Embodying the Monster

{ monstrosity

{ vulnerablity

{ normality

{ perfection

The book examines the ideologies surrounding these perceptions and considers what this tells us about ourselves.

Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to look at it from the basis of what is normal, we create the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. Shildrick calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractiveness. She demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising the phenomenology of the body.

Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.