Living monstrously: a feminist reading of care, refusal, and the teacher’s double bind in weapons

This essay develops the concept of monstrous pedagogy to name the double bind facing women teachers: young teachers are surveilled as potentially monstrous, while veteran teachers who set boundaries are cast as actually monstrous. Drawing on feminist theory and critical film analysis of Cregger, Z., dir. 2025. Weapons [Film]. New Line Cinema. horror film Weapons, combined with autoethnographic reflection on nearly two decades of teaching, I argue that care discourse in education obscures the structural violence embedded in feminized teaching labor.