Radiant Beings: Narratives of Contamination and Mutation in Literatures of the Anthropocene

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Kristin Michelle Ferebee

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Dr. Thomas S. Davis, Advisor

Dr. Jared Gardner

Dr. Brian McHale

Dr. Rebekah Sheldon

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Copyrighted by

Kristin Michelle Ferebee

2019

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Abstract

The Anthropocene era— a term put forward to differentiate the timespan in which human activity has left a geological mark on the Earth, and which is most often now applied to what J.R. McNeill labels the post-1945 “Great Acceleration”— has seen a proliferation of narratives that center around questions of radioactive, toxic, and other bodily contamination and this contamination’s potential effects. Across literature, memoir, comics, television, and film, these narratives play out the cultural anxieties of a world that is itself increasingly figured as contaminated. In this dissertation, I read examples of these narratives as suggesting that behind these anxieties lies a more central anxiety concerning the sustainability of Western liberal humanism and its foundational human figure. Without celebrating contamination, I argue that the very concept of what it means to be “contaminated” must be rethought, as representations of the contaminated body shape and shaped by a nervous policing of what counts as “human.” To this end, I offer a strategy of posthuman/ist reading that draws on new materialist approaches from the

Environmental Humanities, and mobilize this strategy to highlight the ways in which narratives of contamination from Marvel Comics to memoir are already rejecting the problematic ideology of the human and envisioning what might come next.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the Department of English at The Ohio State University, which has been a constant source of financial, emotional, and intellectual support during the years of this text’s development, particularly in the form of the Robert M. Estrich

Fellowship in Literary and Cultural Studies. In particular, I would like to thank the members of my Dissertation Committee: my advisor, Dr. Thomas S. Davis, who patiently worked through all of the chapters herein; Dr. Jared Gardner, who assuaged my panic and validated my interests; Dr. Brian McHale, who provided a skeptical eye; and Dr. Rebekah

Sheldon, who was generous with her time, energy, and experience despite not even living in my home state. I am also grateful to Dr. Todd Comer and Dr. Christine Juncker for their rigorous and helpful critique of sections of Chapter One.

Many colleagues and friends contributed to and sustained the development of the ideas here over the course of their gestation. Kim Le, Miranda Meyer, Zuzanna Wołodko,

Charlotte Geater, Morgan Davies, and the ACiE community were a great source of support and inspiration. The congregation of Tifereth Israel patiently reminded me that there was life outside of academia. My exceptional students at Ohio State provided continual evidence that it would be okay even if this weren’t true.

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Vita

M.F.A. in Creative Writing, The Ohio State University: 2014.

B.A. in Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College: 2009.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University: 2012-4; 2015-9

Writing Program Administrator, The Ohio State University: 2014-5

Publications

“Ecstatic Others: Transcendent Mutant Bodies in Milligan and Allred’s X-Statix.” Studies in the Humanities, forthcoming

“Pain in Someone Else’s Body: Plural Subjectivity in TV’s Stargate: SG-1.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, forthcoming

“The Butterfly Effect: Animacy and Resistance in Pu-239 (The Half-Life of Timofey Berezin).” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, forthcoming

“The Disconnected: Imagining Material-Infrastructural Rights” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 38:2 (Winter 2016) 34-49.

The Writer’s Companion: A Guide to First-Year Writing, with Mike Bierschenk and Edgar Singleton. Cengage Learning: 2016.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Acknowledgments ...... ii Vita ...... iii List of Figures ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1. Uncanny X-Men ...... 33 Chapter 2. Crimes Against Humanity ...... 114 Chapter 3. Animal, Vegetable, Monster ...... 164 Chapter 4. What’s [Inter]Penetrating You? ...... 222 Conclusion. Queerer Things Were Yet to Come ...... 284 Comics Citations ...... 321 Bibliography ...... 328

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Guy sees Venus in X-Statix #2 ...... 56 Figure 2: Venus teleports Guy in X-Statix #2 ...... 67 Figure 3: Venus's energy leaves her suit in X-Statix #2 ...... 69 Figure 4: The death of Madrox's dupe causes him a crisis in X-Factor #72 ...... 79 Figure 5: Madrox hesitates to absorb his dying dupe in Madrox #1 ...... 85 Figure 6: The ambiguous cover of X-Factor #16 ...... 87 Figure 7: Cary and Kerry recount their shared history in Legion 104 ...... 93 Figure 8: Magneto's dream, New Mutants #49 ...... 149 Figure 9: Magneto awakes from the dream, New Mutants #49 ...... 150 Figure 10: The young Magneto faces a Nazi firing squad in X-Men: Magneto Testament #3...... 155 Figure 11: An older Magneto warns future generations in X-Men: Magneto Testament #5 ...... 156

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Introduction

“Almost at once, cells quirked and recombined. In the company of scorched ant and armadillo new lives shuffled forth, sick in their seed, irradiated, wracked with lunatic genes. Queer things issued from monsters of the past…”

John Balaban, “Atomic Ghost”

The poet John Balaban imagines a commercial airline flight caught somewhere between Chicago and Peoria at the instant of a nuclear blast. The plane drops; the passengers transform into ash; yet at the same time, paradoxically, something survives to enter into “the pall of incinerated air”: new lives, quirk-y, sick, perhaps sterile, queer things that are more in the company of the animal than the human, that are the children of monsters, that are possessed of lunatic genes. This moment of mutation is simultaneous with and causatively linked to “earth reassess[ing] the error that was man,” a punitive birthing of the literal post-human. “Atomic Ghost,” Balaban titles the poem, though it is not clear what the ghost is, or who the ghost is; is the ghost the bomb? Is the ghost the speaker? Is the ghost mankind, now erased to make way for something queerer? “Oh,”

Balaban concludes, “to be cast from the Garden again and forever.” It’s a wish that wishes, probably, for mankind to be denied the chance to wreak such devastation, to demolish so much life, but one tends to wish, instead, that it wished for something stranger: that the Eden to which it refers were not the Earth, but the placid moment before 1 disaster, when the droning plane totes Bloody Mary-drinking passengers over a landscape of smog and cattle ponds. Which of us would not wish for exile from such a Garden? And which of us would not wish for the fruit of knowledge, even though it comes through sin?

I ask you to imagine this reading, in which contamination grants us the knowledge that we have always been naked— which is to say that we have always been queer, sick, and subject to lunatic genes, the same stuff as animals, and enjoying a brief interval as ourselves before our bodies become other kinds of things; a reading in which the literally nuclear family that Balaban enumerates (“the error that was man,” he writes, and then continues, “that was me, my wife, our child”) is also revealed as an error, something that the earth has an urge to correct.

This is certainly an interpretation that stands at something of a right angle to mainstream narratives of contamination. Since the dawn of the nuclear era and the correlative rise of anxiety surrounding environmental toxicity, these narratives have abounded: not only the monster-movie horror of films like 1954’s Godzilla or Them!, in which atomic testing creates or wakens animal monsters, but tales that insistently imagined the multitudinous possible futures of human contamination and mutation, from

Poul Anderson and F.N. Waldrop’s bleak prediction of the slow post-nuclear breeding- out of the “true human” in the 1947 story “Tomorrow’s Children” to the serene child geniuses of Wilmar Shiras’s 1953 Children of the Atom or the flamboyant mutants of

1963’s X-Men, to whom Shiras’s novel would give a lasting epithet; from the Fantastic

Four, premiering in 1961, who were bombarded by cosmic rays, or 1962’s Incredible

Hulk, blasted with gamma radiation, to the biotechnological “protomolecule” infection in

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James S.A. Corey’s series of twenty-first century blockbuster novels, The Expanse; from the literary post-irradiation America of Paul Theroux’s 1986 novel O-Zone to the malformed New Mexico cannibals of 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes— all of these texts and more have grappled with the question of what it means to be contaminated, or what it means to be able to be contaminated. Most, like, Balaban’s poem, can be read as emerging from an uneasy fascination with the future— from a fascination with the uneasy future, perhaps. Those that revolve around incidents of present-day contamination, or with the present-day traces of contamination that leak from the past, often frame themselves as harbingers of the uneasy future, the author (and the author’s body) as prophetic warning of doom. To a greater or larger degree, these narratives all engage in speculative fiction.

Yet the sheer proliferation of these narratives and the persistence of their need to probe at this particular nervousness suggests that something underlies their existence beyond an uncertainty about what or who or what sort of who is coming next. Stories about contamination (and, often, its corollary, mutation) are not really post-human stories, though they may present themselves as such. Rather, they are stories that are deeply obsessed with what or who or what sort of who the human is today, and find that this question can only be framed by asking it through bodies that slip through the cracks of human— that, in other words, stand where there are cracks, and demand to be seen.

Like the “new lives” that Balaban pictures being birthed at the instant of death, threateningly thing-y, nonhuman, not allied to procreation, unnatural and yet animal- esque, these bodies seem to be or be subject to ghostly visitations that offers the

3 unwelcome knowledge of our own nakedness: on the one hand, our own always-already exposure to contamination, and, on the other hand, the unclothed emperor that is the

“human” in “humanism.” So, though they are not posthuman, these texts are posthumanist, by which I mean that they reveal a burgeoning and anxious lack of faith in western liberal humanism’s ability to contain and resolve the problems of our age. That is the argument I will make here, and the scrutiny I will offer.

But what do I mean when I say “our age”? Why have these texts emerged at this cultural moment, and what cultural moment is that? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to begin by offering some context.

Electr[omagnet]ic Shadows

In late 1992, a Florida man named David Reynard filed a lawsuit that was to become notable, less for the legal precedent it set than for the claim that it made: that the recent death of Reynard’s 33-year-old wife, Susan, from a malignant astrocytoma (a relatively common form of brain cancer) was caused by the electromagnetic radiation from her mobile phone, and was therefore the shared responsibility of phone manufacturer NEC Corporation and the phone carrier GTE Mobilnet. The case garnered publicity quickly— in January 1993, Reynard appeared on the TV talk show Larry King

Live to make the argument that cell phone usage causes cancer, where he told King and his audience that Susan’s tumor “was exactly in the pattern of the [phone’s] antenna”

(Mukherjee), tracing out the site and angle at which she had held her phone to her left ear.

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The case was dismissed in 1995, but it had spawned others: David Kane, a researcher for Motorola, filed suit against the company in December 1993, claiming that his own brain tumor was the result of testing antenna designs (Chicago Tribune); a class- action suit that wound its way through the courts in the mid-1990s, Verb v. Motorola, alleged that cell phone companies had not warned consumers of increased health risks; in

1994, Richard Ward sued Motorola, alleging that cell phones had caused his astrocytoma, a claim that was dismissed in 1996. Rulings that no scientific evidence supported a causative link between cell phones and cancer did not deter public anxiety over such a possibility, or the fear of those who needed no evidence to believe that there was. Each new lawsuit was meticulously chronicled in Microwave News, a home-printed bimonthly newsletter that had, since 1981, been devoted to warning the public of the dangers of electromagnetic radiation— the titular microwaves, but also radar, power lines, computers, and, yes, cellular telephones— and that might have been dismissed as a loony fringe publication had its creator, Louis Slesin, not been profiled in Time Magazine in

1990 under the heading “Hidden Hazards of the Airwaves” (Elmer-DeWitt). Even after the lawsuits were dismissed, the controversy continued; in 1999, David Reynard appeared on an episode of the popular liberal radio show Democracy Now! that was devoted to cell phones, and specifically to the question: “Are They Harmful to Your

Health?”

The scientific consensus seemed to be that they were not. Though lawsuits continued to collect in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a broad international study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) carried out between

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2000 and 2006 concluded that cell phone use was not associated with the risk of cancer and, in fact, observed a slight decrease in risk (Interphone). However, controversy surrounded the study, which was published in 2010 (Mukherjee), and a 2011 report by the National Institute of Health further muddied the water when it announced that researchers had shown cell phone radiation to cause an increase in brain glucose metabolism (Volkow, et al). In other words: cell phone radiofrequency signals caused changes to the brain, though these changes did not appear to be harmful (they had

“unclear clinical significance”). In the same year, the IARC opted to label radiofrequency radiation “possibly carcinogenic.” Though this allocated cell phones to a precautionary category in which (as scientific commentators pointed out) coffee and pickled vegetables also belonged, news media were quick to issue headlines declaring “World Health

Organization: Cell Phones May Cause Cancer” (Kovach) and “WHO: Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk” (Dellorto). Later research— from an eleven-year study by the Mobile Telecommunications Health Research Programme (MTHRP), released in

2014, and from a National Toxicology Program (NTP) study that was released in 2018— either found no statistically significant health risks from cell phones or resulted in inconsistent data that showed a possible correlation, but not causation. Headlines, however, continued to err on the side of bold statements: “New Studies Link Cell Phone

Radiation With Cancer,” declared Scientific American in 2018 (Schmidt), while midway through the MTHRP study, the BBC was quick to announce that “Cancer doubt remains over mobiles” (BBC). Nothing, it seemed, would fully put to rest the creeping and

6 persistent fear that electromagnetic radiation must have an effect on the human body— an effect no less dangerous for being difficult to see.

Radiation, of course, is a word that inspires anxiety— and for good reason. Its destructive potential was gruesomely described in accounts of the deaths that followed the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but subsequent decades of H-bomb tests relocated the possibility of peril from wartime into the should-have-been-safety of peace and home. Coverage of the first Bikini Atoll tests in Collier’s and Life grappled with the lasting nature and “awful ubiquity” of the radioactivity that lingered after the visible blasts (Boyer 90-1); 1954’s Castle Bravo test, which was marked by an explosive yield that was three times the one predicted and unusually productive of contaminating fallout, irradiated nearby Pacific Islanders and the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru, inspiring the creation of Godzilla— one of many Atomic Age science fiction monsters to be altered, awakened, or otherwise spawned by the mutative touch of radiation. Monsters, like men, could be made toxic unintentionally, Castle Bravo suggested, and the accident, once it had occurred, could not be undone. The leakiness of radiation— its tendency to exceed manmade boundaries, to crawl across limits of space and time— allowed the vision of, as Susan Sontag wrote, “the whole world as a casualty of nuclear testing and nuclear warfare” (Sontag), a killing zone that could not be contained.

More, radiation could be detached from its more obvious (i.e. explosive) military mechanisms, and it was this form of radiation, potentially undetectable, that caused the doubling-down of atomic uneasiness. High-profile accidents at nuclear power plants— the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, as

7 well as the multiple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi precipitated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami— produced and sustained an atmosphere of dread in which radioactive contamination appeared not only as a possible future threat, but as a past and present threat that continued to threaten: an always-already-uncertainty in air, in water, in food. In 2016, Time Magazine reported on “The Lingering Effects of Fukushima on Fish”

(Worland); in the same year, the New York Post proclaimed that radiation from

Fukushima had reached the US, and trumpeted cesium-134 contamination in Oregon seawater, while grudgingly noting that it posed no threat to humans (Tousignant). In

2018, radioactive particles from the disaster were found in Napa Valley wines— again, at levels too low to pose a threat (Zaveri). Just as Microwave News suggested, we’d turned out to live in a world in which the ordinariness of spaces and objects might conceal the traces of something malignant that we were ill-equipped to detect.

Yet the radiation that Microwave News warned against— the radiation that, so many worried and continue to worry, cell phones emit too close to the brain— is not the radiation released by H-bomb tests and nuclear meltdowns. The latter comprises the high- frequency, short-wavelength part of the electromagnetic spectrum that has high enough energy to displace electrons from atoms or molecules it encounters— that is, to create electrically charged ions, thus the term ionizing radiation. The low-frequency, long- wavelength radiation that cell phones and microwaves emit is non-ionizing radiation, which is not high-energy enough to have this effect. The health effects of ionizing radiation are the direct or indirect consequence of the ionization it causes: specifically, the ionization of atoms in or near DNA molecules, which damages one or both DNA

8 strands. While non-ionizing radiation can sometimes cause adverse health effects— for instance, exposure to ultraviolet radiation, a relatively high-energy form of non-ionizing radiation, can lead to DNA disruption and, ultimately, melanoma— the mechanism through which these health effects occur is not the same. Non-ionizing radiation can excite electrons, but it cannot displace them, and for the most part, it is too low-energy to have a significant biological effect at all. In fact, it is similar to or weaker than naturally occurring radiation.

The distinction between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, however, is a fairly technical one, and has not prevented media from presenting and spreading the fear that non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer as easily as ionizing radiation, or that it has other, mysterious negative effects. In 1977, New Yorker science writer Paul Brodeur published a book called The Zapping of America, in which he claimed that that sources of microwaves, particularly microwave ovens, were exposing American to potentially lethal doses of radiation, and that this danger was being intentionally concealed by the military- industrial complex. Brodeur’s subsequent books, The Great Power Line Cover-up and

Currents of Death (first serialized in the New Yorker), expanded the range of potential dangers to include electromagnetic radiation in general, painting a picture of a world suffused by carcinogenic electromagnetic fields, crisscrossed by toxic webs of power lines. In June 1995, Frontline aired a special entitled Currents of Fear that presented the controversy over electromagnetic fields from power lines, rebutting many of Brodeur’s claims while also allowing him a national megaphone. It had become mainstream to doubt the safety of what Robert Becker and Gary Selden called, in 1985’s The Body

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Electric, “electromagnetic pollution,” and to envision oneself as constantly penetrated by invisible rays.

By the twenty-first century, the mainstream fear of microwaves had abated, but those who are wary of radiation or who consider themselves to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity (a medically controversial condition in which electromagnetic fields are perceived to cause headaches, nausea, and other symptoms) still feed an industry devoted to their protection from exposure. Amazon.com offers a wide array of devices that promise “radiation protection” or advertise themselves as

“anti-EMF.” An “Anti EMF Radiation Protection Bracelet” from the company QuanThor promises protection “from bad radiation and other negative energies.” An anti-radiation chip meant to be attached to a smartphone promises to “reduce cell phones [sic] radiation exposure by 70%.” Anti-EMF shield stickers are available for cell phones, laptops, and routers; an anti-EMF “protection pendant” promises to “shield” the body from “the damaging radiation coming from mobile phones, computers, WiFi, Kindle, Microwave,

Induction Cooker, and so. [sic]” Should one choose to go up a price point, an EMF

“neutralizer” and “protection device” is available that plugs into an electrical socket and comes with more than a hundred enthusiastic customer reviews. Exposure, it would seem, necessitates not only protection, but a specific kind of protection: the shield, and the shielded zone into which the penetrating object cannot pass. And for those who find that the safe zone created by these so-called shields is not sufficient, there is the National

Radio Quiet Zone, in rural West Virginia, a 13,000-square mile area in which radio- frequency radiation is banned so as to avoid interference with the National Radio

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Astronomy Observatory. Dozens of people who claim to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity have settled in the area over the past twenty years, hoping that this will offer them security and relief.

But what does security mean, in this context, and what relief is offered by the reassurance that the body is “safe” from radiation? In order to address this question, it’s perhaps useful to return to David Reynard’s case, in which radiation from the antenna of his wife’s phone was pictured as imprinting itself on her body: vividly illustrating its power to transgress the border that separates the inside and the outside of the body, what is the body from what is not. People who consider themselves to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or who are more generally concerned with the effects of radiation, often speak about their fears in just these terms: the body is under assault,

“bombarded by electromagnetic waves” (Otto) that the body feebly defends itself against; radiation produced by phones can “penetrate into the brain” (Geary); an article from celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site, goop.com, highlights that electromagnetic radiation “can penetrate deep inside your head if using a cell phone, or into your body if you’re texting,” and claims that this radiation “will impact your biological functioning” once it’s inside of you (Gittleman). Holistic wellness site weness.org simply asks:

“Effects of Electromagnetic Fields: What is Penetrating You?”

It’s true, of course, that radiation does penetrate the body. It does so constantly, as it always has done: the Earth is bathed in radiation, not least from the sun, and few take issue with this bombardment. The human body even produces weak electromagnetic fields of its own: for instance, through the electrical activity of the heart. Recent alarm

11 over the idea of radiation penetrating the body is therefore not really about radiation penetrating the body (as the failure to distinguish between categories of radiation suggests), though that is its nominal focus. Instead, this alarm centers around a growing awareness that the body is inherently penetrable and penetrated. Over and over again, in

Brodeur’s work, in Becker’s and Selden’s, in Louis Slesin’s Microwave News, one encounters the word exposed. Human beings are exposed to radiation from power lines, from cell phones, from computers. They are almost never exposed to thermal radiation

(heat) and visible light; they are rarely exposed to ultraviolet radiation, even from demonstrably carcinogenic tanning beds. The human body becomes exposed when startled attention is drawn to its capacity to be penetrated, when it is gripped by uneasiness at the evidence that its boundaries are not secure, or securable, that it is naked and beyond naked: unsolid in its flesh. To be safe, in this context, is not to be shielded from any and all rays that might penetrate the body; rather, it is to rest easy in a belief in one’s own impenetrability, to rest assured in one’s own continued discreteness as an object in the world. It is not radiation’s leakiness, in other words, that really frightens, but the potential leakiness of the body itself: the suggestion that it might be exposed to such an extent that the stuff of the self might get out, and other kinds of stuff could get in.

What we might describe as the “anxiety of exposure” is not limited to the fear of radiation, though its appearance, as I will argue, is strongly rooted in the birth of the

Anthropocene era, and therefore in the dawn of the Atomic Age. Lawrence Buell traces the origin of contemporary “toxic discourse,” the fearful narratives of a poisoned and poisoning world, to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Buell 645),

12 which is primarily concerned with the effects of chemical pesticides— though Carson impresses her Cold War audience with the urgency of her claims by describing chemicals as “the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world,” comparing their ability to “enter[] into living organisms” to the radioactive strontium-90 that, released in nuclear explosions, “takes up its abode in the bones of a human being” (6). Radiation, she writes, “is no longer the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom” (7). The chemicals to which she addresses herself were similarly “unnatural,” and indeed supernatural: part of a “chain of evil,” mutating through “alchemy” (6) to cause the effects that Carson characterizes as a “strange blight” and an “evil spell,” the “shadow of death” (2). Buell describes her “totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration” as “a spectacle of… the whole earth contaminated by occult toxic networks”

(648) that he sees as having propagated throughout the environmental justice movement and beyond, and while occult here signifies hidden, it brings with it its full range of connotations. As Ulrich Beck observes, “[p]eople no longer correspond today with spirits residing in things, but find themselves exposed to ‘radiation,’ ingest ‘toxic levels,’ and are pursued into their very dreams by the anxieties of a ‘nuclear holocaust’” (72).1 This

Beck attributes to what he terms “risk consciousness,” a response to a world in which the invisibility of hazards “is no proof of their non-existence,” and instead pollutants and

1 Though, as Rob Nixon usefully observes, many people do still correspond with spirits residing in things, and thus “the two kingdoms of toxic threat and spiritual threat interpenetrate and blend, creating a hybrid world of techno-numinous fears” (63). 13 toxins are “invisible but omnipresent” (73), in which risks do not exist until they are recognized scientifically, but “as the uncertainties of scientific judgments grow, so does the gray area of unrecognized suspected risks” (71), with the result of a phantom category of semi-existence that might be most usefully governed by Derridean hauntology.

Derrida, in describing the “specter” at the center of hauntology, seeks to frame a figure that is neither present nor absent, neither alive nor dead. We do not know what it is, he says, because it cannot be known— it cannot apprehended through knowledge (25).

When Beck outlines a mysterious world in which a danger can only come to exist through being anointed by scientific recognition, and yet people are moved, driven, touched, afflicted by dangers that do not in this sense exist; in doing so, he is describing a world of toxic specters. This perception is echoed by anthropologist Joseph Masco, who offers the term “nuclear uncanny” to describe a world in which radiation “produces the uncanny effect of blurring the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and between the natural and the supernatural” (30), and in which that radiation offers “a nonlocalizable threat of contamination, mutation, and possible death” (31). By nonlocalizable, Masco means that the threat is real, but it cannot be pointed to: it is not here or there or in any one place; it is not then or now or in the future. It exists, but it exists paradoxically between and outside of these categories: ghostly. Rob Nixon’s account of the “slow violence” of toxicity suggests that it is not only radiation that presents in this manner— other forms of environmental disaster also appear (or rather do not appear) as violence “dispersed across time and space… neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” (2). Whereas violence is traditionally

14 understood as “an event or action that is immediate in time” (ibid), Nixon asks us to attend to the violence that is spatiotemporally dislocated. Its time is out of joint, as

Derrida would highlight— and so is its place.

Perhaps this spectral violence is not unique to the post-atomic era. Buell argues that toxic discourse is not— he points out that fears of a ruined world, and specifically a world ruined by human technology, predate the twentieth century. Certainly there was even slowly growing awareness of radioactive substance’s lethal effects before the development of the atom bomb: there was the case of the so-called “radium girls,” the watch-painters who sued the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial

Company (settling out of court and winning, respectively, in 1928 and 1938) after the radium-based luminous paint on the brushes they shaped with their lips sickened and killed many of them, and the Advisory Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection was founded in 1929, the product of increasing evidence that both x-rays and radium could have adverse effects, and that limits had to be set on their use to prevent harm. Yet the discourse surrounding radiation and potential contamination was of a markedly different character then what would come in the era of fallout, Silent Spring, Love Canal, and

Chernobyl. Prior to the deployment of the atom bomb, radiation was understood as contained: radium could “seep[] through the body and bones” (Kilgallen) and “attack the structure of the jaw” when it was put in the mouth; such a poisoning could be “insidious” and take a long time to “manifest itself” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle); scientists were aware that X-rays could cause burns and ulcers, and that overuse could result in death

(Meinhold); however, a simple causal and localizable relationship was evident in all of

15 these cases. The model of immunity that Emily Martin has chronicled, in which the body is understood as a fortress (a “castle of health” [25]) defending itself against foreign invaders, could be made to more-or-less account for these radiation injuries. There was no suggestion of an invisible atmosphere of contamination, no bombardment of rays that were constantly penetrating flesh; there was no fear that air, water, food, and everyday objects might harbor unseen toxins, no sense that the boundaries of the body had suddenly changed, and that the skin that had once seemed solid enough— a meaningful dividing line between the inner self and outside world— now had its status thrown into doubt.

If the turning point seems to arrive with the detonation of the atom bomb, this is not only because of a growing awareness of bodily penetrability. Rather, this event also marks a point at which the human is seen to penetrate another previously solid-seeming body: the geological substance of the earth. In August 2016, the Working Group on the

Anthropocene (WGA) presented a recommendation to the International Geological

Congress (IGC) that the IGC declare the Earth to have entered into a new geological epoch defined by the radioactive traces deposited by nuclear tests. Scholars arguing in favor of recognizing an “Anthropocene” era, a term popularized by Paul Crutzen to describe the age of lasting and powerful human influence on global ecology, have proposed many possible key events and starting dates, from the development of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution; however, the 1945 Trinity Test and the slightly later settling of radioactive fallout have been widely put forward by those seeking strictly geological markers, including the WGA (Carrington). This coincides with what J.R.

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McNeill terms the “Great Acceleration,” a massive and unsustainable increase in global population, technology, consumption, and pollution that began with the post-war boom of

1945. The suggestion seems to be that something started shifting at this point: something that is itself nonlocalizable, difficult to pinpoint to one place or event. Human life became something “sedimented in the geology of the planet,” as Stacy Alaimo writes— humans began to develop a “sense of being embedded in, exposed to, and even composed of the very stuff of a rapidly transforming material world” (2016 1). In this new perception, neither that material world nor the material body constitutes a discrete object; each is intermeshed with the other to such an extent that “the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (2010 2). Alaimo highlights the term exposed in the title of her 2016 essay collection, Exposed: Environmental Politics &

Pleasures in Posthuman Times; she embraces the word as describing a situation that has the potential to be without false and/or unnecessarily disciplinary boundaries, something that restores interconnection. Yet as Alaimo, in part, acknowledges, this focus on exposure brings to mind Adriana Petryna’s anthropological account of Chernobyl survivors, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, where “exposure” connotes both spectral contamination and the expectation that the contaminated submit to inspection and containment by a biopolitical regime. Yet the question that Alaimo asks—

“What can it mean to be human in this time[?]” (1) is applicable to both situations.

Indeed, it is perhaps (and paradoxically) the dominant question of the Anthropocene, which demands a full ontological reevaluation through its constant exposure of failures in the liberal Western conceptual framework of human/being.

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Posthuman[ist] Times

It is my argument that examining the proliferation of “exposed,” mutant, and otherwise contaminated bodies in the literatures of the Anthropocene allows us to understand the points at which humanism fails to adequately contend with or contain the realities of what Alaimo describes as “posthuman times.” In referring to humanism, I am gesturing towards several interrelated ideas: most specifically and classically, the liberal

Western philosophical tradition arising in the Enlightenment that emphasizes the rational, autonomous, and sovereign human subject as the highest form of being.2 More generally, humanism presupposes the existence of a normative Human, and almost universally places this normative Human (consciously or unconsciously) at the axis of existence, taking it as simultaneously the most natural figure (in comparison to which other forms of life can only be peculiar) and the most unnatural figure (distinctly separated from, and often superior to, the remaining mass of the nonhuman world). The vast and vivid collection of what, in my conclusion, I term anthropoqueer bodies (bodies that both are and are not human, that fear their becoming-nonhuman, that resist categorization, that refuse the term “human” and its confinement) that populate the pages of the texts I examine here are a testament to both an obsessive, anxious sense that such a Human is no longer viable in the present era, a fear of what conceptual bodies we might find ourselves occupying in its stead.

2 Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley argue for a more complex and diverse understanding of the humanist tradition, but ultimately (and deliberately) fail to provide a coherent account of how humanism, as a category, can then be defined. 18

In some of these texts, the human has straightforwardly been displaced (or risks being displaced) by new possibilities of being; the human, in a classical humanist sense, is therefore always in the past, and in its place is the next, the post-human. However, my goal in reading Anthropocene literatures as a site where humanism collapses is not to emphasize this posthuman nextness, which Richard Grusin, addressing himself to the critical “posthuman turn,” characterizes as making “a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman, after or beyond the human” (Grusin ix). I view such a narrative, rooted in the time and motion of linear history as well as in an essentialist view of the human, as antithetical to the many other schools of thought that pursue what I would describe as a posthuman/ist agenda (joining together the posthuman and the posthumanist, where posthumanist is understood to oppose itself to humanism). Grusin groups these under the moniker of the “nonhuman” turn, which he defines as insisting that “(to paraphrase

[Bruno] Latour) ‘we have never been human’ [a paraphrase that recurs in posthuman/ist literature] but that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman— and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman” (ix-x). In some respects, this approach is desirable, as terminological confusion often sees the posthuman (that is, the after or beyond of the human) grouped with the posthuman (the move away from the focus on and assumptions concerning the human) and the posthumanist (a rejection of humanism), and the former’s teleological and essentialist sins attributed to the latter two. However, to summarily dismiss the potential of “posthumanism” as a characterization of a critical attitude and practice seems

19 to me to overlook the purpose/fullness embedded in the word. I choose instead to characterize my approach as posthuman/ist, to sidestep any possible confusion by clearly articulating what I understand to be posthumanism’s goals.

If one is seeking a clear summation of posthumanism, the most succinct perhaps comes from Karen Barad in her 2003 essay on “Posthumanist Performativity,” where she describes a posthumanist3 account as “call[ing] into question the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman,’ examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized.” Barad points towards the work of Donna Haraway as “epitomiz[ing]” this account, and Haraway’s 1985

“Cyborg Manifesto,” with its emphasis on collapsing binary divisions and embracing the hybrid or chimeric existence that (Haraway argues) is already ours, has been taken as a foundational text in posthuman/ist philosophy. Rosi Braidotti describes Haraway’s work as “high post-humanism” in its dislocation of “the centrality of the human, in favor of the in/non/post-human and of bio-centered egalitarianism” (Braidotti). Haraway herself has distanced herself from the term “posthuman,” noting that it is “much too easily appropriated by the blissed-out, ‘Let’s all be posthumanists and find our next teleological evolutionary stage in some kind of transhumanist techno-enhancement’” (Gane &

Haraway), and out of concern over the potential neglect of materiality by this tendency, as N. Katherine Hayles has explored (Hayles). However, Haraway’s anti- or post- anthropocentric approach, her insistence on the “radical historicity” of organisms as

3 I have opted to use the term “posthuman/ist” as a gesture towards my interest in both posthuman and posthumanist practices. Barad does not do so. 20 objects of knowledge (Gane & Haraway), and her continued attention to the “leaky distinctions” or “boundary breakdowns” that characterize late twentieth/twenty-first century ideologies (Haraway), affirm her central position within posthuman/ism as Barad,

Braidotti, and others have defined it.

At the same time, Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus engage with posthuman/ism from a different angle in their program for a “posthumanist reading,” which outlines posthuman/ism as a method of encountering and grappling with texts. The “simple” and definitive claim with which they begin is that it is possible to read texts “through the way they set up a catalogue of assumptions and values about ‘what it is to be human’” (Callus and Herbrechter). Their “posthumanist reading” thus simultaneously rejects the “human” as stable category and positions itself to question and challenge humanism. Amongst their rather broad range of assertions is that the posthuman/ist reader must read “as if one were not human,” an idea they unpack by explaining:

“to be ‘human’ necessarily implies its opposite, and helps set up or underscore

hierarchies which in turn determine certain (accepted) ways of reading ‘as a

human,’ so that it becomes pertinent rather than ridiculous to ask how one can

read not as a human. How can one read in a manner that does not take ‘as read’

the humanity from which one reads?” (96)

This relentlessly self-critical refusal to accept the human as given seems a vital step towards a specifically posthuman/ist literary criticism. Callus and Herbrechter further go on to articulate what they see as the goal of such a literary criticism: to “identify oppositions between the human and the non-human at work in a text or practice” and to

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“critically evaluate[] the contrivances that the text is willing to accept or even promote in order to protect the integrity of the distinction and reduce contamination to a minimum”

(97). There is a Latourian note struck by this call to identify and account for the separatist anxieties at work within culture, busily scaffolding and sandbagging against leak and collapse, and indeed the paraphase We have never been human appears as a species of mantra here as well. As posthuman/ist mottoes go, it might be worse; beyond its implicit dismantling of the “human” and those values that have been attributed to such an object, it engages in a weird and anti-teleological timeline that repudiates the most worrying posthuman impulse. Not only are we not moving forwards in a linear arc of transcendence from the human that we previously were, but the very notion of a “human” history has been made incoherent.

Callus and Herbrechter specifically cite science fiction as a literature in which the

“crisis of the integrity of the human” has become a central preoccupation— and where, more than elsewhere, “the challenge to and the confirmation of human ‘essentials’” (98) is played out, psychodrama-like, over and over again. The impulse in science fiction is, as they describe it, a “crypto-humanist” one. I agree that anxieties about the integrity of both the human body and the human category have, in science fiction, reached an almost hysterical pitch, and that these anxieties, more often than not, manifest as an operation to salvage or suture some fixed and legible “human” from a disintegrating imaginary. Such texts, as Callus and Herbrechter note, run the risk of being over-amenable to posthuman/ist readings: friendly to the point that such a reading becomes rote, assimilated to theory, and ultimately powerless. Yet to the question they raise regarding

22 resistance to such an outcome, I would answer that a posthuman/ist reading must not only analyze how and why texts contrive to reinscribe the human in opposition to the nonhuman, but also ask how and why examples of textual resistance to this normative urge— specters of the “posthuman ‘other’” (the “threat or promise” of an “after of humanism” [97])— emerge to wreck, unravel, and revel where we might least expect it, inviting us into a trouble that we must, to coopt the words of Haraway, stay with.

Committing ourselves to the agenda of this “other” is a difficult task, as is demonstrated by Callus and Herbrechter’s weak capitulation to a posthuman/ist reading of the 2000 film X-Men that, as they admit, wins optimism at the cost of leaving “the values and assumptions of humanism, and certainly its rhetoric, intact” (109).

Here, I embrace the challenge of this agenda and apply a robust posthuman/ist reading to texts drawn from literatures of the Anthropocene (comics, film, television, novels, and memoirs dating from the geological and cultural interpenetration of the atomic era and later) that are centrally concerned with exposure and its effects on the human— particularly to popular texts that have previously received little scholarly consideration, but which, I argue, present some of the most telling and vital probes of humanism’s borders. By examining these texts through a posthuman/ist lens, I extract a ghostly portrait of what a new posthuman/ist understanding of subjectivity and the body must look like if it is to function in the Anthropocene age.

Any posthuman/ist reading must necessarily rest upon the foundations of the work that scholars in the fields of feminist, disability, queer, and critical race theory have done to theorize both the subject and the body, exploring the ways in which the “human” of

23 humanism is rooted in the assumptions of the straight cis white able-bodied male. As

Elizabeth Grosz argues, “how bodies are conceived seems to be based largely on prevailing social conceptions of the relations between the sexes” (1994 x); the tendency of even many feminist thinkers to uncritically accept the philosophical dichotomies of modernity (mind/body, male/female, subject/object) has led to a “coupling of mind with maleness and the body with femaleness” (4), and thence to a perception that “women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men,” (14) incapable of transcending the specificity and messiness of the body to occupy the privileged universal subject-observer position claimed by men. To dismantle the solidity of such a subject- observer position thus requires us to attend to the ways in which this position has always been a fiction predicated upon the abjection of the other that is female, and to attend to the possibilities that the female affords to us in reimagining what being is and can be. At the same time, it is important to reject the essentialism that offers itself as an easy trap when one speaks about “the female,” and Rosi Braidotti writes that “feminist emphasis on embodiment goes hand in hand with a radical rejection of essentialism. In feminist theory one speaks as a woman, although the subject ‘woman’ is not a monolithic essence, defined once and for all, but rather the site of multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory sets of experiences” (2011 25). In other words, what feminist theories of embodiment encourage is the very attitude of contingency that posthuman/ism seeks to take towards the human. Indeed, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” already mentioned here as a formative work of posthuman/ism, is situated as a feminist work whose “cyborg imagery” offers a way out both of the mistake of “universal, totalizing

24 theory” and “the maze of dualisms with which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,” arguing that rather than rather than a “common language,” we ought to aim for an “infidel heteroglossia” (1991: 181)— something unsolid and contingent.

Feminism’s efforts to construct such a polyphonic lexicon are themselves an anti-dualist tool that posthumanism can take in hand.

As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes, the female and disabled body are not unalike in their tendency to be characterized as “deviant and inferior”; they are, she writes, both “defined in opposition to a norm that is assumed to possess natural physical superiority” (19). Both Grosz and Garland-Thomson invoke Mary Douglas’s analysis of

Purity and Danger: Grosz in unpacking the ways in which the female body is perceived as threatening fluid and polluting (1994: 192-7), Garland-Thomson in observing how disability functions as “matter out of place,” bolstering her argument that the disabled body connotes danger because it is seen as “out of control” (1991: 33-7). Yet the disabled body also has powers and effects that the female body does not. Lennard Davis argues the able-bodied viewer, confronted with the disabled body, is driven to cognitive dissonance at the repressed awareness that the “whole” body is in fact an hallucination, and that “the

‘real’ body, the ‘normal body,’ the observer’s body, is in fact always already a fragmented body” (139-40). Margrit Shildrick agrees: “It is hardly the broken body that is fragile and vulnerable,” she writes, “…but the ‘normal’ body itself. Although the monstrosity of chronic disease or disability overtly undermines any notion of a securely embodied subject, that ordinary body is not given, but is always an achievement” (2002:

55). The able body must be bolstered, fortressed, constructed, maintained. We might take

25 from this that the exposed body is a valuable site for criticism precisely because it draws our attention to the fragile artifice of the bodily secure, discrete human— revealing the thin veneer of conceptual containment beneath which the body is never, in fact, in place or under control, and in which the “human” in question therefore might be said not to exist.

