ABSTRACT 

 

Title of Dissertation:   QUEER ECOLOGY OF MONSTROSITY: 
TROUBLING THE HUMAN/NATURE BINARY 

 

  Alex Thomas, Doctor of Philosophy, 2023 

 

Dissertation directed by:  Associate Professor Catherine Knight Steele, 
Department of Communication 

 

As a form of visual communication, monsters in popular culture represent and reinforce 

the changing thoughts and emotions cultures have toward the human/nature binary. This binary, 

historically supporting discrimination based on race, gender and sexuality, and the environment’s 

abuse, is often supported through monstrous representations of the Other, but this is a limited 

view of a monster’s potential. I argue that contemporary hybrid monsters that blend humans and 

nature together in one queer, boundary-defying body represent U.S. society’s changing 

relationship with nature while giving the audience a new form of connecting or identifying with 

the environment and Othered body that critiques the popular ideology of both being something to 

fear or use. In this study I advance a monstrous splice of queer theory and ecocriticism that 

probes the plasticity and queerness of humans and the environment allowing for new narratives, 

forms of life, and discourses about naturalization and the environment. Through queer ecological 

theory and methodology, I examine visual and contextual media to study the monster’s potential 

to embody nature, people, and their conjoined discrimination. The plasmaticness and subversive 

culture of animation and comics let the monstrous thrive in their display of the plasticity of 

humans and the environment. I structure my analysis into three case studies focusing on the 



 
 

potential of monsters to critique evolutionary ideology, human exceptionalism, and ecological 

interaction in light of queer theory’s critique of what is ‘natural.’ Radford Sechrist’s television 

series Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts and K.I. Zachopoulos and Vincenzo Balzano’s 

graphic novel Run Wild oppose human exceptionalism by visually plasticizing humanity and 

giving animals culture and agency in a way that rejects anthropocentric thinking. The monsters 

of Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s independent film, Wolfwalkers and Morvan and Nesmo’s 

ecological detective novel Bramble critique the cultural separation of urban and green spaces that 

has excused racial and sexual violence by displaying humanity’s innate connection to nature. 

Finally, Marguerite Bennett’s erotic graphic novel Insexts and select episodes from Tim Miller’s 

Love, Death, & Robots challenge evolutionary ideology. In this last case, characters retain their 

femininity and humanity in their monstrous transformations, rejecting evolutionary and societal 

inferiority and ultimately showing they can still retain parts of themselves and be powerful and 

deadly. Taken together, these texts span genres, writing/drawing styles, intended age groups, and 

environmental messages. They provide a wide range of monster representations and give 

audiences new ways to view and understand the issues surrounding what we see as ‘human’ or 

‘natural’, balancing empowerment, subversivism, and condemnation.  

 

 

  



 
 

 

 

 

QUEER ECOLOGY OF MONSTROSITY: 
TROUBLING THE HUMAN/NATURE BINARY 

by 

Alex Thomas 

 

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
 University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 

 of the requirements for the degree of  
Doctor of Philosophy 

 2023 

 

 

 

 

 Advisory Committee: 
 Associate Professor Catherine Knight Steele, Chair 
 Associate Professor Damien Pfister 
 Associate Professor Anita Atwell Seate 
 Professor Hester Baer 
 Associate Professor Alexis Lothian 
 
 
  



 
 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright by 

Alex Jazz Thomas 

2023 

 

 



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Table of Contents 

 

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ ii 
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv 

Introduction: Monsters, Mistreatments, and the Media .................................................................. 1 

Defining Monstrosity and its Role .............................................................................................. 3 

Defining the Human ................................................................................................................ 9 

Defining Monstrous Nature and its Study ............................................................................ 10 

Mediation Matters: Monsters and Popular Culture ................................................................... 16 

Overview of Project .................................................................................................................. 21 

Scope of Study ...................................................................................................................... 22 

Preview of Chapters .............................................................................................................. 24 

Chapter 1: Queer Ecological Methodology: Visual and Cultural Plasticity in Animation and 
Comics .......................................................................................................................................... 26 

Human Classification used for Discrimination ......................................................................... 27 

Connection between Social and Environmental Domination ............................................... 31 

Visual and Cultural Plasticity through Animation and Comics ................................................ 36 

Visual Plasmaticness of Animation ...................................................................................... 38 

Subversive Culture of Comics .............................................................................................. 43 

Queer Ecology: Merging Ecocriticism and Queer Theory ....................................................... 47 

Summary of Critical Lens ......................................................................................................... 55 

Chapter 2: Human Exceptionalism and Fighting the Animal Within ........................................... 57 

Social Construction of Human Exceptionalism through Evolution .......................................... 58 

Western Societal Aspects of Human Superiority...................................................................... 63 

Rational Soul ......................................................................................................................... 63 

Intentional Culture ................................................................................................................ 65 

Exclusive Body ..................................................................................................................... 66 

When Species Combine: Queer Ecology of Kipo and Run Wild .............................................. 68 

Visual Post-Apocalyptic Blending: “If the city is empty of humans, will it be full of 
monsters?”............................................................................................................................. 72 

Hybrid Culture: “We thought our way of life here was the only way to be.” ...................... 79 

Souls and the Monster Within: “Something’s going on underneath your skin.” .................. 91 



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Experimentation and Vilification of Human Technology ........................................................ 93 

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 96 

Chapter 3: Urban Disgust and Wild Freedom............................................................................... 99 

Settler Colonialism and Erasure of the Other from Green Spaces .......................................... 100 

Relocation and Death of Indigenous Peoples and African Americans ............................... 102 

Nature Limited to White Heteromasculinity....................................................................... 105 

Cultural Disgust and Urban Spaces ........................................................................................ 107 

Environmental Purity and Urban Corruption in Bramble and Wolfwalkers ........................... 110 

Civilization as a Visualization of Imprisonment and Disgust ............................................ 111 

Religion as Unnatural Oppression and Deadly Nature ....................................................... 121 

Nature as for the Othered .................................................................................................... 124 

Using Plasticity to View Inherent Nature ............................................................................... 127 

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 131 

Chapter 4: Embrace of Monstrous-Feminine Nature .................................................................. 135 

Monstrous-Feminine Constructed as Closer to Nature ........................................................... 136 

Reclaiming Body Horror to Accept the Animal Within InSEXts and Love, Death, and Robots
................................................................................................................................................. 142 

Tracing a Connection between Misogyny and Natural Oppression ....................................... 146 

Visual Plasticity and the Animalization of Women ............................................................ 147 

White Patriarchal Domination and Ownership ................................................................... 156 

Using the Monstrous-Feminine for Revenge .......................................................................... 159 

Identification with the Monster or Death ................................................................................ 166 

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 169 

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 173 

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 185 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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List of Figures 

Figure 1: Gestalt of vase and two faces ..................................................................................... 69 
Figure 2: Ava and Flynn questioning their humanity ............................................................. 73 
Figure 3: Ava looking at her reflection ..................................................................................... 74 
Figure 4: Timbercat village ........................................................................................................ 85 
Figure 5:Mebh and Robyn playing in the forest .................................................................... 112 
Figure 6: Bramble standing before the entrance to the city ................................................. 116 
Figure 7: Bramble's view of a train full of people.................................................................. 118 
Figure 8: Robyn's first-person view as a wolf ........................................................................ 128 
Figure 9: First view of Lady's transformation ....................................................................... 145 
Figure 10: Lady's body splitting to consume the doctor ....................................................... 160 
Figure 11: Yan in her cyborg body ......................................................................................... 163 
Figure 12: Yan in her metal fox form ..................................................................................... 164 
Figure 13: Overview of monster mesh placement .................................................................. 174 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Introduction: Monsters, Mistreatments, and the Media 

 I grew up with a deep affection for animals and nature. I wanted to study and care for 

them in any way that I could. However, I felt that affection clash with my race and culture. 

Growing up as a Black child in America, I always heard about who Black people were and what 

they did or did not do. They ranged from minor quips about how Black people do not swim, 

hike, or sail to egregious insults of Black people being called monkeys or apes. For some reason, 

we were simultaneously equated to animals and yet deemed incapable of being in touch with 

nature. We were unfit for civilization yet did not belong in the natural world. I felt that I had to 

care about one or the other, the environment or the Black community. How could I care about 

the Amazon rainforest when people like me were being killed just miles away? It was not until 

college that I learned of the connection between these two pillages of life. It was a lesson about 

the sense of control and ownership that humans learn when we are young. For example, my 

parents taught me that there are certain places where I should not go if I want to live and thrive. 

Other children are taught that certain places and people are lesser than them. That sense of 

entitlement led to where we are now in this Anthropocene moment.  

Then in 2018, I came across a graphic novel called InSEXts that impacted me and 

inspired this study. Two women, one black and one white, trapped by their forbidden love and 

oppressive circumstances, use the animalistic monstrosity within them to emerge from their 

entrapping cocoons and take the life that society denied them. The natural and unnatural blend 

together in a story of love and physical freedom. When we go against the hegemonic ideals of 

society, society labels us as deviants, freaks, and monsters. However, these characters claimed 

the title gladly and embraced their difference and connection to nature with open arms and legs. 

That embrace and connection is the focus of this study.  



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As has been shown in decades of communication research, representations in popular 

culture play a crucial role in how the public comes to understand and act toward issues involving 

discrimination and the environment. As Robert Cox (2010) states, “The way we communicate 

with one another about the environment powerfully affects how we perceive both it and 

ourselves and therefore how we define our relationship with the natural world” (p. 2). With the 

rise of climate change as a prominent issue, it is vital to study forms of communication that 

present representations of environmental deterioration and the conceptual boundaries that we 

have placed between humans and nature (Doyle, 2011, p. 3). As my story illuminates, these 

conceptual boundaries are found within most forms of discrimination in America.  

