E59: The Power and Perils of Monstrosity (w/ Dr. Bernadette Calafell)

It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time for another thrilling and chilling re:verb Halloween Special! This year, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined on the mic by Dr. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Professor and Department Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Critical Cultural Studies division of the National Communication Association. Dr. Calafell’s research explores the concept of monstrosity in academia, popular culture, and politics: both how marginalized and minoritized peoples are deemed “monstrous” by dominant cultural imaginaries, and how oppressed groups often reclaim monster status as a means of empowerment. In addition, Dr. Calafell’s more recent invited talks have addressed how horror films and TV in the (post-) Trump era have been influenced by monstrous policies such as child separation at the border. 

In explaining her rich and insightful readings of these diverse cultural works, Dr. Calafell helps us to understand how horror is a contested genre in which racialized, queer, and otherwise-marginalized subjects are both written out of and into our broader imaginaries -- from the underdeveloped queer possibilities of Get Out to the expansive queer utopia imagined by A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. In the course of our conversation, we reference a whole slew of recent monster movies and TV (listed in full below), and we nerd out with Dr. Calafell over our shared, undying love for the multimedia work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. We hope you enjoy - Happy Halloween, everyone!

Films, TV Shows, and Music Referenced in this Episode

Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories (2014-2017)

On Cinema (2012-present)

“Monster” by Kanye West feat. Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Bon Iver

Get Out (2017)

The Curse of La Llorona (2019)

The Lords of Salem (2013)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

It (2017)

Us (2019)

C.H.U.D. (1984)

Check out the production company Luchagore at this link

Academic Citations:

Anzaldúa, G. E. (2007). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Brooks, Kinitra. Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.

Calafell, B. & Fajardo, S. (2019, 6 Nov.). The curse of La Llorona. Esthesis. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Cohen, J. J. (2018). Monster culture (seven theses). In Classic Readings on Monster Theory (pp. 43-54). ARC, Amsterdam University Press.

Johnson, E. Patrick.“‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From

My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25.

Keeling, Kara.“‘Ghetto Heaven’: Set It Off and the Valorization of Black Femme-Butch Sociality.” The Black

Scholar 33, no. 1 (2003): 33–46.

Levina, M., & Bui, D. M. T. (Eds.). (2013). Monster culture in the 21st century: A reader. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia:The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Peterson, L. (2011). Black monster/White corpses: Kanye’s racialized gender politics. Racialicious. Retrieved from http://www.racialicious.com/2011/01/18/black-monsterswhite-corpses-kanyes-racialized-gender-politics/

Phillips, K. R. (2005). Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture: Horror Films and American Culture. ABC-CLIO.

Zaytoun, K. D. (2015). “Now Let Us Shift” the Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala/The Shapeshifter in the Works of Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 40(4), 69-88.