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Since the rise of rationalism (Bond, 1935) the imagination has often been considered too subjective, and at times regarded with scholarly skepticism (Burke, 2008). Yet, imagination seems to provide basic psychological functions for the human intellect and our understanding particularly of large problems (Hillman, 1975), (Winnicott, 1971). More than the mere ‘fancy’ criticized by Dr Johnson (Havens, 1943), the imagination serves both speculative and interpretive functions, displaying distinct use of cerebral imagery to solve complex environmental and interpersonal challenges. Yorke (2013) argues that humans experience the world dialectically, interpreting everything as cause and effect. Imagination plays a vital role in these universal narratives, shaping our cultural heritage, expression and experience (Zittoun & Gläveanu, 2018). Our oldest tales feature monsters, creatures who are often more interesting and memorable than the heroes who fight them. Halberstam (1995) theorises that monsters are meaning machines. Monsters serve an admonitionary role, and their transgressive nature defines them while displaying a distinct visuality. Like imagination, monsters enable us to analyse and approach difficult topics in innovative ways.

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century (King, 1985). Imagination, the visual and the monstrous find a unique balance in his works. Using Lovecraft's copious correspondence, his drawings and his 1927 short story The Call of Cthulhu as a lens, the relationships between imagination, the visual and the monstrous are examined. These postulate an underlying mutual interdependence between the normative and the monstrous and suggest Lovecraft's imaginative use of the visual and monstrous to transgress the bounds of conventional epistemologies and experiences, thereby displacing the anthropocentric focus of conventional narratives.

Monsters, from ghouls and zombies to shoggoths and Cthulhu, have always fascinated humans and have a prominent presence in cultural production. This is made clear by how much people enjoy Halloween events and dressing up as their favourite monster or the most recent trend of horror themed escape rooms, that include haunted houses, a zombie apocalypse or Lovecraftian monsters. Monstrous creatures represent the fears and desires of society and often embody the allure of danger, transgression and power. Monsters have long been used to construct certain images of the different/unconventional and thus represent anything diverse as the Other. Monsters, however, can be employed to invert or even overturn this relationship by empowering the Other and thus provide us with a more critical view on society in regard to our values, fears and attitudes. The stories and folklore about monsters and the monstrous that incite fear and remind us to always check under our beds before we sleep have also found their way into our everyday lives. Within the mainstream media, criminality is indicative of moral corruption, and is attributed with notions of monstrosity. These monsters do not have claws, instead, they are unpredictable, different and deviate from social and cultural norms. Like the mythical creatures in folklore, monstrosity in its human form reminds us to fear the future, the unknown, Others and society. The monstrous is centrally defined by its unfixedness, its resistance to conformity or to convenient schematic identification. It is somatically and intellectually uneasy, a restless disturbing embodied thought that unsettles, and whose greatest value to us is its very indeterminacy. This chapter illustrates the shifting shapes of the monstrous, their makers, and offers insight about what we can learn from studying these cautionary noetic chimeras. Drawing on the diversity of our academic backgrounds, ideological perspectives and the research from our individual chapters, we address the contemporary narrative of the figure of the monster. Rather than an essay style examination, our chapter explores this narrative through a question and answer format. The flexibility of this format allows readers an intimate glimpse into the ways in which the monstrous can be conceptualised and understood in various frameworks.

The competition reality television show Dragula (Boulet Brothers, 2016-present) features a parade of monsters from the horror canon. Each episode, queer drag artists present outfits based on the show's aesthetic tenants: horror, filth and glamour. Nearly every outfit presented by the show's contestants, dubbed ‘drag monsters’, features some element of monstrosity and many pay specific homage to monsters from horror cinema. In drawing the monster figure into the world of gender performance, Dragula showcases the vast queer possibility of the monster figure. Like queerness itself, these drag monsters prove monstrosity is fluid and need not by associated to any one specific gender; the monster figure provides a canvas on which these artists can move between both human and non-human and male and female. This chapter traces the show's horror lineage – most notably the text from which it queers its name, Bram Stroker's Dracula (1987), and Stephen King's Carrie (1974) as well as the alternative precedent set by the drag legend Divine. Its analysis demonstrates Dragula's creative power in reimaging gender beyond the binary of man/woman by way of the monster figure.

