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The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism

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Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between the monstrous and critical posthumanism. It lays out three paths for thinking the monster: queer theory, critical race theory, and critical disability studies. In so doing, it draws out the twentieth-century histories of monsters in often-ignored works by critical thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and links these to contemporary work by Black, brown, and Indigenous, disabled and queer thinkers on justice, citation and alternative formations of being collectively. In so doing, the chapter offers ways of refuting the dichotomies of the current world order, examining how such dominant colonial, heteropatriarchal structures may be undone. In addition, it explores how we might imagine into being other ways of knowing and being by rethinking justice as a potential apocalyptic destruction of the world order that gives space to already existing modes of collective living and those that are yet to come.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland

    Donna McCormack

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  1. Donna McCormack
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Correspondence to Donna McCormack .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Stefan Herbrechter

  2. Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Ivan Callus

  3. Basel, Switzerland

    Manuela Rossini

  4. University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Marija Grech

  5. University of Southampton, Winchester, UK

    Megen de Bruin-Molé

  6. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Christopher John Müller

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McCormack, D. (2022). The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism. In: Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_18

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