Monstrosity as resistance: rethinking trans embodiment beyond the rhetoric of the wrong body

Abstract

While the production of monsters through political and cultural discourses has never been as dominant as in recent years, the method through which this phenomenon is framed often remains engulfed in comparative essentialism reducing monsters to acts of transgression, with the inevitable result of articulating monstrosity as mere construction of the other. Such othered identity deprives monsters of reality, of their ontology, and confines them in a space of not-being, always defined through what they are not. This article challenges the idea of monstrosity as categorical transgression and uses the narrative of the ‘wrong body’ commonly associated with trans embodiment as a conceptual framework to argue for an ontology of monstrosity.

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