Monstrous Women

[rachelmanija]

I will be attending Sirens again this year, and am thinking of panels to propose. This year's theme is monsters, and as the con is about women in fantasy, that would be female monsters.

Last year, there was only one panel with an explicit LGBTQ focus, and practically the entire con attempted to pile into it, forcing it to shut some out for lack of space and leaving the poor people doing the panels scheduled opposite to speak to nearly-empty rooms. It seems clear that there is enormous interest in the topic, and the con could easily support several more panels on the theme. If you're considering attending Sirens (by far my favorite con I've attended in the last five years or so), please consider proposing something along those lines. (The overall con theme is "women in fantasy," so monsters are not essential.)

However, the obvious panel would be LGBTQ monsters, particularly female and female-identified ones. I am thinking of proposing this, taking a wide view of "monster" - some monsters are literal, some more ambiguous, and sometimes the identity or orientation itself is condemned as monstrous.

Can you suggest fiction or even folklore featuring such "monsters?" So far I've thought of the lesbian vampires in The Gilda Diaries, Micah in Liar, and Mystique in The X-Men. I'm OK with spoilers in comments, so long as they're marked on the subject headers. (So beware spoilers in comments!)

Comments

[eisen]

Would the titular characters of CLAYMORE qualify? The sexuality therein is kind of - convoluted, but it seems like it might have some usefulness in terms of subtext and such. And they're virtually a shoo-in for the con-wide topic, at least - being, as they are, an explicit exploration of the notion of monstrosity and female identity - so it would be a shame to see them go completely unacknowledged.

I don't know if Siren would want to discuss a manga or not; if Mystique is an option, though, I had to at least suggest another comic-related option.

[rachelmanija]

I was already thinking of them for a panel on female monsters in anime and manga. I've only read up to v 15 and am actually not sure exactly what anyone's sexual orientation is, though.

[staranise]

I recently heard that Mercedes Lackey had just put out a novel where the villain was a MTF transsexual (with transfail all over the place).

[rachelmanija]

One could, unfortunately, do an entire panel on the trope of the trans villain.

[rydra_wong]

the lesbian vampires in The Gilda Diaries

Not to mention the lesbian vampires in ... everything! Gilda Diaries is unusual for having such a positive spin on it, but there's a long long tradition (from Carmilla on through many Hammer horror movies) of lesbian vampires as a trope for titillation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_vampire

[rachelmanija]

Hmm. That does look like it could support a separate panel. Maybe someone else could take that one up; I'm not familiar with most of the examples. (I should read Carmilla, I've heard of it for ages.)

[lferion]

I have no idea if any of these are actually what you mean, but:

Patricia McKillip
- In the Forests of Serre has a Baba Yaga character
- The Tower at Stoney Wood has a selkie as a principal character
- Song for the Basilisk has Luna, direct heir to her father's power
- Fool's Run has The Queen of Hearts|Terra Viridian

Bujold - Lady Ijada in The Hallowed Hunt is a shape-shifter/were

P.C.Hodgell's Jamethiel, though I'm not at all certain how to categorize her, has interesting 'monstrous' aspects

Diana Wynne Jones' Aunt Maria in 'Aunt Maria'

Shelob & her distant offspring the spiders in Mirkwood

Nearly any Faery Queen written seriously, including Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, McKillip's Book of Atrix Wolfe, Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age, and so on

--the definition I think I am going with here is along the lines of 'powerful, frightening, and with knowledge, skills and desires/needs/agendas not in line to directly conflicting with what is considered 'normal/moral/regular' social expectation/behaviour/life' (and I hope that makes some kind of sense!)

[rachelmanija]

Are any of them LGBTQ?

[holyschist]

Shori in Octavia Butler's Fledgling might qualify, I think--she's a vampire, and...bisexual is probably the closest term. (I'm not sure how much the text wants us to see her as monstrous, but I had big ol' issues with that book.)

Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch goes through a lots of fairytales, reimagining them through a mostly-lesbian lens. I'd say a lot of the characters are women considered monstrous in the original, although I don't recall if any were literal monsters (witches, yes).

Sarah Monette's Three Letters From the Queen of Elfland, perhaps.

