INTRODUCTION: MONSTERS AND MARVELS

Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is the second video in my series on the monsters of childhood innocence. Once again, we’re going to ask the question of which children are allowed to be seen as “innocent,” and which children are seen as monsters instead?

This is also my first video to unexpectedly become the first part of a two-parter: turns out, there’s just too much to say about childhood, monsters, innocence, and disability. So today, we’re going to cover some historical ground – and talk about why the history of disability in society is so relevant to childhood today. First I’m going to bring you all the way back to the Renaissance, and then we’ll fast forward to the first few decades of the twentieth century to discuss two very different “monster stories” on film: The Black Stork from 1917, and the infamous Freaks from 1932. Then, in two weeks, I’ll be back with some more (relatively) recent monsters from films like The Brood, Orphan, and the oeuvre of Ari Aster. So if that interests you, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss the next installment, but for today, I hope you are in the mood for some monster history.

Travel with me, if you would, all the way back to Early Modern Europe, also known as the Renaissance. Fun fact about me: I was first introduced to monster studies as a field of theory and scholarship in an Early Modern Lit class that I took as an undergraduate at Knox College. Shout out to Dr. Lori Schroeder for ushering me into my life’s work. In addition to the expected selections from Shakespeare and Milton, Dr. Schroeder also included works of nonfiction on her syllabus, including medical texts. Now, to today’s standards, Early Modern medical texts do kind of stretch the boundaries of what we might consider “nonfiction,” because not a ton of the information included in these documents is anything that turned out to be accurate. But what they lack in real science, they certainly make up for in lots of chewy cultural information that can help us trace the evolution of some ideas about childhood that persist to this day.

One such text in that long ago class was Ambroise Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels, which I have since had the fun of teaching in one of my classes. It is a wild read nowadays, but at the time, it came from a highly respected source. Paré was a sixteenth-century French surgeon, successful and prosperous. He wrote and disseminated surgical texts in French (as opposed to Latin), which got him in some hot water for allowing closed knowledge to move beyond the faculty of the medical institutions of the day. In her introduction to her translation of On Monsters and Marvels, Dr. Janis L. Pallister describes Paré as “concerned with the suffering of all mankind regardless of creed or politics” (xxi). In the writings he produced, he was earnestly engaged with understanding and easing medical hardship – just like the majority of medical professionals today. But as most people with really any kind of disability today have experienced, good intentions and hidden biases are not mutually exclusive.

In On Monsters and Marvels, Paré set out to document all the potential causes of – well, what he calls “monsters” and “marvels.” Monsters, according to him, are “things that appear outside the course of Nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune)” (3). His first examples are “a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members over and above the ordinary” (3). Marvels, meanwhile, are “things which happen that are completely against Nature” (3). These include “when a woman will give birth to a serpent, or to a dog” (3). So like the real National Enquirer kind of stuff. Despite obviously existing on a spectrum of actual possibility here, both monsters and marvels are born different. Paré also has another category, “maimed persons,” which include blind people, intersex people (“hermaphrodites” in his parlance), and people with atypical limbs or facial features. So I suppose these don’t necessarily rise to the level of “monsters,” but the “maiming” that we’re looking at here is also primarily congenital. In short, Paré is interested in so-called birth defects: what causes them and if they can be prevented.

Paré acknowledges that in many cases, they cannot. He attributes the first possible causes of monsters to God: both his glory and his wrath. The former includes Biblical examples of disability that are then cured by Jesus – the disability existed in the first place so it could later prove the power of God. The wrath part of the equation, meanwhile, includes a lot of the “marvels” – the totally impossible occurrences, like giving birth to a different species. This, Paré says, often comes from breaking religious laws about reproduction, including interdictions against having sex while a woman is menstruating. So even though God is still the cause here, we are now getting into Paré’s other main reason for monsters: parents.

If there is too much or too little “seed,” you may wind up with a monster, as well as if the seed is rotten or mingled. Womb issues could also be at play: it may be too small, or the mother’s posture or crossing her legs may misshape it. There’s a certain logic to some of these theories: too much seed can lead to conjoined twins; a misshapen womb can lead to twisted limbs, etc. The imagination of the pregnant mother can also be a dangerous thing, like how if a woman meditates too long on an image of St. John the Baptist in his hair shirt, she can give birth to a furry daughter. You know, that thing that happens all the time.