It is important, in addressing this urge towards dissolving the human, to emphasize that the human in question is the human of humanism: a Western liberal human birthed in a white Enlightenment that was rooted in the subjugations of race. Both

Sylvia Wynter and Alexander Weheliye raise the danger that posthumanism can, as

Weheliye puts it, “reinscribe the humanist subject (Man) as the personification of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering cultural and political formations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative versions of humanity” (9-10). I place myself fully in support of drawing on non-humanist cultures and politics that have the potential to rupture the dominance of this Man, and indeed

Elizabeth Povinelli roots her (not only posthuman but post-Life) explication of what she terms geontopower, which I draw on in Chapter Three, in her experiences with indigenous Australians and their approaches to conceptualizing human and nonhuman subjectivity. The critical race grounding of scholars such as Weheliye who engage with theories of the human is essential in resisting the facile tendencies of many self-described posthumanists to approach questions of animal rights and comparisons between the human and the animal without attending to the historical weight that can come with these comparisons, which have so often been used to equate people of color with the

26 nonhuman. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter points towards, the real struggle is to reinstate the

“alternative modes of being human” that humanism has refused to recognize as such, instead characterizing them as subhuman on account of their “lack of the West’s ontologically absolute self-description” (282). As I argue, posthuman/ist readings of characters of color can contribute to this reinstatement.

Any work that seeks to destabilize dominant modes of being, particularly through embracing a fluid, fragmented, and trans- model of the subject, must look to the extensive work that queer theory has accomplished on exactly this project. In addition to theorists such as Jack Halberstam, who has explored monstrous bodies and the anxieties that are projected onto them, the turns that queer theory has taken towards exploring new temporalities and new inter/tra-actions are valuable when dealing with bodily situations— the slow violence of toxicity, the nuclear uncanny— that seem to break or elude time. Indeed, Elizabeth Freeman’s analysis of the queer film The Sticky Fingers of

Time links radioactive contamination itself with the queer touch across time, with the unfolding of new forms of relationality between bodies. This question of new relationalities takes on great importance when one considers the ways in which Rebekah

Sheldon utilizes Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism to explain the centrality of the child (and heterosexual reproduction) in apocalyptic narratives. “Not only does the child signify originary wholeness,” Sheldon writes, “but her presence marks the continued vitality of the human,” the continuation or repetition of a certain form of life

(39). Heteronormativity thus becomes a defense against the failure of humanism, particularly in the leaky, contaminated/ing, collapsing environmental landscape that

27 threatens to pollute the human who bears responsibility for it (a new reading of the anthropos in Anthropocene). I use the term anthropoqueer for liminally human figures not only to indicate a queering of what it is to be human, a refusal to submit to the disciplinary boundaries of the category, but also to signal that new ways of human/being not only enable but demand new relationalities: a redefining of the being-withs that are possible between self and other, between bodies across time, between and within things.

It is with this optimism that I turned towards a posthumanist reading, embracing “not the putative negativity of anti-humanism,” as Margrit Shildrick puts it, “but the positive openings and aspirations of posthumanism” (120). I emphasize this with an awareness that to be exposed is an ambivalent state that can turn towards pain or pleasure— the belly exposed for evisceration or sex— and that specific forms of toxicity can cause enormous suffering. My goal is not to celebrate contamination, but to ask us to rethink what contamination is, and how representations of the contaminated body shape and are shaped by our policing of the human. Only by doing this can we free ourselves from such policing, and open ourselves to new explorations of what being/human is.

Chapter Summaries

In Chapter One, I look to Marvel Comics’ X-Men universe not only as a site of early explorations of contamination and mutation, but also as home to characters who continually transgress “correct” bodily boundaries. I analyze how Peter Milligan and

Mike Allred’s X-Statix title uses Mister Sensitive (Guy Smith) and Venus Dee Milo to explore a romance between two anthropoqueer figures who are literally exposed in that

28 they, respectively, have hypersenses and no fixed bodily form. X-Statix, I argue, foregrounds the exposure of these mutant bodies in a way that resists reinscribing the

“whole,” “complete,” and bounded human body as standard, and instead offers a hopeful vision of environmental entanglement. One element of the mutant body, as figured here, is that it is not characterized in terms of absent or extra, but always by an omnidirectional excess. This is reinforced by representations of mutant characters who possess non- unitary subjectivity, or what I might describe as “the wrong number of bodies and minds”; I focus on Jamie Madrox (the so-called Multiple Man) and Legion’s Cary and

Kerry Loudermilk to investigate how Marvel mutants challenge humanist ideas about the separation of self and other— making the environment only that which is not currently of-the-body.

Chapter Two builds on the first chapter’s analysis of Marvel’s X-Men universe by focusing closely on the character of the villainous Magneto, situating his in-universe history as a Holocaust survivor within the cultural construction of the Holocaust metanarrative and the rise of Western liberal human rights. I draw on both Magneto’s comics appearances and the 2000-2016 X-Men film series to argue that the Holocaust has become a symbolic axis in the X-Men universe’s central moral struggle: that between humanism and posthumanist. The deep connections between human rights rhetoric and popular tropes of the Holocaust have allowed the Holocaust to be appropriated as a form of containment for the threat of Magneto’s posthuman/ist politics, rendering him villainous insofar as he fails to accept the “correct” lesson of history: that the Western liberal universal subject is the essential human being.

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In Chapter Three, I turn to another form of toxic contamination: that arising from industrial disaster. Reading Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne as subversions of the human rights Bildungsroman, a genre outlined by Joseph Slaughter,

I explore the role that contamination and mutation play in the embrace of posthuman/ist identity that the titular characters of both novels ultimately arrive at— an embrace that rejects the human rights Bildungsroman’s re-incorporation of the outlier subject into agreement about the “correct” human/being, celebrating the potential of anthropoqueerness. However, the setting of Animal’s People and Borne in, respectively, an Indian city dominated by the spectral presence of the powerful Kampani that poisoned it and an unnamed future city ravaged by an otherworldly biotech Company prevents either novel from being read as utopic in its vision: each deals with the posthuman/ist transcorporeality (Alaimo) highlighted by its situation as productive of both oppression and power, suffering and possibility. In the end, I argue, Animal’s People makes a strong argument for the liberatory potential of rejecting the Western liberal humanist ideal, yet

Borne goes further in pushing forwards a vision of the world in which the future is not only posthuman but, as Elizabeth Povinelli suggests, post-Life.

Chapter Four argues for a reading of Samanta Schweblin’s novel Fever Dream as an example of “material memoir horror,” and analyzes the ways in which the novel uses and subverts the tropes of anti-toxic rhetoric to reveal the terror of conceptual collapse that underlies these tropes. Examining Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic, Kristen Iversen’s

Full Body Burden, the work of Sandra Steingraber, and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick as works that inhabit the category of material memoir, I suggest that the material memoir is

30 fundamentally an uncanny genre— a genre that centers around failed certainty. I foreground the ways in which anti-toxic rhetoric seeks to restore this certainty by shoring up the boundaries between “natural” and “unnatural” that have come under threat in the

Anthropocene, and critique the championing by Alaimo, Mel Y. Chen, and others of the environmentally ill or contaminated subject, who is often positioned as both revolutionarily awake to trans-corporeal existence and radically wise to the danger of environmental calamity. In fact, I suggest, narratives of environmental illness and contamination work to sustain not only natural/unnatural but also human/nonhuman binaries. Fever Dream exposes this work and offers a posthuman/ist figure that is itself a form of contamination: human parts that are displaced from body to body, leaving behind traces of and responsibilities towards each body they touch. This figure, I argue, has the potential to model new ways of thinking about responsibility in the posthuman/ist age.

In conclusion, I explain the origin of the term anthropoqueer, and put this name to the specific genre of posthuman/ist figure I have considered throughout this text. Framing my discussion of this category with a close reading of The Sticky Fingers of Time, in which the possibilities of queerness go hand in hand with contamination, I root my argument in an understanding of humanism as intrinsically bound up with what Michael

Warner describes as reprosexuality, and suggest that any alternative to humanism must therefore arise from a queer ontology that challenges our fundamental understandings of self and other. Anthropoqueerness opens such an ontology, positioning itself outside of the human/nonhuman binary and in opposition to the Western liberal universalist human subject of the anthropos— the figure that the Anthropocene both vilifies and attempts to

31 keep “pure.” The collapse of humanism in the Anthropocene makes it urgent, I argue, that we embrace anthropoqueerness as a way of understanding our material-discursive

“stickiness,” the ability of beings to stick [to] other beings both materially and (as Sara

Ahmed has described) affectively. Anthropoqueerness is, as Karen Barad describes agential realism, an ethico-onto-epistemology: a being, a knowing, and a knowing what to do about being. It demands that we refigure (or re-produce) our understanding of beings-in-relationship. It is therefore perhaps the only adequate response to an era that we understand as a crisis of correct relationship, without perceiving that the crisis lies within ourselves or, indeed, within our “selves.”

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Chapter 1. Uncanny X-Men

In September 1963, the first issue of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men (later to become famous as Uncanny X-Men) introduced the world to “the strangest super-heroes of all”: a team of teenagers with extraordinary powers who, under the guidance of their telepathic professor, Charles Xavier, work to use their abilities for the benefit of mankind. Xavier calls his students “X-Men” because of the “ex-tra power” that marks them out from other humans ([1]); born with this power, they are so-called “mutants,” members of the distinct, emerging race labeled “homo superior.” “There are many mutants walking the earth,” Xavier explains, “and more are born each year!” Some want to protect and defend the mankind that they are not a part of— as Xavier puts it, “to help those who would distrust us if they knew of our existence”— while others “hate the human race and wish to destroy it[,]” feeling that “mutants should be the real rulers of earth!”

Previous Marvel super heroes had tended to gain their unusual powers through pseudo-scientific accident: Peter Parker was transformed into Spider-man by a bite from a radioactive spider; exposure to gamma rays turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk; the

Fantastic Four were altered by cosmic radiation. Stan Lee explained the invention of mutants by noting that he “take[s] the simplest, easiest way, the coward’s way out… I had already done radioactivity. I had already done a gamma ray. What am I gonna do

33 next? They’re mutants. They were born that way” (Ricca). The implication is that inborn superpowers require no further explanation; their origin need not be sought beyond a mutant’s birth. Yet the first issue of X-Men nevertheless feels the need to hint at a source for the mutant phenomenon— one that, while incomplete and perplexing, would go on to stick to the franchise with remarkable persistence, demanding to be grappled with (and often outright contradicted) throughout the years.

The purported source of mutation, as in Lee’s previous efforts, serves to link extrahuman power to radiation or the radioactive. Xavier explains that his parents had worked on the first A-bomb project before his birth, a fact he links to his status as a mutant (he will later reveal that his father was killed in an atomic blast in Alamogordo

[2]). No attempt is made to explain how radiation from the atomic bomb or subsequent nuclear tests might have caused the mutations of Xavier’s students, their nemesis,

Magneto, or the other mutants to whom Xavier alludes; indeed, the timeline of such an influence seems bizarre to begin with, given that the first atomic test took place in 1945, and Xavier is clearly more than eighteen years old. Xavier himself, in X-Men #14, claims,

“No one knows what causes mutations!” ([3]) Yet neither these initial inconsistencies nor those that accrue throughout later decades (in addition to outright attempts to retcon or re- theorize the origin of mutation) have proven sufficient to decouple mutation from the atomic shadow— as late as 2010, the mutant scientist Hank McCoy would declare, “The prevailing theory is, in fact, that the increase in background radiation from atomic testing did actually trigger the boom in X-gene activation” ([4]) attempting to mediate the appearance of pre-atomic mutants with the substantial power of the association between

34 mutation and radioactivity. Further, the origins of individual mutants have been persistently linked to radioactive exposure, even as the comics canon has abandoned a direct connection between the two phenomena— perhaps most notably by depicting the existence of isolated mutants long before the atom was split. (The mutant Apocalypse, introduced in 1986, is thousands of years old ([5]); Wolverine dates from the nineteenth century [6]) 1968’s X-Men #49 reveals that Hank McCoy’s father was irradiated when he risked his life to prevent a criticality accident at an atomic energy plant, which caused his son to be born a mutant ([2]). Shiro Yoshida (Sunfire), a Japanese mutant who first appears in 1970, was born to parents irradiated in the bombing of Hiroshima, and manifests as a mutant when he first visits the ruins of the city ([7]). 1975’s Giant-Size

Fantastic Four #4 introduces the character of Jamie Madrox, whose father resigned from the “Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center” two weeks after Jamie was born a mutant

([8]). The 1985 Vision and the Scarlet Witch miniseries focuses on the plight of Nuklo, who was exposed to radiation in utero when his superhero mother attempted to prevent a nuclear meltdown, and who was subsequently born with a mutation that causes him to emit radiation at toxic levels ([9]). Exposure to radiation has even been shown to directly trigger or affect mutant powers even after birth, as in the case of Jack Winters, whose accident in a nuclear power plant turns his hands to diamond, and who deliberately transforms himself into a “living diamond” through additional exposure ([10]).

A less direct and more evocative association between mutation and the radioactive is suggested by the frequent use of the terms “atom” and “atomic” to describe or refer to mutants. This use occurs both in-universe and outside of it: a 2013 Marvel

35 event that pits the X-Men of the future against the X-Men of the present and past is entitled Battle of the Atom ([11]); in X-Factor #71, the mutant Alex Summers argues that joining a U.S. government-sponsored mutant team would make him “a smiling front man, an Uncle A-Tom-ic” ([12]). Less verbally, rebellious young mutant rights activist

Quentin Quire is prone to donning a Speedo marked with the trefoil warning sign for radiation ([13]). He is, perhaps, literally marking himself as both a child of and progenitor of children of the atom. The phrase “children of the atom” has been used across decades, media, and genre to describe Marvel mutants: a 2015 volume collects the first X-Men issues from 1963 under this title, which has also graced a 1994 X-Men arcade game (and subsequent iterations) and a 1999 comic that reimagined the origins of the

1963 X-Men in the modern day ([14]). In the 2011 film X-Men: First Class, the villainous Sebastian Shaw characterizes mutants as “children of the atom”; a 2014 collection of essays about the X-Men franchise is titled The Ages of the X-Men: Essays on the Children of the Atom in Changing Times. Perhaps most provocatively, in a 2010 storyline, a Japanese man born to a mother who survived Hiroshima— a “mutant” (in the real-world, not the Marvel sense) with severe physical disabilities— juxtaposes his own status as a “child of the atom” with the status of the X-Men and their ilk: “[c]hildren of the atom. Sports of an irradiated nature” ([4]; [15]).

As it happens, the term “children of the atom” predates Marvel’s mutants by a decade. It was originally the title of a 1953 novel by Wilmar H. Shiras that describes the adventures of a group of superhumanly intelligent mutant children born to parents who were irradiated in an accident at an atomic weapons plant. Yet Shiras’s mutants, who

36 resemble child prodigies more than nascent superheroes, seem to have forfeited the title to their flamboyantly uncanny comics cousins. Certainly, Shiras’s novel takes a soberer and marginally more realistic tone, exploring the responsibility that attends extraordinary power in the absence of any threat other than alienation and fear, and engaging with the inherent isolation of prodigious gifts— all without shapeshifting, psychic armor, the power to cause earthquakes, or mind control. Perhaps in this sense the book was always doomed. Yet the fact that the public has been so eager to accept Marvel’s mutants as the true “children of the atom” in spite of the franchise’s tenuous and inconsistent connections between radiation and mutation suggests that the “uncanny” nature of the X-

Men resonates with a similar uncanniness that readers perceive in post-atomic/nuclear life.

Uncanny X-Men

The X-Men became “uncanny” in October 1978, when the adjective was added above the book’s title for issue #114 ([16]). The X-Men became The Uncanny X-Men in

February 1981, when the title was officially changed for issue #142 ([17]), and it was under this title (and under the creative leadership of Chris Claremont, who had taken over writing duties in 1975) that the series would become best-known. It is a somewhat curious choice of word: neither as brassily martial as the Invincible Iron Man nor as boldly exciting as the Incredible Hulk or the Fantastic Four. To describe something as

“uncanny” is to mark it neither as unreservedly positive nor as immediately inviting. The term evokes uncomfortable shades of the occult, often colored with an element of

37 superstitious fear— a peculiar impression to stamp on a comic book that positioned itself primarily as science fiction (though heavy doses of magic would later mingle with the freely-flung-about language of science and technology). No doubt the very strangeness of such an adjective as a choice for a comic book title suggested it as appropriate for heroes who had, since their first appearance, taken as their defining (and defiant) characteristic the fact that they were strange.

It is not wholly certain if anyone at Marvel considered the Freudian implications4, but one of the strongest associations of the “uncanny” is probably with the work of Freud, whose influential examination of Das unheimliche became, when translated into English, a theory of this concept. Freud considered the uncanny “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and emerged from it”— some object, place, or quality that “was once heimisch, homelike, familiar,” but now, in evoking what has been repressed, causes us to become disturbed and uneasy. Speaking more broadly, he argues that the uncanny is linked to our ancestors’ beliefs in the supernatural as real, familiar, and even commonplace. “We— or our primitive forefathers— once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened,” he writes. “Nowadays we no longer believe in them… but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs”

(247). The familiar that was “surmounted” by new ways of thought thus waits to rise up and trouble us when it is called forth by experiences that seem to demand its explanatory force. The examples Freud gives include confusion over whether an object (a doll, for

4 I am indebted to Allison Stock for confirming that no one currently working in the Marvel offices believes this to have been the case. 38 instance) is animate or inanimate, the figure of the double (the other who is and at the same time is not oneself), situations in which one’s environment seems to possess some agency or articulate some destiny (the repetition of scenes or numbers), situations in which a person seems able to enact their will on the environment around them

(particularly through the fulfillment of wishes or of evil intentions— Freud refers to this and the previous example as cases of “the omnipotence of thoughts”), and uncertainty (as in the case of a haunted house) over whether the dead remain dead. Previously, all of these instances might have been accounted for by a system of supernatural belief; for many people, they might well still be. Yet now, Freud suggests, faith in a “dis-enchanted” modern conceptual schema causes us to feel that such experiences no longer fit into our world. They dislocate us in our own minds, leaving us mired in ambiguity and unable to trust our own senses.

Freud’s work on the uncanny appeared in 1919, at a time when systems of conceptual organization and belief (though not necessarily the ones to which Freud refers) were undergoing monumental change. Yet anthropologist Joseph Masco argues that the “apotheosis” of the Freudian uncanny has been reserved for the nuclear age, and for the emergence of a phenomenon that he dubs the “nuclear uncanny,” which, he writes:

is a perceptual space caught between apocalyptic expectation and sensory

fulfillment, a psychic effect produced, on the one hand, by living within the

temporal ellipsis separating a nuclear attack and the actual end of the world, and

39

on the other, by inhabiting an environmental space threatened by military-

industrial radiation (28)

Masco locates the nuclear uncanny in “psychic tension” and “sensory confusion” produced by both the strange temporalities of nuclear technology, but also by the strange physical properties of nuclear materials. Nuclear materials, he observes, “produce the uncanny effect of blurring the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and between the natural and the supernatural” (30). Plutonium, for example, is warm to the touch, disorientatingly powerful, virtually eternal, and prone to evolution. Radiation is invisible, odorless, and elusive; its effects are cumulative and often stochastic; it

“traverses space in ways that can make the air, earth, and water seem suspect, even dangerous, though no sensory evidence is at hand” (32). Not only does life in the presence of these nuclear materials become, as Masco argues, “otherworldly, strange,”

(ibid), but it invites and even demands a recourse to alternative systems of belief and explanation in a way that Freud would recognize. Masco describes how those living near nuclear facilities come to attribute a wide array of sicknesses and “misfortune” to radiation (ibid); an anti-nuclear activist whom he interviews describes nuclear technology as “a monster in Los Alamos” doing something “primordial and wrong” (231). Adriana

Petryna, in her study of life politics and biological citizenship amongst the survivors of the Chernobyl disaster, notes how the uncertainty surrounding the health effects of radiation, and the confusing, arbitrary mechanisms through which knowledge of these effects was and is controlled, means that “old measures of suffering lose their meaning and validity” (13) and people are driven to search for other methods by which “to render

40 an uncertain and unknowable world knowable and inhabitable in some way” (63). The nuclear age represents a sustained moment in which systems of certainty and knowability have broken down: a decades-long encounter with a haunted house in which the house that we experience as haunted is the whole of the world.

The “uncanny” X-Men appear as manifestations of that haunting. Brad J. Ricca has traced the discourse of mutation that preceded the appearance of these most famous of mutants; notable amongst his collection of Atomic Age fearmongering is not only the recurrence of “monstrosity” as a means of figuring the potentially mutant future—

Waldemar Kaempffert, in a 1955 New York Times article on the “Menace to Humanity in a Prolonged Series of Explosions of Atomic Bombs,” reports on and downplays fears that an atomic attack might render survivors “progenitors of monstrosities”; a 1951 educational documentary, You and the Atomic Bomb, reassures students that “the atomic bomb will not create a race of monsters” (Ricca)— but also the uncertainty that characterizes scientific reportage and discourse surrounding the effects of radiation. The dismissal of public fears about monstrous mutation occurred simultaneous with reports that “Scientists Term Radiation A Peril To Man,” the title of a New York Times article that concluded by noting that “radiation damage inevitably results from exposure,” and that radiation “sometimes but not often produces deformed or freakish children”

(Leviero). Strange temporalities appear in such discussions: Ricca notes that geneticist

Hermann Muller, at a 1959 University of Chicago conference on evolution, set the timescale for major mutation-induced change at “billions of years” before going on to discuss the management of “genetic endowment” as though such change could be

41 induced, controlled, and mastered the very next day (Laurence). “There’s nothing mysterious about radiation,” You and the Atomic Bomb insists, but this did not seem to be the case. Radiation was imperceptible, its effects disputed, its measurement limited to specialist authorities; it penetrated the human body (constantly, not only in the form of fallout from nuclear weapons testing, but from background radiation and as result of the casual, commonplace use of X-rays [Leviero]) and committed invisible alterations that collapsed timelines between the far future and the now, suggesting that those not now rendered “mutants” (strictly speaking) by radiation were nonetheless potential forefathers of the mutant. When Marvel seized upon the notion in 1963, mutation was thus already beginning to function as the site of a particularly intimate conceptual collapse: not only a breakdown of general knowability, but a breakdown of the knowability of the human body.

The peculiar new timelines, causalities, and infiltrations that the nuclear age abruptly presented appear in comics embodied as mutants whose age is out of step with the given history of their births, or whose lineage seems only tenuously connected to the radiation that they are supposedly born of. The same radiation that reaches unthinkably into the deep future is depicted as reaching paradoxically into the deep past, touching all of history. At the same time, mutants emerge as “monsters,” inhuman prodigies that problematize the easy definition of the human. The diverse forms of mutant embodiment challenge conventional understandings of animacy, corporeality, and matter in ways that render them truly uncanny: hot (or perhaps haunting) spots revealing our anxiety about the fissures in our conceptual schema that the nuclear age increasingly reveals.

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Like a Man

The 2000 film X-Men, the first cinematic adaptation of the comics, begins by committing itself to one of the central concerns of the X-franchise: the fluid and permeable boundary between self and not-self, or body and external world. Following a voice-over in which Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) establishes the disjointed temporalities of this nuclear age by juxtaposing the normal timeline of mutation-based evolution (“thousands and thousands of years”) with that of X-franchise mutation (a

“leap[] forwards,” the sort that occurs “every few hundred millennia”), the film visits

Holocaust-era Auschwitz for a brief prologue (about which I will say more later) to show an example of what Freud would have described as “the omnipotence of thoughts.” The child who will become Magneto, separated from his execution-bound parents, reaches out for the metal gates that surround the crematoria and warps them with the physical force of his want. Nazi guards regard him with the fear and amazement that befits an instance of the uncanny: how is it possible that this boy can exert his will beyond the apparent confines of his body?

In an abrupt transition, the film then situates us in modern Mississippi, where the teenaged Marie/Rogue (Anna Paquin) kisses a boy for the first time and inadvertently causes him to seize up in a near-fatal reaction. What has happened? Well, Dr. Jean Grey

(Famke Janssen) informs a congressional hearing in the next scene, “[M]utations manifest at puberty, and are often triggered by periods of heightened emotional stress”— the explanation for the two scenes of supernatural power we’ve just witnessed. A senator

43 confronts Grey about the danger mutants pose: a girl in Illinois who can walk through walls, and rumors of mutants who can “enter our minds and control our thoughts.” (The senator is unaware that Grey herself possesses this power.)

Of these four examples of mutation offered to us within the film’s first ten minutes, all four involve a destabilization of bodily boundaries. Magneto (Brett Morris as a child, later Ian McKellen) is able to “extend” himself to affect metal objects, or even to utilize metal as an extension of his body; Marie finds that she can invade another’s body with a mere touch, causing havoc in their vital systems (or, we will later discover,

“absorbing” mutant abilities into her own body); the girl in Illinois (presumably Kitty

Pryde, a character from X-Men comics who will appear in later films) appears able to disregard boundaries between her body and external objects; telepaths such as Jean Grey and Professor Xavier can intrude themselves into others’ minds, violating both physical and psychic perimeters.

The film goes on to showcase a range of mutations that don’t challenge the vision of a firmly bounded body so overtly— the main powers that Wolverine’s (Hugh

Jackman) mutation grants him are supernatural healing and a fancy pair of claws, and

Cyclops (James Marsden) simply shoots concussive force beams out of his eyeballs, while the villainous Sabretooth (Tyler Mane) and Toad (Ray Park) are, respectively, very large and hairy, and a man with a long tongue who can jump very far. However, the film’s central plot, which concerns a machine that Magneto plans to use to induce mutation in the bodies of non-mutant humans, lays to rest any question about the real uneasiness that mutation causes, both in film and in comics, and where we ought to locate

44 that uneasiness: in a threat both to actual bodily integrity (significantly, the test subject for Magneto’s machine only survives briefly as a mutant before literally dissolving into a mass of water that spills and leaks across the floor) and to the concept of bodily integrity itself, which the X-franchise renders radically incoherent. What does it mean to be a body in a world in which the most intimate parts of oneself (thoughts, circulatory systems, even blood5) might be open to others’ perusal and cooption, and in which even one’s genes aren’t safe from casual infiltration and change? What does it mean to be a body in a world in which the difference between body and not-body might be intermittent, negotiable, and constantly in flux? I suggest that these questions are not fantastical in the way that it is tempting to dismiss them as being— that in fact they are key questions at the root of the uncanny as it is experienced in the nuclear age.

Within the X-franchise, the mutant body appears as uncontroversially

“posthuman,” which is to say that mutants are a form of life emerging after the human, and indeed out of it. “Are mutants the next link in the evolutionary chain,” asks Professor

Xavier in the prologue to the 2003 film X2,” or simply a new species of humanity fighting for their share of the world?” The two possibilities from the basis of two very different beliefs regarding the place and purpose of mutants in the world, but each acknowledges the “next”ness of mutants. Yet my reading of mutation in the Marvel universe understands it not as posthuman, but as posthuman/ist: not a new body superseding the body of the human, but a new concept superseding the idea of it.

5 In X2, the second film in the X-Men series, Magneto escapes from a metal-free prison by removed the iron from a prison guard’s blood and forming it into solid metal. 45

To enact such a reading, I begin by turning to Giant-Size X-Men #1, the first reappearance of the X-Men following a five-year absence due to cancelation. Co-created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, this 1975 issue was the start of an X-Men renaissance that would see writer Chris Claremont step in and lead the franchise to impressive sales and iconic status. It also marked the first appearance of many of the most memorable and lasting X-Men characters: the African weather goddess Storm, the indomitable

Wolverine, the diabolic-featured Nightcrawler, the broadly-accented Irish Banshee, and the Russian Colossus. This new team comprised a markedly multiracial and international crew, in contrast to the all-white and all-American X-Men of the nineteen-sixties. Yet the most notable character in Giant-Size X-Men #1 from the perspective of a posthuman/ist reading is none of these new mutants, nor any of their predecessors. Instead, it is the villain they spend this issue battling: Krakoa, “the island that walks like a man” ([18])

Giant-Size X-Men #1 concerns the disappearance of the original X-Men, who have traveled to the South Pacific island of Krakoa in search of a powerful new mutant.

(Within the X-universe, Professor Xavier possesses a machine called Cerebro that detects and locates mutants all over the world.) When the team of new recruits arrives at Krakoa to search for the missing X-Men and the unknown mutant, they perceive the island only as a peculiarly dangerous location. It is filled with unexpected sand pits, hostile crustaceans, ensnaring jungle trees, aggressive birds, and landslides that seem to target invaders. Only gradually do the new X-Men realize that the powerful mutant detected by

Cerebro is, in fact, the island itself. Krakoa psychically communicates its history to the

X-Men: early atomic tests “permeated” the island with “unseen radiation” until every

46 organism “grew linked in a colony intelligence that gave the island a life of its own”

([18]). The island is capable of forming parts of itself into a monstrous creature with hands, eyes, and a carnivore’s teeth— a mud-coloured animal veined with roots and sprouting palm trees that can speak and fight for Krakoa as a whole. Ultimately, it is hurled into space— but its “spawn” return, first in hostile form ([21]) and later as a peaceful resident of the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning (a mutant academy) ([13]).

There is much to unpack here. Most notable is the fact that both the “mutant- detector” Cerebro and the X-Men themselves identify Krakoa as a mutant— a word that typically, within the Marvel universe, has a very specific semantic range. Typically,

“mutant” refers to a member of homo superior: an offshoot of “humanity” whose members are born with the so-called “X-gene.” This gene is triggered in specific situations (puberty or stress), causing the mutant’s “power” or visible “abnormality” to manifest. While the Marvel universe is full of individuals who acquire unusual features or abilities through accident or adventure, none of these belong to the category of

“mutants,” who form a distinct minority group with a strong sense of identity. In

Uncanny X-Men, an NYPD officer, faced with a battle in Central Park, declares that he didn’t call on the superhero team the Avengers because he doesn’t trust them. “I’d rather deal with real human beings rather than any lousy muties [a derogatory term for mutants],” he says, to which Jean Grey responds, “But—they’re not mutants. They’re super-beings.” (“What’s the difference?” the cop replies.) ([19]). Similarly, a crowd in the spinoff series X-Factor debates whether or not mutants can be trusted: “Hey, they ain’t all bad—look at the Fantastic Four!” one crowd member offers, which another

47 rebuts by saying, “The Fantastic Four ain’t muties, jerk!” ([20]) Yet Krakoa, who/which is not only not homo superior but also not wholly organic in nature6 is uncontroversially labelled a mutant— an identification that is not relegated to the 1975 Giant-Size issue, but reaffirmed in 2011’s Wolverine and the X-Men, when the Krakoa offspring is accepted at the Jean Grey School after first being identified as and then self-identifying as a mutant (and asking if it can become an X-Man) ([21]). There is, then, an element of uncertainty or fluidity to the category of “mutant.” Despite attempts to fix and close it

(through the dogma of genetic science, no less), it remains just a little bit excessive (or x- cessive). We are only always almost sure what a mutant is.

In the case of Krakoa, it is perhaps more useful to ask what mutation is doing. On the one hand, the island’s mutation by atomic radiation has rendered it “monstrous”— its defender-creature’s bulbous eyes, large fangs, and flora-fauna combination of bulging

“muscles” veined with roots are meant to disturb, and do. It also feeds upon the

“energies” of the X-Men by trapping them, spider-like, within its vines. Yet Krakoa’s characterization as mutant works to render it interpretable as a type of body that, as Scott

Bukatman writes of the mutant, is “traumatized, eruptive,” “transgressive, uncontrollable,” a source of “disruption and challenge” (68; 73). The qualities to which we are most likely to attribute its monstrousness instead make it someone/thing to be sympathized with, as mutants (despite bursts of bad politics and outright villainy) are most often depicted as “fragile vessels,” “subjected and subjugated and colonized

6 Giant-Size X-Men #1 cites all “living organisms” on the island has having been linked into one consciousness, yet the issue also clearly shows rocks, sand, and other inorganic parts of the island acting as part of the group mind. 48 figures” whose “first and most dangerous enemies are their own bodies” (66; 73) — not, perhaps, in the straightforward way that Bukatman suggests, but because their bodies render them incapable of situating themselves within systems of organization, and thus place them in a perpetual limbo.7

To be a mutant is to be neither one thing nor another, but not always so obviously as Krakoa, which is at once one and many, organic and inorganic, thing and entity— not to mention natural and unnatural, by virtue of its birth via atomic radiation. Beyond the challenges it poses to these binary formulations, it also turns the idea of life versus nonlife into an uninterpretable mish-mash. Parts of Krakoa are conventionally “living” (trees, animals) and parts are conventionally non-“living” (rocks, sand), yet all have become

“alive” in a way that they ought not to— radiation “gave the island a life of its own,” we are told, a life that is in some sense distinct from the lives of those plants and animals that had previously inhabited parts of the island. These plants and animals retain their previous lifeliness, yet they also participate in a lifeliness that Mel Y. Chen might describe as higher in an animacy hierarchy. (Animacy hierarchies are conceptual organizations of the world into varying categories of power, subjectivity, and affect.

These categories are not descriptive; as Chen emphasizes, “[l]anguage users use animacy hierarchies to manipulate, affirm, and shift the ontologies that matter the world” [42].)

The stones are characterized by a similar duality: while they participate in the agential capacity of the island, they otherwise retain the qualities of stones. (That is, they are

7 An actual (magical) realm of Limbo features prominently in the X-Men spin-off New Mutants. It is a threatening place, but also a haven for the young mutant girl, Illyana Rasputin, who becomes its queen, in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its spatial and temporal incoherence with respect to the “normal” world. 49 limited to what stones can do.) The result is an inability to properly assign positions of animacy to anything other than the island itself, which ought not be an appropriate object for an assignment of animacy (and in particular for the level of animacy that is assigned here). The “components” of Krakoa cannot be wholly accounted for as separate from each other; a trans-corporeal reading of the kind that Stacy Alaimo advocates for, which emphasizes “the movement across bodies” focused on “interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures” is thus not only ideal but necessary in order to make sense of the body/ies that we otherwise struggle to interpret here. “Humanism, capitalist individualism, transcendent religions, and utilitarian conceptions of nature have labored,”

Alaimo writes, “to deny the rather biophysical, yet also commonsensical realization that we are permeable, emergent beings, reliant on the others within and outside our porous borders” (2010 156). In Giant-Size X-Men #1, the mutant universe is presented as one in which this denial of this realization, and the philosophies built upon it, can no longer be sustained.

Ecstatic Others

What one might describe as the “shiftiness” that characterizes being in the mutant universe—the shiftiness of subject-objects that continually transgress or move between categories, or/also the shiftiness that makes up these “bodily natures” as they are constituted through continual interchange— is foregrounded in many post-1975 X-

50 franchise characters.8 Ramzi Fawaz describes the constitution of superheroic bodies as a

“material and psychic becoming characterized by constant transition and change” (22), and this is most visible in mutant bodies, which not only become in ways that call into question bodily natures, but also touch in ways that call into question bodily boundaries.

Anthony Michael D’Agostino, offering a queer reading of the recurring X-Men character

Rogue, notes how her mutation, which manifests as the absorption of others’ powers and personalities upon any “flesh-to-flesh contact,” “produces a subjectivity no longer structured in terms of self-consistency or the distinction between self and other.” Yet

D’Agostino does not wholly explore the other-than-metaphorical implications of this very material interchange, nor the ways in which the challenge it implies to the foundational separation between self and environment suggests an important way in which the mutant body is distinguished from the human

Humanity has always been a vexed issue in the mutant “X-universe.” This was true even in X-Men #1, when X-Men archnemesis Magneto articulated the first iteration of his mutant supremacist/separatist agenda— “The human race no longer deserves dominion over the planet Earth! The day of the mutants is upon us!” ([1])—and even the integration-minded Professor Xavier distinguished between his fellow mutants and their homo sapiens counterparts. At times in Marvel history, on the other hand, the accusation that mutants are not human has been treated as the important and dangerous one.9

8 Generation X’s Paige Guthrie (or “Husk”) sheds her skin(s) to re-constitute her body as various organic or inorganic substances, including wood ([22]), rock ([23]), flame (ibid) and glass ([24]); Peter/Piotr Rasputin (or “Colossus”) can enter into a solid metal body state in which he has “[n]o heartbeat— not the slightest physical sign of life” ([25]). 9 See, for example, God Loves, Man Kills ([30]). 51

Certainly, the rhetoric of humanness still exerts power over mutants— “How… could anyone… be so… inhuman?” Hank McCoy gasps upon encountering a villainous lair

[26])— and “human” comes to stand in for a kind of normative existence with which mutants have a complex relationship. To “pass” for human enough to enjoy the privileges of that existence is a goal for many mutants: new X-Men recruit Rusty Collins comments to Hank McCoy, who has been transformed into a body that is more human-esque than his prior blue-furred incarnation, that “[i]t must feel great to be human again” ([27]).

But what, in a world with a mutant population, does it mean to be human? Or rather: what does it mean to be a human that is not quite human, a being that uneasily straddles the binary division between human and not? Pseudoscientific gestures are made, at various points in the X-Men saga, to the existence of an “X-gene” or set of genes that is/are the definitive marker of mutation ([28]; [29]), yet ambiguity exists around the status of people in whom this gene is dormant and does not manifest, as well people as people who are deemed mutants without it. Amongst mutants themselves, genetic status seems to matter less than the question of embodiment— specifically: a native embodiment that differs from that expected of an ordinary “human being.” The “natural” body of the mutant does not conform to the boundaries of the human; it “deviat[es] from

[God’s] sacred template,” as anti-mutant crusader Reverend Stryker rails ([30]), in ways both visible (an array of appearances concatenated by their lack of resemblance to the human) and invisible (non-normative sensory experiences and dis/abilities). Thus, after a mass mutant “depowering” leaves many mutants stripped of these features and effectively human, ex-mutant Julio Richter considers suicide because he perceives

52 himself to have lost his “true” identity— rather than understanding himself as having been admitted to the “normal” from which he was previously excluded, he laments the loss of “my normal,” as he puts it. His seismic powers had rendered him “attuned” to the planet, whereas being human is “like someone threw a bag over my head, stuffed my ears and nose with cotton” ([31]). He sums up this loss concisely: “I’m not a mutant anymore,” he says. “…I can deal with anything… except that” (ibid).

Mutant being, then, might be most accurately conceptualized less as a deviation from the ordinary boundaries of the human and more as a redrawing of the boundary between human and environment— or, rather, as a destabilization of the expectation that any such boundary ought to be firmly drawn in the first place. Over and over again, mutant embodiment disrupts the givenness of the normative set points where self ends and other begins: from the cyborgian extension of body experienced by Richter, as well as the weather-manipulating Storm, the archvillain/antihero Magneto, who can “feel the metal in the ground” and alter magnetic fields, to Glow Worm, who contaminates others with toxic radiation ([32]), and “Multiple Man” Jamie Madrox, who can create and absorb fully independent duplicate selves.

