'Unspeakable Acts': Coming Out as Werewolf

Late 20th century academic writing on the relationship between queerness and horror in literature, film and television has tended to focus on the covert coding of non-normative sexualities as monstrous. In contrast, Lisa Metherell?s enquiry focuses on gothic tropes of unspeakability in relation to more ?out? werewolf representations. Her research reviews portrayals of werewolves in contemporary horror media, reading them through the context of queer identities, and historical discourses on homosexual unspeakability and the closet. Metherell focuses on a specific scene from TV?s ?Being Human? (BBC3) in which a character named George tries and fails to ?come out? as a werewolf to his family. Exploring this moment, Metherell draws parallels with the difficulties of ever fully ?coming out? as queer (rather than as lesbian or gay) because of its challenges to ?cultural intelligibility? (J.Butler, 1990). At the moment of werewolf transformation; when the human vocal cords tear and twist; no speech is possible. Through her work, she proposes and investigates the potential of radical unspeakability as a tool for queer subjects to exceed and resist normative sexual categorisation. Metherell argues that the queer potential of the werewolf lies in unspeakability: not the unspeakability of something so hideous or shameful that it cannot be named, nor the secrecy and silence of the homosexual closet, but rather in the implicit excess of the subject at moments when spoken language fails to express or capture transformation and alterity.