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monsters: genius — a task for before we next meet

We’ve been circling the word “genius” for a while now without quite landing on it. Last session we talked about the stain, about fans and admirers, about what fandom builds in you and what happens to that thing when the person who made it turns out to have caused harm. But there is a mechanism underneath all of that which we haven’t yet named directly. It is the word that ends arguments. The word that functions as a permission slip, issued before the crime, honoured after it. The word that makes the calculation impossible.

Dederer calls it a “glittering absolute set into a dreary system of relative worth.” The genius breaks the calculator. You cannot weigh genius against harm because genius is not a quantity that can be weighed — it is a declaration that places someone outside the system of ordinary judgment. And declarations, unlike arguments, cannot be refuted. You can disprove a claim. You cannot disprove “genius.”


Before we next meet, I want you to sit with a few things. Not tasks exactly — provocations. Things to disagree about before we’re in the room together.

The image of the genius.

When we close our eyes and try to picture a genius — not name one, picture one — what do we see? Something specific? A body? Usually male? Physical, somehow, even when the genius is a painter or a poet rather than an athlete? Excessive? Moving with a kind of freedom that ordinary people don’t move with?

Picasso crouching half-naked on a beach, drawing a centaur in light with a sparkler. Hemingway kicking a beer can down a road in Idaho. Dederer describes exactly this: she found these photographs in a photo book as a child, and something in those images told her — before she could articulate it — what genius was supposed to look like. “The men were physical, extra-alive, moved by some spirit outside of themselves.”

That image — the body that moves differently, the person who operates by different rules, the one who is simultaneously master and servant to a force beyond themselves — is not a description. It is a construction. It was built, in the Romantic period, out of very specific materials. Christine Battersby traced the history: before the 19th century, artists were craftsmen serving patrons within conventions. The Romantic genius was an invention — a figure defined by qualities that were simultaneously feminised and supermale. Sensitive, irrational, excessive, ungovernable — but not a woman. The same qualities that in an actual woman would read as hysteria or instability became, in this specifically male figure, the marks of greatness. The category excluded women structurally, at the level of what genius was supposed to be, not just at the level of who got called one.

Now: we have Kanye West in Rolling Stone saying “I am a rock star. Rock stars can pull their dick out in public then go rock 20,000 people. Rock stars can give their fucking opinion without having to deal with — what’s that thing I get dealt with every day of my life? Oh yeah. Backlash.” He starts by claiming the genius freedom. By the end of the quote he has demonstrated he doesn’t have it. The hall pass is not universally available. It was built for a specific body and it fits that body and not others.

And then there is this: Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2023 was Taylor Swift.

And the question of whether she is a genius — which has been asked repeatedly and answered differently by different people — reveals something about the category that explicit argument cannot. Because she is extraordinarily skilled. The formal control over her songwriting, the longevity, the scale of cultural influence are undeniable. And yet the word sits strangely on her for many people, and I want you to think about why. She is not excessive in the required way. She is extraordinarily controlled — known for meticulous planning, strategic thinking, careful management of her catalogue and her image. She does not perform being overtaken by a force beyond herself. She performs mastery. And mastery, it turns out, is not what the genius image is built for. The genius is supposed to be subject to something that overtakes him. Swift is not subject to anything she hasn’t approved.

Damon Albarn said in 2022 that she “doesn’t write her own songs.” When pushed — because she co-writes extensively and is widely credited for her lyrics — he retreated. He then praised Billie Eilish as “exceptional,” who also co-writes with her brother. The criterion shifted. It kept shifting until it could exclude Swift specifically while including others who do the same thing. At which point the criterion is not about songwriting. It is about something else. And that something else is worth naming.

Also look who’s the Person of the Year 2025:

The petition.

In 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a decades-old warrant. He had pled guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl, then fled the country before sentencing. In response to his arrest, 138 filmmakers signed a petition demanding his immediate release. The petition called him an “ingenious filmmaker.” It was co-organised by Harvey Weinstein.

Among the signatories: Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, Wim Wenders, Tilda Swinton, Darren Aronofsky, Asia Argento, Wong Kar-wai.

Natalie Portman signed it. Nine years later she said: “I very much regret it. Someone I respected gave it to me and said ‘I signed this, will you too?’ And I was like, sure.”

The petition is the explicit, public, documented version of a cultural mechanism. The word “ingenious” does something in a legal-political context that an argument could not do — it claims an exemption from jurisdiction. It says: the normal rules do not apply here. And it may have worked, partially: the Swiss government released him.

But Portman’s account is the more revealing document. She didn’t think about what she was authorising. She trusted the social context. This is how the mechanism operates — not through deliberate moral failure but through the social lubrication of the genius culture. You don’t argue with the declaration. You sign.

The attraction.

Here is what I find to be an uncomfortable thing Dederer says in this chapter, and she says it almost in passing: “Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness. Maybe we ask these artists to live out our darkest fantasies — and if we give it the label genius, then we don’t have to feel guilt for enjoying the spectacle. We can get off on the performance of badness, we can consume the biography, and remain in good taste. Well, he’s a genius. You can’t blame him. Or me.”

That last word. Or me.

She is not exempting herself from the mechanism she is describing. She is saying: the audience produced this. The collective investment, the unconditional love, the decision in advance that this person operates by different rules — the fan community issued the hall pass before the crime even happened. The genius is not imposed on the culture by powerful men and complicit institutions alone. It is something the audience wanted. The genius lives out the fantasy on our behalf.


Three things to think about before next session.

One. Go back to Dederer’s chapter and find the moment where she describes what the word “genius” does in a sentence — not what it means but what it stops. Write it down. Then find a sentence from anywhere — a review, an interview, a caption — where you can catch the word doing exactly that work.

Two. The Taylor Swift question: is she a genius? Don’t answer immediately. Notice what happens in you when you try to answer it. What is the resistance (or compliance) — or the discomfort (or comfort?) with the question itself — telling you about what the category requires?

Three. Dederer says the desire for resolution — any resolution, cancel or forgive — is itself a symptom. The fan wants the problem solved so they can go back to loving cleanly. Sit with this. Is there something on your own shelf — your own playlist, your own watchlist — where you have reached for a resolution that feels a little too convenient? Not for discussion necessarily. Just to notice.


We will start next session with the Taylor Swift question, because it is the one that forces the category to show what it is built for. From there we are going to the female monster — specifically to what Dederer says about women whose monstrousness involves their children rather than their victims — or what changes when children are involved. The asymmetry between those two types of harm is the thing I want us to think through together.

One question to carry with you until then: if the genius hall pass was issued before the crime — built into the culture before any specific person claimed it — then is the problem the individual monster, or the architecture we built for them to move through?

Victoria Mummelthei
Victoria Mummelthei

Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (26. Mai 2026). monsters: genius — a task for before we next meet. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 12. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/16a1t


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