________________________________________
situationist theory and psychogeography and began to consider how I might draw on
such ideas in my research and in relation to my everyday life. So this is the context
of the research ideas that will be presented in this chapter. Context is important to
the work I do as a ‘critical psychologist’, as we argue that all knowledge is always
situated in time and place.
As outlined earlier in this chapter, in 2001 I had originally intended to analyse
how political rhetoric is represented in different formats such as songs, films and
poetry. However, that idea was quite broad and I wanted to focus down the area to a
specific topic and theme. At that point during my PhD research, I was quite interested
in representations of history in relation to how historical events are represented in
the ‘indoor’ areas of cities such as museums and art spaces as well as how they are
represented in outdoors areas such as business districts, shopping areas and
residential neighbourhoods. When the events of September 11th 2001 took place, I
decided to focus my research on that particular event, as it was reported as a day that
changed the world and also said to herald the new spectre of global Islamic terrorism.
I decided to focus on the World Trade Centre attacks as they seemed the most
significant and catastrophic of all the attacks on that day and were the most reported
by the news media across the world. Following the attacks on the World Trade
Centre and for a few years afterwards, the site lay bare and no rebuilding was taking
place. Only in recent years has a proper exhibition and memorial site named
Reflecting Absence been constructed. However, the bare site in itself drew me to
investigate that space and consider the extent to which I could draw on a
psychogeographical research approach. In my prior work I had drawn on discursive
and semiological analyses to deconstruct and decode word and image
representations of September 11th and its aftermath. And whilst those approaches
were most useful to deconstruct and consider such representations, they did not
really provide much in terms of methods or techniques to analyse the physical space
of Ground Zero. What I foremost wanted to do in this study was to conceptualise a
psychogeographical walking methodological approach in an attempt to make sense
of Ground Zero. By ‘making sense’ I refer to a self-reflective qualitative
psychological approach, which among other things involves considering the
meanings produced in the process about physical places and the extent to which they
may complement or contradict the dominant accounts provided by the mainstream
media, politicians etc. The psychogeographical approach is employed in an attempt
to see things ‘anew’ and with ‘fresh eyes’.

2. Methods and Strategies

As a first step in the process, I considered the pre-existing research from
experimental social psychology and environmental psychology, but neither of those
areas of work seemed to fit with the proposed aims of the research. Rather than
studying spatial cognition, measuring the casual relations of attitudes to behaviours
and assuming to be able to know what goes on in peoples’ heads, I wanted to
 Alexander John Bridger 5
__________________________________________________________________
conceptualise how to use the situationist practice of psychogeography to reflectively
interpret the site of Ground Zero. Thus I turned to work from critical psychology,
including work by Burnett et al, 4 Grup de Lesbianes Feministes 5 and Precarias a la
Deriva, 6 the work of Pinder 7 in geography and Joyce’ 8 and Sadler’s 9 respective work
in political theory and cultural studies.
In my work, I consider it important to analyse social spaces as political spaces.
One of the limits I have found with much of previous environmental, social and
cognitive analysis of environments is the lack of focus in it on spaces as political
entities. What I wanted to do was to draw on psychogeographical walking as a
practice in order to physically map out the traces of neoliberalism in particular
spaces. I draw on the work of the situationists rather than other approaches to
studying environments because that approach is closest to my political standpoint,
which is both situationist and democrat. The terms ‘psychogeographical’ or
‘psychogeography’ refer to the interface of psychology with geography in the loosest
possible manner. One could say that psychogeography is about opening ourselves
up to the experiences of spaces, places and other people, and to explore the effects
of environments on ourselves and vice versa. This practice is done in order to begin
to imagine what environments could look like if they were not completely based on
values of capitalism and consumerism.
The physical aspect to walking in and through environments brings mind and
body to consider environments in a joint effort. Walking is therefore arguably akin
to a mode of thinking through our relations to the physical fabric of our everyday
terrains. The Situationists actually carried out a range of walks in Paris in the late
1950s and early 1960s where they explored themes such as gentrification, the city as
spectacle and modernization. 10 The term spectacle is a really important to consider
here. It refers to a term conceptualised by Guy Debord, a leading member of the
Situationists, to indicate how society is represented as a spectacle and its subjects
are positioned as passive spectators who are seemingly duped by the spectacle.
Examples of the spectacle can include the cult of celebrity in reality television shows
and the spectacular imagery of war reporting. The implications of the spectacle as
an ideological system is that it can lead to people unquestioningly accepting the order
of things. If one applies the notion of spectacle to the Ground Zero of the early 2000s,
before the site was rebuilt, it could be argued that it represented an important site of
reflection as to what to do next, how to respond to the attacks and whether there are
necessary alternatives to the capitalist order of things.
This then leads us into the next important theoretical resource, which is
detournement. Detournement broadly speaking refers to a practice of taking the
original meaning of things and affixing new meanings onto those things. The reason
for doing this would be to question the original meanings of things and suggest and
point to alternative ways of reading them. An example could be that one would
subvert the meaning of a clothing advert by deleting the wording and pasting on new
wording to create a new suggested understanding of the advertisement. It makes
6 Psychogeography and Ground Zero
__________________________________________________________________
sense in this work to consider the concept of detournement in relation to the practice
of psychogeographical walking where the environments are read as texts and our
bodies serve as media of analysis. Rather than walking in order to travel from a to b,
one walks to explore and see spaces with new eyes in order to begin to consider what
non-capitalist environments could look like. With psychogeographical walking, one
subverts and disrupts the ordinary, normalized ways in which we move through
spaces and places from a to b. We may for example do what various situationists did
and use a map of another city or put directional markers on a dice and use that to
navigate a route while we wander through our hometowns. Such strategies would be
used to take a detour, to subvert and disrupt the usual ways in which we would go
from a to b with a view to open ourselves up to and challenge how we usually
experience what we consider to be the ‘everyday’. Spontaneity is key and such
methods may also enable random encounters with new people and places. Debord
provides the following definition of the dérive:

Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of

psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the
classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive, one or more
persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and
leisure activities and all other motives for movement and action,
and let themselves be drawn by all the attractions of the terrain and
the encounters they find there. Chance is less an important factor
in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view,
cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents,
fixed points and vortexes that strongly encourage and discourage
entry into or exit from certain zones. 11

Debord even indicated that one could not criticize the spectacle without at the same
time being part of the criticized system. The points in the above quote also raise the
question whether it is actually possible to do dérives successfully in various
environments. This question, however, is somewhat similar to the question whether
free association as a psychoanalytic concept is in fact ‘free’. We are indeed
determined and constrained to some extent by our everyday contexts, but we still
have some level of free will to be able to change things for ourselves and others.
Having discussed these core theoretical concepts brings me to consider how one
would go about conducting psychogeographical walks. Indeed, there are many
individuals and groups that have drawn on the work of the Situationists, including
Rhiannon Firth (also in this volume), Morag Rose, Tina Richardson, Phil Smith, and
various groups such as the London Psychogeographical Association, the Loiterers
Resistance Movement, Leeds Psychogeography Group and the Huddersfield
Psychogeographical Network.
 Alexander John Bridger 7
__________________________________________________________________
Debord has written that dérives are best conducted in groups of two or more
people as this will allow those involved to cross check their interpretations with each
other. 12 I therefore decided to conduct the planned walk at Ground Zero with my
brother who was also interested in the practice of psychogeographical drifting.
However, contrary to the idea of the dérive as wandering without intention or plan,
our visit to Ground Zero required some planning, as the location was quite some
distance from where we lived and I needed to ensure that I would be able to produce
some data to write about.
Debord writes that psychogeographical drifts can either be site-specific studies
of particular places or can be completely random walks. 13 The first task was to
purchase a Lonely Planet Guide to America and also a Rough Guide map of New
York. The question of how to do the psychogeographical walks and how to
document such activities required some thought. I found Khatib’s account of a
psychogeographical drift around the Les Halles district in Paris to be a very useful
account of psychogeographical work to draw on. 14 I also came across numerous
psychogeographical accounts in forums such as the online Manchester Area
Psychogeographic and London Psychogeographic websites. In addition, there were
a few critical academic psychology accounts of psychogeographical drifts, which I
found useful to consult, as well as other critical activist and psychological accounts
as indicated previously in this chapter. 15 I had intended that after the drift I would
write a reflective story of our walk, interspersed with photographs and artistic maps.
What follows next is an account of our psychogeographical walks.

3. Psychogeographical Walking at Ground Zero

First of all, this account is an abridged version of the analysis. Those interested
may wish to consult Bridger’s PhD (2009) as well as another paper on this topic by
the author. 16 The following analysis highlights some of the main aspects and themes
of the walks carried out at Ground Zero.
In order to maintain some of the effects of disorientation, which appeared to be
conducive to psychogeographical walking, we decided to commence the work at
Ground Zero shortly after arriving to New York from our original destination in the
U.K. Our aim was to attempt to do a psychogeographical walk at Ground Zero and
to explore what it meant for us to be at the site of Ground Zero. We decided to trace
our route around Ground Zero by using a Bangkok map, which also had a World
Trade Center building on it. This practice is indebted to a practice that the
Situationists conducted where they used maps of other cities while walking in places
such as Paris and London. The point of such work was to map out the changing form
of urban environments and to begin to consider what needs to change in society.
When we arrived at the site, we both felt a sense of shock and horror. On
commencing our first walk at the site, the words of Judith Butler came to mind in
relation to her reflections on the September 11th attacks,
8 Psychogeography and Ground Zero
__________________________________________________________________
To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury,
to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else
suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence,
dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. 17

I thought about my own sadness at the loss of lives at that site and across the
world in various recent terrorist attacks, wars and conflicts. I also thought back to
where I had been when the attacks happened. I remembered that my brother and I
had been at home, the phone had rung, my brother had picked it up and one of his
friends had told him to put the television on and watch the news. My brother had put
the television on and we both had stared at the screen and were speechless to see a
news loop of a plane crashing into the World Trade Centre.
In relation to the walks that we conducted over the period of a few days, it proved
rather difficult to wander around Ground Zero, as the whole area was restricted
access, which meant that we could only walk a square route around the site. A
footpath had been laid out for visitors on the site’s outer perimeters and there was
quite a high level of security. Although we had a constant feeling that it was
somewhat inappropriate to take photographs and we kept thinking that the security
personnel may ask us what we were doing, no one seemed to mind us photographing
the site. Apparently the security personnel considered us to be tourists. Indeed there
can be a fine line between tourism and psychogeography. 18 The key difference here
being that tourism is configured as touristic practice tied with consumption whereas
psychogeography is configured as a means to criticize the spatial ordering of places,
systems and our positioning in capitalist society.
We attempted to follow Khatib’s cue of exploring the spaces we felt drawn
towards as a means to open ourselves up to how we felt about being at Ground Zero.
One should add here that such a practice is arguably closely tied to a psychoanalytic
mode of free association whereby one attempts to act and think spontaneously to free
up and create new chains of association of meanings in relation to understanding
one’s everyday experiences. Psychogeographical work can also be considered in
some respects to ethnographical work in terms of qualitative observational methods,
though arguably here the aims are rather more political in order to consider the
political order of things and to use the research practice as part of a process of
meaning making and for considering the question of social change.

4. Conclusions
The purpose of the Ground Zero walk for me was three-fold. The first purpose
was to conceptualise what a psychogeographical psychological qualitative method
could look like, the second purpose to consider the ordering of space at Ground Zero,
and the third purpose to consider the bigger question of whether there could be
alternatives to the capitalist order of things.
 Alexander John Bridger 9
__________________________________________________________________
In relation to the first purpose, since the production of my PhD thesis, which set
out to conceptualise a psychogeographical psychological methodology, I have gone
on to write several papers which outline my approach to studying urban spaces. This
particular chapter forms part of that mapping out of a psychogeographical
psychological approach, but since it is rather brief, those readers who wish to learn
more about my research could consult other writings of mine. Some readers may
find that the psychogeographical psychological approach is similar to other
qualitative methods such as ethnography and observational methods, and indeed it
is, though embedding this approach with a situationist political underpinning means
that the type of analytical claims produced from such work would be different in
focus.
As for the second purpose, I do not claim to be able to produce ‘findings’ from
research, as the aims of qualitative critical psychological work are not to assume to
be able to find meanings hidden in environments or in peoples’ heads. However, it
is possible to draw some conclusions about particular themes constructed in the
process of research in relation to my role as a researcher here. The two main themes
running through the process of the psychogeographical walk centred on surveillance
and power at Ground Zero. Surveillance was a main theme in terms of the high level
security at the site, which we observed during the psychogeographical power. Power
was a main theme in relation to where we were allowed and not allowed to walk.
In relation to the third purpose, this relates to the extent to which research can
enable social change. In essence, psychogeographical walking will not change the
world, but it can shift and shape the ways that we make sense of our everyday
environments, and to do such work in groups can create useful and constructive
dialogue. No one person should be able to say what should change in society as that
is a decision that should be made collectively by people. Hayes has argued that
psychogeographical research serves as a way to further politicise qualitative and
critical psychological research. 19 That argument could connect with what Pinder
indicates in terms of a need to change the ‘social organisation of place’ as well as
changing society. 20 Hence I argue here that psychogeographical methods can serve
as a useful strategy to physically consider our everyday environments and enter into
dialogue with others as to what built environments we really want as opposed to
simply accepting the current consumerist and capitalist formation of towns and
cities.

Notes
1
Alexander John Bridger, ‘September 11th 2001 and the Aftermath: Extending
Qualitative Methods in Psychology’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Manchester
Metropolitan University, 2009).
2
Christopher Gray, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the
Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998).
10 Psychogeography and Ground Zero
__________________________________________________________________

3
Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Post-
Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1992).
4
Judith Burnett, Erika Cudworth and Maria Tamboukou, ‘Women on Dérive:
Autobiographical Explorations of Lived Spaces’, Geography and Gender
Reconsidered (London: Women and Geography Study Group and Institute of British
Geographers, 2004, CD).
5
Grup de Lesbianes Feministes, ‘Exploring New Ways of Insubmission in Social
Representation’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology 1.4 (2005): 107-114.
6
Precarias a la Deriva, ‘Housewives, Maids, Cleaning Ladies and Caregivers in
General: Care in the Communication Continuum’, Annual Review of Critical
Psychology 1.4 (2005): 188-198.
7
David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth
Century Urbanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
8
Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London:
Verso, 2003).
9
, Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (London: MIT Press, 1998).
10
Ibid.
11
Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Situationist International, viewed 26
November 2014, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Abdelhafid Khatib, ‘Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles’,
Situationist International Anthology, viewed 26 November 2014,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/leshalles.html.
15
Burnett, Cudworth and Tamboukou, ‘Women on Dérive’.
16
Alexander John Bridger, ‘Psychogeography and the Study of Social
Environments: Extending Visual Methodological Research in Psychology’, Visual
Methods in Psychology: Using and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research, ed.
Paula Reavey (Hove: Psychology Press, 2011), 284-295.
17
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso, 2004), xii.
18
Phil Smith, Counter-Tourism: The Handbook (Devon: Triarchy Press, 2012).
19
Graham Hayes, ‘Walking the Streets: Psychology and the Flâneur’, Annual Review
of Critical Psychology 1.3 (2003): 50-66.
20
David Pinder, ‘Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City’,
Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405-427.

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Qualitative Methods in Psychology’. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Manchester
Metropolitan University, 2009.
 Alexander John Bridger 11
__________________________________________________________________

Bridger, Alexander John. ‘Psychogeography and the Study of Social Environments:

Extending Visual Methodological Research in Psychology’. Visual Methods in
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General: Care in the Communication Continuum’. Annual Review of Critical
Psychology 1.4 (2005): 188-198.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. London: MIT Press, 1998.

Alexander John Bridger is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of

Huddersfield, teaching in areas including critical psychology, qualitative research
methods and psychogeography. He has published papers on psychogeography and
is currently writing a book titled Psychology and Psychogeography.
 Monstrosity by Monstrous Means: Cambodian Memorial Sites

Hans Christian Post

Abstract
The Cambodian memorials to the Cambodian genocide between 1975 and 1979 can
in numerous ways be termed monstrous. Not so much in that they deal with atrocities
monstrous in scale and character, as in the monstrous visual means they employ and
the imprecise, monster-ridden explanations they deliver. In this they stand in contrast
to Holocaust memorial sites particularly in Europe, Israel and the US, where
curatorial, representational and aesthetic experiments based on an ethos of not
depicting the horror and not delivering simple explanations have for decades
prevailed; an ethos formulated out of respect for victims and survivors and/or due to
a consciousness that the Holocaust represents an event, which in its causes and
effects can be neither fully grasped and represented nor isolated in time and space.
In Cambodia the rationale on the contrary seems to be to show as much of the horror
as possible with no or only little consideration of victims, survivors and visitors, and
deliver the starkest, most conclusive explanations possible. Initially, this renders
memorial sites in Cambodia highly problematic and unethical. But, as this chapter
argues, the sites and their exhibits should be valued for the general truths they hold
and, more importantly, for the potentials for change they carry. By their monstrous
means and violation of the so called Holocaust Bilderverbot-tradition, which has for
decades served as ethical guideline in much artistic and curatorial work concerning
events of genocide, they highlight dilemmas that all genocide memorial sites and
practices ultimately entail, thereby raising anew the question, if there are certain
standards and limits worth meeting and focuses worth keeping, when memorial sites
are created. The Cambodian memorial sites deliver forceful answers to these
questions.

Key Words: Cambodian genocide, Khmer Rouge, genocide memory, memory

culture, memory politics, S-21, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, mug shots, Choeung
Ek Killing Fields, dark tourism, genocide consumption.

*****

1. Introduction
In 2007 the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) concluded a
comprehensive mapping project, which, among other things, revealed 81 memorials
to the Cambodian genocide. 1 Since then more such sites have been identified. In
2013 DC-CAM estimated that 126 memorials exist, often erected at Buddhist
temples by survivors of the genocide. In Cambodia markers of genocide, and of
commemoration are in other words abundant. This could indicate that memory is
alive and that the murderous past has its well-assigned place in local memories and
14 Monstrosity by Monstrous Means
__________________________________________________________________
geographies. But this is not so. Memory is alive in the sense that sites and practices
are currently undergoing change. But, although some of these are pointing forward
and could prove quite fundamental, the changes have not solely been for the better.
Still, due to DC-CAM’s broad outreach programs during the recent Khmer Rouge
tribunals, Cambodia today stands at a crossroad, where it can move towards more
inclusive, humane memorial sites and practices, or stick to the monolithic,
instrumental ones so far preferred.
For, until now, Cambodia’s memorial sites and practices have been marked by
monstrosity. This is especially evident when seen in relation to Holocaust memorials
in, for instance, Germany, where curatorial and artistic experiments based on an
ethos of not depicting the horror and not accepting simple explanations have long
prevailed. In Cambodia the ethos has been the opposite: to show as much horror as
possible and deliver the starkest and simplest explanations possible. This lends
Cambodian memorials an insensitive, imbalanced, unresolved, propagandistic
expression, and this to such an extent that they can be said to reproduce the injustices
of the Khmer Rouge-era and more generally hinder memory and efforts of working
through in the population.
Fortunately, however, the picture is not so clear-cut. Cambodian memorials hold
a number of valuable qualities. Interestingly, the main virtue lies in their
unresolvedness. Many sites, especially the national ones, can be viewed as early
outbursts of horror, anguish and anger or as loud, response-seeking outcries that are
at the same time strikingly silent. Judging from recent developments this odd
combination of loudness and silence is now triggering attempts to counter both and
reset the focus so that commemoration will in the future be more for and by the
Cambodians. Should this trend continue, the remaining question is, if the current
leadership will allow for memory, with all social aspirations that might follow, to
take a more rightful place in Cambodian society.
In the following, memorial monstrosity in Cambodia will be discussed on the
basis of the two most important sites, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Choeung
Ek Killing Fields. The chapter will shortly describe the genocide itself and give an
outline of the early political context of the memorials. This will lead to the discussion
and evaluation of the mug shot exhibition at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
followed by a brief discussion of Choeung Ek Killing Fields.

2. The Cambodian Genocide

The Cambodian genocide took place during the Khmer Rouge-period between
April 1975 and early January 1979. The killings started on the very first day of the
Khmer Rouge taking power and launching its plan to create a purified, self-sufficient
society. 2 All cities were immediately evacuated, with many families separated in the
process, and people thereafter enslaved on farm communes, where they were to
undergo re-education. In addition money, private property and medical, educational,
cultural and religious institutions were abolished. Over the next three years and nine
 Hans Christian Post 15
__________________________________________________________________
months, an estimated 2.12 million people out of a population of 7.890.000 died.
Later analysis has indicated that approximately 1.386.734 were executed, summarily
or in the course of the many purges undertaken to rid the country of so-called ‘inner
enemies’, while the remaining victims died from starvation, exhaustion and disease. 3
In December 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia to end recurring Khmer Rouge
attacks on its border villages. Within days the Vietnamese overthrew Cambodia,
putting an end to the genocide, and thereafter proclaimed a new state, the People’s
Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), led by pro-Vietnamese Cambodians. The Khmer
Rouge, however, survived as a resistance movement operating from Thai bases until
1999, when they finally surrendered.

3. The Cambodian Memorial Sites

It is unclear how much influence the Vietnamese exerted, when the memorials
were created in the 1980s, but they were presumably involved in most efforts and
were certainly the driving force behind the more important memorials. Their motive
was strong. Due to Cold War politics and existing enmities, China and most of the
Western World had condemned the Vietnamese invasion and chosen to support the
Khmer Rouge instead. All aid to PRK was withheld and doubt was raised over the
genocide. 4
As memorial sites Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek were to a high degree shaped to
challenge this lack of recognition and aid. As forensic sites they could hardly have
been better suited. A few days after the overthrow, two photojournalists had
stumbled upon a former school facility in Phnom Penh, where they found 14 recently
killed prisoners as well as smaller and larger cells and myriad instruments of
detainment and torture. What they had detected was S-21, Khmer Rouge’s secret
police headquarters and central prison. Over the next days, troves of interrogation
and confession texts, entry and execution records as well as photographs of prisoners
tortured to death and thousands of mug shots were found at the site, strengthening
the initial suspicion that severe atrocities had taken place. Sensing the site’s
importance, the Vietnamese had it cleaned up and began studying the findings that
have till date revealed that 12.000-20.000 prisoners were held captive and that
presumably only 202 survived. Three weeks later journalists from socialist countries
were invited to witness what increasingly bore the marks of genocide, whereupon
Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel, who previously designed the Museum of American
War Crimes in Saigon, was brought in to create a genocide museum. Guided tours
were initiated one month later, but until July 1980 only foreigners were admitted.
When the ban on Cambodians was lifted, tens of thousands came, many seeking
information about missing relatives. Within three months, over 300.000 Cambodians
and 11.000 foreigners had visited. 5
Simultaneously, mass graves were detected all across Cambodia, among these
graves outside Phnom Penh at Choeung Ek that had since 1977 served as execution
grounds for primarily S-21 prisoners. In the following months, 8.895 bodies out of
16 Monstrosity by Monstrous Means
__________________________________________________________________
at least 20.000 were exhumed at Choeung Ek, whereupon bones and skulls were
placed in a wooden pavilion or arranged decoratively on the ground for visiting
foreigners. 6 Eventually, in 1988, a 62-meter tall stupa with acrylic glass walls was
erected and over 5.000 skulls placed inside.
This outline of the development of the two sites indicates that the prime motives
were to justify the Vietnamese occupation and legitimize the PRK-state by proving,
beyond doubt, the murderous, criminal nature of the Khmer Rouge. Just as
Cambodia was used as a warfare tool by both North Vietnam and the US before
1975, so was commemoration after 1979 employed to serve Vietnamese interests.
Although many memorials spring from local initiatives, the prime focus in early
commemoration was not the Cambodians and their need to reflect on the genocide,
and in many ways this is still so. This becomes particularly evident, when the
monstrousity of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek is studied up close.

4. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Tuol Sleng’s most prominent feature is the large display of mug shots. 7 David P.
Chandler, the renowned scholar of Cambodia’s modern history, has described them
as highly unnerving and affecting, knowing ‘as we do, and as they did not, that every
one of them was facing death when the photographs were taken’. 8 Others have
similarly described them as extraordinarily moving, and in 1997, 22 of the mug shots
were even exhibited as art objects in a controversial exhibition in MoMA and later
sold through a gallery. 9
That the mug shots are moving can hardly be denied. A reason for this is that we
in each witness the genocidal crimes as they are initiated – the photographic act
being the first step in the dehumanizing process that transforms the victim to a
criminal to be convicted and executed – but where the victim still lives and hope
therefore seemingly still prevails. Another reason is that many of the victims look at
us with appealing emotions of sadness, distress and powerlessness, allowing for a
strong imaginary bond between victim and viewer to be established and a deep
feeling of the injustice committed against the victims to evolve.
This, however, is also, where the first troubling question arises. Most visitors to
the museum today are foreign tourists. Is it justifiable that they are moved in a
horrific but emotionally and aesthetically satisfying or even pleasurable way by the
museum’s mug shots? It can hardly be doubted that Mai Lam aimed at precisely this
effect, when the museum was created. Neither can it be doubted that most curators
of genocide evidence would make comparable choices had they had evidence of this
sort at their disposal. In the rule, genocide museums exhibit the given evidence with
the zeal of producing strong emotional and moral responses. But since the artefacts
are not as powerful and bond creating as Tuol Sleng’s mug shots, motives and
politics behind the curatorial decisions, and the emotional and/or aesthetic pleasures
that viewing genocidal evidence can evoke are seldom felt. This is different in Tuol
Sleng and also at Choeung Ek and therefore a point, where the two sites can be said
 Hans Christian Post 17
__________________________________________________________________
to reveal what is generally at stake in genocide memory business. This said, it
remains worth asking if it is justifiable for foreign visitors to emotionally consume
the tragedy of others. But then again, as will be shown in the following, this question
probably puts too little trust in visitors as in the mug shots ability to incite critical
awareness.

5. Viewing the Mug Shots

For as theatre scholar Emma Wills has noted, the mug shots tend to produce
ambivalent, not easily consumed experiences among visitors. A reason for this is the
perspective at play. The point of view visitors must adopt is that of the perpetrator,
and this ‘makes the experience of viewing […] highly ambivalent’, since viewers
are unavoidably drawn into the dehumanizing process. In her play Photographs from
S-21, written as an answer to MoMA’s exhibition, French-American playwright
Catherine Filloux even goes a step further by criticizing, in Wills words, ‘an aesthetic
(and ethical) carelessness’ on the part of viewers, indicating that they are not
potentially, but actively involved in the dehumanizing process in that they misuse
the victims for aesthetic pleasure. 10
Wills, however, finds Filloux’ critique too far-reaching. Although visitors may
enter Tuol Sleng with a certain carelessness, they do not necessarily remain careless.
As Wills has suggested, the mug shots might in fact counter such a state of mind, at
least in the Tuol Sleng-setting, since they ‘seem to ask a question of us that is both
difficult to decipher and even more difficult to discern how to respond to’ and
therefore may have the force to ‘shock us out of unselfconscious spectatorship’. 11
Geographer Rachel Hughes’ study of tourist behaviour at Tuol Sleng confirms
that carelessness and unselfconscious spectatorship are not dominant features among
visitors. Firstly, all sorts of reactions and responses appear, and secondly, the most
prevailing reactions are silence and a concern to behave appropriately. That visitors
react in this way backs Wills’ notion that the photographs have the strength to evoke
unfamiliarity and ambivalence. But as Hughes goes on to remark, the unfamiliarity
also stems from a general lack of interpretative information – a curatorial silence
that leads to most visitors leaving the museum in a state of confusion. 12 With this
remark we turn from the tourists and look instead at the exhibition itself and its
possible dehumanizing effects.

6. The Silences at Tuol Sleng

In her recent book, Archiving the Unspeakable, archival scholar Michelle
Caswell explores the many silences in and around the mug shots. Caswell notes that
silence is a key problematic in relation to the mug shots as these were made by the
Khmer Rouge to ultimately silence (exterminate) the victims. Drawing on this, she
regards later silences in the curatorial and archival processes as potential repetitions
of the dehumanizing process – as suppression, victimization, misuse or ultimately:
extermination. At the same time, however, she acknowledges that the mug shots
18 Monstrosity by Monstrous Means
__________________________________________________________________
have taken on a life of their own in unforeseen ways, often partially countering the
dehumanizing process they originally stem from, and as she shows throughout her
book they have the potential to take on even more life of their own.
Looking at the current exhibition, which to a large extent dates back to the early
1980s, silences appear at several levels. There are firstly the silences evoked by the
lack of adequate, in-depth information. On the information boards the genocide is
reduced to a simple story of a few monsters, foremost Pol Pot, turning a genuine
socialist revolution into fascism, while considerations, what the guilt of other actors
and nations, among these Vietnam, could be, and what other factors played a role,
are left out. Secondly, the mug shots can be said to silence the additional thousands
of mug shots that were presumably made, but never found at the prison, just as they
can be said to silence the remaining more than two million victims, who were never
photographed in the first place leaving voids that cannot be filled. Thirdly, there is a
double silence in relation to the identity of prisoners. The majority of Tuol Sleng
prisoners were Khmer Rouge members accused of treason, and included high-level
officials along with their families. It can therefore be assumed that a proportion of
the displayed victims were once regime sympathisers and that some had even been
supporters of or partakers in the genocide. This, nonetheless, remains untold. The
victims are reduced to a homogenous, anonymous mass, and although this might
give viewers an experience of the genocide’s massive scale and of the anonymity
and silence the victims were rendered, it is at the cost of more precise knowledge
about S-21 and the genocide that could challenge the stereotype, monster-ridden
narratives. 13
A final silence that is worth elaborating on is that the personal identities of the
victims are silenced. This, above all, results from the fact that files and mug shots
were separated, when Khmer Rouge evacuated the prison, but also stems from later
neglects. Until recently there have been only few attempts to exhibit biographical
data of victims, once these have come to light. This, however, is slowly changing,
and this change marks an interesting development that could prove valuable for
future commemorative efforts in Cambodia.

7. Resetting the Focus

When one visits Tuol Sleng today, there is a striking lack of Cambodians. The
reasons for this are surely manifold. But one can view it as yet another silence. The
Cambodian survivors were silenced, as they were not the focal point when the
museum was created. The initial interest of locals was clearly there, and many of the
over 300.000 Cambodians, who visited in 1980, in fact used the exhibition in ways
that could be forward-pointing. They did not come to be haunted or moved, but to
search for loved ones that had gone missing during the Khmer Rouge-regime, and
when a photograph of a relative or acquaintance was found, many added the person’s
name. 14 The motive behind this act was clearly to gain and give certitude. As such,
it marks an early attempt to counter the dehumanizing silences and give back to the
 Hans Christian Post 19
__________________________________________________________________
victims some of their identity and life story, just as it marks an attempt to reset the
focus and make commemoration less a foreign matter.
In recent years DC-CAM assisted by other institutions has done a lot to further
pursue this. The centre has established a digital database of the mug shots with a
search function, thereby making it easier for survivors to specify their search for
relatives. At the same time DC-CAM has helped relatives identify victims through
its monthly magazine Searching for the Truth. Finally, it has added photographs to
the exhibition of, for instance, grandchildren holding the mug shot of a grandparent
they have never met, thereby symbolically bringing victims back into their larger
life stories. It is of course a very small step considering that this might only be
possible in a few cases and that the majority of Cambodian survivors, who saw
relatives ‘disappear’ during the Khmer Rouge-period or lost track of them as cities
were evacuated, will therefore have to live on in incertitude. Still, if more attempts
of this sort were made and displayed, it could pave the way for more critical dialogue
among Cambodians on the genocide as well as on commemoration and its hitherto
unresolved focal points in Cambodia. 15

8. Setbacks and Resistance at Choeung Ek Killing Fields

Speaking of unresolved focal points, it is rewarding to shortly turn to Choeung
Ek Killing Fields, where skulls of many Tuol Sleng victims are displayed in a 62-
metre tall stupa. Although a nearby sign urges visitors to act respectfully, the
memorial site and its stupa is a harsh reminder that respect for victims and survivors
remains in short supply in Cambodian memory politics, not least as the site was 10
years ago leased for a 30 period to a joint Japanese-Cambodian company whose
objective has above all been to increase revenues. But interestingly enough the skulls
at a symbolic level conduct their own protest against this and other acts of misuse
and disempowerment. Whereas the mug shots of victims were exposed to the
somewhat exploiting gazes of foreign visitors, the skulls at Choeung Ek appear to
look into the far distance, as to regain some pride and resist their exposure and the
on-going political inability at both national and international levels to bring justice
to victims and survivors in Cambodia. Silently overlooking the surrounding
Cambodian landscape they remind us that the genocide is still escaping both justice
and understanding, and that Cambodia is still far from finding rest.

Notes
1
‘Mapping the Killing Fields’, DC-CAM, viewed 26 April 2015,
http://www.d.dccam.org/Projects/Maps/MappingKillingField.htm.
2
The Khmer Rouge, which initially formed an insignificant communist movement,
had gained momentum in the late 1960s and especially from 1970 onwards, as the
Vietnam War expanded into Cambodia as a civil war between on the one hand the
Khmer Rouge militia assisted by North Vietnamese troops, and on the other hand
20 Monstrosity by Monstrous Means
__________________________________________________________________

the US backed Khmer Republic led by Marshal Lon Nol. The uneven war, which
claimed the lives of an estimated 250.000 Cambodians, ended on April 17th 1975
with the Khmer Rouge seizing Phnom Penh. Bruce Sharp, ‘Counting Hell’, Mekong,
viewed 26 April 2015, http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm.
3
Ibid.
4
Rachel Hughes, ‘Dutiful Tourism: Encountering the Cambodian Genocide’, Asia
Pacific Viewpoint 49.3 (2008): 326.
5
David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2-8; Cheang Sokha and James
O’Toole, ‘More than 200 Survived S-21 Prison: Report’, The Phnom Penh Post, 4
January 2011, viewed 26 April 2015,
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/more-200-survived-s-21-prison-report.
6
Wynne Cougill, ‘Buddhist Cremation Traditions for the Dead and the Need to
Preserve Forensic Evidence in Cambodia’, DC-CAM, viewed 26 April 2015,
http://www.d.dccam.org/Projects/Maps/Buddhist_Cremation_Traditions.htm.
7
All prisoners were photographed upon arrival as part of the registration process.
Although 12.000 to 20.000 prisoners are estimated to have been held at S-21, far less
mug shots have till this day been found. Michelle Caswell, Archiving the
Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia
(Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 27.
8
Chandler, Voices from S-21, 13.
9
Emma Wills, Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent
Others (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 143.
10
Ibid., 147-148; The play imagines two mug shot subjects, a male and a female,
reveal parts of their personal stories after closing time and talk about, what it means
for them to be displayed as museum objects. Mid-way through the play the two
characters raise the issue of viewer complicity by addressing the visitors: ‘Young
Woman: Who are they, who look? // Young Man: Ghosts, maybe… Ghosts of the
Khmer Rouge. // Young Woman: But they do not look the same. // Young Man: Why
else would they come back again and again to see us? To check on us?’. Ibid., 150.
11
Ibid., 139.
12
Hughes, ‘Dutiful Tourism’, 324-325.
13
Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, 8, 58-59, 65.
14
Ibid., 64.
15
Ibid., 84-88, 120-135.

Bibliography
Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the
Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2014.
 Hans Christian Post 21
__________________________________________________________________

Chandler, David P. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Cougill, Wynne. ‘Buddhist Cremation Traditions for the Dead and the Need to
Preserve Forensic Evidence in Cambodia’. DC-CAM. Viewed 26 April 2015.
http://www.d.dccam.org/Projects/Maps/Buddhist_Cremation_Traditions.htm.

Hughes, Rachel. ‘Dutiful Tourism: Encountering the Cambodian Genocide’. Asia

Pacific Viewpoint 49.3 (2008): 318-330.

‘Mapping the Killing Fields’. DC-CAM. Viewed 26 April 2015.

http://www.d.dccam.org/Projects/Maps/MappingKillingField.htm.

Sokha, Cheang and James O’Toole. ‘More than 200 Survived S-21 Prison: Report’.
The Phnom Penh Post, 4 January 2011. Viewed 26 April 2015.
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/more-200-survived-s-21-prison-report.

Sharp, Bruce. ‘Counting Hell’. Mekong. Viewed 26 April 2015.

http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm.

Wills, Emma. Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent

Others. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Hans Christian Post is a postdoc at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at
the University of Copenhagen. He has written a PhD on the master plan competition
for Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in 1993 and is generally interested in the intertwining of
city planning, building preservation, memory, and history politics.
Monsters Take to the Streets! Monstrous Street-Art as Pedagogy
of Resistance to Post-Olympic Regeneration in Hackney Wick?

Rhiannon Firth
Abstract
This chapter explores geographies of gentrification and resistance in relation to the
monstrous through the lens of street-art in post-Olympic London. It takes as a
geographic case study Hackney Wick, which has for a long time been a bastion of
alternative and creative living due to cheap rents in large, ex-industrial warehouse
spaces. The artistic sociality of the area is imbued within its landscape, as prolific
street artists have adorned ex-industrial warehouses and canal-side walls with graffiti
and murals. Since the announcement of the 2012 Olympic Games, the area has been
a site of intense political and aesthetic contestation. The post-Olympic legacy means
that the area has been earmarked for redevelopment, with current residents facing
the possibility of joining thousands already displaced by the games. The anxiety of
dispossession is reflected by monstrous characters and sinister disembodied teeth,
eyes and fingers embedded within the landscape, painted by local artists. Using
geographically sensitive mobile and visual methodology to document the landscape
and artwork, the chapter analyses and interprets the monstrous themes using a range
of theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille and Nick Land. I argue that
monstrous street-art lays visible claim to public territory for aesthetic purposes at
odds with the visions of redevelopers and the needs of capital. Whilst street-art and
graffiti do not fit easily within frameworks of organized political resistance or
collective social movements, they operate as a kind of epistemological transgression
that triggers transformative affects in the viewer. This creates conditions for
pedagogies of resistance to gentrification by expressing and mobilizing political
affects such as anger and anxiety, raising awareness of geographical politics, and
encouraging the viewer to question the status quo of the built environment.

Key Words: Gentrification, resistance, street art, graffiti, monstrous, situationist

methods, Bakhtin, Bataille, Nick Land, Hackney Wick.

*****
1. Introduction
I was drawn to the conference: ‘Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of
Monstrosity’, from which this chapter results, because the title offered a lens through
which to think about something that had been lurking in the shadows of my
consciousness for some time whilst walking through my neighbourhood, Hackney
Wick and Fish Island. These are two adjacent areas of London drawn together in the
context of the post-Olympic Games redevelopment legacy. They have rich industrial
histories dating back to around 1860 and a rich architecture of beautiful old
warehouses. The area has been dedicated to light industry for the last 40 years, and
24 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________
more recently artists and creative professionals have been re-purposing old industrial
infrastructure. In the context of the Olympic Games legacy, the area is undergoing
intense ‘gentrification’, with large plots of land and old warehouses being sold off
to developers and existing residents being priced out of the market.
What brought the area to mind in the context of ‘Monstrous Geographies’ was
another aspect of the changing landscape: the words and images that appear on the
walls one day, to be viewed, experienced and admired or detested by passers-by,
then painted over with something different another day. I live in the area, and these
are the monsters with which I have the most intimate relationship and day-to-day
contact. In this chapter, I would like to explore their transgressive potential,
conceptualizing these monsters as an irruption of the unconscious into the built
environment, a carnivalesque underworld – what Bakhtin terms the ‘material bodily
stratum’ 1 that expresses and produces affects and triggers a pedagogical function
that transforms the consciousness of the viewer.

1. Street-Art: Transgression and Complicity

Street-art is a form of illicit or illegal drawing in public space. It is distinct from
graffiti, yet the boundaries are blurred and the histories intertwined. 2 Jeff Ferrell
argues that ‘anarchic’ citizens such as street-artists articulate desires and possibilities
beyond the needs of private capital, raising questions of legitimate property rights
and aesthetic value whilst reassembling public space and community. 3 Nonetheless,
it would be erroneous to view street-art as solely a transgressive or resistant practice.
It is simultaneously a ‘subcultural activity’ and a ‘mainstream indicator of “urban
cool.”’ 4 Street-art can be an integral part of the process of regeneration, creating an
atmosphere of creativity and vibrancy that is later drawn upon by planning
authorities and developers to make an area seem appealing. 5 This may or may not
be congruent with the desires of the artists. 6 In the context of Hackney Wick, Iain
Sinclair suggests that many of the artists hail from the nexus of the squatting and
warehouse community that gentrification looks liable to displace, which would
suggest that gentrification is not in the interests of (some) artists. 7 Street-art is an
area where motives and intentions are hard to discern, unethical to impute, and
potentially as multiple as the individuals who choose to communicate in public
space. Furthermore, motives are potentially irrelevant since artists cannot impose or
elicit singular meanings from their viewers. 8 The purpose of this chapter is not to
speculate on motives, but rather to sketch an affective landscape, resisting
interpretive closure whilst engaging with spatial multiplicity and epistemological
transgression. Street-art has a tendency to raise extreme emotions in viewers,
bringing the imaginal or unconscious into material space, questioning physical and
psychic boundaries. The chapter speaks to a growing body of geographic literature
calling for a move away from dispassionate, Cartesian observations as the basis for
understanding visual culture and a move towards embodied accounts. 9
 Rhiannon Firth 25
__________________________________________________________________
2. Monsters and Transgression
My starting point is the uncanny resonance between the functions of street-art
and monstrosity. They have similar epistemological and pedagogical functions:
looking beyond the given, transgressing fixed knowledge, questioning boundaries
and raising ethico-political questions. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests that we ‘read
cultures from the monsters they engender’. 10 Where street-art exists at the
intersection of ‘subculture’ and ‘mainstream’, monsters also have a tendency to exist
simultaneously ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. 11 Theorists of the monstrous articulate it as
the uncanny that resides in the unconscious as an aspect of the repressed subject. 12
It is the Real, the unknowable, the shadow, the Other. 13 However, some texts also
play with the possibility that it can also signify a more affirmative transgression –
escape, queering, 14 the breakdown of boundaries and oppressive categories 15 and in-
betweenness, difference and social rebellion. 16 Like street-art, monsters may not be
explicitly or intentionally political, yet they transgress taken-for-granted
assumptions and in so doing open up possibilities by creating new affects.
In theorizing the transgressive function of monstrous street-art, I draw
particularly on the works of Bakhtin, Bataille and Nick Land who all elaborate
understandings of the monstrous as transformative of consciousness in a way that
transgresses the divide between aesthetics and politics. All three theorists begin from
an approach that is critical of homogeneity imposed by capitalism, which is viewed
as a psychic repression of the affective force of terror and death. 17 The monstrous
also has a utopian aspect. It produces an excess: there is a form of resistance to be
found in unconventional, monstrous, grotesque bodies and what these have to say on
the themes of death, transgression, hybridity and heterogeneity. The monstrous is
notorious for its capacity to unsettle. Tied to Freud’s notion of the ‘Uncanny’, it has
the capacity to ‘generate material of uncertain epistemological status’. 18 Using
monstrous imagery designed to provoke affects such as eroticism and disgust, the
theorists transgress the fundamental limit between life and death 19 and collapse
boundaries between bodies by exploring the transgression of presumed binaries such
as human/animal, 20 human/nature, 21 desire/disgust, 22 animate/inanimate, 23
macrocosm/microcosm, 24 individual/social, 25 hierarchy/becoming, 26
wisdom/madness, upper/lower body or mouth/anus. The theme of transgression
27 28

has been elaborated by feminist and queer theorists who have drawn attention to the
importance of transgressing gender, class and social norms including inside/outside,
female/male, foreign/native, proletarian/aristocrat. 29
Articulating these transgressions by means of language and aesthetics of the
monstrous creates a pedagogy that is both uncomfortable and comic, and expresses
what Bakhtin terms the ‘struggle against cosmic terror … an obscure memory of
cosmic perturbations in the distant past and the dim terror of future catastrophes form
the very basis of human thought, speech and images’. 30 Hierarchical systems can
seize on this affective terror for political purposes: ‘It is used by all religious systems
to oppress man and his consciousness’. 31 Monstrous aesthetics have a pedagogical
26 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________
function because the grotesque image of the body portrayed in monstrous images
and culture ‘transforms cosmic terror into a gay carnival monster’ 32 whereby ‘Terror
is conquered by laughter’. 33 This shift of perspective allows one to approach
alienating phenomena on the ‘plane of material sensual experience’. 34

3. Methodology
My assumption is that street-art constitutes a conversation in the public sphere, 35
not always intelligible at a rational level yet with potentially transformative effects
on viewers at an affective level. 36 ‘Affect’ is an aspect of radical pedagogy drawn
from Deleuzian theory. 37 It has been taken up by anarchists 38 and post-
structuralists 39 and resonates with themes in situationist and psychogeographic
literatures. 40 Affect refers to an intensity of experience that exceeds individualized
emotions and feelings, drawing attention to the ways in which desire flows through
and changes multiplicities including peoples, groups and the built environment. 41
This approach treats the pedagogical moment as becoming-other, a transgression,
rather than imbuing fixed knowledge within a fixed being, cultivating awareness of
multiple perspectives on processes of alienation so as to open one’s own perception
to the perspectives of others. 42 Inspired by the situationists and their concepts of
dérive and détournement, Alexander Bridger contends that it is possible to dissociate
oneself from one’s conventional, everyday understandings of the urban environment
and reach a kind of critical consciousness as to how the environment is both shaped
by social conditions and indeed helps to shape those everyday experiences and
understandings that it is normally hard to step outside. 43 Similarly, my data
collection combined the practice of critical walking with autoethnographic notes and
photographs, offering a narrative account interspersed with photographs in dialogue
with the theorists of transgression. Having read the texts prior to my walk, I re-read
the theorists through and with the landscape in Hackney Wick.

4. An Affective Cartography
I undertook three dice walks of around an hour each. I decided on the rules
beforehand; that is, the direction that each number would signify at different types
of crossing. I also decided on the boundaries of the area that I would stay within.
This included Hackney Wick and Fish Island, the boundaries of which are easy to
identify both on a map and within the territory because they form a triangle with the
A12 road on two sides, and the Lee Navigation Canal on another side. I took notes
and photographs as I walked and consulted the texts. What follows are a very limited
number of examples from a larger pool of data, due to the restraints of the word limit
for the chapter.
 Rhiannon Firth 27
__________________________________________________________________

Image 1: Street-art around fire escape on Smeed Road warehouse. Photograph

© 2015. Rhiannon Firth. Used with permission.

