author: Jack Halberstam
content: Monsters are meaning machines. They can represent gender, race, nationality,
  class, and sexuality in one body. And even within these divisions of identity, the
  monster can still be broken down. Dracula, for example, can be read as aristocrat,
  a symbol of the masses; he is predator and yet feminine, he is consumer and producer,
  he is parasite and host, he is homosexual and heterosexual, he is even a lesbian.
  Monsters and the Gothic fiction that creates them are therefore technologies, narrative
  technologies that produce the perfect figure for negative identity. Monsters have
  to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these
  novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual.
id: 78f7144c-fd08-4d2b-9e18-2c371b3bd3f0