Monsters in popular culture are a communication and analytic tool that serve as a window 

into the fear behind the disconnection between humans and nature. Monsters in popular culture 

are one way that we are currently trying to cope with our impending destruction. Society uses 

monsters to cope with and understand our fears: fear of difference, the lack of control, and, most 

importantly, a fear of death. While we previously believed ourselves to be invulnerable due to 

many dangerously powerful thought-ways circulating the Anthropocene, we have more reason to 

fear our demise than ever. Andrew McMurry (2018) describes these thought ways as 

“messenger-killing, head-in-sandism, fallacious endurability, cosmic apple-polishing, techno-

deference, expansionist ideation, glad-gaming, and the gloom prohibition” or the “eight deadly 

sins of the Anthropocene” (p. 17). As concerns over global warming increase, we are losing the 

ability to ignore the growing issue. Monsters are a valuable tool to examine our culture's 

changing thoughts toward our fears of death and the environment. However, many previous 

studies of the environment and monsters have continued to keep the spheres of humans and 

nature separate and not acknowledge the history of discrimination that accompanies this divide. 



3 
 

At this moment, where we are forced to acknowledge the impact we have had on the planet, we 

should realize that our fate and the fate of the environment are connected. We should seek ways 

to understand this connection and imagine new ways to bridge the Human/Nature divide 

(Neimanis et al., 2015). I argue that monsters that contain human and animalistic or plant-like 

forms can serve as a tool for imagining this bridge between humanity and nature while keeping 

the connection between monstrosity and discrimination in mind and critiquing our treatment of 

the environment. I rely on the fields of queer of color theory, environmental communication, and 

critical media studies to study these queer, boundary-defying monsters in animation and comics 

through a queer ecology analysis. In the following sections, I layout the history of what it means 

to be a monster and a human through culture studies and posthuman and critical race theory 

respectively. I then use that history as a backdrop for my discussion of the relationship between 

monsters and the environment, how monsters have been studied in environmental studies, and 

what my study can add. Finally, I outline the details of this project and the following chapters.  

Defining Monstrosity and its Role  

Monsters are communication tools for both defining and challenging binaries in popular 

culture. Monsters are the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and can be used in many ways to 

play with that line. There are typically four types of relationships between “us” and “them” that 

media portrays: humanitarian (we are OK, they are not OK), usual travelogue (we are OK, they 

may be OK), anthropological (we are OK, they are OK/they are OK, we may not be OK), and 

trouble (they are not OK and neither are we) (Ivakhiv, 2013, p. 148–149). Monsters can perform 

all of these relationships and even multiple in the same film. Monsters affirm that we are only 

truly human when we are in contact with the non-human. My dissertation examines how the 

queer bodies of human-environmental or hybrid monsters can act on and subvert the boundary 



4 
 

between humans and the other. They can do this because monsters in popular culture represent 

and reinforce the changing thoughts and emotions cultures have toward the human/inhuman 

binary. Monsters are becoming increasingly necessary in popular culture for this reason. The 

words monster, monstrosity, and monstrousness all have their etymological root in the Latin 

word monstrare, which means both ‘to show’ and ‘to warn or advise’ (Asma, 2009, p. 13; 

Wright, 2013, p. 3). This definition means that monstrosity is a visual phenomenon. With the rise 

of the visual medium in the modern period, the monster is no longer limited to just the 

imagination (Halberstam, 1995). Furthermore, with the rise in fear of extinction, monstrosity has 

transcended its status as a metaphor and has become a necessary part of our existence to help us 

cope with current fears (Levina & Bui, 2013).  

There are three theoretical approaches to the study of this monstrosity. The first is 

psychoanalytical. This theory argues that the monster is that part of ourselves that we had to 

throw away to live as functional beings. Monsters remind us of what we have lost. The second 

theoretical approach is representational. This approach argues that monsters represent our 

collective nightmares and that their function as embodiments of our fears helps us cope. They 

can also represent what we have repressed to fit into society. This approach sees monsters as 

historically conditioned since our fears change over time, as does what society accepts. The third 

approach is ontological. It views monstrosity as a way of being or becoming. The future or any 

change is monstrous and potentially deadly (Levina & Bui, 2013). These approaches are not 

mutually exclusive, and J. J. Cohen’s monster theses are grounded in all three and are highly 

influential on contemporary monster scholarship.  

In 1996, Cohen posited seven theses on the role of monsters in our culture that I use to 

explain the power of the queer body of hybrid monsters.  



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1. “The Monster Body is a Cultural Body” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 4). In this thesis, Cohen argues 

that monsters always signify something other than themselves. It is born at a crossroads to 

embody a particular moment of time, a feeling, and a place. Monsters put into words what we 

have trouble expressing. Therefore, monsters are a way to read culture, and our culture 

deploys them in diverse domains like religion, biology, and politics (Asma, 2009; Phillips, 

2017). Overall, they usually represent a culture’s changing anxieties (Levina & Bui, 2013). J. 

Halberstam (1995) argues that monsters are meaning machines that produce the perfect 

figure for negative identity. “They can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality 

in one body” (p. 21). Not only that, but monsters can be perfect for representing our fears of 

the environment since monsters have to be everything that the human is not. Since monsters 

lie at the edges of culture, they can help illuminate the center (Langsdale & Coody, 2020). 

Therefore, hybrid monsters are notably distinct in their representation of the human and the 

Other.  

2. “The Monster Always Escapes” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 5). Since monsters always represent 

something else, usually an emotion, they never seem to go away. They reoccur continuously 

for when they are needed to represent a new fear or othered body (Asma, 2009, p. 5). The 

monster's body is “both corporal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift” (J. J. 

Cohen, 1996, p. 6). This ability to shift is why Godzilla movies have continued to be 

produced since the original in 1954. As nuclear and other fears changed in Japan, Godzilla 

was there as an expanding representation of their fears and desires. This extended use is why 

scholars must study monsters along with their cultural history.  

3. “The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 6). Cohen argues 

that the monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization. It resists any 



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classification built on a hierarchical or a merely binary opposition (Erle & Hendry, 2020; 

Mulvey Roberts, 2016). Cohen describes them as a “form suspended between forms that 

threatens to smash distinctions” (1996, p. 6). This description is supported by Derrida’s 

argument that the monster is “that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not 

yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name” (Derrida, 1995, 

p. 21). Therefore, the future is necessarily monstrous. Monsters will always lie at the 

boundary, which is why they are good cultural representations of how we, as humans, 

separate ourselves from others. Monsters must be read critically; otherwise, they can be used 

to naturalize the demonization process and continue the association of fear with the Other 

(Mulvey Roberts, 2016, p. 3).  

4. “The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 7). Monsters will 

always lie at the boundary, which is why they are good cultural representations of how we, as 

humans, separate ourselves from others. Monsters must be read critically; otherwise, they can 

be used to naturalize the demonization process and continue the association of fear with the 

Other (Mulvey Roberts, 2016, p. 3). In this project, I examine if hybrid monsters can 

represent the crossing and erasure of the boundary between humans and nature.  

5. “The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 12). The monster 

marks the bonds that hold our cultural system together (Erle & Hendry, 2020). According to 

Cohen, the “monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together that 

system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot-must 

not- be crossed” (1996, p. 13). If one steps outside of these borders, they expose themselves 

to be attacked or become monstrous themselves. The monster marks what we had to separate 



7 
 

from ourselves to ‘function’ as a society. For example, the monster shows how we lost our 

connection to nature to exploit it for the good of our society.  

6. “Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 16). Monsters evoke 

escapist fantasies. They show us what we want but cannot have, making them even more 

appealing (Halberstam, 1995). We both envy and loath the monster for its freedom in 

physical movement and its ability to move outside of structured culture expectations. This 

contradiction between fear and desire is one reason for the monster’s continued popularity in 

popular culture. 

7.   “The Monster Stands at the Threshold of Becoming” (J. J. Cohen, 1996, p. 18). Monsters 

are the children of our culture and will always return to us. They return, knowing that we 

created them, and ask us why we did. They ask us how we perceive the world and tell us to 

reevaluate our cultural assumptions. In the end, the monsters are us (McMurry, 2018; Mulvey 

Roberts, 2016; Troshynski & Weiner, 2016).  

Monsters are what we could be or have had if we did not create our boundaries. Monsters can 

even be representations of what humans are as a result of our boundaries. Andrew McMurry 

(2018) even argues that we are the monsters: “the gibbering, black-souled ghoul, gnawing 

frenziedly on the planet’s remains” (p. 144). Hybrid monsters are clear examples of either fate. 

Aikaterini Antonopoulou (2016) describes this occurrence as 

an unfinished phenomenon of transformation. It plays with the new and the old, the 
beginning and the end. The body here is not at all a private, self-centered form, separated 
from the other beings. Instead, it is open-ended and unlimited, inseparable from its world. 
It blends with other bodies and with the non-human. (p. 3)  

This transformation begins with the concealment of the human face behind the mask of 

monstrosity. Behind this mask, society can say that all humans are considered equal. The 

monster marks this transformation while it holds it in suspension as it blurs the boundaries 



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between the “utopian ideal and the realistic” (Antonopoulou, 2016, p. 2). Hybrid monsters have 

an incomplete mask that allows the display of the inconsistencies within our feelings towards the 

environment and the Other. I apply these seven theses to the examination of queer humanistic 

monsters whose double body represents the blurred boundary between humans and nature.  

