Revenge of the Monster Queer

The monster queer is a product of the cissexist, heteronormative imagination, a specter which is raised in order to maintain a status quo which is actively harmful toward queer subjects. It is an obscene, inappropriate, and infectious entity, the fear of which has been leveraged to render queer representation and self-expression unthinkable. In the wake of political action targeting drag artistry and trans visibility, this chapter considers a provocative connection between drag performance and cosmic horror. The author argues that drag artists self-consciously adopt facets of the monster queer in order to reclaim and weaponize them. To witness the sexual deviance and gender nonconformity of the monster queer is to risk becoming perverted oneself. The panic inspired by this transformative potential bears a striking resemblance to the Lovecraftian concept of cosmic horror, in which the subject’s brush with the abominable causes them to encounter forbidden knowledge—information so repugnant that the subject can no longer return to normalcy. In the context of the monster queer, this unassimilable knowledge regards the arbitrariness and mutability of gender as a social construct. By exposing audiences to this counterhegemonic truth, drag opens viewers up to new possibilities of gender through monstrous utopianism.