Prodigiosa devianza: l’immagine del mostro tra immaginario popolare e razionalità moderna

In popular culture, the monster represents a prodigy, a liminal figure that interrupts the known order to reveal a hidden meaning. In pre-modern cul- ture, otherness, even in its most disturbing form, always carries a moral or cosmological meaning. With modernity, this paradigm shifts: monstrosity loses its semantic func- tion and is recoded in terms of pathological deviance. Scientific rationality reformulates the monstrous body as a biological error, an object of classifica- tion and clinical-social control. This epistemological shift offers an interpretative key to the monsters in the Brazilian series Cidade Invisível, in which they occupy contemporary metropol- itan space, hidden in the images of subjects excluded from the social fabric: Visual Cultural Studies 10 108 homeless people, prostitutes, waste collectors… Two regimes of monstrosity overlap in their representations: the archaic, prodigious one and the modern, normative one. Through the index of their “disordered” bodies – which break the laws of nature, too large/small, with hybridized parts – modern deviance is established as the embodiment of the process of social labelling. The plot makes visible the crisis of normative identity and the dissolution of boundaries between human and monstrous, legal and illegal, normal and deviant. Cidade Invisível thus stages the tension between imagination and ra- tionality, between official knowledge and subaltern memories.