Monstrous nature, eco-horror and the criminological imagination

• In Event: Visual Approaches in Green Criminology

Abstract

Our visual and literary worlds are saturated with images of nature and the natural, both positively and negatively framed, seductive and feared. The idea of a green cultural criminology has provided a lens through which to view representations of nature but there has been little criminological exploration of our ambivalence about nature and its roots in fear—a state now labeled ecophobia. The presentation of images of wild nature and “other-than-human” species has been used in literature and film as sources of fear, anxiety and the undermining of the familiar. From the Gothic through the eco-horror movie genre to accounts of dystopian futures and the mutated post-human, these visual and narrative themes provide symbols that underpin historical and contemporary thinking about justification and justice, the deserving and undeserving, and appropriate and inappropriate ways of treating other humans and other species. What insights can we derive from such cultural inventions and creativity that can inform the criminological imagination?

Author

• Nigel South, University of Essex