Women Making Monsters & The Monster As Liberation

In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses), he shares that, “The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us.” Through time, monsters have taken on every form within tales from around the world. These tales range from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini's Daughter,” the boo hag (who exists within the Gullah culture within American South), the Chinese tale, “The Painted Skin,” any of Shirley Jackson’s tales that expand our thinking about what and who is a monster, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to pop cultural references like Jordan Peele’s Us, or Monsterland, Mary Laws’s adaptation of Nathan Ballingrud’s stories.

Within all of these manifestations, we question what or who is the real monster. Given that we are the tellers of these tales, the monster is a part of our human cartography. Throughout literature, we have seen the result of monsters presented as women in ways that express a society’s anxiety and fears as it relates to female autonomy and power. However, something very different happens when a woman crafts a monster on the page.

In this talk, Shanta Lee Honeycutt shares some of her insights drawn from her monster – focused workshops she has taught and Vermont Humanities work as a speaker’s bureau member. The audience will experience work from Shanta Lee’s essay-in-progress that is being published in a chapbook this fall, “Daughters of Lilith: The Monster as Liberation” (akinoga press).  This work is also inspired by her latest and 5th book published in February, Do Words Dream Themselves Into Silence Told In Riddles? (Harbor Editions).

Given that the monster is not about what we create outside of ourselves, the figure of the monster often forces us to gaze upon and reckon with our own reflections.

You can learn more about Shanta at www.shantalee.com

This event is free, ADA accessible, and open to the public.