ABSTRACT
This chapter will build on chapters 3 and 4 through considering the relationship between the legal category monster and contemporary practices of normalisation. It will do so in the specific context of transsexuality and the struggles transsexual people bring before law.1 The transsexual offers an example of Foucault’s figure of the abnormal individual. As we saw in chapter 3, the emergence of the abnormal individual is to be comprehended in terms of a shift from the body to the soul as an object of legal concern. In terms of Foucault’s lexicon of the monster, this can be understood in terms of a transformation in the concept of monstrosity. While formerly associated with the materiality of the body, this concept has, over time, been extended to cover the mind or psyche. It is important to emphasise that the concept of monstrosity has been expanded. It is not the case that the older meaning of the concept has been replaced by the modern. On the contrary, and as we will see in the following two chapters, the older meaning of the concept of monstrosity persists in the contexts of conjoined twins and human/animal admixed embryos respectively.
