I Want To Fuck The Monster
Monsterfuckery from a trans and disabled perspective.
Content warnings in this post for discussions of gender dysphoria, especially body horror and pregnancy, and some chronic illness talk such as descriptions of an asthma attack.
I don’t have the tweet and I categorically refuse to look it up, but when The Shape of Water was being discussed after its Oscar nomination a few years ago, I recall seeing a take from a heterosexual woman that was along the lines of, “Monster romances are appealing because they’re fantasies about taming (or maybe she said domesticating) a monster.”
It was, I believe, one of the most heterosexual takes I’d ever seen, and needless to say, I also saw her get read for filth.
It made a lot of people at the time — me included — unfathomably, desperately angry, because it was so wrong in so many ways, not just because it was a complete misunderstanding of many of the themes in The Shape of Water itself, but because it was so at odds with the inherent appeal of much of the genre from a queer perspective, a trans perspective, a disabled perspective, a neurodivergent perspective, and so on.
To us, the monster is familiar, a friend, could just as easily be one of us — the monster is not constrained by the “human” rules of mainstream society…