Since they trouble boundaries between identities, as shown by the seven theses, monsters 

are always queer. My use of the term ‘queer’ relies heavily on queer of color critique and does 

not only apply to LGBTQ+ identity (Chen, 2012; C. J. Cohen, 1997; Ferguson, 2003). According 

to Cohen (1997), limiting queer politics to only LGBTQ identities only creates a binary 

opposition between powerful heterosexuals and powerless queer folks in a way that erases 

intersectionality. She argues that instead of forming a politics around identity, we ought to form 

it around “our shared marginal relationship to dominant power which normalizes, legitimizes, 

and privileges” (1997, p. 458). This argument is not to say that I nor Cohen are anti-identity. 

Instead, I take from her analysis that identity is a means of survival for those who inhabit 

marginalized identities, like people of color and queer people. Instead of anti-identitarian queer 

politics/analysis, like Cohen, I advocate for a queer politics that acknowledges identity while 

challenging identity's role within dominant power structures.  

Building off of this framework that Cohen provides, my definition of ‘queer’ for this 

project combines Mel Chen’s (2012) “improper affiliation” and Giffney and Hird’s (2008) 

critical theory of the signification of “continual unhinging of certainties and systematic 

disturbing of the familiar” (p. 4). Mel Chen’s definition broadens what is included beneath the 

umbrella of queerness so that it can be used to describe an array of “subjectivities, intimacies, 

beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative” (2012, p. 104). In terms of Giffney 

and Hird’s ‘continual unhinging,’ queerness is constantly in the process of being altered as it 



9 
 

denaturalizes its objects (2008, p. 4). Combining these two definitions, I see queer as any being, 

space, or connection with a constantly evolving and inherently denaturalizing but contingent 

relationship with heteronormativity. By this definition, monsters are queer by design. They serve 

as a visual intersection of the racialization, gendering, sexualization, and naturalization of bodies 

and spaces. This inherent quality of monsters, therefore, requires any critique of them to be done 

with consideration of binaries that work as a form of oppression. Because the monster’s queer 

body blurs boundaries, I argue that narratives that contain these hybrid monsters allow the 

audience to imagine a new relationship between humans and nature.  

Defining the Human 

 These boundaries that monsters sustain and blur are centered on a naturalized 

understanding of Humanity used to deem certain bodies and spaces as less-than a white, 

heteronormative ideal. Binaries exist to keep others oppressed, and our definition of humanity is 

used to oppress people based on race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and oppress nature as an 

ideal human’s right to consume and control. The primary understanding of humanity that this 

study works to subvert is the biological inflection or the idea that a human can be objectively, 

and scientifically defined (Luciano & Chen, 2015; Weheliye, 2008). This inflection is the focus 

of this study because its perceived neutrality is used to exert harms like scientific racism and 

evolutionary ideology that deem certain humans as essentially superior to the rest of life 

(Mignolo, 2015). As a result of this sense of superiority, there is a connection between racism, 

homophobia, misogyny, and environmental destruction based on the idea that these life forms are 

essentially less than the most biologically evolved humans: white heterosexual men. Not only 

does this inflection influence harmful ways of thinking, it has been used to define what it means 

to be Black or gay or a woman. For example, being Black is socially defined by its inferiority to 



10 
 

being white but is assumed and subversively presented in American culture to be a biological 

fact. While I will go into more detail in Chapter 1, here I will explain how the way we portray 

and study nature and monsters in popular culture continues to influence this definition.  

Defining Monstrous Nature and its Study 

 Once seen as a space for spiritual awakening, since the rise of Industrialization, the 

Western ideology surrounding nature has shifted to focus on commercialization and fear 

primarily, which leads to monsters that support the human/nature binary rather than defy it. 

Nature ideology is a “way of thinking about the natural world that a person uses to justify actions 

towards it” (Corbett, 2006, p. 13). This belief system is both an individual and a cultural 

construct. Our cultural ideology of nature changed significantly during the Enlightenment and 

Industrialization periods. Since the Enlightenment period, humanity has treated the environment 

as fundamentally separate from our culture. With the dichotomy formed, society saw themselves 

as controllers of nature, which led to increased commodification (Doyle, 2011, p. 3). According 

to Julia Corbett, 

With rampant utilization of the natural world also came an estrangement, a distancing of 
humans from creation, and a fear of it. It wasn’t until recently (the eighteenth century) 
that most Europeans viewed wilderness and mountains in their own countries with 
anything but horror and dread[...] This viewpoint is reflected in words such as 
“wilderness,” from an old English word meaning “of or about wild beasts.” (2006, p. 22) 

The Industrialization period widened this gap even further. Like Othered bodies, Nature was 

seen as an enemy to be exploited or controlled (Murray & Heumann, 2011, p. 12). Due to the 

spread of science, technology, and capitalism – “nature came to be understood as some inert 

thing, entirely independent from human culture. As a result of this ideological shift, capitalism 

has flourished by enabling individuals and corporations to exploit the planet’s resources without 



11 
 

any sense of moral obligation” (Rust, 2012, p. 204). Many environmental groups continue to 

focus their efforts on preserving “pristine” or untouched wilderness separate from humanity. 

The popular ideas of wilderness and the environment originate in Romantic sublimity and 

American transcendentalism in the late nineteenth century. The core of transcendentalism was 

the belief that natural objects reflected a universal spiritual truth. This belief made the wilderness 

an untouched natural space, viable for its inherent transcendent truth and ability to preserve and 

promote white heteromasculinity. Thoreau’s writing led this movement, but the conservation 

movement created by Muir, Pinochet, and Roosevelt resulted in the national park system (Cox, 

2010; Outka, 2008). Outka (2008) argues that the movement marked wilderness as a 

“dehistoricized space in which the erasure of the histories of human habitation, ecological 

alteration, and native genocide that preceded its ‘wild’ valorization is, literally, naturalized” (p. 

2). Stating that the wilderness should be preserved as a pure space separate from culture and 

society ignores the space’s bloody and deadly history as a battleground between different 

identities and between humans and the environment.  

 By the 1980s, activists from minority and low-income communities started challenging 

the idea that nature was separate from their environment (Cox, 2010, p. 54).  Activists decided to 

take matters into their own hands and redefined the environment to mean the places “where we 

live, where we work, where we play, and where we learn” and started with protests about 

landfills and pollution (Lee, 1996, p. 6). In addition, they tried to add human concerns like 

“hunger, toxic waste, urban planning, and the autonomy of traditional cultures” to the 

conversations around mainstream environmentalism (Myers, 2005). These human concerns are 

the core tenet of the environmental justice movement. At the center of this movement was the 



12 
 

belief that all people and communities should be included in decisions affecting their health and 

well-being (Cox, 2010).   

  Due to the wealth and power of the conservationist movement, members like Roosevelt 

were the first creators of environmental media, beginning with early animal documentaries 

(Mitman, 2009). Therefore, a significant portion of popular culture is bathed in the ideology of 

nature as separate from human culture. This ideology operates within media on multiple 

structural levels. Our current representations of nature reveal more about how we fear and desire 

the environment than act as reflections of reality by showing either the environment or the 

human as monstrous (Brereton, 2005, p. 16–17). This typical monster representation reinforces 

the Human/Nature binary rather than supplanting it.  

Monsters have not always provoked the sense of fear they do today. Jeffrey Weinstock 

explains that monsters “are things that should not be, but are, and their existence raises vexing 

questions about humanity’s understanding of and place in the universe” (2014, p. 1). The 

monster “undoes our understanding of the way things are and violates our sense of how they are 

supposed to be” (2014, p. 2). This defiance evokes an emotional response from humanity. We 

experience these monsters through their emotional impact on us, which constructs them as part 

of physical reality (Erle & Hendry, 2020, p. 4). The most prevalent emotion they impart is fear, 

but that was not always the case. In the Middle Ages, monsters were believed to be magical 

characters or connected with the divine (Long, 2014; Vavilova, 2015, p. 185). They represented 

God’s diverse power and were seen as potentially morally superior to humans. Some monsters 

called yokai are still revered in Japanese culture (Rhoads & McCorkle, 2018, p. 13). However, 

with the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, the perception of monsters shifted. The early modern 

science of teratology or categorization displayed monsters as abnormalities that defied 



13 
 

characterization. They were associated with unnaturalness, deformity, and unregulated sexuality 

within this new scientific view that preferred rationalizing discourse over mystical ideas (Long, 

2014, p. 104; Stephens, 2009, p. 175). This disgust and fear grew from the impulse to separate 

man from nature in easy categorization. Anything that did not fit was monstrous. This separation 

continues to cause problems for how we interact with those we consider as Other and our 

interactions with the environment. Popular culture often displays this separation. Environmental 

hybrid monsters that promote more identification than fear can represent a resistance to this 

history.  

Most monsters in popular culture are more likely to support the human/nature boundary 

than defy it, but this use of monsters is understudied in environmental studies. There are multiple 

examples of monsters in horror and other genres of cinema that help audiences emotionally 

address current environmental fears. Two prominent examples are King Kong (fear of 

wilderness) and Godzilla (fear of nuclear waste). Three primary ways scholars have studied the 

intersection of monsters and the environment in popular culture are nature as monstrous, the eco-

gothic, and studying famous reoccurring monsters to find their connection to historically situated 

environmental issues. Nature-as-monstrous scholars deal with real-world monstrosities and use 

them to question the scientific categories that humans have created. One example would be the 

anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. This 

anthology contains essays from multiple fields that study deteriorating landscapes, natural 

wonders, and environmental sources of fear, from volcanos and radioactive waste to studying the 

modern violent acts we perform. While this provides a much-needed look at the harms that parts 

of humanity have done to the world and displays a world beyond categorization, this form of 

environmental monster scholarship often does not attempt to bridge the divide between humans 



14 
 

and nature and rarely acknowledges the fraught history of monstrosity. The remaining two 

themes deal purely with fiction.  

