Monsterfuckery from a trans and disabled perspective.
Content warnings in this post for discussions of gender dysphoria, especially body horror and pregnancy, and some chronic illness talk such as descriptions of an asthma attack.
I don’t have the tweet and I categorically refuse to look it up, but when The Shape of Water was being discussed after its Oscar nomination a few years ago, I recall seeing a take from a heterosexual woman that was along the lines of, “Monster romances are appealing because they’re fantasies about taming (or maybe she said domesticating) a monster.”
It was, I believe, one of the most heterosexual takes I’d ever seen, and needless to say, I also saw her get read for filth.
It made a lot of people at the time — me included — unfathomably, desperately angry, because it was so wrong in so many ways, not just because it was a complete misunderstanding of many of the themes in The Shape of Water itself, but because it was so at odds with the inherent appeal of much of the genre from a queer perspective, a trans perspective, a disabled perspective, a neurodivergent perspective, and so on.
To us, the monster is familiar, a friend, could just as easily be one of us — the monster is not constrained by the “human” rules of mainstream society, and the monster from one narrative to the next is likely to be in some way otherised or isolated, in some way pushed away, even reviled. We identify with the monster, because the monster is different, and so are we.
Her fantasy was our worst nightmare: taking the monster and forcing it into being like her.
We could talk about how heterosexuals think of the “opposite” gender as a mysterious beast to be tamed, how cisgender women dehumanise cisgender men and how cisgender men dehumanise and objectify cisgender women, and how this reflects in many depictions of monsterfuckery and monster romance, but honestly, I’d rather explore it from our side.
I’m running the #MonstrousMayChallenge this year, and this post is musing on the prompt for May 1st: What is a monster?
I’m just going to be talking about the appeal for monsters in different monstrous romances and erotica from my perspective — so transness and queerness, neurodivergence, chronic illness and disability, these all factor into what engages me.
This isn’t to say these are the only angles from which to approach these narratives — like I could think about the relatability of monstrous language perception and judgement from a Welsh perspective, for example, but it’s nothing compared to what Indigenous and Native peoples experience, and while I will be talking about body policing and sensations of hypervisibility, ultimately I’m still talking from the POV of someone who’s thin and white and masc.
Nonetheless, I hope it’s an interesting read, and I very much encourage people to respond with their own perspectives and add to the discussion!
What is a monster?
It’s a wide-ranging term that can apply to almost anything — generally, a monster is a big, scary creature, especially one that is somehow supernatural or alien in origin, and/or ambiguous or unidentifiable at a glance. Monster as a term is vague at its core, which I think is why it so well encapsulates the undefinable and whatever exists without category.
I don’t think that big is necessary to the monster, but I do think the other two aspects are crucial — that it’s frightening, and that it is defined, in some way, by its inhumanity.
What defines frightening, in a monster? Is it its superlative size, or its range of motion? Is it its many undulating limbs, its shuddering body, its strange and unnatural movements? Is it its many, shining eyes, its sharp teeth dripping with venom and saliva, its serpentine tongue?
Is it its scales? Its feathers? Its spines, its horns, its frills, its hooves, its claws? Is it its thick and pungent blood, too thick to be called blood anymore? Is it the way it flits between realities in front of your eyes, makes darkness out of light, or colours out of darkness? Is it the way it moves too fast, too smooth, too sharp — is it how entirely still it can go when it doesn’t move at all?
From a trans perspective, I find there’s a unique appeal in stories about aliens, about monsters, about sentient creatures that are, by definition, impossible to define by human — that is, white Western 21st century — expectations and standards of binary sex and/or gender.
There’s a sense of frustration for me sometimes when I’m explaining my relationship with gender, with dysphoria, with my body, because I often feel so constrained by cis expectations.
I’m a man, yes, but my manhood, my masculinity, isn’t defined by cis manhood — I often describe myself as a dandy or as a fop, and I typically identify with masculinity as explored in the eighteen hundreds, something that isn’t normally so unfeeling, something that doesn’t repress emotions in quite the same way.
More than that, what’s my relationship with my body? When I feel dysphoria, why do I feel it — do I feel this way, this sense of wrongness, because of some innate sense of my body out of touch with my hormones or some other part of me, or is my dysphoria prompted by living in a cis society? Growing up in a world without gendered expectations, would I experience dysphoria at all?
It’s hard to say.
But I do think that dysphoria has given me a complex relationship with body horror, one I think is common to a lot of trans people.
When cisgender, healthy people explore body horror, they often do so from the perspective of how unimaginable it is, to feel like a stranger in one’s own body; to feel like one’s body is hostile to itself, to the soul that in habits it; to feel that one’s body is moving in a way that’s out of control. For trans people, those feelings are as common as anything.
And for me personally, as a trans man I often felt sick to my stomach about the organs I have — pregnancy, throughout my childhood, was the most horrifying concept imaginable, the idea of carrying a parasite within one’s body that would sap and pull away all life from you; that would change your body’s shape and practices to suit its purposes so that even after it was gone, you were forever changed by it; the idea that not only could this parasite kill you, but that attempts to defend yourself from its doing so might be vilified and looked down upon.
More than that, it was expected as a compulsory aspect of life that you should submit to this parasite, that you should not only accept its necessity but embrace it, that after doing all that, you should feed it from your swollen, misshapen body, and then keep it forever.