Image 2: Street-art on roof of Smeed Road warehouse. Photograph

© 2015 Rhiannon Firth. Used with permission.

From Dice Walk #1: Images showing the stereotypical pink gums and teeth of
the artist Sweet Toof. 44 Disembodied teeth seem transgressive because they return
us to ‘partial objects’, deconstructing the unity of the self and returning us to the
material bodily stratum through emphasis on the body. 45 They give living form to
the buildings, turning inert matter into organic mouths, and transgress self/other
relations, drawing the buildings closer to human experience, suspending
alienation. 46
Disembodied teeth and gums transgress certain binaries: life/death, body/world.
For Bakhtin, ‘gaping jaws’, teeth and the mouth represent the entrance to the body,
28 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________
showing that it is open to the world and to others, rather than closed and
individualised. 47 Land frequently links death to its ability to ‘bite’ and it is stated
that death has ‘teeth’. 48 For Bataille, the mouth is primitive and animalistic,
representing the affective and pre-rational aspects of the human, expressing both
rage and terror. 49 I wonder: are these teeth trying to express rage, or terror? Do they
say ‘We are frightened’ or ‘we are frightening’? Perhaps they are transgressing
individualized emotions in this sense, and suspending the alienation presumed
between that which is frightened and that which is frightening, expressing a
conception of affect laid out on ‘one plane of material sensual experience’ 50 and
transgressing the limits separating the body from the world. 51 Might this provoke to
a feeling of empathy and connectedness with the built environment? The
methodology used in this chapter raises more questions than answers, in the same
way that the images might create ‘openness’, in the Bakhtinian sense, to otherness.

Image 3: Street-art on junction of Smeed Road and Stour Road. Photograph

© 2015. Rhiannon Firth. Used with permission.

From Dice Walk #1: The image looks somewhat like a baby with one eye,
perhaps a rather cute Cyclops, it makes me feel a combination of innocence, intrigue,
fear and horror. Nick Land quotes Nietzsche: ‘Only your eye – monstrously/ stares
at me infinitely’. 52 Bataille views the eye as ‘extreme seductiveness at the boundary
of horror’ 53 and as symbolic of consciousness. It is positioned as a ‘third eye’ or
Pineal Eye, on which Bataille also writes as being connected to the attainment of
excess through a primordial relationship to nature. 54 Bakhtin recounts how Rabelais
loved ‘free play with the human body’ including ‘cyclopes with one eye on the
forehead, others with eyes on shoulders or their backs’. 55 The eye is an opening to
the body. It receives information and produces a viewpoint or perspective. Like other
 Rhiannon Firth 29
__________________________________________________________________
monstrous characters, the Cyclops emphasizes the ways in which ‘its exterior aspect
is not distinct from the inside, and the exchange between the body and the world is
emphasized’. 56 Perhaps the Cyclops has something to say about the ways in which
humans are formed by their environment, and the importance of maintaining
connectedness.

Image 4: Street-art outside Stour Space. Photograph

© 2015. Rhiannon Firth. Used with permission.

From Dice Walk #1: This image, which is outside the Counter Café and gallery
Stour Space seems to be a female figure, perhaps with a mouse ear, with a climbing
plant strategically placed over the pubic region; reminiscent of themes surrounding
the transgression of human/animal, human/nature and self/other. Deleuze and
Guattari place great emphasis on the importance of becoming-other, for example
becoming-animal as a form of resistance and transgression. 57 Bakhtin also imagines
a form of human-animal relations in terms of becoming. 58 Becoming resists
hierarchy and alienation, because a hierarchy can ‘determine only that which
represents stable, immovable, and unchangeable being, not free becoming’. 59
30 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________

Image 5: Street-art on Stour Road. Photograph

© 2015. Rhiannon Firth. Used with permission.

From Dice walk #1: This seems to be a reptile or dinosaur running on two legs
and with a body like a human, again echoing themes surrounding human/animal
hybridity and transgression. He returns us to the material bodily stratum because
he’s expressing a clear affect, possibly fear, and is running from the fire that he
cannot escape, reminiscent of ‘cosmic terror’ discussed above, yet like Bakhtin’s
grotesque images, he is a comic character, with a flabby blue physique.
From Dice walk #2: The skeletons are monstrous, and transgressive because they
are the living dead; they transgress the life/death binary. Their placing on an
erstwhile advertising billboard is ominous. For Nick Land, Capitalism is founded on
an Enlightenment rationality where death is hidden from view, and prevented from
‘injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial
interests their rights’. 60 People continue to defer pleasure and gratification because
they are not aware of their own mortality. A reading of this mural as critical or radical
might posit the skeletons as a metaphor for capitalism, masculinity or modernity,
showing the domination of the forces of death over life in capitalism: ‘Compared to
the immortal soul of capital, the death of the individual becomes an empirical
triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock’. 61 Nonetheless, this particular image makes
 Rhiannon Firth 31
__________________________________________________________________
me feel uncomfortable because of the gender positionality and objectification of the
women.

Image 6: Street-art on Billboard on White Post Lane. Photograph

© 2015. Rhiannon Firth. Used with permission.

5. Conclusion
Monstrous street art reminds us of death as an imminent (and immanent) threat
rather than something ‘toothless’ that can be rationalized or reasoned away through
transcendental theism: ‘The death “proper” to matter is the jagged edge of its
impropriety, its teeth’. 62 The images transgress habitual thinking about binaries
between living and inert matter, the animate and inanimate, as well as portraying
body-horror and death directly. The monstrous, disembodied body parts and deathly
figures of the street-art in Hackney Wick give rise to anxious affects, reminding us
of our own mortality in a time where usually ‘death is privatized, withdrawn into
interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without
public accreditation’. 63 Revelation of death and mortality highlights alienation. 64
However, the monsters also have a utopian aspect, inviting us to imagine a world
with different boundaries, differently conceived relations with nature and between
Self and Other. Drawing on the theorists, and my personal affective responses to the
images, I would like to posit the idea of a pedagogical cartography, which articulates
the affective potential of the landscape. As a methodology, psychogeographical
wanderings are flawed in some respects. In particular, it presents a very
individualized and personal perspective. Nonetheless, working with affect and
embodiment is important, because these are essential aspects of everyday life for all
humans 65 and have frequently been neglected in much critical and political theory. 66
32 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________
The images open up questions about what it means to be human, whilst producing
affects that may be either comforting or unsettling yet produce a dis-alienating,
creative relationship to the built environment. Street-art takes the walls of run-down
areas as a basis to form a ‘transgressive utopia’; a term coined by Lucy Sargisson to
refer to bodies of thought and bodies of people living together in intentional
communities. She argues that these illustrate the possibility of ‘other’ ways of living,
and ‘re-inscribe alternative relations onto the culture that we inhabit’ 67 by
transgressing fixed knowledge and assumptions regarding, for example,
public/private property and Self/Other Relations. As such, transgressive utopias
offer an important resource for political thought, and as I have argued elsewhere, for
pedagogical thought. 68 In this chapter I have shown some of the ways in which
monstrous street-art has a transgressive function at an epistemological level, in
particular transgressing concepts such as Self/Other, Life/Death, Human/Animal,
Culture/Nature: ‘Guerrilla artists, whatever their motives, collaborate with the
architecture of ruin. Living arms and hands intertwine with bindweed and yarrow.
Pink-gummed mouths grin on concrete stumps’. 69 Bringing the landscape to life
arguably adds to its value, rendering it animate, and worth protecting. Furthermore,
one could argue for a political function: in a world where space is becoming
increasingly privatized, these conversations on the walls of the changing landscape
might be seen as a way of opening up public space. Nonetheless, these practices fall
far short of organized political resistance, and as noted previously in this chapter,
street-art is often a precursor, whether intentional or not, to the gentrification
process. There is no doubt that monstrous street-art articulates transgressive desires,
both through the process (which may involve illegal activity and trespass) and
through aesthetics. The transgressive potential of monstrous street-art lies in its
ambiguity, and its ability to transgress set assumptions, expectations and knowledge
at an epistemological level by creating space for audiences to be affectively
challenged through encounters with diversity and difference within the urban
environment. I would like to conclude with an open-ended suggestion as an area for
further study, the relationship between epistemological-aesthetic transgression and
political resistance in the context of gentrifying geographical change.

Notes
1
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 370.
2
Alison Young, Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1. See also Orestis Pangalos, ‘Testimonies and
Appraisals on Athens Graffiti, Before and After the Crisis’, Remapping Athens: A
Guide to Athens, eds. Myrto Tsilimpounidi and Aylwyn Walsh (Alresford: Zero
Books, 2014), 154-176.
 Rhiannon Firth 33
__________________________________________________________________

3
Jeff Ferrell, Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001), 246
4
Young, Street Art, Public City, 2.
5
BAVO, ‘Plea for an Uncreative City’, BAVO Research, August 31, 2006, Viewed
on 27 March 2015, http://www.bavo.biz/texts/view/156.
6
Andrew Harris, ‘Art and Gentrification: Pursuing the Urban Pastoral in Hoxton,
London’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (2011): 226-241,
234.
7
Iain Sinclair, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (London: Penguin
Books, 2011), 73.
8
Nick Schuermans, Maarten Loopmans and Joke Vandenabeele, ‘Public Space,
Public Art and Public Pedagogy’, Social & Cultural Geography 13.7 (2012): 675-
682.
9
Harriet Hawkins, ‘“The Argument of the Eye”? The Cultural Geographies of
Installation Art’, Cultural Geographies 17.3 (2010): 321-340. See also Alexander
Bridger, ‘Psychogeography and the Study of Social Environments: Extending Visual
Research in Psychology’, Visual Methods in Psychology: Using and Interpreting
Images in Qualitative Research, ed. Paula Reavey (Sussex: Psychology Press, 2011),
284-295; Alexander Bridger, ‘Psychogeography and Feminist Methodology’,
Feminism & Psychology 23.3 (2013): 285-298.
10
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Monster Theory:
Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996): 3-25, 3.
11
Tyson E. Lewis and Richard Kahn, Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining
Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2.
12
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003). See also Hélène
Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The
Uncanny)’, New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525-548.
13
Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self
(London: Sage Publications, 2002).
14
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1995).
15
Lewis and Kahn, Education Out of Bounds, 2.
16
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. See also Georges Bataille Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings 1927-1939, trans. and ed. Allan Stoekl (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1985).
17
Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
(An Essay in Atheistic Religion) (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 112;
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 335-339; Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader,
eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 81.
18
Hugh Haughton, ‘Introduction’ to The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud (London:
Penguin Books, 2003): i-lv, xlvii.
34 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________

19
Bataille, The Bataille Reader, 42; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 322, 352;
Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 111-112.
20
Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 175-202.
21
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 328.
22
Bataille, The Bataille Reader, 253; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 305.
23
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 365.
24
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 361; Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected
Writings 1987-2007, eds. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic,
2011), 269.
25
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 321.
26
Ibid., 364.
27
Ibid., 361.
28
Bataille, Visions of Excess, 88; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 323.
29
Halberstam, Skin Shows, 1.
30
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 335.
31
Ibid., 335.
32
Ibid., 335.
33
Ibid., 336.
34
Ibid., 381.
35
Ferrell, Tearing Down the Streets, 192.
36
Alison Young, ‘Criminal Images: The Affective Judgment of Graffiti and Street
Art’, Crime, Media, Culture 8 (2012): 297-314.
37
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum,
1988), 265.
38
Paul Routledge, ‘Toward a Relational Ethics of Struggle: Embodiment, Affinity,
and Affect’, Contemporary Anarchist Studies, eds. Randall Amster, Abraham
DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II and Deric Shannon (Oxford:
Routledge, 2009), 82-92.
39
Nigel Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’,
Geografiska Annaler B 86 (2004): 57-78; Michalinos Zembylas, ‘Risks and
Pleasures: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Pedagogy of Desire in Education’, British
Educational Research Journal 33.3 (2007): 331-347; Sarah Amsler, ‘From
“Therapeutic” to Political Education: The Centrality of Affective Sensibility in
Critical Pedagogy’, Critical Studies in Education 52.1 (2011): 47-63.
40
David Pinder, ‘Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City’,
Environment and Planning A 28.3 (1996): 405-427, 415.
41
Alejandro de Acosta, ‘Two Undecidable Questions for Thinking in which
Anything Goes’, Contemporary Anarchist Studies, eds. Randall Amster, Abraham
DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II and Deric Shannon (Oxford:
Routledge, 2009): 26-43, 28; Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling’, 60.
42
Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge,
1999): 185; Sara C. Motta, ‘Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive
 Rhiannon Firth 35
__________________________________________________________________

Spaces of Possibility’, Antipode 45.1 (2013): 80-100; Michalinos Zembylas,

‘Witnessing in the Classroom: The Ethics and Politics of Affect’, Educational
Theory 56.3 (2006): 305-324.
43
Bridger, ‘Psychogeography and the Study of Social Environments’; Bridger,
‘Psychogeography and Feminist Methodology’, 286.
44
It is beyond the scope of this research to determine the authenticity of public street-
art. Works by the artist Sweet Toof can be found on the website: Sweet Toof, Official
Website, 2012, Viewed on 27 March 2015, http://sweettoof.com.
45
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 370.
46
Ibid., 381.
47
Ibid., 338-339.
48
Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 111.
49
Bataille, Visions of Excess, 59-60.
50
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 381.
51
Ibid., 347.
52
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 371, quoted in Land, Fanged Noumena, 228.
53
Bataille, The Bataille Reader, 17.
54
Bataille, Visions of Excess, 82.
55
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 345.
56
Ibid., 355.
57
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 269-270.
58
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 364.
59
Ibid., 364.
60
Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 111.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Bataille, The Bataille Reader, 242-245.
65
Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2014).
66
Bridger, ‘Psychogeography and Feminist Methodology’, 285.
67
Lucy Sargisson, Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression (London:
Routledge, 2000), 116.
68
Rhiannon Firth, ‘Toward a Critical Utopian and Pedagogical Methodology’,
Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 35.4 (2013): 256-276.
69
Sinclair, Ghost Milk, 120-121.

Bibliography
Amsler, Sarah. ‘From “Therapeutic” to Political Education: The Centrality of
Affective Sensibility in Critical Pedagogy’. Critical Studies in Education 52.1
(2011): 47-63.
36 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bataille, Georges. The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Translated and

edited by Allan Stoekl. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

BAVO. ‘Plea for an Uncreative City’. BAVO Research, August 31, 2006. Viewed
on 27 March 2015. http://www.bavo.biz/texts/view/156.

Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge,
1999.

Bridger, Alexander. ‘Psychogeography and Feminist Methodology’. Feminism &

Psychology 23.3 (2013): 285-298.

Bridger, Alexander. ‘Psychogeography and the Study of Social Environments:

Extending Visual Research in Psychology’. Visual Methods in Psychology: Using
and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research, edited by Paula Reavey, 284-295.
Sussex: Psychology Press, 2011.

Cixous, Hélène. ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche
(The Uncanny)’. New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525-548.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. Monster Theory: Reading
Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996.

de Acosta, Alejandro. ‘Two Undecidable Questions for Thinking in which Anything

Goes’. Contemporary Anarchist Studies, edited by Randall Amster, Abraham
DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II and Deric Shannon, 26-43.
Oxford: Routledge, 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum,

1988.

Ferrell, Jeff. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

 Rhiannon Firth 37
__________________________________________________________________

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows. Durham, NC. and London: Duke University Press,
1995.

Harris, Andrew. ‘Art and Gentrification: Pursuing the Urban Pastoral in Hoxton,
London’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (2011): 226-241.

Haughton, Hugh. ‘Introduction’. The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud, i-lv. London:

Penguin Books, 2003.

Hawkins, Harriet. ‘The Argument of the Eye? The Cultural Geographies of

Installation Art’. Cultural Geographies 17.3 (2010): 321-340.

Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, edited by Robin

MacKay and Ray Brassier. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011.

Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An
Essay in Atheistic Religion). London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso, 2014.

Lewis, Tyson E. and Richard Kahn. Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural
Studies for a Posthuman Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Motta, Sara C. ‘Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of

Possibility’. Antipode 45.1 (2013): 80-100.

Pangalos, Orestis. ‘Testimonies and Appraisals on Athens Graffiti, Before and After
the Crisis’. Remapping Athens: A Guide to Athens, edited by Myrto Tsilimpounidi
and Aylwyn Walsh, 154-176. Alresford: Zero Books, 2014.

Pinder, David. ‘Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City’.
Environment and Planning A 28.3 (1996): 405-427.

Routledge, Paul. ‘Toward a Relational Ethics of Struggle: Embodiment, Affinity,

and Affect’. Contemporary Anarchist Studies, edited by Randall Amster, Abraham
DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II and Deric Shannon, 82-92.
Oxford: Routledge, 2009.

Schuermans, Nick, Maarten Loopmans and Joke Vandenabeele. ‘Public Space,

Public Art and Public Pedagogy’. Social & Cultural Geography 13.7 (2012): 675-
682.
38 Monsters Take to the Streets!
__________________________________________________________________

Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self.
London: Sage Publications, 2002.

Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin
Books, 2011.

Sweet Toof. Official Website. 2012. Viewed on 27 March 2015.

http://sweettoof.com/.

Thrift, Nigel. ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’.

Geografiska Annaler B 86 (2004): 57-78.

Young, Alison. ‘Criminal Images: The Affective Judgment of Graffiti and Street
Art’. Crime, Media, Culture 8 (2012): 297-314.

Young, Alison. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

Zembylas, Michalinos. ‘Risks and Pleasures: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Pedagogy of

Desire in Education’. British Educational Research Journal 33.3 (2007): 331-347.

Zembylas, Michalinos. ‘Witnessing in the Classroom: The Ethics and Politics of

Affect’. Educational Theory 56.3 (2006): 305-324.

Rhiannon Firth is post-doctoral research fellow at Cass School of Education and

Communities, University of East London. Her research interests include Utopian
theory and practice, social movements and political resistance, and transgressive
spatial epistemologies.
 Gendered Heterotopias: Creating Space for Menstrual Blood in
Contemporary Art

Ruth Green-Cole
Abstract
Many social and cultural attitudes towards menstruation are intricately linked to the
affective recognition of blood, which then becomes gendered and socially excluded
as menstruation. Numerous cultural traditions add further negative values to
menstrual blood, associating it with pollution, abjection and inferiority. This may be
because menstruation is implicitly understood as destabilizing the boundaries
between inside and outside of the body, private and public, natural and reviled. My
research considers the work of Michel Foucault and his notion of heterotopias as
imaginary spaces that exist in reality as ‘spaces of otherness’. Most importantly, his
account of ‘heterotopia’ (a neologism that rejects the negative and positive values
associated with utopia and dystopia creating an in-between space) places
menstruation into a transient space that women inhabit through cyclical reproductive
states of being. This chapter will examine the way a number artworks concerning
menstruation utilize actual physical space. The structuring of social space, and how
it makes us see, act and ‘make natural’ in space, can be challenged by the spatial
practices and visibility of artworks through directly immersing men and women into
the ‘quarantined’ areas of menstrual huts and gendered space. These spatial
heterotopias are immersive spaces that position the viewer inside of them, a
phenomenological consideration of the body in relation to space. Menstruation is a
significant marker of sexual difference; it is ‘gendered blood’ that divides and
distinguishes women, and that has made them in many cases by association, the
‘subjects’ of evil and taboo. One of the main tools used to maintain this stigma is to
erase the presence of the scene of menstruation in speech, image and representation.
The artworks I examine in this chapter are instrumental in undermining this stigma.
Additionally, this process of undermining also manages to bring about changes in
what we assume to be the function and value of art.

Key Words: Art, heterotopia, gender, menstrual blood, menstruation, performance,

phenomenology, spatial practices, space, taboo.

*****

1. Introduction
Many social and cultural attitudes towards menstruation are closely linked to the
affective recognition of blood, which then becomes gendered and socially excluded
as menstruation, but many cultural traditions add further negative values to such
blood, associating it with pollution, abjection and inferiority. This may be because
menstruation is implicitly and habitually understood as destabilising the boundaries
40 Gendered Heterotopia
__________________________________________________________________
between inside and outside of the body, private and public, natural and reviled.
Social anthropologist Mary Douglas discusses pollution as the notion of symbolic
contamination, whereas taboo is the supernaturally sanctioned law that governs
bodies in societies reifying the taboo. Added to this in various ways across cultural
differences are traditional layers of decorum, social exclusion and disapproval where
women’s bodies and natural processes are not to be broached in the open, a code of
silence is enforced differently from culture to culture, and perhaps even family to
family. Menstruation is one of the main markers of sexual difference; it is ‘gendered
blood’ that divides and distinguishes women, and that has made them in many cases
by association, the subjects of taboo. This suggests that cultural traditions that
stigmatise menstruation, either implicitly or systematically, using hygiene, aesthetic
values, religious ideology or superstition to support this, also place women closer to
the negative traits associated with menstruation. One of the main tools used to
maintain this stigma is to erase the presence of the scene of menstruation in speech,
image and representation. By publically acknowledging and making visible
menstruation, the art works I discuss in this chapter are instrumental in undermining
this stigma. However, this process of undermining also manages to bring about
changes in what we assume to be the function and value of art.
The notion of ‘gendered blood’ is a concept that struggles against patriarchal
traditions, which denigrates and suppresses images of menstruation, while
traditionally in European and American art, valorising women’s bodies as vehicles
for male scopic desire. 1 Biologically, blood may not be gendered, but it is
transformed by society’s values into female, dirty, discharge, abject, shame, and in
Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions to be associated with immorality or
accursedness due to Eve temptation of Adam.
While Christ’s blood is elevated by its transformation into wine in the Eucharist,
as is the blood of heroes lost on the battlefield, ‘women with issue’ are humiliated
or are unspeakable. Earlier art used blood in controlled ways to show concepts of
humanity, sacrifice and transcendent spiritual values almost always in depictions of
Christ's blood, too numerous to mention. Gendered blood in contemporary art is
contested and has become an image or medium that has been appropriated from
traditional masculinity – and the censorship concerning feminine blood understood
as abject – for different subject positions and identities not dealt with before in earlier
art.
Artworks that deal with menstruation in many cultures are important because
they work against negative stereotypes by actively re-valuing gendered blood and
showing it in a positive, defiant or ambiguous light. Contemporary works discussed
in this chapter challenge what is acceptable, and ask questions about what should
and should not be visible. Many menstrual works are meant to shock, in true avant-
garde fashion, but not needlessly or nihilistically. They are important interrogations
of aesthetic authority and decorum, challenging ignorant and popular beliefs about
 Ruth Green-Cole 41
__________________________________________________________________
art's functions, as much as they create visibility and space within art and the public
domain for contested values associated with blood.

