In this essay, I employ Judith Butlers theories of gender performativity to examine the construction of the Monstrosity in Howard Phillips Lovecraft?s two works The Outsider and The Thing on the Doorstep. Focusing on the character?s monstrous attributes, how they are seen by themselves, by others and not least by the reader, I examine how their Monstrosity is created and strengthened by dehumanizing processes. I argue that Lovecraft through his narrative technique complicates the relation between Monstrosity and humanity in his characters, the result of which is a reader left to determine how monstrous, or human, the creature really is.

While the strategy of lending a voice to the monstrous is a well known aspect of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's works, the female monster is a notable exception to this case. In this thesis, I excavate a theory of female Monstrosity through a reading of some of Lovecraft's most read stories and the agency of female characters that appears within. Comparing these female registers of Monstrosity to their masculine counterpart, I develop a concept of female Monstrosity manifested through categories of class, race and gender with the help of Judith Halberstams theories of Monstrosity.Rather than treating these women as active characters, I argue that Lovecraft's inability to handle these monsters forces him to literally put them away ? in attics, cellars, or boxes. These are the marginalized positions from which these women elaborate a monstrous form that transcends the boundaries of sex, gender, class and race.

The novel American Psycho was first published in 1991. It recieved harsh criticism and was viewed as a work of heterosexism, misogyny and pointless violence. Despite the criticism, the protagonist, a wealthy serial killer yuppie namned Patrick Bateman, fascinated the readers. He hides his Monstrosity behind a façade of heteronormativity, but this essay shows that the norms in American Psycho are fragile. Batemans relationships are shallow, his identity is constructed out of traditional masculinitynorms and even though he?s homophobic there?s a homoerotic undertone in the text, as well as gothic patterns that give the novel a fair amount of queerness too.