Injuries to a pregnant mother can also be to blame, and Paré does acknowledge the existence of hereditary illness, so some of his observations do hold up scientifically. The doctors of the past were working with a limited set of tools, but though we may scoff at some of their conclusions now, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that everyone before our time was foolish or ridiculous. If I were in Paré’s shoes, I probably wouldn’t come up with half as many legitimate explanations as he did.

With that said, Paré does round out his list of the causes of monsters with “the artifice of wicked spital beggars” and, of course, demons and devils. Like begets like: monsters lead to monsters.

But now I’m sort of mixing my metaphors. Demons and what Paré calls “monsters,” though to him both exist, are not in the same category of being. Despite considering congenital monsters bad omens, the people themselves that Paré describes aren’t evil. They don’t have ill intent. They’re just results. This is a different definition of monster than the one I typically use when discussing fictional characters. These monsters are positioned outside of normative humanity, and against Nature, but not necessarily imbued with malevolent will. In fact, Paré isn’t particularly interested in their “will” at all, just their biology.

Similarly, Michele de Montaigne, writing around contemporaneously with Paré, penned an essay called “Of a monstrous child.” He described a child who had the incomplete body of a twin still fused to his. However, though he identified this child as a monster, he also wrote, “Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein.” So again, there is no attribution of malice to this “monster.” Monstrosity as a category simply describes physical difference – but still, physical difference great enough to call the category of “humanity” into question in the eyes of these able-bodied writers and their societies.

In their article “The DisHuman Child,” Dan Goodley, Katherine Runswick-Cole, and Kirsty Liddiard use this De Montaigne passage as a jumping-off point for their analysis of the disabled child’s relationship to this social construct of humanity. They write, “discussion of the monstrous is inevitably bound up with discussion the human. Monsters provoke fear, but also fascination, as their ghostly presence, same but not quite, threatens to re-position or even to dissolve the boundaries of ‘normality’ (Shildrick, 1996)” (772). We, as a species aware of its own mortality, have a lot of anxieties about our bodies. Inevitably, for all of us, our bodies will slip away from whatever our cultures consider ideal. They can do this gradually with age and illness or suddenly with violence, but a loss of bodily functionality comes for us all. Visibly disabled people have long unwillingly been seen as an uncomfortable symbol of this fragility. And that kind of goes double for disabled kids, especially once childhood starts to be associated with the uncorrupted ideal state of nature.

Now, in my previous video, I gave a brief overview of the origins of the construction of “childhood innocence,” as we understand the concept today, in the Western world. If you haven’t watched that yet, I recommend checking it out after this one, but the thing that’s important to note here is that in Paré and De Montaigne’s time, we haven’t gotten to this construction yet. We’re two centuries back from Rousseau and his belief in the Natural child who only loses his innate goodness through contact with society. But we can see here that the preoccupation with how childhood is related to “Nature” – Nature as it is supposed to be, as ordained by a divine Creator – predates the conclusions of the Romantic era. Which makes sense: we start out as children. Why wouldn’t we look to this part of life to work out our big questions about what humanity means? Consequently, a lot of cultural ideas about disability and cultural ideas about childhood are developed in tandem. That also means that, if we want to understand the ways that either disability or childhood function in society today – and the ways in which disabled people and children are marginalized – we’ve got to look at both at the same time.

We can already see a big theme of this tandem marginalization in On Monsters and Marvels, in which the disabled children are quite literally objectified: classified, categorized, labeled with terms that highlight their inherent inhumanity. Paré doesn’t hate them; as a surgeon, he wants to help them. He’s also clearly fascinated by them; as Goodley et al point out, that is also a feature of monstrosity. But Paré does very much want to prevent the births of these monsters – at least the ones that can be prevented, mostly through policing the behavior of pregnant people. Don’t cross your legs; don’t imagine too much. If you do, you may give birth to something not quite human. This medical attitude would only be amplified with time, as it came into contact with beliefs in childhood innocence as they gained a stronghold in Western philosophy. The language of monstrosity was already there, but as issues of innocence and the corruption thereof became more and more important to notions of childhood, that perceived monstrosity of disability moves from objectified to antagonistic. The specter of bad genes is specifically out to get your child. That’s right: now it’s time to talk about eugenics.

