How the FUCK did this get so many notes so quickly???? Alright, I had to wait for the ibuprofen to hit (headache) but now I'm at my laptop.
My impetus for the thesis was actually just "hello I like Powerwolf (German power metal band who sings about horny Catholic werewolves)". And I somehow managed to make an academic topic out of that. I'm only just starting out, I have like. 3 pages of text but here's what I got:
Chapter 1 is about conceptions of monstrosity - what is a monster? Why? The basic text you need for this is Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Monster Theory. He's probably THE monster scholar, and his seven theses are a fantastically concise way of defining what monsters. (Very simplified: They symbolize cultural anxieties and rules by breaking them.) I also very much enjoyed Religion and its Monsters as well as the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and Monstrosity. The latter I would also consider essential reading, because it spans a broad number of topics and approaches in like twenty essays.
There's also Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature by Dana Oswald. I'm going at this from a historical perspective because Powerwolf as my main example is heavily based in biblical language and folklore and I just kinda like reading about medieval ways of thinking.
The next two parts of the chapter will be about gender (presentation) and the werewolf. For gender stuff, Judith Butler is pretty much required reading, but I've also looked at Michel Foucault's ideas on Discipline and Sexuality. I read the abbreviated texts in Literary Analysis: An Anthology because anything else would be insane. Dana Oswald (author of he book about middle english monsters) also wrote about monstrous gender in the Ashgate reserach companion. Oh and I really need to reread Judith/Jack Halberstam's Female masculinity, because gender transgressions are a major part of conceiving monstrosity throughout history. Frankenstein has been researched to death (pun intended), but there's also aspects of gender in Dracula.
I'm still looking for research on werewolves but so far I got some interesting info on localized legends from the German/Flemish/Dutch border region and interpretations of historic literature such as from Iceland. I also learned about the shared conceptions of werewolves by medieval Christians and Jews. And lastly, there is a master's thesis about female werewolves that I found extremely interesting. All in all, the werewolf is both at the border between beast and man as well as exceeding gender roles through hypermasculinity and possibly aberrant sexuality. I'll probably have to write something about witches too because there's some parallels between the treatment of suspected werewolves and witches, but that definitely needs more research.
My current plan for the thesis as a whole is to to relate monsters and werewolves to the broader aesthetic of metal music, where the breaking of societal boundaries is part of the scene's identity. (Heavy Fundamentalisms has some great articles.) There's of course the warrior image that plays a part in some subgenres but the genre as a whole can be interpreted as playing with monstrosity through sound (harsh vocals), behavior (moshing) and looks (corpse paint).
Powerwolf specifically imagines their shows as a Catholic mass while wearing corpse paint and singing about blood and sex. (Similar to Ghost, which is why I'm honestly baffled PW isn't more popular on tumblr.) Their artworks often show werewolves as knights, church authorities and on the cover of the album Call of the Wild even as God. It's kind of flip flopping between the wolf keeping the faith and submitting to the wildness while both is depicted as interesting/desirable in a way, so that's a fun dynamic to explore. They don't actually have a "canon" but the themes are fairly consistent. In the past albums they've also had some women protagonists but they're notably not werewolves, so that will absolutely be something to discuss.
Anyway, go check out Powerwolf, power metal is pretty easy to get into and their live shows are fun.
