Introduction
Monsters have always haunted the pages of theology and literature, but today our first encounter with monsters usually comes from pop culture. If you think back to your childhood and teen years, what media first introduced you to monsters and the uneasiness of their presence? What described those monsters and what thoughts did they evoke in you? Were you, like me, haunted by the idea of Dracula and vampires and their association with blood? Did the aliens of War of the Worlds and Alien inspire wonder or fear in you? Or do you think of more human monsters like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers? Were all those monsters even necessarily evil? Or were you more familiar with the rise in media like Teen Wolf, Twilight, and Shadowhunters where being a werewolf didn’t immediately equate to moral evil?
This diversity of monstrous imagery points to the slippery definition of monsters. With each passing generation, popular media revives and represents monsters in different ways, often influenced by the concerns of that age. This is true throughout time as well, with each century bringing different concerns about monstrous beings and their powers in the world. Monstrosity therefore becomes a complex topic, constantly changing and evading our grasp.
Similar to terms like “God” or “queer,” monsters resist easily constructed and complete definitions. To describe them, we are often left appealing to the eerie feeling monsters evoke in us, the way Rudolf Otto or Friedrich Schleiermacher describe God. Or like queerness, we define monsters as those who do not fit into a constructed norm, creating opportunities to use the language of monstrosity as a form of empowerment. In this way, monsters move beyond our cultural distinctions. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, they “demand instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response.”
As difficult as it is to define monsters, their usefulness in culture is clear. In fact, the difficulty of defining monsters in some ways plays a key role in their use as a cultural body. Because of the instability of their definition, monsters can hold many meanings. They can mark boundaries and stand as the threat to those boundaries. In this sense, they play a role in the creation of national borders and theological debates. They are also beings of power that capture our imagination. As such, they become prefigurations of the future, or ways to create spaces of power for historically marginalized groups. This exhibition points to some of the ways theological texts evoke monsters and the questions they have raised. Even as the definition of monster stays in constant flux, theologians continue to use monsters in an attempt to shape a sense of foreboding about what they might mean for everyday believers.