Ecogothic studies typically apply contemporary ecocriticism theories to Gothic narratives 

and tend not to address current issues. These scholars look at monstrous landscapes and monsters 

like Frankenstein and Dracula to see how they either draw out dystopian ecological views or 

reinforce the environmental views of the time (A. Smith & Hughes, 2013; L. Smith & Yeo, 

2019). Overall, these studies tend to focus on the Gothic era of literature as it was a crucial era in 

monster construction. Ecogothic studies make up a majority of environmental monster studies 

because of ecocriticism’s origin in literature studies. Monster studies have only recently been 

branching into media culture to study contemporary monsters or contemporary takes on classic 

monsters (Rust & Monani, 2012). Scholars must look beyond commonly used monsters to study 

new views of environmental fears. Classic monsters are overused to the point of being a 

normalized trope.  

Studies of famous popular culture monsters and the environment examine monsters that 

range from those created through environmental destruction to monsters that must be read with 

an ecocritical lens to connect to the environment. However, they all fall short of critiquing the 

boundary between humans and nature. This scholarship includes the study of Japanese yokai 

(Heise, 2017), massive beasts either nameless or famous like King Kong (Hsu, 2014; Ivakhiv, 

2013), or commonly reoccurring monsters like vampires and zombies (Alexander, 2013; 

Murphy, 2018). Yokai are Japanese monsters, but the benevolent ones are kami or Shinto spirits 

and deities believed to inhabit beautiful nature. Kami and yokai have a long history and walk a 

fine line between monstrosity and divinity. Rhoads & McCorkle’s (2018) Japan’s Green 

Monsters study these beings in Japanese cinema to “examine why they provided a suitable 



15 
 

vehicle for Japanese film studios to comment on topics like nature, pollution, and environmental 

degradation” (Rhoads & McCorkle, 2018, p. 9). Godzilla is a contemporary iteration of yokai. 

Bainbridge’s study of Pokemon suggests that the catch-them-all mentality of the franchise 

represents Japan’s challenge of negotiating between the conservation and consumption of nature 

(Bainbridge, 2014). Yet, when scholars critique giant cinematic beasts, their work tends to be 

contained in the horror genre, reinforcing boundaries between humans and nature.  

Horror films often contain massive beasts that emerge from nature to threaten humanity. 

Two studied examples are the monster in The Host and King Kong. The monster in The Host 

works to bring the audience’s attention to human sources of toxicity, mutations, and 

contaminants (Hsu, 2014). These monsters often function as ways for the Earth to take revenge 

on humanity. In a different vein, Ivakhiv (2013) argues that the cinematic beast has always been 

an admission “that there is an outside to the safe and bounded human world and that that outside 

must be exploited, tamed, yet still feared for it to have the kind of charge for us that we wish it to 

have” (p. 221). He states that King Kong is an example of the wilderness that needs to be tamed 

and commodified before being brought into society because it is too powerful otherwise. Kong 

wants to become one of us, but he has to be domesticated first for our safety. Films like this 

replicate and widen the gap between humans and nature. Despite the time since this film, similar 

narratives persist in cinema and popular culture, while the binary itself is rarely studied in detail.  

In contemporary apocalypse cinema, a growing number of films depict humans fighting 

monstrous versions of nature rather than physical monsters (Tyburski, 2013). There are five 

typical responses that humans have to deal with the monstrous environment: use human 

ingenuity to adapt, stubbornly endure to carry the light of humanity as long as possible, 

graciously accept our fate and succumb, fight to the death, or remain oblivious until it is too late.  



16 
 

These films tap into our eco-anxieties but also further widen the gap between humans and nature. 

They position the environment as a monstrous Other to be feared and destroyed. Unlike these 

monstrous versions of nature, queer hybrid monsters require more attention in environmental 

contexts.  

The queer bodies of hybrid monsters serve as a way to examine and deal with society’s 

fear of death and the environment without separating it entirely from our own lives and fate. 

Instead of fear, these representations of queer monstrosity should allow us to understand better 

both the human and the monstrous in a way that blurs the human/nature binary. I argue that 

contemporary monsters that blend humans and nature in one queer, boundary-defying body 

represent U.S. society’s changing physical and ideological relationship with nature while 

continuing to work as cultural representations, reinforcements, and critiques of our fears and 

desires about the environment. Hybrid monsters can be used as archetypes to express humanity's 

connection with nature further. 

Mediation Matters: Monsters and Popular Culture 

Popular culture plays an increasingly crucial role in the changing relationship between 

humans and nature as it is a primary site of environmental communication that can construct 

society’s perceptions of the natural world and even impact the public understanding of science 

and our actions towards the world (Meister & Japp, 2002; Rust & Monani, 2012; Sakellari, 2015; 

Seelig, 2019). Therefore, I am operating under Julia Corbett’s premise that environmental 

communication is:  

Expressed in values, words, actions, and everyday practices; Individually interpreted and 
negotiated; Historically and culturally rooted; Ideologically derived and driven; 
Embedded in a dominant social paradigm that assigns instrumental value to the 
environment and believes it exists to serve; Intricately tied to pop culture, particularly 



17 
 

advertising and entertainment; Framed and reported by the media in a way that generally 
supports the status quo; and Mediated and influenced by social institutions like 
government and business (2006, p. 8) 

Focusing on environmental communication and issues of framing and ideology, I argue that the 

mediated representations of nature spreads fear of the environment, and dominant members and 

organizations in society have used that as an excuse to control both it and marginalized 

communities.  

 This mediation of humans’ relationship to the environment through popular culture is a 

critical topic of study due to the decrease in other environmental experiences. Visual mediums 

like television and cinema can be problematic for perceptions of climate change since it is not 

always a visual phenomenon. It has a slow pace that is hard to convey in a film (Cottle, 2014; 

Doyle, 2011, p. 4). Most environmental problems take a long time to develop, so there is often 

no way to visually connect the cause to the consequences. The lack of adequate visual 

representation challenges the “acceptance of their very existence” (Hansen & Machin, 2015, p. 

5). Environmental problems are an example of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence. Slow 

violence is a:  

violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is 
dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as 
violence at all. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that 
is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its 
calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. (Nixon, 2011, p. 
2) 

Due to the lack of proper visual representation, slow violence tends to go unseen by the public 

and therefore ignored. It is even worse in our current digital era, where news comes faster with 

dramatic headlines fighting to capture our attention. Nixon argues that speed  



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has become a self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders "uneventful" violence (to those 
who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The 
attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite 
disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable-and 
often insensate-quest for quicker sensation. (Nixon, 2011, p. 8) 

Holding out for a dramatic, visible demise makes it easier to ignore the slow changes that have 

already been happening (McMurry, 2018). Slow violence needs filmmakers, artists, and media 

creators to give it shape to represent it to the public. Nixon states that we must “give figurative 

shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time” (Nixon, 

2011, p. 10). This challenge requires creativity and imagination to devise “iconic symbols that 

embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic 

urgency” (Nixon, 2011, p. 10). Nixon believes that creating these iconic symbols is best done 

through text. However, I argue that monster bodies can be viable representations of ecological 

harm due to their ability to defy categorization and their long cultural history.  

Nature is increasingly mediated through visual media, making iconic symbols of slow 

violence crucial (Blewitt, 2010, p. 20; Corbett, 2006, p. 16). This mediation is a dialectical 

relationship (Sakellari, 2015, p. 829), a form of negotiation (Rust & Monani, 2012, p. 1), 

performative, and done through a range of social and discursive practices (Doyle, 2011, p. 2). 

Consequently, these mediations reflect and support an overarching ideology surrounding nature 

(Seelig, 2019, p. 48). The majority of environmental narratives in popular culture simplify and 

dramatize the issues by showing climate change as a spectacular display of an entirely “natural” 

disaster, framing the environment as a commodity, and/or trying to appeal to the largest and 

lowest common denominator of the population (Brereton, 2005; Campbell, 2014; Doyle, 2011; 

E. E. Moore, 2016; Seelig, 2019). However, narratives can perform a role much more significant 

than simple entertainment. They help give meaning to climate change and other environmental 



19 
 

issues and play a leading role in the public constitution of reality. Viewers welcome narratives 

communicating pro-social values as long as they are not too controversial (Seelig, 2019, p. 67). 

These narratives influence beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors (Braddock & Dillard, 

2016, p. 446). They also increase awareness and concern (Sakellari, 2015). Mass media can 

promote “a stable awareness of climate problems at the attitude level. In this way, media may 

indirectly cause long-term changes in lifestyle” (Arlt et al., 2011, p. 60). Environmental 

narratives can even promote lifestyle changes that were not displayed in the narrative by 

activating these positive attitudes (Rhodes et al., 2016). Positive attitudes activate through the 

increase in a viewer’s sense of personal obligation to act and are influenced heavily by the 

viewer’s identification and engagement with the characters in the narrative (Bilandzic & Sukalla, 

2019). As a visual medium, hybrid monsters give the audience a new form of connecting with 

the environment that critiques the popular narrative of the environment being something to fear 

or use. 