2. Gendered Heterotopia
My research considers the work of Foucault and his notion of heterotopias as
imaginary spaces that exist in reality – as spaces of otherness. Most importantly, his
account of ‘heterotopia’ places menstruation into a kind of neutral liminal space, a
transitory space that women inhabit through cyclic reproductive states of being. I
will come back to this shortly. I also draw on a feminist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology in conversation with the work by gender theorist Judith Butler to
provide a framework for the way we can understand gendered performativity. Butler
explains that gender is constructed through the ‘sedimentation’ of ‘performative
acts’, which gradually and through iteration and mutual recognition collectively
assemble gender identity. To read menstruation as ‘gendered blood’ is to recognise
the ritualization of difference through cleansing practices, psychoanalytic
classification and other constructs that ultimately affect the position of women.
Returning to Foucault, I will now explain his concept of heterotopias and how it
can be applied to menstruation in two ways. Foucault defines his concept of
heterotopias as, ‘[a] sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space
in which we live’. 2 Therefore, heterotopias, in contrast to fictional utopias, are actual
spaces, which, exist outside of or within (such as isolated or restricted areas, jails or
hospitals) the society that produced them. The cemetery and ships, carnivals and
circuses create ambivalent spaces whilst also being spaces of otherness and
difference where abjected and rejected bodies are made to reside. These physical
heterotopias are spaces, which create room for displaced bodies to act. Understood
in this way, heterotopias are evolving spaces of positive transgression that can
transform into constructive spaces so that marginalised people can act inside them
in order to rupture or recode these spaces.
Spatial heterotopias are immersive spaces that position the viewer inside of them,
a phenomenological consideration of the body in relation to space. For example,
gendered heterotopias are commonly associated with domestic spaces and places;
the den, man-cave, and workshop, can be considered gendered heterotopias. This is
because they are real spaces that exist in reality; however, they are places specifically
reserved for the male gender. Although anachronistic, female gendered spaces were
traditionally the home but in particular rooms, such as the kitchen, the laundry and
the bathroom. Many artworks, which in themselves are spatial, have transgressed
against or have productively worked through heterotopias.
As mentioned earlier, my use of the notion of heterotopias is two-fold. Whist
previous mentions of heterotopic space are located in the physical realm; there is a
particular heterotopic framework that Foucault considers a deviation from material
heterotopias due to their cyclic liminality. These spaces are different from other
42 Gendered Heterotopia
__________________________________________________________________
material or physical spaces in that they occur in relation to reproduction: specifically,
menstruation, pregnancy and lactation. Foucault elaborates,

[t]here is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis

heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or scared or forbidden
places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and
to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis;
adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly,
etc. 3

Crisis heterotopias differ from public spaces insofar as female bodily spaces are
corporeal and cerebral spaces that have historically devised women’s social function.
This culturally constructed set of rules determines normative behaviour or that which
is ‘made to appear normal’. 4 Signs of menstrual blood in public are considered
deviant, as menstruation is something that women are taught to conceal from an early
age.

3. Spatial Art Practices

Tracey Emin’s installation History of Painting Part 1 (1998), (which consisted
of morning after pills, pregnancy tests, five blood soaked tampons and tissue
displayed in vitrines), actually situates bloodied tampons into a public space, a
deviation from normative behaviour and a ‘defiling’ of reified public spaces. In
doing this, Emin transforms previously understood as transcendent masculine spaces
of the art gallery (and art history itself), to create an equivocal and polysemous
(multiple meanings) heterotopia for art.
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is useful as a way to avoid the dualities of
public and private, clean and unclean places, real and imaginary spaces where gender
essentialism can result, especially when women are associated more with the second
term mentioned in these dualities. Not only are biological processes restricted to
marginal places and contained or quarantined there and associated with unclean and
negative values, these places become women’s places. Foucault’s heterotopia
destabilises such strictly defined spaces suggesting fluidity between spaces and
categories is possible.
United States artist Amy Jenkins uses sculpture and video installation to displace
notions of space and object. In Ebb (1996) a miniature bathtub begins as a fount of
bloody water, which is projected onto its porcelain surface. Jenkins creates a four-
minute loop where a woman (the artist) climbs into the tub and the blood flow acts
like a receding tide into her body, in effect reversing the menstrual flow. Ebb refers
to receding menstruation, a soaking up of life force and an internal receiving. 5 It is
a process of purification in reverse. The artist fortified by her transfusion, submerges
herself, then steps out of the bath and disappears, leaving the viewer alone
temporarily in the dark void of the gallery space.
 Ruth Green-Cole 43
__________________________________________________________________
The soundtrack that accompanies the video projection creates an atmosphere of
privacy in an imaginary bathroom. We hear the water echo as it splashes against the
side of the tub, a faint tap drips and the breathing and sighing of the woman is
accompanied by the underlying regularity of her heartbeat. Visiting Ebb in the
gallery, one would experience a multitude of sensory experience, from the darkened
room, peering down into a the world of a miniature tub, gazing at a naked
menstruating woman in a moving projection, and listening to a fluidic soundtrack
would all evoke a sense of trespassing. 6 Artists such as Jenkins create gendered
spaces in galleries to make visible marginalised lived experiences, and to spatially
and phenomenologically challenge the viewer.
Ebb, the presentation of menstruation and a bathtub in a gallery, traces its linage
from Womanhouse, (1971) initiated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, along
with a group of students as part of the CalArts Feminist art program. This project
became gendered to make visible the segregation of social space in society. Within
this larger installation in an abandoned mansion in a residential street in Hollywood,
Chicago was responsible for creating Menstruation Bathroom, a room installed with
an abundant variety of sealed, unsealed and used sanitary products. The rubbish bin
inside Menstruation Bathroom was so full that pads and tampons it threatened to
overflow onto the floor in an excessive fashion. Menstruation Bathroom was a room
designed to challenge both men and women’s assumptions about the female body.
As menstruation is typically experienced in a bathroom, the very act of menstruation
in bathrooms engenders the space itself. The bathroom then becomes a heterotopic
site where abjected and rejected bodies are confined to ‘deal’ with ‘dirty’ processes.
These traces of menstruation and associated paraphernalia transform the space from
a normative bathroom into the gendered heterotopia par excellence.
In contrast to Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom, which includes the semiotics
of blood, Joana Vasconcelos’ chandelier A Novia (The Bride) (2001) has instant
appeal by engaging the viewer with its gargantuan scale, drawing them in to reveal
the detailed construction is comprised of 25,000 tampons. The repetition of tampons
conceptualises the notions of consumerism and control of women’s bodies. Through
repetition Vasconcelos achieves abstraction of these ideas so that the message is
implicit, she elaborates, ‘I somehow manage to translate lo-cult into hi-cult-By
combining something banal, something quotidian and worthless with the concept of
modern sculpture’. 7 The tampon is a mass-produced product, whereas in some
countries they do not exist in the home. Vasconcelo’s follows on to discuss the idea
that menstruation is universal yet is not thought of in the same way in every country.
Vasconcelos commented that a man she met in Istanbul made it clear that the tampon
has additional meaning. 8 ‘In this man’s culture, the tampon is frowned upon, seen as
something that causes infection and destroys a woman’s virginity’. 9 For
Vasconcelos, the tampon is a banal object, however in Istanbul tampons are
concealed from view, not talked about, and have to be purchased at the chemist
conspicuously as it is very embarrassing.
44 Gendered Heterotopia
__________________________________________________________________
As the title suggests, A Novia represents the union of a man and a virgin bride,
which traditionally is considered a highly desirable social position. Vasconcelos has
ironically emphasised this by the incorporation of unused tampons as clean and
‘virginal’. The link between menstruation and femininity is further emphasised by
the location in which A Novia has been exhibited. Various large salons and gallerias
have hosted this work and these spaces serve to further de-construct and re-construct
the notions of class, beauty and the femininity. On the artists’ website, a
documentary video layers slow moving cinematography with classical music. The
phenomenological experience of being with this work, accompanied by refined
music in a space of reverence, enhances a paradoxical message of cleanliness and
uncleanliness, virgin bride and promiscuous women.

4. Conclusion
Spatial art practices such as Chicago and Emin’s actively transform personalised
and marginalised bodily functions making them centre stage and spatialising and
sustaining the affective and immersive aspects of menstruation. Furthermore, the
sequestered space is no longer the space it was before. If an object is put in the
‘wrong place’, two things occur; the element displaced is ‘matter out of place’ 10 and
the place left behind has been altered. Therefore, a new space is created, a space that
allows marginalisation to be made visible. Therefore, Chicago, Emin and Mitchell
through their work create a visual discourse about menstruation, which critiques the
way modern industrial societies manage menstrual taboos.
In a different way, Vasconcelos’ A Novia underlines the management or control
of menstruation that has become domesticated and misinterpreted by different
cultures. She uses pop art methodologies of elevating the banal into sequestered
spaces; as well as appropriating or subverting the everyday object and realities,
particularly those that concern the position of women in terms of class distinction
and cultural identity. The subversion is also phenomenological as Vasconcelos’
work is temporal as well as spatial. For example, viewers must walk through the
affective space of the installation in all these works; a women must be conscious of
self while taking the time to do so. Importantly, the ‘matter out of place’ is the male
visiting this installation space. This undermines gender essentialism assigned to
spatial coordinates, following which the male visitor breaks the taboo, by entering
the space that has historically stigmatised women, thus transferring the stigma onto
him. The man is made to feel disorientated or queer – in Young’s terms, which also
creates a queering of the space because the male’s presence changes its function as
a segregated menstruation space, traditionally, men are not used to art addressing
them in this manner. The shifting roles questions men’s spaces against women’s
spaces as the man transverses the divide while renegotiating his own socially
constructed gender. In many of these installations, for example, Chicago’s
Menstruation Bathroom and Vasconcelos’ A Novia, men literally walk into the space
of stigma and taboo associated with menstruation.
 Ruth Green-Cole 45
__________________________________________________________________
It is important to keep in mind that there is not one right or correct way to
understand what menstruation, menstrual blood and taboo mean. Nevertheless, it is
important that artists should be allowed to analyse and expose how traditional
structures of power can make people feel vulnerable and ashamed. In diverse and
personal ways, the artists I have discussed in this presentation share this common
aim. Some artists such as Emin are content to use their art to critique how menstrual
blood is made into gendered blood and associated with a stereotype of the weaker
and inferior sex. This biological determinism remains unchallenged if assigned to
the margins of the non-visible. Thus, their art functions as a social critique of gender
essentialism merged to biological essentialism. Some artists go further and celebrate
menstruation in their art as a way to turn stigma and shame into transgressive and
creative acts. This causes some conflict, the kind characterised by the different
traditions of feminism indebted to Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. While Butler
vehemently opposed gender essentialism and saw gender as a social and cultural
construct that assigns negative traits to women, Irigaray was content to accept some
of these traits — the female imaginary — and celebrate them as a way of creating
that existed away from transgressing against patriarchy. It could be argued that this
tension continues to exist in the multiplicity of approaches to menstruation in art.
However, it is important that, whatever approach one favours, such a discursivity be
aired in public, made visible and divested of any historical or habitual residues of
shame or deference to models of decorum and femininity.

Notes
1
The term ‘gendered blood’ comes from Mary Jane Lupton, Menstruation and
Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 3.
2
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986[1967]): 24. The term
heterotopia was first used by Foucault is the preface for The Order of Things (1966),
a few months after, he employed the word again in a radio broadcast of two lectures
called France Culture. In 1967, he completes a text called Of Other Spaces, which
transcribes this radio lecture, adding more principles afterward to describe and
define heterotopia.
3
Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 24.
4
Ibid.
5
Ebb has a companion work Flow (2005), a nine-minute time-lapse over nine
months of pregnancy, (one minute per month). Flow ‘is an allegory for the act of
creating, or bringing forth form the self’. Amy Jenkins. ‘Flow, 2005’, Amy
Jenkins.net, Accessed 2 July 2012,
http://www.amyjenkins.net/video%20pages/flow.html.
6
Ebb has interesting parallels with Mona Hatoum’s, Corps etranger (1994) and
Deep Throat (1996) where the internal is made visible with endoscopic footage of
46 Gendered Heterotopia
__________________________________________________________________

the body, showing a larger concern deconstructing emotional reaction such as desire
and revulsion.
7
Agustín Pérez Rubio, ‘From Micro to Macro and Viceversa: A Conversation
between Agustín Pérez Rubio and Joana Vasconcelos’, Joana Vasconcelos, (Lisbon:
ADIAC Portugal, Corda Seca, 2007), 164.
8
Interestingly, in the 1960s, Menstrual product manufacturer Kimberly Clarke
‘moved to the position that tampons were smaller than the opening of the hymen,
therefore they were perfectly fine for virgins to use’. Lara Freidenfelds, The Modern
Period [Electronic Resource]: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 175. Some women
enthusiastically adopted the tampon as a menstrual management product, while
others rejected them as ‘dangerous’, too ‘difficult’ or ‘ineffective’. Freidenfelds
comments ‘Many women who chose not to use tampons displayed a keen awareness
of the class and ethnic differences their other, shared, menstrual practices had served
to obscure’. Ibid, 8. The tampon was treated as a potentially harmful menstrual
product considering it was used to ‘tamp’ or ‘plug’ the blood flow. Obstructing blood
with a tampon blood led people to believe them as harmful products.
9
Rubio, From Micro to Macro, 163.
10
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (London: Routledge, 1984). 41.

Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble! Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.

———. ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique

of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’. The Thinking Muse: Feminism
and Modern French Philosophy, edited by Jeffner Allen, Iris Marion Young,
85-100. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London: Routledge, 1984.

Green-Cole, Ruth. Visualising Menstruation: Gendered Blood in Contemporary Art.

Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Auckland, 2014.

Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 16 (1986 [1967]): 22-7.

Freidenfelds, Lara. The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century

America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
 Ruth Green-Cole 47
__________________________________________________________________

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which Is Not One. New York: Cornell University, 1985.

Jenkins, Amy. ‘Flow, 2005’. Amy Jenkins.net. Accessed 2 July 2012.

http://www.amyjenkins.net/video pages/flow.html.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S.

Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 1982.

Lupton, Mary Jane. Menstruation and Psychoanalysis. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1993.

Rubio, Agustín Pérez. ‘From Micro to Macro and Viceversa: A Conversation

between Agustín Pérez Rubio and Joana Vasconcelos’. Joana Vasconcelos, Lisbon:
ADIAC Portugal, Corda Seca, 2007.

Ruth Green-Cole is the Director of the Whangarei Art Museum, Northland, New
Zealand. Her research interests include contemporary art, New Zealand art,
printmaking, artist books, the leaky body, menstruation, gender, queer theory, and
feminist art practices. To read more about menstruation and art please visit Ruth’s
blog hyperheterotopia.com. This chapter is an excerpt of her Master of Arts thesis
‘Visualizing Menstruation: Gendered Blood in Contemporary Art’.
 Part II

Mythical Monsters
 Mélusine’s Iconography: Her Legend of Territorial Expansion
and Transformation

Zoila Clark
Abstract
Mélusine, the mermaid of Starbucks Coffee, is a symbol of cultural hybridity. Her
monstrous body represents wholeness and globalization. It also reflects the duality
of her body, which functions like ‘the image of an androgynous Yahweh’, 1 and the
conscience of opposites or mediator by whom opposites unite. 2 She is sometimes
portrayed with bird or dragon wings, and sometimes without them, like a mermaid.
Her name derives from Mère Lusine [Mother of the Lusignans], and she is
considered the founder of Lusignan, a province of France. According to feminist
scholar E. Jane Burns, her legend is in this way related to the ‘territorial and dynastic
expansion’ 3 of her descendants beyond Lusignan ‘across the Mediterranean to
distant Armenia’ 4 during the crusades. At the same time, her legend serves as a
metaphor for the way in which the world, just like her body, undergoes
transformation through conquest and trade during the Middle Ages. However, this
trade has continued over the years. The literary scholar Philip E. Bishop states that
‘for mythic cultures, myths also provide compelling explanations for the origins and
organization of human society. […] the equivalent of today’s political constitutions
and social histories’. 5 This parallel will help us find out why our global social
structure is currently being expressed with the icon of Mélusine’s Starbucks Coffee
and why her icon can now be found all over the globe. Mélusine continues to
shapeshift through time, and in order to find out why, we need to focus on how the
meanings of her hybrid or monstrous body have evolved. I argue that if we study the
evolution of her representation and the different versions that have been made of her
up to this moment, we can find out why her icon is still with us.

Key Words: Mélusine, Starbucks Coffee, mermaid, globalization, motherhood,

transformation, geography, iconography, monstrous.

*****

1. Late 3rd Century B.C.

On Etruscans’ burial urns of the noble we find a Skylla, a winged marine monster
with the torso of a young woman and coiled fishtails instead of legs. Etruscans
believed that the journey to the underworld involved a dangerous sea voyage. The
Etruscans’ gods influenced the Greeks and the Romans. In Greek mythology, we
find Homer's Odyssey (675–725 BC), which describes Skylla and Charybdis as two
monsters living behind huge rocks that create a channel of water where sailors are
afraid of meeting their deaths. In this tale, a Skylla is a gate guardian of the
52 Mélusine’s Iconography
__________________________________________________________________
underworld, a hybrid that helps us face our fear of the unknown when we cross
boundaries.
The representations of the Etruscan Skylla show perfect symmetry and the union
of opposite realms: air/water, human/animal, good/bad. 6 The colours are the same
above and below, and her hands signify a union of opposites because the left hand is
up, while the right hand is down. This reveals an Etruscan belief in complementarity
opposites: above/below, life/death, human/animal, angel/Satan. This split duality
seems to be reinforced by Christianity, with its emphasis on good versus evil and the
imagery that came to represent their division during the Middle-Ages. For the Italian
professor Graziano Baccolini, ‘the winged figures of the Etruscans return in the
Christian figures of the angels and Satan’. 7
As sea people who traded in the east and west, the Etruscans mixed with people
on both sides of the world, without accepting their trading partners as kin. However,
their civilization influenced the Greeks and the Romans, who were also faced with
having to deal with people they considered barbarians and alien to their civilized
cities. In the past, there was no possibility of hybridity as there is today. The
barbarians and aliens were considered monsters associated with death. Therefore,
the image of the hybrid or monstrous body of the Skylla seeks to acknowledge the
hybridity of people around the world and the anxiety that they cause through
disparities in culture and appearance. The monster is a guardian of the entrance into
different geographical worlds, including those of both the living and the dead. The
Etruscan Skylla is otherworldly and associated with the world of the dead. Although
the Etruscans were able to partake of that other world, complete assimilation only
occurred after death when they stopped being what they were in life. According to
the historical geographer Miles Ogborn,

The world of increasing global connections and interconnections

involving trade, violence and cultural encounter is not something
unprecedented. What is going on now can be understood on the
basis of what happened in the past. 8

Globalization has a history which has changed over time and so do the monsters or
representations of the Other.

2. Medieval Times
In Medieval times, we find that the dragon or winged serpent symbol of Mélusine
is negatively connotated. According to American Studies professor Jane Caputi, the
dragon of the Apocalypse in the biblical text is a primordial mother goddess. 9
Likewise, the concept of goddesses can be traced back to the pagan Babylonian fish
goddess Tiamat, a female dragon that is slain by her son Marduk to create the
world. 10 This dragon slayer, according to Doctor Lloyd D. Graham, reappears in ‘the
Mexican icon Our Lady of Guadalupe, here showing the sky-woman of Revelation
 Zoila Clark 53
__________________________________________________________________
fighting the dragon’. 11 Later on, in many European churches, we find statues of
angels and saints, such as the English Saint George and the Irish Saint Patrick, who
slew a dragon and a series of snakes respectively. This myth of the exile representing
the evil Other as a snake is present in the exile of Mélusine as narrated by Jean
d’Arras in his French novel: Mélusine; or the Noble History of Lusignan in 1393.
This is the story of an inter-racial marriage. Mélusine’s curse as a fairy is to
become a snake from the waist down on Saturdays, so, if she marries a human, her
husband will have to leave her to herself on that day. Mélusine meets Raymond from
Bretany in the forest. He accepts the taboo, and they get married. It is Mélusine who
tells him how to make a fortune and avoid blame for having killed his own uncle
accidentally when hunting a boar. They have ten children, all of whom bear a strange
mark on their bodies; however, this curse turns into a blessing because it makes them
superhuman. The last three do not carry a mark, which indicates that the curse is at
an end.
Unfortunately, Raymond’s brother is jealous of Raymond’s success and advises
him not to trust Mélusine and to spy on her. Raymond makes a hole through the door
with his sword and sees that her bottom half is a snake. 12 She forgives him, but one
day he calls her a monster in public and blames her for their children’s mistakes.
Feeling rejected, she jumps through the window, leaving a human footprint on the
stone, whereupon she develops wings and flies away like a dragon with wings and
tail, ‘the same tail that is said earlier to have defeated the English commander
Cresswell at Lusignan’. 13 She leaves evidence of her humanity using a footprint as
a seal and later demonstrates love for her descendants when she comes back at night
in human form to milk her babies. According to legend, she is also seen or heard as
a dragon wailing at night, especially when the castle changes leadership. Her lineage
is in addition said to continue in many parts of Europe and the Mediterranean with
her sons becoming kings of new lands. The lineage goes back to the Duke of Berry,
who reconquered Poitiers and Lusignan from the British. He was the patron who
requested Jean d’Arras to write the story of Mélusine. The inhabitants, of Germanic
origin and thought by many to have come from Britain, knew this Celtic myth. The
Duke hoped that the Potevin people would thereby accept him as a descendent of
their Goddess Mélusine’s sixth son Geoffrey, considered the most courageous
conqueror. To her worshippers, Mélusine is mother earth who chooses a leader for
her people and creates a civilization in which they might flourish. Her power is
expressed through sexual excess and her fertility in having ten children that will then
conquer the world. This is why the Parthenays, a family allied to English
descendants, have Couldrette write a second version of the legend in which they are
the descendants of Mélusine’s youngest son Thierry. This second version is ‘blocked
from the presses by the victorious French monarchy’. 14
Mélusine’s body is hybrid because the people of Lusignan are bicultural with
roots in ancient goddess beliefs. However, in the patriarchal days of the Middle-
Ages, says medieval scholar Griffin, the monstrosity of the female body is a
54 Mélusine’s Iconography
__________________________________________________________________
projection of the masculine mind, an articulation of fear of the uncivilized behaviour
associated with the animal. 15 Griffin finds that Raymond’s guilt over having killed
his uncle turns him into a monster, but he projects this onto Mélusine and cleans
himself of all blame, just us we humans in general disassociate ourselves from
animals by considering them inferior to us. The Medieval Mélusine is human on the
inside only, but an imaginary animal on the outside, a dragon. She is cast out and
only nine of her sons are accepted as human. The remaining one is like Mélusine
considered a monster because he is too violent and does not assimilate into civilized
life, and eventually killed on the orders of Mélusine herself. This prompts
anthropologist DeMello to ask: ‘Can we really speak of bodies without also speaking
of society and culture? [...] the answer is no’. 16 Therefore, the body of Mélusine will
have its transformations until we reach the contemporary period.

