In June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and called for Muslims around the world to migrate there. Over the next five years, around 150 women left the UK to heed this invitation, and the so- called 'jihadi brides' were rarely out of the news. This book traces the media fascination with those who joined the 'caliphate', including Sally Jones, Aqsa Mahmood and Shamima Begum. Through an analysis of the media that presented the 'brides' for public consumption, Leonie B. Jackson reveals the gendered dualistic construction of IS women as either monstrous or vulnerable. Just as the monstrous woman was sensationalised as irredeemably evil, the vulnerable girl was represented as groomed and naïve. Both subjects were constructed in such a way that women's involvement in jihadism was detached from men's, scrutinised more closely, and explained through gender stereotypes that both erased the agency of female extremists and neglected their stated motivations. As Jackson demonstrates, these media representations also contributed to the development of new norms for dealing with the 'brides', including targeted killing and the revocation of citizenship. While the vulnerable girl was potentially redeemable, the monstrous woman was increasingly considered expendable.

Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as ′monstrous′ or ′vulnerable′ and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily ′normality′ and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.

This book marks a major shift in the way we think and feel about organizations. Radically reconsidering what we see as organizationally normal and abnormal, Thanem shatters the borders of convention to enable the becoming of a new and monstrously radical politics of difference. With reflexivity, sensitivity and courage, this politically and theoretically charged work offers an affirmative alternative to habituated organizational violence and oppression. It does so in the form of a monstrous ethics of organizations. Essential reading for those interested in the best of the latest advances in organization studies. Carl Rhodes, Swansea University, UK A beautifully expressed, wonderfully crafted object, transcending the idea of organization theory book ; this is a playfully serious and provocatively modest encounter with the monstrous we inhabit and the monsters we create with our work and everyday life. It made me laugh with embarrassment and cry with joy by prying open much that we, organizational scholars, often try to hide. Finally, our monstrosity was free to roam in the light of what we claim as knowledge! It felt very liberating. Marta B. Calás, University of Massachusetts, US Invited to experience becoming-monster as we get to exercise our norms as students of organizations, Thanem makes a case for the socio-corporeal ontology of organization. Disassembled by the generosity of the multitude, we are provided with an opportunity to learn to know our own particular heterogeneity, our styles of assembling ourselves to what we have become. Becoming is thereby learnt. Important lessons, both for analysts and practitioners of organizations. Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Drawing on contemporary debates in organization theory, this book explores the monsters that populate organizations, what organizations do to these monsters, and how this challenges us to re-construct organization theory. Torkild Thanem first interrogates how organizations and organization theory seek to kill monsters and how organizations exploit the monstrous for commercial purposes from the alien monsters of the sci-fi entertainment industry to the monstrous branding of energy drinks and the organic-synthetic chimeras produced by biotech and agribusiness companies. He then argues for more diverse, more joyful and more responsible organizations through a positively monstrous theory, politics and ethics of organizational life. Proposing a theory and ontology of organizations beyond poststructuralist constructionism and critical realism, The Monstrous Organization creatively addresses the history and theory of monsters in organizational life. It will appeal to scholars, doctoral students and master's students in management and organization studies, business ethics, diversity management, cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.

Exploring the ideas of bodily monstrosity; vulnerablity; normality; and perfection, this book examines the ideologies surrounding these perceptions and considers what this tells us about ourselves.

In June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and called for Muslims around the world to migrate there. Over the next five years, around 150 women left the UK to heed this invitation, and the so- called ‘jihadi brides’ were rarely out of the news. This book traces the media fascination with those who joined the ‘caliphate’, including Sally Jones, Aqsa Mahmood and Shamima Begum. Through an analysis of the media that presented the ‘brides’ for public consumption, Leonie B. Jackson reveals the gendered dualistic construction of IS women as either monstrous or vulnerable. Just as the monstrous woman was sensationalised as irredeemably evil, the vulnerable girl was represented as groomed and naïve. Both subjects were constructed in such a way that women’s involvement in jihadism was detached from men’s, scrutinised more closely, and explained through gender stereotypes that both erased the agency of female extremists and neglected their stated motivations. As Jackson demonstrates, these media representations also contributed to the development of new norms for dealing with the ‘brides’, including targeted killing and the revocation of citizenship. While the vulnerable girl was potentially redeemable, the monstrous woman was increasingly considered expendable.

This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her ‘type’. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human – particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity – the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

This book visits vulnerability in contemporary British fiction, considering vulnerability in its relation to poetics, politics, ethics, and trauma. Vulnerability and risk have become central issues in contemporary culture, and artistic productions have increasingly made it their responsibility to evoke various types of vulnerabilities, from individual fragilities to economic and political forms of precariousness and dispossession. Informed by trauma studies and the ethics of literature, this book addresses such issues by focusing on the literary evocations of vulnerability and analyzing various aspects of vulnerable form as represented and performed in British narratives, from contemporary classics by Peter Ackroyd, Pat Barker, Anne Enright, Ian McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson, to less canonical texts by Nina Allan, Jon McGregor, and N. Royle. Chapters on romance, elegy, the ghost story, and the state-of-the-nation novel draw on a variety of theoretical approaches from the fields of trauma studies, affect theory, the ethics of alterity, the ethics of care, and the ethics of vulnerability, among others. Showcasing how the contemporary novel is the privileged site of the expression and performance of vulnerability and vulnerable form, the volume broaches a poetics of vulnerability based on categories such as testimony, loss, unknowing, temporal disarray, and performance. On top of providing a book-length evocation of contemporary fictions of vulnerability and vulnerable form, this volume contributes significantly to considerations of the importance of Trauma Studies to Contemporary Literature.