Though I refer to Richter’s powers as a “cyborgian extension,” indicating that he experiences a body that is larger and/or more diffuse than that traditionally ascribed to the human, it is a mistake to understand mutants through the framework of the transhuman, in which the non-normative (and particularly the cyborg) body is read as human-plus— in other words, a surpassing that is predicated upon the attainment of “whole” or

“complete” humanness, and which is often imagined as an annexation of nonhuman

53 elements without a fundamental challenge to the notion of what whole or complete humanness is. The mutant bodymind offers that challenge through its refusal to be less or more than human, and its consequent situation as other in a way that threatens to mark it as what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, echoing Mary Douglas, describes as “matter out of place,” something that “does not fit into the space of the ordinary” (1997 33-4) Garland-

Thomson is writing of unease surrounding the disabled body, and indeed the mutant body significantly overlaps with the disabled body, sharing many qualities of the

“aberrant” and the “anomalous” (ibid). Indeed, one could argue that mutants are a way of making explicit the perceived threat of the disabled body: mutant bodies do not only threaten to/and disrupt physical norms or social order, as disabled bodies are perceived to, (Garland-Thomson 1997 37) but are endowed with supernatural powers that often turn destructive— a merging of the monstrous and the magically potent that recalls pre- modern interest in the wonder and the prodigy. At the same time, I wish to suggest that the figure of the mutant, in offering a model of being that cannot be mapped onto conventional expectations of the body, in fact productively disrupts normative categories of able and disabled, and that this disruption is directly linked to the mutant destabilization of binary division between human and environment.

Here, I wish to turn to Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s 2001-2006 X-Statix books as a site that plays with the possibility of non-normative “human-ish” embodiment in ways that emphasize the interlinkages between [dis]ability and rigidly policed boundaries between self and environment. The notably peculiar and unglamorous mutants who make up the X-Statix (formerly X-Force) team particularly lend themselves

54 to such an exploration, I believe, because they are not presented as “supercrips”— a term that, in one of its uses, refers to the disabled hero whose super-abilities compensate (and must compensate) for the body’s perceived defect, thus reinforcing the perception of disability as a lack or failure that must be made up for if the disabled person is to be understood as “whole” or adequate. The bodies of X-Statix protagonists Guy Smith and

Venus Dee Milo, in particular, present as significantly disabled by their mutations, and subject to struggles that are familiar to disabled people. At the same time, however, the extreme strangeness of their bodies challenges us to imagine what an “able” version of their bodies would look like: what “correct” boundaries these bodies ought to be reset to.

This challenge highlights radical forms of what Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality and challenge us to think this concept through at its extremes.

Guy is a purple-skinned, antenna-ed, and white-haired man who is so physically hypersensitive that the slightest stimulus is unbearable to him: the fine mist of a shower feels like needles stabbing his skin; the flapping of a fly’s wings jars his spine ([33]). The assistive suit he wears controls his senses enough that he is not in constant pain, though he sometimes supplements it with other devices (sense-reducing medicine, or numbing cream). Venus Dee Milo is a disincorporated and unstable swarm of energy kept in a vaguely humanoid form by her own assistive suit. In X-Statix #23, she appears to manifest humanish and vulnerable bodily organs ([34]) yet outside of this instance, she is portrayed as boundary-less without the confines of her suit. When Guy visits her room one night, he doesn’t see her— only a large tank full of a similarly colored energy. “Are you… in that stuff?” he asks. “No, Guy. I am that stuff,” Venus replies ([33]).

55

Figure 1: Guy sees Venus in X-Statix #2

Venus is a person, and she is a material person, but she is not a person-shaped person. As such, the boundaries between her body and the environment are difficult to assign. The tank that Guy observes her in works “something like a dialysis machine,” using compounds to “clean between [her] molecules” ([ibid]) in a way that makes evident the extremely diffuse and permeable nature of her energy-based existence. (She is using the tank rehabilitatively because her artificially contained body exploded after she teleported a nuclear device to the oceanic abyss— something she seems to consider only 56 a minor and temporary problem.) Yet though Venus’s lack of clear boundaries is the more obvious, Guy too experiences an embodiment that is inherently penetrable and unsealed, rendering him constantly aware of the interchange between himself and his environment. The two characters, both separately and in their pleasingly bizarre love affair, pose an implicit critique of the norms that regulate appropriate divisions between body and environment, while never neglecting to highlight how central such norms remain to the design, both practical and philosophical, of the modern world.

In spite of his antennae and purplish skin, Guy has a fairly conventional humanoid body. However, it is a body whose “leakiness” is highlighted by the extremity of his hyper-senses. He does not have the luxury of understanding his body as neatly and firmly bounded, because he is constantly aware of the extent to which he is penetrated by the extracorporeal world of the environment. The vibrations of sound, the molecular minglings of smell, the most “imperceptible” of collisions with his environment are all central parts of his existence, foregrounding what Stacy Alaimo has described as the trans-corporeal flows that are central to existence. “Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality,” Alaimo writes, “…makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background... for the exploits of the human since ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin— perhaps even closer” (2010 2). For Guy, it is impossible to imagine any other kind of corporeality. His bodily nature is indeed always an experience of the body that is

“never a rigidly enclosed, protected entity, but is vulnerable to the substances and flows of its environments” (2010 28).

57

It is possible, and in some ways useful, to read Guy as an allegory for multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a (human) syndrome that Alaimo discusses in some detail as a site at which to explore trans-corporeality. MCS, which is also known as environmental illness (EI), is a controversial name given to the experience of sufferers who report adverse and often severe reactions to clinically insignificant amounts of chemicals, leading to the impression that they are literally allergic to their environments. MCS tends to encompass or overlap with a number of diagnoses, from sick building syndrome, food intolerance, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and other “idiopathic environmental intolerances” to syndromes such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, which are symptomatically similar but etiologically less clear. As such, it has been situated by the skeptical in a lineage of “pseudodiseases” that might more accurately be termed “diseases of sensitivity.” These diseases of sensitivity emerge, in this reading, from the older diagnoses of hysteria and neurasthenia, with which they share a large number of symptoms: fatigue, impaired memory and concentration, headaches, and diffuse muscle pain. Yet at the same time, such diseases seem to be a distinctly modern phenomenon.

“American nervousness” or “Americanitis,” as neurasthenia was labeled at the turn of the twentieth century, might have been traced to a particular lifestyle of excessive information intake and speed—George Miller Beard listed among its causes

“steampower, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women” (Schaffner 331)—but it was not until the rise of allergism and its branching metamorphosis into “clinical ecology,” as Theron Randolph called his study of environmental illness, that the environment itself was perceived as the aggressor in

58 diseases of sensitivity.10 At this same time period, the discourse of toxicity was beginning to gain power— Lawrence Buell describes how the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s

Silent Spring helped to fuel an “awakening” to the realization (or dread) of inescapable contamination. “Totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration”

(648) created, and continue to create, a sense of disenchantment and disempowerment that is compounded by anxieties about innovation. The everyday world of late modernity becomes, as Alaimo describes it, “a landscape of perpetual risk, where even the most benign-seeming substances— bread, water, a sofa— may harbor danger,” and where the subject “confronts not only a barrage of conflicting information and disinformation but the specter of a dangerous lack of information” (2010 93). Within this nervous environment, it is easy for the MCS sufferer to appear as one who is (hearkening back to the language of Buell, but with an ironic tilt towards twenty-first century slang) “woke” to the occult reality that others find it easy to ignore: an imperceptible toxification of everything around us. Similarly, when Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism for the politicization of psychosocial disorders—among which some, if not most, of environmental illnesses might well fall— and suggests that capitalism as an environment produces and enforces the conditions of mental illness, he figures the sufferer as a kind of prophetic canary that—more materially susceptible than others to the unseen truth—

10 I do not mean to overlook here either the earlier roots of this medical framework in theories of diet and health, which Anna Schaffner discusses in the context of neurasthenia and “the pathologization of modernity,” nor Linda Nash’s discussion of the “ecological body” in the nineteenth century, but rather to separate these ideas of the “intertwinement” or exchange between body and environment from the modern experience of environment as inescapable and imperceptible threat. 59 enacts wokeness in their witting or unwitting body. The sufferer is not just sensitive (a condition of exhibiting certain responses to stimuli); they are sensitive: able to perceive what others cannot, almost paranormally. Indeed, they are hypersensitive. Their sensitivity is the core of the condition; what they are sensitive to (steampower, the telegraph, capitalism, chemicals, wheat gluten) is beside the point.

I unfold this history to contextualize why it is relevant that Guy Smith’s code name (or “mutant” name) was originally “Mister Sensitive.” In X-Force #117 he attempts to change this name to “The Orphan”; as he does so, his voiceover narration reads: “I am an orphan. I’m every orphan. That’s what defines me. I am an orphan” ([35]). As the issue has just featured an X-Force “press packet” in which the tragic death of his parents was related, the reader has no reason to question this. Yet in X-Force #120, Guy reveals that he has known the truth for years: his parents did not die when he was a child, but were convicted and imprisoned for trying to murder their unwanted mutant son ([36]).

(His adoption of the title “The Orphan” is thus rooted in an identification that is not straightforward. In what sense has he been orphaned? By his disability? Is he attempting to enact a separation between himself and his environment?) He himself sees his renaming as an attempt to kill an identity that he cannot live with: “I think about the name they gave me [Mr. Sensitive],” he muses. “Maybe it’s that name I want to kill”—a reference to the suicidal impulses that lead him to play a nightly game of Russian roulette

([35]). Yet he cannot manage to shed his definitive quality, or the name that comes with it: when, in X-Statix #4, he reminds an X-Statix fanboy that he “used to be Mister

Sensitive,” the fanboy replies, “I think you should change your name back. Mister

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Sensitive is cooler and… kinda more appropriate” ([37]). By X-Statix #9, Guy has done so— but not before admitting to Professor Xavier that he “want[s] to be ‘Mister

Insensitive’”. He wants an assistive suit that will not merely allow him to control his hyper-senses, but that will “[s]top everything… a suit that will wrap me up in stainless- steel… ring-fence my heart with impenetrable metal. Cauterize my soul” ([38]). This crisis is precipitated by Guy’s perceived instability: still haunted by the death of a former lover, and troubled by his role in a young mutant’s murder, Guy has left the X-Statix team. “I quit being ‘Mister Sensitive.’ I quit being ‘The Orphan,’” he declares in the previous issue. “From now on, I’m just Guy Smith” ([39]). Yet he cannot “quit” the sensitivity that renders his embodiment non-normative, and that is testament to the

“disordered” relationship between his body and the environment.

As Mister Sensitive, Guy possesses the hypersensitivity of an MCS sufferer: he reacts to stimuli in his environment at levels that are, for the “normal” body, imperceptible. He must find ways to live by imposing artificial boundaries between what he deems himself and what he considers environment, not only by utilizing his assistive suit, pills, and numbing creams, but by relying on devices such a specialized shower that emits mist and a total sensory shutdown unit for his occasional overloads. His official X-

Statix biography relates that he has studied “martial arts and mental disciplines” in an effort to cope with the disabling pain of his senses ([35]). Yet what he is hypersensitive to is not occult toxicity in the environment (whether of the literal form that is singled out in

MCS, or the less literal forms that mark other diseases of sensitivity), but rather the

61 environment itself. He is not “chemically” reactive, as Stacy Alaimo describes MCS sufferers, but environmentally reactive.

The difference between these two terms highlights a difference in the way that the relationship between subject and environment is understood. Alaimo considers the chemically reactive subject as having become “a sort of scientist” and, at the same time,

“something akin to a scientific instrument” (2010 130)—a detective tasked with solving the poisoning of their own body, which is ongoing and can thus never be “solved.” In this situation, the subject uses their body to constantly evaluate the environment, sorting it into categories of poison or not-poison, toxic or nontoxic, foreign or friend. Often, these categories align themselves rather neatly with a culture/nature dichotomy that has been comprehensively and rightly criticized: the flight from the toxic becomes a flight from contamination to the pastoral. (Buell 647). While this engagement does foreground the trans-corporeality of the subject and, as Alaimo writes, “the environment of environmental illness” (2010 140), it does so in a way that characterizes the environment as the corrupted city that serves as setting for so much noir fiction, and the trans- corporeal subject as, again, “woke” (as the detective often forcibly is) to the hidden wrongness that others don’t perceive.

The body of the chemically reactive subject also often seems to be described in terms that echo the self/nonself division Emily Martin observes in accounts of the immune system, a division that “is often accompanied by a conception of the nonself world as foreign and hostile… [P]opular publications depict the body as the scene of total war between ruthless invaders and determined defenders” (53). This “warfare” model has

62 come to dominate models of the immune system: foreign agents assault and penetrate the domestic body. It is easy to see how MCS builds on this model, disease giving way to innumerable toxins. The “reactivity” of environmental illness is thus really a vulnerability, a weakness in the walls of the human body triggered by onslaught or slow attrition. “[I]t was one of those chemicals that I can feel moving into my brain and grabbing on, and it won’t let go,” Alaimo quotes an MCS sufferer as saying (2010 131).

Another describes sources of chemicals more explicitly as “agents that attack [him] with a sudden fury” (ibid). Alaimo characterizes the “solvents and elastic” that serve as

“antagonists” in MCS autobiographies as “permeat[ing] the self” (2010 132). But

“permeating” seems like a strange term for the act of an antagonist, and here “invading” seems like a better fit.

In contrast, it’s difficult to describe Guy’s environmentally reactive body as

“invaded.” There are no toxic substances attacking him; it is not only man-made

“contaminants” that he is hypersensitive to, but literally all stimuli— an undifferentiated mass of environment with which his body interacts by virtue of its being. There is no possible “safe space” (Coyle 62) or clean environment for him outside of total sensory deprivation (though following the demise of the entire X-Statix team, the miniseries X-

Statix Presents: Dead Girl finds him in his version of heaven: a colorless, featureless, and supernaturally empty non-place where there are, as Dead Girl explains, “[n]o distractions” [40]) because his body is not figured as a fortress under assault but, rather, as without walls to begin with. While he is certainly vulnerable— a panel in the X-Statix team press packet depicts the onset of his mutant sensitivity by showing him naked in a

63 dark room, huddled in a fetal position ([33])— his vulnerability is not a vulnerability to hostile forces, a weakness or failing in his body. He is vulnerable to “[a] warm breeze.

The rustle of hidden life underfoot. The racing of a girlfriend’s heart” ([ibid]). It is a vulnerability that is total: a radical openness to the world around him. Furthermore, it’s a vulnerability that is not portrayed as an infirmity, injury, or defect. Despite the suffering that Guy’s sensitivity causes him, and the dark moments when he wishes he could be

“normal,” he is also vocal in opposing the idea of a research that seeks to “cure” mutation. He tells teammate Myles Alfred, who is desperate to rid himself of his mutation, that participating in research for such a cure “is giving out the wrong message… that what we are—our mutanthood, our difference, all this—is some kind of illness” ([41]). What Guy offers as a figure, then, is a trans-corporeality in which vulnerability to and enmeshment with other matter is not understood in terms of violation, in which sensitivity to the other need not have a toxic object, and in which bodily difference can disable without describing itself as weakness or “damage” to an essential Human. If anything, it is perhaps in this sense that Guy is, as he briefly insists,

The Orphan: removed from normative structures and therefore exposed, but exposed too to the possibility of new and fluid forms of family.

The identity of orphan is one that links Guy with Venus Dee Milo. One of the first encounters between the two involves Venus sharing how the childhood manifestation of her mutant power resulted in the deaths of her entire family ([33]). (It is ultimately revealed that they are not dead, but displaced to another dimension; like Guy, she is an orphan who is not an orphan [42]) This incident left her struggling: with the

64 manifestation of her mutant powers, she ceased to have a stable, contained body (in the process losing her recognizability as a Black girl— a complex identity issue with which the comic never fully engages) and suffered through “[e]ight years of therapy. Four suicide attempts. Manic depression. Self-loathing. Unable to sleep without drugs that keep the nightmares away” ([33]). It is easy to read Venus’s “brokenness” in her character design: her red and yellow suit covers her head and torso, ending abruptly at the shoulders in “stumps” that recall her namesake statue, which Lennard Davis points out

“is considered the ideal of Western beauty and eroticism, though it is armless and disfigured” (127).

Davis takes the Venus de Milo as a starting point for an essay that enquires into the way that the disabled body is “seen.” The art historian who gazes upon such a statue, he theorizes, “does not see the lack, the presence of an impairment, but rather mentally reforms the outline of the Venus so that the historian can return the damaged woman in stone to a pristine origin of wholeness” (135). This fantasy acts as a defense against the trouble caused by a chaotic, unstable, or “incomplete” body. Yet on the other hand “if indeed our standard is two hands,” Davis points out, “the critic and the artist are constantly faced with the fragmentary nature of the body, analyzing parts, facing the gaze of the missing part that must be argued into existence” (137). This fragmentary nature must be “repressed” by the critic, the historian, or (more generally) the viewer through the hallucination of a total, systematic, and untroubling whole. This hallucination forms a sort of “armor” or “shield” against the disabled Venus’s “unwanted reminder that the

‘real’ body, the ‘normal body,’ the observer’s body, is in fact always already a

65 fragmented body” (140)— an idea that Davis links to Lacan’s theory of development: the infant first understands its body as a collection of fragmented parts, before learning to misidentify the image in the mirror as its whole self. Awareness of “wholeness,”

“completeness,” and the “normal” further teaches us to classify the experience of fragmentation as partial, incomplete, abnormal. We all begin with (and can only repress our experience of) the “damaged” body, but we deny the reality of this— and thus deny that none of us can be “whole,” or, though Davis does not extend his work in this direction, completely separate from the environment against which we define ourselves

(as wholeness must fundamentally always position itself against an other that is not part of the whole).

It is our efforts to conceal and forget the fact of our fragmentary (penetrable, leaky) selves that lead us to “conceive and construct that phantom goddess of wholeness, normalcy, and unity— the nude [Venus]” (141), Davis writes, but perhaps it is from some impulse to reclaim that fragmentary model of the self that Milligan and Allred offer X-

Statix’s Venus Dee Milo as a version of this goddess who can literally never be nude.

This is not to say that her character design escapes the heteronormative fantasizing Davis discusses— the impulse that demands a particularly heterosexual wholeness, for instance the reconstitution of [the] Venus as intensely sexualized rather than simply “able- bodied”— for Venus’s everyday assistive suit suggests the exaggerated hourglass figure of the stereotypical comics heroine, and the “special” suit she dons for her sexual encounter with Guy works to entirely contain her in skin-like substance, so that she resembles a “whole” and conventionally attractive (albeit red-skinned and masked)

66 woman ([42]). In other words, the reader is provided with the means to easily elide her actual embodiment and escape into the fiction that the suits allow: a fiction that she looks like them. Rather than mentally reforming the damaged outline of the Venus, the reader is encouraged by the outlines of Venus’s suits to form an imagined body beneath them: one that conforms to the self/environment divisions that we expect.

Figure 2: Venus teleports Guy in X-Statix #2

Yet Venus also productively troubles, not only as the Venus de Milo does, but also in ways that are particular to her own embodiment. Just as the missing parts of the 67

Venus de Milo have a “gaze” that confronts the viewer, requiring he or she to wrestle them into existence (or rather wrestle them into replacement with the completive part),

Venus’s everyday form is marked by absences that remind us of her bodily difference, and by the challenges it presents. Though she “wears” elbow-length gloves to supplement her suit, the gaps between her shoulder “stumps” and the seams of the gloves appears as empty space populated by floating black spots, and the lack of body in the gloves and the suit is clearly visible. The eerie, black-ringed, pupil-less eyes of the suit’s mask serve as a constant reminder that we are not looking at (and that she does not possess) a face. In the brief, twenty-five-issue run of X-Statix11, there are three scenes in which Venus exits her suit and appears only as loose, unstable energy: two scenes in which she loses control of herself and explodes outwards, and the previously mentioned scene in which Guy sees her as a red-and-black mass of “stuff” in a cleaning tank. In two of these instances, the artificiality of the bodily outline her suit maintains is foregrounded by the oddly deformed appearance of the empty suit fabric: collapsing in on itself or hanging limp from a bedpost. In the third instance, we see the suit only as a black blur amidst the bright red of her explosion. But the context of the explosion serves to highlight her bodily difference: members of the X-Statix team are speculating about whether she and Guy have had sex, and Venus, after losing control of herself, reforms within her suit to tell them that not only are she and Guy not [yet] lovers, but: “Fact is, I’ve never done it with anyone. Haven’t ever wanted to. Couldn’t do it even if I did want to” ([38]).12 The comic

11 Venus did not appear in the X-Force issues that preceded X-Statix. 12 The public nature of the conversation surrounding Venus’s sex life— her admission ends up being broadcast on TV and discussed in the media— suggests less the attention paid to a female 68 seldom allows us to entirely escape Venus’s material reality— fantasize (or hallucinate) a more rigorously-bounded “whole” or “normal” one as we may.

Figure 3: Venus's energy leaves her suit in X-Statix #2

In considering the trouble with Venus, it is significant that Venus’s suits effect a containment of her— an imposition of acceptable boundaries between human and environment. I don’t mean to suggest that it is unacceptable for Venus to desire a more

“normal” appearance. Indeed, there are aspects of her character design that I hesitate to criticize as heteronormative precisely because I am unwilling to complain, for instance,

celebrity than the way that the sex lives of disabled people are treated as an object of open curiosity. 69 that a disembodied woman’s person-suit outlines breasts that have no possible function— or that she might want to be both functional and attractive for the act of sex. Sara Ahmed has reviewed the problematic emphasis on functionality and productivity in the development of prostheses, noting how “[n]ormalcy can be understood in terms of function: having a part that can do, and is willing to do, what it is assumed [to be] for

(‘willing and able’)… a body that is not whole, that has nonfunctioning parts, must be willing if not able, or willing to be able” (2014 109-10). Robert McRuer, in critiquing the discourse of normalcy, observes that “being able-bodied means being capable of the normal physical exertions required in a particular system of labor” (303). It is under this definition that the body and the parts of the body are “for” certain functions that, if adequately performed, render them “normal.” To accept assistive devices that endow a person with “ability” and criticize those that deviate from this standard is therefore an ideological judgment, and ability becomes a question of submission to norms or consent to embodying ideology.

Can we then frame deviance from the functional norm as productive subversion, what Ahmed would rate approvingly as a form of willfulness? Is Venus’s desire for a sexual appearance and experience willful in this way? Perhaps; however, McRuer connects “compulsory able-bodiedness” to a discourse of “normal” [heterosexual] relations that are similarly compulsory. “Compulsory heterosexuality,” he writes, “is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa” (302). Not explicit is the idea that heterosexuality, as the “foundational sexual identity for women,” demands that women function as sexual objects for men, and this functioning is therefore incorporated

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(a word I use advisedly) into able-bodiedness/normalcy. Thus while Venus may feel her sexual self-expression as an assertion that she is more than a laboring part (an idea that is supported by the conversation in which she tells Guy that “Professor X is not only good at creating suits to enable us mutants to better enhance our super powers. He’s been working on a special suit for me,” drawing a clear line between suits that allow her to function optimally and the suit that is not defined by this consideration [42]), the shadow of compulsory heterosexuality complicates the question of whether she is being willful or merely willing to be able.

In this sense, Venus’s suits do act as an artificial definition in more than one very important sense: interpolating a[n arbitrary] barrier that demarcates the distinction between what counts as self and what is rendered environment, imposing not only a body, but a body that can be for: body parts that can be for certain functions, from which the performance of sexuality is not excluded. This is the same sense in which Guy’s assistive devices attempt to create (if less dramatically), police, and maintain “normal” boundaries— boundaries that clarify the relationship between body and not-body, or rather the lack of relationship (as it would be trans-corporeally understood)— and in so doing allow him to function. The extent to which these tasks overlap foregrounds the extent to which issues of disability are, in fact, always also environmental issues: centering around a profound concern with ensuring that the physical and ideological integrity of body and environment are not mutually contaminated, and producing in the process a rigid schema that determines bodily teleology.

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The requirement that a certain body exist, that [certain] body parts be present, is the same that acts upon viewers of the Venus de Milo, a rejection or repression of the [disabled] body that is not whole and therefore cannot wholly function, yet with Venus Dee Milo another possibility must be controlled: the [transhuman] possibility that she might exceed the parts and whole of the functional body. The “stuff” of her is depicted as something between a liquid and a gas, a substance that calls to mind the stigmatization of the female body as “leaky” (something that is visibly true of Venus, whose character design shows her continually “leaking” blobs of black energy from her shoulder stumps), and the way that body fluids (or fluid bodies), as Elizabeth Grosz has written:

attest to the permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside, its

liability to collapse into the outside… to the perilous divisions between the body’s

inside and its outside. They affront a subject’s aspiration towards autonomy and

self-identity… They resist the determination that marks solids, for they are

without any shape or form of their own… Body fluids flow, they seep, they

infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed (1994 193-4).

Just as the fragmentary body threatens the subject with the possibility of disintegration, the fluid [part of the] body troubles with the specter of dissolution and collapse. Yet the fluid body is characterized by a “formlessness” that offers different challenges to the de- forming of the fragmentary body. Grosz counters the traditional construction of the female body in terms of “lack” or “absence” with an argument that it has been constructed “as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid… as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment… a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder

72 that threatens all order” (1994 203). Here, Grosz gestures towards the sense in which the proper human body is coded as masculine in its ability to strictly regulate its division from the environment, which serves as both a physical and conceptual (insofar as this separation is also coded as the objectivity attained by separating subject from object and, as Grosz notes, necessary for autonomy) means of imposing the ideological order that requires such division, and that is thus imperiled by the female, the disabled, and the trans-corporeal. The modern creation of the “human,” as Bruno Latour reminds us, is simultaneously the creation of the nonhuman (13), and fluid bodies threaten the possibility of the “human-ish,” the body that is not hybrid— a term that posits the pre- existence of separate categories— so much as it is a human that is always incompletely or contingently differentiated from the nonhuman. More: the very fluidity of these bodies suggests their resistance to any codification that would provide a model of the “whole”; to any codification, therefore, by which the order of whole/incomplete (able/disabled) and human/nonhuman might be re-established and enforced. Venus’s literally leaking body, spilling messily out and perhaps never quite re-cohering to all be “human” again, materializes such a threat.

However, Grosz also describes how “the fluidity and indeterminacy of female body parts… are confined, constrained, solidified, through more or less temporary or permanent means of solidification by clothing or, at the limit, by surgery” (1994 205).

Venus in her suited form becomes here a literal rendering of this inscription of the female. Why ought Venus look like the Venus, after all? Presumably she could take any form she likes; in X-Statix #2 we see her stream freely, like a river of spotty black energy,

73 from her cleaning tank to the limp fabric of her suit. I have discussed her suit as prosthesis, but in truth this is an approximation; the prosthesis is understood as something replaces or compensates for a loss, and while one might argue that the suit in some ways replaces or compensates for Venus’s loss of bodily form or structure (recalling that she began life as a girl who possessed these things), more accurately the suit not only does not allow her to lack certain things (requiring her to be willing to be able, as Ahmed puts it) but also does not allow her to be other things (requiring her to be willing to be human- ish). The human (or Human, referring to the idealized whole human form) is here revealed to be not so much about possession and loss, presence and absence, but— as

Grosz’s analysis would suggest— about limits, particularly those demarcating the distinction between human and environment. The quest to be more Human is the quest to enact better limits, to cut us off from modes of being that may include not only alternative forms of human embodiment not figured as transhuman surplus or disabled deficit, but also modes of being together that might otherwise invite us to explore our situation not in but as environment.

Venus draws attention to the artificiality of such limits, which are figured as something she can literally put on and take off at will, and in this sense, models mutant being as the mode of being I have described above: a being that is not only trans- corporeal (highlighting the inseparability of human and nonhuman) but also foundationally an ontology of otherness that offers many affordances for critics, an ontology that is predicated upon refusing the binary distinctions offered by a regulated body that one either is or is not. Venus’s willingness to be human-ish is predicated upon

74 the potential to be something else. It is in this sense that her “formlessness” and

“disorder” threaten the “form” and “order” of the Human. She and Guy embody a difference that is difficult to read as lack or defect, yet that also cannot easily be understood as extra- or super-human (an addition to the extant whole)— an absence of boundaries that is not a failure of the Human, but a refusal of very concept. It is perhaps no wonder that the union of Guy and Venus (or, rather, their attempt at consummation) transports them to another dimension. As an event, it offers two equally compelling readings: on the one hand, the queer potential of such an encounter is so destabilizing to the humanist world that the two lovers must be literally displaced; on the other hand, this displacement results in the reunion of Venus with her presumed-dead family, suggesting that while difference orphans itself (as Venus believed her difference to literally do), the power of coming-together in difference is something that can ultimately un-orphan us all.

This Self Which Is Not One

Lennard Davis, in his discussion of the Venus de Milo, points out that Freud includes amongst his examples of the uncanny a number of dismembered body parts—

“dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet that dance by themselves” (Freud 14). “What is uncanny about dismemberment,” Davis writes, “seems to be the familiarity of the body part that is then made unheimlich by its severing” (Davis

141-2). However, Davis himself sees the body parts as, in fact, “the original, familiar

[fragmentary] body made unfamiliar by repression” (142). Freud’s mistake, he believes, is in assuming that the “whole” body is the original, familiar form, rather than the

75 fragmentary body that (Davis argues) precedes it. Our experience of the uncanny is therefore linked to our awareness that the fragmentary body is the body that is always already our own.

Neither Freud nor Davis explicitly delves into the question of bodily excess rather than severance, absence, or lack (the lack of the body that would make the body part

“whole” and familiar), though I have explored how Davis’s fragmentary body may be reinterpreted as a formless one that troubles through its potential for such excess. The closest approach to bodily excess in Freud’s essay comes in his account of the “double:” persons who appear identical and/or persons who share mental processes “so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling, and experience in common with the other… so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own,” so that the self is

“doubl[ed], divid[ed], and interchange[ed]” (9). Freud connects the double with

“extraordinarily strong feelings of something uncanny” (10). I would argue that this is unsurprising if we consider the double as another example of excess: a site at which the limits of the Human are transgressed and confused.

To the primarily physical permeations, penetrations, and enmeshments of the bodies I have previously discussed, the double adds the question of metaphysical [lack of] containment. The failure of posthumanism to engage with this issue is one that I have previously discussed (Ferebee), noting that posthuman/ist scholars tend to approach the self or subject as either singular (a self/subject modelled on the human) or infinitely multiplicitous (a process, an assemblage, a happening). The latter is often figured as the underlying truth of the former: we perceive ourselves as self/subjects, but in actuality we

76 are multiplicitous happenings. This may seem a step away from the dominance of the human model, but in fact it has worked to reinscribe the centrality of the single self/subject. “One needs at least some subject position,” Rosi Braidotti writes (2013 102), and that subject position defaults to one. It seems simpler to contemplate one self with a fragmentary or fluid body than a fragmentary or fluid body belonging to more than one self. Yet I would argue that the posthuman/ist project requires dismantling anthropocentric and/or humanist assumptions not only about the body and its division from the environment, but also about subjectivity— and further that posthumanism’s attempts to theorize nonhuman agency and vitality have been hindered by a failure to explore alternative forms of self/subjectivity.

Here, again, the X-universe works to provide forms through which the anxieties and uncertainties of the modern uncanny can be explored and their particularities understood. There are many Marvel mutants who might be read as examples of the uncanny “double” (Karma of the New Mutants, who can possess another’s body; the

Stepford Cuckoos, a set of clone girls who can act as a hive mind); however, I will focus on two sites (I do not say “two characters,” for reasons that will become obvious) where

“doubling” is used in ways that trouble and challenge our perceptions not only of the body/environment boundary, as in the case of X-Statix, but of the boundary between self and nonself. The first of these sites is an example drawn from comics: Jamie Madrox, the

“Multiple Man,” whose mutant ability involves creating and absorbing independently sentient “duplicates” of himself. The second comes from the 2017 FX/Marvel television series Legion: two characters, Cary and Kerry Loudermilk (Bill Irwin and Amber

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Midthunder), a mutant middle-aged white man and young Native American woman who occasionally merge to become one character. Examining these sites through the lens of a posthuman/ist reading makes visible the human/ist assumptions that legislate our qualifications for self/subjectivity, and is provocative in what it suggests about the ideological fissures through which the uncanny seeps in the present age.

I have previously mentioned Jamie Madrox as a case of a mutant whose parents’ exposure to radiation (his father worked at a “nuclear research center”) is intimated to be the cause of his mutation ([8]). From birth, Madrox produces an identical duplicate of himself whenever he is physically struck— the first occurring when the obstetrician slaps him to start him breathing (ibid). For most of his life, he wears a special suit (another in the line of “special” assistive suits designed for mutants) that prevents him from accidentally duplicating himself. When he begins to exercise the ability, his “dupes,” as he slangily refers to them, are generally “reabsorbed” into his body when he has no further use for them. It’s not until he learns that one of his dupes has been murdered, in

1991’s X-Factor #72, that Madrox is begins to confront the ontological implications of this practice. Finding himself unable to reabsorb the dupe, as he assumed he could do, he begins to panic: “But it can’t die! It doesn’t have a life of its own to lose! It can’t be separate from me at any time!” ([43]) Increasingly frantic, he screams at the dead duplicate, “You can’t be separate from me! You’re as independent as a toenail clipping!

Come on! Come on! Wake up! Wake up! BE ALIVE! BE ALIVE!!!” (ibid). As he is dragged away from the body by fellow mutant Havok, he moans, “Oh, God. He’s really dead. I produced a corpse… out of me… That’s me lying there… or him…” (ibid). The

78 transition from “it” to “he” to “me” through the direct address of “you” exposes an instability of ontological status: the dupe goes from the nonhuman and perhaps nonlife category of thing (“it”) to an other living self that can be addressed (“you”), then from an other self that was once alive and now is not (“he”) to an own self (“me”) that is, paradoxically, dead. Another X-Factor character comments that she had assumed the dupes were “just extensions” of Madrox (ibid), a phrase that brings to mind a body part or, specifically, limb.

Figure 4: The death of Madrox's dupe causes him a crisis in X-Factor #72

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When we speak of extensions, we typically speak of “an extension of [his, her, my] body.” To be “of” the body is to be subordinated to the bodily whole in a way that

Sara Ahmed has dealt with extensively in her work on willfulness, noting how parts of the body come to our attention when they break or “stick out;” that is, when they fail to

“agree” with or carry out the will of the body (2014 43). The body “part” exists in opposition to the “whole” in this sense, differentiating itself only a challenge to or perhaps questioning of the unity of the body. Barbara Johnson, for instance, notes that

“[i]n replacing a body part, one has to acknowledge that the body has parts” (Johnson

87), when “[t]he human has a soul to the extent… that he or she is imagined as whole, all organic, one” (ibid). The discourse of body “parts” and “extensions” participates in a larger ideology predicated upon the centrality of the whole to self-identity and subjectness; Johnson also notes, for instance, that in the story of the puppet Pinocchio,

“[t]he principal sign of Pinocchio’s ‘realness’ is the disappearance of the signs of his articulation: in the puppet the joints are marked; in a ‘real boy,’ they are erased” (90).

Humanness (as “realness” here unquestionably signifies; Pinocchio goes from being an artificial [human] boy to a real [human] boy) is defined by or, at the very least, dominated by an ontology of wholeness. A lack of this wholeness, on the other hand, can mark one not merely as artificial, but also as monstrous; Frankenstein’s monster is the classic case of this. Jack Halberstam notes that “the monster is not human because he lacks the proper body— he is too big, too ugly, too disproportionate” (1995 35); too, “his formation out of bits and pieces of life and death, of criminals and animals, animate and inanimate objects means that he is always in danger of breaking down into his constitutive parts” (36-7). He

80 is forever a “fugitive from identity” on account of his “propensity… to deconstruct at any time” (37). To be human, the body must not be part-itioned; it must not have seams. The fragmentary body becomes, in this reading, not frightening in and of itself, but because it poses the possibility that we ourselves are somehow inhuman. This is the fear that we repress when we repress the fact that we are made out of parts.

Yet Madrox does not see his dead duplicate as a part of himself that has been severed and thus become nonself, which is the nature of the uncanny body part. Rather, he sees the dupe as having died, in the way that a separate human being does. A part of the body cannot die, because it is not alive in this sense. One potential exception— I say

“potential” because it exists in a fraught and liminal zone of construction, in which it can be read as both body and body part— is the embryo or fetus, as Chen (44) and, most extensively, Susan Squier have explored. There are reflections of this not only in

Madrox’s later relationships to his duplicates (some of whom refer to him as “Dad” [44]); others of whom refer to themselves as having been “born” from him [45]), but also in a strange storyline that sees one of Madrox’s dupes “impregnate” fellow mutant Siryn in a one-night stand. Siryn carries the child to term and gives birth to it, believing it to be

Madrox’s, but when Madrox (who also believes it to be his child) touches it for the first time, he absorbs it into his own body: it has never been a “real” infant, but an infant duplicate. “Apparently… the offspring of a dupe isn’t really anything more than a—”

Madrox attempts to explain ([46]).

Margrit Shildrick has noted that the fetus is one of two cases (the other being transplanted organs) in which “the conventional discourse draws distinctions between self

81 and non-self material,” though— unusual in the situations of bodily change or disruption that Shildrick joins Drew Leder in labeling dysappearance— it is not clear “that there is an other at all, even though an other will eventually emerge at birth” (Shildrick 17). The bodily confusions produced by the situation of pregnancy raise the question, for

Shildrick, of whether the binary of self and other is ultimately without use. However, another question presents itself when we consider what Shildrick also frames as an issue of a split between self and other: just as the fetus eventually emerges as a “distinct self,” no longer part of the mother’s body, so the recipient of a transplant organ “is expected to incorporate the alien material into her own embodied existence, no longer as foreign, but as an integrated element of her own identity” (18). This “shift” from self to other or from other to self also entails a more important shift between part and whole, and the confusions that emerge when elements of one remain within the other (as Shildrick details) result from a need to maintain this division. The splitting phase that Shildrick identifies, at which the fetus leaves its mother’s body, is the phase at which the fetus ceases to be a “part” of the self and becomes an other “whole body” (though the phenomenon that Squier discusses as the rise of “fetal subjectivity” has increasingly seen the fetus considered as a whole body prior to birth, with the result that the mother’s body is sometimes conceptualized as a container, accessory, or “part” of or for the fetus).

Similarly, the integration of the transplant organ is the point at which it ceases to be a

“part” of the other and becomes indistinguishable from the seamlessly whole body. The ontological uncertainty and difficulty that accompany these transitions (Shildrick 18) suggest that this change in perception is not automatic, but rather a prolonged attempt to

82 wrestle affective knowledge into some kind of accordance with the conceptual schemata that govern our world.

The affair of Madrox’s infant dupe, though on one level set up for maximum drama (both Madrox and Siryn descend into self-destructive spirals of rage and grief following the loss of the child), also acknowledges the extent to which Madrox’s duplicates occupy a similar ontological position to unborn children— albeit unborn children with a single progenitor, unborn children who appear as adults, and unborn children who can interact with the “outside” world. What I mean is that the duplicate is a body that resists location within the binary of part/whole. It is simultaneously part and whole, as Madrox realizes with the death of his first dupe. His original view is that his dupes, as parts of himself, become, when divorced from him, parts without a body: objects in the environment outside of his borders. (Ahmed refers to “being cut off from a body… becoming part of a world with others,” though in an analogical sense [2014

193].) His reference to a “toenail clipping” is instructive here; nail clippings and hair are parts of the body that, when cut from the self, hardly even bear the residue that marks them as having been “of the body.” (There is still a hint of the uncanny to these body parts— witness the widespread historical belief that hair and nails could be used by practitioners of magic to affect the body from which they came, and that it was therefore necessary for them to be carefully disposed of (Fraser; Keith Thomas reports folk healers in England also making use of urine). Yet the shift from one category to the other in these cases does not strike us as so strange and threatening as that of severed limbs.) What the death of the dupe reveals is that his duplicates also have qualities of the whole. “He was a

83 separate individual,” Madrox says, brooding on the incident later. “His life was gone, and he wasn’t part of me anymore… What if he never was? What if… what if they have their own souls?” ([43]) The repetition of the word “separate” (which Madrox has previously used twice to discuss the situation of the dupe) stands out; the fact that the dupe is separate, apart from rather than a part of Madrox, means that it is potentially human. If it is not a part, then it must be a whole.