ONE OF US: THE BLACK STORK AND FREAKS

Allow me to introduce you to the worst movie you’ve never seen: the 1917 silent film The Black Stork. Right away, we can sense the hysterical melodrama with that title – and we can, and should, point and laugh. I believe we simply must allow ourselves to mock eugenicists, even as we more seriously oppose them: it’s a dangerous ideology, definitely, but it’s also so fundamentally absurd. The Black Stork. Calm down.

And make no mistake, this movie is eugenicist with a capital E. For those of you who may be shaky on the definition, eugenics is a pseudoscientific belief system and set of practices aimed towards perfecting the human race through selective reproduction. Basically, it’s a complete misappropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory. In the nineteenth century, when these ideas were new, a bunch of people saw the phrase “survival of the fittest” and thought, hey, we can do that on purpose! Spoiler alert: no, we can’t. Evolution occurs via lucky mutations surviving through the generations because they serve a beneficial function in an ecological niche. It is not a process of perfection. Take the human back. It’s shaped the way it is because our distant ancestors benefited from bipedalism, for both imminent survival reasons due to habitat changes and then also holding babies reasons as brains got bigger and babies were born less able to care for themselves because those big ol’ heads wouldn’t come out if they cooked any longer – an issue itself that was compounded by our developing bipedalism, because there’s no linear cause and effect here, but instead an endless feedback loop. (General apologies to my human origins professor in undergrad for this not enormously articulate rendition of stuff you taught me nearly 15 years ago.) Anyway, our backs are the way they are because we better fit our long distant niches that way, but I don’t think anyone would argue that this part of our anatomy is perfect. As we age, if you sit too long, stand too long, move too much or too little, sneeze while looking behind you one time, you’re gonna mess up your back. That’s just part of having a human body. Biological perfection straight up is not a thing. As a goal, it is literally physically impossible.

Of course, as we know, “humanity” is not only a biological category; it is a sociocultural one. This is what Goodley et al. explore in their article – as always, the works cited is in the description. They title their work “The DisHuman Child” precisely because they want to call attention to the negotiations around our cultural ideas about humanity that disability forces us to have. Goodley et al. write, “We want to ask what disability does to typical, common sense normative human categories of adult, child, youth and family. How might disability affirm some of the ways in which these categories are lived out whilst, simultaneously, demanding new ways of living (dis/life)? When we think of the goals of capitalism, science, medicine and citizenship, what assumptions are these huge societal practices based upon, and in what ways does disability disrupt these assumptions (dis/capitalism, dis/science, dis/medicine and dis/citizenship)?” (773). In all of the categories that they name, in the Western context certainly, a major collective goal is “progress.” Progress towards what? Well, a more perfect society – as defined by those with the most to gain, of course. When the impossibility of this “perfection” by things like disability is made clear, you can either renegotiate your definitions, as Goodley et al. encourage us to do … or try to eradicate the problem.

So despite the inherent absurdity of its central premise, too many people still fall into the allure of eugenicist rhetoric – though most people these days would deny that terminology, even if they’re spouting the same old nonsense. It’s not too hard to see why this philosophy could be seductive. It’s about health, now and for the future! Who doesn’t want health? Who, for instance, wouldn’t want to Make America Healthy Again?

Well, what do we have to do in order to make that happen?