I don’t feel quite like that now.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d still rather die than get pregnant, and a hysterectomy is at the top of my wish list, but as I’ve grown older and explored my body and my sexuality more, I’ve made pregnancy less frightening to myself, and a lot of that process has been explored via monsterfuckery.
The most frustrating thing about my genuine, all-consuming terror of pregnancy throughout my childhood and as I grew into a teenager was how people refused to see the concept of pregnancy as anything monstrous, and would even get offended if you described it that way.
If you have a womb, pregnancy is your obligation and an expectation, and you are expected to define yourself by the children you will have, especially via pregnancy — when you say that you’d rather not, you’re an aberration. When you point out the horror of the process, you’re decried as avoiding what is natural and normal.
The benefit of playing with monsters is that “natural” becomes a question of perspective.
I write a lot about monsters and their ravages on human bodies — I write bloodsucking and venoms and mystical bites; I write about magical poisons and transformations; I write about invasions of the body, twists and changes of the body, modifications and transmogrifications of the body.
More than that, I do write about breeding, and pregnancy — I write about monsters who come such prodigious amounts that the person they’re fucking swells with it, is weighted down by it, sloshes with it; I write about monsters who lay eggs that make their home in their partner’s body; I write about plants that force themselves down throats or into other orifices to spread roots and grow fruit, to make themselves a garden there, with no thought to the person made a victim of it.
Whether these are written to focus on horror or erotica — or an amalgam of the two — the result is the same: stretch marks, scars, chemical changes, bodily changes, helplessness. Maybe pleasure, maybe agony.
But no one steps in to tell me it isn’t monstrous, even when for the monsters I’m writing, it is natural.
Reclaiming that horror through writing sex with monsters has been a part of reclaiming my body — sex can be horrifying, its effects can be horrifying, pregnancy can be horrifying.
The human body, even perfectly healthy, can do horrifying things, and while my example of pregnancy from a dysphoric perspective is an extreme one, it’s not the only aspect of human biology one can explore from a monstrous perspective.
What I love about writing monsters interacting with humans is exploring the mutual sense of foreignness, the mutual desire to explore one another’s strange, alien bodies: I love writing about the most simple processes — taste, digestion, perspiration and the resulting body odour, breathing, biting, healing from wounds, growing hair, cutting fingernails, walking on two legs, sleeping, dreaming — and explore the difference between one species and another.
It’s remarkable how at home one can feel in one’s own body, when one allows oneself at times to think of it from a distance, as a complicated biological machine.
This applies a lot from a chronic illness and disabled standpoint too — when my joints are particularly bad of a day, or when my asthma is bad, it’s interesting, it’s engaging, to explore what it would be like to have neither bones nor lungs to speak of.
So often, you end up imagining what it might be like to have a body different to your own, stronger, better — but who’s to say it wouldn’t have other weaknesses, ones you could never imagine?
What does a merman feel when he cannot breathe, when he comes out of the water and has nothing to filter through his gills? Where is the pain concentrated, if he feels pain? Where is the pressure? What is his response, when he begins to lose consciousness — does he, too, feel light-headed and dizzy? Does he too try to force his body through a process it cannot currently perform? Does he reach out and grasp at anyone near him, do his eyes bulge, does his mouth open and shut, does he shake, does he tremble?
Is his fear, in that moment, like mine?
What does it feel like, not to have bones, for that matter? Not to have skin? Not to have teeth, not to have hair, to have something else? What does it feel like to have wings, frills, tentacles?
I’m already used to imagining if my body was different, but more than that, I’m used to other people assuming my body is different, because they assume that my body must be or should be like theirs — and I think that’s part of what’s so engaging about thinking of monsters and doing the opposite.
And all of the above are only really physiological aspects, but what I really like about monsters, about aliens, is the difference not just in culture, but in things as simple as how we process stimuli, how we think, how we feel emotions.
From an ADHD (maybe autistic?) perspective, like… I had difficulties growing up with judging social norms — even now, I struggle with making the “correct” assumptions or the connections between some things that people expect me to.
When you’re neurodivergent in some way and/or when you have a mental illness, even the processes of your own brain can sometimes be overwhelming or a mystery, and even being aware of your neurochemistry, that doesn’t mean you can control it.
Aliens and robots can often be relatable, when they respond to situations the “wrong” way, when they aren’t emotive in the way the humans in stories expect them to be, when they have the incorrect priorities or different social norms. It’s fascinating to think of someone who ultimately feels an emotion you can’t conceive of, or to whom an emotion you feel every day is utterly foreign.
For me personally, a lot of monstrous romance and monsterfuckery is in the appeal and the acceptance and the respect and the love of people who are different — and in that, we embrace our own difference and the complexity of that difference.
There are so many monstrous stories that appeal aside from those I’ve discussed — Teen Wolf is a movie that ultimately explores the horror of puberty to its extreme, but many trans takes on shapeshifters and transformation explore second puberties or neverending ones, for example. I could run out of breath talking about all the monstrous stories I’d love to see from perspectives like mine, but I think I’m in a good spot to end my thoughts here!
I can’t think of anything less appealing, less desirable, than taming or domesticating a person, monstrous or otherwise — but living with them, exchanging things with them, exploring one another? Especially if they’re big and sexy with big wings and sharp teeth and stronk?
Sign me up!
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