Theriomorphic Bodies: (En)Gendering Monstrous Corporeality in Contemporary British Fiction
Theriomorphic Bodies: (En)Gendering Monstrous Corporeality in Contemporary British Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This paper looks at how the topography of female corpor(e)ality – traditionally perceived in terms of a dysmorphic counterpart of male bodily shape – is re-charted in two contemporary novels by British women writers. By programmatically deploying female protagonists with a monstrous genealogy, authors like Marina Warner and A. S. Byatt construct alternative historiographies of monstrosity, emphasising the ruptures and distensions that have impinged on its discursive formation. In effect, these novels interrogate the constructedness of marginalized categories, and are intent on re-valorising the “cavernous,” “visceral,” “secreting” and “protruding” female body as a fluid site of potentiality, as a transformative liminal “anti-structure.”

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