DRAFT NOT FOR CIRCULATION 87 Chapter six Further Notes Toward a Monster Pedagogy John Edgar Browning EDUCATION The old adage that humans fear what they don’t understand seems innocuous enough, even practical in its contemporary uses, even, if only potentially, self-vindicating for the user. But as someone who occupies/d more than one marginalized demographic, I’m inclined to see it differently, from the outside, as a kind of romanticized, even amnesic racism or bigotry. Rumblings during the Enlightenment about the so- called “natural hierarchies” of race—that is, the need by early scientists to biologically taxonimize “physical difference into relations of domination” in order “to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery” writes a New York Times opinion columnist for Slate as recently as 2018 (Bouie)—all but melded with the collective consciousness of Victorians and then gained strength in the eras that followed. However, by 2009-2010, following the election of America’s first non-white president, many of us felt a shift in this collective consciousness, and so I began to acknowledge publicly the creative possibilities monsters offered that I had been experimenting with in the classroom since 2005. Unfortunately, their classroom practicality at that time lay only in their seemingly inherent ability to elicit in students both curiosity and stimulation, not in their actual critical application. The latter often proved inaccessible to students in general postsecondary education courses because they lacked the appropriate theoretical underpinning, just as the educators themselves did who wanted to teach monsters. It became apparent that more and more educators were finding themselves ill-equipped to appropriate monsters as teaching tools in the classroom