Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein, and up through Bram Stoker’s Dracula into the modern horror film, Halberstam probes deeply into the layered meanings offered by the Gothic discourse. The monster is a transgressive creature, one with indistinct boundaries. I couldn’t help but to think how odd it is to suppose that we end at the limits of our bodies. The things that we do influence our environment, and we are capable (often through science) of a kind of spooky action at a distance (think of drones, HAARP, or fracking—I’m talking literally spooky here). As Halberstam points out more than once we don’t make monsters, monsters make us human.
Skin Shows is all about boundaries. Biological, psychological, sexual—we define ourselves by our boundaries. The monster is no respecter of such boundaries, forcing us to face our own definitions with a certain ambivalence. What do our monsters say about us? Do we really want to know? Monsters can be brutally honest. More honest, at times, than religions are willing to be. As views change over time, so do conceptions of the monster. Religions frequently attempt to hold out against inevitable change. Perhaps such stalwart bravado is admirable, at least until we experience a dark and stormy night of the soul. Here be monsters.