I quote this passage here to underscore the persistent critical difficulty in describing not only Frankenstein’s creature but also his “monstrous” gender. Notably binary, Butler’s rhetoric describing the creature’s gender representation relies on terms such as “destabilized,” “liminal,” “excess,” and “unspeakable.” For Butler, “monster” functions in a space where “manhood” and “femininity” meet. then the “monster” functions as a liminal zone of gender, not merely the disavowed dimensions of manhood, but the unspeakable limits of femininity as well. If the monster is really what a “man” looks like when we consider his aggressive form, or if this is really what a “woman” looks like when her own gendered place is destabilized. The novel Frankenstein manages to keep women in their place, and yet the monster may well be carrying that excess of gender that fails to fit properly into “man” and “woman” as conventionally defined. In her recent afterword for Barbara Johnson’s A Life with Mary Shelley (2014), Judith Butler describes Frankenstein’s creature in terms of both gender and monstrosity: Jolene Zigarovich The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein Notable among her books are Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge, 2013) and Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle, 2006).SPECIAL ISSUE ON FRANKENSTEIN (Edited by Michael Griffin and Nicole Lobdell) She has directed the Emmy-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005), which brings together eye-witness accounts of trans women and drag queens who fought police harassment in San Francisco in August 1966. She has also been executive director of the LGBT Historical Society of San Francisco, which collects LGBTQ history and makes it available to the public.

Besides her academic work, she has been closely linked with trans activism as a member of the group Transgender Nation, of which she was one of the founders in the early 1990s. Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona, Susan Stryker has written articles and books like Transgender History (published in Spanish as Historia de lo trans (Continta me tienes, 2018), which have played an essential role in the development of transgender studies and in shaping the theoretical debate on transsexuality in recent years.

Stryker transgender