Yet the dupes cannot quite be classified as whole others, either. For one thing— most obviously— Madrox creates them as copies of himself, though they tend to represent fragmented elements of his personality. (One dupe might be existentially depressed [47], another aggressively violent [ibid], philosophical [ibid], chaotic [31]), or gay where Madrox identifies as straight [48].) Madrox also, following their absorption or death, takes on the memories and sometimes the physical marks of what has befallen the dupes. One dupe travels in time to a dystopian future and is branded with an “M” for

“mutant” over his eye, which Madrox manifests on his own face upon the dupe’s death

([49]). Other dupes are sent out by Madrox to explore the world and learn specialized skills, which Madrox acquires when the dupes return to be reabsorbed. Despite his initial crisis over the realization that his dupes might be independent people, Madrox seldom expresses hesitation about absorbing them— though when faced with a dying dupe, he panics and refuses, explaining— in narration positioned over a panel filled by an image of his horrified face— that “taking” a dupe on the verge of death is “like dying [him]self.

Like… like [his] soul’s being torn in half.” He continues: “I don’t absorb the wound… but the trauma of what he feels… felt… it’s… I just can’t” ([50]). The change in tense

84 from “feels” to “felt” suggests ongoing uncertainty as to the status of the dupes; does the dupe continue feeling when he is absorbed into Madrox? When he is incorporated into

Madrox’s body, does Madrox become the only one who can feel? Certainly, Madrox feels the dupe’s pain as his own— like dying himself only, perhaps, because he does not die, but situating the dupe as part of his body rather than, as he observed of the dead dupe, “separate.”

Figure 5: Madrox hesitates to absorb his dying dupe in Madrox #1

Madrox’s other notable hesitation in absorbing a duplicate comes in X-Factor

#16, when he hunts down a dupe who has “gone rogue” in failing to return to be absorbed

([51]). The issue begins, unusually, not with Madrox or in the “Mutant Town” 85 neighborhood of New York where X-Factor takes place, but with a sermon being delivered by a small-town Episcopal priest. The reader is given an “establishing shot” of the church’s exterior and a “long shot” of its interior before a series of panels offering odd fragments: a child in the congregation scolded by his mother; the priest shot from above, in shadow; the lower left quarter of the priest’s face; his hands relaxed against the

Bible; the same hands drawn up in a distressed motion as— in the center of the second page— Madrox enters the church. The third page finally reveals the priest, with the full- on view that the fragments had only teased, to be a Madrox duplicate. Though Madrox’s internal narration starts on this page, reasserting himself as protagonist by putting the issue in his point of view, the reader has already been set up to perceive him as an intruder. This impression is strengthened when we learn that the rogue dupe, Father

“John Maddox,” has a wife and son (the mother and child in the congregation), the latter of whom he has named after his/Madrox’s/their father. In other words, Madrox arrives as a destabilizing threat to this peaceful, domestic life. It is at this point that the reader perhaps begins to suspect that the Pablo Raimondi and Brian Reber cover for the issue is not as straightforward as it seems. While one might first read the cover as showing

Madrox defending a woman and child by warding off a hinted-at monster with a crucifix, it is in fact the duplicate (“Maddox”) who is wielding the crucifix, and Madrox who is depicted (with the shadow of his distinctive hair and the tail of his signature coat) as the monster.

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Figure 6: The ambiguous cover of X-Factor #16

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Madrox has come to put an end to the dupe’s existence; “Maddox,” realizing this, first flees and then pulls a gun on him (“Would [killing me] be murder/suicide?” Madrox asks sarcastically) before submitting himself to what he terms Madrox’s “dominion”— echoing the topic of his sermon, in which he questions what is meant by this word. “Now there are some,” Maddox preached to his congregation, “who think that having dominion means that we can do whatever we wish. ‘Dominion,’ after all, means ‘absolute ownership.’ But we do not ‘own’ the earth. It existed long before the…” (This is the point at which Madrox interrupts him.) The title of the issue, “No Dominion,” also raises questions about the relationship between creator and creation, as well as prefiguring

Madrox’s ultimate decision: to spare Maddox, and leave him to his life. What is significant about this choice is that Madrox has previously explained his need to absorb

Maddox thus: “Because I’m not whole. Because you’re a piece of my soul, and if a man doesn’t have his soul intact… he’s got nothing.” Leaving Maddox, he reaffirms his affective experience of incompleteness, noting that (for the first time after a long existential crisis) he feels “free[d]” by his decision, and “[t]hat’s worth a small piece of

[his] soul any day.”

Madrox, in other words, identifies himself as being absent a “part” and therefore not “whole.” Yet this lack of “intactness” does not leave him with nothing, but rather with a restored sense of completeness. Indeed, his use of the word “free” implies the kind of separateness that he has previously equated with being an individual, independent non- part— a whole human being. It would seem that he is both whole and not-whole at the same time. What’s more, the comic has gone out of its way to establish Maddox as a

88 whole rather than a part: framing him as an “ordinary” person before his identity is revealed, and suggesting that Madrox has interrupted his (Maddox’s) story, rather than that Maddox is an offshoot of Madrox’s own. Maddox even reappears in X-Factor #40, when a suicidal Madrox, distraught over the incident of the dupe child, seeks him out for a heart-to-heart ([52]). In their conversation, though Madrox refers to himself as

Maddox’s “creator,” he also describes Maddox as not only having “a life of his own… but[…] a life that’s better than any I’ll ever have.” It’s clear he’s no longer capable of viewing Maddox as merely a part of himself. He phrases the dilemma thus: “You may be me, John… but I’m not you.”

How can we resolve this paradox of identification, the persistent refusal of

“things” (people, people who are not quite people) to solidify as parts and wholes? In addressing it, I wish to return to the issue of the fragmentary body. I previously characterized the fear of the fragmentary body as being “the fear that we are made out of parts.” But I suggest that one element of this fear is the fear of being a part— that is, the fear of being assimilable to another body. This threat is predicated upon the notion of an absolute selfhood in which to be part of the other is to be cracked open or contaminated by it, and thus to forfeit one’s [whole] self (Ferebee, forthcoming). The extent to which this exposes “wholeness” as being a question of will/power can be seen in the way that the forfeiture of self is seen as arising from submission to the will of another body

(Ahmed 2014)— a dominion or domination that erases one’s own. The fear of not being whole, in other words, is not merely a fear of “coming apart” (losing parts of oneself, exposing the possibility of disintegration) but a fear of becoming a part (subjugated to

89 another body’s will). “To be a self,” Shildrick writes, “is above all to be distinguished from the other, to be ordered and discrete, secure within the well-defined boundaries of the body” (Shildrick 1999 79). The ideology of the Human reveals itself to emerge primarily out of a policing not only of physical limits, but also of the psychic limits of the self, though these limits are perceived to correctly overlap such that the ideal subject is a self housed in an “appropriate” body, “an inviolable self/body that is secure, distinct, closed, and autonomous” (Shildrick 2001 51). The arrival of the term “inviolable” is particularly significant here, as a blurring of the boundaries between self and other is indeed seen as violation. I have elsewhere described how alien and cybernetic joined consciousnesses, hive minds, and symbiosis have typically been figured in science fiction as a form of rape, or as a fate worse than death (Ferebee), while Shildrick examines the perceived “monstrousness” of conjoined twins (2001 55-67), with their disruptive

“violation of internal order.” An “excess” of consciousness (the mind or self that is more than one) is typically understood not only as a violation, but as an injury or loss— an annexation of the finite territory of the self by a hostile other.

Shildrick’s argument is that the perceived “vulnerability” of the monstrous body

(“by reason of its own lack of fixed form and definition” (2001 54); that is, by its lack of solid boundaries) provokes anxiety about the repressed fragmentary self/body, which is always already vulnerable, partial, and prone to disintegration. This adds to Lennard

Davis’s reading of Lacan an emphasis on the enmeshment of the self with the body: we are not selves in fragmentary bodies, but fragmentary self/bodies. None of us is ever a whole, inviolable self. This raises challenges, obviously, for an understanding of

90 subjectivity in which a prerequisite for subject status is existence as such a being. Such challenges can only be productive— Shildrick suggests that “the monster might be the promising location of a reconceived ontology” (2001 67)— and yet I question whether attempts to rethink the ontology of the self/body can meaningfully be developed using the language of wholeness and parts. Is it useful to conceive of ourselves as fragmentary self/bodies, or to centralize our vulnerability to permeation, penetration, or other acts that imply an “intrusion” of the other’s part into our whole? I suggest that it instead makes more sense to reject the model of parts and wholes that has proved an insufficient foundation for our attribution of subjectivity. Its failure to satisfactorily resolve ontological problems such as those posed by Madrox and his dupes (or, as the comic explicitly points to, that of fetal life) is representative of larger deficiencies that underlie current crises of the Human.

In order to further this point, I turn to the most recent example I will discuss: [a] character[s] from 2017’s Legion. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to them henceforth as two separate characters, as our language does not easily accommodate the notion of a being who is sometimes more than one being. However, this is the situation of

Cary and Kerry Loudermilk, two mutants who take the “concorporation” (Shildrick) of conjoined twins to new levels through their radically blurred and constantly fluctuating boundaries.

Legion viewers are first introduced to Kerry as a taciturn, brutally efficient fighter: a young Native American mutant militant who helps protagonist David Haller escape from a sinister government organization. In the next episode, David meets Cary: a

91 gangly, awkward, middle-aged scientist who greets David upon his arrival at the mutants’ secret base. Later, while performing medical tests on David, Cary begins talking to himself in an offhand but incomprehensible manner (“Apple. Nixon. Uh… uh, onion. No, onion. […] No, you don’t play like— shh”). “I talk to myself sometimes too,” David offers, a little confused. Cary answers, “For the record, I wasn’t talking to myself, I was talking to Kerry.” “Wait— I thought your name was Cary,” David ventures. “Yes, it is,”

Cary replies distractedly. “So…” David says, lost, “you were talking to Kerry, just not the Cary that happens to be yourself.” “Correct,” Cary says, satisfied that they’ve resolved the issue. (Legion 102) The homophony of the two names leaves viewers in the same position as David: unable to parse the distinction, relationship, and interaction between the two Car/ries or even understand whether there are two Car/ries at all. It’s not until the third episode that the young Native American Kerry and the older white Cary appear in the same scene, Kerry shown training with a boxing post on one side of Cary’s laboratory, before at last— apparently bored— she crosses the room and abruptly merges into his body (Legion 103). Later, she emerges just as abruptly to retrieve a hypodermic needle that Cary needs. In the fourth episode, female protagonist Syd attempts to clarify the nature of the Car/ries’ existence, asking Kerry, “So… you live inside his body?” “We share,” Kerry corrects. Syd wants to know if such an embodiment is “weird,” to which

Kerry responds by launching into her and Cary’s joint history. This history is spoken by both of their voices, overlapping and finally speaking in unison; the scene of Kerry and

Syd’s conversation fades and is replaced by a montage: brief glimpses of the Car/ries’ childhood and more recent past, intercut with a scene in which Kerry and Cary lie facing

92 away from each other in a shadowy, earth-toned room that may or may not only exist in their shared mind. In this latter scene, Kerry and Cary appear to be telling their own history to each other. The ambiguity of the setting makes it unclear whether this takes place in the past, or is imagined, or is somehow simultaneous with Kerry’s speech to Syd.

The story Kerry (and Cary) relate(s) involves a Native American couple who are expecting a daughter, and whose marriage collapses when the wife gives birth to a white son. The son, Cary, is raised by his single mother, and wakes up one night at the age of eight to find an eight-year-old Native American girl playing with his train set.

KERRY: So for the next year, he thinks maybe he made her up, like his imaginary

friend who comes and goes, but—

BOTH: Then he figures out—

CARY: That she lives inside of him.

BOTH: That they’re two people in one body.

Figure 7: Cary and Kerry recount their shared history in Legion 104

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Understandably, Syd is not quite satisfied by their response to her query. “That’s his side,” she says— a curious comment, given that, from her perspective, it’s Kerry and not

Cary who’s been speaking. “What about you? …You’re a person too, with feelings. I’m asking what it’s like for you.” Kerry responds that Cary does “the boring stuff… Eating, sleeping, whatever it is you guys do in the bathroom. And I get all the action. He makes me laugh, and I keep him safe. If that’s weird, I’m okay with it.” This assessment seems honest, and is consistent with what we see of the two in the show. Kerry is impatient, sulky, uncommunicative, and slightly immature, excited mainly by the prospect of violence or taking risks.

Her immaturity is perhaps explained by the fact that, as we learn, she only ages when she is outside of Cary’s body. Physically, she is perhaps college-aged, which also seems congruent with her emotional level. Tromping through a forest on a dangerous mission, while her companions discuss the puzzling mysteries they’ve encountered, she enthuses, “This would be an awesome place to have a fight! Helicopters coming in, gunships, ninjas on fast ropes. Heck, yeah.” Later, when the team comes under attack by government agents armed with heavy weapons, she glows with pleasure and announces,

“All day it’s talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk… My turn” (Legion 104). At the same time as she possesses a certain teenage-boy quality, however, she is also shown to possess a worldliness that the bumbling, naïve, and anxious Cary lacks. While Cary is someone who (in a deleted scene (Legion DVD Extras) takes seriously the sarcastic suggestion that the mutant team might stage an “intervention” and sit a psychic parasite down in a circle to chastise him for being a “bad boy”— “Would that work?” Cary asks— Kerry, in an

94 earlier episode, regards Cary cynically when he nervously insists a rescue operation might not degenerate into violence. “Don’t kid yourself, old man,” she says. “There’s always a fight” (Legion 105). Indeed, when they arrive at the scene of the operation in question, concorporated as Car/ry, the leader of the mutants, Melanie Bird, demands that

Kerry emerge, as Kerry is the more capable of the Car/ries (ibid). In turn, though Cary is the more physically aged, and often appears as the more adult, he can sometimes evidence a surprising childlike-ness, as when Melanie asks him, while Kerry is out on a mission, if Cary misses her, and he asks rather abashedly, “Is that dumb?” (Legion 104)

Too, when Kerry later becomes furious with Cary over his perceived abandonment of her to a dangerous trap on the astral plane, Cary trails her from place to place, sadly asking her if she wants to merge back together (Legion 108).

At least, it’s clear that this is what Cary is asking Kerry. However, he never articulates it as such. He refers to their shared body as a state in which the two of them can “recharge” (ibid)— but otherwise only indicates their joining together through a hand gesture that follows a trailed-off sentence: two curled hands touching together at the fingertips or knuckles. “Did you want to… [gesture]?” (Legion 107) Cary asks, and then later, “You should… we should… [gesture]… recharge” (Legion 108). The impression is of a failure of language, a caesura where the material experience specific to the two of them eludes or exceeds any term that might contain it. The material experience can only be communicated through a material enactment. The choice of enactment is interesting as well; it suggests that each of them is the hand of a body. In the conventional sense, this would render them “parts”— certainly, the arm and its handiness, including the fist

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(which Cary’s curled hands resemble), feature prominently in Sara Ahmed’s work on partness. Yet it is clear that neither Cary nor Kerry is a part of the other. The show appears to carefully mitigate against this perception: though the story of Car/ry’s childhood might suggest that Cary (who lived for eight years unaware of Kerry) is the dominant or “whole” form, of which Kerry is a subsidiary part, Kerry is given the role of narrator (with its implications of subjectivity) in sharing that story. Though her youthfulness might also lead to a reading of her as less central, or supplementary to the older Cary, she technically predates him (the comment that their parents were expecting a girl suggests she was originally visible in their mother’s womb) She is also the first of the

Car/ries to whom the viewer is introduced, and thus established as a separate and

“complete” character before any other possibility is considered.

Yet at the same time as neither Cary nor Kerry is a part of the other, neither of them is apart from the other. Even when the two are not “sharing” a body, an ambiguously physical connection between them persists. A montage at the end of the fourth episode shows Kerry engaged in an intense and brutal fight while Cary, in his laboratory at the mutant base, acts out her movements, reacting to the physical blows that are inflicted upon her and seemingly able to “see” the threats she faces. When she is later shot, he collapses in tandem with her, and suffers her pain as her wounded body is carried back to the base. It’s unclear if Kerry experiences the same phenomenon with Cary (as he is the less active member of their duo, and less frequently in danger), but she shares his pain when she is integrated into their body. Or rather: the pain of either becomes, when they are integrated, their pain; their first merge after Kerry’s fight results in her injuries

96 manifesting in/on Car/ry’s body, the lasting effects of which both feel. (“It hurts me too,”

Cary reminds her, in response to Kerry’s silent-to-the-audience complaining.) (Legion

105) The two seem entangled at some mysterious and quasi-material level, the nature of which is unclear even to themselves— “What happens to her when I die, I wonder?” Cary muses (Legion 104), when reminded of the disparity in their aging.

Cary describes his concorporation with Kerry as “a very delicate ecosystem”

(Legion 105), a phrase more suggestive than the show perhaps realizes. I use the term

“concorporation” to refer to the interaction between the Car/ries, but in fact, to be exact,

Cary says that “[i]t’s a very delicate ecosystem,” [emphasis mine] in response to being asked why he can’t heal Kerry by merging with her: “I’d go into shock. It’s a very delicate ecosystem.” It seems to refer not to their shared body (Cary seems to use “I” to refer to his body, which would go into shock at the point of becoming their body, so why would he not continue to use the singular or plural first person?) but to some state of being that encompasses their existence both as one and two bodies— not to mention the blurring that exists between their one- and two-ness, as Cary can clearly “piggyback” into

Kerry’s body for a kind of one-and-two-ness, whether or not the reverse may be true.

“Concorporation,” though I do not use it in precisely the same sense as Shildrick, seems to adequately encompass the range of bodily with-nesses that Kerry and Cary move in and out of.

In some ways it does seem useful to describe this concorporation as an ecosystem, since that term implies an arrangement of energies, objects, and organisms that is not fixed. Indeed, movement/interchange/flow is an obvious and natural part of an

97 ecosystem. It is this movement/interchange/flow that constitutes the ecosystem— the inter-existence of the beings that participate in it. Car/ry do/es seem best defined as the site of the inter-existence of the organisms that are Cary and Kerry, and labeling them in this way opens the door to considering the roles of other objects, organisms, and energies that form part of this “ecosystem.” (Kerry, for instance, can eat— Cary attempts to placate her, at one point, by offering soup— but prefers not to, so she must acquire her energy from Cary, whose energy intake is presumably affected.) Yet at the same time,

“ecosystem” does not seem to adequately capture the challenges that the Car/ry concorporation offers to conventional ontologies. First and foremost, an ecosystem is not a being; that is, it does not have an ontology. In making this statement, I don’t mean to imply that it is by any means clear-cut what (or who) does and does not qualify as a being. In fact, I wish to introduce an example that muddies the waters considerably: the deep-sea “colonial organism” called the siphonophore.

“Colonial organism” is a term that attempts to capture the uncertainty of the siphonophore’s status. There is a tendency to want to refer to a siphonophore as “a creature” or “an organism” (Inglis-Arkell), or to discuss what the siphonophore “does”

(Simon), but a siphonophore is actually a colony of individual animals called “zooids” that have highly specialized biological functions and integrate together into a “body” that acts as a larger-scale animal. “Being a siphonophore,” writes Casey Dunn of Yale’s Dunn

Laboratory, “is as if you were to bud thousands of conjoined twins throughout your life, some with only legs to move everybody, others with only mouths to ingest food, others with enlarged hearts to circulate the shared blood[…]” (Dunn). Indeed, a 2014 Wired

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Magazine post on the subject begins by discussing the logistics of life as a conjoined twin

(Simon)— recalling Margrit Shildrick’s exploration of that ontologically challenging state. Like the conjoined twin, the zooid has a certain degree of independence, though it cannot survive independently; each raises the useful question that Wired reads in marine biologist Stefan Siebert’s remarks: “What is individuality?” Siebert points out that

“[h]umans are colonies— we are colonies of single cells.” Insects, too, exhibit colonial behavior. But we attribute subjectivity to insects, and not to cells, which we regard as

“parts” of the human. The issue of will seems to raise its head again: the part is that which acts [only] as a vessel for the will of a larger body. The trouble of the siphonophore and the conjoined twins seems to be that in neither case is there a clear hierarchy of whole and part. The two twins seem to compete for the part of the whole; neither the thousands of zooids nor the siphonophore seems particularly sentient, possessed of a will. Shildrick notes the need on the part of chroniclers of conjoined twins to make judgements as to whether one whole subject or two existed (Shildrick 2001 66); she notes how, in a documentary about Irish conjoined twins, “it is routinely asserted that under the skin they are certainly two, with discrete subjectivities already given and simply awaiting release from the fleshy bondage of their shared skin suit” (114).

Elizabeth Grosz details, in a 1991 essay, the ways in which such judgements of subjectivity seem not to dovetail with the lived experiences of conjoined twins themselves (Grosz 1991 33). Yet neither Shildrick nor Grosz offers a wholly satisfying account of how to approach the subjectivity of such twins. Grosz attributes to conjoined twins a “spectrum” of subjectivity that ranges from one extreme (“the so-called normal,

99 individuated singular subject”) to another (“a non-individuated, collectivized group subject”), while at the same time she describes the twins as “psychologically distinct individuals” with “two identities” who happen to be “far closer than any other two being

[sic— perhaps a telling error?] ever could be” (1991 35). She does not seem to feel that the questions raised by such forms of being extend beyond the specific “freaks” to which they pertain, but rather that their importance is limited to the psychoanalytic power of the

“monstrous being” (1991 36) and its relation to the “us” who are always not the freak.

Shildrick describes herself as “inclined to caution” when faced with the prospect of deriving a subjectivity that would encompass such differences, though she also claims that “monstrous corporeality” potentially figures “the site not just of a reconceived ontology, but of a new form of ethics” (Shildrick 2001 67; 119). Problematically, where

Grosz seems to consider the ontology of the freak of limited use, Shildrick, I would argue, sees it as too broadly useful. Monsters reflect, she writes, that “[o]ur necessarily embodied identities are never secured, and our bodies never one” (2001 119). She accepts these ideas without perceiving them as inconsistent with the binary of self and other, perhaps because she translates them to a metaphorical sphere in which a touch between two people is the site of “physical and psychical interchange” or “interpenetrati[on]”

(ibid), and in which moving away from “the phantasy of the wholly unified and self- complete embodied subject” gives us access to “a more sustaining mode of becoming with others” (ibid). All of these possibilities may be true, but they also seem to have been watered down a great deal from the material circumstances that they are derived from.

Again, the “we” who are being addressed here are not, one might conclude, the monsters.

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Both Grosz and Shildrick acknowledge the problems that the viewpoint of the monster presents, insofar as Shildrick notes that, with conjoined twins, “the other is also the self” (2001 63), and Grosz describes how famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng both lived individuated lives (each marrying his own wife) and acted, at times, as one person (referring to themselves in the first person singular, and signing their letters with the joint name “ChangEng”) (1991 32-3). Yet providing the kind of account that is called for here (and the Shildrick points towards in her suggestion of a “reconceived ontology”) requires, I suspect, the kind of “recuperation” that Shildrick opposes— accepting that the ontology of the “monstrous” is also the ontology of “us.” Monsters “mak[e] demands on us to be accounted for,” in the words of Astrid Schrader, “to be taken into account” (297).

Schrader is writing not about monsters, but about something she terms a

“phantom,” and about a particular phantom: another puzzling sea (or, rather, estuary) organism, this one a dinoflagellate called Pfiesteria piscicida, the “fish killer.” The problem of this “particular other” is that it “does not exist as such” (ibid)— under specific environmental conditions, a toxic predator emerges from a benign organism, and then ceases to exist when its supply of prey is exhausted. As such, “[t]here is no point in time at which Pfiesteria could be captured in their entirety” (283). The term “captured” here is significant: what Schrader breaks down into Pfiesteria piscicida and toxic

Pfiesteria are in some sense the same organism, but attempts to detect or measure this are limited to recording either an organism that is, but does not do (Pfiesteria piscicida, which does not kill fish) or an organism that does, but seems not to be in the sense of pre- and post-existing its doings. Problematically, the toxic Pfiesteria “is neither an ecological

101 subset nor a temporal variation of the species, but both at the same time… [A]s long as the species is assumed to exist prior to toxic Pfiesteria,” the toxic species involves what

Schrader terms, quoting Geoffrey Bowker, “two fundamentally incommensurable ontologies” (290). Schrader therefore suggests an ontology that she calls “phantomatic:” a mode of being that references Derrida’s hauntological “specter,” “neither being nor non-being, neither present nor absent, neither of the ‘past’ nor of the ‘future,’ but which affirms an indeterminate relationship between being and becoming and between ‘past’ and ‘future’” (278).

I wish to draw several parallels with Schrader’s portrait of Pfiesteria (though I suspect Schrader, whose work is located in science studies and therefore has different goals, would object). In each case, the problems of part-/whole-ness and self-/other-ness can be clarified, if not resolved by viewing them through this lens. What I particularly wish to emphasize in Schrader’s account is the entanglement of beings and doings, which she draws from Karen Barad’s agential realism. Specifically, I want to begin by asking if we can think of the siphonophore in these terms. The siphonophore as such comes into

“being” through its doing; while the colony of zooids can be referred to descriptively as a siphonophore, it is not until the colony takes some action that “the siphonophore” exists as a subject. Though Stefan Siebert says that the “many thousands of individuals… form an entity on a higher level” (Simon), the notion of a “higher level” seems to grope towards some way to stabilize this creature within a framework that necessitates fixed, continuous being. In fact, the siphonophore becomes ontologically simpler and clearer if we categorize it as loosely within the phantomatic mode that Schrader suggests. The

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“higher level” is not higher but spectral, a level at which doing brings being into existence, but being is, in fact, neither continuous nor fixed. One benefit of approaching the ontology of the siphonophore in this manner is that the zooid is not then relegated to a lower level of being, but continues to remain “whole” and possessed of its previous individuality. It is simply that studying the being of the zooid will not allow one to perceive or “capture” the colonial siphonophore as subject-agent.

Rather than an ecosystem, then, perhaps it is useful to think of Car/ry as a [highly individuated] form of colonial organism like the siphonophore, and ask how considering their concorporation through the lens of entangled beings and doings helps to make sense of what seems, otherwise, unresolvable. The chief difference is in the fact that Car/ry is not a subject-agent; that is, there does not appear to be a joint consciousness that emerges from the merged Cary and Kerry. What emerges instead, at various points, are Cary and

Kerry as different-boundaried beings. That is, the boundaries of their beings— their body/minds— are in flux. Cary may map his self onto “his own” discrete body, or onto the separated bodies of himself and Kerry (experiencing both of their bodily sensations and enacting both of their motions). Kerry may map her self solely onto “Cary’s” (their shared) body, or onto her own body. Their shared body may be the site of both their selves, as when Cary is seen talking to Kerry while she is also “in him.” The personal history Car/ry relate to Syd (and the bivocal manner in which they relate it, in scenes that deliberately blur the lines between past and present, internal and external) suggests Kerry understands Cary’s childhood, prior to her appearance at the age of eight, to also be in some part “hers.” However, if one assumes that the boundaries of these subjects are

103 dependent upon what is being investigated, rather than fixed in some objective fashion, then none of this poses a problem. There is no need to debate whether or when Kerry is/becomes a “part” of Cary’s body, or how one might describe a “whole” body that can extend to share another body (as Cary does when he “eavesdrops” on Kerry’s body when she is in danger). Similarly, it is not necessary or useful to debate the lines between other and self; to say, as Shildrick does, that “the other is also the self” becomes almost nonsensical, in this schema, because the boundaries of the other and the self shift according to the intent of the investigation. (Indeed, Karen Barad specifically observes, in her agential realist account of yet another sea creature, the brittlestar, that the agential cut between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is “differentially enacted” by the organism— “in one agential cut, [an arm of the brittlestar] is part of the former; in another it is part of the latter”

[376].)

To utilize this approach also puts paid to what otherwise might be troubling ways of reading a body such as Car/ry. Specifically, their concorporation acutely raises issues of race and, less centrally, gender. Within some strands of posthumanism itself, there is a tendency to read the posthuman/ist body as beyond or outside of these questions; this is a tendency that more generally arises in attempts to conceive of a “colonial” body. One thinks of the celebrated collaborations between the performance artists Marina

Abramovic and Ulay in which the two identified themselves as creating a separate

(perhaps “higher level”) body, outside, as Charles Green writes, “the binary iterations of woman/man and nature/culture” (Green 42). It was, Green quotes Ulay as saying, “not important that [they were] man and woman.” Gender was intended to disappear in their

104 work. Green reads in their collaborations a “phantom” and “hermaphrodite” body, while also comparing them to (what else?) Siamese twins (ibid). It’s perhaps not surprising that, during this same period, Abramovic wrote disparagingly of her first experiences with

Australian Aboriginal people, describing herself as “disappointed” by them (Green 41), as though they were a resource that had been found lacking. Race and gender are understood here as akin to clothing that the body can put on or take off, in a way that points to (as I will address more fully in Chapter Two) liberal humanism’s consideration of difference as a category that the “enlightened,” rational subject can enter and exit at will.

Yet, of course, even to use the term “colonial body” in reference to the human, rather than to the hydrozoan, is to point (wittingly or unwittingly) towards the phantom omnipresence of race in this discourse. The colonial body could easily be the exploited body of the native, turned part in the imperial apparatus. It could easily be the body that is still subjected to the lasting forces of colonialism. Both of these interpretations must be grappled with in the case of Car/ry, in whose story Nativeness plays such a significant role. Indeed, Kerry is identified as Native, rather than as “Native American”— perhaps a part of the show’s efforts to unfix its setting from any particular nation or time13, though actress Amber Midthunder is a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribe

(Braine), and Car/ry’s parents have been given a surname, White Cloud, clearly intended

13 Legion combines a 1960s aesthetic with modern or even futuristic technology, deliberately displacing the viewer in time; the brief references to specific dates seem not to accord with the show’s timeline, and conflict with cultural touchstones (for instance, a man supposedly trapped outside time dances to a record by current musician Feist). 105 to suggest Native American origin— perhaps as a nod to indigenous people who prefer to identify themselves as Native rather than accept colonial designations.

Alexander Weheliye has noted that many strands of critical theory “occlude” race, positioning themselves as “uncontaminated by and prior to reductive or essentialist political identities such as race or gender” (7), when in fact “there exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization” (8). Critical theory (Weheliye, in his critique, singles out bare life and biopolitics discourse) therefore tends to reaffirm the humanist Human as universal— positioning it as pre-racial and unmarked/not-yet- marked. Yet this “timeline” is disrupted on Legion, which invites a critical reading of

Cary’s whiteness (and, indeed, maleness) as a disruption or contamination of Kerry’s original, Native body. Ray and Irma White Cloud, two Native people, have their household torn apart by the birth of Cary, whose body is marked out as not-Native (or not phenotypically Native) and therefore as “bastard” (Irma is stuck, Kerry says, “raising this bastard runt” [Legion 104]) without legible claim to inheritance or origin. The centrality of Cary’s whiteness to the history of their childhood that Car/ry relate— its visibility, its responsibility for the dissolution of their parents’ marriage, the signifying it provides of

Cary’s racial and filial otherness— denaturalizes his “universal” body and forces the viewer to see him as racialized, as pointedly white.

At the same time, the fact that it is Cary or Car/ry’s white male body, rather than

Kerry’s Native American female body, that has a continuous and stable physical existence— in Legion’s second season, Kerry becomes trapped on the “outside” and can only absorb Cary into her, rather than vice versa, which is experienced by her as a

106 horrifying and unnatural state of existence— suggests a certain dominance that makes the term “colonial organism” both apt and troubling. It’s possible (though, I would argue, not accurate) to read Cary as literally “colonizing” Kerry’s body prior to birth, displacing her from her natal/native/Native ground and minimizing her into a “part” both of herself and himself. In this reading, Kerry’s indigeneity is assimilated into whiteness through this colonization, figuring Car/ry as a body that is phenotypically white, but Native “on the inside,” evoking the long history of white appropriation of Nativeness, as well as narratives that see white characters “become” Native through their superior performance of Native culture. Dakota historian Philip Deloria, commenting on this history, argues that “playing Indian” not only serves as a way for whites (specifically Americans) to negotiate identity crises— including the search for authenticity or spiritual “wholeness” in an anxious modern world— but also works “as an ultimate tool for grabbing hold of… contradictions,” balancing (but not synthesizing) the civilized and the indigenous, the

“primitive” and the modern (157). Twentieth century appropriators, he writes, “followed their cultural ancestors in playing Indian to find reassuring identities in a world seemingly out of control” (158). The fact that the X-Men universe is characterized by

“out of control” bodies, everyday violence, and disputed identities— and this is nowhere more true than in Legion, where even the boundary between the real and the hallucinatory is often in doubt— raises the question of whether Kerry’s Nativeness might, in spite of its lack of [stereo]typical signifiers (no buckskins, beads, or braids are involved) risk being used as a gesture towards the authentic and the stable, especially within Car/ry’s inherently uneasy body. The fact that Legion seems more invested in destabilizing,

107 estranging, and emphasizing the uncanniness of its situations mitigates against this reading. Yet other troubling elements of the colonial remain: frequently, though Kerry is present in scenes as Car/ry, she is not visible and has no voice. (The viewer sees and hears only Cary carrying on his half of conversations with her.) The materiality of her

Nativeness is thus absent— mirroring colonial narratives that sideline or obscure the body of the native while relying on nativeness as concept or background “color.” The colonial body is the body in which the native is perpetually rendered invisible in relation to the imperial whole. The native cannot attain wholeness so long as it/she/he is forms part of the colonial empire (“When willing ‘agrees’ with what is generally willed, a part becomes part of a background,” Sara Ahmed writes [2014 121]); it is only through exerting a separate will (Ahmed’s “willfulness”) that the part “breaks” free of the body and potentially travels towards the formation of a new “bod[y] that matter[s]” (193).

However, this reading of Car/ry as colonial body is inextricably tied up with the ideology of wholeness: with the assumption that there must be a whole into which the part is subsumed, whether this whole is Cary’s white body (to which Kerry’s Native body is made part-y) or a transcendent “post-racial” body (Car/ry) that inevitably appears as the unmarked “universal,” which is to say white. An agential realist ontology of emergence, similar to what Astrid Schrader suggests with her “phantomatic ontology,” removes this assumption and offers an interpretation that accounts for the ways in which

Cary and Kerry seem to resist being read as a more familiar narrative of race. If anything, this interpretation forces us to examine how racializing assemblages operate, and how their logic is deconstructed by bodies that exceed or subvert the “proper places” that

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Western humanist subjectivity allots them. Legion emphasizes that Cary is not Native, as might be suggested by the idea that “the other is also the self” in such a situation; equally emphatically, Kerry is Native. Because neither is a part of the other, it is not possible for

Cary to be Native “on the inside” in the sense that I previously suggested; neither does

Kerry become subjugated to whiteness, or either of them transcend race through part- icipation in Car/ry. (If anything, one suspects that they are more conscious of race, given its formative role in their identities and their perpetual confrontation with each other’s racial other-ness.) The shifting forms in which they materialize, sharing each other’s bodies, are not not-subject to race because of their unconventional borders. But these forms do raise questions about what it means to be raced: if there can be no fixed object of racialization (if bodies continually materialize/emerge), then racialization is transparently a process that is continually (re-)enacted, race a quality that is continually

(re-)created. Racialization cannot be, as Weheliye puts it, “conflated with mere biological life” so that white subjects “‘see’ themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of [the good/life/fully human] genre of the human while responding antipathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack” (27).

Cary and Kerry’s entanglement, in fact, not only calls attention to the constant process of differentiation that works to distinguish these two groups, but also offer a situation in which whiteness can never be naturalized and is always perceptibly being re-made in relationship with nonwhiteness.

The extent to which the uneasiness and challenge of characters like Cary and

Kerry is due to an insufficiency on the part of the ideology of wholeness is only made

109 more evident by the relatively minor emphasis that is placed on their genders. Despite a scene in which Car/ry emerge from the shower clad only in a bathrobe and Kerry casually steps out of Cary as he begins to brush his teeth (Legion 104)— a scene that one would expect to foreground questions about their relationship/s to gender— the topic does not arise, and does not assume the same weight in their shared backstory as race. I suspect that one reason for its ability to recede into the background is because it does not operate on a part/whole basis. A person (even an intersex or nonbinary person, who may not identify as male or female) does not conventionally identify as “part” male or “part” female; too, the language of being one gender “on the inside” and another “on the outside” has fallen out of favor in transgender communities; and the language of assimilation and colonization has not been historically used with gender. Though some aspects of gender operate in ways that are similar to race (constantly re-enacted, re- categorized, and dependent on a state of not-being the abject other), the structure of its power seems to operate through a different paradigm. It therefore doesn’t, in the case of

Car/ry, communicate the same sense of unease or categorical confusion. However flawed our construction of gender may be, the current conceptual system seems to contain it quite well.

The fact that the same is demonstrably not true for so many of the bodily issues I have discussed points towards the way in which Car/ry participate in the uncanny— which is, after all, at root, an experience of a conceptual system’s failure to contain the material it is expected to regulate. Legion is clearly aware of the centrality of the uncanny to its world— a flashback in its second season shows a young Admiral Fukyama (the all-

110 seeing, basket-headed leader of the mutant Division 3, who has been surgically altered into a “machine that bleeds” and speaks through a set of singing mustachioed female androids) reading a copy of Das Unheimliche when he is first approached by a man from the project that will transform him. “What’s that you’re reading?” the man asks. When

Fukyama wordlessly shows him the cover of the book, the man quotes from it:

“Everything is unheimlich that ought to remain secret and hidden but has come to light”

(Legion 208). The fact that this scene is projected within a “mainframe” that appears to combine organic/inorganic and human/inhuman elements (in the precedent scene, the mutant Ptonomy has awoken to find his mind inside the binary code-filled mainframe after his dying body was “plugged into” a tree that appears to form part of the apparatus) heightens the impression that Legion is aware of itself as a text that both produces and comments on the uncanny. Whereas the Marvel comics and X-Men films seem to inadvertently reflect the uncanny feelings of an increasingly anxious world, Legion deliberately sets out to provoke those feelings. A scene in the second season sees Cary and Kerry (forcibly separated by the show’s villain) attempt to combine, only to end up as Kerry’s body with Cary’s writhing arm sticking out from the center of her chest

(Legion 202)— a strikingly image that, perhaps more than any other, visiblizes the confusion of bodies and selves, insides and outsides, body/self and inside/outside boundaries, by which they’re marked. This is not only matter out of place, but matter that draws attention to its out-of-placeness. Legion demands that we feel uneasy. We should, it seems to think— we live in an uneasy world.

