We have met the monsters and they are not disambiguates

I’m not going to write much about this, except to excerpt from this interview two things:

Take a look in the mirror. Might that be a monster looking back at you?

In her wide-ranging, weirdly fascinating new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, historian of science Surekha Davies tells the story of humanity as an epic of monstrification, following the evolving definitions of what it means to be human, and of what it means to be placed outside of that definition. Davies describes how Westerners saw that the places they colonized were populated by beings who looked, ate, spoke, and behaved differently — and to fill the gaps in their understanding, imagined them as monsters, beyond the limits of humanity. She traces how that impulse underlies how humans have built nations, drawn borders, created scapegoats, and justified the destruction and enslavement of whole populations.

But monsters are us, writes Davies, and understanding the process by which we make them and how they continue to dominate our imaginations is a key to recognizing our mutual humanity. She proposes that people might reclaim monstrification to embrace difference, rather than reject it — first by recognizing that the boundaries between the human and monstrous are drawn, by humans, for human purposes — and that it’s possible to draw those boundaries differently, or not at all. Understanding humanity, that is to say, means understanding monstrosity

And this:

You bring up in the book that humanity is good at dehumanizing people and humanizing non-humans. And you can see this in capitalist work relationships, in the evolving idea of who is allowed to have free speech in the United States; increasingly it's these corporate beings, while people are dehumanized, made into numbers, made into raw material, made into resources.

That's an interesting question. I think the category of the human has always been like growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking. In certain times and places, only if you were a male property owner, could you vote. In the early 17th century, in the British Caribbean colonies, these slave and servant acts were written to disambiguate the Christian servant from the black enslaved person. There are these moments when stories are told in order to separate groups, to make it easier to exploit one group of people, to divide up groups that actually had a lot in common.

Or maybe I just like it because I’m in the third season of Dr. Who which is chock full of monsters!

Or…or…maybe I just love the word disambiguate. I would love to find a time and place to use that in a sentence.