Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction
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EDIBLE SUBJECTIVITIES: MEAT IN SCIENCE FICTION JOVIAN PARRY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO January 2019 © Jovian Parry, 2019 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation argues for the critical urgency of both challenging the constitution of subjectivity itself and disputing the a priori exclusion of other animals from attaining some kind of ethico-political subject-status. Deploying a Baradian performative posthumanist analysis attentive to patterns of difference, I engage the theoretical tools of ecofeminism, critical animal studies (CAS), and material ecocriticism to interrogate subjectivity by attending closely and critically to twentieth and twenty-first century Euro- American Anglophone science fiction (SF) stories about meat. Meat animal narratives open the subject to alternative modes of knowing that anthropocentric epistemologies foreclose, intervening against the structural exclusions imposed by various material- discursive apparatuses of domination that define, authorize and enact subjectivity as always and only human, over and against the figure of the animal. SF, a genre of alterity that has long been at the vanguard of literary engagements with nonhuman subjectivities, likewise works to subvert hegemonic notions of the subject as always- already human and complicate overdetermined configurations of “the subject” as an ontologically predetermined entity. Engaging SF narratives about human cattle dystopias, alien encounters, in vitro meat and alimentary xeno-symbiogenesis, I approach subjectivity as an emergent phenomenon born of the intra-action of differentially materialized agential entanglements, and—crucially—their constitutive exclusions. Rejecting subject-object dualism as an unliveable onto-epistemological paradigm that excludes anything edible from relations of respectful use, I argue for the necessity of enacting subjectivities in terms of concrete practices of restraint and humility, with humans firmly situated as embodied animal beings, enmeshed with and accountable to a much larger community of more than human, more than animal and more than animate actants on a finite planet. iii LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT STATEMENT This dissertation was written on the territory of the Huron-Wendat, Petun, Seneca and, most recently, the Mississaugas of the New Credit. This territory is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the lands around the Great Lakes. I am grateful for the opportunity to work on this land, and I am mindful of broken covenants and the need to strive to make right with all our relations. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been remotely possible without the mentorship of Leesa Fawcett, who has tirelessly supported and advocated for this project for longer than she could have been expected to. Sincere thanks are also due to committee members Joan Steigerwald, Noël Sturgeon and Catriona Sandilands, examiners Sherryl Vint and J. Keeping, and chair Aryn Martin. I also owe thanks to my mum and dad for their unwavering faith, and to Judy and Raj, each of whom already know why. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract….…………………………………………………………….……………………… ii Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………iii Land Acknowledgement Statement………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………..v Chapter One: Introduction: Subjects in Meat Stories………………………….………….1 Subjectivities and agencies…………………………………………………………….4 Trascorporeality………………………………………………………………………..15 Meat……………………………………………………………………………………..16 Science fiction………………………………….………………………………………19 Systematic methodological framing………….………………………………………25 Ecofeminism(s.)………………………………………………………………………..27 Critical Animal Studies.………………………………………………………….…….31 Material Ecocriticism.………………………………………………………………….34 Research questions and chapter overviews………………………………………..36 Conclusion: Narrative and world-making……………………………………………46 Chapter Two: Human(e) Meat: Dualism and the Human Cattle Dystopia……………….51 Colonial cannibalisms…………………………………………………………………53 Anthropological machinery, hierarchical dualisms…………..…………………..…54 Twentieth century cannibal SF: Tiptree and DeFord……………………………….58 “Unspeakable nonhuman flesh eaters!”………………………………………………62 Animals and LePan’s Animals…………………………………………………..……64 Animals and disability..………………………………………………………………..68 Gender and sentiment.………………………………………………………………..72 Dualism in D’Lacey’s Meat..…………………………………………………………..77 Meat and misogyny……………………………………………………………………81 . Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..84 Chapter Three: Kin and Carrion: Appetite, Ethics, and Alien Encounters……………….87 Anti-anthropocentric egalitarianism in Traviss’ Wess’har Wars…………………..87 “Where’s the line now?”