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Conclusion

I have suggested that the reason mutants appear as manifestations of the uncanny within the Marvel universe is due to the role of the atomic in their origin story, or, rather, that mutation and the atomic have remained intertwined because mutants manifest the specifically nuclear uncanny: the incapacity of modern Western conceptual schemata to account for the lived reality of the post-atomic world. Even theorists who do not link the uncanny to the nuclear note its rediscovery and popularity as a concept in the late twentieth-century; Anneleen Masschelein notes its “conceptual latency or preconceptualization” until the mid-1960s (a timeline that matches its resurgence to the birth of the X-Men) and, indeed, describes it as “a late-twentieth century theoretical concept” (4) that she connects to “a critique of scientific rationalism [and] the suppositions of the Enlightenment project” (8). Something, in other words, caused the uncanny to emerge as a necessary critical tool in the latter half of the twentieth century, and this something is related to the failures of rationalism and the Enlightenment. Mark

Fisher, writing of the weird and the eerie (which he acknowledges are often placed in the category of the uncanny, though he objects to this), sees these affects as “fundamentally tied up with questions of agency,” particularly “the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate,” and with “twisted forms of time and causality that are alien to ordinary perception,” as well as unfamiliar conjoinings and [un]belongings (11-13). Joseph Masco is, I believe, astute in identifying the nuclear as a source of uncanny experience, and

Masschelein lists “nuclear threat” amongst those factors she considers to have contributed to the uncanny’s rise (5); however, no one, I believe, has accurately read the

112 influence of nuclear anxiety in destabilizing ideas of the body— in producing an uncanny embodiment. Or perhaps I should choose other, less negative words: the uncanny is, it’s true, often framed in terms of anxiety, discomfort, shock, and fear, but as I’ve suggested in my discussions of mutant bodies, the unstable, uncertain, and transgressive qualities of the uncanny can arise from its potential, from its surplus, its excess. While the uncanny is a symptom of the breakdown of a system of organization, it is also a breaking-through, a sign of the insistence of matter on cohering in rich, diverse, and surprising formations.

What would happen if we understood the uncanny as an experience of threat, but as an invitation to new and more expansive visions of life (and, as Elizabeth Povinelli might insist, nonlife)? Perhaps this would turn our focus from the death of one conceptual project to the work of building another. The specters that “haunt” us— those hauntological figures, both real and imagined, that seem to hint at the fundamental unsteadiness of the ground on which we stand, or perhaps the spacetime in which we exist— might be less the repressed shadows of an older way of being in the world than the harbingers of one that we have not yet seen our way through to, one whose signs we cannot yet apprehend.

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Chapter 2. Crimes Against Humanity

Taking the X-Men’s loose and cryptic ties to the atomic at face value, one might expect that the franchise’s central, key historical moment would be the 1945 Trinity test— or the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that first publicized the atomic bomb’s power and consequences to the world. Yet though these events are unquestionably of key importance to the mutant narrative, the role of atomic history is often a puzzling one, cryptic and obscure. When it appears (as I have described), its time is often “out of joint”— mismatched to characters’ ages, or to the mutation attributed to it. In a typical example, the 2013 film The Wolverine begins with the titular hero surviving the Nagasaki bombing as a prisoner of war, but provides no context for the event or meditation on its effects. Rather, the attack is an isolated incident in a brutal war, and it is the already- mutant Wolverine’s willingness to save a Japanese officer— knowing, with an impossible atomic foresight that is never justified, “what’s coming” and taking the brunt of the bombing with his own super-healing body— that acts as catalyst for the movie’s narrative. Atomic testing in the Pacific gives birth to evil (or at least angered) mutants

([18]), and a tragic hero is born out of Hiroshima ([7]), suggesting that a reluctance to engage with America’s nuclear history is not, or not entirely, at fault here; the atomic is simply an elusive, murky figure whose role in the franchise never quite seems to be clear.

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A clear historical center is present in the X-Men universe, however. It opens two

X-Men films, makes an appearance in a third, and is discussed in six; it was the topic of a limited-series comic that featured, unusually, almost no superpowers at all; so immovably central is it to the narrative of the X-Men’s first and best-known sometime-villain that extravagant efforts (including being de-aged and then re-aged to a more convenient youthfulness) have been made to keep him canonically tied to it, although it did not form part of his backstory for the first eighteen years of his existence. This historical moment is, of course, the Holocaust.

The Holocaust first entered X-Men canon in 1981, with the publication of

Uncanny X-Men #150, which reveals that original X-Men nemesis Magneto (Max

Eisenhardt, Magnus, or, most famously, Erik Lehnsherr) is a survivor of Auschwitz.

Interestingly, the comic begins with Magneto (prior to this revelation about his past) describing nuclear war as a “holocaust” whose increasing risk world leaders not only disregard, but view as “desirable.” His demand for total nuclear disarmament on these grounds is viewed by the X-Man Cyclops as an attack on “freedom,” and his retaliatory strike when this demand is not met puts him in conflict with the X-Men— a conflict that he abandons when he believes himself to have killed the young (and, unbeknownst to him, Jewish) mutant Kitty Pryde. Magneto, distraught, reveals that his quest to “create[] a world where [his] kind— mutants— could live free and safe and unafraid” is rooted both in his abandonment by his wife when he used his powers to avenge their murdered daughter and in “[his] own childhood— the gas chambers as [sic] Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded [his] family to their death” ([55]) As his family’s lives were

115 nothing to them, he says, “so human lives became nothing to me.” Kitty survives, and so does this element of Magneto’s history, though it would go on to take other forms: in one version, his family is gunned down by a death squad that he survives, only to be later captured and sent to Auschwitz ([56]); in the film X-Men, his family is taken to the gas chambers, while in X-Men: First Class his mother survives to be shot by the sinister mutant Mengele Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Originally, Magneto states that his mutant powers did not manifest until adulthood— “Had I possessed it in the camps… the tyranny of [the] Third Reich would have ended overnight!” ([57])— whereas later comics, taking a darker turn, suggest that he was able to save himself with his powers, but not others ([56], [58]), and the films depict him as tortured on account of them by

Shaw (X-Men: First Class). Key facts persist in all versions: Magneto was a child in

Auschwitz, and his family perished in the Holocaust. He is Jewish (though some confusion previously surrounded this: he utilized a false identity and claimed the same ethnicity as his wife, who was Sinti [59], but also was not shown to practice any Jewish religious or cultural traditions).

Following the introduction of this element of Magneto’s story, the significance of the Holocaust to the X-Men franchise spread. Uncanny X-Men #161 sees the first meeting of Charles Xavier and Magneto in Haifa, Israel, at a clinic for Holocaust survivors, where

Xavier also meets and falls in love with traumatized survivor Gabrielle Haller, who will later bear his child ([57]). Uncanny X-Men #199 sees Magneto and Kitty Pryde (whose grandfather had relatives that perished in the Holocaust) attend a reception at the National

Holocaust Memorial, where they are attacked by Freedom Force (a government-

116 sponsored team of evil mutants) ([60]), setting up a storyline in which Magneto is placed on trial for his crimes in the World Court, and defended by Gabrielle Haller, now the

Israeli ambassador to Britain, and Charles Xavier ([61]). The specter of the Holocaust tangles with the comic’s narrative of rising anti-mutant hatred, with a spectator standing and shouting at Haller, “Jewess, you’ve sold out your own kind!” Haller comments to

Xavier in the next panel that “‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’

Some old hatreds never seem to die.” Faced with more anti-mutant sentiments and borderline violence, Kitty Pryde tells Haller that the trial can’t go on: “The X-Men— all mutantkind— are on trial as well as Magneto!” Haller rebukes her, telling her, “[W]e who survived have a duty to make certain that the Holocaust never happens again, to anyone!” A curious enmeshment has happened in this moment, at which Magneto, specifically as a Jewish Holocaust survivor, has come to embody all mutantkind. Though this rhetoric is never again so close to explicit, Magneto continues to act as a focus point that draws the shadow of the Holocaust over the mutant narrative in ways both subtle and overt. A panel in a narrative about massacres features a close-up of his Auschwitz tattoo

([62]); a Nazi prison for mutants in the ruins of the former mutant nation of Genosha sends him flashing back to his time as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz ([63]); after expending a nearly-fatal effort to save Kitty Pryde’s life, he whispers affectionately to her in Yiddish before collapsing ([64]). His identity as a survivor colors all of his actions, even retroactively suggesting interpretations of his behavior in the pre-1981 X-Men books.

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Yet for all the weight that is placed on the Holocaust in comics, it perhaps figures even more centrally in the X-Men films. It is, after all, where the first film, 2000’s X-

Men, begins: in the bleached-out, rain-drenched mud of Auschwitz, in which the shoes of shuddering men and women are treading. The camera pans up to guard tower, where the ordinariness of a kettle and cup momentarily jar the attention, then down again to the shuffling crowd, singling out the child Magneto, looking small in his over-sized, yellow- starred, coat. We, along with him, notice the tattoos on the arms of the starved prisoners, their striped uniforms. When his family reach the point of sorting, there is panic, and in the chaos, Magneto falls behind. He tries to catch up, sobbing, but the gates close; he reaches out, dragged back by guards, and, in a sudden manifestation of mutant power, causes the metal to crumple towards him. A guard strikes him on the head with a rifle, and he collapses. The camera takes in the warped gate, then pans up along the line of a crematorium tower, fading out before it reaches the plume of smoke that must mark the top. It’s a distressing scene that runs through a checklist of Holocaust tropes— child torn from parents, barked German commands, dogs, mud, barbed wire, yellow stars, tattoos, striped pajamas— and it’s a scene that is repeated as the beginning of the 2011 “reboot”

X-Men: First Class. Once again, we see the guard tower with its cup and kettle, the location title that reads Poland 1944 (though, curiously, the sequence is compressed so that it is not a shot-for-shot remake); again Magneto falls behind, is separated from his parents, warps the barbed-wire-gates towards him; again, a guard strikes him on the head.

This time, the final shot comes from a different perspective: that of Sebastian Shaw, who is watching from a window. The film then cuts away from Auschwitz to a scene of

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Charles Xavier’s childhood, but (unlike X-Men) returns to continue Magneto’s story. We see him brought before Shaw, his mother shot, his mutant powers once more released by rage and grief. Shaw gives him a Reichsmark coin, which the camera moves in on, and the scene fades to black around the circle of the coin, which gradually spins to reveal that its obverse is the logo of the film: an X and the subtitle First Class. As the coin starts to spin again, it drops away into a scene in which it floats around the fingers of an hand. The camera slowly pans from hand to wrist to arm, and we see the familiar numbers of an

Auschwitz tattoo in blue ink. This is the adult Magneto: a mutant hand, a numbered arm, and only lastly a body and face.

What are we to make of the fact that the same scene of Auschwitz is staged twice?

It is as though Matthew Vaughn (the director of X-Men: First Class) is communicating to the audience: the story of the X-Men can only begin here. Even more extraordinary is the decision to place the film’s logo on the obverse of the Nazi coin, suggesting that the X-

Men— or not, in fact, the X-Men, but simply X, the quality that is signified by the X in

X-Men— are in some sense the opposite or other face of Nazism. This is not a suggestion that has any relation to the plot of the film, which reveals Shaw himself to be a mutant with fairly generic aims of world domination; though Magneto begins the film as a Nazi hunter, and is (as in the comics) motivated almost entirely by his experiences in

Auschwitz, his ideology is rendered confused by the fact that his central obsession is with

Shaw, who is only incidentally a Nazi, and in fact appears to hold no actual Nazi views.

The story of Magneto and Xavier’s first meeting has been relocated from Israel to the

United States, and no longer involves a clinic for Holocaust survivors (or Xavier’s love

119 affair with such a survivor, though some might argue that the homoerotic overtones of his relationship with Magneto fill such a role), removing even more of the specific historical context from the X-Men/Holocaust link, and though the film’s final scenes do include

Magneto intoning, like a litany taken from Holocaust literature, “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again!”, the overall sense is of jumbled fragments that gesture towards a “Holocaust aesthetic” rather than forming an internally coherent statement. Yet the insistence of the Holocaust even here— the need for the film to restage it, reinvoke it, repeat its language— suggests how powerful its role in the X-Men universe actually is. Indeed, 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, though set in the 1980s, would return to Auschwitz yet again: depicting Magneto destroying the remains of the camp as a mark of his embrace of violence, grief, and anger. The viewer might be forgiven for feeling that once is fine, twice is a little unsettling, and three times signals that something truly strange is at work.

Magneto, it should be clarified, is not a hero in the X-Men universe. Though at times he’s performed heroic actions ([64], [65]), worked alongside the X-Men ([66],

[67]), or even acted as the headmaster of Xavier’s school ([68]), he has always been, at best, a tragic antihero— when he is not an outright villain. His core beliefs are positioned as antithetical to those of the “heroic” X-Men: he is generally depicted as believing that mutants are and should be separate from humankind, that mutants are superior to humans

(though this belief is somewhat altered by his discovery that he has a human granddaughter [69]), and that radical violence is necessary and justified to defend mutants from (and avenge mutants after) human persecution. The X-Men, by contrast,

120 protect humans from the violence of “evil” mutants, espouse peace in the face of persecution (Magneto cracks, after being mentally attacked by Xavier while defenseless,

“Well, there goes that Nobel Prize you’ve always suspected you deserved…” [70]), and seek to earn the title of “human” for mutants, integrating mutants into the human world.

As extreme as Magneto’s actions may sometimes be— actions that including declaring war on humanity ([71]), torturing Xavier ([72]) and the X-Men, and generally regarding human lives as expendable— the root of his villainy ultimately lies in his opposition to the attitude articulated by the X-Man Havok in one of 2013’s most controversial comics,

Uncanny Avengers #5:

I don’t see myself as born into a mutant cult or religion. Having an X-gene

doesn’t bond me to anyone. It doesn’t define me. In fact, I see the very

word ‘mutant’ as divisive. Old thinking that serves to further separate us

from our fellow man. We are all humans. Of one tribe. We are defined by

our choices, not the makeup of our genes. So, please, don’t call us

mutants. The ‘m’ word represents everything I hate ([73]).

Criticism of the comic focused both on the identity of the man delivering this speech

(Havok is a straight white able-bodied cis man whose mutation is not visible, thus allowing him to pass as a non-mutant) and on the speech’s rejection of the value, and indeed the very notion, of minority identity (Wheeler). Yet in its emphasis on rational moral choice as defining metric for human citizenship, its embrace of liberal universalism, and its rejection of material solidarity, it serves as a decent encapsulation of the philosophy that has governed the “good” mutants for the entirety of the X-Men’s

121 history. Indeed, in the first issue of Uncanny Avengers, Captain America describes Havok as “the best candidate to fight for Xavier’s dream” ([74])— and that is exactly what this speech sees Havok doing. If we read Magneto as embodying the rejection of this philosophy, then perhaps it’s possible to see how the central ideological battle in the X-

Men universe coalesces as one of humanism against posthumanism— and how the

Holocaust works to figure as symbolic axis in this struggle, appropriated as a moral narrative that enforces the autonomous subject of Western liberal humanism as the human being.

A Crime Against Humanity

David Luban, in his comprehensive 2004 overview of “crimes against humanity,” notes that the title of this category has a double meaning: on the one hand, a “crime against humanity” is one whose grievousness injures all of humanity, not merely the victims who are directly affected; on the other hand, to call an act a “crime against humanity” is to suggest that it “violat[es] the core humanity that we all share and that distinguishes us from other natural beings” (Luban 86). These two readings create an ambiguity as to whether a crime against humanity is a crime against humankind (“the aggregation of all human beings”) or the “value they injure,” humanness (86-7). Luban notes that Hannah Arendt understands crimes against humanity as constituting crimes

“‘against the human status,’ or against the very nature of mankind” (87), while also suggesting that these crimes are crimes against the human community, perpetrated upon particular bodies (88-9)— an embrace of the category’s central ambiguity with which

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Luban agrees, arguing that crimes against humanity are violations both of humanness and against humankind (90).

Arendt, of course, was writing in the context of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Luban cites her as, in her analysis of this trial, describing the Holocaust as “a new crime, the crime against humanity” (87). In fact, Arendt’s referent is nothing so clear. When she speaks of a “new crime,” she is referring to the creation of the “crime against humanity” in the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, and her intent is to probe the nature and foundations of this category (Arendt 120). This is not to say that she does not tie the category to the mass murder of Jews: “It was precisely the Jewish catastrophe,” she writes, “that prompted the Allies to conceive of the ‘crime against humanity’ in the first place” (ibid).

Ultimately, Arendt does characterize Eichmann’s crimes as “unprecedented,” arguing that the horror of Auschwitz is “of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past,” and suggesting that such a crime is distinguished not by its seriousness, but by its

“essence” (125). Even here, however, Arendt is not quite describing the Holocaust as a new and fundamentally separate character of crime— because at the time of her writing,

“the Holocaust” as such did not exist. The term “holocaust” appears in Eichmann in

Jerusalem, used to describe the Nazi genocide, as it had appeared in a 1962 New York

Times article that referenced “the Nazi holocaust” and quoted an Israeli official who proclaimed, “It is impossible to isolate the holocaust within its narrow historical limits

(Fellows). Yet the lack of capitalization in these instances serves to denote the extent to which the crimes of the Nazis were not yet understood, at this time, as forming a singular, coherent, discrete event. Arendt’s argument as to the unprecedented nature of these

123 crimes is set against what she claims was the contemporary Israeli/Jewish view that “the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler” was not “the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, the oldest crime [of violent anti-semitism] they knew and remembered” (Arendt 125). None of those who participated in the Eichmann trial, she writes, “ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz”— its significance as an essentially different crime (ibid). Eichmann in Jerusalem therefore marks part of a process of the Holocaust’s becoming: its coalescence as a unique phenomenon that was increasingly read as “an interruption in the normal flow of history,” as Zygmunt Bauman described the orthodox position in 1989 (viii); as “an irreducible radical rupture” in history, as Alon Confino characterizes the “canonical” view (79); as something that, Elie Wiesel wrote, “transcends history” and is “the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted” (Fine 132). The validity of these positions I leave to others to debate; what interests me is this coalescence and its relationship to the

“crime against humanity”— the extent to which the Holocaust has come to figure this crime’s ultimate extreme, and how its legacy (that is, the legacy of the Holocaust as

“ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust,” as Norman Finkelstein suggests, 3) has been utilized to codify and regulate liberal universalist ideas of the human.

If the Nazi holocaust served as the precipitating cause of the “crime against humanity,” it also served as the precipitating cause for the document intended to prevent, or perhaps to suture the damage caused by such a crime: the United Nations’ 1948

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider write,

“must be understood as [a] direct responses[] to the shared moral revulsion of the

124 delegates against the Holocaust (150). Johannes Morsink argues that “each and every article of the Declaration ultimately reflects revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust”

(Levy & Sznaider 150)— a historical context implicit in the UDHR’s preamble, with its reference to “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” (UDHR).

The cause of these “barbarous acts,” the preamble states, is “disregard and contempt for human rights.” The framers of the UDHR positioned the document as part of a linear narrative of progress with its roots in Enlightenment ideals of civilization triumphing over barbarism, yet at the same time, as Joseph Slaughter argues, “the rhetoric of the declaration betrays an anxiety about the confident teleology of civilization” (15) stemming from the very experience of barbarity embedded in its making. The

Enlightenment conception of the human as “natural moral creature… inherently rational… inherently dignified” (18) could perhaps no longer be supported, and gave way to a more “fragile and tenuous” figure (61) woven with semi-coherency from various threads of humanism, a “hybrid image” that was “neither fully natural nor fully artificial,” a “split personality… replicated in and intensified by the textual form of the law itself (63). The UDHR worked to conventionalize the tautology that “[h]uman rights are literally the rights one has because one is a human being” (76) by centering on,

Slaughter writes, “the free and full development of the human personality” (ibid)— a form of normative development that Slaughter identifies with the Bildungsroman narrative. “The teleology of human rights personality development,” he writes, “describes a progressive project of learning to recognize what one already is by right,” which requires the nascent citizen-subject to accept and engage in a narrative of incorporation

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(249-50). With the UDHR, in other words, human rights became a “tautological- teleological complex” (248) pointing towards a narrative of self-recognition through which one learns to identify oneself (and assume the responsibilities of, as well as demand the recognitions of) what one always already was: that is, human.

As the Holocaust acquired identity through sociocultural shaping forces—

Finkelstein identifies Zionist political work on the part of Israel and its allies; Peter

Novick notes complex currents of American identity politics; Novick, Levy, and Sznaider all cite the role of media in developing the Holocaust as what Novick describes as “a shocking, massive, and distinctive thing”— it took on a central and instrumental role in the rise and spread of the UDHR’s brand of international human rights. Indeed, Levy and

Sznaider argue that the Holocaust’s prominence as an event is in part due to “the indispensable role it has served in the transition from the world of national sovereignty… towards a more cosmopolitanized global civil society, of which the recent proliferation of human rights regimes is a prominent manifestation” (155). Stephen Hopgood identifies a

Holocaust “metanarrative” utilized by human rights advocates to claim that “Auschwitz and Nuremberg had been the start of a steady, final climb toward global justice” (48), and quotes U.N. prosecutor and human rights advocate Richard Goldstone as “argu[ing] that

‘the most permanent, important, and unique feature of the Holocaust is that it gave birth to the international human rights movement’” and an international criminal court (53), which Hopgood describes as “a classic retrofitting of the metanarrative” (ibid).

This metanarrative allows the sacralized, universalized Holocaust of historical rupture to serve as “a moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and the absence of master

126 ideological narratives” (Levy & Sznaider 155). Holocaust memory therefore takes on a normative power in the “new [human] rights culture” it has helped to articulate (ibid); if the Nazi holocaust appeared as a fissure in Enlightenment narratives of the human, the

Holocaust worked to suture these narratives by birthing a new human in the subject of human rights.

But who or what is that human? As Slaughter observes, international human rights law begins by imagining “the normative, rights-holding citizen-subject— an abstract ‘universal’ human personality that ‘presumes particular forms of embodiment and excludes or marginalizes others’ and that has been historically defined as ‘always already [white, propertied, and] male” (43). It is this form that comes to serve as a representation of what Slaughter draws on Gayatri Spivak to describe as “that which [sic] we cannot not want” (139)— a phrase that troubles when we understand it as indicating the ways in which our desires are always already legislated, in this case by rights regimes that do not only define the parameters of the “human” in “human rights,” but also inscribe the forms of life that the “rightless and marginal” must aspire to if they are to become (tautologically) wholly human.

The Holocaust seems to figure, in its popular mobilizations, as the opposite of the aspirational community that international human rights law articulates— I might even draw forward the word obverse, which indicates one side of a coin but also gestures towards some innate connection. The two are linked as though on two sides of the same coin. “Nothing legitimizes human rights work more,” Levy and Sznaider write, “than the slogan ‘Never Again!’” (143)—a slogan which, they point out, draws on such a

127 powerfully instilled memory that it seldom requires explanation; the original moment of human [rights] negation is understood. The Holocaust has come to represent not only the first crime against humanity, but what a crime against humanity is. Therefore (on the obverse), it has also come to function as a way to define what humanity is in the first place: a delineation of “the aggregation of all human beings” and of the value that is

“humanness,” the “core humanity that we all share.” In other words, it articulates humanness by marking out what it is that a crime against humanity offends.

This analysis would lead one to expect that the invocations of the Holocaust in the

X-Men franchise are working to deliver a human rights message— that the franchise highlights the horrors of the Holocaust in order to endorse the universal subject of human rights and thus the corresponding articulation of what it is to be human. Certainly, the franchise does endorse this subject and its articulation; the philosophy of Charles Xavier seems to arise directly from a rights framework, and his role as, first and foremost, a

“professor” who leads mutants towards self-actualization aligns neatly with Slaughter’s reading of the centrality of education and development in the human rights narrative. “I taught them,” Xavier says, when tempted to leave his school and join Magneto. “I gave them their reason for being” ([30]) The teaching and the teleology are apposed. (Xavier’s protégé Jean Grey, during a confrontation with the Avengers, provides another neat summary of Xavier’s philosophy when she furiously points out that mutants are “born with our powers! They’re a part of us! That’s why society fears and hates us! But we’re human beings… and we have the same rights!” [75])

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Yet the Holocaust appears in the X-Men franchise almost exclusively in connection with Magneto, who is positioned as Xavier’s ideological opposite: insisting on the other-than-human-ness of mutants and the importance of the different rather than

(and over) the universal; resisting the notion of a core value or shared quality that can be used to easily demarcate the human from what is not. What’s more, Magneto explicitly roots his beliefs in his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. “You have faith in the essential goodness of man,” he tells Xavier shortly after their first meeting. “In time you will learn what I have learned— that even those you love will turn from you in horror when they discover what you truly are. Mutants will not go meekly to the gas chambers.

We will fight… and we will win!” ([57]) In the 2000 film X-Men, leaving a congressional hearing on the “mutant problem,” he reminds Xavier, in response to the other man’s plea not to give up on humanity, “I’ve heard these arguments before.” His declaration at the end of X-Men: First Class— “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again!”— summons up the full memorial weight of the Holocaust in service to an anti- human ideology (here clearly positioned as in the wrong) that opposes the “enemy” who is “united in their fear of the unknown,” and who cannot accept the extreme differences of mutants. Here, never again does not demand a move from the “crime against humanity” to the embrace of legislated humanness; it suggests a reading of the Nazi holocaust not as crime against an already-extant but unarticulated humanity, but as a violent enactment of the same policing of humanness that both preceded that holocaust and continues to find iteration, including through human rights regimes. To Magneto,

“humanity” is that from which he has historically been excluded— and therefore a

129 category he has good cause to view as unreliable and constructed, regardless of the categorizer. What he is unwilling to see happen again is the persecution of the excluded by the normatively “human”— a threat he will take any action to deter.

This reading complicates what is seemingly the most straightforward and didactic of the X-Men franchise’s representations of the Holocaust, the 2008 miniseries X-Men:

Magneto Testament. This five-issue comic depicts the young Magneto’s journey from

1935 Germany to the Warsaw Ghetto to the 1944 Auschwitz revolt, acting as a piece of historical fiction that annotates Magneto’s personal experiences with facts about the horrors of the Nazi regime. The trade paperback comes equipped with historical endnotes and a teacher’s guide, suggesting its strange situation as (nominally) a superhero comic that aspires to seriousness. The titular “testament” is a note that Magneto buries in an empty canister while working as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, a note that describes his experiences and ends, “To whoever finds this, I’m sorry. Because I’m dead… and now it’s up to you. Tell everyone who will listen. Tell everyone who won’t. Please. Don’t let this ever happen again” ([76]). In an epilogue, Magneto returns to the ruins of

Auschwitz in 1948 and digs up the canister. These final lines of his testament reappear as captions, ending the last issue with the words, “Don’t let this ever happen again” ([77]).

In other words: never again.

If X-Men: Magneto Testament were simply an historical comic about the

Holocaust, this choice would seem unremarkable, heavy-handed, and clichéd. The child victim (Magneto begins work as a Sonderkommando at fourteen or fifteen years of age, and his youth is emphasized by art that depictions him as small and large-eyed, allowing

130 him to function as the kind of child-victim whose representation Susan Moeller refers to as “the moral referent,” a “nonpartisan subject” who can evoke sympathy “on a plane that appears apolitical or suprapolitical— ‘purely’ moral” (48), emphasizing the universalizing claims that arise from the Holocaust) directly addresses the future reader, who is simultaneously the reader of the testament and the reader of Magneto Testament, and pleads with them to take up the responsibility of remembering the Holocaust and mobilizing that memory to prevent future genocide. On the final page, the child has grown to maturity, and here, as Slaughter suggests we might expect in the narrative of human rights personality development, the “process of recognition [of what one already is by right] is figured… specifically in terms of a responsibility that links reading to writing, recognition to narrative” (249). Here, through writing his testament— which begins with the words “My name is Max Eisenhardt,” a declaration of identity that is repeated in the first panel of the final page— Magneto ought to fall into the role of the citizen-subject articulating a “narrative speech act of self-recognition” through which he is incorporated into the community of rights bearers (249-50). Thus this subject reaches the Bildungsroman narrative’s culmination of modern subjectivation, which Slaughter describes as “the cultivation of a democratic, humanitarian sensibility— a profound fellow-feeling that enables the Bildungsheld to recognize the equal humanity and fundamental dignity of the human personality in both the self and others” (253). Surely the adult Magneto, reflecting on his testament in the 1948 epilogue, ought to occupy that position of recognized-and-recognizing as he implicitly reaffirms his younger self’s words.

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Yet it is not at all clear that this is the position that the adult Magneto occupies, and the child Magneto’s plea to the reader not to “let this ever happen again” is complicated by the fact that this is exactly the motivating force behind the “villainous”

(and certainly violent) actions of the Magneto of 1981 to the present day. (For that matter, the fact that Magneto is considered a villain is enough to complicate this plea.) It is his commitment to the notion of never again that prevents him from embracing the human rights subjectivation that Slaughter outlines. Reflecting on his testament (a word that itself often has strong human rights connotations, both of bearing witness to a violation and of the testimonio, a literary genre that acts a specific form of such witnessing) does not cultivate in him a “democratic, humanitarian sensibility,” and even less does it spur him to recognize such a thing as an equal humanity in himself and others. Indeed, as I have already noted, he confesses in Uncanny X-Men #150 that the effect of his experiences was that “as [the lives of his family] were nothing to [the Nazis], so human lives became nothing to me” ([55]). Any beliefs he may have held in the value of humanness, in the sense either of a shared value amongst humans or of a value inherent within the identity itself, have been destroyed by his realization that “human” is a status that is never more than conditionally bestowed, and predicated always upon exclusion. His war thenceforth is against those who claim the identity of human at the expense of the Other whom he himself has always been.

This is not only a war against those who lack the X-gene and are therefore categorically “human.” When faced with the Marauders— a group of mutant mass murderers who do the bidding of supervillain Mr. Sinister— in the 2014 Magneto solo

132 title, Magneto declares that they “no longer fit [his] picture of a mutant,” due to their

1986 massacre of the helpless Morlock mutant subcommunity in the name of “genetic cleansing” ([78]). “Do you think your powers make you a mutant?” Magneto asks. “Do you believe that affords you any leniency?” He explains that when the Marauders slaughtered the Morlocks, they “decided that those mutants were not worthy of life”

(ibid). This phrase seems to clearly echo the phrase “life unworthy of life”

(lebensunwertes Leben), which originated in the title of a 1920 book by Karl Binding and

Alfred Hoche: Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwertes Leben, or The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, which argued for the euthanasia of the disabled. The titular phrase of this book would find its way into the language of Nazi Germany

(Agamben 89), first to describe the “incurably ill” children who constituted the victims of the regime’s first organized mass murder, then gradually expanding to encompass delinquents, Jewish children, “incurably ill” adults and, of course, Jews, Roma, and other undesirables (Lifton). Giorgio Agamben has compellingly read this eugenics program as rendering Nazi Germany “the first radically biopolitical state” (91), pointing out the connections between regime’s overseeing of “the preservation of the people” and its concern with “biological degeneration,” and its attempts to exert control over life, death, and reproduction with the aim of “fortify[ing] the health of the people as a whole and… eliminat[ing] influences that harm the biological growth of the nation.” However, this seems to be one of the instance in which Agamben sees exception (to put it most appropriately) only through failing to see how the phenomena he examines form part of a lineage of dehumanization. Alexander Weheliye argues that Agamben, by characterizing

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Nazi Germany as the first and radical example of modern Western power, also characterizes all other interpretations of race, ethnicity, and racism as “crude, simplistic, prehistorical, and undeserving of sustained critical attention,” naturalizing race as a “real object” and engaging in an “unseeing of racializing assemblages” (64-5). I would join

Weheliye in turning to Sylvia Wynter as a chronicler of the lineage that Agamben does not acknowledge, and as someone who properly situates the twentieth century reliance on biological definitions of the human (and corresponding anxieties about the biological

“health” of the populace) as only the latest in that ongoing, iterating act of dehumanization through which the Human differentiates itself from the Other.

Evolution/Natural Selection, along with its “imagined entity of Race,” Wynter suggests, acts as a secular replacement for the supernatural beings to whom we previously attributed our modes of being human, allowing us to continue to repress our own authorship or construction of these modes (273). The need to represent social structures as “extrahumanly determined” could now be fulfilled by the “‘law of nature,’ ‘natural law’: as a law that allegedly functioned to order human societies in the same way as the newly discovered laws of nature served to regulate the processes of functioning of physical and organic levels of reality” (297). “Life unworthy of life” has, in other words, always been a category constructed in the same way: by the [re]constitution of the category of human in opposition to other. Only the rationale and mechanism have changed.

For Magneto to use this language in order to condemn the Marauders on the basis of their engagement in this process of othering is therefore an acknowledgement of the

134 fact that his struggle is fundamentally not one of mutants against humans, but one against the differentiation of life in this way. The Marauders are mutants, but they are mutants who have judged other mutants (the subterranean Morlocks) as life unworthy of life, and therefore they have acted as the humans who declare all human life to be worthy life and then police the boundaries of who can be considered human. This also points towards the fundamental difference between Magneto and Xavier: Xavier fights to place mutants inside the categorization of “the human,” arguing that while they are genetically different, this genetic difference does not affect their “core value.” By encouraging them to recognize themselves in/as the figure of the human outlined in human rights doctrine, he fundamentally leaves unchallenged the idea that such a figure— such an outline— should exist, and accepts the shape of that figure as though it is always already given. Here, the

“extrahuman” force that assumes responsibility for categorization is no longer a strictly biological one, but rather the human rights regime itself, with its tautological narrative of normative realization. Magneto, by contrast, maintains an emphasis on material difference in which mutation matters (and indeed is horrified not only by the Marauders’ acts of mass murder, but by the extent to which Mr. Sinister has left them incapable of solidarity with their species, stripping away “the things that made them mutants” [78]) but also resists any ideology that seems predicated upon othering classifications. When he kills the Marauders, though he describes himself (perhaps with a sense of bitter irony, echoing those who have accused him of adopting a Nazi-like ideology; perhaps believing that he is, in fact, taking on what he views as the ultimate sin) as doing what they did to the Morlocks, this is not clearly the case: it’s an act of personal vengeance, after which he

135 resurrects them to serve on a mission designed to protect mutants from government regulation. “This time,” he narrates, “with their sacrifice… they will remember what it means to be a mutant” (ibid).

Extrahuman

But what does it mean to be a mutant? Here, the idea seems connected to the question of solidarity; and, indeed, solidarity has long featured centrally in Magneto’s plans, from the first revelation of his experiences in the Holocaust, when he laments, cradling the body of Kitty Pryde, that he had sworn not to rest “til [he] had created a world where [his] kind— mutants— could live free and safe and unafraid” ([55]). He founds the mutant nation Genosha (or, rather, the existing nation of Genosha, which had been “built on the backs of genetically-engineered mutant slaves”— something that the rest of the world chose to conveniently ignore— is surrendered to him by the United

Nations) and governs it until and following its destruction ([62]); he joins the X-Men in defending the second mutant haven of Utopia ([70], [79]); he returns to the ruins of

Genosha in order to build a new mutant nation, a ramshackle “sanctuary” where mutants can feel safe ([80]). In the X-Men films, a similar sense of solidarity marks his commitments: when released from prison in X-Men: Days of Future Past, he furiously accuses Charles Xavier of abandoning the “mutant brothers and sisters” who were tortured and killed by humans in the absence of protection. “Where were you when your own people needed you?” he shouts, growing so emotional that he loses control of his powers and nearly sends an airplane spinning out of the sky. “Hiding… pretending to be

136 something you’re not! You abandoned us all.” This solidarity is rooted in a material or

“fleshy” kinship, but a material kinship not of similarity— aside from possession of the

X-gene, mutants have little in common, and can have drastically different experiences of embodiment— so much as of shared experiences of difference. As I suggest in Chapter

One, mutation is characterized by difference that continues differing, by the proliferation of difference, by excess. It’s significant in this context that the Magneto of the X-Men films encourages shapeshifter Raven (Mystique) to embrace her natural body, which is blue, scaly, and very nonhuman, telling her that he “prefers the real Raven” to the enticingly “perfect” humans that Raven imitates, and that she is an “exquisite creature”

(X-Men: First Class). Xavier, by contrast, refers to Raven’s natural body as a “cosmetic problem,” and finds it difficult to look at her in her natural form. (Raven, attuned to this tendency, questions whether his “mutant and proud” rhetoric is only “with pretty mutations or invisible ones, like yours.”) It’s no surprise that Magneto, in film and comics, is frequently shown as attracting to him mutants with more extreme or

“monstrous” visible mutations that disqualify them from participation in normative humanity. His ideology is not one in which their deviations from this norm are tolerated, but rather one in which they are not conceptualized as deviations. Indeed, he finds it difficult to comprehend such an attitude: in X-Men: Days of Future Past, he surveys a

Xavier who has taken a drug that allows him use of his legs while suppressing his telepathic ability, asking, baffled, “You sacrificed your powers so you could walk?” The potential desirability of such a choice (either in terms of its eradication of disability or its erasure of mutation) seems to escape him. The core of his identity— the quality that he

137 has dedicated his life to preserving and fostering in others— is the aggressive embrace of difference as a mode of resistance to all attempts at policing a “human” norm.

At the same time, the question of what constitutes this difference is not a simple one. The X-Men universe has seen non-mutants fetishize the mutant body in many ways— through the “U-Men,” a group of non-mutants who augment their bodies with organs removed from mutants ([81], [82]), and through the street drug Mutant Growth

Hormone (MGH), produced from mutant cells (harvested from the bodies of dead mutants), which gives non-mutants the temporary experience of mutation before wearing off and returning them to their more normative embodiment. Magneto actively enacts vigilante justice against the producers and distributors of this latter drug, one of whom defends himself by arguing, “This isn’t some mutant hate operation. We admire mutants”

([83]). Some of his “guys,” he tells Magneto, have even got “Magneto Was Right” t- shirts. Magneto is unimpressed, and proceeds to do battle with the MGH-enhanced security guards, observing in narration, “There are many differences between a mutant and a pretender pumped up on MGH. Users typically haven’t been hounded… beaten… persecuted… not the way a true mutant has” (ibid). When a team of high-level law- enforcement officials arrives, he notes that “these agents only gun down these killers… when they look like mutants” (ibid). What Magneto is articulating here is the way in which fetishization and, indeed, consumption of the mutant body removes that body from its embodiment, from the lived experience of being mutant, which is inextricably bound up in what one might describe as “[de]humanizing assemblages” (drawing on, but not appropriating, the language of race). Further, such fetishization situates mutation as

138 something always other to a normative and “natural” state of “human”ness. In a portrayal of the U-Men that seems, at the very least, ambivalent about the direction of the transhumanist/posthuman movement, Grant Morrison writes “transpeciesist” millionaire

John Sublime, guru of the U-Men, as a chilling psychopath who treats mutants as organ farms at the same time as he claims to be “empowering the different, celebrating the strange” by helping his followers “release the mutant within” ([81])— an approach that similarly recenters the human by positioning it as the neutral space from which identity can be freely constructed, and again suggests that mutation must always be an other to the norm of the human. The critique that Sublime opens himself to is similar to that leveled against transhumanism and the posthuman, which tend to presume a normative human identity freely available to all— a problematic stance, given the extent to which the universal human subject (as I have previously discussed) is coded as straight, white, able- bodied, cis, and male.

The fact that Magneto, in the 2000 film X-Men, engages in an effort to transform a group of humans into mutants might make it seem as though he is not wholly exempt from the mindset he persecutes in others. His central villainous plot in this film involves installing a machine at the top of the Statue of Liberty that will emit mutation-triggering radiation over a United Nations World Summit taking place on Ellis Island. “After tonight,” Magneto says, “the world’s powerful will be just like us. They will return home as brothers. As mutants.” On the surface, this idea would seem to invite the same criticism as the notion that MGH offers non-mutants the experience of being a mutant, rather than the experience of having a mutant body. The distinction here seems to be that

139 those mutated by Magneto’s machine will not be read as humans who have opted to adopt the fetishized properties of otherness, but as mutants, which is to say as non- humans: their bodies embedded within [de]humanizing assemblages that, as Weheliye writes of racializing assemblages, “etch[] abstract forces of power onto human physiology and flesh in order to create the appearance of a naturally expressive between phenotype and sociopolitical statues: the hieroglyphics of the flesh” (50).

The lack of a history of otherness, for which Magneto indict the users of MGH, will not here serve Magneto’s victims as an exemption from or ability to be exempt from assemblages that dehumanize the mutant. A useful comparison might be to disability: the person who finds herself going blind in adulthood is not in the same position as a person who “experiments” with disability by covering her eyes for a day. Nor can the role of choice in the recreational experimentation be overlooked: as Randi Gressgard emphasizes, “[i]n order to become a normal, autonomous individual, the subject must be abstracted from social or cultural constraints; one becomes tolerable to the extent that one is able and/or willing to transform [non-normative] practices into individually chosen beliefs or practices” (543). Gressgard is here drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, who identifies the way in which tolerance is extended to morally autonomous individuals whose autonomy must be established by the ability to exit the tolerated group (Brown

34). Culture, Brown argues, is transformed by the regime of tolerance into “a mere way of life,” “food, dress, music, lifestyle, and contingent values” that are “a source of comfort and pleasure,” something that the autonomous individual chooses to engage with and can opt out of at any time (153).

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At the same time, a unique, authentic, and irresistible “inner truth” that is figured as beyond personal choice can be deemed tolerable, and indeed tolerance here possesses a regulating power that serves to enforce the boundaries of that which is tolerable (and therefore civilized) at the same time as it continually defines that which cannot be tolerated (and is barbaric): the threatening other (Gressgard 549). Liberal tolerance,

Brown writes, can be “appropriately extended only to individuated subjects and regimes that promote such individuation” (173); so long as potential recipients of tolerance fulfill this qualification and thereby establish themselves as autonomous and rational, tolerance can be extended to “inner truth,” which is, after all, a notion that inherently reinforces the strength and centrality of the individual self. Indeed, the person who insists on the importance of their individual “inner truth” in the face of group hostility might be seen as praiseworthy, so long as that “inner truth” fortifies rather than weakens the privileged position of the normative self. After all, it is the organicist person (one who is insufficiently individuated, and therefore perceived to lack autonomy and rationality) who is deemed to be neither “capable of tolerance, nor to be entitled to tolerance” (ibid).

The individuated subject is, of course, a subject whose body and mind are contained by normative boundaries; as Gressgard writes, “the processes by which the humanist subject is fixed and maintained as unified and autonomous are threatened and disrupted by various kinds of non-normative body identities and expressions” (Gressgard

547); “improperly or inadequately gendered bodies,” for instance, may prove intolerable insofar as they fail to fulfill the expectations of bodily wholeness and organization, and are thereby experienced as chaotic, incomplete, monstrous, and inhuman (550). The

141 mutant body (as I have explored in detail in Chapter One) presents even more serious threats to the containment and organization of bodyminds. Mutants almost universally fail at the requirements of individuation: even those who possess the correct number of bodies and minds, correctly organized, may transgress the boundaries between human minds through telepathy, penetrate the separation of human and nonhuman bodies through manipulation of objects, elements, and forces, or blur the boundary between the categories of human and nonhuman (or life and nonlife) through bodily form and transformation. It would seem, in fact, that the central difference around which the category of mutant is organized— the difference that Magneto embraces as a mode of resistance— is an ambiguity of individuation. The proliferation of mutant bodies and powers eludes all efforts to locate a universal, neutral, and “whole” mutant form, but it acts too to obviate the given-ness of a unified, autonomous subject, and, further, to problematize the possibility of such a figure’s existence. Thus, the mutant not only occupies a position at the very outer limit of tolerance, but offers a constant ontological threat to tolerance itself, drawing attention to the tenuous and very shaky foundations on which its ideology is built.

The comics’ U-Men and MGH users manage to avoid this crux of tolerance by positioning mutation as an “inner truth” (“the mutant within”) that is discerned by an autonomous individual who predates the mutant, and that is controlled through individual choice: the individual literally deconstructs the mutant body into pieces that can be consumed (both literally and in the sense of appropriate[-able] culture), controlled, and ultimately subsumed by the body of the individuated subject. Magneto’s aim in X-Men,

142 on the other hand, is to effect— by altering the UN delegates and thus subjecting them to

[de]humanizing assemblages— a being mutant that places them outside of liberal tolerance, forcing a material kinship (the “brother” status Magneto speaks of) between

“the world’s powerful” and those from whom they’ve previously sought to differentiate themselves. And, indeed, his first test subject (the anti-mutant activist Senator Kelly) demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach: sick from the instability of his artificial mutation, he turns to the X-Men for help, explaining that he “was afraid that if [he] went to a hospital they would…” “Treat you like a mutant?” Xavier finishes his sentence.

It’s no accident that the film situates Magneto’s mutation-machine in the Statue of

Liberty, overlooking Ellis Island, allowing Magneto to remark that he “first saw [the statue] in 1949,” when “America was going to be the land of tolerance. Of peace.” He is speaking to the young mutant Rogue, whom he plans to sacrifice to power his machine, and when she asks why he is going to kill her, he replies, “Because there is no land of tolerance. There is no peace— not here or anywhere else.” His act is meant, in other words, as a decisive rejection of the notion of tolerance and its illusive promise as a route to universal Eden; he is not merely rejecting it as a solution to the human/mutant conflict, but more broadly as an ideology of difference, as is implicit in the connection he suggests between his mutant present and his refugee past.

The physical setting of this scene is perhaps intended to evoke in audiences’ fondness and support for a rosy vision of the [liberal] tolerance that Magneto references.

The Statue of Liberty can, after all, be read as a monument to tolerance: to a particularly

Western humanist model of diversity and coexistence. Too, the fact that the United

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Nations World Summit that Magneto plans to attack is located on Ellis Island might evoke images of a past that celebrated immigration and the intermingling of cultures and kinds (as the specific reference to the United Nations also brings forward the ideological presence of tolerance and human rights). Perhaps Magneto’s distaste of tolerance is meant to strike a sour note and reinforce his villainy. Yet the Ellis Island also calls to mind the stringent and dehumanizing classification of immigrants, as well as their detention and deportation— something that is especially the case given the shadow of the

Holocaust that hangs over Magneto’s speech, and the United States’ historical reluctance to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, of which he must surely be aware.

The result is oddly telling, visualizing the tension with which the narrative reverberates. While the movie seems to suggest that Magneto’s anti-human[ist] sentiments arise from a paranoia born in the unhealed trauma of his past, it provides visible reminders that his fears are, in fact, well-founded. He seems to have crawled up out of a crack in the Statue of Liberty, insistently calling attention to the flaws in its promise, like a specter of the excluded. The fact that the film ends with him in prison (a kind of Foucauldian panopticon, transparent, encircled, and continually monitored, no less) reinforces the idea that he represents the Other that must be contained, controlled, not tolerated. Significantly, Magneto’s prison also functions to cut him off from any metal, a kind of invisible amputation that effectively renders him human. His body has been restrained so that it cannot exceed the normative standard— for other people’s safety, of course.

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Powers

In 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, the villainous Apocalypse describes Magneto’s mutant power as having been “born” at Auschwitz. He transports Magneto, who has retired from supervillainy, to the ruins of the camp— the film is set in the 1980s— and prompts him to destroy what remains by guiding him to press his hands against the barren earth. “Reach down,” Apocalypse tells Magneto. “Feel the metal in the ground.” Magneto kneels in silent communion with the magnetic currents of the planet, the scene intercut with fragmented flashbacks of his time at the camp, as well as the murder of his wife and daughter at the hands of mutant-fearing Polish soldiers. The camp unmakes itself into dust as the figure of the adult Magneto stretches his arms out and screams, mirroring the pose of his tormented child self in a flashback from X-Men: First Class.

It was indeed at Auschwitz, the films reminds us, that Magneto manifested his mutant powers. (In the comics, where his family died at the hands of a death squad rather than in the camp, his powers manifest at the moment of their murder instead.) The films consistently connect this manifestation to the extremity of fear and anger that he felt; in

X-Men: First Class, Xavier attempts to correct what he sees as a weakness by teaching

Magneto to strengthen his power through balancing his rage with “serenity,” insisting that there is “so much more to [him] than [he] know[s]— not just pain and anger.”

However, X-Men: Apocalypse seems to suggest that Magneto’s greatest strength is and will always be ultimately found in the pure, raw scream produced by trauma.

Magneto’s powers, then, are from the start linked to a kind of unconstrained emotionality that has long been viewed as inconsistent with the rational subject.

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Ecofeminist Val Plumwood has observed the perceived binary between reason and emotion, and the way that reason is perceived as universal and universalizable, where emotions are “essentially unreliable, untrustworthy, and morally irrelevant” (Plumwood

5). “Emotions,” Plumwood writes, “and the private sphere with which they are associated have been treated as sharply differentiated and inferior as part of pattern in which they are seen as linked to the sphere of nature, not the realm of reason” (ibid). In other words, emotion is sub-, in-, or non-human, where reason is the defining quality of the human subject. Indeed, the Enlightenment view of the rational subject understands emotion as a contamination of the human— the Cartesian “knower,” Susan Bordo writes, “must be purified… of all bias, all ‘perspective,’ all emotional attachment” (Bordo 76).

Significantly, this purification requires the transcendence of the impure realm of the body— the material, what Bordo describes as the location of the “messy aspects of experience.” This division of the world into mental and physical, reason and emotion, human and nonhuman, subject and object, is part of a larger “passion for intellectual separation, demarcation, and order” that Bordo identifies within Cartesian philosophy

(77).

Within this binary view of the world, Magneto’s refusal to not be motivated by emotion— his location of his power, his politics, and his self-identity in his rage, rather than in the serenity that Xavier demands— is both productive of and produced by his intolerability. His unwillingness to become “rational,” no matter how often this is recommended to him as the more legitimate course of action, is consonant with the observations I have previously offered regarding his experience of “humanness” as a

146 conditional status that derives its power from othering and subjugation, and that is dependent upon what Bordo cites sociologist Richard Sennett describing as a

“purification urge” associated with a need for power, a desire to “control the meanings of experience before encounter,” a maintenance of “pristine ontological integrity” (ibid). To lay claim to humanness is to endorse this system of separation, and hierarchization; to be human, one must constantly argue one’s case for exclusion from the category of that which is not— against the implicit non-, sub-, or inhuman. Perhaps one part of what is

“born” at Auschwitz is Magneto’s refusal to participate in such a system, which dehumanizes in the name of human-making.

But both the X-Men comics and films portray Magneto’s mutation itself as something that manifests itself at the point of genocide as a resistance to or refusal to be contained— as a ferocious, almost animal demand for more life. A 1987 scene in which

Magneto dreams about this manifestation depicts it as a literal rebirth. Einsatzgruppen soldiers, shown as shadowy, faceless figures with glints for eyes, fire at his family— the gunshots crossing from left to right in hard, bright lines of light that seem to literally fracture the dark center of the page, while the tiny figures of the Eisenhardt family tumble into the red square of the pit that intersects them. The geography of the page, which lacks any clear panel boundaries, seems to suspend their bodies in the disorienting moment of their falling: tumbling both into the pit and through it, into the white space of sky below as we look upwards from the pit through Magneto’s perspective. Boxes of third-person narration site the moment of his mutant manifestation at that point of fracture, with its red and disorienting pit. “Bullets fly. He hears screams. Death rushes towards him. His mind

147 burns, power he never dreamed existed coming alive, reaching out— bullets, for him, seeming to move in slow motion—“ ([84]) The reader’s eye follows the narration downwards and left, into a close-up of the scene, as it continues, “The simplest of matters, to use this strange, new ability to move them aside, to make them miss—“ The falling motion of the narrative continues as his parents and sister are shot— “He is falling with them,” the narration tells us— then rises to the right as we see his face turned up from the pit, though the narration at first suggests that he has been “[s]hot, like them.

Killed, like them.” It’s on the next page that his survival is confirmed:

He wakes to darkness, dirt in eyes, nose, mouth, pressing in, holding fast,

still loosely packed, air to breathe in gasps, like an animal, which way is

up, alive, scrabble, scratch, dig, claw, alive, bodies everywhere, holding

him down— don’t leave us, he hears them silently call, stay, please, this is

where you belong— (ibid)

A spectral, blue-white figure of the buried child claws upwards at darkness, and the narration continues, “—Blood soaks the earth, quicklime burns his skin, alive, alive, I am

ALIVE!” We see the young Magneto bursting forth from the earth, surrounded by radiance, doubled with an image of the adult Magneto rocketing upright in bed. The twin faces, one young and one old, heighten the impact of the miraculous “resurrection,” as though we are seeing it twice— just as the narration’s change in person both renders it more immediate and gives it to us from two points of view— or as though Magneto is still, continually, being reborn.

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Figure 8: Magneto's dream, New Mutants #49 149

Figure 9: Magneto awakes from the dream, New Mutants #49

No other depiction of this moment is as explicit in its suggestion of rebirth. The re-visioning of the scene in X-Men: Magneto Testament instead focuses on it as a moment of extreme possibility. We see, in alternating panels, the line of Einsatzgruppen soldiers firing on the family and the fierce, sharp eyes of the young Magneto. The narration— broken across the panels in the drawn-out moment as the bullets travel— repeats a piece of dialogue that Magneto’s father has previously spoken to his son:

“Sometimes… you get a moment… when everything lines up. When anything is possible.

When suddenly… You can make things happen” ([56]). What is happening in these panels is ambiguous— author Greg Pak has written that as part of a deliberate choice to

150 keep any reference to mutant powers “more subtle,” the creators opted to make it unclear whether Magneto is moving the bullets, as the 1987 scene depicts him doing, or whether his father has managed to push him aside— but there is a clear implication that it is extraordinary, that this eerily slow moment is, as Jakob Eisenhardt has suggested, pregnant with limitless potential.

At first read, the tone of these scenes tends to strike one as strange. Magneto is a child who has lost or is in the process of losing his entire family in a brutal act of genocide. He will go on to suffer through Auschwitz, and his experiences of the

Holocaust will haunt him for the rest of his life. Why do these scenes lean so heavily on themes of possibility, life, and rebirth, and why does this seem to contrast with the films’ depictions, in which the manifestation of Magneto’s powers are an act of rage and love, but not a salvative one?

There is one respect in which the films echo the tone that Claremont and Pak take in the comics: Apocalypse’s insistence, in X-Men Apocalypse, that Magneto’s power, like some form of life or potential life, was “born” at Auschwitz. Yet Apocalypse is a sinister figure who nakedly manipulates a newly grieving Magneto, using the setting of the camp as an emotional bludgeon to bring Magneto to his cause— in the same scene, he offers a theologically puzzling (to say the least) claim that he is the Jewish God, calling his credibility into question. The implication seems to be that the viewer ought not to view

Magneto’s power as a form of life arising from Auschwitz, or that they ought to view this life as in some sense damaging, wrong, something that Magneto must reject or correct, just as the films position his rage as a quality in need of rejection/correction. (X-Men:

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First Class shows us the adult Magneto as a ruthless and monomaniacal Nazi hunter prior to meeting Xavier. “I thought I was alone,” Magneto says to Xavier at their first encounter, and their subsequent relationship, in which Xavier “trains” Magneto to set aside his fury, does seem to be the only alleviation of loneliness and bitterness that the latter has ever known.)

The comics are more ambivalent in their depiction of Magneto’s miraculous survival. His dream of emerging from the mass grave occurs during one of the eras of X-

Men in which he is no longer a villain, it should be mentioned, but instead acting as headmaster of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters at Xavier’s own wish; he interprets the dream as a reflection of his struggle over how best he can serve the mutant community and protect those dear to him, as he was not able to do during the Holocaust.

“My power… saved me,” he reflects, agonized; “why couldn’t it do the same for those I loved?” ([84]) The guilt and pain associated with the memory render it bleak and troubling, despite its powerful evocation of life. Too, there is something ambiguously unsettling about his survival: he “breathes in gasps,” “scrabble[s],” “scratch[es],”

“dig[s],” “claw[s],” “like an animal,” and it is unclear if we ought to believe the dead when they tell him that “this is where [he] belong[s].” Claremont’s language leaves him in a liminal state between human/nonhuman and dead/alive, as the jarring, fragmented art of these pages (the lack of panels leading scenes and times to bleed into each other) suggests a collapse of temporality. These are, of course, not coincidentally, the markers of the uncanny, and indeed there is something profoundly uncanny about Magneto here, who like the limb of “The Willful Child” in the Grimm fairy story (read in detail by Sara

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Ahmed [2014 1-3]), will not be contained by the grave and insists on rising, in defiance of category. He is not damaged or corrupted by rage and trauma in the same way that the films depict; his preoccupation with the potential for a second Holocaust— “Is my dream a harbinger of mutantkind’s eventual fate?” he wonders— is portrayed as reasonable rather than paranoid. Yet at the same time, this scene is situated in an issue of New

Mutants that sees the titular young heroes trapped in an alternate future where an unwise alliance on Magneto’s part has led to a mutant-supremacist dystopia, suggesting that he is still, at root, making the wrong choices— that he is doomed to make the wrong choices until he accepts the “correct” ideology to which his experiences have blinded him.

X-Men: Magneto Testament contains the only depiction of Magneto’s mutant manifestation that depicts the moment as an unproblematically powerful and inspiring scene. The young Magneto, bleeding but defiant, confronts the reader in close-up from the second panel of the page. He is older than the child of New Mutants #49, more expressive, and where that child is shown bursting raggedly up through the dirt, we see this one only after he has risen, standing tall and sure-footed in the foreground with the pit behind him ([56]). The garish colors and hard angles of New Mutants #49’s fractured, chaotic page have been replaced by somber golds, greens, and blues over elegant pencils in orderly boxes, interrupted only by a few stray autumn leaves that overstep the panels’ borders as though falling in front of the scene, rather than inside of it. The impression is that of a well-shot Hollywood film with Magneto as its hero. And, indeed, the young

Magneto is the hero here. There is no hint that he will later become a villain; he functions only as the narrator-protagonist of a piece of Holocaust literature, his survival a triumph

153 of the human spirit. (The final panel of the comic’s last issue, set in 1948, depicts the slightly older Max gazing with somber dignity out towards an unseen horizon, his shadow stretching behind him across a sea of bright, sunlit grass, as the words of his buried “testament” plead with the reader not to “let this ever happen again” [78].)

And it is a triumph of the human spirit. I have previously noted that writer Greg

Pak has described himself and the creative team as opting to keep any reference to mutant powers “more subtle”— he writes that the team chose to make it “less clear,” in the scene that New Mutants #49 depicts as Magneto’s first mutant manifestation, “that Max is moving the bullets. Instead,” he says, “we strongly imply that Max’s father pushes his son to safety.” A later scene in which Magneto and his future wife escape from

Auschwitz during a Sonderkommando revolt— a scene that is supertitled with the same quote from Magneto’s father that features over the scene in which Max survives his family’s execution— shows them fleeing through a downed metal fence, but is even subtler in its suggestion of any mutant power (ibid). Both scenes are thus powerful, but the power that they depict and celebrate is the power of the autonomous human will, not mutant “power”— not the troubling yet life-giving force of Magneto’s liminality, but the force of an inherent humanity in the face of inhumanity, one leads a boy to risk his life for the girl he loves, or a father to sacrifice himself for his son.

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Figure 10: The young Magneto faces a Nazi firing squad in X-Men: Magneto Testament #3 155

Figure 11: An older Magneto warns future generations in X-Men: Magneto Testament #5

In other words, Magneto’s story has here been transformed from one about the experience of being other-than-human into one that affirms and defines an experience of humanness. It is primarily the narrative of a crime against humanity, and is therefore implicitly a narrative of humanity: a human rights Bildungsroman of the sort that I have previously explained. What allows it to be inspiring is the removal of all elements in

Magneto’s biography that might conflict with or threaten the integrity of such a narrative: his emotionality, his embrace of the position of nonhuman, and the fact that it was his

156 transgressive mutant power rather than the strength and virtue of the human that enabled him to live.14

The presence of these same elements (or, in fact, their centrality) in other

Magneto stories perhaps accounts for the bleakness, futility, or ambivalence of these depictions: the dominance of humanist ideology requires that its violations be represented as untenable and productive only of misery. Mutant embodiment in the absence of the individuated, autonomous, and enlightened human subject must be depicted as feeble and tortuous; it cannot save or redeem, but only haunt and confuse. Mutant power is power, but it is not empowering. In fact, in both X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Apocalypse, it disempowers Magneto, leading to his subjugation, first by one villain as a child (when the revelation of the young Magneto’s mutant powers lead him to be medically experimented upon in Auschwitz), and then, as an adult, by another (when Apocalypse transports

Magneto to Auschwitz and encourages him to destroy the ruins of the camp in order to convince Magneto to submit to his authority). Where not only being human but championing humanist values leads to ennobling survival, being mutant without these values leads only to trauma, failure, and damage. To be other-than-human, in this narrative, is always to be less than human. And to persist in claiming such a status,

Magneto’s later life implies, is to be at worst a villain— at best, only a sad fool.

14 The issue of Magneto’s miraculous survival causes so much anxiety that the Teacher’s Guide included in the trade paperback edition of X-Men: Magneto Testament encourages teachers to regard this “subtly fantastical” element as an example of magical realism, thus providing another way to contain any suggestion that the narrative is not about the nature of the human. 157

Conclusion

In Chapter One, I outlined how X-Men began publication at a time when concerns about the atomic and its potential effects on the human were mainstream within

American culture. Magneto’s first appearance, in X-Men #1, thus took place in this climate of atomic fear, and his threat of “making homo sapiens bow to homo superior” originates in this era, when even the X-Men viewed their mutant powers as “extra” and

“super-human,” and the chief tension between Xavier’s ideology and Magneto’s had to do with the question of whether genetically altered super-beings would use their powers

“for the benefit of mankind,” as Xavier characterizes his mission, or to rule the “lesser humans,” as Magneto would like ([1]). The fear expressed in X-Men #1 is in part an atomic one, but it is an atomic one less concerned with the possibility of extinction, which had dominated so much of the early Atomic Age, than with the abrupt left turn that the bomb seemed to mark, a sense of disorienting newness and possibility at once threatening and possessed of a “magical aura” that attached itself to atomic power and its utopian promises (Boyer 119). X-Men not only suggested that humans were living in a new world, but identified an anxiety about the new humans of that world, those born as natives and strange to those who were not. Thus its uneasiness regarding the benevolence— or lack thereof— of these natives towards those outside their own kind were rooted perhaps partly in the cultural shift that critic Leslie Fiedler references in the

1965 essay whose title would later be memorialized in the New Mutants’ name: the disappearance of the past from the present, and the way in which the present itself “seems on the verge of disappearing into the future” (191), leading to (or reflected in) an interest

158 in “the end of man… the transcendence or transformation of the human” (192), not in a bodily but in a philosophical sense.

The 1981 revelation of Magneto’s backstory, however, and its subsequent appearances as a key part of the X-Men mythology, occurred in a different era, with different concerns. Paul Rabinow has described the ways in which the 1970s, 1980s, and

1990s were an era of unprecedented public awareness of debate surrounding biomedical ethics and the question of human dignity and rights, noting key decisions by both

American and French policy-making bodies during these years. Certainly in France (the key focus of his research), he suggests, there was a “frightened and angry reaction against the demystification of the largely unexamined equivalence of the body to the person” during this era; “[t]he tacit identification of the body and the person… had not previously been consciously scrutinized” (101), and advances in medical technology, artificial procreation, and genetic engineering created new fears regarding the implications of bodily manipulation and commodification of the human (a vision of the human that

Rabinow specifically locates in the long reach of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights). Susan Squier, too, notes the ways in which the late twentieth century saw a proliferation of medical interventions that altered “our ways of conceiving, being born, growing, aging, and dying,” thus filling our world and our literature with what Squier terms “liminal lives”— examples of “a new biomedical personhood mingling existence and nonexistence, organic and inorganic matter, life and death” (4-5). The liminal zone,

Squier suggests, can offer “a source of creative play, possibility, and human agency,” but it also creates “personal, cultural, and institutional tension” as it becomes more and more

159 difficult to define what life is, “much less to decide whether we should attribute a variation we encounter to forces of nature or culture” (5; 7). In other words, the late twentieth century was a time of unprecedented uneasiness surrounding the boundaries of the human body, and the potential of the ability to transgress or destabilize these boundaries to signal the end of the human, both as a coherent body and as a coherent concept.

Against this backdrop, Magneto was abruptly situated in what is perhaps the single most powerful humanist metanarrative: that of the Holocaust, which, while in 1981 not yet as historiographically developed as it would become, had already begun to evolve the specific tropes that would characterize its depictions; the NBC miniseries Holocaust, which Peter Novick describes as “the most important moment in the entry of the

Holocaust into general American consciousness,” had aired three years prior, in 1978, and the United States Congress had voted in 1980 to establish a national Holocaust museum, though this museum would not be opened until 1993. Magneto’s entry into this metanarrative identifies him as at once victim and perpetrator. In a single page, he not only rejects his goals (“I swore… I would not rest until I had created a world where my kind— mutants— could live free and safe and unafraid, where such as you, little one, could be happy. Instead, I have slain you”) and reveals himself to be contaminated by traumatic emotion (“I have lived too long with my hatred”), but also repents of his villainy, equating himself with the Nazis (“as [my family’s] lives were nothing to [the

Nazis], so human lives became nothing to me”) and thus endorsing the normative vision of Western liberal rights-based humanness outlined in the wake of the Holocaust ([55]).

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In so doing, he resolves the tension that Rabinow and Squier describe as symptomatic of the cultural climate: he, the foremost advocate of transgressing and destabilizing the human, has had his radical force effectively corralled and contained.

This is not so surprising; Magneto’s entire history is one of repeated containment.

He is a character who constantly threatens to burst free of the box labeled “villain.” A

New Mutants arc of the late 1980s sees him become headmaster of Xavier’s School for

Gifted Youngsters at Xavier’s own request, retiring from his more radical actions ([85]); at the same time, it is precisely the radicalism of both his philosophy and acts that sees him become an icon to angry young mutants in the form of the “Magneto Was Right” shirt first premiered by angry young mutant par excellence Quentin Quire in 2003 ([86]).

The question of whether Magneto was or is right has continued to be a hotly contested one in both the fictional world and the real one; fans have created their own “Magneto

Was Right” shirts, and the popular X-Men-themed podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-

Men produced a 2014 t-shirt offering the less contentious claim that “Magneto Made

Some Valid Points.” As a result, every X-Men media property has had to reinforce the incorrectness of his posthuman/ist ideology by putting him back into the “villain” box again and again. He has repented, he has died, he has lived in the ashes of his failed nation; he has caused Charles Xavier’s disability; he has been imprisoned for assassinating John F. Kennedy; he has taken the lives of children; he has destroyed a good portion of the Earth.

He has, in a spectacularly odd moment, even destroyed Auschwitz— an act that is positioned as warped, terrible, and agonized, indicative of the villainy he’s capable of

161 under the guidance of Apocalypse, but that seems in fact suggestive of something more complicated. As Magneto gives in to the roar of fury within him, using his magnetic power to turn the camp to rubble, the event taking place contrasts strikingly with the scene of childhood powerlessness that plays out in flashback, where the child Magneto screams out his futile rage over the inability to prevent his mother’s death. The intended reading, one suspects, is that Magneto’s formative loss of agency has left him damaged, and thus easy prey for power-hungry madmen— the visual structure of the scene suggests that Magneto is still the angry child who never escaped Auschwitz: an eternal victim, desperate to wield some control over his own fate. This reading is, in itself, interesting— it reinforces the moral, already communicated in previous films, that power without the acceptance and practice of “correct” human values is ultimately a form of powerlessness.

However, another reading— or meta-reading— suggests itself. One of the oddest aspects of this scene is that it involves no apparent loss of life; what viewers are meant to be shocked by, and to grieve for, is the destruction of Auschwitz itself. The film never explicitly states why this is; the reasoning, it seems, ought to be clear. And perhaps it is.

Auschwitz, after all, as historian Tim Cole writes, “has come to mean a lot more than the physical remains of the camp complex.” The “mythical Auschwitz,” as Cole describes it, stands in symbolically for the entirety of the Holocaust, and the reconstruction of the camp as a memorial/tourist destination serves less to preserve the remnants of an horrific site than to present a manufactured narrative of the Holocaust. It is a “Holocaust theme- park” that has become a site of grim pilgrimage, the “sacred space of a secular religion,” which Cole and Novick view as particularly key to North American Jews (whose

162 relationship to the Holocaust and its role in their identity may be particularly complex), but which I would argue is key to all Westerners— thus the controversy when Western heads of state fail to make the near-obligatory visit (Cole). The “secular religion” of which Cole writes is, in fact, a framework that offers a ready explanation of what it means to be human, by establishing, in the time-honored way of those who crafted the

“crime against humanity,” what being human is not.

Is it any wonder that Magneto would seek to be free of such a place? More even than the literal buildings of Auschwitz, he is destroying what “Auschwitz” has become: a narrative imposed upon his own past, one that mines it for moral lessons that force him into categorizations he would like to resist; a set of tropes that see his suffering as a series of symbols (and, indeed, glimpses of those tropes appear in flashback through this scene: the child torn from his family in the gray downpour, the striped pajamas, a gaunt mother lighting a hanukkiah in the dark), as though offering a shorthand of dehumanization.

Magneto, in obliterating the “sacred site” of Auschwitz, is rejecting this narrative’s right to use him as fodder for a framework that justifies his imprisonment. He is eliminating that framework, wiping away the walls and fences, freeing himself to find, instead, a new way of understanding what it is to be mutant— what it is to be excessive, an X unbound to any other side of the coin.

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Chapter 3. Animal, Vegetable, Monster

An unusual being is created or transformed by the actions of a corporate entity whose power is so vast and so pervasive in the life of a community that it is known not as a but as the company. Cast away and discovered as a child, this being is adopted and educated by a mother or mothers who seek to inculcate in him the virtues and values of humanness, though he himself is not human, or does not claim this identity. Against a post-apocalyptic backdrop in which life is precarious, constantly endangered by, among other things, the lasting wares of the absent-but-still-agentially-powerful company, this being negotiates his own relationship with personhood as he comes to understand both his embeddedness in and isolation from the human community. Ultimately, he chooses to embrace his difference, forging a new definition of what it means to be a subject and anticipating a community-to-come in which those excluded from the category of the human will grow in number— a vision that is rich and affirming, yet also uneasy and ambivalent.

The narrative I have just outlined is that of Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s

People, whose narrator was deformed by the effects of an industrial disaster in the Indian town of Khaufpur. Khaufpur (which translates from the Urdu as “terror city”) is a fictionalized stand-in for Bhopal, where a December 1984 Union Carbide accident released tons of toxic chemicals into the air; the company responsible for Khaufpur’s similar “Apokalis,” as the titular Animal understands one character to call the cataclysmic night, goes unnamed in the novel, referred to only as “the Kampani.”

Animal, who was a newborn at the time of the accident, and who was discovered 164

(apparently orphaned) in the immediate aftermath, traces his existence to the Kampani: he remembers nothing before, at the age of six, chemical exposure caused his spine to warp so that he was capable of walking only on his hands and feet. Called a “wild animal” as a child, he adopts the epithet first as his name and, later, as his self-identity. A series of compassionate women (the French nun Ma Franci, the student Nisha, and the

American doctor Elli) strive to impress upon him his humanity and educate him in its ways, and Animal’s refusal to submit to this classification forms a thread that runs through the novel’s exploration of Khaufpur’s impoverished and still-toxic landscape, as well as the city’s fraught relationship with both American humanitarianism and the elusive Kampani. Ultimately, the novel seems to suggest that “Animal’s people,” the poor (and specifically the poisoned poor) whom Animal also identifies as “the people of the Apokalis,” may also be defiantly animal people, people who embrace and recuperate their exclusion from humanness.

Yet the same narrative outline that fits Animal’s People also fits another novel:

Jeff VanderMeer’s hallucinatory 2017 work of science fiction, Borne. The world of

Borne is extraordinarily different to that of Animal’s People: it takes place in the ruins of an unnamed city contaminated by both toxicity and the proliferating biotech that originates from the destructive and mostly-abandoned Company. Rachel, the novel’s narrator, finds a strange pod that resembles a “stranded sea anemone” and salvages it, naming it despite believing it at first to be a biotech plant, then an animal. Borne, as she calls the Company-created pod, eats, grows, metamorphoses, and begins to talk; Rachel, who thinks of him as a child, teaches him to read and abjure violence, despite the extreme

165 violence of their post-apocalyptic world. Borne is deeply concerned with being “nice” and with protecting Rachel, whom he loves; at the same time, he realizes that his nature is to consume life, and his fear that he will not be able to stop himself from consuming

Rachel leads him to leave their tiny family and live on the fringes of the city. In a final act that encompasses both the protection he longs to provide and the inhuman nature he has tried to suppress, he defeats the giant biotech man-bear Mord by consuming Mord entirely and self-destructing, resulting in a miraculous rainstorm of biotech creatures that harbinges a rich new post-human liveliness for the ruined city.

In spite of their generic differences, the narrative similarities between Animal’s

People and Borne point to the ways in which both novels are concerned with commenting on and critiquing normative tropes of humanness. Both are deeply concerned with the way that personhood is constructed, and with the uneasy, complicated intersections of personhood and thingness— the slippage of subject and object— that neoliberal capitalism produces. (While Borne is not set in a recognizable reality, its city is revealed to have served as cheap factory and industrial dumping ground for the Company of another time or world.) Both draw on the rhetoric of an unending (or perhaps always- almost) apocalypse in order to challenge the ways in which such rhetoric serves to regulate bodies and legislate against alternative modes of life. Both are, in other words, fundamentally posthuman/ist works— as their characters’ decisive turn away from humanness would suggest. However, where Animal’s People roots its posthumanism in a celebration of the animate’s power to triumph over the toxic technological inanimate,

Borne marks a shift towards what Elizabeth Povinelli might describe as a post-

166 geontopower world in which the conceptual division between life and nonlife has collapsed. In what follows, I explore these two articulations of posthumanism, and begin to consider a form of being that, in its contaminated-ness of the classical subject, can straddle and confuse categories of life and nonlife in a way that has emerged as a particularly urgent manifestation of Western neoliberal twenty-first-century anxiety.

Salvage

“To me,” Rachel, Borne’s narrator writes in the novel’s opening paragraph,

“Borne was just salvage at first” (3). She means this in the sense of a piece of abandoned property picked up for later use; Rachel is a scavenger who scours the ruined city where she lives for viable material to take back to the home she shares with her lover/mentor,

Wick. Yet her opening description of what appeals to her about Borne suggests an alternate etymology for the word, in which it is related to the Vulgar Latin salvaticus, which comes from the Latin silva; that is to say: wilderness. “Come close,” Rachel says,

“I could smell the brine, rising in a wave, and for a moment there was no ruined city around me…. Instead, for a dangerous moment, this thing I’d found was from the tidal pools of my youth, before I’d come to the city” (3-4). Borne is “salt” and “wind” and

“water,” “seashells” and “sand” and “horizon.” At the same time, Borne is “defenseless,” something that, hidden under Rachel’s shirt, “beats against [her] chest like a second heart” (7), already imagined in the terms of child-liness although “‘[i]t’ had not yet become ‘he’” (6). In becoming salvaged, Borne becomes something to be salvaged: to be protected, as the first etymology of salvage, with its roots in the Latin salvus, “something

167 that is safe,” suggests. From the first, then, he is a wild child, a piece of the nonhuman that can be or ought to be human— as, perhaps, all children ultimately— originally— are.

Rachel gives Borne his name, she says, because of a comment that Wick once made about one of his biotech creations: “He was born, but I had borne him.” But at the same time, the name (particularly in the context of the book, which seems to acknowledge the potential wordplay of its title with its large population of semi-sentient bears)15 points towards the act of childbearing as much as Rachel’s literal carrying-home of Borne. Her initial sense-impressions of Borne seem to sidestep his evident nonhumanness and see him as a piece of her own childhood recreated, the opportunity for a salvage operation whose object is herself. In this sense, Borne’s “birth” is the repetition inherent in reproduction, but a repetition that is less about the carrying-forward of self and society into the future, and more about the attempt to reclaim an always-already- stolen past. This thread of the lost past recurs; when Borne learns to speak, Rachel, listening to his newly-acquired voice, thinks for a moment that “he’d spoken in the voices of both my parents at once” (44). When Rachel sets out on an organized education for

Borne, she says that she wants to teach him formally “so that he would know what stars were and what the sun was— the way my parents used to teach me… Because I still had what they had given me— rituals, values, knowledge— their way of preparing me for a hopeful future” (140). She realizes the absurdity of such an education in their brutal, always-endangered world, but when Borne criticizes the plan she’s made— “Borne plays

15 I am indebted to Rachel Stewart for this observation. 168 the piano. Borne dances. Borne sings. Borne recites poetry. Is that what you want? While

I’m doing other, more important things, I guess part of me could do that for you” (146)— she is both hurt and willfully obtuse. “But it’s for you!” she says. “‘It’s something for you, so you can learn.’ Never for me. Not even for the memory of a schoolgirl in a far- distant city, in music class, in a fancy restaurant, playing on a real playground and dreaming of being a writer” (ibid).

What Rachel wants for Borne, more than anything, she realizes, is for him “to be

‘normal,’ to fit in, to be like a normal ‘boy’” (147). She is aware that Borne— whose body is at this stage an amorphous form with feathery pseudopods and a shifting number of eyes— is not human, and in fact their first conversation takes the form of a question game to figure out what Borne is. Yet when their lack of shared concepts causes the questions to break down, Rachel instead turns to delivering a moral lesson: “Killing is bad… Killing should never happen. Don’t kill” (46). This lesson is necessary because

Borne has, in fact, already killed three feral children who were torturing Rachel, though he refers to this as “knowing” (later “tasting”) the children. Borne is confused by

Rachel’s attempts to explain what it is to kill, but when Rachel later discovers a journal that he has been keeping, she discovers how seriously he had taken her lessons. “BORNE

MUST STOP KILLING,” he has written in the early pages. “BORNE MUST STOP

TASTING. BORNE MUST STOP BEING BORNE. BORNE MUST EAT WHAT IS

ALREADY DEAD, LIKE NORMAL PERSONS” (190). Less explicitly, Borne makes it clear that he is internalizing what he has learned from Rachel: before he has fully mastered his ability to shapeshift, he responds to Rachel staring at him by absorbing all

169 but two of his eyes, which he shifts higher up his body and become larger, blue, and lashed. “He must have thought he looked more normal that way,” Rachel observes (43-4).

At the same time, it’s clear that Borne is speaking and behaving in the child-like ways that Rachel expects. “I do not know when I am being what they want me to be and when I am myself,” he records in his journal. “It is better when I am ‘cute.’ It is safer” (190).

