GENEALOGIES OF MONSTROSITY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF MONSTROUS CORPOREAL OTHERNESS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION

This study embarks on a Foucauldian descent into the archival traces of contemporary figurations of monstrosity, which permeate postmodernist British fiction at the turn of the millennium. In view of monstrous corporeality constantly marking out the perimeters of proper human embodiment, whether in teratological taxonomies or in travelogues depicting deformed races at the fringes of human civilisation, the author rallies to her argument Michel Foucault’s genealogical survey of the pathologisation and discursive constitution of a domain of marginal otherness serving to delineate the abjected outside of the western liberal subject. The plural from the title, genealogies, emphasises the dislocation or diffraction of the monstrous figures outlined by the fictional texts the author examines from strict, fixed origins: by admixing mythical, scientific, culturally perspectivist or citational Gothic constructions of monstrosity, the novels the author investigate ultimately evince the firm imbrication between teratology, as the discourse of the monstrous, and attempts to construct notions of what counts as normal and normative humanity.