What relation does the monster figure have to gender? It is widely accepted that monsters in television, cinema and literature commonly stand in for the Other, be that a social, political or racialised Other. To consider monsters and monstrosity through the lens of gender is to investigate the links between the monster figure and the Others that exist under the system of patriarchy – most notably women, gender-diverse people and queer folks. In this collective chapter, Francesca Lopez, Russ Martin and Chloe Olivo explore how the monster figure relates to gender via a conversation that traces the links between three individually written chapters – X-Men: The Normative System Disguised as Mutant, Dragula and the Expansive Queerness of the Drag Supermonster and Femicide on the Frontier: Analysing Motives Behind the Femicide Crisis in Ciudad Juàrez. Each of these chapters investigates social norms relating to gender and those who challenge or defy them. Ultimately, the authors argue, it is those whose gendered and sexual identities are not associated with social power that are made monstrous by the patriarchy. This conversation-based chapter considers both real-life situations in which real people are made monstrous and monsters from fiction films and reality television. Ultimately, the authors suggest that the monster figure can be powerful and transformative for those who exist on the margins of the patriarchy – though, as this chapter documents, such is not always the case.

The purpose of this paper is to problematise the notion of woman-as-monster and draws together a conceptual analysis of the monstrous-feminine and its relation to maternal and monstrous bodies including its implications for equality and inclusion in the workplace.

Whilst exploring how female monsters are inextricably tied to their sexual difference, the author draws on social and psychoanalytic perspectives to suggest how such monstrosity is expressed through ambivalence to the maternal. The author analyses two “faces” of the monstrous-feminine in particular: the archaic mother and the monstrous womb (Creed, 1993) and develop this discussion in relation to the potential for a feminist monstrous politics of organisation.

First, the author exposes the basis on which the monstrous-feminine articulates and disarticulates femininity, that is to say, how a feminist analysis of monsters may enable but also foreclose a positive articulation of disruption, disorder and disorganisation central to the conceptualisation of monsters. This is done through a reading of the maternal-feminine and literature on motherhood in organisation studies. Second, the author locates the monstrous-feminine in the body and explores how maternal bodies are constructed and experienced as monstrous as they disrupt the self/other relationship. This analysis suggests that embodying the monster comes with risks and that different configurations of the monstrous maternal are necessary for equality and inclusion in the workplace.

The paper identifies and contributes to growing research on the ambivalence of monsters and expands a neglected area of the feminine and maternal aspects of these relationships and what this means for workplace relations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Marxist accounts of capitalism and capitalists as “vampiric” and “cannibalistic” can challenge the exploitation underlying “monstrosity” of the diverse “liberal organization”.

To bear out this argument, it will critically turn to Marx's original description of capitalism as “vampire” like. It will do so by examining a range of theoretical and existing empirical research related themes of contemporary diversity.

The paper argues that in order to avoid becoming capitalist monsters it is imperative to adopt an explicitly anti-capitalist Marxist perspective centring on themes of a “monstrous” capitalism. Capitalist organizations, not only “suck the blood of workers” but turns them into exploiting vampires, feeding on others for own profit and promotion. Yet it also expands on such readings by emphasizing the liberating possibilities that a more contemporary view of “monsters” stressing radical diversity and difference can make to this Marxist critique.

To this end, it illuminates how a perspective uniting these ideals, termed here as a “revolutionary monstrous humanism”, can effectively challenge the dehumanization of managerial control and market ideologies while also fighting for the right of individuals to express their heterogeneous and always evolving unique cultural identities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze information security assessment in terms of cultural categories and virtue ethics, in order to explain the cultural origin of certain types of security vulnerabilities, as well as to enable a proactive attitude towards preventing such vulnerabilities.

Vulnerabilities in information security are compared to the concept of “monster” introduced by Martijntje Smits in philosophy of technology. The applicability of different strategies for dealing with monsters to information security is discussed, and the strategies are linked to attitudes in virtue ethics.

It is concluded that the present approach can form the basis for dealing proactively with unknown future vulnerabilities in information security.

The research presented here does not define a stepwise approach for implementation of the recommended strategy in practice. This is future work.

The results of this paper enable computer experts to rethink their attitude towards security threats, thereby reshaping their practices.

This paper provides an alternative anthropological framework for descriptive and normative analysis of information security problems, which does not rely on the objectivity of risk.