A Stranger Among Those Who Are Still Men: Reading Monsters as Performing Transgender Identities in Four Short Stories by H. P. Lovecraft
In his book Skin Shows, Jack Halberstam posits that depictions of monsterhood in horror media can be directly comparable to different socially constructed identities, such as gender, and even transgender. But can such a comparison be made in a text regardless of its author’s biases and intentions? The purpose of this essay is to find out how the monsters in four of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories