Unbecoming Female Monsters

Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work founded on the idea that female monstrosity is buried within cultural constructs. It looks at the cult of the female body as a contested site of patriarchal fears and anxieties around female sexuality and its reproductive power. Cristina Santos explores how any process of female sexual development occurring outside societyΓÇÖs predetermined acceptable behavior patterns for women is considered deviant, monstrous, and/or degenerate. This type of socio-cultural censorship of female self-expression then leads to the prejudgment of the female by external forces within confining and inauthentic roles for the individual. Ultimately, those women who chose an authentic self-expression of their sexuality run the risk of possible exclusion from their community and punishment for not adhering to the dominant normative code.