ABSTRACT
Santiago García and David Rubín’s graphic novel retelling of Beowulf depicts the monstrous creature, Grendel, ejaculating onto the hero just before they battle. Reading Beowulf as horror, bodily fluids encode both social boundaries and repressed desires for modern heteronormative audiences. This chapter identifies the interconnectedness between the monster and the hero, in accordance with some Beowulf scholars, as well as cultural theorists such as Julia Kristeva. Then, as Beowulf and Grendel both seek a masculine ideal by means of the other’s body, they each exhibit latent phallic desires, in accordance with Lacanian psychoanalysis. I argue that Grendel’s ejaculate represents unrestrained homoerotic impulses spilling out onto other men, threatening both the homosocial order of early medieval English cultures and modern cohorts of men who subscribe to the prescriptions of toxic masculinity.