3. Early Renaissance
Even though Mélusine has a hybrid body, she is during the Renaissance
portrayed as beautiful in her mermaid form. She loses her dragon wings. Like a
Greek Goddess, Mélusine’s beauty is classical and with perfect symmetry.
According to the art professors Robertson and McDaniel, ‘in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century Europe, an ample body was most admired as evidence of a
person’s wealth and power’. 17 This is the case of Mélusine, who still wears a crown
like the queen of Lusignan. Sometimes her crown has the Venus star on top, which
acts as a guiding light to guide sailors, thereby associating her with Aphrodite. In the
Tarot deck, she is the star on the seventeenth trump or Pisces. 18 We can observe that
absolute symmetry is used, as Professor Emeritus Neuhaus affirms, to achieve an
effect of central emphasis, of grandiose dignity. […] If we draw an imaginary
vertical line through the centre of such structures, the two resulting halves will be
found to be exactly alike. 19 It is interesting to note that this sculpture also uses the
brown of the Renaissance masters, according to Professor Neuhaus. 20 She wears a
skirt to cover her genitals and give the impression of the tails being a prolongation
of a long dress, the proper vestment of a queen. Her body posture is itself a large
crown of three points. 21

4. Late Renaissance
During the late Renaissance where the European discoveries of new lands around
the world begin, the mermaid comes to serve as a symbol in different European and
conquered countries. Some mermaids lose one tail and the crown to add a traditional
object from the conquered land. In South American churches, mermaids play a little
guitar called charango by indigenous people. However, the European mermaids of
the Renaissance also resemble Amazons or warrior women with swords and shields
instead of the two-tailed crowned queen. We may also observe that our two-tailed
queen Mélusine is now dressed and covering her breasts. These mermaids portray
strong women as figures of power in the sea. In contrast to this, a different mermaid
 Zoila Clark 55
__________________________________________________________________
can be found in some European churches: a mermaid with comb and a mirror
intended as symbols of vanity and temptation. Mermaids within the Christian
tradition at this time were thought to seduce men and drag them down, as did the
devil. Two types of Mélusines thus emerge during the late Renaissance: the strong
mermaid warriors in heraldry and the flirtatious mermaids in churches. 22

5. 19th-Century
The Romantic period portrays women as both seductive and modest. This period
has idealism and nostalgia for the past, so it is not surprising to find paintings of
Mélusine produced during this time. According to art history specialist Madelynn
Dickerson, ‘the concept of the sublime mirrored the values and interests of the
Romantic Movement –emphasizing emotion, mystery, and the imagination’. 23
Consequently, we find a Mélusine that is concerned about her hair and looks down
as a sign of modesty and the emotion of shame when her mystery is discovered. The
painter visualizes the sublime in this dramatic scene. Mélusine also has only one tail,
because, unlike during the Renaissance when she displayed her body, she cannot
express pride. She has a veil to cover her genitals under her lower abdomen, and
when she washes her hair, her arms cover her breasts. Her crown is no longer made
of gold, but of natural plants. For his part, the husband holds some keys and is able
to see her clearly without having to peep through a small hole. The husband is in a
clear position of power as he stands and watches while Mélusine who is seated in
water becomes the object of scrutiny and judgment. His phallic sword is down,
indicating that she is not desired by him, but is instead seen as strange and distant.
Her body is controlled so as not to expose itself as an empowering emblem of pride. 24
He also does not need to hide to see her as he did in the medieval narrative. Professor
Caputi notices that peeping at forbidden mysteries is generally punished in myths
and featured in such tales as Medusa and Godiva, both ancient goddesses. Taboos
once protected the earth, 25 but since the nineteenth century nature has been under
tight control.

6. Contemporary
Starbucks’ first symbol is taken from the late Renaissance period, when,
according to her legend, Mélusine is the mother of ten children and appears with a
protuberant belly. As an old woman wearing a crown, she proudly shows the breasts
that suckled her children. She is holding up her tails as if they were legs, a gesture
not viewed as obscene during the Renaissance. The brown Renaissance tones relate
her to mother earth as life giver and also life taker when we are buried back to earth.
This image was branded by Christian groups as pornographic and reprehensible. In
contrast, the latest Starbucks Coffee-logo in green portrays Mélusine with
geometrical lines that make her appear less human. Since Cubism, modern art has
fragmented everything, even the body of women, and this is such an example. The
most well-known Starbucks Mélusine has no belly button because we can only see
56 Mélusine’s Iconography
__________________________________________________________________
the top part of her body, which is the human half. The top part of her two tails blend
in with her hair and arms to form a circle or the orifice through which we can see
her as Raymond did in the myth. However, this time we cannot see her sexual
prowess because she has been castrated for public scrutiny. The design is based on
circles, triangles, and waves. Maybe the green stands for a contemporary ecological
appeal towards nature, since we recycle the cups of coffee with her symbol. 26 Having
become a coffee logo, Mélusine can be said to have entered the realm of Pop art
since, as Dickerson claims, logos are often incorporated into this kind of art. ‘Pop
art questioned the difference between good and bad taste, and broadened the scope
of possible fine art subject matter to include everyday objects and culture’. 27 In a
sublimated way, we could say that Mélusine is still feeding her children, but instead
of the milk she once used, she now fills them with café-au-lait and snacks from
Starbucks. Mélusine could well be an archetype image of our connection to our
mother when we were in the womb. Her snake-tail in the water would be the
umbilical cord, and the two fishtails her spread legs when we are born.
As Professor in International Development Studies Gavin Fridell affirms,

the idea of free trade has a long history dating back hundreds of
years. Its recent popularity, however, has been driven by the rise
of neoliberal policies to hegemonic status among wealthy states
and international financial institutions beginning in the 1970s. […]
Throughout modern history, the capitalist state has played a
central role. 28

Therefore, it is no coincidence that Mélusine, the twin tailed fairy mermaid carved
in wood in Renaissance ships as a symbol of territorial imperial expansion overseas,
continues to be the symbol of a globalized world. Mélusine, who started as mother
of the Lusignan, now has Starbucks children all over the world. The worldwide free
market fantasy makes us all part of the capitalist family. As Fridell argues, the
economics of coffee cannot be understood with politics and ideology left out. 29
Globalization is a process of hybridization and acceptance of the Other. Professor
of Global Studies and Sociology Jan Nederveen finds that globalization is not
exactly westernization because it is not unidirectional as it was during imperialism.
There is fluidity in all directions, as well as ‘indeterminacy and open-endedness of
globalizations’, 30 and ‘influence of non-Western cultures on one another’. 31 No
longer a threatening monster, a hybrid being like a fairy-mermaid is a tamed version
of the icon of the Etruscan Mélusine. In Medieval times, legend has it that Mélusine
was the Other, a threat that had to be assimilated or exiled. Once a threatening
symbol of her sexual power, her serpent tail became transformed during the
Renaissance into a pair of fish tails with an open posture which suggested she was
offering herself to us. Later on, in the 19th century, mermaids wanted to be humans
so that they might be loved by them, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little
 Zoila Clark 57
__________________________________________________________________
Mermaid (1836). This tamed mermaid reappears in the Disney version of The Little
Mermaid (1989). However, in 1971, the Starbucks Mélusine recovers her two tails,
like the mermaid of the conquering times of the Renaissance, and offers herself as a
fertile land from which coffee may be produced and profits made. Her fertility can
be compared to the capitalist production of goods in big quantities. The two tails also
symbolize the union of East and West. The Renaissance icon of Mélusine has gone
through some changes and embraces ecological concerns for greenness, at least
according to the Starbucks official website. 32 Moreover, global nations no longer
operate in terms of territorial centres and boundaries, and nor do they use
nationalistic literature. As a result, the story of Mélusine is not literary anymore;
rather it is expressed visually in mass-media and worldwide merchandise. Owing to
the cubist nature of the icon that appears on this merchandise, her image belongs to
no specific nation or culture. Cubism simplifies codification to basic lines that can
be understood worldwide. According to the distinguished philosopher and writer
Santiago Castro Gómez, our new economy ‘packages information articulated as
merchandise’. 33 Starbucks is manipulating the myth of Mélusine in world markets
in a more globalized way than the Duke of Berry did through Jean d’Arass’ novel.
More than a geopolitical heritage of the past, Mélusine’s role as the Starbucks logo
seems to present her as a symbol of intercultural heritage and a new hybrid political
economy.
We could sum up by saying that even though Mélusine’s image is still with us,
she is not the almighty goddess people once respected and worshipped as the
gatekeeper between the world of the living and the world of the dead. She is now a
commodity of mother earth promising prosperity through her greenness. Her animal
side is hidden or camouflaged and her body has been fragmented out of fear, shame,
and denial of female sexual power. Nowadays, it is common to hear that women get
raped because they are revealing too much of their bodies. The sexuality of women
is thus very much controlled and packaged into more acceptable forms. Mélusine’s
pretty young face is one such representation. It is used to produce money and create
an addiction to coffee, which makes us work harder and enjoy our productivity as
part of our own pleasure for eating and brand status. The goddess/monster divide,
says Professor Caputi, ‘recasts goddess as devil, monster, and whore’. 34 Mélusine is
blamed for our coffee and sugar vices and addictions, and she is no longer seen as
our protecting mother unless we go back to her Etruscan and Celtic origins before
her exile, domestication, fragmentation, and commodification. As part of our global
and hybrid culture, however, the meaning of her icon may become more than just a
political seal of globalization in time, and her hybridity may even help us overcome
racism, classism, ageism, and other isms that now divide us. After all, our
‘increasingly integrated and interdependent global culture is no longer defined by
national or regional boundaries’, 35 so embracing the gothic monsters as identity
icons could be a way to grow towards social justice in the sense that opposites
represent a form of equality that remains free of hierarchy. So far, Mélusine’s bodily
58 Mélusine’s Iconography
__________________________________________________________________
transformations have mirrored our changing global world, and it is now up to us to
assign new meanings and create a new history. The Starbucks logo could be changed
by new generations. Sometimes logo symbols can be appropriated by consumers and
transformed. In the future we could therefore have different Mélusines that portray
a harmony of interracial facial features and skin colours as part of the beauty of
hybridity.

Notes
1
Jonathan F. Krell, ‘Between Demon and Divinity’, Mythosphere 2.4 (2000): 381.
2
Ibid., 391.
3
E. Jane Burns, ‘Magical Politics from Poitou to Armenia: Mélusine, Jean de Berry,
and the Eastern Mediterranean’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43.2
(3013): 276.
4
Ibid., 276.
5
Philip E. Bishop, Adventures in the Human Spirit (New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
2002), 33.
6
The Etruscan Mélusine. Scroll down to see the 7th image of Mélusine in colour.
Mélusine has wings and two tails. ‘Melusine de Alba’, Jungian Genealogy, Viewed
on 6 April 2015,
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/melusine-de-alba.html.
7
Graziano Baccolini, ‘Reflections on the Etruscan Civilization’, Why the Etruscans?
2, Viewed on 6 April 2015,
http://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/intro.html.
8
Miles Ogborn, Global Lives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.
9
Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2004), 155.
10
Ibid., 24-25.
11
Lloyd D. Graham, ‘Mother Earth, Pisces and the Two-Tailed Mermaid’,
Academia.edu, 9, 1-12. Viewed on 6 April 2015,
http://www.academia.edu/3336225/Mother_Earth_Pisces_and_the_Two-
Tailed_Mermaid.
12
This Medieval Mélusine. Scroll down to see the 8th image of Mélusine in colour.
It is the scene of Raymond observing Mélusine through a small hole is well-known
in Medieval Times. ‘Melusine de Alba’, Jungian Genealogy, Viewed on 6 April
2015, http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/melusine-de-alba.html.
13
Burns, ‘Magical Politics from Poitou to Armenia’, 287.
14
Mattew W. Morris, ‘Jean d’Arras and Couldrette: Political Expediency and
Censorship in Fifteenth-Century France’, Postscript: Publication of the Philological
Association of the Carolinas 18-19 (2002): 39.
 Zoila Clark 59
__________________________________________________________________

15
Miranda Griffin, ‘The Beastly and the Courtly in Medieval Tales of
Transformation’, The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature,
Thought and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 140.
16
Margo DeMello, Body Studies (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5.
17
Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, ‘The Body’, Themes of Contemporary Art:
Visual Art after 1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 86.
18
Krell, ‘Between Demon and Divinity’, 383.
19
Eugen Neuhaus, World of Art (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1936),
178.
20
Ibid., 229.
21
The Early Renaissance Mélusine. Scroll down to see the 6th image of Mélusine in
colour. It is a sculpture. ‘Cultural History of Mermaids Introduction’, Viewed on 6
April 2015, http://bgconv.com/docs/index-145294.html?page=7.
22
Ibid., The Late Renaissance Mélusine. Scroll down to see the 7th image of
Mélusine in colour.
23
Madelynn Dickerson, The Handy Art History Answer Book (Detroit: Visible Ink
Press, 2013), 162.
24
Mélusine in the Romantic Period. Scroll down to see the 5th image of Mélusine in
colour. Raymond observes and there is no door between them. ‘Melusine de Alba’,
Jungian Genealogy, Viewed on 6 April 2015,
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/melusine-de-alba.html.
25
Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones (Santa Fe: Bear and Company
Publishing, 1993), 189.
26
Mélusine in the Contemporary Period. Scroll down and compare the 4th image to
the 6th image of Mélusine in colour. ‘The Starbucks Siren’, Kemet, Viewed on 6
April 2015, http://www.khemet.net/sbucks2.html.
27
Dickerson, The Handy Art History Answer, 237.
28
Gavin Fridell, Coffee (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 15.
29
Ibid., 18.
30
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, Global Modernities
(London: Sage Publications, 1995), 46.
31
Ibid., 53.
32
Starbucks is proud of its green strategy in their Global Responsibility Report.
‘What Is the Role and Responsibility of a For-Profit Public Company?’ Starbucks,
Viewed on 6 April 2015, http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/global-report.
33
Santiago Castro Gómez, ‘Apogeo y decadencia de la teoría tradicional: Una visión
desde los intersticios’, Revista Iberoamericana 69.203 (2003): 349.
34
Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, 13.
35
Bishop, Adventures in the Human Spirit, 441.
60 Mélusine’s Iconography
__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography
Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Mermaid. First published in 1836. Viewed on
6 April 2015. http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_merma.html.

Baccolini, Graziano. ‘Reflections on the Etruscan Civilization’. Why the Etruscans?

1-2. Viewed on 6 April 2015.
http://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/intro.html.

Bishop, Philip. Adventures in the Human Spirit. 3rd edition. New Jersey: Prentice
Hall, 2002.

Brownlee, Kevin. ‘Mélusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis’.

Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 18-38.

Burns, E. Jane. ‘Magical Politics from Poitou to Armenia: Mélusine, Jean de Berry,
and the Eastern Mediterranean’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43.2
(2013): 275-301.

Caputi, Jane. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

———. Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth. Santa Fe: Bear and
Company Publishing, 1993.

Castro Gómez, Santiago. ‘Apogeo y decadencia de la teoría tradicional: Una visión

desde los intersticios’. Revista Iberoamericana 69.203 (2003): 343-53.

Couldrette. The Romans of Partenay, or of Lusignan: Otherwise Known as the Tale

of Mélusine, edited by Walter W Skeat. London: Publication for the Early English
Text Society by K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1866[1401].

D’Arras, Jean. Mélusine; or, the Noble History of Lusignan. University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.

DeMello, Margo. Body Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Dickerson, Madelynn. The Handy Art History Answer Book. Detroit: Visible Ink
Press, 2013.

Fridell, Gavin. Coffee. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.

 Zoila Clark 61
__________________________________________________________________

Graham, Lloyd D. ‘Mother Earth, Pisces and the Two-Tailed Mermaid’.

.

Academia.edu, 20 April 2013. 1-12. Viewed on 6 April 2015.

http://www.academia.edu/3336225/Mother_Earth_Pisces_and_the_Two-
Tailed_Mermaid.

Griffin, Miranda. ‘The Beastly and the Courtly in Medieval Tales of Transformation:
Bisclavret, Melion, and Mélusine’. The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in
French Literature, Thought and Culture, edited by Amaleena Damlé and Aurélie
L'Hostis, 139-150. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey, edited by Robert Fagles and Bernard Knox. New York:
Viking, 1996.

Krell, Jonathan F. ‘Between Demon and Divinity’. Mythosphere 2.4 (2000): 375-
396.

Miller, Iona. ‘Melusine de Alba’. Jungian Genealogy. Viewed on 6 April 2015.

http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/melusine-de-alba.html.

Morris, Mattew W. ‘Jean d’ Arras and Couldrette: Political Expediency and

Censorship in Fifteenth-Century France’. Postscript: Publication of the Philological
Association of the Carolinas 18-19 (2002): 35-44.

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. ‘Globalization as Hybridization’. Global Modernities,

edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Las, and Roland Robertson, 45-68. London: Sage
Publications, 1995.

Neuhaus, Eugen. World of Art. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1936.

Ogborn, Miles. Global Lives: Britain and the New World 1550-1800. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Robertson, Jean and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after
1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

The Little Mermaid. Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements. CA: Walt Disney
Home Video: Buena Vista Home Video, 1989. VHS.

‘The Starbuscks Siren’. Khemet. Viewed on 6 April 2015.

http://www.khemet.net/sbucks2.html.
62 Mélusine’s Iconography
__________________________________________________________________

‘What Is the Role and Responsibility of a For-Profit Public Company?’ Starbucks.

Viewed on 6 April 2015. http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/global-report.

Документация. ‘Cultural History of Mermaids Introduction’. Mélusine in the Early

and Late Renaissance Periods. Viewed on 6 April 2015.
http://bgconv.com/docs/index-145294.html?page=7.

Zoila Clark holds a Ph.D. (2009) and a M.A. (2004) in Spanish from Florida
International University, an M.S. (1999) in TESOL from Nova Southeastern
University, and she also obtained an MA in Women’s Studies from Florida Atlantic
University in 2015. Her research focuses on cultural studies.
 The Dark Side of the Sun:
The Great Beast, Monstrosity and Solar Narratives

Cavan McLaughlin
Abstract
From Mega Therion, to The Great Beast 666 and even Little Sunshine, Aleister
Crowley, the renowned occultist from the turn of the twentieth century, went by
many names (and many more than those mentioned). Still to this day often hailed by
some as ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’, he was among many things, a self-
styled solar myth. All manner of deities have been accused of being ‘moral monsters’
and perhaps it is no surprise that making one’s personal goal the embodiment of solar
mythos, Crowley’s life story itself is analogous of the problem of evil. The will to
power has often been a philosophy courted by those attracted to the dark and
chthonic aspects of the divine. However, as diametrically opposed to the chthonic as
the sun appears to be, the sun is in truth dual, with its own dark side. It is the giver
of life and light, but equally, can bring suffering, pain and even death. The sun is, by
its very nature, amoral, so if every man and every woman truly is a star, perhaps the
search for transcendence could make monsters of us all.

Key Words: Aleister Crowley, solar myth, Great Beast, 666, Thelema, Satan.

*****

1. Introduction
Infamously dubbed ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’ and the ‘Man We’d Like
to Hang’, for many Aleister Crowley is the very personification of evil, for others,
however, he is a gnostic saint, the prophet of a New Aeon, and some would even
say, an enlightened master who realised the very highest levels of spiritual
attainment. 1 One might struggle to find more diametrically opposed
characterisations of a single individual. However, paradoxical as it may seem, just
such an apparently diametric opposition finds its welcome unity within this complex
and mercurial individual. As Crowley notes of his own system of spiritual
attainment: ‘My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below
the hells’. 2 Crowley, it seems, was so comfortable with his dark side, that he would
eventually proclaim himself as the Great Beast 666, with perhaps more than a hint
of ironic pride.
I approach this discourse as a creative practitioner, as a filmmaker in fact, but
more broadly an artist and a storyteller. My aim is to examine the Great Beast’s
method of spiritual attainment, magick, in respect to his intentional weaving of
narrative, in this case transpersonal solar mythic narrative. 3 From this I hope to glean
some insight into the possible negative consequences inherent in our prevailing
models for creating contemporary solar heroes, particularly, in regards to the
64 The Dark Side of the Sun
__________________________________________________________________
exteriorising of their implicit monstrosity, played out in the role of the villain. If we
accept that modern myth-making still serves, among other purposes, a psychological
and pedagogical function, we can see that, retaining this binary opposition of
hero/villain (when audience identification is overwhelmingly with the hero), might
instil further reinforcement of unresolved tensions between contending aspects of
the psyche. 4 Accentuating this faux separation, rather than integrating and conflating
these aspects into whole and individuated heroes, conceals from an audience the
psychologically valuable realisation that, ‘the shadow too, is emitted by the sun’. 5
It is in part because of this unifying principle that Jung favoured the sun as a
symbol for God. He writes, ‘The sun is [...] really the only rational representation of
God […] not only beneficial, but also destructive; […] It shines equally on the just
and on the unjust’. 6 The sun is also symbolic of our own centre (just as it is the centre
of our solar system) and symbolic of our Self (our totality, containing consciousness,
the unconscious, and the ego) and as such it is allegorical to our very sense of both
centeredness and wholeness, making it the perfect symbol of spiritual aspiration and
psychological integration.

2. Solar Mythic Narrative

In order to ascertain what Crowley’s system of magick and the construction of
narrative – solar mythic or otherwise – have in common, it is important to understand
exactly what constitutes magick in Crowley’s view. Crowley defines magick as ‘the
Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’. 7 Now,
utilising a term such as magick arguably infers a supernatural ability for a given
subject to directly alter aspects of objective reality in miraculous ways. However, as
we will see, this subject/object dichotomy is not one that Crowley subscribes to.
What Crowley actually proposes is a system for making changes in one’s own
consciousness. If our perception of reality can be transformed, then the world as we
experience it will also be transformed.
Crowley’s magick utilises myriad techniques for transformation, but the focus
here is specifically on the creative act of storytelling and myth making. For Crowley,
creative expression (in all of its forms) is central to magick and so, in relation to art,
he is emphatic, declaring, ‘All Art is Magick’. 8 This thesis regarding the inherent
connection between art and magick, and more specifically the ‘word’ (and thereby,
storytelling and narrative), is suitably embellished by the influential storyteller,
writer and self-ascribed modern magus, Alan Moore.

Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe

this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art,
[…] is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of
manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in
consciousness. 9
 Cavan McLaughlin 65
__________________________________________________________________
Not only do stories create the cultural fabric within which we exist. Lloyd
Glauberman has argued that ‘in a very literal sense we are stories. The narrative that
is our personal history is the very essence of who we are’. 10 In our infancy we do not
yet have capacity for long-term memory, but as this powerful and transformative
neurophysiological mechanism emerges we

begin to experience our life as a story. It is at this minute that our

sense of self is born. Figuratively speaking, successful living is
being able to have script control over our life story. 11

The act of ‘manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in

[one’s] consciousness’ certainly would qualify as having ‘script control over one’s
life’ and so one might redefine magick as the Science and Art of wilfully taking
authorship of one’s own life story. Each of us, as stories-in-themselves, storytellers
and participants in the exchange and consumption of shared stories, has this power
(and indeed responsibility) of authorship. Narrative is undeniably a powerfully
persuasive tool with the ability to shape beliefs and change minds. One need only
consider religious texts, advertising, propaganda, and gossip to witness this force in
action.
This ‘active manipulation’ is clearly the approach Crowley took to his own life
story. When examining his life story, separating fact from fiction can be a tricky
process. Moreover, in numerous cases this blurring is a direct result of Crowley’s
own artifice. 12 This process of actively shaping one’s personal narrative to produce
self-transformation is central to Crowley’s process of self-realisation, or in Jungian
terms, process of individuation.
Born on October 12, 1875 as Edward Alexander Crowley, he was raised in a very
strict Brethren household. 13 Crowley attests to the fact that when his mother was at
her most heightened exasperation of his youthful antics she would declare he was
the Beast, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation, a title, he would later confer on
himself. 14
Before this, however, he took on the ‘nom de guerre’ of Aleister, with its
‘atrocious spelling’ in order to facilitate ‘the process of becoming famous’. 15 Here
we see a simple and powerful method of taking authorship of one’s own life story:
changing the name of your central character. It is clear that, rather than simply
engaging in a change of name for reasons of preference or pragmatism, the emergent
Aleister Crowley was almost certainly creating a new persona for himself to grow
into, a consciously constructed mask with which to reveal and conceal his ‘True
Self’. 16
This technique of self-authorship through consciously renaming oneself is not
peculiar to Crowley, but is a key technique of the Western Esoteric Tradition,
expressed with beautiful succinctness by the pivotal statement used within the
66 The Dark Side of the Sun
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Neophyte initiation ritual of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: ‘by names and
images are all powers awakened and reawakened’. 17
This hugely influential magical order (both influential in Crowley’s personal
development and on the Western Esoteric Tradition at large) required initiates to
take on a motto as their newly appointed magical name. 18 This motto/name would
express the aspirant’s most sincere spiritual objective. Furthermore, initiates very
commonly adopted new names of aspiration as they ascended through higher degrees
of initiation and spiritual development, their magical names evolving and adapting
just as they did. These names (or mottos) are not simply identifiers, but also a sort
of mission statement.
The aspirational name that we are most interested in here is To Mega Therion, or
The Great Beast 666, which relates to the particular narrative that Crowley would
eventually present as a model for his own life and indeed for the world at large: solar
narrative and the associated individualist solar hero. In his autohagiography Crowley
states, ‘this Aleister Crowley was not a man, or even a number of men; he is
obviously a solar myth’. 19

3. Thelema and Duality Transcendence

Solar symbolism is unquestionably important in mythology and storytelling at
large, but why was it so important to Crowley? What connection does it have with
his most infamous title of The Great Beast 666 of Revelation? How might one
profess to hold such an office and yet be considered a great teacher of spiritual
attainment? To answer these questions, we must delve a little deeper into Thelema,
the New Aeon religion, or philosophy, for which Crowley became prophet.
The word Thelema (θέλημα) is derived from the Greek, meaning ‘Will’. The
primary holy text in Thelema, Liber AL vel Legis, or commonly, The Book of The
Law, was purportedly revealed to Crowley by a praeterhuman intelligence called
Aiwass, in Cairo, Egypt during April, 1904. This bizarre and complex text, requires
extensive decoding, but essentially establishes a New Aeon of spiritual evolution,
the Aeon of Horus, the Egyptian sun god, within which the primary precept is to ‘Do
what thou wilt’. 20
One’s Will, in this sense, referred to by Thelemites as the True Will, is the
dynamic fulfilment of one’s higher purpose in harmony with the Will of Nature; the
Universe; Divinity; Destiny or another congruent notion that fits with the individual
Thelemite’s world view. ‘Do what thou wilt’ does not mean, ‘Do whatever you like’,
but rather it very specifically means, ‘Do precisely and only that which it is your
unique purpose to do’. 21
Importantly, it is also proclaimed in The Book of the Law, that ‘every man and
every woman is a star’ with their own unique and particular path through the
universe. 22 Therefore, it is no accident that the primary deity of the New Aeon is
Horus, a solar deity. The inference being that every man and every woman is in fact
a sun. As Crowley himself puts it, ‘our religion therefore, for the People, is the Cult
 Cavan McLaughlin 67
__________________________________________________________________
of the Sun’. Or, we can find a more explicit explanation in the writings of modern
Thelemic scholar, IAO131. 23

In the same sense that the sun, as a star, is center of the solar
system in the physical macrocosm, every man and every woman
is understood to be a sort of microcosmic star and center of his or
her own system. 24

For Crowley, the time of the dying and rising god (in all its forms) had come to
its end, and in the New Aeon the solar symbol would evolve away from the outdated
notion that the sun dies and is reborn. Such a notion lends itself to dualism, and a
focus on death and resurrection. The role of the mystic is to transcend dualism and
in the New Aeon of scientifically illuminated understanding, the sun, with respect to
our updated cosmological understanding, can be just such a symbol. 25

The crowned and conquering child [Horus], who dieth not, nor is
reborn, but goeth radiant ever upon His Way. Even so goeth the
Sun: for as it is now known that night is but the shadow of the
Earth, so Death is but the shadow of the Body, that veileth his
Light from its bearer. 26

Crowley has extended his authorship from the personal to the cultural by
promulgating through his philosophy/religion of Thelema, the manner in which a
solar symbol can be seen as inherently duality transcending, transgressive and
unifying.
This desire to transcend dualism was most especially held by Crowley in relation
to morality. Doing one’s Will, as we have shown, has nothing to do with moral or
ethical judgement. Crowley greatly admired Nietzsche 27 and was in accord with the
idea that ‘there is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation
of phenomena’. 28 The sun certainly exemplifies this. Insofar as, it is the source and
sustainer of life, it can equally bring suffering, pain and death. The sun is amoral. If
one were to suffer a cancerous growth due to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun, one
does not blame the sun for doing that which it must do according to its nature.
Crowley argues, ‘the idea of evil comes only from perceiving the oppositions which
are transcended by Truth’. 29
The goal, for Crowley, is to identify with the ‘True Self’, or the totality of the
Self. This is an all-encompassing state that must then, by definition, include one’s
Shadow. ‘Horus, the Sun, is a symbol of That which contains [and] transcends
dualities, an image of our True Selves, identical in essence yet diverse in expression
for each individual’. 30 Here we have another method for engaging actively in the
authorship of personal and cultural myth. Through reinterpretation one can
repurpose concepts and transform their meaning. Crowley has reappropriated the
68 The Dark Side of the Sun
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myth of Horus for his own ends (just as he subverts and reappropriates Christian
mythology and other religious imagery despite being a scientific naturalist).

4. 666: The Number of the Beast

In the 1531 edition of De Occulta Philosophia, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
famously included seven magical squares (or kameas), each associated with one of
the seven classical astrological planets. 31 The sun has

a square composed of 36 squares (6×6). The numbers 1-36 are

then arranged in such a way that every row and every column add
to the same number. That number is 111, and the sum of all the
squares is 666 (see Figure 1). 32

Figure 1: Magic square (kamea) of the sun.

© 2015. Cavan McLaughlin. Used with permission.

This link between 666 and the sun was well known by Crowley. Playfully alluded
to during the libel case brought against him in 1934, Crowley gave testimony saying:
‘It only means sunlight; 666 is the number of the sun […] you can call me “Little
Sunshine.”’ 33 Renowned Thelemite and author Lon Milo DuQuette offers the
following explanation as to why Crowley would choose such a title, knowing many
would construe it as an abomination. DuQuette argues:
 Cavan McLaughlin 69
__________________________________________________________________
The term “Beast 666” was just another example of Crowley using
concepts that in the past represented the unholy terrors of an evil
future, and redeeming them so that they presently represent the
holy mysteries of the emerging new age. It’s as simple (and as
unsatanic) as that. 34

What DuQuette proposes is in alignment with the ideas presented here of

Crowley’s authorial reinterpretation and repurposing of myth, this time, of the
pervading cultural mythology that was imposed upon him (namely Christianity).
Rather than being restrained by the social order that was in part maintained by the
Christian mythology, he elected to transform the meaning of principle diabolical
Christian symbols and thereby shift their mythic function, allowing their use for
psychological development and personal metamorphosis, without being constrained
by the social order.
Crowley biographer Richard Kaczynski, though sympathetic of Crowley’s
achievements, suggests that the resulting ‘unfortunate terminology’ ultimately
impaired Crowley’s chances of being popularised as a renowned spiritual
philosopher and mystic. 35
Despite claiming that ‘the devil does not exist’, Crowley makes frequent
statements regarding Satan that would seem to imply that the accusations of devil-
worshipper and Satanist are far from unfounded. 36 For example, ‘the Devil our Lord,
[…] is Satan, therefore also the Sun, whose number of Magick is 666, the seal of His
servant the BEAST’. 37 This, however, would be missing the point. Satan, in terms
of Crowley’s naturalist ideology, is not a distinct supernatural entity of positive evil,
but rather, in Jungian terms, a chthonic aspect of the sun/Self.
In both Jungian psychology and Thelemic philosophy there are correspondences
between the symbols of the Self, the sun, and the unitary archetype of the
Christ/Antichrist dyad. For Jung, where the Christ is of the light and is the spiritual
aspect of the Self (identified with consciousness) there must therefore be a Shadow
side, for which he most commonly employs the alchemical symbol of Mercurius,
wherein the chthonic and material aspect of the Self is expressed (and identified with
unconsciousness). 38 Although Jung himself wrestles with the direct comparison of
Satan, or the devil, with the figure of Mercurius, and denies outright correlation, the
distinction is not as clear as he would wish it and he himself recognises that, ‘if
Mercurius is not exactly the Evil One himself, he at least contains him’. 39 In a letter
to Father Victor White he simply states that Christ ‘is one side of the self and the
devil the other’. 40
When we deny, fear, and vilify this chthonic aspect of the sun/Self we project it
outwards into interpersonal relations, or more broadly, as a cultural scapegoat.
Another irony then is that by purposefully assimilating the Shadow, by having (or
aiming to have) a complete acceptance and appreciation of all existing things,
Crowley advocates a ‘wedding’ with both this satanic/chthonic/material principle,
70 The Dark Side of the Sun
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and a higher spiritual immaterial principle. 41 In doing so he induced so much fear in
others that one might reasonably suggest they have en masse projected their own
Shadow onto him. 42

5. Conclusion
If each of us, as innate storytellers and artists, accepts that art, like Crowley’s
system of magick, can indeed achieve changes in consciousness through the
manipulation of symbols, words, or images, then perhaps when writing our own
personal stories and writing stories for our culture at large, it may be wise to consider
the possible psychological dangers inherent in suggesting an audience identification
with wholly ‘good’ heroes in a seemingly never-ending battle with polar opposite
forces of positive evil. Clear moral distinctions rarely, if ever, exist. Any attempt to
present such wholly ‘good’ messianic solar heroes brings with it the same problem
of evil inherent in theology. The omnipotence of, for example, Superman or Neo
from the Matrix (1999) is just as awe-inspiring and indeed terrifying as any other
ultimate power or divinity. Moreover, it is entirely contestable that they are even
capable of achieving only good in a strict moral sense. In contrast, Crowley’s
Thelemic idea of (solar) heroism as the heroic effort inherent in the transformative
process of individuation and reorientation towards one’s innermost nature and
expression of Self (one’s True Will) is vastly more coextensive with human
experience and therefore a more suitable aspirational characterisation.
Joseph Campbell, when discussing the innate horror of existence, frequently
paraphrases Schopenhauer in saying, ‘Life is something that should not have been’. 43
Life is monstrous, and we as participants are monstrous also. Our very sense of self
arguably develops from our sense of narrative, so the narratives we shape, shape us
in turn. Narratives using the hero/villain binary exteriorise and fragment the implicit
monstrosity of the authorial power of the free-willed individual and of the
monstrosity of life itself. Attempts to deny our monstrosity by repressing or
fragmenting our Self lead to tensions in the psyche and thereby neuroses. As such,
narrative modes of binary opposition offer us drama, but their lack of synthesis limits
their capacity to function as a guide to psychological development. By contrast, a
New Aeonic solar hero transgresses and transcends such binary oppositions and
embraces the true nature of its inherent monstrosity; a nature that, like the amoral
solar symbol and the Jungian Self, is a totality and therefore defies categorisation.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn so poetically expresses:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing

evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the
rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of every human being. 44
 Cavan McLaughlin 71
__________________________________________________________________
The life of Crowley, if viewed as a self-styled solar myth, serves to demonstrate the
authorial power to shape personal mythologies (even if the narrative he shaped
ultimately impaired his chances of being popularised and given the recognition he
arguably deserves). Through revisionary models of solar myth, personal and cultural,
we in turn can author the re-imagining of our inherent monstrosity and facilitate
psychological integration and individuation, by way of an affirmation of being in
accordance with our true nature; the very same process that constituted the life’s
work of the Great Beast.

Notes
1
John Bull, Sunday Express 1923 (headlines from May 24th and May 19th
respectively).
2
Aleister Crowley, ‘Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus sub figura XC’, The
Equinox 1.6 (1911): line 40, 22.
3
I will use spelling magick here with an additional ‘k’, as Crowley did, when making
clear the distinction between sleight-of-hand/stage magic, and magick used as a
system of spiritual attainment.
4
The fourth function outlined in Joseph Campbell’s ‘Four Functions of Myth’, from
Pathways to Bliss (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004), 6-10.
5
Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963),
98.
6
Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company,
1916), 127-129. Heavily edited here for brevity, the whole passage is very much
worth reading in its entirety.
7
Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA, Book IV Parts I-IV, 2nd revised edition (San
Francisco, CA/York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 1997), 126.
8
Ibid., 197. Crowley’s emphasis.
9
Alan Moore, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, dir. Dez Vylenz and Moritz Winkler,
2005. UK, The Disinformation Company, 2008, DVD.
10
Lloyd Glauberman, ‘The Transformational Power of Storytelling’, Huffington
Post, Viewed on 5 January 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-glauberman-
phd/storytelling_b_2254110.html.
11
Ibid.
12
Take for example the simple fact that Crowley wrote his own ‘Autohagiography’,
with some clearly mischievous humour, but also arguably an important underlying
message about the mutability of perceptual truth and self-perception. See Aleister
Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (Berkeley,
California: North Atlantic Books, 2010). For a specific example, Crowley famously
faked his own death in 1930, with the help of Fernando Pessoa, including a
suggestively suicidal note and misguiding information given to the press, before
72 The Dark Side of the Sun
__________________________________________________________________

turning up alive and well. See Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister
Crowley (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 450-452.
13
Crowley’s father was a fanatical evangelical preacher. Daily Bible studies and
the atmosphere of Christian fundamentalism were to have an enormous influence
on Crowley’s philosophy and writing style.
14
Ibid., 16.
15
Crowley’s explanation of his own name change in, The Confessions of Aleister
Crowley: An Autohagiography (London: Arkana. 1989), 139. The full quote is: ‘For
many years I had loathed being called Alick, partly because of the unpleasant sound
and sight of the word, partly because it was the name by which my mother called
me. Edward did not seem to suit me and the diminutives Ted or Ned were even less
appropriate. Alexander was too long and Sandy suggested tow hair and freckles. I
had read in some book or other that the most favourable name for becoming famous
was one consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee, as at the end of a hexameter:
like “Jeremy Taylor”. Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions and Aleister is the
Gaelic form of Alexander. To adopt it would satisfy my romantic ideals. The
atrocious spelling A-L-E-I-S-T-E-R was suggested as the correct form by Cousin
Gregor, who ought to have known better. In any case, A-L-A-I-S-D-A-I-R makes a
very bad dactyl. For these reasons I saddled myself with my present nom-de-
guerre—I can’t say that I feel sure that I facilitated the process of becoming famous.
I should doubtless have done so, whatever name I had chosen’.
16
To use Crowley’s own terminology (used interchangeably with Silent Self), ‘the
True Self of his subconscious self, the hidden Life of his physical life’. Quote from
Aleister Crowley, ‘Liber Samekh: Theurgia Goetia Summa Congressus Cum
Daemone sub figura DCCC’, Magick: Liber ABA, Book IV Part IV, 2nd revised
edition, Point II, Section Gg, Line 5, 532.
17
Israel Regardie, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, Vol. 1 (Arizona:
New Falcon Publications, 1994), 15. By way of expressing how important this single
statement was to the Golden Dawn the author immediately goes on to say, ‘the newly
initiated Frater or Soror into the Order could spend considerable effort and time
meditating on just what this means. When he does this, he will be led into the deepest
mysteries of the teachings of the Order’. This phrase also informs the title of the
popular modern Golden Dawn text by Peregrin Wildoak, By Names and Images:
Bringing the Golden Dawn to Life (Cheltenham, UK: Skylight Press, 2012).
18
‘It was this Golden Dawn that attracted some of the most talented personalities of
the time — including W.B. Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Florence
Farr, Annie Horniman, A. E. Waite, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Dion Fortune and
Aleister Crowley. And it was this Golden Dawn that itself provided a NEW DAWN
for “occultism” in the early 20th century’ Carl Lewellyn, ‘Foreword and
Appreciation’ to The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie, Revised 6th edition (USA:
Llewellyn Publications, 1986), ix.
 Cavan McLaughlin 73
__________________________________________________________________

19
Crowley, Confessions, 32. It is worth noting that Crowley is perhaps again being
mischievous, given the absurdity of his boasting within these passages, as simply
very act the writing of one’s own Autohagiography would also suggest, but it is not
at all clear that he did not choose to regard himself as both a saint and indeed a solar
myth. In any case, the uncertainty merely serves to strengthen the argument
regarding the mutability of his life story and his role in purposefully facilitating that
mutability.
20
Aleister Crowley, ‘The Book of the Law: Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX’,
Magick: Liber ABA, Book IV Part IV, 2nd revised edition, I:40, 307.
21
Aleister Crowley, ‘Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion’, The Equinox 3.1
(1993): 39-43
22
Ibid, I:3, 305.
23
At the time of this chapter’s writing he continues to publish only using his
magickal name/motto of IAO131 and keeps his mundane identity secret.
24
IAO131, ‘Psychology of Liber AL – PT.2: Each Person Is a Star with a Will’
IAO131.com, (blog), February 25, 2013, Viewed on 7 January 2015,
http://iao131.com/2013/02/25/psychology-of-liber-al-pt-2-each-person-as-a-star-
with-a-will/.
25
With respect to mystical union: ‘In mystic states we both become one with the
Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. […] In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism,
in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note’,
William Harmless, Mystics (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
26
Khaled Khan [Aleister Crowley], The Heart of the Master (London: OTO, 1938),
33.
27
Crowley made Nietzsche a Saint in his Gnostic church (Ecclesiae Gnosticae
Catholicae) and wrote in Magick without Tears that ‘Nietzsche may be regarded as
one of our prophets’. Crowley, Magick without Tears (US: New Falcon Publications,
1991), Ch. 48.
28
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 64.
29
Khan [Crowley], Heart of the Master, 25.
30
IAO131, ‘New Aeon Initiation: The True Self Contains Good & Evil, Upright &
Averse’, IAO131.com (blog), August 9, 2010, Viewed on 7 January 2015,
http://iao131.com/2010/08/09/new-aeon-initiation-the-true-self-contains-good-and-
evil-upright-and-averse/.
31
Kameas predate this publication by many hundreds of years, but Agrippa’s text
was extremely influential in Europe and is primarily responsible for the use of
kameas in the Western Esoteric Tradition today.
32
DuQuette, Magick of Aleister Crowley, 4.
33
Crowley v. Constable and Co., Limited and others—informally known as the
‘Black Magic Libel Case’. April 10, 1934. Cited in Kaczynski, Perdurabo, 474 and
74 The Dark Side of the Sun
__________________________________________________________________

also Lon Milo DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley (San Francisco: Weiser
Books, 2003), 5.
34
Ibid.
35
Kaczynski comments: ‘Calling himself “the Great Beast” didn’t help. Despite
what [Crowley] believed this figure from Revelation represented – a solar icon for
the Magus of a New Aeon – most people connected it with the devil’. Kaczynski,
Perdurabo, 72.
36
Crowley, Magick/Liber ABA, 277.
37
Crowley, Liber Samekh, 534.
38
These ideas are discussed in a number of Jung’s works, but a very good synopsis
can be found in chapter 10 of Mathew Mather’s The Alchemical Mercurius: Esoteric
Symbol of Jung’s Life and Works (London, New York: Routledge, 2014), 138-149.
39
Carl Jung, ‘The Spirit Mercurius’, Collected Works of C. G. Jung Vol. 13:
Alchemical Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 245, 228.
40
Carl Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung, Vol. 2: Volumes 1951-1961, ed. Gerhard Adler
(Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990), 133.
41
This marriage of heaven and hell (William Blake, who authored the famous text
with this very title, is also recognised as a Gnostic Saint in Crowley’s Ecclesiae
Gnosticae Catholicae), quoted directly in the introduction of this chapter, is the focus
of the ‘holy book’ of Thelema, ‘Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus sub figura XC’,
The Equinox 1.6 (1911): 17-22.
42
Crowley speaks directly to just this sort of Shadow projection: ‘This “Devil” is
called Satan or Shaitan, and regarded with horror by people who are ignorant of his
formula, and, imagining themselves to be evil, accuse Nature herself of their own
phantasmal crime’. Magick/Liber ABA, 163.
43
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
(California: First New World Library, 2003), 15.
44
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row,
1974), 168.

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———. The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. California:
First New World Library, 2003.

Crowley, Aleister. Magick: Liber ABA, Book IV Parts I-IV, 2nd Revised Edition. San
Francisco, CA/York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 1997.

———. ‘Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae’. The Equinox 1.2 (1909): 11-30.
 Cavan McLaughlin 75
__________________________________________________________________

———. Liber Oz/Liber LXXVII. London: OTO, 1942.

———. ‘Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus sub figura XC’. The Equinox 1.6
(1911): 17-22.

———. ‘Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion’. The Equinox 3.1 (1993): 39-
43

———. ‘Liber XV: OTO Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae’. The
Equinox 3.1 (1993): 247-267.

———. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography. London:

Arkana, 1989.

Glauberman, Lloyd. ‘The Transformational Power of Storytelling’. Huffington Post.

Viewed on 5 January 2015.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-glauberman-
phd/storytelling_b_2254110.html.

———. ‘New Aeon Initiation: The True Self Contains Good & Evil, Upright &
Averse’. IAO131.com (blog), 9 August 2010. Viewed on 7 January 2015.
http://iao131.com/2010/08/09/new-aeon-initiation-the-true-self-contains-good-and-
evil-upright-and-averse/.

———. ‘Psychology of Liber AL – PT.2: Each Person Is a Star with a Will’.

IAO131.com (blog), 25 February 2013. Viewed on 7 January 2015.
http://iao131.com/2013/02/25/psychology-of-liber-al-pt-2-each-person-as-a-star-
with-a-will/.

Jung, Carl. Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 9 (Part 2) Aion: Researches into
the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd Revised Edition. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2014.

———. Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 13: Alchemical Studies. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1970.

———. Letters of C. G. Jung, Volume 2: Volumes 1951-1961, edited by Gerhard

Adler. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990.

———. Mysterium Coniunctionis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963.

76 The Dark Side of the Sun
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———. Psychology of the Unconscious. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company,
1916.

Kaczynski, Richard. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. Berkeley, California:

North Atlantic Books, 2010.

Khaled Khan [Aleister Crowley]. The Heart of the Master. London: OTO, 1938.

Mather, Mathew. The Alchemical Mercurius: Esoteric Symbol of Jung’s Life and
Works. London, New York: Routledge, 2014.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Marion Faber. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008.

Regardie, Israel. The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic. Arizona: New
Falcon Publications, 1994.

———. The Golden Dawn, Revised 6th Edition. USA: Llewellyn Publications, 1986.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore. Directed by Dez Vylenz and Moritz Winkler. 2005.
UK, The Disinformation Company, 2008. DVD.

Wildoak, Peregrin. By Names and Images: Bringing the Golden Dawn to Life.
Cheltenham, UK: Skylight Press, 2012.

Cavan McLaughlin is a broadcaster, creative media practitioner and academic with

research interests regarding the role of spirituality and occultism in contemporary
visual culture. As a media professional of some 14 years he has been involved in
almost all aspects of audiovisual production, specialising in music promos and
album artwork.
 A Plague upon Our Virtual Land

Jad Khairallah
Abstract
An interchangeable relationship between a concrete geographic land of technology,
consumerism and entertainment appears to amend the virtual land of television
imagery. The culture of consumerism and entertainment picks up where the war
photography of Susan Sontag left off and pushes the issue even further. The once
purely photographic image of atrocity is now raised and matched by technologically
advanced televised images that, to this day, deploy the shock effect as their
influential power, stunning the viewers with Live images popping out of the screens
to incarnate this shock in the form of a realistic entity. This contemporary visual
culture reforms itself not only through anxiety but also through ideologies that enjoy
disaster, gloat over horror and operate on the principle that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
This is not to say that these representational products of human atrocities are utterly
devoid of feeling but, instead, and in reference to their receiver, they are now free-
floating and impersonal. They lie for a while and vanish later on. The one-time
spectacle of imagery appears to be changing. Employing the ideological theorization
of Susan Sontag, whose image function lies under a strictly photographic aesthetic
of death, I explore the overwhelming plague invading the purposeful aspect of the
shock. This plague, in the form of a mighty effect, spreads fast within the virtual
land of television and infects the cognitive geography of the receiver. It is a
reinterpretation of the shock within the virtual geography of the image under the
custody of contemporary culture. The discussion gives insight into a somehow
eradicated future that basks in the emotionlessness of the culture of spectatorship
with regards to shocking televised atrocities.

