Tracing Monsters: Reading Stryker, Reading Frankenstein

Abstract

Abstract

In ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’ (1994), Susan Stryker reclaims the word ‘monster’ to explore the physical and social/cultural/historical mutability of the transgender body. She argues that a performative ‘transgender rage’ propels a process of both positive and negative ‘mutation’ or change. In this article, I explore Stryker’s engagement with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and discourses of monstrosity in her seminal 1994 article and beyond, including her ‘More Words to Victor Frankenstein′ (2019) and When Monsters Speak (2024). I argue that this has been a complex engagement, which has raised as many questions as it has answered. Monstrosity, as a concept, is mutable – and therein lies its power. In a close reading of Stryker’s work, I explore questions of how these discourses of mutability are employed, where they come from, and what work they do. Stryker uses her ambivalence to the transgender ‘monster’ to trace a deeper psycho-social change in attitudes to embodiment, otherness and changeability in Western societies. The weight of the word ‘monster’ has changed over the many years of Stryker’s practice, as has the visibility and recognisability of transgender bodies. I examine Stryker’s attempt to capture this, along with its expressions.