The Black Stork has some ideas. In this film, a heroic eugenicist doctor, called Dr. Dickey in the movie but played by Dr. Henry Haiselden, an actual eugenicist essentially playing himself, presides over the birth of a newborn with various and sundry (poorly defined) physical disabilities. You see, the baby’s father selfishly hid from his wife “the blood taint of an indiscreet ancestor,” and that decision resulted in a defective child. Dickey/Haiselden – I’m just going to call him by his real name from here on out – declares that, while he could save the child with surgery, it would be far better to let nature take its course and allow the baby to die, because “There are times when saving a life is a greater crime than taking one.” He’d already made this point when he paraded the disabled children in his institution in front of the prospective parents, decrying the medical advancements that allowed them to live. Haiselden believes, “It’s not the fault of the child. But someone is to blame.” After all, “As its babies, so is the nation.” The new mother, however, does not heed his warning and summons other surgeons to save her child, even though Haiselden protests that doing so is against the will of God, who clearly wishes for this child to die. So begins a lifetime of despair. The child is ostracized as an unlucky jinx as a boy. As a man, he frightens those in polite society, despite just having like … a curved spine. Not that this plot would be at all justified with more pronounced markers of visual differences, but the horrified reactions of everyone around him are rendered just so absurd when it’s like, my man has scoliosis. Chill out.

Anyway, “Unable to longer endure the constant humiliation and embarrassment caused by his deformity, he leaves home and becomes a derelict of the streets.” He eventually decides to go kill his mom for her crime of having him, but he can’t bring himself to go through with it. He goes to kill Haiselden, but upon reading his eugenicist writings, realizes that he’s not to blame, either. So then he goes to the doctor’s lounge filled with the physicians who saved him as a baby and opens fire. He serves a prison sentence, but then after his release, he finds a disabled woman and starts a family, at which point, “The horrible evil grows and grows.” He and his malformed children live in abject poverty.

But then – his mother wakes up! It was just a dream. The child is still a newborn, and with relief, she gives the go-ahead to Haiselden to euthanize him. Haiselden administers the lethal drug, and a ghostly Jesus receives the baby’s soul: innocent, but only in death.

So, you know. There’s a lot going on there. The Black Stork is miserable to watch – even in its time, no one thought it was a well-made movie, whether or not people agreed with its message – but there are two details that I think are super important for any discussion about childhood and disability – and monstrosity. One is that “euthanasia” scene, in which Jesus receives the baby’s soul. Throughout the film, the disabled son is depicted as a monster: against the natural laws of humanity, and ultimately antagonistic towards it. Unlike Paré’s monsters, who are only unnatural, this character does become “evil.” Even when he’s not committing direct gun violence, he and his eventual family are a drain on society; they actively make the world worse for other people. Because of this man’s disability, he becomes a derelict, a drunk, and a violent criminal, and his offspring are doomed to the same fate. But as soon as that nightmare ends and the baby dies, his “natural” childhood innocence is restored to him – just as the “natural” and literally divine balance of life and death is restored, with only the strong surviving. Haiselden says it’s not the child’s fault – at least initially. But the innocence of the disabled child is not imagined in the same way as the innocence of the able-bodied child. The dead baby’s innocence is the beautiful sinless sacrifice of martyrdom: of ending so that others may thrive. But able-bodied innocence is imagined as promise for the future.

That’s the other detail that really stands out to me in this movie: “As its babies, so is the nation.” I talked in my last video about how Rousseau imagined childhood as a state of deep connection to nature – including what he believed was original human nature, unencumbered by the corrupting influences of society. If a child is given a “natural education,” allowed to learn through experience and delay social influence, he (and we definitely are talking he here) can grow up to be a better sort of adult than the ones he is inheriting the world from. Childhood innocence may not last forever, but if cultivated correctly, it can transform into moral adulthood. What I see in eugenicist propaganda like The Black Stork is an offshoot from this construction of childhood innocence as a force for good in the future. We need to invest, eugenicists argue, in the right children, so that they can become those moral adults – which, due to the pervasiveness of the Protestant work ethic in, for example, American society, means productive adults. Innocent childhood must be able to grow into the kinds of national citizens who will, well, Make America Great, by being part of the systems of labor and capitalism that grow the strength of the nation. If a child cannot do that, then the only way to maintain the innocence of childhood – to be a force for good instead of a monstrous force for evil – the child must perish before becoming an unproductive adult. That’s eugenics.

This is why the social study of childhood is so important for understanding these systems of ableism. Constructions of innocence are so tied up in constructions of futurity. We safeguard the former to ensure the latter. But what do we imagine as a worthy future? Whose futures do we care about – and what kinds of futures do we fear?

