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[F]ear is a social act which occurs within a cultural matrix. "To fear" and "to be afraid" are social events which have social consequences.1
"The reason you caught me is that WE'RE JUST ALIKE." (Hannibal Lecter to the police officer who identifies him)2
Spurious certainties and terror support each other.3
1. Common Weal
How does one make a monster, and why? What are the civic uses of scandal? However ugly and morally repulsive they may be, monsters are nonetheless political beings. Scandal, by definition, is never private, and so the political fantasies enacted in the name of a monster are quite public in intent. That is the point of Gothic politics-the establishment of a hermeneutics of fear. This essay studies the civic, political, and pedagogical uses of a range of contemporary social monsters: how do Gothic formularies of deviancy and criminality, derived largely without reflection from a genre of commodity horror, and registered in the body of the monstrous person, help script the politics of the ordinary and the normal?
Monsters, like the poor, we have always with us. Indeed, the ongoing stability of any society depends upon the presence of monsters-those unfortunates whom social regulatory systems fail, and whose monstrosity, however marked, can be pointed to precisely as demonstrations of that failure. For this reason, the creation of the monster is as important a civic duty as the ritualized spectacle of its exorcism, an orgiastic scene constantly iterated in horror film and pulp narrative. But monsters appear in other, less obvious sites, as well. They are created as civil agents by media and in daily politics; at the polls and on the evening news; in church rhetoric and in state polemic. Why make a monster? The monster-located, decried, and staked-reconfirms the virtues of the normal for those who, from time to time, need persuading.
Social categories of the impolite and unspeakable are powerfully persuasive tools, and monsters are their agents. Not to put too fine a point upon it, this essay concerns the relation of the uncivil (rhetorics of fear and rituals of terror) to the civil (the polite and the normal) which these enforce. Fear is a powerful teacher, and its pedagogy is never more insistent and ubiquitous than when those who suffer...