Decadent Monsters
Dr Julia Skelly (Concordia University)
What is decadence, if not the lived experience of pleasures perceived as excessive – whether pleasure in decay, pleasure in drugs, pleasure in fine furniture – and thus dangerous, even destructive. We who are interested in decadence recognize that pleasure is dangerous, because it makes us want to live as fully human, awake to both the beauty and cruelty of life. There is a reason that the idea of pleasure activism is an idea or way of being in the world that resonates with many women, queer folks and nonbinary individuals, and it is not insignificant that it is a Black queer woman – adrienne maree brown – who has literally edited the book on pleasure as a radical practice. In her introduction to Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019), brown insists on her right to experience a range of different kinds of pleasure without shame or pathologization. As an art historian, I am fortunate to be constantly looking at beautiful things. This is one of my favourite kinds of pleasure – visual, aesthetic pleasure. Late nineteenth-century decadents such as Oscar Wilde knew how important – how indispensable – aesthetic beauty is to a life well lived. To believe in beauty despite cruelty is an act of resistance. To seek out pleasure despite being told to live small is an act of resistance. Pleasure makes people want to live, and sometimes in order to live, we have to resist those who would have us know only fear, silence and cruelty.
As I was finishing a book on contemporary feminist art, in which I employ monster theory liberally throughout, I watched The Substance (2024; dir. Coralie Fargeat): the Demi Moore body horror movie that ends with Monstro Elisasue, a monstrous hybrid of Moore’s character (Elisabeth) and the ‘better’ (i.e. younger) version of Moore’s character (Sue), mashed all together with too many eyes and breasts, a horror concoction created using prosthetics, silicone, and clay. The film’s denouement, which I loved, shows Monstro Elisasue projectile spewing fountains of blood onto an audience who had come to watch the nubile version of Moore’s character – played by Margaret Qualley – ring in the New Year. The opposite of subtle, this penultimate scene includes a male audience member standing, pointing at the blobby mass, and screaming: ‘It’s a monster!’ I liked the on-the-noseness of this conclusion, illuminating what many of us have long known: that some men (‘Not All Men’) believe – consciously or unconsciously – that women are monsters. The movie does not end there, but rather with the quickly diminishing blob ending up on Elisabeth’s star on Hollywood Boulevard, where the movie had begun. The monster disappears completely and is forgotten. Hollywood has chewed up and spat out yet another actress.
Fig. 1: Raqib Shaw, Jane (2006). Enamel, glitter, plastic beads and graphite on paper. Tate, London. Presented by the Mottahedan Family 2007. © Raqib Shaw.
Queer artist Raqib Shaw, who is Kashmir-born and London-based, has explicitly used the visual language of monstrosity in his 2006 painting Jane: a depiction of Henry VIII’s third wife wearing period-accurate clothing but with a monstrous piranha face, surrounded by bloody blobs with shrieking mouths. The work is decadent in its depiction of the opulent crimson velvet gown with gold-embroidered sleeves, but also in Shaw’s use of glitter as a superfluous, excessive, visually pleasurable material.[1] It is a monstrous version of German artist Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Jane Seymour (1536-37), which is now held in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The painting unveils how women have often been constructed as monstrous through historical discourse, a process that British author Hilary Mantel laid bare in her fictional account of Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall in the novel Bring Up the Bodies (2012). Anne Boleyn has famously been framed as a witch and a shrew, deserving of her death so that Henry could marry Jane. Shaw’s painting suggests that even the good girls of history are not safe from being turned into the monstrous-feminine if it serves patriarchal purposes.[2] Significantly, art critic Nick Hackworth has read Shaw’s monstrously decadent portrait in terms of both beauty and violence, writing: ‘Simpler and bolder in their composition, [Shaw’s paintings] take Holbein’s famous portraits of…Jane Seymour and Anne Boleyn and cannibalise them’.[3] Like actresses in Hollywood, Henry’s women were chewed up and spat out when they had outlived their purpose. The decadent monster may be chewed up and spat out, but they nevertheless find joy and freedom in beauty and pleasure, and they are most notable for their powers of protection. They protect themselves and they protect others, especially the most vulnerable.
Decadence and Monster Theory
It is crucial to remember that Wilde, like many other queer people at that time and since, was discursively framed through text and image as monstrous. Caricatures depicted Wilde as physically grotesque, a gaping maw that over-consumed food, alcohol and cigarettes. This corporeal excess, represented ad nauseum in both periodicals and visual culture, functioned as a code for Wilde’s illegal homosexuality, and he was outed during his 1895 trials, which further entrenched the image of Wilde as a threat to polite English society.[4] However, I want to think about decadent monsters as a category not of pathology but of resistance. Monster theorists remind us that monsters are man-made. They are what scares us. But they also stand at the gates of possibility and thus can function as catalysts of change: as hybrid beings who protect and guide us.[5] What is a decadent monster? It is a being – human or nonhuman – that brings together pleasure, beauty, and protectiveness.