It’s clear that Rachel, intentionally or unintentionally, is in fact not so much educating Borne as she is shaping him, or perhaps (given his inherent shapeless-

/shapeshiftiness) attempting to assign him a fixed shape. That shape is human, or perhaps, in a broader sense, person, so perhaps it is not surprising that so much of

Borne’s relationship with Rachel should seem to align itself with Joseph Slaughter’s observations about the human rights Bildungsroman, which I first introduced in Chapter

Two. Slaughter, it will be remembered, argues that the vision of human development assumed and required by the Western human rights regime corresponds closely to that of the Bildungsroman (which plots the individual’s trajectory from naivete towards “full” subjectivity and citizenship), and that education, particularly literacy, but also moral education, thus plays a key role in the normative process of human personality development. According to Slaughter, both the human rights regime and the trope of

Bildung “subpoena the individual to occupy the role of the narrator in their cultural narratives of human personality development,” but present this occupation as consensual or mutual— “the individual is supposed to come to perceive social institutions as manifestations of the self— as the forms that the individual would have freely chosen”

(203). The technologies of literacy and the ideology that posits the citizen-subject as

170 desirable role are conjoined; human rights law both “presumes that the individual’s narrative capacity and predisposition are innate and equally shared by all human beings everywhere;” however, “the particular forms in which the will to narrate finds expression are inflected and normalized by the social and cultural frameworks in which the individual participates” (40). Specifically, Slaughter suggests that

the teleology of human rights personality development describes a progressive

project of learning to recognize what one already is by right, but this process of

recognition is figured in the later human rights documents specifically in terms of

a responsibility that links reading to writing, recognition to narrative. The self-

saying, self-incorporating citizen-subject that the law anticipates is itself

predicated upon a reading proficiency in the semiotics of human dignity and the

human personality development figured according to the trope of incorporation

(249).

The would-be human must not only read and write, but must learn to understand, accept, and independently articulate their own [appeal for] humanness. The progress from illiteracy to literacy reflects an “emancipatory” view of modernity that understands literacy as “a primary means to enlightenment itself” and as “the necessary equipment both for the enjoyment of human rights and for the articulation of a right to have rights”

(273), as Slaughter expresses, but also implicitly sketches a hierarchy of sophistication in which modernity and rationality are linked to literacy and the process of intellectual, spiritual, and material development with which it is assumed to be bound. Illiteracy becomes “a vice of the disenfranchised— invoked variously as the cause of, the cause

171 for, and the effect of exclusion from modern society” (279), and bound up with an ignorance not of letters, but of the universal human society to which letters alone can offer admittance. This universal human society is positioned as “civilized” in a way that marks the humanitarian giver and granter of human rights as representative of civilization— a civilization whose mantle they confer upon the recipient of their aid in recognition of having achieved a certain status, in a ceremony in which the one whose status is continually reaffirmed is, in fact, the giver/granter themselves.

We can see this dynamic at work in Rachel’s relationship to Borne. Her impulse to provide him with the education that she herself received is rooted in her longing for the civilized life that she has lost, and in her craving for what she perceives as “normalcy”— her decision to educate Borne, her desire for him to be normal is, she confesses, rooted in the increasing instability and savagery of her living situation (147). Educating Borne is an act of preservation (when Borne asks questions about the cities and countries he sees on a globe, Rachel realizes that the places he’s indicating don’t exist anymore, that “[m]ost of those cities had burned, in my recollection” [ibid]), but also a means of imposing hierarchy and structure on her unstable world. In pretending that Borne can and should be

“salvaged” from his nonhumanness, Rachel positions him as child in need of rescue, and herself as the mature adult who models the universal “final form.” If “to be human is to desire survival and reproduction above all else,” which Rebekah Sheldon reads cultural tropes of the endangered child as suggesting (61), then Rachel’s desire to transform

Borne from “wild child” into proto-human also contains a desire to reclaim and play out

172 the normative role of the human— a desire that the book’s ending significantly critiques, as I will later address.

Sheldon suggests that the child, often depicted as an embodiment or piece of the future “in need of salvation” (a “cipher for the future of the adult” and, simultaneously,

“a cipher for the future of the species” [4]) transforms, in the Anthropocene era, into a figure that saves (6). The Anthropocene’s “threat of nonhuman profusion,” the proliferation of the nonhuman and the increasingly visible power of its presence, is contained by the child who “reconsolidate[s] liveliness back into [the] human” (119). The child, that is, promises the continued vitality of the human in a world in which that vitality (and, indeed, that human) is increasingly unclear. This mobilization of the child,

Sheldon argues, appears in the context of a “burgeoning apprehension (in both sense of the word) that we are past the threshold by which we might recover a complacent nature happy to provide a scenic background for human action” (6-7). The world cannot be saved, in other words, and yet the child is a world that can be saved, and by virtue of being that world, the child therefore saves.

Borne, of course, is not a human child. Yet he plays the role of the child in a narrative that models itself on human childrearing and humanitarian subject-making, and he plays the role of the “good” child, too, in the novel’s grim landscape of humanity, where the human children are far from promises of a hopeful future. “The young,” Rachel says, “were often the most terrible force in the city,” and the first encounter with feral children that she recounts features her extensive torture by a gang of them. Physically, they are augmented—

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There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that

curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands

like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One

wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still

had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I wished he’d had wasps instead. (30)

At the same time, their inhumanity— their failure to perform the humanity that ought to be inherent in them— seems to stem less from these biological alterations, and more from their behavior. “Nothing in their gaze could tell you they were human,” Rachel describes them. “They had no memories of the old world to anchor them or humble them or inspire them. Their parents were probably dead or worse, and the most terrible and transformative violence had been visited upon them from the earliest of ages” (ibid).

None of the children speaks, or shows any sign of comprehension; later, a scavenger girl

Rachel encounters (not augmented, as the feral children are) does speak, but ultimately to try and trade another child for a handful of biotech (217).

It is after the attack by the feral children that Borne (who has consumed them) begins speaking, and thus makes himself eligible as a child. Rachel is frightened of him at first, but immediately grows to love him, in part because of the “silly,” childish conversations she has with Borne: “Why is water wet?” Borne asks. “If something is dry, does that mean it’s not wit[sic]?” “I’m thirsty. And I need a snack. I’m hungry. I’m hungry. I’m hungry” (48-9). Immediately, too, Borne begins to perform the normative human-ness that is not apparent in the feral children. He pretends to need light to read books, though Rachel suspects he does not— “I know he liked to mimic what he saw me

174 doing,” she reflects. “Perhaps he even though it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes” (53). When he tries to shapeshift into a human form to scavenge with

Rachel, he insists that he needs to wear shoes to complete his ensemble: “‘Everyone wears shoes,’ he said, quoting me. ‘Simply everyone’” (55).

There is a form of reproductive futurism at work here, in Rachel’s raising of

Borne, but it is not the form that Sheldon addresses in her analysis of narratives that sacralize the human child. The human being whom Rachel is attempting to “reproduce” is not a biological human, but rather the “civilized” universal subject of human rights discourse— the “abstract ‘universal’ human personality” (Slaughter 43), a being who behaves and believes in certain ways, even (crucially) articulating himself through the halting first-person narrative of his journal, where he struggles with the question of his humanness: “My name is Borne… My name is not-Borne and I came here on Mord’s body… My name is not-Borne and I did not come here on Mord’s body, but I am human.

—I am not human. I am not human. I am not human… I am a person” (189). This journal is even a human child’s journal: hidden from Rachel in the closet, it comes with a lock on the cover, and a tiny key in the lock, a testament to Borne’s dedication to being a “normal boy.” Rachel says of the journal, “This was salvage of a particular type” (ibid). In context, she seems to be speaking of saving something of Borne after he has been driven away. But the journal represents, too, the particular type of “salvage” that Rachel has already performed: a human-making that “civilizes” the not-yet-human and, in doing so, contains nonhuman liveliness in the figure of the child, containing the threat of the nonhuman by rendering it a bearer of human values.

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Yet for this strategy to be successful, Borne must remain a child. When Borne attempts to have more nuanced, adult conversations with Rachel, Rachel finds them unsettling reminders both of Borne’s alienness and the troubled world in which they live.

“I had looked forward to having adult conversations with Borne,” she reflects, “and now I didn’t want them. I didn’t even quite understand the conversation we were having, and I didn’t want to be reminded of the ways my body was being tested every day in the city”

(145). Borne-the-child is a refuge of “normal” human civilization for Rachel, a promise of something simpler and, perhaps, purer than the devastated world— as she makes clear when she comments that she had “been stupid to think [she] could keep him safe from contamination by the city” (77) by isolating him, an observation that refers not to the city’s physical toxicity, but to its degradation and grimness.

It is unsurprising, then, that when confrontation precipitates Borne’s casting-out from Rachel and Wick’s home, it arises from the troubled nature of Borne’s child-not- childness. Borne, Rachel discovers, has learned to mimic human bodies, and has pretended to be both her and Wick in conversations with the other. Borne-as-Wick’s conversation with Rachel centers around love: Does Rachel love Wick, Borne-as-Wick asks; then, “What about Borne? Do you love Borne? How much do you love Borne?”

(177) When Rachel replies that Borne is like her child, Borne-as-Wick seems disappointed. “Is that what Borne still is to you?” he asks. “A child?” (178) The faint, uneasy trace of ambiguity this introduces to Rachel and Borne’s relationship is made more explicit later, when Rachel is forced to question whether she has slept with Borne, thinking that he was Wick. Borne recoils at the suggestion; when he realizes how

176 appalled Rachel is, he retreats back into his childness: “Rachel, it’s Borne. Your child.

You love me like a child. You said you love me like a child” (183). Wick counters that

Borne is not human; Borne, in turn, insists on his personhood: “Rachel told me— I’m a person!” (ibid). These responses illustrate the logic at work in Borne’s complicated position: he can be recognized as a person only insofar as he plays out Rachel’s fantasy of Bildung-making, submitting himself to the identity of salvage: the nonhuman that can be made to make itself human through sufficient earnest work. As Sheldon writes, “the future the child points to is the adult who stands where the child no longer is;” the child, therefore, “has no future” (37). This is particularly true in the case of Borne, for whom growth and maturation entail the very actions that human values foreclose to him: his biological growth and his unusually rapid development of complex skills both depend on his “absorption” and “digestion” of people, which Rachel considers killing. To be an adult (for whatever value of this term applies to a being so nonhuman) requires him to reject the status of child/proto-human that attracts Rachel and obligates her to salvage him.

A not-dissimilar dynamic is at work in Animal’s People, in spite of the narrator’s biological humanness. Rather than read the novel as an “environmental picaresque,” as

Rob Nixon has done, both Jennifer Rickel and Liam O’Loughlin suggest that its formal structure is intended to invoke the testimonio genre of human rights narrative; more specifically, Rickel argues that Animal’s People “parodies a testimonial narrative structure in order to challenge literary humanitarian reading practices” (93). This interpretation is rooted in the formal move that sees the novel positioned as a

177 transcription of a testimony spoken into a tape recorder by Animal for a “jarnalis” and the journalist’s cosmopolitan audience, and in the climax of this testimony, which centers around the question of whether Animal will accept humanitarian aid and receive a spinal operation in America, renouncing his animal identity. Yet this broad reading ignores those elements of the novel that conform to the human rights Bildungsroman— specifically, Animal’s situation as the illiterate “wild child” whom various figures throughout the text attempt to imbue with the values of Western civilization.

Like Borne, Animal is “salvaged” by a mother figure: Ma Franci, who insists that he “walked on two feet just like a human being” as a child, and will not believe him when he insists that he “no longer want[s] to be human” (1). As an older child, he is found scavenging for scraps with dogs in the market by Nisha, a university student who promises to find him work and tells him that he is clever, that he will “learn new things”

(22). Zafar, Nisha’s future husband, informs Animal that he should think of himself as

“especially abled” rather than as disabled, and that he should not allow himself to be called Animal, as “[he is] a human being, entitled to dignity and respect” (23). Zafar also explains to Animal that he is a “poison victim,” teaching him the rules of his “biological citizenship” (Petryna) and positioning him in a human rights frame of victim/perpetrator in which he appears as the dehumanized subaltern whom Zafar hopes to save. For Zafar, this salvation requires Animal to acknowledge/articulate his own humanness as a demand for the rights that Zafar believes ought to be inherently his.

As Zafar introduces Animal to the world of human rights discourse, Nisha teaches

Animal to read and write Hindi, then invites him to join a group of children to whom she

178 teaches English. The two causes are united when Zafar brings Animal a children’s picture book he has created that explains the industrial disaster; Animal, however, rebels against reading this book. “I am not a child,” he tells Nisha and Zafar, and insists on instead reading the copy of Pride and Prejudice that Zafar is carrying for himself (36). However, even this merely wins Animal the accolade of being Nisha’s “best pupil”— keeping him firmly positioned as the recipient of the “gift” of literacy that Nisha and Zafar, as educated citizen-subjects, can bestow upon him.

Another significant “gift” bestowed upon Animal is that of music; Somraj,

Nisha’s father (a celebrated musician who will eventually marry the humanitarian doctor

Elli) attempts to teach Animal singing and the structure of a musical scale, telling Animal that he should learn to listen for the music in everything (48-9). Later, Elli herself builds on this musical education in teaching Animal to play the piano (171). The resonance between these music lessons and Rachel’s desire for Borne to learn to play the piano, sing, and recite poetry (as Borne dismissively characterizes her plans) would seem curious if this were not a parodically consistent depiction of the importance of aesthetic education to the classical Bildungsroman— aesthetic education forming part of the

“civilizing mission” governing the incorporation of under-subjects in this genre (Morton

123), or even, as Marc Redfield argues, constituting the nature of Bildung itself. Though musical literacy is not tied to development and rights in the same way that Slaughter describes literacy, this in fact merely serves to highlight the extent to which the primary purpose of education in the Bildungsroman is not as a technology for modernization and advancement, but rather as a form of cultural colonialism— an implicit outline of a

179 hierarchy of taste in which the ability to appreciate the correct form of words and music marks one as possessing a refined sensibility. If one understands this “refined sensibility” as constituting a literal refinement of the senses, a learning-to-sense-in-the-correct-way, then it is not only Animal’s ear that Elli corrects with her instruction in the piano. She also teaches him to see in the “refined” way when she characterizes the Nutcracker neighborhood as looking “like it was flung up by an earthquake.” Animal, jarred by the description, experiences a profound sensory adjustment:

Up to that moment this was Paradise Alley, the heart of the Nutcracker, a place

I’d known all my life. When Elli says earthquake suddenly I’m seeing it as she

does…. Like drunks with arms round each other’s necks, the houses of the

nutcracker lurch along this lane which, now that I look, isn’t really even a road,

just a long gap left by chance between the dwellings. Everywhere’s covered in

shit and plastic. Truly I see how poor and disgusting are our lives (106).

Underlying this re[fined]-seeing is an ideology of what it means to be a road, a neighborhood, and, ultimately, a human. “Madam, it’s these people,” a government representative has told Elli immediately prior, making excuses for what Elli describes as the neighborhood’s “filth”; “they don’t know any better” (105). If the people of the

Nutcracker were taught to know themselves as the dignified beings that Zafar insists they are; if they learned to read and write, as Nisha believes they should, so that they could comprehend their status as lacking, or victims; if they could develop the refined sensibility that would allow them to perceive the distance between their current state and that to which they ought to be always already entitled, then they could be incorporated

180 into the human community. However, the people of the Nutcracker, who do not merely not-know, but resist their own education— Elli sets out magazines in Hindi, Urdu, and

English in the lobby of her clinic, as well as crayons as paper, despite being told that most people in the neighborhood cannot read, only to find both her magazines and her medical services boycotted by the neighborhood (134)— raise and, indeed, strengthen the question that Pablo Mukherjee sees Animal as articulating: “if there are those who, by the dint of their underprivileged location in the hierarchy of the ‘new world order,’ cannot access the minimum of the rights and privileges that are said to define humanity, what can they be called?” (221)

Animal, of course, is not only a member of the paradoxically human-yet- nonhuman fraternity of the radically poor. He is also disabled, and a central element of the book involves Elli’s humanitarian efforts to treat his deformed spine and arrange for him to have spinal surgery in America— a literal re-shaping of Animal’s body that emphasizes the extent to which he is treated as “salvage,” indeed as a proto- or potential human, by the humanitarian characters who engage with him. The discourse of medical intervention and “cure” that surrounds Elli’s efforts are inseparable from the discourse of the universal human. Animal’s quadrupedal existence has been linked to his nonhumanness from the books opening paragraph, when he describes himself as once having “walked on two feet just like a human being,” and the way in which the possibility of bodily wholeness is linked to the culture of the Global North is foregrounded by Elli’s reminder that “if [Animal] had been born in Amrika, [he] would not be running around on all fours” (140). If Animal were American, in other words, he

181 would not be [an] animal, as her use of language affirms that he is; he would have been

“rehabilitated” into the shape of the human. Elli further expounds upon this idea while discussing a proposed American trip to have the spinal surgery done, telling Animal that if he had been born in America he could have gone to college, that the people of the

Nutcracker are “as clever as the Amrikans… but [Americans] have all the money so they have good lives and [the lives of the Nutcracker’s residents] are little more than shit”

(247). Animal reflects to himself: “Yes, soon I shall walk like a human being, I will think clever thoughts, amaze people, and no longer will I do things that shame me” (ibid).

Here, literal uprightness bleeds into metaphorical “uprightness”; the ability to enact normative human embodiment becomes entangled with the ability to perform the normative human subjectivity that humanist discourse details, and Elli’s humanitarian work becomes interpretable as an effort to render “Animal’s people” legible as humans, refining their bodies as a part of the same mission that refines the senses, perhaps hearkening back to an Enlightenment sense of culture as linked to the body in possessing the power to literally refine (or degrade, in the case of disorderly culture) the nerves.16

This attention to all forms of human education would render Animal’s People a somewhat formulaic humanitarian Bildungsroman if it were not for Animal’s curious responses to the efforts of the would-be educators who surround him. Unlike Borne, who strictly and indeed desperately tries to observe Rachel’s rules of humanness, even continuing to mimic human appearance in order to “fit in” and “make a go of it” long

16 James Kennaway, for example, provides a thorough account of “pathological music,” noting its long connection to morality and normative ideas of, inter alia, gender. 182 after he has been cast out of Rachel and Wick’s home (220), Animal actively mocks and/or rejects the values that Ma Franci, Zafar, Nisha, Somraj, and Elli attempt to instill in him. Ma Franci’s insistence on revisiting the topic of his humanness causes him to remark in frustration that his lack of desire to be human never sank “in to that fucked-up brain of hers” (1); when Somraj tells him that the world is full of music, and that Animal will understand this, as he has “a power of hearing, Animal comments: “Actually what I understood was never mind bicycles, if the poor sod hears music in such things as bhutt- bhutt pigs, he must be fully fishguts” (49). Nisha’s efforts to elevate him through reading and writing are consistently met with sexual responses that Animal doesn’t shy away from discussing. And reflecting on the efforts of Zafar and a religious friend, Farouq, to convince him to accept his humanness, Animal says, “Well, maybe if I’m cured, otherwise I’ll never do it and here’s why: if I agree to be a human being, I’ll also have to agree that I’m wrong-shaped and abnormal. But let me be a quatre pattes animal, four- footed and free, then I am whole, my own proper shape” (208). On the heels of this perceptive observation, he starts a comical argument with Farouq over the idea that paradise is for humans rather than animals and that he will have to “turn human” if he hopes to be let in, pointing out there can be no honey in paradise if there are no bees.

Animal’s most dramatic and significant rejection of the humanitarian narrative being imposed on him, however, comes at the book’s conclusion. Following a climax that sees Animal experience a datura-induced hallucination in the jungle while the ruins of the

Kampani’s factory burn down, Animal tells Zafar (who has come to find him, part of a large search party) that he would rather not have been found, as he cannot bear “to go on

183 being an animal in a world of human beings” (364). Zafar tells him, “Animal, my brother, you are a human being. A full and true human being.” Animal, Zafar, and Farouq embrace each other and weep before returning to the Nutcracker. The scene seems designed to engineer a resolution that will see Animal finally declare his humanity, establishing himself as a member of the rights-bearing human community (as the protagonist of the humanitarian Bildungsroman must) and setting aside his nonhuman affectations to accept a normative human lifestyle. Indeed, the next page details the arrival of a package from America announcing that money has been found for Animal to travel to America, and that his operation has been booked. The transformation from

Animal to Human seems inevitable— until, on the last page, Animal reveals that he does not intend to go through with the operation. “[i]f I have this operation,” he reflects,

“I will be upright, true, but to walk I will need the help of sticks. I might have a

wheelchair, but how far will that get me in the gullis of Khaufpur? Right now I

can run and hop and carry kids on my back, I can climb hard trees, I’ve gone up

mountains, roamed in jungles. Is life so bad? If I’m an upright human, I would be

one of millions, not even a healthy one at that. Stay four-foot, I’m the one and

only Animal (366).

The humanitarian narrative is suddenly disrupted: thrown into disarray. Animal’s education in humanity has failed to have the expected edifying effects; it has not produced the citizen-subject and, in fact, has resulted in Animal explicitly rejecting the universal human and all such a model offers— as Rickel notes, Animal emphasizes his uniqueness, and politely disdains to become “another iteration of ‘universal’ humanity” 184

(102). Significantly, by reserving this ultimate rejection for the final page of the novel—

Animal has previously expressed more ambivalence, confessing that his mantra-like denial of any desire to be human conceals a “yearning to walk upright” (23)— Sinha builds a portrait of a character who has achieved the qualifications for humanity that the humanitarian narrative sets forth (who has been salvaged), yet who deliberately opts out of identifying as human. Rickel argues that this ultimate move calls the dehumanization of the Nutcracker’s poison victims into question, challenging the way in which a more conventional narrative structure “would allow a literary humanitarian reader to rescue these ‘dehumanized’ victims” (90); I would add that it sunders the mechanics of such dehumanization by opening the possibility that to be human is not the only, natural outcome of such a trajectory or, indeed, the ultimate good.

Borne sees its titular character similarly turn away from humanness and embrace the nonhuman at the moment that would seem to mark his incorporation into the human community— or, at least, the community of persons, “person” being a word that, in the world of Borne, functions to indicate a biologically nonhuman being that nevertheless performs the normative citizen-subjectivity of the human. Rachel and Wick, having fled their home, encounter Borne on their way to the ruins of the Company. Rachel is at first frightened of Borne, who has grown enormous and dangerous, but nevertheless finds herself responding to him as though he is once again her child. “I was tired,” she says,

“and I’d raised him and couldn’t help it” (259). “[T]he old motherly concern” appears

“from under [her] armor,” and she urges Borne to rest and heal from the wounds he has suffered as a result of the perils of the City. Borne’s response is laughter, which Rachel

185 describes as “[s]uch a human response from a creature that now manifested so inhuman”

(260). Borne confesses to Rachel that he has “stopped trying to be good,” because “[i]t isn’t in [his] nature,” but Rachel emphasizes that he must try, to which Borne responds in frustration: “I’m not built like you. I’m not human. I’m not a person.” “You are a person,” Rachel says for the last time— “[e]ven with the evidence before me, or perhaps because of it” (261). Borne does not contradict her again, but rather goes to confront the giant, perilous bear-monster Mord. He becomes “thick and formless and dark” before turning into a bear-monster of his own, even more “inhumanly savage than Mord,” that moves “at first like a lizard, then a silverfish, and then staggered as if drunk” (263)— combining disjointed qualities of different creatures in the body of a creature who already combines the disjointed qualities of bear and man. As the battle continues, he abandons this shape to become purple and tentacle, “bristling with spikes and ridges,” marked by

“rings of eyes [that] appeared and disappeared” (312), before he stretches himself out around Mord like “an enormous passionflower blossom” (313) and consumes Mord in an instant that obliterates them both. Rachel, grieving for Borne, writes that she mourns “the child [she] had known who was kind and sweet and curious, yet who could not stop killing” (314), juxtaposing Borne’s lovable human characteristics with the nonhuman aspect of him that she could not tolerate. VanderMeer scholar Benjamin Robertson understands the important element of Borne’s admixture in this moment to be “a tiny amount of something else, something from which the planet has turned away in this age of giant monsters: humanity” (155), suggesting that “[m]onsters inherit the earth, but only by way of a humanized one whose life takes on meaning by creating the conditions of

186 this inheritance” (ibid). However, in fact it is Borne’s final willingness to be nonhuman— a creature who not only shifts between various animal, plant, and unclassifiable bodies, but whose strength is in the ability to consume— that saves Rachel, Wick, and the remains of their city from the threat of Mord.

The inheritance to which Robertson refers occurs in the aftermath of Borne and

Mord’s disappearance: a supernatural rain falls on the city for three days, a life-giving rain that brings “all manner of creature” falling from the sky or sprouting from the ground. “Grass grew fast and wild… and on some of the dead blackened trees down the slopes I noticed new leaves,” Rachel recalls. She witnesses the renewal of plant life that has been long-dormant; “[b]irdsong came lyrical through the storms, and animals long- hidden emerged from sanctuary” (315). “There came from across the city, to the astonishment of people used to poverty,” Rachel says, “such a sense, in that moment… of plenty” (317). This is not a simple triumph of life over death or of the natural over the unnatural, either of which would tend to reinscribe notions that the erasure of

“contamination” (both in the sense of man-made technology contaminating the “natural” world, and in the sense of the conceptual contamination that this technology causes in the form of biotech) has “cleansed” the city and reestablished the correct “animacy hierarchy,” a term that Mel Y. Chen borrows from linguistics to discuss the arrangement of various forms of matter in terms of value (13). Rather, the life that emerges in Borne’s wake is “biotech, uncanny” (315). Some portion of it comes from the Company’s holding pools, where biotech was discarded alive, with the result that “[t]he strange, forgotten animals abandoned by the Company live among us,” Rachel says, “like Bornes that want

187 nothing from the old world” (317). Borne, with his final turn towards the nonhuman, has engendered a generation of Bornes who are, unlike him, not troubled by the need or desire to achieve human/person status. The “old world,” for them, is the world that adhered to such categorizations— the human-dominated world of civilization that has been, for a long time, dead. In the new world, where she too must live, Rachel comes to realize that “Borne was always trying to be a person because [she] wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means” (320). It is her hard-earned unknowingness, her effortful unlearning that allows her to persist, establishing a community with Wick— who, she has learned at the book’s climax, was never human, but instead some form of biotech created by the Company. Rachel herself, though human, came “from the Company,” arriving as a refugee through a portal from another world or time. As such, she and her parents

“weren’t human by Company rules,” but instead “parts, or biotech.” Her parents were murdered for this reason, and she was disposed of in the holding ponds until someone happened to kill or salvage her (300-1). The nonhuman, always, is that which is useful only when put to a purpose, in need of saving, and Rachel, who is used to being the humanitarian, now finds that she is no different from the “things” she saves.

No one, in the world of Borne, is really human. That is the knowledge Rachel gains, the knowledge that, paradoxically, enables her nescience when it comes to the human. When she predicts, at the close of the book, that the new “uncanny” life will

“outstrip all of us in time, and the story of the city will soon be their story, not ours,” her tone is not one of defeat— indeed, in the “fearlessness” of this new life, she claims to

188 find “a kind of solace,” and in its willingness to “pursue [its]own plans, [its] own destiny… relief” (317). This is not the end of a human that will soon no longer exist, or even, as Robertson suggests, an “ending [that] indicates a continuation… the end of the human that is in no way the end of the planet” (150), but a dissolving of a category that has enabled hierarchies of violence to create pain and destruction. Rachel herself participated in perpetuating this pain, injuring Borne, Wick, and herself with her insistence on valorizing the “old world.” Having turned her eyes toward the new world, she sees the possibility of a future— closing the novel describing the potential for the city’s river, once dead with pollution, to someday be beautiful again (323).

Bad Company?

A strange rainstorm also marks the conclusion of Animal’s People. Following

Animal’s vivid datura-induced hallucination in the jungle, the breaking of his fever and the arrival of rain convince him that he has died and entered paradise. As in Borne, the rain brings life; it even brings visions of a nontraditional, transgressive form of life.

Animal finds a series of cave paintings: “animals of every kind, leopards and deer and horses and elephants, there’s a tiger and a rhino, among them are small figures on two legs, except some have horns some have tails they are neither men nor animals, or else they are both” (352). The presence of these figures, which seem to defy categorization, causes Animal to decide that he has “found [his] kind, that “this place will be [his] everlasting home” (ibid). Significantly, this paradise exists in “the deep time when there was no difference between anything when separation did not exist when all things were together, one and whole before humans set themselves apart and became clever and made 189 cities and kampanis and factories (ibid). It is possible to read this description as hearkening back to the ahistorical vision of Edenic nature that William Cronon formatively critiques as constituting part of the “Trouble with Wilderness”— “a place outside of time, from which humans had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin” (10). Animal’s suggestion that human exile/separation from this paradise is tied to human cleverness, and specifically to civilization, industrialization, and technology, is deeply suspect insofar as it appears marked by the peculiarly Western nostalgic primitivism that displaces recuperative instincts onto the project of creating a purified “elsewhere,” free from the unsalvageable taint of the human-as-other-than- natural-being. The idea that the only home for the uncategorizable figure of the human/nonhuman transgressor is a utopian one, incapable of manifesting in historical- material time and space, would seem to suggest that this figure is doomed to the experience of statelessness and isolation that is indicated by Animal’s despairing weariness of being “an animal in a world of human beings.”

Yet I argue that, in fact, just as Sinha uses the humanitarian narrative to subvert that genre’s aims, he draws on this deeply inscribed ideal of utopian wilderness to reject the sacrality of its claim. There is, from the start, something perplexing about the notion that Animal would find his “home” and his “kind” in a paradisiacal jungle that exists in a present-pastness that is at once now and before cities, kampanis, and factories. Animal himself is a creation of the Kampani, his body “smelt[ed]” into its shape by the poisons that contaminate both his flesh and his community. He has, as Rob Nixon argues, been

“spawned by a kind of chemical autochthony” (54), and while the primary discourse

190 surrounding his body is that of animality, suggesting a being that may blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman while still possessed of a fundamental naturalness,

Animal himself argues that he has “no choice but to be unnatural.” This statement comes in reference to his desire to “mate” with a human woman, crossing species boundaries and thereby enacting the “radically changed culture of nature” that the industrial disaster has imposed on the city (ibid); however, Animal’s unnaturalness is also the result of his toxicity: the fact that this radically changed culture-nature (as I would prefer to term it) involves a contamination that refuses to remain contained and inert, but instead, as Nixon describes, “remain[s] dynamic, industrious, and live” (63). Nixon uses these adjectives to emphasize the “durability” and therefore capitalist excellence of the Kampani’s products; however, one might also see them as pointing to the ways in which these “invisible poisons” have become literally incorporated into the bodies of Khaufpur, becoming part of the lived experience and therefore the liveliness of the community. Twenty years after the accident, mothers fear to breastfeed their children because, as one tells Elli, “Our wells are full of poison. It’s in the soil, water, in our blood, it’s in our milk. Everything here is poisoned.” What’s more, she adds, “If you stay here long enough, you will be too”

(108). The “slow violence”— a term Nixon uses to refer to violence that does not conform to the sensational model we expect, but rather takes attritional forms that see it

“dispersed across time and space” (Nixon 2)— of the Kampani continues to happen, carried out by what Mel Y. Chen might term “animate contaminants” (167).

In one of the novel’s key moments, Zafar recounts a dream he has had under the influence of the datura that Animal has covertly fed him. In the dream, a crow offers him

191 a number of wishes. Zafar wishes to see the face of his enemy, and the crow shows him a vast building in which the Kampani houses doctors, engineers, chemists, “a thousand public relations consultants,” “three-and-thirty thousand lawyers,” a bunker full of atomic bombs, and a party for “generals and judges, senators, presidents and prime ministers, oil sheikhs, newspaper owners, movie stars, police chiefs, mafia dons, members of obscure royal families,” all friends of the Kampani (229). When Zafar protests that he wanted to see his enemy’s face, the crow replies, “The Kampani has no face” (ibid). This passage has been conventionally interpreted as suggesting that the “ahuman dimensions of neoliberal technology,” as Justin Omar Johnston puts it, present “a peculiarly contemporary problem” that Zafar’s humanist activism (predicated upon autonomous subjects and the recognition of every human as worthy of dignity and respect) cannot effectively confront. This interpretation is no less valid for being the obvious one; however, I would suggest that there is another sense in which the Kampani “has no face”: it exists not merely as a corporate entity comprising people and property throughout transnational networks, but also as the traces it has left behind in the form of contamination, which have annexed bodies and environments to it. Nixon begins to unintentionally hint at this when he speaks of “the spectral Kampani bosses [who] keep failing to materialize” throughout Animal’s People (51); in a sense, the Kampani, if not its bosses, has always been materially present in Khaufpur, its “excellent poisons” the obverse of the angry ghosts Animal understands as filling the abandoned factory.

Problematically, however, the environmental justice readings that would make sense of

192 this non-discrete ontology have typically been applied almost exclusively to the bodies of sufferer-survivors, and not to the assemblage of contamination itself.

Stacy Alaimo writes that environmental justice movements “epitomize a trans- corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act” (63), arguing that the recognition of the interconnectivity of the human with “the material, often toxic flows of particular places”

(62) has required a robust reconfiguration of social justice movements that have traditionally understood the human body as “bounded and coherent.” Yet her focus is on reading the ways in which victims of contamination have come to conceptualize their bodies as entangled with the environment of which they form a part. Mel Y. Chen’s discussion of animate contaminants, too, examines the experience of the recipients of toxins. Nixon perhaps comes closest to offering a substantial analysis of the apparatus through which contamination occurs, yet his principle concern is not with ontological reevaluation, or with questions of corporeality/embodiment. Perhaps because so much of environmental justice (and, more broadly, justice-oriented) writing is so heavily focused on vulnerability, one rarely encounters an elaboration of the trans-corporeal being of contaminators. One might be forgiven for getting the impression that the history of toxins is simply not relevant, or that poison intra-acts only with those whom it poisons. Yet toxins do have a history— one that is as diffuse and intra-active as their afterlife. A reading of toxicity as stemming from a discrete event or events of contamination— a single moment, like the splitting of an atom, from which consequences spread— divorces

193 the materiality of that event from the web of culpability it forms part of, and reinscribes the discreteness of the body through the implication that entanglement is not thoroughgoing, and takes place only when one substance penetrates another’s skin.

The question I hope to raise is this: at what point do the Kampani’s poisons cease to be the Kampani? If the answer is, as I would argue it is, that they do not, then the persistence of these poisons in the ecosystem of Khaufpur constitutes an ongoing presence on the part of the Kampani; the problem of Khaufpur is not that the Kampani can never be summoned so much as it is that the Kampani can never be erased, and that the bodies of Khaufpuris have thereby been incorporated into an apparatus in which they are allowed no agency. Animal’s People seems to communicate this idea through

Animal’s hallucinatory relationship with “Khã-in-the-Jar,” a preserved two-headed fetus he encounters at various points in the novel. Khã-in-the-Jar is a product of the industrial accident, aborted due to his deformities, who describes himself as a member of the

“Board of Directors” of the Kampani: an assembly of terribly injured, aborted children in jars who, being unborn, are the youngest of the Kampani’s victims and paid the highest price. “Never mind dying,” Khã-in-the-Jar says, “we never even got a fucking shot at life” (237). This, according to the Khã, makes them the Board of Directors, whose goal is

“[t]o undo everything the Kampani does. Instead of breaking ground for new factories to grow grass and trees over the old ones, instead of inventing new poisons, to make medicines to heal the hurts done by those poisons, to remove them from the earth and water and air…” (ibid) As their bodies contain the largest number of “shares” of the

Kampani’s poisons (which, the Khã says, everyone on earth has a share of in their body),

194 they have the right to determine the fate of the Kampani, if only by countering its actions.

Problematically, however, it is only in the haunted world of Animal’s mind that these spectral Kampani bosses possess a kind of authority.

The idea that Animal himself is of the Kampani— that perhaps he himself ought to qualify for some role in a terrestrial Board of Directors— is never explored in the book. Ultimately, Animal’s utopian paradise of oneness is abandoned in favor of the earthly, contaminated jungle in a scene that sees “the animals that were once absent” appearing in the midst of the rain, causing Zafar to declare, “hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast”— part of a Farsi poem he earlier recites that, in its complete couplet, declares: “If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this” (357). However, Animal remains more-or-less defined by the blurred contours of the animal/human binary, in spite of the neither-animal-nor-human “poisonwallah shares” that he carries in his idiosyncratic body.

The revelations that mark the climax of Borne, on the other hand, offer a more complicated vision of the relationship of its characters to their own Company. Borne, we discover, is not only biotech, but a biotech weapon, one of hundreds sent to Rachel’s city in the last shipment from the collapsing Company, intended (Rachel presumes) to

“absorb” the city and wipe it clean. Wick is not merely, as the book has up to this point suggested, a weary defector from the Company, but in fact its creation as well; Rachel discovers, deep within the Company, boxes full of “withered-away parts,” each of which contains “tossed aside,” “abandoned,” “discontinued” models of Wick’s face (299). And

Rachel, though a refugee from some collapsing distant world, is “from the Company.” In

195 spite of the Company’s withdrawal, it is difficult to find something in their world that is not in some way “contaminated” by the Company. Rachel recalls that in her native world,

“[m]alformed animals or rare ones could incite panic, and the newspapers ran articles about suspected biotech cornered and hacked to death by men with machetes” (238).

However, the boundary between the “natural” and the “unnatural” in the world of the city has, it seems, completely collapsed; in the book’s final pages, Rachel discovers that the oddly intelligent animals of the city have been tunneling into the deepest levels of the

Company building and rendering it their domain— “people, of a kind,” as Rachel describes them (294), who have plans of their own, which they arrange for “those with hands” to help them achieve. It is implied that these animals are all mutants— Rachel refers to some of them as being “in the guise of foxes,” and later mentions their ability to

“wink[] in and out of view as if slipping into and out of space, of time” ( 293-4).

Certainly, the animals have been carrying biotech out into the wider world, rendering that world an entirely Company ecosystem, but one over which the formal hierarchy of the

Company has no power. The Company, here, has been given over to a “Board of

Directors” composed entirely of the nonhuman and, in the wake of Borne’s cataclysmic consumption of Mord and the resulting rainstorm, a nonhuman drawn largely from the life that the Company has actively rejected by discarding it in their holding ponds.

The “real” leadership of the Company, in the world of Borne, is absent. As with

Animal’s People’s Kampani, they have abandoned the city they contaminated. Borne’s science-fictional setting, however, allows for an innovation: the Company has not retreated to a metaphorical “First World,” but to a literal other world on the opposite side

196 of a silver portal, a portal that the Company has closed behind it. When Rachel discovers this portal, she can still see the world beyond it: “a place undamaged by war, untouched by ruination by the Company… it was whole and functional and rich, and all of the other things our city was not and might never be” (294). Another character, the ex-Company biotech-producing Magician, tells her that the Company sent supplies through this portal, and the city sent products back. “They had made us dependent on them,” Rachel realizes.

“They had experimented on us. They had taken away our ability to govern ourselves…

And, in the end, the remnants of the Company had walled themselves off from us when they were done with us, when it became too dangerous” (296) Though the Company came from somewhere else (the exact nature of which Rachel accepts she may never fully understand), it “would always be embedded in our deepest history, against our will”

(ibid). The parallels here to real-life situations of industrial abuse and contamination, including to the Bhopal disaster that fictional Khaufpur of Animal’s People is rooted in, are not difficult to spot. Yet the situation Borne presents is both simpler and more complicated than the one that Animal faces. Where “Amrika” is a distant but viable location, a material utopia over the sea that Elli extends to Animal as a tantalizing escape from his contaminated city and body, the Company’s world is forever closed to Rachel.

There is no utopia. The Magician, who explains the nature of the portal to her, sees this as

“a terrible pity,” as she hoped to travel to the other side, but still hopes to use the portal and the lingering biotech that surrounds it to gain more power and assume leadership of the city. Rachel, on the other hand, delineates her view of the portal and the utopian glimpse it offers in a series of curious and defiant statements: “It… wasn’t real, and it

197 wasn’t going to save us. Any of us. And I refused to give it agency, allow it into my reality” (294). It is, she says, “a scene that would fill anyone from our ruined city with such yearning and, perhaps, recognition. It was so obvious a trap” (297).

