Author(s): Pérez Navarro, Pablo ; Santos, Ana Cristina ; Santos, Ana Lúcia ; Brilhante, Joana ; Pieri, Mara ; Fidalgo, Pedro
Date: 2024
Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/10316/117362
Origin: Estudo Geral - Universidade de Coimbra
Project/scholarship: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/HE/101044915/EU; info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/894643/EU;
The thematic issue “Monstrous Genealogies: Reclaiming Queer Lives and Embodiments”* arises from our desire to continue the debates initiated at the III Monster’s Summer School, held from September 18th to 22nd, 2023, at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, Portugal. It brings together a series of contributions from the Summer School participants, including both students and speakers, as well as articles received in response to an open call. In retrospect, we realize that this heterogeneity reflects an essential aspect of the relationship between monstrosity, as a thematic concern, and academic production, as a critical problem. Our proposal engages with the processes of reconciliation with the figure of the monster as an abject other, while rejecting its reduction to a mere rhetorical figure. Instead, our call was intended to be an invitation to speak about the monster, with the monster, and from the perspective of the monster, always remembering that they know little about historical reparations. The monster neither negotiates nor waits for dignified resolutions. Instead, it erupts, disrupts, and aches. Paradoxically, monstrosity also serves as the veil that power casts over the suffering of the other. Bearing these ambivalences in mind, how might we approach the monster without reproducing the power hierarchies that govern our immediate surroundings? Not only between students and educators, but also in the relationship between the formal spaces of learning and the world beyond them. Particularly when these hierarchies are entangled with the institutional inertia that tends to reproduce unequal relationships between subjects and objects of knowledge. After all, what would “school” be if we were still afraid of monsters?
