Inside a California University’s ‘Festival of Monsters’: Genocide, Racism, and Zombies

The Center for Monster Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz held its third annual Festival of Monsters conference last week, where more than 80 academics, students, and independent scholars explored left-wing ideas on race, gender, and the environment through a "monster theory" lens.

UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies, established in 2021, describes itself as "a group of artists and scholars dedicated to the investigation of monsters and how they are defined throughout history and culture."

"Monsters play a role in the representation of some of the most challenging problems facing our world: matters of race and religion, social justice, and environmental threats," the center says on its website. Courses offered at UC Santa Cruz that the Center for Monster Studies describes as "Monster-related Classes" include Monsters in Drama; Critical Realities (climate change monsters); Black Geography Lab; Shakespeare; Sex and Violence in Irish Literature; Frankenstein's Monsters; and Victorian Pop Culture.

The conference, held from October 15 to 18, included sessions titled "Cannibalism and Deviance," "Eugenics and Freakery," "Monstrous Bodies," "Zombies," "Black Women and Monsters," "Monstrous Ethics," and "Don't F*** with these Women."

Titles of the talks included "So You've Been Accused of Cannibalism . . . ," "Making America Monstrous Again: Queerness and Community in Frankenstein," "Latin-American Freak Shows and Colonializing Discourse," "Nourishing the Female Monster," "Never Let Go and Black Monstrous Motherhood," "Monstrosities/Masculinities/Mobilities," "How to Get Eaten by a Dragon: Ecopoetics of Predation," "Monsters at the Genocide," and "Power Lines: Agency and Complicity in the Naming and Making of Monsters."

David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor at the University of New England, delivered the first keynote speech, which was named "False Monsters, True Horror: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization." In his talk, Livingstone Smith addressed racialization as a precursor to dehumanization, according to Contingent Magazine.

"Groups of people who are dehumanized as monsters are almost always first racialized. Racialization precedes dehumanization," Livingstone Smith said in a similarly themed talk delivered in November 2022. "To racialize a group of people is to (1) regard them as fundamentally and unalterably different from 'us,' whoever 'us' happens to be, (2) regard them as intrinsically inferior to 'us,' and (3) regard this status as transmitted biologically, mainly by descent, but there are some interesting variations on that if we look cross-culturally."

In his 2022 talk, Livingstone Smith argued that racialization leads people to perceive a class of "lesser human beings," which thereby allows them to see individuals in that class as "less than human."

"I don't believe in human races," Livingstone Smith said in the 2022 lecture. He concluded his talk by encouraging the audience to "learn how dehumanizing propaganda works," "take political action to reduce objective vulnerability," "recognize that we are all potential dehumanizers," "make historical education a priority," and "work towards getting rid of the very idea of race." In the Q-and-A portion, Livingstone Smith said, "I think we are dangerously close to fascism."

The second keynote speech was titled "Monsters: A Reckoning" and delivered by Kimberly Lau, a literature professor at UC Santa Cruz. On her personal website, Lau states that she "teaches courses on fairy tales, monster studies, popular culture, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century women's fiction, all within the context of feminist theory, critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies." Her books include Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale; Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women's Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics; and New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden.

Monstrosity is "a manifestation of white heteropatriarchal masculinism," Lau said during the speech, as reported by Contingent Magazine.

One of Lau's more recent academic articles is "Monstrous Longings in the Age of Insurrection: A Twilight Postmortem," which argues that the Twilight young adult series "celebrates and extends legacies of prejudice and oppression under the guise of everlasting romance, love, and marriage."

"If, as I am suggesting, Twilight's popularity represented a metaphorized cultural desire for the return of the now ostensibly marginalized white patriarch to his 'rightful' place at the center of society, the January 6 insurrection animated those desires in astonishingly public fashion," Lau wrote in the article, published in 2024.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the dean of Humanities and an English professor at Arizona State University, delivered the most recent keynote speech, titled "Monster Theory at 30," in which he reflected on his widely cited 1996 essay "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" and the 1996 collection he edited, Monster Theory. A central claim argued in "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" is that monsters reflect a culture's anxieties during a particular period, and therefore a culture can be understood through the monsters it produces.

During his speech, Contingent Magazine notes, Cohen argued that people who commit horrific acts — such as fascists, eugenicists, and serial killers — are monstrous but are human beings.

The conference concluded with a "Monsters Ball" on October 17. The Center for Monster Studies website announced that wearing a costume was encouraged but not required.