Unbecoming Female Monsters: Latin American Gender and Sexualities

Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work founded on the idea that female monstrosity is buried within cultural constructs. It looks at the cult of the female body as a contested site of patriarchal fears and anxieties around female sexuality and its reproductive power. Cristina Santos explores how any process of female sexual development occurring outside society s predetermined acceptable behavior patterns for women is considered deviant, monstrous, and/or degenerate. This type of socio-cultural censorship of female self-expression then leads to the prejudgment of the female by external forces within confining and inauthentic roles for the individual. Ultimately, those women who chose an authentic self-expression of their sexuality run the risk of possible exclusion from their community and punishment for not adhering to the dominant normative code."