The monster strikes back: American women revising the abject (Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, Meridel Le Sueur, Octavia E. Butler)

The purpose of the present study was to examine the ways in which contemporary American women revise images of female monstrosity/abjection. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's excellent study of the angel/monster paradigm in women's writing in The Madwoman in the Attic established the ways in which both sides of this binary have been utilized to contain and constrain women's lives and artistry. Several fine scholars have discussed the ways in which norms, surveillance, and the process of normativization, while used to contain and constrain human beings, are constantly exceeded with the potential for rupture and have also established the possibility of exploding these constraints/containments. Utilizing the work of Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, Meridel LeSueur, and Octavia Butler, my dissertation emphasizes this point of rupture in its discussion of the ways in which both literal and imaginative monstrosities inscribed upon the cultural, political, social, and literal female body/ies are (de/re)constructed in order to liberate rather than contain or constrain women.