Environmental narratives that attempt to invoke fear hinder this connection and are not 

effective for persuasion about how to treat the environment. The use of fear is apparent when 

filmmakers depict environmental threats with “dramatic metaphors, negative imagery and 

rhetoric inciting fear” (Seelig, 2019, p. 64). As is the case in climate change documentaries 

(Sakellari, 2015, p. 834), there is resistance to persuasion attempts when filmmakers focus on 

fear (Pike, 2012). There are two main theories on why fear negatively impacts the results of pro-

environmental messages. The first is that it is because fear is difficult to sustain long-term. 

Therefore, it does not lead to long-lasting impacts (Sakellari, 2015). The second is that the fear it 

imparts acts similarly to trauma due to a feeling of helplessness. As a result, the message and the 



20 
 

environmental issue become something society attempts to suppress to protect itself (Narine, 

2014).  

Eco-trauma results from treating the harm we do to the environment as a form of trauma: 

“something acknowledgeable that we work to repress in order to avoid its painful effects” 

(Narine, 2014, p. 2). Neurologists define a traumatic event as one where someone is exposed to 

an excess of external stimuli and brain stimulation that they cannot process (Narine, 2014, p. 4). 

Though this usually refers to the people experiencing the trauma firsthand, a lesser form can be 

felt in both a second and third-hand context. For example, seeing images of others dying would 

typically be a traumatic event for some people, which is also the case of eco-trauma. Displaying 

ecological harm in a way that causes trauma is not productive. In such a case, the audience cares 

too much about the harm, resulting in a traumatic sense of “loss or even betrayal, grief, guilt 

perhaps, a need for vengeance, or reparation, and a real potential for depression and rage” 

(Branston, 2016, p. 809). These traumatic events or images of the harm we do to the planet could 

“confound us, stifle us and even paralyze us politically and psychologically” (Narine, 2014, p. 

1). The sensory overload could leave us in awe or hinder us from any practical, emotional 

response. These uses of fear also continue to widen the gap between humans and the 

environment.  

 Narratives of fear produce additional challenges for persuading audiences. First, viewers 

may see the film as a part of the doom and gloom environmentalism agenda. Due to doom/gloom 

environmentalists trying to scare people into caring about climate change and the planet, the 

public views them and any form of environmental activism negatively. Any film containing a 

narrative of fear about the environment will only add to this pessimistic view. Second, stories 

with an intense fear or optimistic look at environmental issues are usually oversimplistic. As 



21 
 

stated by Seymour (2013), “Gloom/doom and optimism are often merely different sides of the 

same coin, a coin that represents humans’ desire for certainty and neat narratives about the 

future” (p. 3-4). Both gloom/doom and optimistic narratives must oversimplify the issues to 

show a clear cause-and-effect sequence. We need different forms of environmental 

representation and connection that break away from these dominant narratives of fear or 

optimism. I argue that one way the media can persuasively and accurately represent 

environmental issues is to openly display the plasticity of humans and the environment through 

the queer body of monsters as a visual tool.  

Overview of Project 

As shown, monsters are an important cultural communication tool in popular culture for 

understanding American fears, binaries, and thoughts towards the Other and environment, but 

they also can be used as a subversive tool to disrupt those same binaries. Rather than using and 

studying them as an instrument of fear and oppression, they have the potential to openly display 

the social construction of humanity and nature that has been used to sustain the human/nature 

binary and the harms that comes with it. To showcase their potential, I answer the following 

questions through this study: 

1. How do hybrid monsters utilize plasticity through animation and graphic novels to 

embody the queer ecological connection of life forms? What new ways of life do they 

display for members of discriminated groups that bridge the Human/Nature divide? 

2. How can hybrid monsters be used to critique the hegemonic, racist, and homophobic 

ideals of Humanity without reinforcing the Human/Nature binary? 



22 
 

3. How can hybrid monsters be used to critique the spatial regulation of nature, race, and 

sexuality that is often used for environmental racism and control without excluding 

man-made spaces from the ‘environment’? 

4. How can hybrid monsters be used to critique the view of the animal or feminine as 

evolutionarily inferior while displaying the mesh of queer ecology? 

 

Scope of Study 

 This study examines three case studies of hybrid monsters to analyze their potential to 

visually and contextually display a queer ecological mesh of life and the plasticity of physical, 

spatial, and social identities. As I discuss in Chapter 1, my use of plasticity focuses on how the 

human body is physically connected to and composed of nature and its social malleability. I also 

explain my monstrous splice of queer theory and ecocriticism that determines my queer 

ecological analysis. Finally, I examine each monster for how they embody queer ecology and 

plasticize humanity to trouble the human/nature binary and present new ways of living with each 

other and the world around us.  

 I chose my cases from the animation and graphic novel mediums because they display 

how even forms of popular culture deemed less ‘serious’ are integral to social construction and 

are thoroughly suited to hosting subversive monstrosity. The visual plasmaticness of animation 

and the subversive culture and format of graphic novels give monsters the visualization and 

context needed to thrive and display their full potential. I chose three texts from each medium, 

and analyze each in chapters two through four. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Wolfwalkers, 

and select episodes from Love, Death, and Robots serve as my animation examples. Bramble, 

Run Wild, and InSEXts are my graphic novels. These texts represent different genres, 



23 
 

writing/drawing styles, intended age groups, and environmental messages. As such, they allow 

for a wide range of monster representations that give audiences new ways to view and 

understand the issues surrounding what we see as ‘human’ or ‘natural.’ I provide a synopsis of 

each text, including narrative, style, and how the main character’s body displays its monstrosity. 

I chose these particular texts for three main reasons. First, they had at least one character that 

combined the human and nonhuman. They were published in the last ten years. Since monsters 

are cultural tools, they change over time, and I wanted the monsters I study to be relevant to our 

current time period. Lastly, these texts were relatively easy for an American audience to find-- 

something you could easily pick up in a comic bookstore, like I did, or find on a common 

streaming service. I put no demographic (age, gender, race, nationality, etc.) limitations on who 

the creator of these texts could be because this project displays new and inventive uses of 

monstrosity, and I did not want to limit who was capable of it. Additionally, I did not limit my 

texts to those intended solely for an American audience. Instead, I analyze each text through a 

lens of American history and context. Ultimately, this project intersects queer theory and 

ecocriticism using media studies tools to show the potential hybrid monsters have to reimagine 

our relationship with nature in a way that does not recommit the harms of binaries in America.  

This project is significant because it contributes to environmental media and 

communication studies by showcasing the usefulness of queer ecological methodology for the 

analysis of complex representations. It also outlines a new way of displaying social issues to the 

public. Although queer ecology is not new, it is understudied in environmental communication 

and ecocriticism. Even when used, it often focuses heavily on environmental issues and ignores 

the role of social discrimination. It is particularly timely as we continue to struggle with showing 

the effects of climate change on vulnerable populations to the general public of America. This 



24 
 

study highlights the connections between discrimination and environmental destruction in a way 

that gives members of discriminated groups an avenue of defiant expression that is often 

censored with American popular culture.  

Preview of Chapters 

Throughout this project, I argue that hybrid monsters display the mesh of queer ecology 

in a way that exhibits new ways of life for marginalized people but must be balanced between 

human and environmental concerns, physical plasticity and audience identification with the 

monster, and empowerment and condemnation of groups in power. However, even if the balance 

is off, these monsters still critique human exceptionalism, the physical separation between 

humans and nature, and evolutionary ideology that sees women and nature as inferior.  

In chapter one, I describe my critical lens and approach to studying the queer body of 

monsters using queer ecology theory to analyze animation and graphic novels. The chapter 

explains my use of monsters and human plasticity, why I chose to study animation and graphic 

novels, and the criteria I use to gauge how my cases display the queer ecological mesh of life. 

The case studies are broken into three chapters with each chapter focusing on two texts. Each 

chapter of cases answers question one and one of the remaining three. In chapter two, I analyze 

the animated Netflix show, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and a graphic novel, Run Wild, to 

answer how hybrid monsters can be used to critique discriminatory ideals of Humanity without 

reinforcing the Human/Nature binary. The chapter addresses the issues of human exceptionalism 

and how the monsters in both texts critique the concept of essentialist human superiority. In this 

chapter, I explain the importance of including the human in the hybrid monster to allow for 

identification with the Other and the addressing of pertinent social issues. Chapter three answers 

how monsters can reject the hegemonic spatial regulation of brown, feminine, and queer bodies 



25 
 

and nature without demonizing urban spaces. I give an overview of the repercussions of settler 

colonialism that has taken place in America and discuss how the monsters in the film 

Wolfwalkers and the novel Bramble bridge the created divide between what we call civilization 

and wilderness. I argue that these narratives must give nature agency and life while not 

recreating spatial and social binaries used to oppress marginalized groups. In the final chapter, I 

utilize Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine in conjunction with queer ecology 

theory to analyze how female monsters can be used to trouble the thought of nature and women 

being evolutionarily inferior and worthy of disgust. I argue that hybrid monsters should be used 

to allow the audience to see the mesh of life and social issues in reality through the recognition 

of themselves in the queer monstrous body. As a result of these case studies, I find that monsters 

provide many techniques for displaying the plasticity of the body and our connection to the 

world around us, from promoting identification with the Other to showing humans and nature 

that will not submit quietly to binaries.  

