The monsters next door: representations of whiteness and monstrosity in contemporary culture

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is the examination of whiteness as a dominant identity and subject position. Whiteness has conventionally assumed a normative, monolithic status as the template of humanity. Recent theorising has attempted to specify and denaturalise whiteness. In order to participate in this fracturing of whiteness, I analyse examples in which it functions as a site of contested and ambiguous contradiction. To this end, I use contemporary monstrosity to examine whiteness. Monstrosity is a malleable and culturally specific category of difference that measures alterity, and by displaying discursive functions in an extreme form offers insight into the ways in which deviance and normativity operate. I argue that the conjunction of whiteness and monstrosity, through displaying whiteness in a negative register, depicts some of the discursive operations that enable whiteness to attain such hegemonic dominance. I deploy theories of marginalisation and subjectivation drawn from a variety of feminist, critical race, and philosophical perspectives in order to further an understanding of the discursive operations of hegemonic and normative subject positions.

I offer a brief history and overview of both the history and prior conceptualisations of monstrosity and whiteness, and then focus on two particular examples of contemporary white monstrosity. I closely examine the representation of monstrosity in serial killer films. The figure of the serial killer is typically a white, heterosexual, middle class male whose monstrosity is implicitly reliant upon these elements. In my discussion of the recent phenomenon of fatal shootings at high schools in North America, I investigate the way the massacre at Columbine High School functions as the public face of the phenomenon and for the unique interest it generated in the mass media. I focus on a Time magazine cover that featured a photograph of the adolescent perpetrators under the heading The Monsters Next Door, which condensed and emblematised the tension that they generated. It is through the perpetrators uneasy occupation of dual subject positions namely the unassuming all American boy and the contemporary face of evil that their simultaneous representation as average and alien undermines the notion of whiteness as neutral and invisible.