Introduction: Monsters and Performance Culture: Five New Theses / Michael M. Chemers and Analola Santana -- Mythic Deviance: 1. Bali’s Rangda and Barong in Cosmic Balancing / Kathy Foley -- 2. Exterminating the Phantom: Nativist Constructions of Contagion and Monsters in Nineteenth-Century New York City / Mia Levenson -- 3. Married to the Monster: Gender and Moral Ambiguity on the Gothic Stage / Aoise Stratford -- 4. The Xtáabay as Monstrous Woman: Gender in Maya Cultural Production in the Yucatán Peninsula / Sarah Campbell -- Forbidden Eroticism: 5. Monstrous Arousals: La Rose, Un Faune, La Faune / Penny Farfan -- 6. Girl/Not Girl: The Hemispheric Monsters of Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Druglord / Lisa Jackson-Schebetta -- 7. Defending the Patriarchy: The Monstrous (Queer) Other and the Anti-Carnivalesque / Catherine (Katya) Vrtis -- 8. Monsters of Africa and the Loss of Identity / Anita Gonzalez -- The Monstrous Body: 9. A Genealogy of the Fu Manchu Moustache / Esther Kim Lee -- 10. Uncanny Affect, Performing Prosthetics: Disability, Monstrosity, and the Puppet / Laura Purcell-Gates -- 11. Monstrosity in a Pandemic: Hypercapacity, Debility, and Death in Repo! The Genetic Opera / Samuel Yates -- 12. On the Afterlife of Teratological Specimens / Margaret Werry -- Strange Families: 13. "She Ain’t Gonna Break": Theorizing the Life, Bare Life, and Living Dead Girls in The Devil’s Rejects / K. Scarlett Harrington and Bernadette Marie Calafell -- 14. Nuclear Normativity, Monstrous Masculinity, and Matter in Burning Vision / Liz Fairchild -- 15. Undocumented Zombies: US-Mexican Immigration, The Walking Dead, and the Effort/Shape of Monsters / Jeff Kaplan

"Monsters in Performance boasts an impressive range of contemporary essays that delve into topical themes such as race, gender, and disability, to explore what constitutes monstrosity within the performing arts. These fascinating essays from leading and emerging scholars explore representation in performance, specifically concerning themselves with attempts at social disqualification of "undesirables." Throughout, the writers employ the concept of "monstrosity" to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant. The editors take a range of previously isolated critical inquiries – including bioethics, critical race studies, queer studies, and televisual studies - and merge them to create an accessible and dynamic platform which unifies these ranges of representations." -- Utgivarens hemsida.