 

  



26 
 

Chapter 1: Queer Ecological Methodology: Visual and Cultural Plasticity in Animation 

and Comics  

Monsters have been used alongside scientific discourse to define humanity in a way that 

is detrimental to the treatment of the environment and marginalized groups of people. Scientists 

created a connected framework of biological superiority and classification leading Western 

society to support racist and homophobic practices like slavery and sterilization alongside 

environmental destruction and commodification. This link between environmental and social 

issues requires any study of nature monsters to be aware of the way that these monsters continue 

to shape the public’s perception of race, gender, and sexuality. I argue that hybrid monsters can 

be used to display the plasticity of life while still acknowledging this fraught history of 

humanity.  

 Displaying plasticity requires showcasing how humans are biologically and conceptually 

flexible. Animation and comics are uniquely suited to host such displays due to their visual 

plasmaticness and subversive culture. How animation allows the body and landscape to stretch, 

bend, and blend infinitely allows the medium to tell stories about and show bodies in new ways 

that support the instability of plasticity and hybrid monsters. On the other hand, comics, 

especially graphic novels, have a long history of resistance against conservative mindsets and 

boundaries. Furthermore, the very form of comics is monstrous as they rely heavily on symbols 

and iconography in a way that is accessible to a broad audience and arrange panels and frames in 

ways that can resist linear storytelling. Monsters abound in animation and comics, but I am using 

both genres and the monsters within them in combination with monstrous queer ecology to 

expand our understanding of their potential as tools for social critique.  



27 
 

In this chapter, I propose a monstrous splice of queer theory and ecocriticism that probes 

how the plasticity or queerness of humans and the environment allows for new narratives, forms 

of life, and discourse about naturalization and the environment. This form of queer ecology does 

not just combine queer theory and ecocriticism but displays how life itself is queer, not only in 

terms of sexuality but in terms of existence and connection. Life is interconnected on every level, 

creating a mesh of interrelations that resist boundaries. Hybrid monsters that embody both 

humans and nature allow the audience to view this plasticity of life and place themselves with it. 

I utilize queer ecology and expand upon axes created by Ivakiv (2013) to analyze my case 

studies showing the expansive possibilities of this mesh and monsters as media communication 

tools.  

Human Classification used for Discrimination 

The human/inhuman binary strives to naturalize bodies and spaces according to a 

heteronormative ideal. Therefore, any critique of monstrous representations that accepts the 

human/inhuman binary reinforces the binaries historically supporting discrimination based on 

race, gender, sexuality, and the environment’s abuse. Binaries are used to push ‘others’ to the 

outskirts of the Human and is the impetus for the creation of ‘the monster’. As a result, Human, 

as a term, operates descriptively, prescriptively, and proscriptively (Giffney & Hird, 2008, p. 7). 

Each of these three operations coincides with a primary inflection of what it means to be human. 

These inflections are the cognitive-rational Human or ‘Man’ (prescriptive), the humane Human 

(proscriptive), and the biological/Human as a species (descriptive). Though these inflections can 

be separated, there is some overlap and a level of contingency between them.  

The cognitive-rational Human or Man describes the ideal citizen and is a masculinized 

and normative sense of the Human. In this inflection, Man is 



28 
 

rational, bounded, integral, sovereign, and self-aware. This is the figure to whom rights 
and citizenship are granted; this is the default figure that grounds and personifies norms 
of behavior, ability, and health; this is the figure around which we ordinarily construct 
notions of political and social agency (Luciano & Chen, 2015, p. 190) 

I call this inflection prescriptive because it sets strict guidelines for who may count as a rational 

Human. In America, you would have to be a white male even to qualify. Anyone else has 

historically been seen as lesser in the eyes of the law and treated accordingly. People on the other 

side of the binary, in this case, tend to be the ‘masses’ or the ‘public.’ The ‘masses’ are a 

grouping of everyone that is not a healthy, well-behaved white male, and they are seen as 

unregulated, uneducated, and easily used or deceived (Jenson, 1992; Lippmann, 2000).  

The humane Human is the affective inflection and is a sympathetic-emotional figure of 

the human. According to Luciano and Chen (2015),  

To be “human,” in this sense, is to feel for others, to love and to grieve and to respond to 
the suffering of others. This mode of humanness, aligned with the ideal of humaneness, 
grounds most liberal and sentimental appeals to justice as a way to remediate damage. 
(Luciano & Chen, 2015, p. 190) 

This inflection is not as strict as the rational Man since it is focused more on things a humane 

Human should not do and a rather vague list of what they should. However, even if this 

inflection is less strict than the former, it is still a regulated form of humanity. It is meant to bring 

the community together and combat possessive individualism, but the inflection remains 

heteronormatively white, just like Man. Beings on the other side of the binary would typically be 

inhumane such as murders, rapists, or animal abusers. However, due to the flexibility of ethics 

and morals, the bar can be controlled in a way that allows those with power to push anyone to the 

other side of the binary.  

In contrast to the other two, the biological inflection of the Human is taken as a scientific 

description of what a human is but has often been used as a prescriptive and proscriptive filter to 



29 
 

create a hierarchy within humanity. This inflection is the most common in our current era with 

the rise of evolutionary thought. The theory of evolution allowed American society to form a 

material connection between humans while establishing a differentiated hierarchy between 

humans and other life forms. This inflection allowed those with power to define what is and is 

not ‘natural’ according to either human or environmental nature. This use of the ‘natural’ creates 

an ideal or standard to aspire to within humanity. Sylvia Wynter calls this the universal human or 

bio-economic man. In this inflection, the Other, such as Black people, the disabled, the poor, 

etc., are seen as less ‘ideal’ in the eyes of natural selection. What makes this inflection unique is 

that the  

idea of “bio-economic man” marks the assumed naturalness, which positions 
economic inequities, “natural selection,” and concepts such as the free market not in the 
realm of divine design, as in the previous religious order of things, but beyond the reach 
of human intervention all the same (Weheliye, 2008, p. 323). 

This inflection claims that the world is ordered by nature and the market while defining what is 

considered ‘natural’ itself.   

The primary issue with this inflection is that the creators, or those that most powerfully 

imagined this idea of humanity, force that ideal on others by claiming it as the ideal of Universal 

Humanness. “The Human is therefore the product of a particular epistemology, yet it appears to 

be (and is accepted as) a naturally independent entity existing in the world” (Mignolo, 2015, p. 

108). In other words, this a self-regenerative loop created by life and cultural systems but claims 

not to be. Wynter thinks of this as a grand macro-origin story, and Humans are storytellers who 

“storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological” (McKittrick & Wynter, 2015, p. 

11). I focus on this inflection since it is the current hegemonic inflection of humanity and is the 

source of most contemporary monsters. The creation of monsters plays a part in the self-



30 
 

regeneration process of these inflections. This system of control creates them in order to 

constantly update and, in a way, enforce their control.  

All three inflections tell a story that excludes and controls Others in the form of racism, 

sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination. The biological inflection, specifically, 

works through science. As Brown (2015) argued, science is always and inherently political in its 

history and application. For example, “the development of the very idea of races comes out of 

the natural sciences, which themselves grew out of the practice of collecting, classifying, and 

categorizing life forms” (Brown, 2015, p. 327). Bodies are not mediated the same way through 

science. Science can and has been used to either save/enhance some bodies while controlling and 

using others. “As studies of medical racism show, black people have historically been objects of 

scientific exploration and the involuntary recipients of painful, often fatal medical practices” 

(Brown, 2015, p. 322). Moreover, not just Black bodies bear the weight of science.  

The myth of objective science gives way to discrimination against Black and queer 

people. In her book, Queering the Color Line, Somerville (2000) shows that the categories of 

‘black’ and ‘white’ and ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ have been intertwined throughout 

American history. She argues that the surveillance of Black bodies with the rise of racial 

segregation provided the logic scientists needed to conceptualize homo/heterosexuality as 

distinguishable categories. For example, the three models of homosexuality (inversion, 

intermediate, and abnormal) relied upon and reinforced preexisting models of racialized bodies 

through evolution theory, comparative anatomy, hybridization, and the assumption that scientists 

made that the body was a legible text. Just as I am doing in this study, Somerville uses this 

knowledge to critique how racial and queer identities are often studied separately despite their 

historical connection.  



31 
 

Not only is their history intertwined, but Black subjects’ humanity also has been made 

dependent on their submission to sexual regulation. The nuclear, heteronormative family ideal 

was used to control Black people and construct white families as superior (Ferguson, 2003). 

Black men were said to be “playing too feminine a role in the social structure to be good for 

heterosexual family formation and reproduction” (Lemelle Jr., 2005, p. 80). If any Black people 

wanted to rise within America's social structure, they had to conform to heteronormative ideals 

and police others within their community.  

Connection between Social and Environmental Domination  

While this connection between the history of racial and queer discrimination is vital, my 

focus in this study is how the development of racialized and queer bodies through natural 

sciences connects to environmental ideology. Racialized and queer bodies are socially 

constructed by categorizing life forms. Once categorized, scientists compared these bodies to 

others to determine which were more ‘evolutionarily advanced.’ Thus, racialized bodies, queer 

bodies, and the environment are linked through this evolutionary narrative that pits the “perverse, 

the polluted and the degenerate against the fit, the healthy, and the natural” (Mortimer-

Sandilands & Erickson, 2010, p. 3). As a result, understanding the connection between 

environmental ideology, racism, sexism, and homophobia is crucial for studying the hybrid 

monsters I analyze in my dissertation.  

 The connection between racism and environmental ideology starts with scientific racism. 