To explore those questions, let’s look at another controversial movie of yesteryear: Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. This movie has spent decades being banned and censored, and it essentially ruined Browning’s career, even though just a year earlier he had put out the iconic Dracula. It takes place in a traveling circus of which the “freak show” is a large part. The sideshow performers generally get along well with the able-bodied performers of the circus; they have formed a tightknit community. Though Freaks is billed as a horror movie, it really isn’t one until the very end. Most of the runtime is dedicated to vignettes of circus life that really humanize the disabled performers – who are played by actual circus sideshow performers – to an extent that can surprise modern audiences. Browning himself had spent a great deal of his life working within circus environments, so he had also forged friendships with people deemed “freaks.” He portrays them as having the same kinds of concerns and interests as anyone else – including romantic interests. Now, sometimes this is played for laughs, particularly in the case of conjoined twins and their distaste for one another’s suitors. The audience is clearly assumed to be primarily able-bodied. Otherwise, the pointed normalcy of the “freaks” would not be as surprising or ironic as it is often framed as being. But there also is real sympathy for and with the performers. For instance, when the bearded lady gives birth, it is a cause for celebration within the community. It is decidedly not the tragedy that plays out in The Black Stork. This community of embodied difference wants to exist as it is, and wants to keep existing in the future, and therefore its children are imbued with the same hopeful futurity and loving innocence as able-bodied children in the mainstream culture outside the circus.

Yet that is not the only thing going on in this movie.

The main romantic entanglement of the film, and its primary plot throughline amid the vignettes, is the fracturing relationship of the little people Hans and Frieda. Hans has fallen for the able-bodied trapeze artist Cleopatra, who encourages his affections because of his inherited wealth. Cleopatra intends to marry Hans for his money and then kill him so she can take it all. Unlike many of the other able-bodied members of the circus, she and her accomplice and lover Hercules the strongman have nothing but disdain for the sideshow performers. She manages to hide this well enough until her wedding banquet with Hans, when the sideshow performers carry out a ritual to welcome her into their fold. They pass around a goblet of wine as they chant, “Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, we accept her, we accept her. Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, one of us, one of us.” Drunk and enraged, she yells, “No! Dirty, slimy freaks!” Hans is devastated by her outburst, and she taunts him: “What are you going to do? Are you a man or a baby?” He protests: “Please, please. You make me ashamed.” In what I personally think is the most upsetting sequence of the film, Hercules then forces Hans onto Cleopatra’s shoulders, and she capers around with him on her back as though he were a child, while he covers his face.

Eventually, the sideshow performers discover that not only is Cleopatra awful, she is actively murderous. Only then do we transition into horror. The sideshow performers pursue Cleopatra and Hercules through the rain; armed with knives, they crawl through the mud under the circus carts. The visual language of the film clearly becomes that of the horror genre, entirely different from the previous straightforward shots of the domestic vignettes. And the viewer is very much positioned in the perspective of the able-bodied would-be victim. Again, that able-bodied assumed audience has been present throughout the film, but while previously we were positioned to be sympathetic – and to an extent we still are, because we’re not supposed to like Cleopatra – we are now, in this moment of violence, also positioned to fear the disabled – and to fear disability itself. Because that is the vengeance that is enacted upon Cleopatra: she is mutilated, tarred and feathered, with her limbs and tongue destroyed. She is now on display in the sideshow, but devoid of the agency and community of the rest of the performers.

So like, what do we do with all that?

A ton of critical ink has been spilled about Freaks, and there are lots of scholarly opinions about how to read this film. Personally, I kind of approach it in a similar way to how I talked about Uncle Tom’s Cabin in my previous video: it is a more-humanizing-than-average-for-its-time attempt to depict an oppressed minority from a member of a majority group, but it also definitely reproduces a ton of damaging tropes and stereotypes. It’s not eugenicist. It’s not The Black Stork. For its able-bodied audience, it wants to show disability in others as sympathetic – even ordinary. Until Browning’s horror director sensibilities kick in and you get the weird cultish chant. And then, of course, while disability in others may be fine, the prospect of disability for oneself as an able-bodied person is still meant to be terrifying – monstrous.

