13 Nov 6th Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Made Monstrous, Made Available – Monstress and the Law of Extractable Life
[Nivedita S is a Research Fellow with the Centre for International Law, National University of Singapore and an avid reader.]
The political economy of resource extraction in international law typically focuses on tangible resources such as land, minerals, energy, and biological materials. The vocabulary that international law appears to have developed is a vocabulary of things. The likes of permanent sovereignty of natural resources, the seabed regime, investment protection for mining concessions, and the emerging law of critical minerals presuppose a sub-surface resource that lies beyond the people who claim it. Scholarship on extractivism pushes against this boundary by showing how the “extractive zone” reorganises land, labour and life. Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress confronts this framework by making this resource a person, shifting the analysis of extraction from the subsurface to the living body.
This post argues that Monstress reveals legal subjecthood and extractability as mutually constituted rather than sequential. International criminal law separates bodily subordination from extraction, treating persecution and enslavement as distinct crimes against humanity. Yet the comic depicts them as mutually reinforcing practices. International law’s separate categories risk obfuscating this structural relationship. Monstress therefore challenges us to recognise the production of extractable life through the recursive relationship between persecution and bodily commodification. I use the comic as a thought experiment to view a world in which this mechanism can be seen as a whole.
The Resource is a Person
Monstress is set in a fantasy matriarchal world fracturing by conflict between the Federation of Man and the Arcanics, a race of “monstrous” beings who are hybrids of humans and “Ancients”. The Federation is dominated by the Cumaea, an order of witch-nuns who have systematically subjugated the Arcanics by incrementally harvesting “lilium,” a valuable, purple-coloured magical substance, from the bones of captives, who are kept alive and thus permanently maimed to maximise extraction yield over time, and ultimately killed. Lilium not only enhanced human minds and bodies, but it also had miraculous regenerative powers, and in concentrated forms could even extend human lifespans. The Arcanics are bought and sold at auctions, fitted with collars and assigned to laboratories, where Cumaean novices dissect Arcanic children as part of their training. (Monstress Vol. 1, “Awakening”)
The design and illustrations in the comic are also significant here. Takeda renders Cumaean spaces in a lavish, art nouveau-like style such that the ornamentation of a civilisation and the infrastructure of its harvesting share the same frame. Lilium is not hidden but lights up the city. Liu’s stated inspiration of World War II and colonial atrocities highlights the historical relevance of the comic: a fantasy format that brings to the consciousness a history of racially targeted experimentation.
A Recursive Loop
In a typical account of atrocity, there is a sequential flow of events. A particular group is identified and defined as being inferior or dangerous. This definition allows for its exclusion, which then permits exploitation. Here, classification is a single step that acts as a gate for the victim, once completed and through, the victim has moved on to the next step.
In contrast, in Monstress, the dehumanisation of Arcanics as “monsters” excludes them from legal and political protections (that the Federation typically extends to humans) and makes their bodies available for harvesting. The potency of lilium is then treated as retroactive proof of the level of danger posed by the Arcanic, legitimising further capture, control and extraction. The Arcanic’s status as a “monster” is not settled at intake; it is reaffirmed with every harvest, and the harvest is what pays for the renewal.
Two aspects make this recursive loop obvious. The first is the incremental extraction. A body harvested a little at a time is a body that must be kept alive, and therefore kept captive, and therefore kept classified. The longer the yield, the longer the status must be maintained. The second is economic dependence. The Cumaea’s political authority over the Federation is underwritten by lilium – the “key to their ascendancy”. Their interest in Arcanic monstrousness is not merely ideological; it is material. A Federation that stopped considering the Arcanics as monsters would face the loss of the very substance that its ruling order relies on.
This is why subjecthood and extractability are mutually constituted here. Dehumanisation enables extraction, and extraction sustains dehumanisation. By “extractable life”, I mean a population governed so that its body resources are available for the taking, and whose availability is the reason it is governed that way.
Two Crimes, One Mechanism
How would international criminal law describe this conduct? The strongest example could be persecution and enslavement as crimes against humanity under article 7 of the Rome Statute.
Persecution, under article 7(1)(h) and 7(2)(g), is the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights, contrary to international law, by reason of the identity of a group. The Arcanics are an identifiable group, targeted on grounds that fit within the Statute’s protected categories, and their deprivation of liberty and bodily integrity is clearly severe.
Enslavement, under article 7(1)(c) and 7(2)(c), is “the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person.” The ICTY Appeals Chamber in Kunarac (paras 117–119) identified signs of such powers, including control of movement and physical environment, measures to prevent escape, force and coercion, duration, assertion of exclusivity, and cruel treatment. The Cumaea’s regime arguably satisfies most of these. It shows what ownership-like power looks like when the object of use is the body itself: control over how long a captive remains alive, how the body may be used, and what may be taken from it. Here, extraction is not merely evidence of that control. It is one of the practices through which ownership-like power is exercised expressly.