[oyceter]

Second Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, which often sets up romances between the princesses and the monsters/witches of the original fairy tales. Also, there are a lot of female monsters in Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales duology, and I'm pretty sure a fair amount of them are LGBTQ, though it's been a while since I've read them. Valente does a lot of interesting stuff with looking at what's considered monstrous and "abnormal" for bodies.

Manga-wise... Claymore I think is more homosocial than anything else, although I feel there should just be an entire panel on Claymore just for this theme!

Maybe there could be a look at the evil/dead lesbian stereotype and why it's there and how to counter it? Or how to do monsters and LGBTQ without ending up with evil trans characters and etc?

[rachelmanija]

Oh, don't worry! I would not do the panel uncritically! How to portray monstrous LGBTQ characters without making it seem like their sexuality and identity is itself monstrous is obviously a key issue. (I feel like the dead lesbian stereotype is a type of homophobia that isn't clearly relevant to the issue of monsters and the monstrous. Evil lesbians, now, are relevant.)

Claymore might come up, but I'd like to do something focusing either just on it, or on female monsters in manga and anime.

[jesuswasbatman]

The extremely heavy and authorially-confirmed lesbian overtones of Ace's relationship with Karra the werecheetah in the Doctor Who story "Survival".

Also I haven't got round to reading the novel, but I understand the little girl vampire in the prose version of Let the Right One In is female-presenting but actually either androgynous or transsexual.

[kore]

Dude, the original pre-Dracula vampire Carmilla is a total lesbian! Even better, the whole novella is narrated by one of her escaped female victims who misses her. It's, uh, problematic, but weirdly cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla

There's also Christabel, Coleridge's poem, which has a witchy antiheroine and definite lesian undertones. I think there's a shitload of modern lesbian/gay vampire short story anthologies (some erotica written for/by women), but the only one I've read was Poppy Z. Brite's Love in Vein.

[thecityofdis.livejournal.com]

I can't think of any off the top of my head, but considering the long history of demonizing queer folks - literally! - in literature, I'm sure there's got to be plenty to mine from.

Sadly, my brain is currently experiencing the Friday BSoD.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Well, if you think of anything later, you know where to find this post.

[rosefox]

Braindump, possibly useful or possibly not:

Cat Valente's Orphan's Tales books feature a wide variety of female monsters; it's been a while since I read them, but knowing Cat, I'm pretty sure there's some queerness in there.

"The Cage" is an adorable lesbian werewolf story, but the lesbians themselves aren't werewolves.

The title character of "And Salome Danced" is a queer gender-shifting monster.

There's a lesbian Native American werewolfe in Allyson James's Firewalker.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

All I can think of off the top of my head are the quaddies and Betan hermaphrodites from the Vorkosiverse (the quaddies we spend the most time with are female, particularly in Miles' time, and there's the Nicol/Bel relationship). This is of course SF and not fantasy, so possibly not suitable for your purposes.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

No, that's a good idea. SF counts! There's an interesting dynamic, if I recall correctly, in which Bel is considered "normal" to Betans, but quaddies are odd even there.

[neery.livejournal.com]

The heroine of Lost Girl is a bisexual succubus.

Taura from the Vorkosigan novels is one of my favorite SF "monsters", but sadly not bisexual, as far as I remember.

I'm not sure how wide a view of "monster" you want to take, but Daja from Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series was ostracized from her community because as the only survivor of a ship wreck she was considered cursed, and a bringer of massive bad luck. She's also a lesbian, but that only comes up in a later book.

I think the heroine in Laurell K Hamilton's books might be a bisexual vampire? But I've never read those books myself. And I think Tanya huff has a series of books about a gay vampire, too.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

No, Hamilton's protagonist Anita Blake is a (re)animator/necromancer who can raise the dead, among other things. As far as I know, Anita remains at least nominally human throughout the series, despite uneasily feeling that she has more and more in common with the "monsters"--vampires, werewolves, and leopard-type shapeshifters, as I recall--she becomes romantically involved with as the series progresses. (I've only read the first five or six books.) The books I've read and glanced at seemed to feature her acquiring more and more male love interests, so if there's any bisexuality involved on Anita's part, it's probably pretty slight.