Fig. 2: Max Beerbohm, caricature of Oscar Wilde (1894). © Estate of Max Beerbohm. Available at: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw43531/Oscar-Wilde
Visual beauty and visual pleasure have been crucial for many Black artists creating political work. Black queer artist Mickalene Thomas, Black Canadian artist Tau Lewis, Black British artist Yinka Shonibare, and Black queer male artist Nick Cave all use patterns, textiles, and visual pleasure in their political artworks. Cave’s and Lewis’s works are sculptural interventions that are also deliberately monstrous in the sense of being nonhuman, otherworldly beings crafted out of cloth and other materials. I argue that both artists are deliberately creating figurative sculptures that are intended to protect Black people. Cave’s Soundsuits are made out of a range of materials and are meant to be worn. They are beautiful in their colours and materiality. They are also armour to protect the Black body. As several Black scholars have pointed out, Black people have often been rendered monstrous to justify their violent erasure.[6] Cave’s Soundsuits aren’t literally monsters, but they are protective, shielding the Black individual from violence.[7] Lewis’s assemblage sculptures and monumental masks are also protective. By creating figurative sculptures out of a range of found, opaque materials, and refusing to represent violence to the Black body, Lewis is putting into practice anti-colonial scholar Edward Glissant’s theory of opacity, which is a rejection of the legibility and access that is usually expected in depictions of people of colour.[8] In a catalogue for Lewis’s exhibition Vox Populi, Vox Dei (2023), Tiana Reid remarks: ‘Lewis’s sculptures, evocative of plant and animal life, bear perhaps some resemblance to human shapes but clearly aren’t people at all, making them, in a certain sense, monsters’.[9] Some of Lewis’s figures can be read as monsters, but they reshape our conventional understanding of monsters as threats, instead inviting us to see them as protectors and harbingers of change and futurity.
Both Cave and Lewis produce sculptural works that evoke visual and haptic pleasures, and both artists’ sculptures have been read in terms of monstrosity. According to Romi Crawford: ‘In a sense, the dysmorphic physical forms of Cave’s pretty monsters resist a want for racial or gendered assignation’.[10] Lewis’s and Cave’s artworks can productively be viewed as decadent in their use of colorful and dazzling materials: textiles, metals, shiny things, sparkly things. Materials that create music when they move. These sculptures enact pleasure activism. They are decadent monsters who are a threat not to the viewer, but to the status quo in art history and white supremacist society. They promise to protect Black women, Black men, Black nonbinary people, Black trans individuals, Black queer people, Black drag queens. Pleasure is political. Decadence is political. Beauty is political. The decadent monster is political. The decadent monster asks us to keep fighting for a better world. In this way, the decadent monster is a figure of progressive politics, one in line with what Alice Condé has proposed, namely a progressive kind of decadence that departs from a reactionary decadence favouring individualism over solidarity. Contrary to monstrous tropes more commonly associated with decadence (be it Dorian Gray’s portrait or Wilde’s denigration in the press), the decadent monster in the works addressed here reject restrictive, limiting, rigid definitions of decadence. Their decadence is joyful, liberating, and expansive.
What happens – or what is possible – when I combine monster theory and decadence as a theoretical framework for visual culture and social life? I want to propose that, not unlike Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, decadent monster theory illuminates that which causes fear and loathing at the same time that it illuminates a vast, potential network of solidarities and alternative futures. The decadent monster as an analytic lens for both art and lived experience offers more specificity than Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory has allowed for. A person is (usually) only perceived and treated as a monster if they are seen as a threat to the healthy, white, heteropatriarchal, cis social body, and when a person is rendered monstrous (that is, viewed and discursively constructed as a monster), this discursive process is directed towards constructing the justification for their violent erasure, whether through murder, imprisonment, or illegal deportation. This kind of crazy-making cruelty is part of the monsterizing cycle: identify someone as a monster, erase them violently. It’s not Frankenstein’s monster being attacked with pitchforks; it’s people of colour being abducted in broad daylight by ICE, or sex workers (especially trans and cis sex works of colour) being murdered because they have been framed as monstrous, leaky bodies who are a threat to the healthy, white, male social body. JK Rowling is guilty of monsterizing rhetoric on Twitter. The murder of trans people is the direct result of monsterizing rhetoric. Monsterizing discourse is fundamentally dehumanizing, and it has material consequences.
How did I get from decadence to violence? It’s not such a great leap. In the late nineteenth century, the most famous decadent of the age, Wilde, experienced social, legal and discursive violence as a result of his perceived decadence, which was associated with racial degeneration by Austrian physician Max Nordau. The ideology of racial degeneration, of course, also resulted in the murder of millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust. Wilde was not murdered, but his spirit died in Reading Gaol. Wilde was framed as monstrous through caricature and character assassination, in his frenemies’ letters and articles, medical texts, and newspaper accounts of his hotel bedsheets.
Why Monsters?
