Claiming The Monstrosity
Hortense Spillers challenges the normative understandings of womanhood that have been shaped by patriarchal, colonial, and racist frameworks. Her work exposes how the category of “woman” itself has historically excluded and distorted Black female subjectivity—casting it as excessive, deviant, or monstrous. Yet, within this imposed monstrosity lies a radical potential.
To “claim the monstrosity” of Black womanhood, as Spillers suggests, is an act of defiance and self-empowerment. It refuses the demand to conform to the narrow ideals of femininity defined through white, heteronormative, and patriarchal lenses. Rather than seeking inclusion into an order that was never built for our liberation, it calls for a reimagining of what it means to exist as a woman outside of its confines.
The phrase itself—claiming the monstrosity—carries a double movement: it is both resistance and creation. It is not merely about rejecting imposed identities, but about seizing the power to name ourselves. To claim the monstrous is to transform what was meant to marginalize into a declaration of agency. It is an act of redefinition—a deliberate choosing of the abject as a site of power, a space from which to speak, to make meaning, and to remake the world.
Spillers asks us to consider: What if the monstrous could be our inheritance rather than our shame? If monstrosity is the name given to those who refuse containment, then claiming it becomes a political gesture—a reclamation of the very language used to erase us. In doing so, the Black female subject ceases to be an object of the white colonial gaze and becomes the author of her own narrative.
To claim monstrosity is to refuse the fantasy of purity. It is to embrace complexity, contradiction, and excess as sources of strength. It allows us to write a new grammar of being—one that does not seek legibility within dominant systems but explodes them entirely. Claiming the monstrosity is the birth of another kind of womanhood: unruly, embodied, and free.