The Elements of Crimes require that persecution be committed “in connection with” another act under article 7(1) or another crime within the Court’s jurisdiction, and the law of cumulative convictions permits both to be entered on the same facts. Under the test established in the ICTY’s Čelebići appeal judgment and applied at the ICC, multiple convictions are permissible where each provision contains a materially distinct element. In Ongwen, the accused was convicted of both persecution and enslavement arising from the same attacks on camps for internally displaced persons, and the convictions were confirmed on appeal.
The issue here is not that international law cannot see both harms but the form in which it sees them. The connection requirement in persecution is a tether: it anchors persecution to some other prohibited act. And the Čelebići test justifies cumulative convictions precisely because each crime contains something the other lacks. The relationship between persecution and enslavement thus enters the legal record as overlap between distinct offences, each separately proved. What Monstress depicts is a relationship of production, in which the persecutory classification generates the conditions for ownership-like use, and that use regenerates the classification.
It is not that we need a new crime. The question we should be asking is what a doctrinal framework built from discrete elements leaves out of view, and where does that omission matter? This matters at sentencing, where the gravity of a system is assessed through its parts. This matters for reparations, where harm framed as a set of separate violations that would call for separate remedies. And it matters outside criminal law, where the economic and the persecutory dimensions of the same practice are routinely addressed by different legal regimes altogether.
Kept Alive, but in a State of Injury
Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics helps illuminate this recursive aspect. Necropolitics names “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” and the creation of “death-worlds” in which populations are given “the status of living dead” (p 39). Writing of the plantation, Mbembe observes that “the slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors” (p 21). Persecution sees exclusion from a political community, while enslavement sees ownership of a person. Neither is built to see governance through calibrated exposure to death, where the technique of governing is extraction.
The Cumaea’s captives are worth more maimed than dead, so the operation keeps them on the brink. Mbembe’s contribution here explains why exposure to death and the management of life are not opposites in this system but two aspects of a single mode of governance. The Arcanic is neither simply a rights-holder whose rights have been violated, as the vocabulary of persecution implies, nor simply a thing put to use, as the vocabulary of ownership implies. The Arcanic is governed through calibrated injury, and that injury is organised by extractive value. Extraction is not incidental to Arcanic subordination. It is what makes the Arcanic governable.
Off the Page: Persecution and Forced Labour
The fragmentation the comic exposes is not confined to fiction or to criminal law. Consider the state-imposed labour programmes targeting the Uyghur and other predominantly populations in Xinjiang. The OHCHR’s 2022 assessment found that “the close link between the labour schemes and the counter-‘extremism’ framework” raised concerns about whether such programmes could be considered voluntary (para 121), and that the broader pattern of arbitrary and discriminatory detention “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity” (para 148). The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery concluded that “some instances may amount to enslavement as a crime against humanity, meriting a further independent analysis” (A/HRC/51/26, para 24). China has rejected these findings. These findings may be contested but remain legally significant in terms of how responses have been organised.
On the extraction side, the United States’ Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act operates through a rebuttable presumption that goods made in Xinjiang involve forced labour. The EU’s Forced Labour Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2024/3015) prohibits products made with forced labour from the Union market. The instruments are not particularly concerned with why the labour is extracted from this specific population. The persecutory classification, the designation of a group as “extremist”, is addressed in human rights findings; the labour extracted from that group is addressed through trade law measures. The regimes run in parallel and rarely meet. Though legislature sometimes links the tracks, for example, the US Act also extends sanctions provisions to human rights abuses connected with forced labour. Neither asks the Monstress question: how does a labour programme justified as counter-extremism operate as persecution, and how does persecution make a workforce available?
Where a population’s classification as dangerous (“terrorist”) is the condition of its availability for labour, and the yield of that labour is folded back into the justification for “re-education”, the harm has a similar recursive form that the comic depicts. A trade measure that removes the product from the market tends to leave the classification intact. A human rights finding that condemns the classification tends to leave the economics untouched. What is not addressed is what connects them – the loop.
What Monstress Asks of International Law
Monstress makes a legal blind spot visible by imagining a world in which the thing doctrine separates cannot be separated. In Liu and Takeda’s world, there is no single moment at which an Arcanic is first classified and later used. Every harvest is also a reclassification.
To me, Monstress asks three things. First, extraction should be understood as a category that can also encompass the human body, not just land and minerals, and scholarship on extraction should treat persecutory classification as part of its subject matter rather than its background. Second, within international criminal law, the relationship between persecution and enslavement (these being the examples discussed here) deserves analysis as a relationship of production, which can inform how gravity is assessed and how reparations are designed, even within existing elements. Third, across regimes, responses to state-imposed forced labour should be evaluated by whether they address the link between the designation of a group and the value extracted from it, not only each half in isolation.
Monstress therefore asks us to recognise the production of extractable life: the recursive process through which persecution makes bodies available and extraction keeps them classified. Until the law can see that loop, it will continue to punish one half of the mechanism, or regulate the other, while the mechanism itself continues to run.