However, Rachel Morgan, the witch heroine of Kim Harrison's Hollows series ("Dead Witch Walking," etc.) has a vampire best friend/P.I. partner/roommate who's either lesbian or bisexual with a major obsession with the apparently heterosexual Rachel. (I'm only on the second book in this series.) The vampire best friend actually gives Rachel what is quasi-seriously referred to as a "dating handbook" explaining what to do, wear, etc., to avoid triggering the dangerously commingled sexual/bloodlust instincts of the vampire in your life.

Spoilers for Dancers of Arun (and possibly but less so for Dune)

[chomiji]

Would Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Dune) and his taste for good-looking teeanged boys (preferably only semiconscious) count?

How about the "witches" in Elizabeth Lynn's Arun series? In The Dancers of Arun, there was one ethnic group (the Asech) who regarded those with mind-powers as weird (and possibly evil, but I'm not remembering the details well enough). Kel's lover Sefer (m/m) was killed as a result of this situation (althought IIRC, it was much more complicated than his being killed because he was a witch).

[jinian.livejournal.com]

What springs to mind is (bizarrely) only HIM from the Powerpuff Girls (http://powerpuff.wikia.com/wiki/HIM). Flaming like whoa, but neither a woman nor really appearing to have sexuality as such. Still, could be interesting to talk about in context. I'll keep thinking.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

In a broad sense, I'd consider the Jaime Gumb/Buffalo Bill character from Silence of the Lambs, with his sexuality/gender issues (and serial killing) to have been portrayed as a monster. (For the killing, not the gender issues, of course.)

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Tanith Lee must have published something relevant here, but unfortunately I'm not sure exactly what. It's been too long since I last read Red as Blood to recall if any of the stories would be useful, though they well might be. There are certainly stories involving female monsters, both there and in other collections (e.g., "The Gorgon," which I can state is not LGBTQ).

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Yes, unfortunately, her retelling of Snow White has the wicked queen kill Snow White after sex (another bisexual = killer, sigh).

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Pretty much all bisexual women in major motion pictures are monsters. Sharon Stone had cornered the market in bisexual women = crazed killers for a while, but it's an old trope. Faster Pussycat Kill Kill is another classic example.

[sovay]

However, the obvious panel would be LGBTQ monsters, particularly female and female-identified ones. I am thinking of proposing this, taking a wide view of "monster" - some monsters are literal, some more ambiguous, and sometimes the identity or orientation itself is condemned as monstrous.

Hm. Off the top of my head—

All three sets of protagonists in Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned: the gender-shifting vampires in "Stained in Crimson"; the murderous protagonist who assumes both male and female identities in "Malice in Saffron"; the double-gendered haunting in "Empires of Azure." The female is foregrounded in all three novellas.

The Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists from Caitlín R. Kiernan's In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers (2002, reprinted in Alabaster in 2006 as "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées"). Biancabella and Candida reappear in the vignette "Still Life" in Tales from the Woeful Platypus (2007), reprinted last month in Sirenia Digest #61. In fact, if you want queer female monsters, you could do a lot worse than go through the Sirenia archives. There are a number of them—I'd single out "The Cryomancer's Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)," "A Child's Guide to the Hollow Hills," "Derma Sutra (1891)," "The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherezade," "The Belated Burial," and "The Prayer of Ninety Cats" as particularly strong examples; on the science fiction side, "Faces in Revolving Souls" (A Is for Alien, 2009). It is also possible that Constance Hopkins from The Red Tree (2009) qualifies.

Spoilers in comments!

[skygiants]

Monstrousness levels may vary, but Alaya Dawn Johnson's second Spirit Binders book features a queer equilateral-triangle relationship between a man and two women. One of the women is a magic-userwho eventually becomes entangled with Death in some kind of bargain (that . . . I'm still not entirely clear on, but involves immortality and chopping off her arm) and become the dangerous witch-antagonist of the series who is considered pretty monstrous by the majority of the population.

I don't know Libba Bray's Victorian schoolgirls trilogy - I read the first book, but it was a long time ago - but from what I understand there's a lesbian relationship, and one of the girls involved dies and becomes a 'corrupted spirit' (thus says Wikipedia.)

If I remember correctly, Pamela Dean's Tam Lin features at the very least rumors of vague lesbianity around all of the fairy-court-affiliated professors, and Janet occasionally gets warned about this by people attempting to be helpful.

