You Want to Teach Feminism in a General Education Class? Try Monsters

Teaching feminism through a monster studies lens provides the opportunity to examine the ways in which women have historically been and still are monstrified in an effort to subjugate them. This chapter takes a “how-to” approach for teaching feminism in a general education course by coupling it with monster texts—John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre; A Tale” (1819), Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), and Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum (1998). The focus is how to reach and make an impact on undergraduates in possibly their only humanities course. To make this accessible to educators, the chapter begins with foundational terms and concepts in feminist studies, moves to information about monsters—vampires and witches—and how those monsters intertwine with feminism, and ends with analyses of the texts, just as the course would. Finally, the appendices contain suggested guided notes and assignments for the three texts.