Equally complex and contradictory is the way this film depicts the association of disability and childhood. We’ve already seen how Hans is humiliated by being treated as a child: a particular cruelty given his specific disability. Here, being treated as a child means having his wishes and feelings disregarded, along with his bodily autonomy. So that gives us a lot of insight into how both the concepts of “disability” and “childhood” are constructed in our society, and the social roles that people within these categories are restricted to.

While that moment feels like a salient critique, the film also uncritically falls into reproducing these stereotypes in other scenes. In an earlier part in the movie, two men come upon a group of performers picnicking in the forest. Most of this group is made up of the performers with microcephaly, or atypically small heads, which also involves intellectual disability. The men are horrified and try to chase them away, and the performers retreat to the embrace of the able-bodied Madame Tetralini, who works for the circus. She refers to the performers as “children,” and one of the men objects, “Children! They’re monsters!” Madam Tetralini insists that children is “what most of them are,” and that they deserve to play in the sunshine. She’s right about that last part: they should get to play and be outside and do what they want. But the performers are adults. By calling them “children,” Madam Tetralini is asserting their innocence – saying that they are not monsters – but also their deficit. This is a common conflation that people with developmental and intellectual disabilities in particular are faced with. Adultism and ableism often go hand in hand, because both envision a fully, typically developed adult as the natural end point and pinnacle of humanity. E. Kay M. Tisdall explores this connection in her article “The Challenge and Challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from Disability Studies and Research with Disabled Children.” As the title would suggest, Tisdall asserts that scholars of childhood and scholars of disability should work together and learn from one another’s theories, given the interconnectedness of their fields. She writes, “Children and disabled people have been treated as ‘lesser’ because they are positioned as dependent on adults or carers/able-bodied people respectively” (183). And as nice as they may sound on the surface, our collective constructions of childhood innocence – or “childlike” innocence, as it is applied to many disabled people – reinforce this deficit narrative. Remember, innocence is not only about moral purity, but also ignorance – a lack of knowledge. Having less awareness, less understanding than adults – or people without disabilities.

And while Freaks advocates for sympathy, even genuine fondness, for these people, it still demonstrates how these “lesser” categories of humanity are seen as a horrifying place to be for those who have (temporarily) risen above them. If that’s how you’re born, we may “charitably” see you as innocent – not a complete adult, but blameless, like a child – but if an able-bodied person acts immorally, then any bodily damage that comes upon them is their just punishment, because it diminishes them. And in Freaks, it’s not God or the Devil visiting his wrath upon the wrongdoers, as they do in Paré’s theories, but the disabled people themselves.

Now, here is where I had originally planned to transition to a discussion of further developments of the disabled-person-as-evil-villain trope in monster movies with analysis of The Brood and Orphan. But this is already pretty long, and there is one more thing we have to talk about before we leave our discussion of eugenics. So, as I said at the start of the video, part two of this discussion of childhood, disability, and monstrosity will come in two weeks, but before then, let’s close out this conversation with a look at why all of this disability history matters so much for kids today.

MAHA: EUGENICS REDUX

In April of this year, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the (sigh) Secretary of Health and Human Services, said, “Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

In this statement, RFK Jr. offers a mix of appeals to our dual desires for childhood innocence and futurity. “They’ll never play baseball.” What could be a more idyllic, more American childhood activity than that? Wholesome games of catch with dad, happy little kids – wiped out. “They’ll never write a poem.” Both the promise of art in the child’s future, but also the image of the dreamy Romantic youngster in tune with Nature – wiped out. And then, of course, there’s the stuff that I’m going to cynically assume really matters to people in positions of power like RFK: the taxes, the jobs, the productivity – all wiped out. He literally calls children “our greatest resource.” In other words: “As its babies, so is the nation.”

So yeah, the highest health official in the American government is openly agreeing with the monstrosizing rhetoric of The Black Stork. Autism is clearly his favored monstrous disability. He personifies – but certainly does not humanize – this diagnosis and imbues it with malevolent will: “Autism destroys families.” It’s out to get you and your kid. It is the “horrible evil,” in the parlance of Henry Haiselden. Disability becomes monstrosity itself. And remember, monsters are narrative metaphors. Every monster is also a monster story, and that story has victims and heroes – as defined by the story’s narrator. The victims here? Why, according to our narrator Bobby, the innocent children. And the heroes? Wouldn’t you know it, ol’ Bob himself, by fearlessly going to war against the monster.