Under the framework of objective science, colonizers racialized human bodies, creating 

categories as they had with animals and plants to reinforce the ‘biological superiority’ of white 

men. Therefore, Black bodies became a part of the biological system that determines the ‘value’ 

of a human. As stated by Weheliye (2008), blackness “cannot be defined as primarily empirical 



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nor understood as the non/property of particular subjects, but should be understood as an integral 

structuring assemblage of the modern human” (2008, p. 324). For white men to argue that they 

were the best-evolved version of the Human, they had to present a less evolved version. That 

became one of the backbones of the bio-economic inflection of the Human. Black people are 

deemed too ‘natural’ or animal-like, simultaneously classifying both Black people and the 

environment as inferior to the Human ideal. According to Iman Jackson (2020), this dichotomy 

between evolved human and primal nature refigured blackness as abject, human animality and 

extends human recognition to demean blackness as the animal within the human. This animality 

allowed scientists and eugenicists to see Black people as the lesser, more expendable version of 

humanity. They were valued for only labor, biological capacities, and experimentation (Brown, 

2015). Thus, Black people are exploited just like the environment and animals they are compared 

to. There is resistance to this animalization, and some embrace inhumanness as a form of 

activism or identity (Weheliye, 2008). This embrace makes any monster that combines a 

racialized and animal body complicated to study but significant for both environmental and 

critical race studies.  

These new forms of biological and environmental knowledge refigured blackness and 

inspired new ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality. Like blackness, modern understandings of 

sexuality and sexual identity are grounded in biological discourse and evolutionary thought. 

According to Sandilands and Erickson (2010) 

the historical origins of modern understandings of sex, sexuality, sexual identity, and 
sexual orientation are grounded in biological discourses that are heavily influenced by 
evolutionary thought, and conversely, that evolutionary thought is supported by modern 
understandings of sex as an internal and essential category, and also by notions of natural 
sexuality from which nonreproductive sexualities are understood as deviant. (p. 7)  



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Essentially, normalized sexuality and evolutionary thought are in an endless loop with one 

another. As a result, nonheteronormative sexuality, sexual identities, and sex are seen by 

dominant American culture as acts against nature (both environmental Nature and human 

nature).   

In other words, anyone who did not perform heterosexual acts was evolutionarily inferior. 

We can trace this idea to Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection. As Mortimer-

Sandilands & Erickson explain, 

Indeed, although natural and sexual selection are different processes, in their co-relation 
as “selection,” as modes of species adaptation, there was in Darwin a link between an 
organism’s relationships to its environment and its sexual relations. Foucault has argued 
that the very category of “the homosexual” was a creation of this Victorian period, a 
naturalizing move in such institutions as sexology and medicine in which sex came to be 
understood not as a set of acts but as a state of internal being (in this case, a deviant one), 
an “implantation of perversion” that had the effect of retroactively crafting 
heterosexuality as equally internal and constitutive: a question of one’s nature. (2010, p. 
8) 

Despite these being theories of animal behavior, they were used to deem certain sexual behaviors 

and identities of people as deviant and unnatural. Thus, our modern understanding of 

homosexuality was constructed.  

 This construction of the category ‘homosexual’ excludes individuals not conforming to 

this notion of evolutionary fitness from natural spaces and exerts control over those who do not 

perform heterosexual acts and the natural world’. During the American Transcendentalism 

period, wild places were presented as a space for a specific heteromasculinity that excluded 

Black, immigrant, and queer people from nature or blamed them for environmental destruction. 

The narrative those in power created was a battle between wilderness conservation and urban 

development. Many changes were taking place in America. There was “immigration, urban 

expansion, industrialization, women’s increasing economic independence, and the 



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transformation of the economy from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism, to name a few 

factors,” and these changes made elite white men anxious about the challenge to their dominance 

(Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010, p. 3).   

In turn, outdoor pursuits became a new place for white men to exert their dominance and 

superiority and escape the issues of urbanization. Theodore Roosevelt was the poster boy for this 

movement from economic supremacy to a greater emphasis on physical strength (Mitman, 2009). 

Roosevelt reinvented himself from a weak boy to a “strapping, virile, and muscular man whose 

physical prowess came to be equated with and stand for his political strength.” He became the 

ideal of this new version of masculinity (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010, p. 14), now 

called Rooseveltian masculinity, while nature became a place to develop both moral and physical 

fitness. As Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson explain,  

Wilderness spaces such as parks came to be valued as sites to be preserved away from the 
corrupting influences of urban industrial modernity, and in particular, as places where 
new ideals of whiteness, masculinity, and virility could be explored away from the 
influence of emancipated women, immigrants, and degenerate homosexuals (Mortimer-
Sandilands & Erickson, 2010, p. 14)  

Since white men claimed natural spaces, urban spaces became the only place for queer, 

immigrant, and Black people, which powerful white men and environmental organizations, like 

the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the National Conservation Commission, marked as 

places of degeneration and immorality. The result was decades of environmental racism, the 

correlation of homosexuality with environmental issues, the association of immigrants with 

homosexuality, and more.  

 Environmental organizations, like the ones mentioned, claimed that parks and other 

human-controlled natural spaces were a cure for urban degeneration. However, creating and 

propagating these spaces came with a biopolitical agenda. In natural spaces, white heterosexual 



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men could perform and solidify their superiority through hunting and other outdoor sports. Parks 

were a cure to nonwhite, nonheterosexual existence, while nonwhite reproduction and 

homosexuality was framed as toxic to nature. Gosine (2010) points out that  

Although overpopulation propaganda and its material offshoots (family planning 
programs, coercive sterilization practices, etc.) and the criminalization and policing of 
sexual acts between men have been and are generally treated as distinct phenomena, their 
genealogies are intimately interwoven through the projects of colonialism, development, 
and nation building. Read against the heterosexist, racialized formations of nature 
engendered through these projects (the creation of national parks, etc.), heterosexual, 
potentially reproductive sex between non-white people and homosexual sex, I argue, 
threaten colonial-imperialist and nationalist ambitions. (p. 150) 

 

Influential white men often used environmental protection and its branching agendas to disguise 

environmental destruction and many forms of social oppression (Seymour, 2013, p. 9). As this 

history clarifies, the environment, especially the combination of monstrosity and the 

environment, cannot be studied without considering race, gender, and queerness. Just like 

pictures or sentences, monsters require context for deeper understanding. This history is crucial 

to the background of any environmental monster created in the U.S.. Monsters shift, evolve, and 

adapt to their current eras. However, even environmentally-themed monsters will be rooted in 

this bloody and discriminatory narrative that those in power have crafted about nature and 

racialized, queer, and gendered bodies.  

Acknowledging this history does not redefine what it means to be Human. Instead, 

through this history, I trouble normalizing a firm boundary between Humans and Nature by 

elucidating the inevitable discrimination and destruction that comes with this boundary. Black 

and queer people, too often marked as inhuman, open up new forms of sociality and modes of 

being outside this restrictive boundary (Iman Jackson, 2020; Weheliye, 2008). In other words, 

they display the ‘plasticity of life.’ Monsters can be used similarly. According to Brown (2015), 



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“fantasies about the plasticity of life in theoretical and speculative thought must not rely on some 

scientific neutrality but consider the histories of social and scientific racism and eugenics” (p. 

324). As a communication tool, monsters can open up new modes of expression and discussions 

of identity and societal fears. They display the plasticity of life while still drawing attention to 

the fraught history of the Human as it is the basis for their creation. Using monsters to redefine 

the Human or advocating that monsters be included in Humanity would erase this history and 

any subversive intentions. With the rise of climate change, human bodies and practices have 

become even more intertwined with the geology of the planet, which makes it an excellent time 

to rethink our relationship to nature and potentially displace human exceptionalism. I argue that 

environmentally-themed monsters continue to play a role as a tool for shaping the public’s 

perception of environmental and humanity in a way that impacts our understanding of race and 

sexuality.  

Visual and Cultural Plasticity through Animation and Comics 

The plasticity of humans and the environment as biologically and conceptually flexible 

categories allows for new forms of engagement and ideas for new modes of existence outside of 

biological determinism by showcasing the ambiguity of the Human/Nature divide (Brown, 

2015). For example, from a biological standpoint, scholars like Jayna Brown and Catherine 

Malabou have used the human body's inner workings, like the gaps between neurons and cellular 

reproduction, to show the body’s plasticity and non-heteronormativity. Malabou (2008) writes 

that  

Cerebral space is constituted by cuts, by voids, by gaps, and this prevents our taking it to 
be an integrative totality… Between two neurons, there is thus a caesura, and the synapse 
itself is ‘gapped’ . . . the cut plays a decisive role in cerebral organization. Nervous 
information must cross voids, and something aleatory introduces itself between the 
emission and the reception of a message, constituting the field of plasticity. (p. 36)  



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This is the foundation for the concept of neural plasticity, which argues that the nervous system 

is malleable and changes itself functionally and structurally according to experiences. We can 

extend the idea of physical plasticity to the way the human body is composed of millions of 

bacteria necessary for our bodies to function properly. Considering the biological body as not 

one distinct entity but instead composed of colonies of other life, gaps, and asexual cells, it is 

harder to define the Human as a distinct definable entity separate from nature and even questions 

idea of “the human” as a species.  

