Monstrous Beauty: The Alternative Aesthetic of Difference in Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this article, I analyze Emil Ferris' unique visual and textual narratives in her graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by using Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (enstrangement/defamiliarization) as well as humanistic theories of monstrosity to show how Ferris reframes concepts of monstrosity and alterity/difference to prompt her readers to reevaluate their biases. I argue that Ferris' unique aesthetic "enstranges" the past to create monstrous beauty—provoking her readers to embrace the weird and undefined, to reexamine the familiar, and to reevaluate what we consider monstrous and beautiful. Ferris employs various literary and artistic devices to enstrange. Firstly, she enstranges her own artistic form, punctuating her narrative with horror comic covers, reproductions of artwork from the Art Institute of Chicago, and experimenting with different text and comic styles. Secondly, she "enstranges" her protagonist by adopting the character's preferred self-image in her depictions rather than how others see her. The ultimate effects of these strategies of enstrangement are to force her readers to grapple with an alternative aesthetic of difference that reframes the historical memory of the Holocaust and the experience of coming of age as a queer woman in the 1960s in Chicago by using influences from gothic and horror genres that allow us to grasp the emotional impact of structural misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, and general fear of difference.