RADIUS closes its 2025 year programme BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS with a group exhibition on monstrosity as foundational to queer ecology. Through the work of eleven artists, CAN THE MONSTER SPEAK? examines the historical, scientific, and cultural construct of queerness as monstrous and explores monstrosity as an emancipatory and desirable political aspiration. By embodying notions of transformation, ambiguity, and deviancy, monsters upset constructs like race, gender, purity, and beauty, and thus represent a transgression of the norms that make up the dominant cisgender, binary, patriarchal, heterosexual, and white system of power. At the same time, monsters are necessary to define what is considered “normal” by contrast and exclusion. This exhibition unpacks this duality and explores different embodiments, affects, and considerations of monstrosity as a tool of resistance, a mode of becoming, and a political position. In doing so, it advocates for ecologies beyond binaries, beyond the human, and beyond the constraints of gender, sex, and identity as enforced by Capitalism. In other words, a way of inhabiting the Earth around the celebration of difference, where monstrosity is a radical refusal to normativity, and where queerness is the relentless practice of freedom within systems not meant to be surpassed.

And the monster spoke back 

On November 17, 2019, philosopher Paul B. Preciado was invited to give a speech on the 49th Study Day of the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris on the theme ‘Women in psychoanalysis’. Preciado, a transgender man whose philosophical work has long been denouncing and dismantling different constructs of gender and the body, confronted the three thousand five hundred psychoanalysts in the audience with a particular violent history: that of the pathologisation of queer bodies and sexualities. Sharp-witted, incendiary, and defying, Preciado weaved an autobiographical account of transitioning with a critique of the gender binary, the historical establishment of which was aided by modern scientific disciplines—and specifically psychology, psychiatry, and pharmacology from the nineteenth century onwards. 

On November 17, 2019, the monster spoke back to its creator. Yet Preciado could not finish his speech as he intended to because he was halfway booed off stage. A year later, he decided to publish the speech in its entirety, and he titled it Can the Monster Speak?. Preciado’s powerful speech ignites this exhibition as it intends to carry on his contestation to scientific and cultural discourse around queerness and explore the political potential of monstrosity. 

Necessary evil

Vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons, witches… Monsters have long animated our horror imagination. Traversing all kinds of cultural production and media, monsters are portrayed as dirty, ugly, menacing, and undesirable creatures that disrupt human order and that must be eradicated. As Jack Halberstam has argued in his analysis of monstrosity in Gothic literature and cinema, monsters are vessels of many anxieties, fears, and threats to the nation, Capitalism, and the upper class. Monsters trigger dread and terror as they estrange the categories of beauty, humanity, and identity that have shaped what a “normal” person should be and behave. Whatever falls outside the margins of normalcy within a dominant cisgender, patriarchal, heterosexual, and white society immediately adopts a certain degree of monstrosity and abjection, and therefore needs to be antagonised, surveilled, and controlled. This is particularly evident in queer bodies like intersex babies, transgender people, the sissy child, sodomites, masculine women, and effeminate men. All of these bodies display difference outside the dominant system of representation and reproduction. They are particularly terrifying because they reveal the truth of such system as a made-up, biased construction that can only be kept in place by exerting violence, both physical and epistemological. 

It is not the lack of cleanliness, health, beauty, intelligence, or decorum that defines monstrosity and causes abjection. Monstrous is what disturbs identity, system, and order; what does not respect borders, positions, and rules, as it vagrantly exists outside the parameters of decency and challenges the status quo. Paradoxically, by embodying what is considered inhuman, the monster produces the human as a discursive effect. Judith Butler summarises it by saying that “it is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanised; it is rather that dehumanisation becomes the condition for the production of the human”.  The production of monsters is necessary to keep systems of oppression ongoing: a necessary enemy that can legitimise the border that draws the normative enclosure where the human lives. 

The fabrication of monsters for the establishment of hegemonic systems of power is inseparably connected to processes of racialisation and segregation. Postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha uses the term ‘metonymies of presence’ to describe the way colonial discourse constructs the colonised subject. The coloniser sees the colonised—or, interchangeably, the doctor and the queer, the politician and the migrant, the supremacist and the uprooted—as both an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible within the coloniser’s framework of knowledge. This creates a situation where the oppressed are both distinct from the oppressor—an “other”—yet subjected to the oppressor’s systems of representation and control. Trapped in a lesser form of being, an impoverished or corrupted version of the ideal man, the monstrous Other can only be understood, represented, and managed under systems of repression, enslavement, isolation, and exploitation.

Monsters are also ecological subjects, not only as entanglements of different human and nonhuman parts—mermaids, harpies, werewolves—or as representation of ecosystems—the swamp, fungal zombies—but also because they often represent warnings of natural transgression. Monsters often symbolise pollution (‘Godzilla’) and natural disaster (Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’). Monsters are also byproducts of extractive capitalism (‘The Worm’ in Dune), and manifestations of the repressed costs of industrial progress (Cordyceps fungus in The Last of Us).

The monster is the abject Other that enables the formation of all kinds of identities—personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal, particular—and the container of sexual, cultural, and ecological anxieties. However, the production of monsters as a main condition to the continuity of Capitalism makes their existence a powerful site of political counter-power. 

The promise of monsters

A monstrous political ecology promises a regenerative politics in the sense that it can both reveal and undo the racist, ableist, supremacist, classist, queerphobic, and speciesist foundations on which the “human” as we know it has been constructed. Far from universal, the concept of “human” has long enabled the overrepresentation of the European cisgender heterosexual man as if it were that of human itself. As Sylvia Wynter points out, such overrepresentation at the expense of the marginalisation of other kinds of humanity hinders any struggle to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, the environment, global warming, severe climate breakdown, and the sharply unequal distribution of earthly resources.   

Embracing monstrosity as a desirable condition and a way-out to Capitalism invites us to explore other ways of understanding and representing ourselves, new forms of becoming and kinship, alliance, and change. There is potential in re-signifying monstrosity, in embracing it rather than rebuking it, in recognising that the horror lies in the perpetuation of monstrous stigma by those who deem themselves normal. It is this normativity that drives the current epoch of mass extinction, as it is intimately connected to the cultural dominance of fixed, heterosexual ways of reproduction, desire, and relating over symbiotic and promiscuous queer assemblages—which, as Lynn Margulis demonstrated, form the conditions that have driven the evolution and diversity of species on the planet, including the human. 

Synonymously to monstrosity, Saidiya Hartman speaks of waywardness as a means of resilient living of the racialised, pathologised, criminalised, and dispossessed. Waywardness is a means of inhabiting the world that challenges the status quo. It is a claim to opacity and self-representation, a propulsion to strike and refuse, to love what is considered unlovable. It is born from the lived experience of enclosure, segregation, discrimination, and it insurgently lays the ground for new possibilities and vocabularies towards queer agency and freedom. In her words, it is “a beautiful experiment in how-to-live”. Waywardly, the monster exists, moves, acts, resists, fights, assembles, desires, loves. Defyingly, the monster speaks in the desiring tongues of queer existence.