Monstrous figures both police and expose the fragility of human boundaries.

Evidence

One of the ways in particular in which the boundaries between humans and almost-humans have been asserted is through the discourse of ‘monstrosity.’ Monsters serve to mark the fault-lines but also, subversively, to signal the fragility of such boundaries. They are truly ‘monstrous’—as in things shown and displayed—in their simultaneous demonstration and destabilization of the demarcations by which cultures have separated nature from artifice, human from non-human, normal from pathological. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 642

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides the analytical definition of how monsters function culturally — marking and destabilizing boundaries.