My legs were crossed and my hands pushed against the hard wooden floor beneath me. The gym smelled vaguely of disinfectant, which wasn’t really a comforting smell on the first day of school. A bunch of 5-year-old kids with high-pitched voices were in jagged lines scattered across the floor. The lights above me were dim and hazy, the type of lights that make you sleepy. I ran my hands through my short, prickly hair and took a deep breath. I looked around the room, trying to take in all the faces. My gaze was broken by a loud giggling from the line next to mine. “Are you a girl or a boy?” a girl probed and her friend looked at me up and down with an unforgiving glare. I hadn’t known it then, but I was lying outside of some sort of gender norm. My hair did not resemble the long, luscious locks that girls were ‘supposed to have’, and these other girls seemed to pick up on this. I was a little offended, although I shouldn’t have been; could they not see my pink jacket? They cackled and looked at me. That was the first time I ever felt monsterized.
Jeremy Cohen’s Monster Culture is an attempt to explore the idea of culture through monsters. Cohen presents seven carefully crafted arguments to adapt the reader to the idea of monsters and their existence. Cohen’s main idea of Monster Culture is that culture defines our societal norms, and therefore outlines what is ‘acceptable’ and what is not in our society. Monsters are anything that don’t fit into a liminal space; this makes them unfamiliar and people are not able to understand them, which is why they are given negative attributes. This also tells us that monsters are not feared because they are scary, but rather because they threaten conformity and attack widely accepted ideologies. They potentially stem from a place of ignorance; if one is not informed, they may monsterize someone that isn’t monstrous. They instigate both fear and envy; people around them desire their power and freedom but are confused by their unusual practices. The essence of the essay is that monsters stem from culture, “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment- of a time, a feeling, and a place.” (Cohen 1) They are influenced by social movements and do not fit into clear-cut cultural, political, racial, economic and sexual categories. This idea is apparent in Thesis 3 of Monster Culture. It is titled ‘The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis’. Cohen suggests that the idea of the monster threatens conformity and lies between a binary, making it unfamiliar to the people that view it. He uses the term ‘ontological liminality’ as an attempt to describe the blur between the binary where monsters fall. ‘They are disgusting hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration…a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6). Cohen’s idea of monsterization is apparent in a piece called ‘My Life as a Muslim in the West’s ‘Gray Zone’.
Laila Lalami’s ‘My Life as a Muslim in the West’s ‘Gray Zone’ is an essay about Muslims in Western Societies and the liminality, or in her words ‘gray zone’, that they fall into. First published in The New York Times Magazine, Lalami discusses the position of Muslims after 2001. She uses examples from her personal life and in society as opposed to Cohen’s more historical and fictional examples. Lalami is, first and foremost, stigmatized, like many other Muslims in Western countries. She is asked by a woman attending her novel’s reading, “Why aren’t we hearing from more people like you?” (Lalami 1) and is told that the only Muslims she had ever seen were extremists on TV. Due to the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media, among many other reasons, Muslims began to be feared as individuals. 9/11 reinforced the perception that Americans had of Muslims; that Muslim men were a threat to American freedom and that Muslim women were oppressed within their own culture. In addition to the stigmatization, Lalami is a victim of monsterization. She says that the ‘gray zone’, a place where she cannot label herself as either a Muslim extremist or Western crusader, is a space that she belongs to as she is “not a very good Muslim” (Lalami 1). This identity crisis that she faces, including the home she has made “between all these cultures, all these languages, all these countries.” (Lalami 3) is what Cohen would describe as being “like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram” (Cohen 7)- a prerequisite for being a monster. The concept of monsterization according to Cohen applies here because Lalami is a victim of category crisis, but it doesn’t account for the various levels of evil that ‘monsters’ possess. For example, Lalami monsterized for being in a binary where another side “wants to eliminate coexistence between religions and to create a response from the West that will force Muslims to choose sides.” (Lalami 2) It would seem that Lalami should not be monsterized in this situation, but according to her article, she is. This introduces a complication. Should one be monsterized if they are in an extreme category of a binary or in the middle of it? (reword or change to monster spectrum)
Lalami states that “the gray zone is the space inhabited by any Muslim who has not joined the ranks of either ISIS or the crusaders.” (Lalami 2). In Lalami’s case, the ‘gray zone’ that she falls in is a creation of ISIS. Therefore, she is monsterized by them. However, is she really monstrous? Let’s assume the layout of a binary is two extremes and an inner space. One side of the binary that we’re facing in this case is a terrorist organization. Cohen would not consider them monsters according to his definition as they are not inside the binary and they are not unfamiliar to people, but they would still be deemed monstrous by many others. Several other binaries that we come across do not adhere to Cohen’s theory of monsterization between the two extremes. For example, males and females. Those who fall in between the binary are monsterized, but in this case we have women who are monsterized too. Another example of this is being black or white, according to Cohen being mixed race should make you a monster. But for centuries black people have been monsterized. Cohen is correct in many cases for his definition of a social and cultural monster, but fails to reference the possibility of the monstrosity that can be found in the extremes of a binary. Binaries usually have an unequal power distribution between both of the sides. The value that each of the sides are given is not always just. The value attributed to a group of people, no matter where they lie on the binary must be identical to the value of other groups that lie on the same binary to achieve equality. The way society accepts these differences in power is the reason why we can challenge Cohen in his definition of the monstrous. So a large portion of the time, not only is the middle of a binary monsterized, but also one of the extremes. The people that define binaries for us are usually the same people that have power over how we view the world around us. Cohen says, “women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves repeatedly transformed into monsters.” (Cohen 9). Cohen’s quote includes ‘women’ and ‘nonwhites’, but does not include ‘men’ and ‘whites’ which can give us insight as to who is setting the binaries that we follow. The power dynamic in binaries set forth an implication that is important in a larger context.
The implication of monsterization is that there are people in our society who are not given enough respect. Cohen is fighting for those people, the ones that ‘dwell at the gates of difference’. He comments on a topic that is completely relevant today because of the disproportionate levels of worth that different groups of people are given. Cohen’s use of the word “monster” makes his larger argument more valid because it says a lot about who we are as people. We give negative characteristics to people who aren’t like we are. We aren’t willing to accept everyone. But what’s so wrong about people who are different? Monsters have a pedagogical potential to them. Cohen uses the words “re-evaluate” and “tolerance” in his 7th thesis, and these prove to be important when monsters are alive and well in our world today. We need monsters to reform our society and culture. We need monsters so that the 5-year-old girl with short hair waiting in line doesn’t feel monsterized, and we need monsters because “It is a form of resistance; the only form of resistance I know.” (Lalami 4)