ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the legal category monster and with Foucault’s theoretical framework for making sense of law’s monsters. It aims to highlight how the figure of the monster offers to inform contemporary thinking about outsiders and, in particular, the process of their constitution. In focusing on the process whereby outsiders are constituted, the chapter aims to interrogate how certain individuals or groups come to receive the label monster and why this appellation proves successful in cultural terms. Of course, other questions might be posed. In particular, much psychoanalytically informed theoretical work around the concept of the monster seeks to universalise the monster as everyman (Cohen, 1999, p 22). This amounts to a claim that the monster resides in each of us given that hybridity is the inevitable effect of taking up a position in the symbolic order. However, while we are perhaps all monsters in this sense, and while recognition of this fact might be a place from which a progressive politics might begin, it remains the case that only some individuals or groups are, at any given historical moment, demonised by the term monster. While we might all be monsters, we do not all bear the same relationship to this term. Accordingly, it becomes important to inquire after the conditions through which monsters become culturally legible. Moreover, and as Hanafi cautions, while psychological factors are clearly important in understanding monsters, monsters are, perhaps, best approached as ‘an ideological cluster’, that is, ‘as an entity constructed and represented within a social group’ (2000, p 14).