Studies on race have shown the Human to also be a socially flexible construct in a way 

that is useful for monster studies. As I have stated, the Human concept requires racialized and 

othered bodies to define itself. Iman Jackson (2020) argues that, rather than being excluded, 

Black people are recognized and included in the Human to plasticize or create hegemonic levels 

of humanity. She describes plasticity as  

 a mode of transmogrification or by the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as 
if it were infinitely malleable, lexical, and biological matter such that blackness is 
produced as human, subhuman, and superhuman…simultaneously and in a manner that 
puts Being in peril because the operations of simultaneously being everything and 
nothing for an order constructs blackened humanity as the probation and exorbitance of 
form. I suggest that rather than blackened people being different things at different times 
(human, animal, machine, object), they are all of these things and nothing at once. 
(Crandall, 2020)  

Black people are used as monstrous and malleable humans to control and use them. While some 

critical race scholars like Sylvia Wynter call for Black people to be included in a new version of 

the Human, Iman Jackson calls for new modes of being that take advantage of this inhuman 

quality pushed upon Black people. To put it succinctly, the Human is biologically and 

conceptually flexible, and monsters are one of the best ways to display that trait. However, not 

all mediums can adequately display this abject body of monsters and humans. For example, live-

action media is particularly limited to the confines of the human form when not using computer-



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generated images. The plasmaticness of animation and the subversive potential of comics allows 

them to display monsters and the plasticity of life more easily than other mediums and have been 

doing so for decades.  

Visual mediums like animation and graphic novels can function as tools for education 

and communication (Farinella, 2018). Over time, animation, comics, and graphic novels have 

become more respected mediums, which has led to them being used more often for 

communication about serious topics (Heise, 2017, p. 118). For example, monsters have been 

used as educational tools in animation and literature to teach children and young adults about 

personal, social, and emotional issues; character, motivation, human rights, democracy, and 

conflict (Ames, 2013, p. 6; Erle & Hendry, 2020, p. 5). However, these mediums are meant for 

more than just children and have an adult audience numbering in the tens of millions worldwide 

(Heise, 2014, p. 302). Animation and comics can simultaneously take on grim issues in the texts 

while exhibiting a needed plasmaticness and ability to transgress boundaries.  

 

Visual Plasmaticness of Animation 

Plasmaticness is a term coined by Sergei Eisenstein that refers to animation’s infinite 

ability to let animated bodies “expand, contract, stretch, bulge, flatten, implode, explode, 

fragment, and yet return to their original shape” (Heise, 2014, p. 304). By using this ability, 

animation can tell stories and show bodies in new and potentially educational ways. In addition, 

this ability has been beneficial in engaging with environmental deterioration. Characters can 

possess unstable forms that provide an imaginary escape for those who wish to hold such 

freedom from society and biological order. It also displays that humans are not the only beings 



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with liveliness, intentionality, and agency. This ability coincides nicely with the queer, category-

defining body of the monster. 

Despite having matured as a medium, animation remains undervalued in culture and 

scholarship. The genre is relied upon for pleasure and entertainment, yet it also sparks 

conversation about sensitive and controversial topics (Pike, 2012, p. 25). It can address war, 

discrimination, technology, and environmental crisis while staying on an entertainment level that 

is still acceptable for children and young adults through playfulness, a sense of humor, and satire 

(Heise, 2014, p. 301). Animation can draw together people of different ages, ethnicities, gender, 

religion, or nationality by “uniting audiences under thematic ideas and concerns” (Selby, 2013, 

p. 7). Therefore, animation can operate as Bruckner calls “teaching machines” (Bruckner, 2010, 

p. 187). Animation has this power because it “challenges expectations of art, film, and narrative” 

(Murray & Heumann, 2011, p. 11). It can reframe our relationship to and evoke attachments and 

emotional responses to the nonhuman and objects. It can make us rethink our perception of 

movement, time, and space through framing, camera movement, and the capacity to give objects 

liveliness (Beckman, 2014, p. 5).  This ability falls within animation’s plasmaticness. 

  The plasmaticness of animation has both a harmful and beneficial impact on narratives 

about the environment. “Enviro-toons” describe animated films and television shows that deal 

explicitly with environmental concerns. American enviro-toons from the 1930s onward had three 

typical narrative and aesthetic patterns: “the power of nature over the human world, the need for 

controlling human intervention and nurturing the natural world in order to strengthen their 

interdependence, and criticism of human exploitation of the natural world” (Murray & Heumann, 

2011, p. 5). The toons typically reflected the evolution of the environmental movement. Enviro-



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toons address issues that are historically and culturally specific (Murray & Heumann, 2011, pp. 

242–243). These films can be less problematic than live-action because animation can make the 

manipulation of the natural world obvious rather than hiding how media frames nature for human 

consumption (Bruckner, 2010, p. 189). Animation can contribute toward understanding the 

future by creatively predicting scenes rather than just recording situations from life and can do so 

in an often significantly cheaper and quicker way (Selby, 2013). Animation can also reveal the 

liveliness and instability of things like trees and other things that usually appear unmoving to us 

(Ivakhiv, 2013, p. 203). Therefore, animation can articulate issues and values that live-action 

films find more challenging.   

However, historically, the plasmaticness of animation has primarily reinforced control 

rather than freedom due to the construction of the environment as a commodity. Despite the 

potential of animation for social change, these enviro-toons often focused on entertainment and 

consumption of both the film and accompanying products. Disney movies like Finding Nemo 

(2003) and Bambi (1942) are two examples of this as cases of anthropomorphization. Finding 

Nemo acts as an example of commodification, while Bambi is an example of how plasmaticness 

is used in detrimental ways. 

Finding Nemo follows a clownfish trying to rescue his son from humans that stole him 

from the ocean. In films like Finding Nemo, animal characters are anthropomorphized. 

Anthropomorphism allows the viewer to only see animals and the natural world through the lens 

of humanity and establishes humanity as the normative value to compare all life. This 

anthropomorphization started with Disney’s very first nature documentary in 1948: Seal Island. 

Walt Disney is said to have insisted that there should be no “evidence of human ‘civilization’ in 



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the pristine and highly constructed versions of nature that the True-Life Adventures offered to 

American audiences” (Molloy, 2012, p.172). However, Disney simply overlaid human social 

structures, norms, and values onto the animals they filmed. These films shifted from the typical 

documentaries that focused on hunting, tracking, and expeditions to focus solely on animals as 

the main narrative agents: “In Disney films, animals were directly attributed with emotional 

lives, motivations, and intelligence. In short, they were granted subjectivity, a far cry from the 

instrumental view of animals favored elsewhere”. However, this anthropomorphization is a 

misrepresentation of animal behavior that leads to audiences misunderstanding nature (Molloy, 

2012, p.172).  While anthropomorphization can help some viewers relate to animals and form 

identification, these animated animals are so anthropomorphized, so plasmatic that children are 

often disappointed by the real thing (Bruckner, 2010; Ivakhiv, 2013, p. 215). Despite Finding 

Nemo’s message of leaving fish in the ocean, sales on clownfish rose by forty percent after the 

film’s release, and most clownfish are taken from the wild.  

Not only do these films influence sales, but Disney and other filmmakers benefit from 

anthropomorphic animals because any reference to nature furthers their green or environmentally 

friendly brands. In a capitalist society, companies balance promoting environmental issues and 

selling their products (Mitman, 2009). The general rule of environmental representation is to 

appeal to the “lowest (and largest) ‘common denominator’ by avoiding topics that are too 

controversial while choosing issues that resonate with a broad audience.” (Moore, 2016, p. 542). 

This mentality applies to more than just the movie industry. Commercial news replicates this 

mentality when these issues are ignored and marginalized or turned into oversimplified, 

dramatized events where the ‘bad’ guy has already been brought to justice (E. E. Moore, 2016, p. 

542). In the end, these films have become little more than an escapist fantasy where we are 



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“never forced to confront how the behaviors of individuals, institutions, corporations, and 

governments are altering both animal and human lives” (Mitman, 2009, p. 214). Therefore, films 

show anthropomorphized animals but keep the boundary between humans and nature clear; 

further, they reinforce the commodification of the environment.  

Like Finding Nemo, Bambi features an anthropomorphized animal in the form of a young 

buck as he grows up in the forest and eventually becomes the next king of the forest. During the 

narrative of Bambi, the forest where he lives burns and is reduced to charred remains. By the end 

of the film, the forest returns to its lush state after almost no time has passed. The erasure of 

damage is an issue with plasmaticness and film in general. This damage can highlight threats, but 

the erasure of it “suggests that bodies, and by extension the natural world at large, will survive 

the worst abuses unscathed and never really suffer any irreversible harm” (Heise, 2017, p. 120). 

This recovery from damage is the foundation of many animated films and makes any 

conservation concern seem superfluous. However, at the same time, these plasmatic bodies and 

environment playfully demonstrate “ideas of resilience, adaptation, and synthetic ecologies in the 

Anthropocene” (Carruth & Marzec, 2014, p. 209). Rather than a unique aspect of Bambi, these 

themes and issues have been a feature of animation since the 1930s.  

However, environmental scholars and critics have paid little attention to animation until 

the past fifteen years (Heise, 2014, p. 302). The complications with plasmaticness show that we 

should not limit scholarship to films that deal explicitly with environmental concerns. Just the 

presence of plasmatic bodies and landscapes allows for plasticity and the critique of the 

displayed boundary between humans and nature or the lack thereof. Since animation has a long 



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history of study within media studies, I am bringing in media scholar tools like monsters and 

plamasticness to environmental communication.  

Subversive Culture of Comics 

Rather than movement, comics support plasticity through their historical resistance to 

conservative mindsets and boundary-subverting format. Comics represent “juxtaposed pictorial 

and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or produce an 

aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud, 2001, p. 9). In this dissertation, I study graphic 

novels specifically because they are complete rather than serialized narratives with a history of 

addressing complex issues. The definition of a graphic novel is heavily debated in comic studies. 

At a basic level, graphic novels are “complete narratives[s] told in the