‘Don’t feed the plants!’: Monstrous normativity and disidentification in Little Shop of Horrors | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 13, Issue 3
  • ISSN: 1750-3159
  • E-ISSN: 1750-3167

Abstract

The 1982 camp horror musical tells the story of a meek little flower shop attendant named Seymour, who comes across a novelty carnivorous plant that eats human blood. The talking plant preys on Seymour’s infatuation with his beautiful co-worker Audrey to radicalize him into feeding the plant ‘fresh’ bodies. Building on the work of theatre scholar Michael Chemers, who asserts that stage monsters represent larger social and political anxieties of their time, this article identifies Seymour, the normal, white, heterosexual everyman, as the real ‘monster’ of the musical. Thus, the musical’s creators, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, exposed the monstrousness of normativity at the poignant moment in American culture, during the early years of the conservative Reagan administration. This article uses José Muñoz’s theory of ‘disidentification’, a strategy employed by marginalized people working ‘on and against dominant ideology’ to analyse the creators’ didactic and subversive strategy.

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2019-12-01
2024-05-02
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): disidentification; monsters; normativity; nostalgia; Reaganism; satire
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