……………………………………………………………….91 Deep ecology and denial of difference.……………………………………………..93 Bright boys and better toys………………………………………………………….101 Respect/use dualism…………………………………………………………………104 Savagery and civility in O’Guilín’s Bone World.………………………………..…105 Eating your neighbours………………………………………………………………112 Communicative interspecies ethics…………………………………………………113 Lifeboat ethics…..…………………………………………………………………….117 Human cattle: redux………………………………………………………………….119 Conclusion: Food and respect/use dualism……………………………………….122 Chapter Four: Disembodied Meat: Storying Semi-Living Subjectivities………………..126 “Technologies of living substance”…………..……………………………………..127 Liberation from corporeal form?…………………..……………………………….131 IVM and culinary culture: The IVM Cookbook………..…………………………..134 vi Suffering as spice?………………………………………………………………..…138 Carnophallogocentric subjectivity……………………………………………..……142 3-D printed moose steaks?………………………………………………………….147 Cells as Selves?…………………………………………………………….………..154 Pohl and Kornbluth’s ‘Chicken Little’ and Atwood’s ‘ChickieNobs’…….……..…159 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………165 Chapter Five: Me(a)tamorphoses: Indigestion, Infection and Symbiogenesis in SF….167 “Disease is a relationship”…………..………………………………………………168 Symbiosis and symbiogenesis…………………………………………………..….170 A “new age feminist plot”…………………………………………………………….172 Symbiogenesis in SF: “inheriting and embodying the eaten”……………………175 Simak’s symbiogenesis……………………….……………………………………..178 Evolutionary heresies………………………………………………………………..183 Bacteria bite back…………………………………………………………………….189 Xeno(symbio)genesis: Octavia E. Butler………………………………………..…193 Vegan ecofeminists from outer space?…………………………………………….198 Acquisitive cannibalism?…………………………………………………………….203 Oankali estrangements………………………………………………………………206 Conclusion: Contact zones………………………………………………………….210 Chapter Six: Conclusion: Imagining Otherwise……………………………..…………….214 Entangled ethics………………………………………………….…………………..215 Vegan Subjectivities in D’Lacey’s Meat and LePan’s Animals……………….….221 Against purity: critical intersectional veganism ……………………………….…..224 Conclusion: New stories, new directions………………………………………..…227 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………..…232 !1 1. Introduction: Subjects in Meat Stories “Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millénaire," Guattarri observes, “the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotiv” (Guattarri 1995, 122). Scholarly interest in ‘the animal’ has likewise never been higher than at the turn of the third millennium.1 Critical work on animals and subjectivity typically proceeds either by arguing for the ethical imperative of including (some) other animals in dominant conceptions of ‘the subject,’ or, on the other hand, deploying the material-semiotic figure of the animal as a limit case to deconstruct the notion of subjectivity altogether (Derrida & Roudinesco 2004, 63; Calarco 2017, 35; Glenney-Boggs 2012, 3; Braidotti 2016, 13-4; Weil 2012, 2; Pick 2011, 2). Often construed as ill-matched projects (eg. Haraway 2008b, 176), I argue for the critical urgency of both challenging the constitution of subjectivity itself and disputing the a priori exclusion of other animals from attaining some kind of ethico-political subject-status (Braidotti 2016). Mindful of the well- established role of narrative in the enactment of subjectivities (Vint 2007; McHugh 2011) and attentive to the emergence and proliferation of subject forms through the edible encounter (Bennet 2010; Turner 2014), I deploy the theoretical tools of ecofeminism, critical animal studies (CAS) and material ecocriticism to interrogate subjectivity by attending closely and critically to twentieth and twenty-first century Euro-American Anglophone science fiction (SF) stories about meat: “the most delegitimated subject 1 Following Midgley (1979[1995)], at times I use the word ‘animal’ for convenience to denote “animal other than human," “but it must never be forgotten that we have no clear basis for [this division]… Drawing analogies ‘between people and animals’ is, on the face of it, rather like drawing them between foreigners and people” (15). I am also mindful of Derrida’s (1991b) admonition that the term ‘animal’ subsumes a nearly unfathomable diversity of creaturely life beneath a falsely unitary term. !2 position possible in our society,” according to Plumwood (2012, 58). Western societies “have developed strategies for blocking out and not hearing the speech of those in that position” (ibid.): listening to meat requires not only the dismantling of dualistic constructions of human exceptionalism, but also an understanding of the