But the story does not match reality. “Autism” is not an autonomous entity. It does not exist outside of the people who have it. The only way the monster can be identified is by pointing at the bodyminds of autistic people – by making them, the real people, including real kids, the monsters in this story. If childhood is defined by “innocence” and by the promise of futurity, then those kids who cannot embody those ideals in the way that we have come to collectively define them get kicked out of the category of childhood – and the category of humanity – into the category of monstrosity.

These monster stories have material consequences in children’s lives, and when we’re talking about human bodies and brains, those consequences can be and too often are death. The eugenicist storytelling of The Black Stork reframes the child’s death as a good thing. Eugenics literally means “good birth,” but really it’s a belief in the existence of “good deaths.” Whether via euthanasia or sterilization or the phasing out of disability through perfect breeding – reminder: literally impossible – eugenics celebrates death, welcomes it, valorizes it. It puts death in the role of the hero in the monster story.

In an article for the blog Science-Based Medicine, oncologist David Gorski analyzes the broader antivax movement in the context of eugenics. This article also came out April of this year, after a second child died in the Texas measles outbreak. Gorski borrows the term “soft eugenics” from an episode of the Conspirituality Podcast, hosted by Derek Beres and Matt Remski. He does so because, “Eugenics, after all, implies the active removal of those thought to be inferior, either through sterilization or outright killing, and, say what you will about RFK Jr. and the antivaccine movement, it’s difficult to accuse them of actively doing that. What the antivaccine movement does—and has always done—is basically “let nature take its course”; i.e., let nature do the culling. The child who survives was “fit,” and the child who doesn’t wasn’t.” That’s probably a fair distinction to make in terms of actual medical practices – it’s true that RFK Jr. and his ilk aren’t literally euthanizing anyone like Haiselden – but in terms of the philosophy, the similarities are much greater than the differences. Dr. Gorski notes that this approach of “naturally” culling the herd was rampant during the height of the COVID pandemic, when mask and vaccine skeptics were constantly stressing that COVID is only deadly for those with “underlying conditions.” Even if that were true, which it’s not, that only matters at all if there is an underlying assumption that those deaths are less bad than the deaths of non-disabled people – that those deaths are maybe even ultimately a good thing. The weak die, the strong survive. The children with real futures, the futures the nation wants, get to become adults. And the dead children? Well, once they are no longer a monstrous threat to the health of everyone else, then they can reclaim their innocence in Jesus’ arms, just like in The Black Stork.

Soooo … that’s where part one of this topic ends. I don’t really have a way to pull out of the downer ending on this one, folks, other than to say that we need to be willing to engage in the project of renegotiating our ideas about humanity, as laid out in the scholarship of Goodley et al. And these essays on monster stories is my way of contributing to that project, as much as I can. I hope that you are enjoying these efforts, or at least finding them thought-provoking when they’re too dark to really “enjoy.” If you are, then please go ahead and like the video, subscribe to the channel, and leave a comment down below. I would love to grow this channel into a strong public space for discussion, and any engagement you can give the video helps me to do that. In two weeks, I will be back with part two of this topic, so I hope I will see you then back here on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• The Black Stork, dir. Leopold & Theodore Wharton (1917)
• Freaks, dir. Tod Browning (1932)

References:

• Goodley, D., Runswick-Cole, K., & Liddiard, K. (2016). The DisHuman child. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 770–784.
• Gorski, D. (2025, Apr. 7). Measles, MAHA, and “soft eugenics.” Science-Based Medicine. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/measles-maha-and-soft-eugenics/
• Kennedy, R.F. (2025, Apr. 16). Secretary Kennedy on Autism. CSPAN. https://www.c-span.org/clip/news-conference/secretary-kennedy-on-autism/5160723
• Paré, A. (1573, 1982). On Monsters and Marvels (J.L. Pallister, Ed. and Trans.). The University of Chicago Press.
• Tisdall, E.K.M. (2012). The Challenge and Challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from Disability Studies and Research with Disabled Students. Children & Society, 26(3), 181-191.