Ooooohhhh The Monster:
I decided to break down the seven theses as opposed to trying to extract three main points. After all, there are at least seven...;)


Cohen begins his article by proclaiming a "new modus legendi: a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender" (3). What follows is simple and straight forward. He's ready to rebel against the previous modes of cultural studies. He acknowledges that the previous system had the "compulsion to historical specificity and the insistence that all knowledge is local" (3). In the article he proposes seven theses towards understanding cultures through their monsters; and the monsters abound: Vampires, the Alien, Frankenstein, Werewolves, Grendel, the Boogeyman...


Thesis I: The Monster's Body is a Cultural Body

• "Monsters are the embodiment of a cultural moment".
• "monstrum: "that which reveals," "that which warns,"
• "a glyph that seeks a hierophant"
• "The monster signifies something other than itself: always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again".
  

Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes

• "The monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear somewhere else.
• "No monster tastes of death once." He always comes back and has the "propensity to shift."
  
• "Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them."

Each monster that Cohen introduces has enjoyed multiple incarnations. Here he tracks the Vampire and discusses the resurrections contained in the works of Stoker, Coppola, Rice, and Le Fanu.

• In each of these vampire stories the undead returns in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements ot a specific determining event.

Thesis III: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis

• Referring to the previous thesis, Cohen explains that Monsters typically "escape" because they are so difficult to classify/categorize (6).
• "They are disturbing hybrids whose externallly incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration...a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions" (6).
  

Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference

• "The monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond" (7).
  
• "For the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual" (7).
• In his explanation of monstrous difference, Cohen expounds with multiple examples: Muslims during the times of the Crusades, Native Americans during hte period of Manifest Destiny,
  

Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible

• "The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual) delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol ot (worse) to become monstrous oneself" (12).
• "Every monster is in this way a double narrative, two living stories: one that describes how the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves" (13).
  

Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire

• "[T]he same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies"...(17)
• "This simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the monster's composition accounts greatly for its cultural popularity, for the fact that the monster can contained in a simple binary dialectic (thesis, antithesis...no synthesis)" (17).
• "The habitations of the monsters (Africa, Scandinavia, America, Venus, the Delta Quadrant--whatever land is sufficiently distant to be exoticized) are more than dark regions of uncertain danger: they are also realms of happy fantasy, horizons of liberation. Their monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of other genders, other sexual practices, and other social customs can be explored" (18).
• Kristeva's concept of "abjection:" "It lies there quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, fascinates desire, which, nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside, sickened, it rejects...But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, tahat leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned" (19).
  

Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold...of Becoming

• "They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse...but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge--and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside" (20).
• "They ask us why we have created them" (20).