This chapter addresses the need for clarity of definition and identifies the various fields in which hybridity operated in the Greek world. Recent work in monster theory emphasizes the role of monsters in policing the borders of what is normative. Monsters have repeatedly been interpreted as threats to the order created by classification. Hybrids are better understood not as threats to order, but as expressions of anomaly. As a mode of cultural production hybrids are a means of coping with that which defies neat classification. This may veer towards the monstrous, as in the case of the demonic female figure, the gorgon, but equally it can tend towards the curious and the wondrous, like Pegasos alighting at the Peirene Fountain in Corinth or the horses of Achilles grieving for the death of Patroklos. In trying to understand how and why the Greeks generated hybrids in their mythology it may seem that we are putting the Greeks on the psychiatrist’s couch, but Freud’s conception of the Uncanny sheds some light on how hybrids function. They represent the challenge of the anomalous.

This chapter maps out the central paradigms for conceptualizing the monsters of American horror, marking their inextricability from politics and moving toward identifying the principal forms of monstrosity in the early twenty-first century. Monstrosity has been defined as impure and abject, existing on borders, not categorizable; the incarnation of “otherness,” typically racial, gendered, sexual, or class; and a terrifying reflection of the “self,” as the monster has increasingly become an avatar of “normality” rather than what threatens it, embodying dominant rather than marginalized social structures and ideologies. Most recently, monsters are being generated by scientific explorations that insist on the thoroughgoing entanglement of life, the ways in which the “human” is not singular, not exceptional, but rather symbiotically entwined with nonhuman life. This form of horror is adeptly exploited in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, about an entangled fungus and a colonial family.

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer creators have intentionally deployed such Gothicisms for the sake of representing queerness. This chapter explores the conflicting purposes of horror’s depiction of queerness by reviewing several Gothic tropes as they appear in American horror texts, focusing specifically on monstrosity, vampirism, the asylum, medical body horror, and haunting.

Chapter 5 is a key turning point in the narrative of the book. It analyses radical Catholic pamphlets printed in Paris and Lyon c. 1588–89, during a period in which the king was assassinated and the Catholic League controlled Paris and many other French towns. These pamphlets attack a now monstrous figure, the politique, for duplicity and for linguistic and moral flexibility. They confirm that the politique is shadowy and hard to define; this is part of the new politique problem of the late stages of the wars, which did much to create the historiographical legend of the Politique party. In these works, politique shifts from object of knowledge and knowing subject to object of opprobrium – but some qualities of the knowing, linguistically capable politique subject are retained. I argue that longer-term trends and influences are also present in source material as well as the immediate concerns of the crisis of c. 1589. This chapter also brings visual sources to bear on the politique problem, including two of the only known representations of the politique figure, found in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Drolleries collection.

This chapter draws parallels to the gothic trope that surrounded discussions on embryos in vitro in the 1980s as a frame of analysis that has grown in counter-response to law’s tendency to place entities either within the category of a ‘liberal, individual self,’ or outwith it (rarely in between). To explain, the gothic self is characterised by disorder, chaos, and dependency. It cannot be subsumed under the traditional ‘self’ that the law presupposes of its subjects. Further, within ‘the gothic’ lies the key concept of ‘monstrosity’, at the margins of what we deem to be human: ‘we stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous’. While the gothic trope does not explicitly centre around ‘the in between,’ it is argued that we should see gothic entities as such, because of their common placement - legally, and sometimes socially - on the boundary between liberal, individualised human, and something akin to a science-fiction-esque ‘monster.’ The controversy that causes rhetorical parallels between new research and monstrous beings and mad scientists to be drawn is a major contributor to policy-makers reluctance to revisit the legal status of embryos in vitro.

This is not a work of fiction, although I wish it were. Some of the cases described here could recall the imagery evoked by Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, who tells a horror story about a young rogue scientist who creates an unsightly monster through clandestine, aberrant experimentation. Although Frankenstein is the name of the monster’s creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, readers would be forgiven for debating who the real monster happens to be. In Policing the Womb, the story of Marlise Muñoz comes to mind. Brain-dead, decomposing in a Texas hospital, forced by state legislation to gestate a barely developing fetus while her body decays and the anomalies in the fetus mount. Eventually, it will be reported that the fetus is hydrocephalic, which means severe brain damage in this case and water or fluid developing on its brain. Medical reports will also show that the fetus is not developing its lower extremities. The state knows brain death is irreversible.