I have long been enamoured with Rosemary Betterton’s chapter ‘Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women’s Art’ (1996), which draws not only on Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) but also Barbara Creed’s feminist text on horror films The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993).[11] Then I read Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023).[12] The art monster, according to Elkin, is the female/feminist artist who is perceived as too much, as excessive, and yet perseveres nonetheless.[13] The art witch is a particular kind of art monster; the witch protects herself and she teaches others how to protect themselves. Feminist artists and feminist art historians can be art witches if they want to be. In her book The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016), Alexandra Kokoli asks: ‘Why witches?’[14] She was thinking about why some feminist artists and scholars have been drawn to the figure of the witch since the 1970s. I have responded to Kokoli’s question in an article about Hungarian Surrealist photographer Kati Horna by stating that, of course, the witch is, more than anything, a powerful woman.[15] That is what makes her so dangerous and so feared by the patriarchy.
Given the ways that women, queer people and people of colour have been rendered monstrous through discourse, it is no surprise that the language of monstrosity sometimes pops up in scholarship on queer artists of colour. In their discussion of queer Black artist Nick Cave’s multi-media and multi-sensorial Soundsuits, Crawford uses the aesthetic language of monstrosity, merging it with beauty, to illuminate the radical work that Cave’s Soundsuits do. Crawford states: ‘Insofar as the Soundsuits hinge upon a modified body, they implicate a sort of trans-ness and the promise of all manner of trans-formativity, not only racial and sexual’.[16] This passage evokes Frankenstein’s monster, a character that many queer scholars of horror have discussed in terms of trans identity. For instance, Jack Halberstam has discussed the threatening trans character in Silence of the Lambs (1991; dir. Jonathan Demme).[17] As Halberstam remarks: ‘Monstrosity in The Silence of the Lambs, in fact, is always an effect of the surface as it ripples across fields of criminality, surveillance, and discipline. Monstrosity, in this film, cannot be limited to a body, even a body that kills in order to clothe itself, or a body that cannibalizes in order to feed. Monstrosity is now a disembodied and disembodying force reduced to silence and to blindness’.[18] Halberstam here points out that monstrosity is not only about the body; it is about fears, beliefs, and (mis)information about people who appear to be different from oneself, which often leads to blind hatred and violence. The decadent monster is invigorated by beauty and pleasure, and uses these powerful tools to protect themselves and others who have (undeservedly) been rendered monstrous. Some artists are decadent monsters. Some artists create decadent monsters. Their materials are glitter, metal, leather, porcelain, velvet, rhinestones; anything sparkly, shiny, gorgeous. Decadent monsters protect the vulnerable, and I think they are inviting us to do the same.
Julia Skelly teaches in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Skin Crafts: Affect, Violence and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her book Intersecting Threads: Art, Cloth and Intersectional Feminism will be published by Bloomsbury in February 2026.
Notes
[1] See Susan Stryker, “Sea Beams Glitter,” in When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 87-90.
[2] For more on Shaw’s work, see Patrick Elliott (ed.), Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2018).
[3] Nick Hackworth, ‘Violence and Beauty Collide’, Evening Standard, 1 December 2006; https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/violence-and-beauty-collide-7390990.html.
[4] See Julia Skelly, ‘The Paradox of Excess: Oscar Wilde, Caricature, and Consumption’, in Julia Skelly (ed.), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600-2010 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 137-60.
[5] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed.), The Monster Theory Reader (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 41.
[6] Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
[7] Romi Crawford, ‘Surface and Soul in the Work of Nick Cave’, in Naomi Beckwith (ed.), Nick Cave: Forothermore, ed. by Naomi Beckwith (New York: Delmonico Books, 2022), 43.
[8] For more on this, see Julia Skelly, Intersecting Threads: Art, Cloth and Intersectional Feminism (London: Bloomsbury, 2026).
[9] Tiana Reid, ‘What the People Are Like: Voices from Without’, in Vox Populi, Vox Dei: Tau Lewis (New York: Clarion, 2023), 11.
[10] Crawford, ‘Surface and Soul in the Work of Nick Cave’, 42.
[11] Rosemary Betterton, ‘Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women’s Art’, in An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996), 130-60.
[12] Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (London: Vintage, 2024; originally published 2023).
[13] I also discuss this phenomenon in my book Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
[14] Alexandra Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1-2. See also Adam Alston, ‘“Burn the Witch”: Decadence and the Occult in Contemporary Feminist Performance’, Theatre Research International, 46 (3) (2021), 285-302; and Katy Deepwell, ‘Feminist Interpretations of Witches and the Witch Craze in Contemporary Art by Women,’, The Pomegranate, 21 (2) (2019), 146-71.
[15] Julia Skelly, ‘Masks, Dolls, and Witches: Kati Horna’s Alchemical Photography’, in Woman’s Art Journal, 45 (2) (Fall/Winter 2024), 3-13.
[16] Crawford, ‘Surface and Soul in the Work of Nick Cave’, 43.
[17] On Silence of the Lambs, see Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 161-77.
[18] Ibid., 177.