And if anime counts, of course there's Anthy Himemiya, prominent anime lesbian and shapechanging witch.

Re: Spoilers in comments!

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, speaking of schoolgirls and video media, there's Thelma the ghost from Hex...

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Are you only looking for modern genre-fic examples? If not, Le Fanu's "Carmilla" is pretty much the great-grandmother of English-language lesbian vampire stories; you could make a pretty good case for Geraldine in Coleridge's Christabel being a precursor of this type, too. (Heck, you could probably dedicate an entire panel to lesbian vampires alone, there's such a wealth of examples ranging from Victorian literature to modern queer erotica...)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think you're on to something. There's probably room for one panel on LGBTQ monsters, and one just on lesbian vampires.

Spoilers for Suddenly, Last Summer

[clodia-risa.livejournal.com]

I was going to mention Wraeththu, but then I reread your entry. Although they are hermaphoditic, most of the Wraeththu start out as human males, so I don't think it quite fits.

There's also the real-life story that Monster (2003) was based on (also see the title of the movie).

This story is also not quite what you're looking for, but I think I'll relate it anyway. In the movie/play "Suddenly, Last Summer", the main character is being institutionalized for witnessing something her aunt wants to kept secret. It is revealed at the climax that while on vacation, her cousin was murdered and eaten by some young men that he had paid for sexual favors. You know from the beginning that the cousin is dead, so I kept wondering what horrible thing he had done that his mother was trying to hide. I thought he was a serial killer or a monster or something horrible. I was confused and let down when the big secret turned out to be that he was homosexual. Frankly, I think she would have been less ashamed and horrified if he had been a murderer.

Re: Spoilers for Suddenly, Last Summer

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

It was also implied that the cousin had a taste for quite young men.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Grendel's Mother is my favorite female monster in literature, though I think the way she became a sex object in the recent movie is appalling.

[sorenlundi.livejournal.com]

There are definitely enough lesbian vampires to warrant a panel all of their own. My personal favourites are the film Daughters of Darkness (featuring Delphine Seyrig as the Countess Bathory), the novel I, Vampire (in which a 500 bisexual vampire woman falls in love with a shapeshifting alien currently in the shape of Virginia Woolf) and, while we're talking about Tanith Lee, there's a pretty fabulous transwoman lesbian sorta-vampire in her Blood Opera trilogy (Dark Dance, Personal Darkness and Darkness, I), though she doesn't show up until book two.

Re:

[sorenlundi.livejournal.com]

500 year old, I mean.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

This year's theme is monsters, and as the con is about women in fantasy, that would be female monsters.

Or what women find monstrous, as opposed to men?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting thought. (I assume "female monsters" based on the previous two years of "female warriors" and "female fairies.")

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

in Carrie Vaughn's "Kitty and the Midnight Hour," the first book in her ongoing series about a late-night talk show host who's also a werewolf, the heroine's best friend is T.J., a gay male werewolf who's practically the only member of the pack who treats her decently. (This may have something to do with the fact that T.J. experiences a certain amount of static himself from the other pack members over his sexual orientation, despite having worked his way up to being second in command by defeating most of the others in physical combat.) (SPOILERS) Somewhat predictably, he winds up dying at the end of the book in an attempt to save Kitty.

Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear's "In the Company of Wolves" reportedly involves a lot of m/m sexual activity among the (possibly somewhat werewolf-ied) young men who bond telepathically with a pack of human-friendly giant wolves who help defend the community against marauding trolls, but I haven't actually read it yet.

I believe there's a gay male werewolf among the supporting characters in at least the first book ("Moon Called," I think) in Patricia Briggs' series about Mercy Thompson, crime-solving auto mechanic/were-coyote, but he plays a pretty minor role, as I recall. Native American bounty hunter Jane Yellowrock in Faith Hunter's "Skinwalker" and "Blood Cross" is also an animal shapeshifter whose main alternate form is more or less lupine (I think), but I don't recall anything about queer sexuality on her part in the first book. (I haven't read the second one yet.)

[ejmam.livejournal.com]

Warren's (the gay werewolf) role gets bigger in later books, as does his human boyfriend's role. There's some discussion about why it's hard to be gay and a werewolf. There are very few female werewolves; I think it would be even harder to be lesbian. Vampires are (of course) much looser about their sexual definitions.