A Grammar of Monstrosity
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Gender, Violence, and the Making of an American Monster
As Halloween approaches, we enter a season of familiar rituals: masks, disguises, altered identities, and the pleasurable transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. But what happens when these rituals of fantasy give way to representations of actual people, historical violence, and the anxieties through which this culture understands and polices gender?
Netflix's Monster: The Ed Gein Story offers a revealing occasion for asking these questions. Beginning with Ed Gein's arrest in Wisconsin in 1957, following the disappearance of Bernice Worden, the series draws upon a historical investigation that uncovers evidence of two murders, grave robberies, and the disturbing treatment of human remains. From these spare documented events, Netflix constructs an elaborate narrative of psychological disturbance, sexual identity, and bodily transgression. It imports literary and cinematic inventions, from Psycho to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, cameos of Ted Bundy, Jerry Brudos, Richard, Speck alongside historical figures such as Christine Jorgensen -- all of these are invented encounters and relations that work to pathologize a history that is in fact reconstructed and confirmed by almost 75 years of media purience.
Beneath the spectacle Netflix offers in these one-up episodes lie familiar fears about masculinity, femininity, and the instability of gender itself—fears that Netflix introduces into its narrative, fashions into apparent explanations for Gein's violence, and brings into troubling resonance with contemporary controversies surrounding transgender identity. Netflix is producing this representation now, and its choices invite us to ask whose bodies become objects of fascination, whose experiences become explanations for violence, and what remains hidden within the pleasures of horror.
This 75-minute presentation questions the fictionalized Ed Gein that Netflix constructs with little regard for historical fact. It also examines the larger cultural machinery of violence, gender anxiety, and identity through which a figure becomes recognizable—and marketable—as Monster.