Monster Bodies of the Digital Freakshow: Between the Moral Monster and the War-Machines

Abstract

This article elaborates a theoretical-critical itinerary to account for contemporary representations of the monstrous body, considering it as a device that challenges norms and blurs traditional categories such as identity and subjectivity. A technography and a digital ethnography of identity representations in TikTok was carried out, including archiving and classification of publications and contents of subjectivities-corporalities that correspond to two ways of being a machine and to the notion of machinic agency according to Deleuze. From this field, critical categories that emerged from that register are proposed: the incomplete, the non-binary, the disposable and the posthuman. The study suggests that TikTok can be seen as a cartography of monstrous bodies circulating online, challenging traditional notions of normality and pathology. This representation of the monstrous body is a reaction to the transformation of social norms in semiocapitalism, where the body is depathologized and the meaning of the monster acquires a double significance: that of the moral monster, trapped in normopathic logic; and that of the war machine, as a nomadic, subaltern body, which is being constructed as an artist of itself.