Monstrous Intersectionalities

The relationship between disability and trans studies and activism is fraught, not only because of transphobia and ableism in the respective movements but because of a diagnostic parceling up of bodies and identities into discrete categories that go back to the nineteenth century. This chapter uses the figure of the monster, one of the oldest representations of embodied difference, to challenge the “categorical exclusions” (Hong, 2002) between trans and disability. Delving into the history of monstrosity, the chapter not only advocates for an intersectional perspective that traces the converging lines of disablement, normative gendering, and racialization in constructions of the monstrous but also argues for the employment of the monster as itself an intersectional analytic. In the final section, the chapter turns to the case of Layleen Polanco, a Dominican trans woman who died in 2019 while incarcerated at the Rikers Island prison complex in New York in order to highlight the real material consequences of these discourses for racialized, disabled, and gender nonconforming bodies.