دانلود کتاب دوشیزه، مادر و پیرزن: هیولاییِ زنانه در بازی‌های ویدیویی

Monsters are fascinating figures, beings of all potential shapes and forms that spring from our cultural imaginations to manifest in our stories, haunt our dreams, and shape our societies. While monstrous beings certainly frighten us and represent an embodiment of our anxieties, they also give shape and form to all that which is mysterious, ambiguous, and transgressive. We are encouraged to fear monsters as children in our morality-laden fairy tales and then we learn to hate them and all those whom we label “monster,” so the monstrous serves as a way to impart lessons, police behaviour, and demonize and ostracize others. Yet, as has become particularly apparent in contemporary popular culture, we also often feel irresistibly fascinated by and drawn to monsters, many of whom are continuously reenvisioned, remediated, and even sometimes redeemed. In this sense, monsters can often be contradictory and ambiguous figures, both symbolic and literal, endlessly morphing and mutating to play various roles and serve various purposes. This malleability, ubiquity, and ambiguity have not only been key drivers behind the endurance and popularity of the monster, but these aspects also hint at why the monstrous has remained such an important and popular object of critical and scholarly analysis across countless fields. As Rosi Braidotti (2011) has pointed out, monsters “represent the in-between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word for ‘monsters’: teras, which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration, placed between the sacred and the profane” (p. 216, emphasis in original). This etymology is important to consider given that monstrosity has been a focal point of analysis for scholars interested in how certain bodies and behaviours have been policed, punished, or even rejected from dominant social groups throughout history. The word “teratology” means the study of monstrosity, but in medical science it refers to the study of anomalous births, thereby conflating physical anomaly with monstrosity and demonstrating how non-normative bodies are categorized as monstrous. Teratology, as a “science,” ostensibly seeks to objectively classify and explain anomalous births; however, given that men (particularly white men) have historically always overseen the categorization of certain bodies as aberrant and monstrous, it is impossible to remove all trace of judgement from the process. In this sense, teratology is a manifestation of the desire for discursive control and knowledge over the monstrous Other. The same can be said of monstrosity in mythology or popular culture: although it might be more or less veiled or symbolic, monsters are often designed or described using signifiers that code them in relation to identifiable groups. This is a way of establishing an “us” versus “them” or “Self” versus “Other” dynamic that has historically focused primarily on gender, race, ethnicity, and physical disability. Braidotti (2011) has stated that “the monstrous body, more than an object, is a shifter, a vehicle that constructs a web of interconnected and yet potentially contradictory discourses about an embodied self” (p. 243). She notes that “gender and race are primary operators in this process” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 243) though I would add physical disability or anomaly to that list considering the medical meaning of teratology, and queerness has also long been associated with monstrosity. Controlling the discourse about certain bodies is a way to dominate and police those bodies, thereby dictating which bodies are acceptable and which are not. This has far-reaching consequences—as Donna Haraway (1991) has argued, “monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations” (p. 177). Similarly, in his book Monster Theory, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996) has argued for the rich cultural significance of the monster, demonstrating how scholars can read cultures through the monsters they engender. This is because the monstrous body is a cultural body, in that it “quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” (Cohen, 1996, p. 4). By incorporating these elements, “the monster is difference made flesh” in that it functions as a symbolic Other upon which various kinds of alterity can be inscribed (Cohen, 1996, p. 7). Teratologists like Cohen as well as feminist cultural scholars like Haraway and Braidotti have demonstrated how the figure of the monster symbolically polices the borders of what is permissible and dictates which bodies are acceptable. As Cohen has noted, to step outside of social norms risks either “attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself” (Cohen, 1996, p. 12). Given this preoccupation with physical difference, as many scholars of mythology, fairy tales, and horror/monster media and literature have argued, the act of murdering monstrous creatures can be understood as a violent and cathartic re-establishment of the normative, dominant, and patriarchal order. Killing a monster is therefore a way to expel or erase the unwanted “Other” and establish, confirm, and shore up that which is considered “Self”—killing “them” to reaffirm the “us.” As Braidotti argued in the opening quote, analysing and deconstructing the cultural objects involved in this mediated symbolic violence can therefore be considered important components of a feminist, social justice-oriented project. The “monstrous” as a broad category of alterity, marginality, deviance, and transgression formed and communicated in relation to certain “Othered” bodies and behaviours is the focus of this book. Specifically, my aim here is to unpack monstrosity in relation to the portrayal of women—in the form of feminine and female-coded monsters—in games.