The monstrous and deformed function as placeholders marking the limit that normalizes the inside.

Evidence

Heterogeneity’s scope, range, and reach are challenged at both ends: by the curtailments of the homogeneous, what I have called its closures, its closing down, and by the sort of unrecognizability its robust openendedness may rub up against – the monstrous or teratological, the deformed, the mutant. The shiftiness of the latter across time suggests they are place-holders for the limit, the boundary, the constitutive outside or beyond that normativizes and normalizes, thus rendering acceptable the inside, those taken to belong, the comforting and comfortable stasis of being and belonging. Beasts of yesterday have become – today’s avatars! — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1897

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the ‘monstrous’ is a shifting placeholder that constitutes and normalizes the inside — the inside’s comfort depends on an outside that is historically mobile — is dense and worth sitting with.
• XREF: Resonates with Foucault’s normalizing power and with the moral-panic literature, where deviance defines the moral boundary of a community.