| Sumario: | Elizabeth Grosz states that the promise of posthumanist theory is ‘its ability to generate concepts that allow us to surround ourselves with the possibilities for being otherwise’.2 When Anne Carson translated the fragments of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis into a contemporary pseudo-autobiography, centred on a queer, red, winged, and androgynous POC named ‘Geryon’, I argue that she positioned herself at the forefront of the posthumanist venture.3 In this work, entitled, Autobiography of Red, Carson subverts the heteropatriarchal dehumanisation of deviant embodiment by granting Geryon a sense of autonomy, recognising him as both the monstrous Other, and as a valid ‘subject’.4 In my reading of Autobiography of Red, I argue that Carson engages with ideas of monstrosity, humanness and subjectivity in her presentation of the monster Geryon as a protagonist in the text. Carson highlights the validity and ‘possibility’ of ‘being otherwise’, by invoking Stesichorian precedent and gifting the audience insight into Geryon’s lived experience from his own abject perspective. In Carson’s recognition of the monstrous, the binary dialectics of the modern patriarchy are perverted, and abstracted and themselves become, ‘otherwise’; an expanded conceptualising of ‘the human subject’.5 In this paper I will explore Carson’s talent for revealing alternate possibilities for texts such as Stesichoros’ in which monstrous individuals are given autonomy, validated and thereby, liberated.
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