‘I pledge you!’: Disability, monstrosity and sacrifice in Wytches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the introduction to Freakery (1996), editor and disabilities scholar, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, charts a shift in the West’s cultural perception of and relation to ‘freaks’, arguing that the extraordinary body once viewed with wonder became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a site of error. Michel Foucault ([1984] 2010) identifies the same trend on a broader scale, demonstrating that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain populations – the mad, the criminal, the impoverished, the queer – were rewritten as a social disease blighting normative society. This social equation endures to this day; one has only to scan recent blockbusters to identify the monstrous body as evil, the deformed body as deficient and expendable and, by contrast, the able body as the practically un-killable hero. In this context, the thematic achievement of Scott Snyder et al.’s Wytches (2015) is notable for its refusal to adhere to this equation, and further for its articulation of a positive alternative to it. Wytches, a Gothic horror from the first page, inverts the Victorian equation of horror with madness and monstrosity. While the comic’s eponymous antagonists are unquestionably monstrous, inhuman, and child-eating to boot, they are easily escaped and mainly act in response to the vile, selfish morality of the townsfolk they neighbour. This article first reviews theories of difference and othering as articulated by Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Michel Foucault, and expands understandings of ‘freakery’ and difference to include not just the corporeal but also the mental via Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Max Nordau and Roy Porter. It then argues that Wytches’ monstrous use of normative bodies against the dedicated rescue of its neuroatypical protagonist by abled and disabled characters alike, subtly and compellingly re-inscribing the freaked body not only as a heroic body but as a wondrous one, and argues fiercely against the long-standing social equation of difference and innate evil.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".