From Hybrid Beasts to Anthropogenic Mutants: Rethinking the Monster in a Post-natural World

This thesis explores the figure of the monster in contemporary Anglophone and Chinese
literature, film, art, and performance. It examines the times, spaces, and material and
discursive conditions that give rise to monsters, and the ways in which these monsters both
illustrate and problematize the concepts of time, space, and the conditions of their creation.
The monster is framed in the thesis as a method for reading cultures and tracing routes of
resistance and escape from hegemonic systems. These systems are situated in the historical context of the Anthropocene, and in the transnational and cross-cultural spaces where this study unfolds. Conceptualized as entangled bodies and affective becomings, the monsters in this thesis navigate the tensions between natural historical and ecological approaches to the nonhuman worlds in which humans are increasingly embedded, mediated by ever-evolving technoscientific apparatuses. These monsters also index non-normative alliances across species, as well as between the organic and inorganic, life and death, operating at both planetary and molecular scales. These intersections reveal how the meanings of “local” and “global,” as well as “inside” and “outside,” are continually negotiated and reshaped. The shifting focus of monstrosity as bodies and affects allows for an exploration of hybridization and mutation as the twin mechanisms that construct monsters, and through which monsters destabilize the systems that create and confine them. The manifestation of monstrosity in the selected literary and artistic works opens imaginations about human becoming through transcorporeal performativity and threshold encounters, both in speculative realms and everyday scenes. This thesis argues that reading and writing with monster offer alternative modes of perception and thinking, specific to their socio-cultural contexts, yet also capable of traversing those contexts to assemble queer affects and uncertain objects in response to a post-natural world co-shaped by humans and nonhumans.