Over the years the monstrous has become an increasingly powerful figure for thinking and engaging with difference: it materializes a desire to break free of the institutional constraints that govern us; it expands the range and intensity of what Butler (1990) speaks of as liveable lives; and it harbours a pursuit of justice for those subjectivities and bodies that are rendered abject.

This ebook interrogates how the monstrous relates to issues of equality, difference, diversity, inclusion and exclusion. In their own ways, the authors of this issue have engaged the monstrous to surface, promote, challenge and undo difference and its abjection—whether immigrant workers, pregnant bodies or capitalist subjects. Each paper presented furthers the importance of affirming difference as a means of preventing symbolic, epistemic and material violence that threaten equality and justice.