Read Trans* and Transcendence: Crip Theory in Bride of Frankenstein
Li Jiasheng’s essay “Trans* and Transcendence: Crip Theory in Bride of Frankenstein” was written for my Fall 2023 Perspectives on the Humanities course. The class focused on cultural representations of animals and automatons: sci‑fi films, speculative fiction, and theoretical work in animal studies and multispecies intersectionality that use non‑human others to situate and unsettle our very notion of “the human.”
For the final research project, Jiasheng began with a deceptively simple question: Why do the villagers in James Whale’s films pity the blind hermit yet hunt Frankenstein’s Creature, while both live with disability? From that point of departure, the essay builds an argument of impressive breadth and rigor. Drawing on Robert McRuer’s concept of “compulsory able‑bodied heteronormativity,” it threads disability studies and queer theory into classic horror cinema, showing how the Frankenstein cycle both reflects and resists anxieties about the body, gender, and normalcy. The piece balances close textual analysis with a commanding grasp of theoretical frameworks. What impresses me most, however, is its critical capaciousness. Rather than simply labeling the Creature as a metaphor for disability or queerness, Jiasheng demonstrates how the figure collapses the very binaries (able/disabled, male/female, life/death, human/other) that shore up those categories in the first place. For its lucid prose, interdisciplinary ambition, and its commitment to questioning the sedimented norms that structure our cultural narratives, Jiasheng’s essay represents exemplary undergraduate scholarship.
-Jingsi Shen