Life is a long exorcism: horror as mixed race resistance in Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda’s Monstress

ABSTRACT

In Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda’s award-winning speculative comic series Monstress (2015-), protagonist Maika Halfwolf is a woman of many monsters, reminiscent at times of a zombie, vampire, onryō, werewolf, and more. This article argues that the (over)abundance of monster references and other speculative elements are central vehicles for exploring contemporary and historical representations of Asian multiraciality in the United States. Monstress uses the speculative, including monster tropes, to superimpose competing figurations of racial mixture in the United States – from narratives of passing to narratives of treachery to narratives of superheroes. Maika becomes almost incoherent as these meanings are layered upon her character, used to define her story arcs, and visualised upon her body. Liu and Takeda thus draw attention to and unsettle the way knowledge about mixed race Asians is produced and replicated, dreaming of unsignified – of exorcized – multiraciality. At its heart, Monstress uncovers and lauds the agency of mixed race characters within and against the confines of the narratives in which they have long been captured.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical mixed race studies
• Asian American literature
• speculative fiction
• monsters
• post-racial discourse
• superheroes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While Monstress is an ongoing comic, this article will read the series up through 2022.

2. Significantly, US understandings and representations of multiraciality have historically fixated on mixed race individuals with white heritages because mixed race troubles the boundaries of race and thus the privileges of whiteness.

3. See, for example, novels including Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (Ozeki 2013); Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (Lee 2014); and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (Ng 2014) and Our Missing Hearts (Ng 2022).

4. See, for example, LeiLani Nishime’s Undercover Asian (Nishime 2014) and Sika Dagbovie-Mullins & Eric Berlatsky’s Mixed-Race Superheroes (Dagbovie-Mullins and Berlatsky 2021).

5. This has been well-documented in Chris Koenig-Woodyard’s ‘Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels: The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress’ (Koenig-Woodyard 2021). Koenig-Woodyard also discusses some of Liu’s earlier work and its connections to mixed race as a precursor to Monstress, 139–143.

6. Koenig-Woodyard and Rebecca Jones both explore this connection to eugenics via Monstress’ references to World War II; see Koenig-Woodyard 146 and 152 and Rebecca Jones’ ‘“My Body Isn’t My Own”: War, Monsters, and Matriarchy in Monstress’ (2018).

7. See Barbara Creed’s analysis of The Exorcist in The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Creed 1993) for an in-depth examination of women in exorcism films.

8. See additional essays collected in Werner Sollors’ Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Sollers 2000) for further discussion of the tragic mulatta in literature.

9. Additional discussions of passing in Monstress can be found in Koenig-Woodyard 151–152.

10. Maika’s possession by Zinn is a secret only in the early issues of Monstress.

11. Further info on the long history of racial mixtures in the United States as representative of a post-racial future, see work including Tavia Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz (Nyong’o 2009), John Chock Rosa’s ‘“The Coming of the Neo-Hawaiian American Race”’ (Rosa 2001), and Melissa Eriko Poulsen’s Figuring Futures: Early Asian American Mixed Race Literature (Poulsen 2015).

12. For elaboration of this critique, see texts including Nishime’s Undercover Asian and Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz.

13. For discussion of Time’s cover, see the frequently cited Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Female_Man_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Haraway 1997) by Donna Haraway and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Berlant 1997) by Lauren Berlant. For discussion of popular portrayals of Barack Obama, see Celia Rousseau Anderson’s ‘What are you? A CRT Perspective on the Experiences of Mixed Race Persons in “Postracial” America’ (Anderson 2015); Marcia Dawkins’ ‘Mixed Messages: Barack Obama and Post-Racial Politics’ (Dawkins 2010); and Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz.

14. For additional discussion of multiracial Asians in speculative texts, see Nishime’s Undercover Asian and Jinny Huh’s The Arresting Eye (2015). The discussion of Alina in Shadow & Bone was first raised by Dr. Wei Ming Dariotis in her presentation at the 2022 biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies conference.

15. For further discussion on techno-orientalism, see David Roh, Besty Huang, and Greta Niu’s Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Roh, Huang, and Niu 2015).

16. Ibid.

17. See Koenig-Woodyard for in-depth discussion of Daken’s character arc, 141–142.