Key Words: Atrocity, televised images, shock, contemporary culture, enjoy

disaster, lack of depth, virtual geography, monstrous perception.

*****

1. Introduction
Under the umbrella of virtual geography, the image reigns supreme, while
influenced by the surrounding culture and the latter’s technological progression. The
reign of the image falls within a unique spatial aspect that belongs to an intangible
and two-dimensional ground, best acknowledged through this chapter within the
television sphere. The moving image, a reflective mirror of its culture, holds close
to its core a set of universal beliefs that depicts itself in contrast to its surrounding
environment. Those beliefs function within technology, consumerism and a media
frenzy society, and lead to a faster image projection with a focus on content, visual
presentation and even visual perception. As the inspiration of the screen dines on
78 A Plague upon Our Virtual Land
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cultural chronicles, a motivational aspect for grabbing a hold of the viewer’s
attention is the element of surprise, which is best referred to as the shock.
The shock comes courtesy of any perturbation in the aesthetic and psychological
normality of the viewer, as disturbance appears to take shape when images of any
terrible situation burst out from the news, shows, advertisements or any other
available screen. Through this contemporary visual frame, I will argue that the
notion of shock, portrayed in the context of war atrocities undergoes a change in
perceptual representation, from a sturdy player within a virtual geographic land
(television) to an easily moulded concept that nevertheless seems to spread fast
within the cognitive geography of the receiver. I will relate this to Susan Sontag who,
in Regarding the Pain of Others, claims that the shock is a base for a media-driven
enterprise. The insanity of war generated the following ideology when she was
reporting on the monstrosities of the battlefield: if the horror could be made ‘vivid
enough’, people would take in the insanity and its outrageousness. 1 To prove a point
or an ideology in time is to deploy shock to discipline the mind. As Sontag writes,
through the framework of war images, her photographic aesthetic of death reflects
just an introduction to culture’s impact of the insanity of war when reporting the
horrors of the battlefield.
I will refer further to Sontag’s point that the virtual land of contemporary
televised images is a depiction of an agitated culture, whose representational method
is the image. 2 With an immense cultural impact on media-driven technologies, the
image and its aesthetic – the shock as ‘a leading stimulus of consumption and source
of value’ 3 – finds itself being moulded into something, 4 something that is the seed
of a contemporary visual frame, so interconnected with the visual that it is bound to
impact on its field of perception. This elevated status is similar to a plague in the
way that it spreads fast while taking advantage of many influential elements. With
symptoms that translate into a newly monstrous perception, the receiver is
characterized by a lack of depth and a flatness of some sort.
Therefore, under the custody of a contemporary frame and in order to understand
the shock’s ramifications, I will attempt a reinterpretation of the shock while taking
into account various elements from within the concrete geographic land that
surround the television medium. This system must be elaborated upon first, by
questioning the technological increase in contemporary image production; second,
by addressing the culture of consumerism and entertainment amid its updated
method of image consumption and, third, by concluding with the domain of the
spectacle and the emergence of a culture of spectatorship. This gives a glimpse on
the contemporary plague destroying the purposeful aspect of the shock while
claiming custody of a cognitive geography and catering to a newly monstrous
perception.
 Jad Khairallah 79
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2. Technology and the Image
The contemporary frame highlights the importance of technological
advancement unto its virtual television land. It is through image projection that the
likes of Jacques Ranciere, who discusses contemporary tools, focus on the beneficial
aspect of such components in the exposure of the image. This increase of exposure
links to an overflow of imagery that can also link to the use of shock within a modern
day outline.
A major point of discussion within the virtual land of the contemporary image
sits within its tools of creation; from the perspective of Jacques Ranciere, writer of
The Future of the Image, he stresses that the image creation is as important as its
tools. As part of this approach, he emphasizes important theoretical notions within a
contemporary world, which take into account the many modern strategies linked to
the creation prospect while acknowledging the media’s ease of exposure. 5 One of
these notions, according to Ranciere, embraces modern-day mediums as open to
exploration and unlimited, as this provides the image with endless possibilities.
Technology stands parallel to the image with a more refined transmission tool
and, in redirecting the notion of image to the shock, I place the concept of atrocity
in the spotlight, as one is to consider that, similar to other aesthetical
implementations, these uncensored images of war, for example, have the chance to
be roaming free and can present a constant and detailed level of exposure unto the
receiver. In a spatio-temporal frame, where rapid advancement in digital media,
globalization and communication appears more abundant, technology easily renders
the observer as facing countless images. Television is but one medium of
transmission, with its non-stop input of moving images and up-to-date method of
exposure, restructuring the cognitive geography of the contemporary individual.

3. Culture of Consumerism
This over-exposure of high quality images from the virtual land of television
functions within a culture of consumerism. The overflow of information is abundant
and the notion of shock starts to assimilate with the fast image projection and create
for itself a stronger authoritative base. Fast and with lots of background noise – that
is how the receiver processes information originating from contemporary
television, 6 owing to the role it plays in broadcasting and influencing cultural
ideologies. Curt Cloninger, in his essay Manifesto for a Theory of the New Aesthetic,
believes that the only way to read is ‘acrobatically’, where society has even updated
its reading method to better accommodate these new modernized images of
atrocities.
Through this chapter and as the moving images present themselves in the form
of visual eruptions, akin to death and famine, the notion of shock, portrayed bluntly
through the television medium, acquire a natural presence within that domain.
Whether or not they are part of a political agenda, shocking images cater to the
anxiety of the situation and overflow the screen. Television is one major player and
80 A Plague upon Our Virtual Land
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a large example of the rapid emission of information that, according to Cloninger,
‘cannot be processed except as a function of peripheral seeing and distracted
absorption’. 7
As the shocking images of atrocity overlap with various glossy and informative
images, this initial acceptance is due to the fact that ‘we recognize ourselves’ in these
images. 8 These images of death stand in between total familiarity and white noise,
as this recognition of the self is ‘complicated, enmeshed, othered’, 9 yet very much
reflective of its own disturbed geographical environment. This approach makes it
clear that the shocking images are in no way totally new but, instead, familiar in their
impact, which aims for a better state of treatment from their consumer. The receiver
is experiencing the shock with better high definition in reference to technology and
much more consumer friendly as they speak to the familiar self. The shock is given
a better chance for a faster and more efficient experience that makes you question
the role of entertainment and its impact within this heavily influential visual culture.

4. Culture of Entertainment
A media-frenzied society is what inspires contemporary culture to channel
images that idealize the presentation and admire the spectator. Under the custody of
entertainment, the anxious world outside will not disrupt the anxiety of the virtual
world inside the television box but, instead, use the power of technology to morph
it. The term ‘spectacle’ gives us an insight into the nature behind the screen, which,
in reality, must deploy realism, yet it happens to act upon preconceived models. 10
The likes of settings, plots and narratives, defined by the screen, diminish
authenticity and turn the image into a spectacle. For the French sociologist and
cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard, the media delivers a heightened dose of reality,
which is referred to in Mark Poster’s book, Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, as
‘a spectacle of exposure’. 11 Under the custody of entertainment, contemporary
media projects through the television box both natural and man-made imagery that
is wrapped by media-driven ideologies.
The creator behind the screen is in touch with how the receiver interacts with
media, whether as a passive spectator or an active participant. 12 In the words of
anthropologist Victor Turner, the creators are bricoleurs that respond to real events
and to shifts in attitude and value, and always seek to combine cultural elements and
create new meaning while taking into account technological shifts. 13 The creator
behind the image opens the door for the receiver to indulge himself in ‘uncommon
sense’. 14 The interest in plot, characters, shapes and colours is very appealing as it
reflects ‘the realm in which we allow our monsters to come out and play’. 15 The
culture of common sense, which the receiver takes shelter in, is counteracted by that
‘uncommon sense’ found in the television. 16 The inspiration of the creator morphs
outside of its regular frame for the purpose of attracting the viewer.
The notion of shocking the spectator is one method that both links with disturbing
visuals and draws inspiration from none other than its culture. While anxious with
 Jad Khairallah 81
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respect to the social, political and economic anxiety that can underline the spectator’s
perspective on the shocking image, his contemporary spatio-temporal frame is also
an excellent culture of entertainment. The spectacle is all about enjoying the show,
and a show requires a crowd that television attracts through its many methods of
extravaganza. Attracting the viewer’s eyes through the shock is but one method of
the television box that links the entertainment concept and the disturbing
presentation. Think about an image of a falling building; here, the receiver is
manipulated by images that prove shocking and yet attractive enough for his eyes to
stick around and watch. While disturbing visuals are one medium for inducing
shock, as the likes of a natural catastrophe are heightened in plot and narration to
create a perfect show-stopping number, the latter comes to question a bigger,
influential aspect on the culture itself.

5. Culture of Spectatorship
The shocking images stand at a point in time where the chaos of juxtaposed
images on television becomes a regularity for the viewer, as he functions with,
instead of against, that virtual environment. Here is where I attempt a better reading
of the shock’s position with regard to the previous contemporary tools of technology,
consumerism and entertainment, and its implication as a plague on the mutation of
the spectacle.
The culture of spectatorship is a term that references the culture’s position within
a media-frenzied society. A society in which television circulates fast images that
successfully mould within the technological magic of the spectacle. By so, one ought
to question the position of the shock through such an environment and solicit the
matter of ramification on its visual adaptation. With regards to the receiver, shocking
atrocities arising from contemporary television and that strange, weird feeling when
constantly watching live images of death and famine can be exhausting. That
intensity in image circulation and the constant probing of the eyes are bound to take
their toll, as Susan Sontag asserts that the ‘mutation in the sphere of culture’, 17 comes
to grips with the predominance of the world’s atrocities. The mutation Sontag speaks
of reference a cultural change in the perceptual indifference to the shock.
To argue within a culture of spectatorship is to look where the objects of
contemplation are backed up by tools of great influence: big chunks of high quality
imagery reflecting fear and anxiety are covered by a cultural layer of consumerism,
captured on television and broadcasted around the globe in seconds and flow around
wrapped by the magic of the spectacle. This new media with its bedazzled look
requires us to rethink the shock. Here, an issue emerges. In our culture of
spectatorship, have we lost the power to be shocked? Sontag’s photographical
dialect acts as a reference for discussion as she asserts that disturbing images can
stop to irritate our inner self following the mutation in the sphere of culture. 18
The chunk of images arising from the anxious culture appears to be harmless, as
Sontag explains by means of referring to the projected images as situational aspects
82 A Plague upon Our Virtual Land
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of people we do not know. While the addition of the layer of entertainment, in
presentation and coverage, makes up for an indifferent impact coming from the
spectators’ point of view. This is not to say that the atrocious cultural products are
utterly devoid of feeling with reference to their receiver but, instead, they are free-
floating and impersonal. 19 They circulate for a while and vanish later on. This whole
atmosphere is characterized by a lack of depth and a flatness of some sort. The
weight and seriousness of any image fade from honour and admiration as it stands
juxtaposed with the glossy image of advertisement; 20 the shiny glossy images
function side by side with the shocking image.
The media has trained the viewer to transform unintelligible realities into fiction;
Sontag mentions the example of 9/11, where the screen captured the planes slicing
through the World Trade Center. Viewers later agreed that the scene was unreal,
comparing it to an ‘action movie’. 21 The reception of the viewer placed him in the
seats of a spectator attending the screening of an apocalyptic yet ultimately
‘harmless’ blockbuster. Politics aside, events like this showcase the surreal
dislocation from a culturally tensed reality. No pain is felt when no harm is done to
the viewer. ‘Harmless’ is how Sontag refers to these images. 22 She asserts that within
a culture of spectatorship, victims of famine and war are people we do not know; as
it is harder to feel their pain but easier to see their pain. Through this ideology, the
one-time spectacle of imagery appears to be changing.
Getting accustomed to the shock is where Fredric Jameson, in his book
Postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism, admits that such inquiries no
longer scandalize, and a new ‘depthlessness’ finds its extension both in
contemporary theory and in a whole new culture of the image. 23 The current era is
fascinated by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of ‘schlock’ and ‘kitsch’, according
to Jameson. The alteration of shock, in this case, comes to add its own contribution
to the mix as an extra layer to the change in the sphere of culture. Guy Debord, in
his book Society of the Spectacle, states that the spectacle is ‘but a social relation
among people, mediated by images’, 24 in that the receiver and its image overlap; and
what gives the culture its new change of form is the lack of separation between ‘real
life’ and the represented, spectacle one, 25 with the lives of the receiver becoming a
spectacle. Following that notion, Debord starts to alienate the shock that underline
the spectacle, and condemns its inclination towards emerging as essential. It appears
that the conditions of the shock start to mutate outside of its once-natural position.

6. An Inevitable Plague
An interchangeable relationship between a concrete geographic land of
technology, consumerism and entertainment appears to amend the virtual land of
television imagery. An overwhelming plague appears to destroy the purposeful
aspect of the shock, spreading fast through its geographical landscape. As shocking
the viewer with images of real-life disasters, such as war, death and famine, was
once believed to shake the inner self and operate on the principle that ‘if it bleeds, it
 Jad Khairallah 83
__________________________________________________________________
leads’, 26 this method of the shock is repositioned by Susan Sontag in her book
Regarding the Pain of Others, as she questions its mechanism in contrast with the
spectator while in a photographic context. Yet, under the custody of technology and
cultural advancement, the photographic images of Sontag are raised and matched by
televised images that still, to this day, deploy horror. The culture of consumerism
and entertainment picks up where Sontag left off and pushes the issue even further
to the point where the shock is easily rendered weak as it vigorously circulates the
contemporary television screen while picking up a new means of experience from
the culture of technology, a better authoritative base as it assimilates with the fast
image projection and a less atrocious presentation as it functions parallel with the
culture of entertainment.
As a reinterpretation of the shock under the custody of various influential
elements, while functioning within the geographical land of images, this culture
reforms not only by anxiety but also by ideologies that enjoy disaster and gloat over
horror. Stunning the viewers with Live images popping out of the screen incarnates
the shock in the form of a realistic entity. 27 And no matter the amount of blur or the
lack of it, the moving image follows its duty as a cultural educator that aims to inform
and influence the viewer. While noble in its role, its ideologies cannot but be
retouched by the power of consumer entertainment that coexists side by side with its
culture.
Within a plague of perceptual indifference that invades the contemporary frame,
flattens its land and reform its culture, an environment of consumerism and
entertainment manifests itself within the monstrosity of the virtual space; the culture
of spectatorship claims custody of an inevitable perception that not only alters the
impact of shock (getting used to the shock) but gives rise to new questions regarding
its future aspect within other fields of discussion.

Notes
1
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 8-14.
2
Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge,
1999), 20-35.
3
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 20.
4
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience’, Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and
Michael Ryan (Oxford, Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 441-447.
5
Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2009), 25-27.
6
Curt Cloninger, ‘Manifesto for a Theory of the “New Aesthetic”’, Metamute, 3
October 2012, viewed on 23 February 2014,
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/manifesto-theory-%E2%80%98new-
aesthetic%E2%80%99.
7
Ibid.
84 A Plague upon Our Virtual Land
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8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Mark Poster, Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings (Cambridge: MIT: Stanford
University Press, 2002), 200-201.
11
Poster, Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, 201.
12
Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, ‘Television as a Cultural Forum’,
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 8.3 (Summer 1983): 561-573.
13
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Co, 1995).
14
Ibid.
15
Newcomb, Hirsch, ‘Television as a Cultural Forum’, 564.
16
Turner, The Ritual Process, 160-179.
17
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 13.
18
Jameson, Postmodernism.
19
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 22.
20
Ibid., 27.
21
Ibid., 19.
22
Ibid.
23
Jameson, Postmodernism,14.
24
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 5.
25
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 62.
26
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 17.
27
Paul Flaig, ‘Life Driven by Death: Animation Aesthetics and the Comic Uncanny’,
Screen Journal 54 (2013): 1-19.

Bibliography
Berleant, Arnold. ‘Koht ja Paik / Place and Location’. Notes for a Cultural Aesthetic,
edited by Tüür Kadri and Laanemets Mari, 19-26. London: Routledge, 2002.

Cecchetti, David. ‘Nonsense Aesthetics: (Imaginary) Living After the Death of

Falsity’. Ctheory, 2012. Viewed 2 May 2014.
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=710.

Cloninger, Curt. ‘Manifesto for a Theory of The New Aesthetic’. Metamute, 2012.
Viewed 3 February 2014. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/manifesto-
theory-%E2%80%98new-aesthetic%E2%80%99.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
 Jad Khairallah 85
__________________________________________________________________

Ffytche, Matt. ‘Night of the Unexpected: A Critique of the ‘Uncanny’ and Its
Apotheosis within Cultural and Social Theory’. New Formations 75 (Spring 2012):
63-81. Viewed 12 May 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.3898/NeWf.75.04.2012.

Flaig, Paul. ‘Life Driven by Death: Animation Aesthetics and the Comic Uncanny’.
Screen Journal 54 (2013): 1-19.

Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge: MIT, 1993.

Grindstaff, Laura and Joseph Turow. ‘Video Cultures: Television Sociology in the
“New TV” Age’. Annual Review of Sociology 32 (2006): 103-125.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:

NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience’. Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie
Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 441-447. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell, 2008.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Newcomb, Horace and Paul M. Hirsch. ‘Television as a Cultural Forum’. Quarterly

Review of Film and Video 8.3 (Summer 1983): 561-573.

Poster, Mark. Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings. Cambridge: MIT: Stanford

University Press, 2002.

Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London: Verso, 2009.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Co., 1995.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London:

Psychology Press, 2003.

Jad Khairallah obtained his bachelor’s degree in Interior Design from Notre Dame
University Lebanon in 2011. He is currently a Master of Arts and Design student
with a research focus on the image and its cultural influence. He is interested in the
psychology behind the design creation and the relation it holds with its surroundings.
 Gods and Monsters:
Religious Inquiry and the Monstrous Classroom

Joshua Paddison
Abstract
This chapter explores how bringing monsters into the college classroom transforms
it into a space where students can conduct unique and profound examinations into
religious history and culture. Whether conceived of as real or imaginary, friendly
or terrifying, monsters embody our most desperate hopes and fears about God, the
limits of science, the nature of evil, the afterlife, humanity’s place in the cosmos,
the past and the future, and the Other. The monstrous allows us to approach
essential questions in the study of religion in fresh ways, including: What is
‘religion’ itself? Studying monsters exposes students to a wide range of ‘strange’
religious beliefs, from seventeenth-century Puritanism to nineteenth-century
spiritualism to the twenty-first-century alien abduction movement, helping them to
rethink assumptions about what is and is not ‘religion’. Furthermore, because
monsters cross boundaries of medium and category they are created in folklore,
gossip, pop culture, the arts, scientific investigations, theology, and online – they
provide rich case studies for understanding diverse religious cultures, texts, and
spaces. Monsters, as liminal figures, are often raced and gendered in complex ways
that allow us to think about intersections of religion and other co-constitutive
categories of identity. Monsters help us to see how modernization, science, and
‘secularization’ brought not irreligion but new avenues for the pursuit of awe,
mystery, and horror, which are at the heart of the religious experience. The
monstrous classroom becomes an unsettling space where students re-examine,
through fresh eyes, fundamental issues that frame theological, religious, and
historical inquiry.

Key Words: Pedagogy, religion, theology, history.

*****

1. Introduction
‘Religion is never without its monsters’, writes religious studies scholar
Timothy K. Beal. ‘Whether demonized or deified or both, no matter how many
times we kill our monsters they keep coming back for more’. 1 Monsters – whether
conceived of as real or imaginary, friendly or terrifying – embody our most
desperate hopes and fears about the existence of God, the limits of science, the
nature of evil, the afterlife, the natural world, humanity’s place in the cosmos, the
past, the future, and the Other. This chapter explores how bringing monsters into
the college or university classroom transforms it into a space where students can
88 Gods and Monsters
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conduct unique and profound examinations into religious history, practice, and
culture.
I currently offer a course called ‘Ghosts, Monsters, Demons, and Aliens in U.S.
History’ at Wittenberg University, a Lutheran-affiliated liberal arts institution in
Springfield, Ohio. I am trained as a historian but I have taught for Religious
Studies and American Studies departments, and I bring an interdisciplinary
approach to my teaching. In my ‘Ghosts, Monsters, Demons, and Aliens in U.S.
History’ course (see syllabus below), we read books and articles by historians,
religion scholars, sociologists, and folklorists as well as examine a wide array of
historical primary sources from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first:
sermons, folk tales, witchcraft trial transcripts, spiritualist poetry, alien abduction
narratives, ghost stories, comic books, demonology manuals, ‘Satanic’ rock music,
religious tracts, online message boards, and horror movies and television shows.
The course is a writing-intensive sophomore-level General Education seminar,
capped at 25 students, aimed at non-history majors. It focuses mostly on the United
States but this same approach could profitably be applied to other parts of the
world.
From my perspective, the many ghosts, monsters, demons, and aliens students
encounter in the class are all, at their core, religious manifestations, in the sense
that they help people construct existential meaning. Like all things divine,
monsters and other supernatural entities resist empirical testing, yet we believe. We
need these entities because they help us answer crucial religious questions: Is there
a God? What happens after we die? Why is there evil and suffering in the world?
What does it mean to be human? Is this mundane life all there is? The monstrous –
and its flip side, the wondrous – help us understand and navigate our own
existence.
As its title suggests, I divide the course into four units and each unit skips
forward through history as we trace Americans’ changing attitudes, beliefs, and
encounters with each type of supernatural entity. The first unit on demons, for
example, starts in late-seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts. We examine
what the outbreak of demonic possession among young people – mostly young
women – reveals about Puritan conceptions of gender, race, and selfhood. From
there we move forward to the 1970s and the resurgence of a fascination in demonic
possession following the popularity of The Exorcist novel and film. What did the
thousands of Catholics and evangelical Protestants who sought exorcism in the
1970s hope to receive? Finally, we move to the 1980s and widespread concern
over ‘Satanic’ rock music. We explore both the appeal of Satanic heavy metal
bands like Slayer, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden as well as the cultural
transgressions that made those bands targets for censorship and repression. The
course’s other three units – ghosts, monsters (we look at the Jewish golem,
Bigfoot, and zombies), and aliens – move similarly through time, allowing us to
explore continuities and change in different cultural moments. Along the way, we
 Joshua Paddison 89
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learn about a wide variety of religious traditions and movements, not just various
forms of Christianity but also Judaism, the Lakota Ghost Dance, Hoodoo,
Buddhism, Mormonism, the Nation of Islam, Scientology, Heaven’s Gate, and the
Raëlian movement.

