A Stranger Among Those Who Are Still Men: Reading Monsters as Performing Transgender Identities in Four Short Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract: 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 can be read as performing transgender identities. In order to do this, I employ theories of identity performativity, queer readings, queer coding, and Halberstam’s ideas on monsterhood and gender and adapt them into a transgender theoretical framework. Using these theories, this essay argues for a link between the way the monstrous characters in “The Outsider”, “Cool Air”, “The Dunwich Horror”, and “The Thing on the Doorstep” perform mind-body dissonance, social tension, and bodily transformation in a way evocative of transgender identity expressions.