Nest #1: Going feral
On monstrosity, animality, Silence of the Lambs, Frankenstein, Peyton Thomas, and Caroline Polachek.
In this Nest: thoughts on The Silence of the Lambs and its associated projects; an embrace of Frankenstein’s monster as an animal ally and trans icon; and Peyton Thomas’ transformative notes on ‘feral’. Plus: your first Vibe Check.
Silencing the Trans
With the advent of another Silence of the Lambs spinoff this year (it’s called Clarice, it looks boring), I’ve been pondering the original film’s violently transmisogynistic legacy. Its central villain is a character who, to quote the film, “thinks… [he is] a transsexual”, and who kills women with the intention of taking their skin and ‘becoming’ a woman. The transmisogynistic implications are clear, and have been discussed at length, and the film has been rightfully derided by queer and trans activists.
What’s interesting to me, though, is Cáel M. Keegan’s recent essay arguing that we should not ignore the film completely, because its transmisogyny accidentally reveals a lot about where we were at as a culture during the 90s with regard to LGBTQ+ rights, and particularly how some gay and lesbian identities were positioning themselves in opposition to the transgender community. Keegan explains:
What if The Silence of the Lambs isn’t simply a story of transmisogynistic violence, but a story about how that violence figured in the process through which gay and lesbian identities secured national belonging?
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[Silence is] … a story about how one type of queer subject was welcomed into the arms of the state through the sacrifice of another, far less acceptable kind: Starling is the ostensibly working-class lesbian feminist hero who finds and destroys the transgender monster. Silence helps us understand how representations of transgender psychosis were a foil against which late-20th century gay and lesbian normalcy was culturally produced.
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The value of Silence today, then, isn’t simply in the importance of Starling as a feminist icon (Marshall), or in the example of Bill as an expression of transphobia (Truitt): It is instead their relation to one another as a formal exploration of which kinds of queerness would be welcomed into national belonging and which would be marked as irredeemable.
Keegan in no way excuses the film’s transmisogyny, but he offers an interpretation I’ve not seen before, and an argument for Silence’s significance as a historical artefact. A really thought-provoking piece, and worth reading in full.
(For further exploration, and maybe a future Nest: where does Hannibal — a Silence of the Lambs prequel with a fervent queer and trans following — sit in all of this?)
Body of Bodies
On the topic of transgender monstrosities and flesh consumption, let’s talk about Frankenstein. There are three things that intrigue me about Frankenstein’s Creature: his herbivorous diet, his resonance as a transgender symbol, and how these two things might overlap to say something about anxieties of the flesh.
Let’s talk about the herbivore thing first. Mary Shelley was a devout vegetarian, and Carol J. Adams’ seminal book The Sexual Politics of Meat illuminates the oft-ignored vegetarian politics that are present in Frankenstein. “For a work that has received an unusual amount of attention over the past thirty years, in which almost every aspect of the novel has been closely scrutinized,” Adams writes, “it is remarkable that the Creature’s vegetarianism has remained outside the sphere of commentary.”
Adams refers to a key scene in the novel:
In a ringing, emotional speech the Creature enunciates its dietary principles … “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb or the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. […] The picture I present to you is peaceful and human.” The Creature’s vegetarianism serves to make it a more sympathetic being, one who considers how it exploits others. By including animals within its moral circle the Creature provides an emblem for what it hoped and needed — but failed to receive — from human society.
It makes sense that the Creature would not want to eat animals, as he himself is a body created from the slaughtered bodies of others, and would have a uniquely empathic perspective on their suffering as a result. Adams notes that the Creature would likely have been made of the parts of herbivorous bodies, as “it is only herbivorous animals who are consumed by humans”. Adams elaborates on this connection:
In Frankenstein we find … a Being who, like the animals eaten for meat, finds itself excluded from the moral circle of humanity.
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The Creature’s futile hopes for admittance to the human circle reflect the position of that time’s vegetarians and feminists; they confront a world whose circles, so tightly drawn, refuse them admittance, dividing us from them.
The Creature being kind of vegan is enough to make me to love him, but to top it all off, he’s also kind of trans! References to Frankenstein have been deployed in both transphobic and pro-trans discourses, making it clear that the one thing everyone agrees on is that the Creature is trans (whether they like it or not).
There’s a level on which most monsters are resonant to queer and trans audiences — they reflect our own experiences of othering and vilification, as well as our uniqueness and feelings of being misunderstood. But the Creature’s ‘monstrous’ body takes on extra significance for being surgically constructed, a status on which it is easy to project transness. I’m still doing my research into the writing on this, but Susan Stryker’s essay ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’ seems to be the most prominent text on the subject. (I haven’t read it yet, so don’t take this as a recommendation!)
After becoming aware of the trans resonance of the Creature, I found myself wondering: “Why hasn’t anyone done an explicitly trans take on the Frankenstein story yet?” Of course, after a few days, I was hit with the obvious: someone has done it, duh, and it’s called The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Cáel M. Keegan comes through with another powerful cinematic reading here:
[Rocky Horror] ingeniously inverts the medical discourses of transgender pathology that were developing in the mid-1970s: In the film, Dr. Frank N. Furter has seized the means of gender production from the hands of the medical industry, and has produced his own “monster”—the ideal, white cisgender body of Rocky. This is a reversal of the classic story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, which has often been used to symbolize the relationship of surgeons to transgender people. In Rocky Horror, the transgender creator is granted the power of scientific knowledge, while the cisgender body is reduced to the speechless object of his desire.
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We witness the resulting mayhem through the perspective of the chaste, heteronormative couple—Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon)—who fall under Dr. Frank N. Furter’s thrall and are “transduced” into gender non-normativity, queerness, and sexual liberation. Rocky Horror thus reverses the process of gender transition, producing trans bodies (Brad and Janet become copies of Frank N. Furter) from cisgender ones.
Between Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Silence of the Lambs, there’s some kind of throughline developing here: time and time again, cinematic and literary representations (both positive and negative) of monstrosity and flesh are used to negotiate cultural fears and desires around transness and bodily transformation.
Further Reading: ‘Notes on Feral’, Peyton Thomas
An essential accompaniment to these discussions of othering, animality, queerness and the body. I cannot express enough gratitude for this piece, which might be one of the most significant things I have ever read/will ever read in my life — a rare formative reading experience where you can feel the ‘forming’ happen as you read it. Here’s an excerpt:
In my mind, I’d always collapsed “feral” into “wild.” I missed the subtle distinction between the two. A wild creature is born in the natural world, and lives and dies within it. A feral creature was born in captivity, and tamed, and broken, and emerged, somehow, into freedom.
Some thoughts on ferality have long been swirling around my brain, as a supporter of animal liberation and a participant in Alyson Campbell’s Feral Queer Camp (which is taking applications for 2021!) — but Thomas’ piece crystallised the word’s significance like never before. Cannot recommend enough.
Vibe Check
Finally, in the spirit of going feral: Caroline Polachek screaming at geese.