2. Teaching Religion through the Monstrous

Studying monsters and these sorts of religious entities allows students to
approach essential questions in the study of religion in fresh and potent ways. The
remainder of this chapter will highlight five of these ways. First, the topic itself
generates phenomenally high levels of student interest. I have found that a
monstrous course title generates strong enrolment numbers as well as an enduring
excitement in a way that more traditional courses may not. From a practical
perspective, this approach is an effective way to ‘smuggle’ a religion course into
the curriculum that attracts plenty of motivated students. A monstrous course is a
‘fun’ class that can also be rigorous, using students’ pre-existing interest as a motor
to propel them into deeper academic waters.
Second, studying the monstrous helps students consider one of the fundamental
questions of religious studies – namely, what is ‘religion’ itself? I order my four
units strategically so as to help students re-consider the parameters of what is and
is not religious. We begin with demons, which everyone sees as clearly arising
from people’s religious beliefs and texts, and move on to ghosts, which most
students recognize as having something to do with religion, and then to monsters
and finally aliens. Students come into the class certain that Bigfoot and aliens have
nothing to do with religion, but by the end of the semester, they see that in fact
people’s searches for Bigfoot and aliens are, in important ways, religious impulses.
For some Bigfoot hunters, for example, Bigfoot represents the potential for
mystery and the unknowable in an increasingly disenchanted world; for others,
Bigfoot is an otherworldly visitor with a message of peace and environmental
responsibility; and according to Mormon folklore, Bigfoot is Cain from the Book
of Genesis, destined to wander the earth seeking to ‘destroy the souls of men’. 2
Through monster studies, students see that religion is not defined simply by a set of
sacred texts, institutions, or creeds, but is a fluid process of making meaning that is
both individual and social.
Students come to recognize how people’s encounters with the monstrous are
often described in ways similar to their encounters with God or the divine. In the
Book of Job, God visits Job in the form of a whirlwind, demanding, ‘Have you an
arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?’ 3 Job’s mixture of dread
and awe is characteristic of people’s meetings with the monstrous here on earth. To
highlight this, I show students the finale of Steven Spielberg’s film Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in which the characters stare awestruck and
terrified as the massive alien ‘mother ship’ slowly moves atop Devil’s Tower. As
Timothy K. Beal has noted, gods and monsters elicit ‘a vertigo-like combination of
90 Gods and Monsters
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both fear and desire, repulsion and attraction’. 4 Religion and horror can both
overwhelm our rational mind in a way that is simultaneously awesome and
unsettling.
To help students who are more familiar with ideas of a loving rather than a
frightening God appreciate this connection, I ask them to write down a description
of how it feels – physically, in your body – to be scared. I then ask them to
describe how it feels to experience religious ecstasy, based on their lives or
imaginations. Comparing what they wrote, students usually find a number of
correlations. Both experiences seem to feel similarly: your heart races, your
muscles tense, your senses seem especially acute, you tremble or shake, you feel
‘more alive’. This short writing exercise helps students who find the notion of a
terrible God counter-intuitive to see religion as more than a little horrifying, as it is
lived. In this, we follow William James’s focus on religion as experience, out of
which ‘theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily
grow’. 5
Furthermore, my approach to studying monsters exposes students to a wide
range of ‘strange’ or non-normative religious beliefs, from seventeenth-century
Puritanism to nineteenth-century spiritualism to the twenty-first-century alien
abduction movement. By taking all religious expressions seriously and treating
them all respectfully, be it Roman Catholicism, the Lakota Ghost Dance, or the
Raëlian movement, students begin to rethink assumptions about what is and is not
a ‘valid’ religion. They see that the only things separating a ‘religion’ from a ‘new
religious movement’ or ‘cult’ is longevity and mainstream acceptance. My students
read Scientology scholar Mikael Rothstein, who writes,

The power of Western society allows the myths of Christianity to

flourish as respectable or even true narratives, whereas
Scientology’s myths have no such status. It is not about the
narratives themselves, it is about the status they are able to
achieve. 6

For students coming from a strong religious background, typically Christianity, this
notion helps them see their own religion in a new light, situating it both historically
and comparatively among other traditions. For some students, this is a disturbing
notion; for others, it is liberating; but all leave class pondering what gets called
‘religious’, what does not, and why.
Third, monsters cross boundaries of medium and category – they are created in
folklore, gossip, pop culture, the arts, scientific investigations, theology, and
online. According to literary critic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘the monstrous is a genus
too large to be encapsulated in any conceptual system; the monster’s very existence
is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure’. 7 As such, they provide rich case studies for
understanding diverse religious texts and spaces. Because monsters, by definition,
 Joshua Paddison 91
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are ineffable, much writing about them falls into the category of esoterica. When
students puzzle over esoteric primary sources – such as Thomas Lake Harris’s
florid spiritualist trance poetry, Elijah Muhammad’s cryptic descriptions of the
giant ‘Mother Plane’ that carries flying saucers destined to destroy the earth, and
writings by members of Heaven’s Gate about the ‘Evolutionary Kingdom Level
Above Human’ – they appreciate more fully how sacred texts operate. With their
great length, lack of conventional narratives, and highly abstracted verbiage,
esoteric texts immerse the reader in a specialized worldview. These are truly
religious texts: they express religious ideas but also enact a religious experience in
their reading. Impenetrability, abstraction, and repetition simultaneously confirm
these texts’ divine origins and render them useful for prolonged study and
meditation. As students come to see these sorts of texts as deliberately opaque – in
other words, they realize that it’s not their fault that the reading is so difficult –
they begin to consider the uses and appeals of all sacred texts.
Studying monsters also helps students think more deeply about sacred spaces.
In my course they encounter a variety of supernatural locales: Lily Dale, New
York, the nation’s largest spiritualist colony, visited by 25,000 curious ‘pilgrims’
each year; Roswell, New Mexico, the location of a supposed UFO crash in 1947,
now decorated with obelisks and a stone monument declaring it a ‘universal sacred
site’; the Bigfoot Museum in Humboldt County, California, celebrating and
documenting the first Bigfoot sightings; and the Amityville Horror House, in
Amityville, New York, famously haunted in the 1970s. These function as sacred
spaces as much as any church, synagogue, or temple – places where visitors
deliberately cross a threshold in preparation of meeting the divine. But unlike most
churches, synagogues, and temples, these ‘monstrous’ sacred spaces are also
tourist destinations, attracting true believers looking to connect, sceptics looking to
debunk, and everyone in between. More obviously than traditionally religious
structures, monstrous spaces are both sacred and profane.
Fourth, monsters, as liminal figures, are often raced in ways that help students
to think about intersections of religion and other co-constitutive categories of
identity. As religion scholar Sylvester Johnson has recently pointed out, ideas of
the monstrous have long been entangled with transnational processes of
colonialism, imperialism, and racism. ‘Whether describing fanged cannibals, one-
eyed giants, or headless monopods’, writes Johnson, ‘[colonial] firsthand accounts
disseminated lurid tales of monstrous bodies that promised by the very nature of
their physicality to confound any efforts to perceive humanness in the monstrous
form’. 8
Throughout American history, Native Americans, African Americans, and
other racialized groups have been associated with the monstrous. Puritans viewed
Indians as in league with the Devil, and they placed the blame for the Salem
witchcraft outbreak on Indian woman Tituba. Two centuries later, Tituba became
transformed in public memory as African rather than Native American to fit the
92 Gods and Monsters
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racial needs of the nineteenth century. 9 Historian Mary Renda has shown how
white Americans in the 1930s were gripped by fears of Haitian zombies reanimated
via ‘voodoo’ – ‘monstrous, once-dead black men rising up, embodying white fears
of black revolt at home as well as abroad’. 10 Today, evangelical Protestant
‘spiritual warfare’ handbooks urge Christians to cleanse their home of ‘demonic’
Asian, African, and Native American artworks and objects. 11 Meanwhile, angels
are usually imagined as looking white and coming bathed in white light. These and
other examples from my course help students to perceive religion and race as
mutually constitutive systems, marking certain groups as outside the parameters of
what is considered natural, normal, sacred, and human.
These cultural associations continue to have terrible, real-world consequences.
As I was teaching this course in fall 2014, headlines became dominated by the
killing of African American teenager Michael Brown by white police officer
Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. In his testimony before the grand jury,
which declined to indict him, Wilson said that Brown had looked ‘like a demon’
before he shot him. 12 This sort of demonization and dehumanization is a small but
important component of much larger processes of racialization, marginalization,
and violent oppression in the American past and present. The Ferguson shooting
revealed to students how notions of monstrosity and racial inferiority remain
intertwined in the American cultural imagination.
Fifth, and finally, monsters help us to consider the question of secularization –
that is, religion’s supposed loss of authority due to science, modernity, and
‘rationalization’. From Max Weber’s ‘disenchantment of the world’ that
supposedly followed the Enlightenment to philosopher Charles Taylor’s assertion
that today ‘belief in God is no longer axiomatic’, secularization has been lamented,
championed, and above all assumed to be undeniable. 13 Recent religious studies
scholarship, however, has interrogated notions of secularization, emphasizing how
those notions in fact depend on and spring from religious (largely Protestant)
discourses. 14 Have people truly become ‘less religious’, or have their religious
impulses been relocated – as suggested by historian William R. Hutchison –
‘whereupon we proclaim their disappearance because we are looking for them in
the wrong places’? 15
In fact, by studying monsters, we see how modernization, science, and
‘secularization’ have brought not irreligion but new avenues for the pursuit of awe,
mystery, and horror, which are at the heart of the religious experience. Consider,
for example, those Americans who claim to have been abducted by aliens. At first
glance, at least for my students, aliens and UFOs seem ‘secular’ in the sense that
intelligent life could plausibly exist somewhere in the universe. However, as we
read the accounts of ‘abductees’, many of which were related during hypnotism,
students come to see the abduction experience as fundamentally a religious one.
UFO abductions are dream-like: people say they are outside their body, they float
and fly, fall, appear naked in public, day becomes night, time shifts, and there are
 Joshua Paddison 93
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impossibly large structures. Just as God came to Saul on the road to Damascus as a
bright light from heaven, UFO abductions often begin with a bright white light
from the skies. Like prophets, abductees are often given a message of truth – the
importance of world peace and environmentalism, or special knowledge of
humanity’s origins or a coming catastrophe. Aliens use technology so advanced it
seems like magic. Some abductees believe there are two alien races in battle, one
good one evil, reminiscent of the ‘spiritual warfare’ that some Protestants believe
is going on between angels and demons. Most Americans abducted by aliens are
women, just as women have disproportionately been able to communicate with
spirits; both alien abduction and mediumship provide routes to spiritual authority
outside traditional (and traditionally sexist) churches. In short, UFOs are – to quote
Carl Jung – a ‘modern myth’, reflecting fundamental religious anxieties and
desires. 16
However, it should be noted that most UFO abductees – like early spiritualists,
Bigfoot hunters, and preppers for the zombie apocalypse – do not consider their
experiences to be ‘religious’, or even ‘spiritual’. 17 Part of the appeal of their search
for these entities is that many see it as ‘scientific’, although not in the sense that
professional scientists use the term. Ghosts, for example, seem to give irrefutable
‘proof’ of God, divine justice, and an afterlife. So when thinking about
secularization, studying monsters helps us see the allure – some would say misuse
– of scientific discourse even within what I see as being ultimately a religious
quest. Religious impulses are being ‘relocated’; they are also borrowing from and
adapting to the discourses of modernity in complex ways.

3. Pedagogical Challenges
To help students make these kinds of connections across our units, I organize
the midterm and final exam around several ‘big questions’ that arise from our
discussions. We create a set of these questions as we read, we then grapple with
these questions from week to week, and, on exams, students use course materials to
answer one or more of them. Previous ‘big questions’ have included: What is the
appeal of the monstrous? How have Americans’ conceptions of the monstrous
changed over time? What specific cultural hopes, fears, and anxieties are addressed
by ghosts, monsters, demons, and aliens in different eras? How have Americans’
ideas about the monstrous reflected and shaped their racial views? Does what
we’ve learned about Americans’ interest in the monstrous support or challenge the
notion of secularization? How have ideas of the monstrous reflected Americans’
conceptions of nature, animals, and science? How do monsters function as a
component of theodicy? Such ‘big questions’ challenge students to make
comparisons between course topics, observe historical patterns, and use evidence
to support a verifiable claim.
I also guide students as they conduct their own research into an aspect of the
American monstrous of their choosing. We talk about this project throughout the
94 Gods and Monsters
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semester and practice together various skills that help students write a successful
research paper, including practicing close readings of historical sources, using
secondary sources to contextualize primary sources, conducting research online
and in local archives, forming and evaluating arguments using historical evidence,
and writing with clarity, economy, and verve. Students have investigated a wide
range of topics, from spiritualist cookbooks to ghost stories on the television show
Supernatural, from online communities for Bigfoot hunters to the U.S.
government’s responses to Roswell-related conspiracies. Even more than exams,
this research paper serves as a culmination of the discussions, skill-building, and
explorations we’ve conducted all semester. In addition to these larger-scale exams
and projects, I assess students’ understanding of day-to-day concepts through short
reading responses, group work and presentations, and in-class writing exercises.
The greatest challenge I have encountered while teaching this course is that
students, whether they consider themselves religious or not, usually start the
semester knowing little about U.S. religious history. More than in other seminars, I
have found it necessary to deliver ‘mini’ lectures on such subjects as the religions
of the African diaspora, the mainline/fundamentalist split within U.S.
Protestantism, the basics of Puritan theology, the rise of the ‘New Age’, and other
topics. As a result, the class ends up functioning as something of a U.S. religious
history survey. It also functions as an introductory religious studies course in that it
exposes students, usually for the first time, to how scholars approach the study of
religion critically and respectfully.

4. Conclusion
Monsters, according to religion scholar John Lardas Modern, ‘call into question
founding assumptions that constitute the true, the good, and the beautiful; they cut
across the religious/secular binary; they negate the very act of human meaning-
making, confound categorical formations, and make mockery of our epistemic
conceits’. 18 As a result, the monstrous classroom is a space that is both unsettling
and empowering. In it, students can re-examine, with fresh eyes, important issues
that frame theological, religious, and historical inquiry.

Notes
1
Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (London: Routledge, 2002), 10.
2
Joshua Blu Buhs, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2009); Matthew Bowman, ‘A Mormon Bigfoot: David Patten’s
Cain and the Conception of Evil in LDS Folklore’, Journal of Mormon History 33
(2007): 62-82; Brian Regal, Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and
Cryptozoology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
3
Job 40:9, The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version.
4
Beal, Religion and Its Monsters, 7.
 Joshua Paddison 95
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5
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), 31.
6
Mikael Rothstein, ‘“His Name Was Xenu. He Used Renegades…”: Aspects of
Scientology’s Founding Myth’, in Scientology, ed. J. R. Lewis (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 383.
7
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory:
Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 7.
8
Sylvester Johnson, ‘Monstrosity, Colonialism, and the Racial State’, J19: The
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3 (2015): 182.
9
Veta Smith Tucker, ‘Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of
Salem Village’, Journal of Black Studies 30 (2000): 624-34.
10
Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S.
Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001),
225.
11
Sean McCloud, American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary
United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 47-51.
12
Amy Davidson, ‘Darren Wilson’s Demon’, The New Yorker, November 26,
2014, viewed 12 March 2015,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/demon-ferguson-darren-wilson-
fear-black-man.
13
Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (New York: Routledge, 2009), 155; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.
14
Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American
Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Winnifred Sullivan,
The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2007); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011).
15
William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and
Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 200.
16
C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1978); Thomas E. Bullard, ‘UFO
Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological
Guise’, Journal of American Folklore 102 (1989): 147-70; John Whitmore,
‘Religious Dimensions of the UFO Abductee Experience’, in The Gods Have
Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, ed. James R. Lewis (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1995), 65-84.
17
On ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘religious’, see Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious:
Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
4-7.
96 Gods and Monsters
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18
John Lardas Modern, ‘Introduction: Duty Now for the Future’, J19: The Journal
of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3 (2015): 168.

Bibliography
Beal, Timothy K. Religion and Its Monsters. London: Routledge, 2002.

Bowman, Matthew. ‘A Mormon Bigfoot: David Patten’s Cain and the Conception
of Evil in LDS Folklore’. Journal of Mormon History 33 (2007): 62-82.

Buhs, Joshua Blu. Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009.

Bullard, Thomas E. ‘UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative

Returns in Technological Guise’. Journal of American Folklore 102 (1989): 147-
70.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Collings, Beth and Anna Jamerson. Connections: Solving Our Alien Abduction
Mystery. Newberg, Ore.: Wild Flower Press, 1996.

Davidson, Amy. ‘Darren Wilson’s Demon’. The New Yorker, 26 November 2014.
Viewed 12 March 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/demon-
ferguson-darren-wilson-fear-black-man.

Fessenden, Tracy. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American
Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Fuller, Robert C. Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched

America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and

Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.

New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903.

Johnson, Sylvester. ‘Monstrosity, Colonialism, and the Racial State’. J19: The
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3 (2015): 182-89.
 Joshua Paddison 97
__________________________________________________________________

Jung, C. G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton University Press 1978.

McCloud, Sean. American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary

United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Modern, John Lardas. ‘Introduction: Duty Now for the Future’. J19: The Journal
of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3 (2015): 165-173.

Modern, John Lardas. Secularism in Antebellum America. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2011.

Regal, Brian. Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S.
Imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Rothstein, Mikael. ‘“His Name Was Xenu. He Used Renegades…”: Aspects of

Scientology’s Founding Myth’. Scientology, edited by J. R. Lewis, 365-87. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Sullivan, Winnifred. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 2007.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2007.

Tucker, Veta Smith. ‘Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of

Salem Village’. Journal of Black Studies 30 (2000): 624-34.

Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Whitmore, John. ‘Religious Dimensions of the UFO Abductee Experience’. The

Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, edited by James R. Lewis,
65-84. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Joshua Paddison is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Wittenberg

University in Sprinfield, Ohio.
98 Gods and Monsters
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Appendix A
Course Syllabus

Ghosts, Monsters, Demons, and Aliens in U.S. History

Objectives: Using historical primary sources as well as scholarly books and

articles, we will investigate what ghosts, monsters, demons, and aliens reveal about
Americans’ changing religious beliefs and cultural attitudes from the colonial
period to the present. It is my intention that students will: consider the ubiquity and
importance of horror, the supernatural, and the monstrous in American history,
religion, and culture; explore the complexities of a diverse array of American
religions, past and present; practice careful reading of diverse textual, aural, and
visual primary sources; examine a variety of perspectives and weigh the validity of
competing arguments; think ‘historically’ by paying attention to change and
continuity over time; and formulate their own arguments using evidence and
careful analysis.

Schedule of Topics and Readings:

Week One: Course Introduction: Gods and Monsters
• Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (London: Routledge, 2002),
excerpts.

UNIT ONE: DEMONS

Week Two: Puritan Possessions

• W. Scott Poole, ‘The Devil Is Come Down in Great Wrath’, from Satan in
America: The Devil We Know (Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2009).
• Samuel Willard, ‘A Brief Account of a Strange and Unusual Providence of God
Befallen to Elizabeth Knapp’, 1672.
• ‘Examination of Tituba’, 1692.

Week Three: Exorcists and Exorcisms

• Michael W. Cuneo, American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of
Plenty (New York: Doubleday, 2001), excerpts.
• The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, USA: Warner Bros, 1973.
• Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil (USA: Reader’s Digest, 1976).
 Joshua Paddison 99
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Week Four: Spiritual Warfare

• Jason C. Bivins, ‘“Runnin’ with the Devil”: Conservative Evangelical Fear and
Popular Music’, in Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative
Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Robert Johnson, ‘Me and the Devil Blues’, 1937.
• Slayer, ‘Hell Awaits’, 1985.
• Petra, ‘This Means War!’, 1987.
• Snoop Dogg, ‘Murder Was the Case’, 1994.
• Jack T. Chick, ‘A Demon’s Nightmare’ tract, 1972, viewed on 31 May 2016,
https://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0004/0004_01.asp.
• Chuck D. Pierce and Rebecca Wagner Sytsema, Protecting Your Home from
Spiritual Darkness (Minnesota: Chosen Books, 2004).

UNIT TWO: GHOSTS

Week Five: Women and Spirits

• Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of
Spiritualism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), excerpts.
• ‘Miss Cora Hatch, the Eloquent Medium of the Spiritualists’, Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper, 1857.
• Thomas Lake Harris, An Epic of the Starry Heaven (New York: Partridge &
Brittan, 1854).

Week Six: Race and Ghosts

• Robert S. Cox, ‘Shades’, from Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of
American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
• Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a
Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1932).
• Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935, viewed on 31 May 2016,
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/index.html.

Week Seven: Haunted Geographies

• Darryl V. Caterine, ‘Lily Dale: To Wonder Is to Wander’, in Haunted Ground:
Journeys through a Paranormal America (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011).
• Ying Chang Compestine, A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts, ( New York: Henry
Holt and Co., 2009).
• ‘Question: Are ghosts real??!! :(?’, Yahoo! Answers message board, 2011,
viewed on 31 May 2016,
https://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110403152637AAnqtSP.

Week Eight: Exam

100 Gods and Monsters
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UNIT THREE: MONSTERS

Week Nine: The Golem

• Chayim Bloch, The Golem, trans. Harry Schneiderman (Blauvelt, N.Y.: Rudolf
Steiner Publications, 1972[1919]).
• Steve Niles and Dave Wachter, Breath of Bones: A Tale of the Golem,
(Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2014).

Week Ten: Bigfoot

• Joshua Blu Buhs, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), excerpts.
• Julie Scott, Visits from the Forest People (USA: Pine Winds Press, 2010).
• Bigfoot Discovery Museum, Newsletter, 2011.
• Lycurgus A. Wilson, Life of David W. Patten, 1904, viewed on 31 May 2016,
https://archive.org/details/lifeofdavidwpatt00wilsrich.

Week Eleven: Zombies

• Kelly J. Baker, The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie
Apocalypse in American Culture (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Bondfire Books, 2013).
• Night of the Living Dead, dir. George Romero, USA: Image Ten, Laurel Group,
Market Square Productions, 1968.
• ‘What Lies Ahead’, The Walking Dead, dir. Ernest R. Dickerson, Gwyneth
Horder-Payton, written by Frank Darabont, aired 16 October 2011, AMC.

UNIT FOUR: ALIENS

Week Twelve: UFOs and Religions

• Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker, Paranormal
America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities
in Religion and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2010), excerpts.
• Guy Malone, ‘Christian UFO Research’, 2000, viewed on 31 May 2016,
www.alienresistance.org.
• ‘Vatican Astronomer Cites Possibility of Extraterrestrial ‘Brothers’, New York
Times, 2008.
• Elijah Muhammad, The Mother Plane, 1965-1973.

Week Thirteen: UFOs as Religion

• John Whitmore, ‘Religious Dimensions of the UFO Abductee Experience’, in
The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1995).
 Joshua Paddison 101
__________________________________________________________________

• Beth Collings and Anna Jamerson, Connections: Solving Our Alien Abduction
Mystery (Newberg, Oreg.: Windflower Press, 1996).
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: Columbia
Pictures, EMI Studios, 1977.

Week Fourteen: UFO Religions

• Mikael Rothstein, ‘“His Name Was Xenu. He Used Renegades…”: Aspects of
Scientology’s Founding Myth’, in Scientology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009).
• Heaven’s Gate, ‘“UFO Cult” Resurfaces with Final Offer’, USA Today, 1993.
• Raël, Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers, (Nova Distribution,
2005), viewed on 31 May 2016, http://www.rael.org/download.php?view.1.

Week Fifteen: Exam