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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!)
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!)
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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.
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But there's a lot of hints and subversion and reversal and suchlike, so I thought it would at least have potential.
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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
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There's also good old Lucy Westenra, one of my favourite Bad Girls ever, altho she gets killed in this kind of metaphorical ritualized gangbang with stakes. //shudders
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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!)
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The folklore figures -- especially the crones: Baba Yaga, many of the 'witches' don't get a sexual aspect to their stories at all, so it's hard to say. That right there is a thing: the powerful women in myth/folklore who aren't fertility-related don't get to have sex lives. But that's not the question you asked here.
Sorry!
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Erishkegal & any Goddess of the underworld ever, including Hel
The Morrigan
Scylla and Charybdis
The Gorgon
The Eumenidies
(Actually, from a certain point of view, Any Goddess Ever, especially presupposing that 'monstrous' =/= evil or bad)
More fantasy &etc:
Achren in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books
Mombi, the Patchwork Girl, and sundry others in the Oz books
Ariane Emory (both of them, but particularly II) in C.J.Cherryh's Cyteen books
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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.
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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?
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Claymore might come up, but I'd like to do something focusing either just on it, or on female monsters in manga and anime.
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Claymore! I feel there should be an entire panel on monstrous bodies in anime and manga! Or something on the annoying sexual monsters? Kitsune, the vagina dentata in Ninja Scroll vs. the female tentacle monster in Claymore?... um.... and now I remember why I don't read that much shounen.
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Anime/manga monsters (not LGBTQ, or not necessarily)
I'd also like to rec some shorter/complete series ahead of time. For instance, Afterschool Nightmare is complete in ten volumes (hey, it's short compared to thirty and ongoing) and has some cool variations on female monstrousness. (Kureha, the avenger! The disabled girl whose mermaid form is perceived as weak/helpless, but isn't at all! The girl with no face! Mashiro! Sou's twin!) Not to mention interesting gender stuff that doesn't really fit the regular categories.
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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.
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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.
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Sadly, my brain is currently experiencing the Friday BSoD.
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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.
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Bel is definitely normal on Beta, although still "other" to some extent (people make generalizations about herms, etc.).
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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.
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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.
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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).
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What I remember is this white, white house. And the woman (the killer), gets this young beauty from...somewhere? I thought it was some kind circus-like place, but you know how vivid but vague Lee stories get. Anyway, she dresses her up in this closet, and is obsessed, but eventually kills her and buries her in the backyard. There's flowers at some point, and the killer is married, and I think (but I could be misremembering) that the young woman is her husband's mistress and/or she's an artist. Ringing any bells?
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The girl is a circus performer who reminds the wife of her husband's ex-wife's imaginary daughter. (Yes, really. It makes more sense in context.)
You know... I love Tanith Lee's over-the-top lushness, but she can have some seriously sketchy subtexts. (In this case, not even -sub.)
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I knew there was more going on with that relationship, I just couldn't put my finger on it. It was, weirdly, a gorgeous story! And I loved it! But.....
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Definitely not "Red as Blood" - as tool_of_satan says, the good/evil axis is swapped in that, and Bianca gets a chance to more or less start over.
The Sleeping Beauty one isn't like that either. I don't recognize your summary, I'm afraid. Her version of Rapunzel, "The Golden Rope," starts out a little like that, but that's not how it ends. (This writeup has extensive summaries of each of the stories in the collection Red as Blood. Spoilers galore ... .)
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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 CaitlÃn 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.
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Spoilers in comments!
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.
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(There are quite a few gay and bi male supernatural characters as well, vampires and others, and the one vampire wedding we see is between two kings who IIRC actually seemed to be marrying for love as well as for political reasons; much as in the "Hollows" books, there's a definite vibe that many of the vampires, whatever their original orientation in life may have been, may end up at least a little bit bi.)
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Also, there are a couple of instances of gender-crossing villains in Germanic myth: Grendel's mother, for one, and the shenanigans in the middle of Grettir's Saga for another. The latter explicitly uses male homosexuality as an insult, although of course this being a saga it's all about the zombified corpse being insulted for all eternity. (And being unable to find its head.)
(Blah blah strictness of gender roles, blah blah cross-dressing is equivalent to homosexuality, blah blah not our modern social conceptcakes. I would also say blah blah zombies, but that goes without saying.)
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Spoilers for Suddenly, Last Summer
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.
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I've always considered being bisexual to be one of the vampire rules, like not being about to go out in sunlight.
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Or what women find monstrous, as opposed to men?
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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.)
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