“Monster” is a broad category, but what defines the monstrous figure above all is its function of marking the boundaries of the “human”. As Margrit Shildrick (2022) says, the monster is neither good nor evil, neither inside nor outside, neither self nor other. It dwells at the threshold and is transgressive, disruptive, and transformative. By disrupting the order of things both internal and external, it unsettles the distinctions that define the human and exposes the precarity of “normality”, liable to crack at any moment.
We live in an era marked by encounters with unpredictable entities that pose a direct threat to the human species, like viruses and artificial intelligence. On one hand, this watershed has allowed us to rethink the figure of the monster, marking a critical moment for re-evaluating what we mean by “nature” and “human”. On the other hand, we are witnessing an intensification of violence against women, queer people, and animals globally. Against this backdrop, the panel seeks to make tangible the potential kinship between human and non-human bodies denied a place within the current social order.
As Donna Haraway, whose thinking informs the conceptual framework of this panel reminds us: only by accepting our own monstrosity can we begin to imagine a more equal and just world beyond hierarchies of gender, race, species, and class, and realise the promises of monsters.
The panel brings together four papers spanning a wide range of cultural and temporal contexts, from contemporary American speculative fiction (Borne, Lives of the Monster Dogs, Sorrowland) to Chinese feminist SF and Gothic traditions (Mexican Gothic, Sour Cherry). Each paper draws on distinct theoretical approaches, including queer theory, disability studies, feminist ecocriticism, crip-of-color critique, and posthumanism. This diversity of methodologies enriches the panel by offering multiple lenses through which to understand the promises of monsters, and the session is structured to support both focused presentations and meaningful exchange, with four 13-minute papers followed by at least 15 minutes of open discussion.
Weston Leo Richey argues that “monsters, when imbued with the desire for love and the capacity to mediate and engage in love, intimacy, and relationality, queer such forms of attachment” by examining Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne (2017) and Kirsten Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997).
Fletcher Weiss discusses Rivers Solomon’s 2021 novel, Sorrowland, which follows Vern, a pregnant Black queer young woman, as she escapes a Black separatist cult called Cainland and gives birth to her twins in the woods. Building on theories of embodiment and haunting, crip-of-color critique (from Jina B. Kim), and Tobin Siebers’ “complex embodiment,” this paper explores Black queer, trans, disabled embodiment through motherhood and speculative form by focusing on Vern’s embodied hauntings.
Mary Ruth Robinson links ecological catastrophe to the patriarchal and colonial structures. Drawing on recent work in queer ecocriticism and Gothic theory, she argues that Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) and Natalia Theodoridou’s Sour Cherry (2024), represent a distinct development in the feminist Gothic: one that refuses to locate monstrosity in the gendered or queer body, one that rewrites environmental disaster as the inevitable consequence of patriarchal violence, and one that positions monstrous ecologies as a site of feminist knowledge production.
Xinlan Zeng defines contemporary Chinese feminist SF as “science fiction from the uterus,” which highlights its focus on the technological reshaping of reproduction and alternative genetic kinships. In her paper, she examines Chinese feminist SF authors by drawing on Rey Chow’s concepts of “sentimentalism” and “triviality”, and argues that cyborg figures in their narratives maintain a continuous, unfinished process of becoming within algorithmic governance, demonstrating how feminist science fiction conceptualizes posthuman survival through localized, intimate connections.
The shared focus of the panel on monstrosity as a site of resistance and transformation provides a cohesive thread, while the differences in cultural contexts, theoretical frameworks, and specific themes ensure a rich and varied discussion. The panel’s exploration of feminist speculative fiction through the lenses of queerness, disability, ecology, and technoscience demonstrates the genre’s capacity to challenge dominant narratives and imagine alternative futures.