It’s funny: in my research, as I’ve strove to find a cohesive ethnography for the monster fucker community, I’ve realized a few things.
First, I’m not sure that a cohesive ethnography exists period within any community. My first study in my masters program was about studying the Dark Romance genre, and it proved just that. It was a community that was united by a love for the genre, but beyond that things were so variable especially about what they liked and why they liked it.
The same is said about the monster fucking community. Bookstagram/Booktok monster fuckers are very different than say Tumblr Monsterfuckers. There are overlaps of course, united by a love of monsters, but even that is contentious as people all argue about if something is monster enough to label oneself as a monster fucker.
And the thing is, this ironically aligns with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) in which he says: “History, like individuality, subjectivity, gender, and culture, is composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth epistemological wholes. Some fragments will be collected here and bound temporarily together to form a loosely integrated net—or, better, an unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body.”
Kinda neat, isn’t it?