MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

Three Theses on Female Monstrosities

What distinguishes a female monster from a male one? Drawing from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s influential essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in this talk I focus on three interconnected theses which identify key elements in the creation and perpetuation of the figure of the female monster. Taking as a starting point the understanding that Ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian tradition are the breeding grounds from which our idea of monsters arise, I claim in the first thesis there is no female monster without the good mother vs. bad mother intra-gender distinction, which is itself a transposition of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. In the second thesis, I argue that the female monster reproduces herself or is reproduced through a multiplication of images; she is a copy of a copy of a copy. In this way, she exists in the plural and never in the singular. The third thesis delves into a feminist embrace of monsters and offers the claim that in its inability to be contained, the female monster points us toward the horizon of freedom. In marking sexual difference, these three theses help to reconceptualize and refine our understanding of monstrosities and of the parameters of the human.

Monstrosities
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