The “trap” of that utopian glimpse lies in the way that the yearning and recognition Rachel perceptively identifies have the power to promise something that

Rachel identifies herself as wanting: the potential for something or someone to “pull a lever or push a button to fix [the city’s] situation, reset it, and bring forth everything afresh” (296). It is the promise of an uncontamination, a reverse flow of time, an erasure that will render Rachel’s world as pure and “whole” (the word that Rachel, significantly, uses) as the world on the portal’s other side. The allure of this promise is recognizably linked to the rhetoric of nature that looms large in Western mythos, the linkage of

“transcendent nature” to an Edenic whole imbued with sacred values while the

“contaminating taint of civilization” (Cronon 1) reminds us of our post-Fall residence in a broken world. If nature is (as Cronon writes of the wilderness that is meant to be its final bastion) “the ultimate landscape of authenticity… the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we are— or ought to be” (11), as the vision

Rachel sees through the portal suggests itself to be, it is both the deep-time paradise of

Animal’s datura vision and the real that must be returned to. Yet Rachel specifically defines it as not real, refusing its promise of an unruined city. Clearly, in an objective sense, it is real; what she seems to be asserting, therefore, is that it is not the real: she refuses to accept it as the standard against which her own [adopted] city must be defined, and against which it will always be defined as monstrous, poisoned, wasteland.

198

To say this is not to say that Rachel does not see the city as in need of salvation.

We have seen it through her eyes as a desperate and violent place, and upon her return she describes it as having been “torn apart by monsters” (309)— leaving neatly ambiguous the question of exactly who or what are the monsters she means. However, the utopian glimpse will not, cannot save; instead, it transfixes the viewer, positioning them as “[l]ike the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn, forever ‘near the goal’ of a union they’ll never in fact achieve,” as Lee Edelman writes of those who are “held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today and tomorrow are one” (30). Indeed, Rachel considers the possibility that the world on the other side of the portal is literally the future, displacing its toxic manufacture in the past. She also, however, wonders whether the other side of the portal is the past, displacing its toxicity in the future. The difference between temporalities seems slim.

What we are dealing with is not simply time, but rather spacetime: one as undivorced from the other. Time, after all, is meaningless without a material aspect. What matters is that Rachel’s world cannot now be uncontaminated. The Company will not only always be embedded in its deepest history, as she reflects, but— this being the case— in its worldline, the term that physics uses for the body of such a history in four-dimensional spacetime.

Where, then will salvation come from, if not from the utopian glimpse, and if no one remains in the depths of the Company to pull the lever or push the button that will reward Rachel’s world with the restart it deserves? It won’t, Rachel decides, come from the Magician, who seeks to replicate the processes of the Company she left. Instead, the

199 future is the animals who “had dug their way in, had come back into the place that had created their destroyed and destructible lives. The rats in the walls, who were in the process of rewiring everything, changing everything” (297). And, après the deluge of

Borne’s creation, the future is the rejected biotech in the holding ponds, as well as the new uncanny life revealed to have been breeding all along in the ground. However briefly, the future is even Wick and Rachel, who are, respectively, biotech and a refugee from another world. All of these are those who hold the largest number of “shares” in the

Company— whose bodies, in most cases literally, are the Company— both the damage it wrought, and the product it was made to sell. The future is thus not freedom from the

Company, which— as Rachel has already pointed out— will always contaminate the body of this world, but a revolution from within: the poisoned and even the poison itself rising up to seize control of the Company whose flesh they have always been, innovating new ways of living, vibrant survivals. “Wick tells me we live in an alternate reality,”

Rachel relates at the book’s close, “but I tell him the Company is the alternate reality…

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day” (318). Too, she says,

“I tell him the Company is the past preying on the future— that we are the future” (ibid).

The future has ir/erupted from the Company.

Apocalypse Nowish

In Animal’s People, it is less clear who the future is for, or what the future is. The book ends with Animal declaring: “All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us” (366). There are two references here: the specific poor here are presumably those whom Animal has

200 previously referred to as “[his] people”: the people of the Nutcracker, who “have nothing” yet who, to Elli’s disbelief, refuse the humanitarian aid she offers— foreshadowing Animal’s own eventual (differently motivated) refusal of that aid. To call them simply “the poor” seems therefore curiously incomplete; they are not only poor, but contaminated— “someone’s sick in every house in the Nutcracker, in many houses everyone is sick,” Animal says (183). Animal also points towards this state of contamination in describing them as the “people of the Apokalis,” a phrase that Ma

Franci uses to discuss her delusional belief that the industrial accident in Khaufpur marked the start of the Christian Apocalypse. “Listen,” she says, “injustice will triumph, thousands will die in horrible ways. Well, what else happened that night?” (63) In Ma

Franci’s vision of the Apocalypse, the scorpions that live in the walls of the home she shares with Animal will grow to the size of horses and grow insect wings. “They’ll have faces like people and long hair like women, but their teeth will be like lions’ teeth…

They’ll wear golden crowns, when they beat their wings, it’ll sound like an army of chariots rushing to war” (62). The Apocalypse would seem, therefore, to be populated by

“unnatural” creatures who occupy no clear category, having both human and animal aspects; these creatures are not, as one might expect, horrific monsters, but rather righteous punishers of the wicked who enact justice, presumably on behalf of God. The end of the Apocalypse ought to be marked by not by a return to categorizability, but rather to the abolition of category, as Animal experiences in his vision of “paradise,” by the destruction of the sinful material world, and by the abolition of time. Upon encountering Zafar and Farouq in the jungle, when he has emerged from his datura-

201 induced hallucinations, he assumes that “[t]he Apokalis and the bad times are over” (354) and that they are in heaven, where, though they are dead, “there is nothing of [them] that will die,” as Animal says of himself. They are no longer “people of the Apokalis”— so what does it signify that, at the end, Animal reiterates this identification, and that he posits a world in which the future is full of others like him?

Ma Franci’s Apokalis is a Catholic apocalypse, relocated to Khaufpur rather than

Jerusalem because, she says, “there are thousands upon thousands of dead here ready and waiting. God wants the Resurrection to get off to a good start” (329). The violence wreaked upon Khaufpur will be repaid by the visitation of angels, the punishment of the wicked, and the rising of the dead. The people of the Apokalis will be safe because God

“will shelter them, no more shall they suffer hunger or thirst, nor have to do heavy work, never again will they be tormented by the sun nor by burning winds… he will heal their sores and their coughs and fevers and he will wipe the tears from their eyes” (353). A cosmic balance will be achieved, one that has always already been written into a “sacred history” of which the Apocalypse and its aftermath are but the end (Fenn 108). As

Rebekah Sheldon writes, apocalypse “designates that which has always already been awaiting our discovery, now at the end of the quest literally unveiled” (41); in specifically religious terms, this end is an inevitable “utopian transformation of the body

(and the body politic) through suffering,” as Elana Gomel writes (406). “The worse are the tribulations before the end, the better is whatever follows,” Gomel observes (408), as

Ma Franci would certainly agree: she delights in the notion of the world burning and turning to dust, presumably owing not only to what Gomel sees as the “narrative

202 pleasure” that arises from imagining the “bizarre and opulent tribulations” visited upon bodies, but also from a justified vindictiveness: a delight at the prospect of justice, so long elusive, being granted to her and to the Khaufpuris, along with their eternal

(entelechial?) reward.

Presumably, once the Apocalypse is over, the people of the Apokalis will cease to be the people of the Apokalis; indeed, perhaps they will cease to be people, as Richard

Fenn notes that in some versions of Christian apocalypse, “the individual is absorbed on the final day into a collectivity engaged in continual adoration of the only One who has any remaining claim to uniqueness, authority, and finality” (108). The “apocalyptic promise” is one of total homogeny— if not a practical homogeny, then certainly an ideological one, as “the soul [must be] fitted into an authorized version of the sacred story” in order to enter into paradise” (ibid). (Fenn notes the extreme degree of conformity anticipated by and imposed by apocalyptic believers such as Pat Robertson.)

Through the lens of homogeneity, there is perhaps something suspect about the resurrection of the body and the promise of perfect bodily health. To what model of the human body are all the saved “corrected”? Animal, for instance, suffers a “great disappointment” when he believes himself to be in paradise but finds that he is “still bent”; “in paradise I thought I would be upright,” he reflects, “didn’t Ma promise it?”

(353) Just as the “soul” must be fitted through orthodoxy, so the body must also fit.

Paradise is a place that permits no extrusions.

Apocalypse, then, is upheaval, a break in time that upends order, but what it portends is a time-beyond-time in which upheaval will be past, an equilibrated utopia that

203 reproduces only itself “beyond duration” (Sheldon 41). To conceive of oneself as “of the

Apokalis” therefore potentially situates one as inhabiting a moment of temporary catastrophe, holding one’s breath until the foreordained end. As Richard Klein writes of the nuclear sublime, the “time and tense” of the apocalyptic imagination is “the already of a not yet” (79). In this sense, the apocalypse can function as a form of temporal displacement in which things fall apart but need not be repaired because the end is soon, and because the very fact of their falling-apart-ness presages an imminent coming- together. The attraction of this idea becomes evident if we consider Ma Franci’s vision of the Apokalis as beginning with the industrial disaster in Khaufpur: faced with the scale of the death and suffering produced by this incident, as well as with the unprecedented dispersal of its toxic effects— not to mention the ease with which the Kampani avoided culpability— Ma Franci could not conceive of any reparations for such damage, or of a world that was doomed not to be repaired. The Kampani disaster marked a rupture past which it was no longer possible to see the present as stable and self-reproducing. The solution that apocalyptic imagining offered was one not only of restoration, but also of suffering patched with reward.

Animal’s hunger for this brand of thinking comes across clearly in his jungle idyll. So reluctant is he to sacrifice the end that has come at last that he weeps and struggles with Zafar and Farouq when they come to find him. “Do not take me away from here, not unless it’s to the city of god,” he says, raving “about how dying was no big deal, that living in darkness and poverty was the real problem” (356). When Zafar convinces him that the world has not ended, Animal describes himself as “los[ing his] immortality.”

204

He narrates that in that moment: “I knew then that Zafar really was alive and so was I.

Life dropped like a heavy mantle about my shoulders and I began to weep for pity that I was to return to the city of sorrows” (357). Yet he does return, accepting the burden of life and its “organic messiness,” which Gomel positions as opposed to the “image of purity” that is the ultimate object of apocalypse, the “crystalline New Jerusalem” (405).

And when offered the chance to escape his poverty for some window of time and

“correct” his apocalyptic body, he instead opts to remain one of the people of the

Apokalis.

Perhaps Animal believes that divine retribution is still coming, even though it has not arrived yet. After all, he reiterates his faith in paradise, saying that he believes he will someday meet Ma Franci there (365). Yet he also tells the tape recorder into which he’s speaking that he has told the novel’s story in order to “find out what the end should be”

(ibid)— not how to conclude his narration, but whether he ought to travel to America for surgery. The “end” is thus an earthly one, not eschatological, and involves deliberately turning away from the homogenous, towards an affirmation of his own prodigious nature.

“Is life so bad?” he asks— a question that feels rhetorical, but demands a complicated answer. If life is not so bad, then it is not apocalyptic; it is merely life, the opposite of lifeless paradise. The novel’s last line, with its prediction of the growing numbers of the people of the Apokalis, functions similarly. It is a prophecy of suffering, yet in that it is a novel construction. The future is no longer a utopian place that can act as a container for the suffering of the present, a site to which that suffering can be displaced and transformed through quasi-magical means into wealth and significance. Instead, it holds

205 only more of the same apocalypse. The people of the Apokalis become not those born at a particular moment in time, but those who live a situation of unfolding precarity that is not spatiotemporal in nature, and in fact violates the expected rules of spatiotemporality.

Elli shares a conversation with a wealthy Khaufpuri friend who laments that Khaufpur has become synonymous with poison: “I curse the day the Kampani came here because its disaster erased our past” (152). Animal (the apocalyptic body) has also forgotten, as

Rob Nixon notes, his “childhood human name,” which Nixon describes as “as lost as his city’s culturally rich, prelapsarian, pretoxic past” (54). In this way, apocalypse becomes a condition that doesn’t only not anticipate an ending, but that obliterates its own beginning.

This is a construction of apocalypse that is particularly suited to contamination— particularly contamination of the nature that appears in both Animal’s People and Borne.

The apocalypse created on “that night” in Animal’s People continues on, renewing itself without end, not only in the bodies of those who experienced the disaster, but in the bodies of those who drink from the poisoned wells and pass toxins on to their children.

The abandoned site of the factory, Animal is warned, still holds the potential to reprise the disaster, and in the book’s climax, a fire Animal accidentally sets sees this potential actualized: a material reenactment of the trauma that haunts Khaufpur (and I use the term haunts advisedly; though Animal experiences the factory’s ruins as populated by the ghosts of the dead, the real specter is the trace presence that moves through the collective body of Khaufpur, an event that is “over” but refuses to end). The work of the Company, in Borne, is similarly prone to the “leakages” (in Rob Nixon’s term) that fill Animal’s

206

People— leakages that bleed across the domains of both space and time. Rachel recalls how even in the world of her birth (presumably another satellite realm of the Company) biotech was presumed to be “already out in the world more than people knew… pretending, trying to blend in, to escape notice” (238), and by the end of the book we see the astounding extent to which this is true— the extent to which there is no space of the

“natural” any longer. The Company’s effects on time are equally dramatic: not only has the city Rachel inhabits been seemingly robbed of its history by devastation, but a series of odd memory-related issues punctuate Borne’s narrative. Rachel cannot recall her own arrival in the world of the book, as Wick has used his biotech skills to wipe her memory, at her own request. Borne has no knowledge of his own origins, and learns at a superhuman rate through absorbing the consciousnesses of those he kills, something that

Wick sees as “ransack[ing] their memories” (185) but that Borne sees as keeping them alive forever “inside of [him]” (222). In Borne’s apocalypse, both beginnings and endings are unstable, because biotech both erases the past and contaminates the future with uncanny persistence.

There is a question, of course, as to whether what is happening in Borne could correctly be called an apocalypse. Reviews of the novel have consistently described it as post-apocalyptic (Locke; Hand) or as occurring “after the biotech apocalypse”

(Mukherjee), though the Los Angeles Review of Books embraced the term “post- apocalyptic” while heading the review in question “Apocalypse Soon” (Langer). Even

Robertson characterizes the landscape of the novel as “postapocalyptic” (144), while emphasizing that VanderMeer’s focus is distinct in its interest in what is given life by the

207 apocalypse, rather than what survives. Few of these interpretations of Borne address the nature of the apocalypse in question; Jessica Langer, in the LARB, seems to consider

Borne an example of “climate fiction,” implying that it is concerned with ecological disaster, and Robertson argues that “it would be difficult for any reader not to see Borne as a partisan statement about the need for political action on climate change and other ravages of the Anthropocene” (146). Yet no such climate disaster is suggested in the book. Rather, the key element seems to be industrial contamination. Rachel mentions the

“poisoned river,” a lack of “real rain,” and the fact that “[e]ven real rain was often poison” (16); Borne describes the city as “sick everywhere,” full of “low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff” (144). This contamination is not the result of one single toxic incident, but of long abuse by the Company. This already complicates the question of the apocalypse’s beginning, suggesting that it has emerged from the non-apocalyptic, the ordinary, in a way that complicates the binary of ordinary/apocalypse. In spite of this,

Borne does seem to initially situate itself within the genre of the post-apocalypse, which

James Berger reads as the discourse of “aftermaths and remainders,” a narrative that, as

Elana Gomel puts it, “seems to be concerned not with the sharp moment of death but with the interminable duration of dying” (408), the process that lingers a little while after the fatal wound. (Paradise, one might say, is apocalypse’s afterlife.)

Rachel’s attempt to “salvage” Borne is, as I have already recounted, certainly marked by elements of mourning for a world that is already dead: the “civilized” human world that is no longer viable. Yet what the climax of the book reveals is that Rachel has not been inhabiting a carefully preserved remnant of that world— that, in many ways, she

208 herself is not its “pure” remnant. The history of the city is not her own; the domestic world she has constructed and maintained with Wick is one in which he has secretly agonized over his nonhumanity and his sense of being not-a-person, writing in a confessional letter that he only slowly learned to consider himself capable of being a person, and that still, after the arrival of Borne, he didn’t believe himself to be so— that he is “more like Borne,” and that when Rachel “told [him] [Borne] was human, [he] felt less human, less real” (306). Too, Rachel’s “child,” the role that, in the post-apocalyptic genre— Sheldon argues— often serves to promise the “restoration of ordered progression” (90), and a solution to the “problem of proper reproduction” (92), the rejection of the “radical foreclosure of human futurity implied by the postapocalyptic setting” (ibid), is in fact not only nonhuman, but directly complicit in (if not responsible for) the foreclosure of human futurity in the miraculous surge of nonhuman life that occurs after his consumption of Mord.

In other words, Borne is not concerned with aftermaths and remainders, but rather with an ongoing ecological unfolding that takes place without concern for the “sense of an ending,” intermixing human and nonhuman life without distinction and enfolding contamination into itself without moral valence. Applicable here is Sheldon’s reading of

Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, in which she suggests that “the threat does not come from the collapse of the future but from its uncanny duration beyond the end (ibid)”, that “[t]hough the conceit of the novel hinges on the idea that the apocalyptic

Event has rendered the soil no longer suitable for cultivation,” elements of the novel suggest “that some life continues to thrive” (ibid). The polluted world of Borne is not

209 wholly beyond cultivation; Rachel notes that with the terror of Mord gone, wells are “dug or cleaned out, filtered,” vegetables are planted, and there are “rumors of an orchard or two” (519). She spies lights, some of them electric, “a part of the old world brought back to us,” and perhaps for this reason characterizes the city as “new-old” (ibid). Yet at the same time, she is clear that the old world will never be rebuilt, and that the new world belongs to the spreading biotech animals amongst whom the human communities live. In this sense, Borne has served as Rachel’s “sacred child,” but not as she initially tried to make him, and not as the sacralizing figure of the child usually serves in narratives of the

[post-]apocalypse. Rather than promising a human future and eventual reinstatement of a harmonious order (not least of all a loss that is “not of nature per se but of a particular relationship to the natural” (Sheldon 93), a relationship rooted in human containment of the nonhuman), a promise that is akin to the Edenic paradise that is always both infinitely before and infinitely after us, as Animal’s experience of originary “deep time” suggests,

Borne promises transformation, a continuance stripped of self-similarity, of repetition.

Borne delivers catastrophe as Sheldon envisions it: something that “rewrites ecology as a refusal of the finality of an end and the metaphysics of health or sickness that accompanies such an ending and that is always implicitly tied to some criterion, some desirable outcome” (42). If Rachel who rejects the specter of paradise when she refuses to allow the Company’s portal to haunt her, it is Borne who renders that ever-postponed paradise out of bounds forever when he ensures the nonhuman’s (and the contaminated, or indeed the contaminant’s) proliferation. The apocalypse that is never a post- apocalypse— never merely a dying body’s last twitch, but that body’s continual

210 transmutation in ways that may be alien, difficult, or painful, but that resist, as in

Animal’s People, the label of damaged, deformed, or wrong— continues with vibrant disruption in its non-teleological directions. This is the ecology, not the people, of the

Apokalis.

In/ter-animacy

The nature of Borne’s apocalyptic ecology, however, defies expectations that attach themselves to the notion of “ecology.” Even Sheldon, after all, characterizes what thrives after the so-called apocalypse as “life,” if nonhuman life, an idea that Animal’s

People affirms in its assumption that where the nonhuman finds its flourishing is in the animal. The inorganic appears in Animal’s People only as that which corrupts or breaks the world: poisons, toxins, technology, “cities and kampanis and factories.” Animal characterizes the ruins of the factory as a place where “a silent war is being waged,” where “Mother Nature’s trying to take back the land,” where plants appear as though

“they want to rip down everything the company made” (31). The “Board of Directors” headed by Khã-in-the-Jar frames its goals in terms of a similar opposition between life and nonlife: they aim not merely to ameliorate the damage done by the Kampani, but to

“grow grass and trees” over the old factories. There is, perhaps, an implicit focus on life as that which is vulnerable, as attested through its Kampani-inflicted suffering; though

Judith Butler writes that “[i]t does not suffice to say that because life is precarious, therefore it must be preserved” (33), the subtitle of the book in which this assertion appears— “When is Life Grievable?”— suggests that though not all life is always grievable, that which is not life never is. The reasons for this are complex; I will highlight 211 here chiefly that what is not life, we understand, cannot be dead, for we do not attribute to it the autonomous and unified wholeness that we understand death as ending. (Mel Y.

Chen notes that key factors in determining the position of a word in hierarchies of animacy tend to be the agency and individuation of its referent [25-6].) What is alive is always at risk of being not-alive, a risk that is directly entangled with its being; that is, the distinct and bounded quality of self-identity that is always at risk. By contrast, in

Animal’s People, the invulnerable Kampani “has no face”; its buildings and chemicals do not decay; these inhuman qualities are contrasted with the precarious living beings of

Khaufpur. Significantly, what is not life can also not be contaminated; or rather, a river may be poisoned and a well contaminated, but these qualities only signify insofar as they harm life. There are no laments for rocks, wells, walls, or soil in Animal’s People. What is non-life appears only as contaminant or as shelter, vessel for contaminant, annexed to the opposing army that threatens lively being. It is no wonder that Animal, in rejecting the constraints of the human, must turn to that which is nonhuman yet still life, and thereby imbued with value. An animal may not be human, but it can still be.

In Borne, questions of being are not so simple. Borne, when Rachel “salvages” him, is initially a “thing” that cannot be distinguished further, an it that “had not yet become ‘he’” (6), and in fact had not become alive at all. “What is this thing?” Rachel asks Wick, noting that “it” pulses, but comparing this pulse not to a heartbeat, but to a lamp (8). “What isn’t it?” Wick replies— “That’s the first question” (9). This question proves prescient when Borne demonstrates the characteristics of a number of beings.

From a “thing,” Rachel first treats him as a plant (17). Borne grows in size and learns to

212 speak, manifesting animal and human qualities, yet when Rachel plays a “game” to try and determine what he is, she first asks if he is a machine, which she defines as a “made thing. A thing made by people” (though Borne points out that she was made by two people, and therefore should qualify as a machine) (44). Rachel returns to this idea of

Borne-as-machine later, but Borne insists, “I am not a machine. I am a person. Just like you, Rachel” (63). At the same time, Borne demonstrates the ability to be, for example, a rock: a rock that Rachel can hide inside, and a rock that can be injured, a rock that leads to his first experience of himself as “vulnerable” (107), but still a rock. He does not seem to regard being a rock as incompatible with being a person. In his diary, he writes a list of speculative statements about himself: “I was made by the Company. I was made by someone. I am not actually alive. I am a robot. I am a person. I am a weapon. I am not/intelligent” (189-90). This seems to serve as way for him to try and make sense out of distinctions that do not come naturally to him. Rachel notices early on that Borne struggles to understand what it means for something to be “dead” or “alive”;

“[s]ometimes,” she notes, “Borne said that something was dead if it didn’t move, like a chair. Or a hat” (69). Later, he hangs three skeletal bodies on the wall in his apartment and is puzzled as to why Rachel finds this ghoulish, despite the fact that he understands they are dead— “They’re definitely not living in there anymore,” he says, as though this might be exculpating; “I promise you, there’s no one there” (142)— suggesting that perhaps he still fails to understand some essential distinction between dead and not-life.

Long after Rachel thinks he has mastered this distinction, Borne insists that he does not kill the people he eats; rather, he “absorb[s]. Digest[s]. It is all alive. In me” (185). When

213 he accepts that he has killed them, he tells Rachel, “I killed them but they’re not dead… I don’t think they will ever die” (222). With the grammar of death so evidently beyond him, Rachel surmises that “[t]o him… there was no death, no dying, and in the end we stood on opposite sides of a vast gulf of incomprehension. Because what was a human being without death?” (ibid).

This is, perhaps, the moment at which Rachel realizes that she could never have made Borne “human”— that his experience of the world could never have fitted into what she understands as human rules or grammar, which rest upon the foundational divisions of Western liberal culture (still visible in Animal’s People, for all its posthumanist strengths). For an account of these divisions, I turn to Elizabeth Povinelli, who argues that biopower— the technology of governance that offers a disciplinary

“power over man insofar as man is a living being,” as Foucault writes (243), a state control over human biological life and function that most scholars view as characteristic of the modern era— is in fact only a manifestation of a larger geontopower that is concerned with the maintenance of the distinction between what Povinelli terms “Life” and “Nonlife.” What unites multiple forms of power (sovereignty, disciplinary power, biopower), Povinelli writes, “is a common but once unmarked ontological assertion, namely, that there is a distinction between Life and Nonlife that makes a difference” (8).

From this ontological assertion flow a framework of beliefs about intentionality, vulnerability, and ethics (35); it is “the fundamental ground of the governance of difference and markets” (ibid), and is stringently policed in the face of instability and increasing entanglement. Povinelli, whose anthropological work occurs in collaboration

214 with the indigenous peoples of Australia, notes that “settler liberalism” has often worked to contain challenges to geontopower from indigenous populations who insisted that

“Nonlife acts in ways only available to Life” by bracketing such a belief as “impossible if not absurd,” and those who hold it as safely “Other” (21); however, geontopower’s increasing visibility in the face of the leakiness and collapse of its boundaries means that disputes are not so easily fenced in.

These irrupting disputes mean, Povinelli argues, that geontopower’s distinguishing brackets are now “debatable, fraught, and anxious.” She notes: “It is certainly the case that the statement ‘clearly, x humans are more important than y rocks’ continues to be made, persuade, stop political discourse” (9). In fact, Animal’s People features exactly such an example, when the wealthy Khaufpuri’s lament about the erasure of Khaufpur’s past is met by a pointed response from Elli: “Also erased thousands of people” (152). The fact that her friend urges her to “[f]orget about the disaster,” claiming that it is only “some people in the slums” who cannot move on, suggests that the reader is meant to accept the legitimacy of her position. People are worth more than history— the hierarchy of animacy becomes a calculus. Yet Povinelli claims that there is now, increasingly, “a slight hesitation, the pause, the intake of breath that… can interrupt an immediate assent” to this notion (9). From this widening crack in reasoning comes the imaginings of Borne, which seems to mark what Povinelli sees as the giving-way of posthuman critique to post-life critique (14).

Povinelli offers a “formula” that she claims is, in the Anthropocene, “unraveling:”

“Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife” (9). Some of the ways in

215 which Borne disrupts this formula are, perhaps, already clear; his failure to distinguish not only between the dead and the living but between objects that can and cannot die suggests an experience of the world in which these divisions are not meaningful or, more significantly, preexisting. More interestingly, his attempts to articulate his experience of

“absorbing”— something he does not only with life, but with not-life, indiscriminately

(23)— suggest a view of the world where the rules of animacy simply do not apply.

That is to say, Borne does not regard the things and people he eats as undifferentiatedly inanimate— unindividuated, without identity or agency, and therefore licit for consumption. Nor, however, does he consider them to lose their individuation and agency through their assimilation into his own flesh. At times, he refers to himself as “knowing” things that he’s eaten, and he writes in his journal that he “can still see [the things he’s eaten] inside of [him], and talk to them, and they are still who or what they were before”

(203). His observation about the “dead astronauts” whose skeletons he hangs on his wall suggests an obscure understanding of identity or, perhaps, entity that does not see these qualities as being bound to physical bodies— the dead astronauts “have gone away,” but have not ceased to exist. Meanwhile, he attributes animate qualities to the bodies themselves, saying that he put them in his apartment because “[t]hey seemed lonely…

Now I have rescued them. Now they’re safe, I think” (143). What Borne attributes to the entities around him is a capacity for presence and relationship (inter/intra-recognition, knowability) that is keyed neither to animacy nor inanimacy, but rather exceeds such a division and renders it indeterminable.

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In his approach, it’s possible that Borne is in some ways drawing on the landscape of the city itself, which renders Povinelli’s formula incoherent in ways that Rachel seems unable to see. She herself relies on biotech that is machine-life: “alcohol minnows” that are swallowed for a sensation of drunkenness, “diagnostic worms” and “surgical slugs” that repair the body, “neuro-spiders” and “attack beetles” that work as weapons. Mord, the giant bear that terrorizes the city, began as a Company scientist who was made into an animal with technology. When Rachel journeys to the Company late in the book, she speaks of “biotech traps” that erupt “in the form of behemoths, leviathans, illusions of life that snapped impotently at the empty air and cast around for flesh to rend, and then fell back down into spasms of their own false dying” (264), “[l]ittle curling shrimp creatures trapped in puddles that hatched and died, hatched and died perpetual, the same organism over and over, its own procreation” (264-5). The earth of the city itself isn’t “dead or alive, but contested between the animate and the inanimate,” seeded with “the Company life that had been discarded and dispersed like dandelion tufts… so even a derelict, abandoned lot toxic with oil pools and black mold might in a week or a year or a century blossom into strange life” (154). It is incredible that, in such an environment, Rachel could insist on maintaining geontopolitical divisions. Yet perhaps this is not so surprising given the determination with which she clings to a fantasy of Western liberal human life that, after all, relies on geontopower as its engine.

Indeed, though Povinelli points out “the increasingly unavoidable entanglements of Life and Nonlife in contemporary capitalism” (41), she also argues that industrial capital “vigorously polices the separations between forms of existence so that certain

217 kinds of existents can be subjected to different kinds of extractions” (20), the implication being that capitalism specifically relies on geontopower as its engine— an insight that is consonant with Jason Moore’s argument that capitalism is itself “a way of organizing nature” (2)— the “production of knowledges aimed at controlling, mapping, and quantifying the worlds of commodification and appropriation” (20). The Company, as a kind of blank avatar of capitalism, lays this productive technology bare: biotech, as property, “parts,” or “experiments,” can be easily used and disposed of, and Rachel can be disposed of with equal facility if she is classified thus. “Made things,” as Rachel articulates—“something made of either metal or flesh,” she explains to Borne, “[b]ut not through natural biological means” (45)— are machines, and therefore not-life; even ambiguously living “made things” are properly property, and therefore ranked below biological life. Once again, what is at work is a calculus of animacy subtended by geontopower. Not only are more animate things of greater value than less animate things, but less animate things are appropriately the objects to the subjects that are more animate things. (Chen notes a study that demonstrates the likelihood of words for less animate things receiving distinct ergative markings when appearing as subjects, “in a kind of communicative reassurance that such types of subjects could indeed possess the agentive or controlling capacities required to do the action provided by the verb” [25].)

Borne’s inadvertent achievement is to expose this geontopolitical logic as contingent, de-naturalizing it and making possible the vision of a post-life world that is, in the end, the only way for the city to truly triumph over the Company. Significantly, this occurs through his destabilization of Povinelli’s innermost set of brackets: he is a

218 child who is borne rather than born, whose growth is foregrounded as “unnatural,” and who is neither a reproduction of Rachel’s physiology nor capable of reproducing the human values that Rachel longs for him to adopt. While his eventual rejection of

Rachel’s “salvage” operation is vital and necessary for the embrace of nonhuman identity that enables him to triumph over Mord and replenish the city, Rachel’s motherly affection for Borne entails an acceptance of him as fulfilling the role of child. That is: as Rachel’s

“child,” Borne functions as an embodiment of the future and a promise of survival, but his grafted nature helps Rachel to recognize that this future is not human— that the future can be not-human, and yet not represent her own failure or death. Indeed, if the future is

(as it appears to be) one of a total collapse of geontopolitical logic, in which the boundaries of life/nonlife, nature/society, and human/nonhuman have ceased to be meaningful at all, then there is no reason why a not-human future cannot be Rachel’s— that is, in the genitive sense. For her to engender the future does not necessitate self- similarity, supremacy, or ownership, and when she speaks of a “we” who can “make [a world] here”— not a new world, with its overtones of erasure and apocalypse— she is not speaking of humans. She is speaking of herself and Wick, a machine who is also a person, Company-made flesh. Perhaps she is speaking of the larger in/ter-animate city: the humans, the Company’s abandoned and intelligent animals, the ambiguously lively alcohol minnows and biotech microorganisms, the mutant children, the Mord-crafted bears who have “their own intricate chirping, huffing language and have begun to develop their own customs” (317), the natural and unnatural plants. She is speaking of an entire ecosystem of vital, determined, violent, monstrous, and curious contamination—

219 though perhaps “contamination” is the wrong word for what has become, in the end, only part of a vast and roiling body that admits no hierarchy within itself, and exiles nothing to its outside.

Epilogue

To endorse the logic I have just outlined allows and even demands a rethinking of the concept of contamination. It asks us to consider that life has no superior quality to nonlife, and that what we take to be a war between life and nonlife is perhaps something altogether different: the obscure mechanics of an ecosystem that births and consumes itself in equal measure. There is, in this recognition, a risk of understating the suffering of those affected by contamination— animate and inanimate alike. By specifying the potential suffering of all entities, I hope to highlight that a re-focusing on the inadequacy of an animate/inanimate divide does not foreclose the possibility of suffering, but extends it to those from whom it has often been withheld. Indeed, Povinelli challenges the life/nonlife distinction by exploring case studies of indigenous Australian entities that are vulnerable on account of being classed as nonlife. The goal of such a concept, in other words, is not to minimize the deaths of those who perish in industrial accidents, but to acknowledge that the death of culture and history, of landscape and artifact, is also a loss.

Yet at the same time, this work necessitates redrawing the maps of suffering. If, for instance, we understand Animal’s body trans-corporeally, as something that both inheritance and environment (most significantly, his chemical exposure) have wrought, we begin to see him not as a human whose extant and “pure” potential body has been violated, corrupted— a utopian glimpse that Elli dangles before him when she imagines 220 the life he might have had if he had been born in New York— but rather as co-extensive embodiment of life and nonlife forces who struggles with the problem of pain. (This seems to be Animal’s own perception, based on his choice at the novel’s end.) Such a reconceptualization not only destroys the idea of the chemical-affected body as a deformed version of itself (the humanist logic that underpins the “salvage” impulse), but also opens the door to the “Board of Directors” I have previously discussed: those who

“own shares” in the toxicity that comprises part of their bodies, and who as such ought to be allotted governing power in its assemblage. By ceasing to draw distinctions between what is and is not properly “of the body,” what can and cannot be considered part of the self, we empower rather than dehumanize those who have been victims of

Companies/Kampanis that want us to struggle, as Wick and Borne do, with what it means to be a person, and whether it’s possible to be a person when one is “contaminated.” The answer that new approaches to being offer is simply and always: yes.

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Chapter 4. What’s [Inter]Penetrating You?

The central narrative of Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s 2017 novel

Fever Dream unfolds as a dialogue. We enter, in medias res, the strange interrogation of the narrator, a woman who is dying, by a boy who is attempting to help her realize the exact moment when what is killing her began. This process requires her to tell him the story of everything that has happened since she first came to her vacation home in this small rural town. She has to be observant, the boy tells her. She can’t leave out the details. He prompts her with questions: “What else? What else is happening in that very moment?” (His speech is represented in italics, as though his voice is ambivalently real.)

Yet there is no clear logic that governs what details are and are not important; when the woman, whose name we learn is Amanda, demands to know where her daughter, Nina, is, she is told this doesn’t matter. The fact that she is going to die in a few hours is similarly unimportant. But the fact that Nina has a habit of running around the vacation house in circles at lunchtime is important, as is the memory of a three-legged dog that crosses the street after running out of a field. “I need to understand which things are important and which things aren’t,” Amanda pleads (“Necesito entender qué cosas son importantes y qué cosas no” (58 English; 46 Spanish). But she doesn’t. She can’t. The boy, David, can tell her only that it’s “something in the body. But it’s almost imperceptible, we have to pay attention” (“Se trata de algo en el cuerpo. Pero es casi 222 imperceptible, hay que estar atento”) (66 English; 51 Spanish). But the exact moment never seems to arrive: it centers around an incident in which Amanda, Nina, and David’s mother observed the delivery of several plastic drums containing a substance toxic enough that the drum-handlers have to wear gloves, and a sudden wetness on Amanda and Nina’s clothing, and a strange smell, and Amanda’s sudden sickness. “This is the moment,” David says (“Este es el momento”). “Don’t get distracted. We’re looking for the exact moment because we want to know how it starts” (“No te distraigas. Buscamos el punto exact porque queremossaber cómo empieza”) (90 English; 66 Spanish). Yet “the exact moment” (“el punto exacto,” an even more narrow and rigid delineation than “el momento”) seems to both keep happening and never quite happen. It eludes Amanda and

David, as— David suggests— it has in other retellings, which Amanda does not remember: “We’ve already talked about the poison, the contamination. You’ve already told me four times how you got here” (“Ya hablamos del veneno, de la intoxicación. Ya me contaste cómo llegaste hasta acá cuatro veces”) (110 English; 79 Spanish). David jumps ahead in the story, careless, because without any clear sense of its passing, “[t]he important thing [has] already happened. What follows are only consequences” (131)— in the Spanish, “Lo important ya pasó. Lo que sigue son solo consecuencias” (92).

Has Amanda’s illness been caused by whatever was in the plastic drums? Is this same substance related to the dead bird in a stream that David drank from, or a horse that sickened after drinking from the same stream? What has altered David and the other children of the town, some of whom “go through poisoning episodes” (“sufrieron intoxicaciones”) and some of whom “are born already poisoned, from something their

223 mothers breathed in the air, or ate or touched” (“ya nacieron envenenados, por algo que sus madres aspiraron en el aire, por algo que comieron o tocaron”) (151 English; 104

Spanish)? The implication seems to be that this is what David is trying to discover: the

“exact moment” of Amanda’s contamination, and what this would allow the two of them to understand about the knotted web of connections that ties their bodies together. Yet time and space have become unstable and disjointed. “Is this about the poison?” Amanda asks. (“¿Se trata del veneno?”) “It’s everywhere, isn’t it, David?” (“Está de todas partes,

¿no, David?”) David replies, “The poison was always there.” (“Simpre estuvo el veneno”) (169 English; 116 Spanish). When Amanda reflects yet again on the afternoon when she encountered the plastic drums, she laments that the “rescue distance” she monitors, her sense of the distance she would need to cross to save her daughter, “didn’t work, [she] didn’t see the danger” (“no funcionó, no vi el peligro) (170 English; 116

Spanish). The book’s title in its original Spanish is, in fact, Distancia de rescate, or

Rescue Distance, foregrounding the disordering of geographies that’s at its heart and the disrupted calculations that consequently pour outwards, even as David— the dogged and increasingly sinister investigator— tries his hardest to make sense of them.

Reviewers have described Fever Dream as a “toxic eco-horror tale” (Meyer), an

“ecological horror story… almost as if Henry James had scripted a disaster movie about toxic agribusiness” (Economist), situating it in the context of growing concern about the effects of pesticides and fertilizers on Argentina’s rural farms. Yet to read the book in this way, as a tale of environmental contamination’s catastrophic and insidious effects upon the natural world, neglects to observe the extent to which the elements of horror Fever

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Dream arise not from toxic contamination and its effects, but rather from the uncertainty as to whether or not there is or could be toxic contamination, and, if so, whether or not it has had any effects— the inability to locate any precise moment at or way in which the human body might have been corrupted, or to tie together the potential symptoms of this corruption into a coherent explanation that makes sense. In this respect, Fever Dream draws upon the tropes of the increasingly influential environmental contamination genre that Stacy Alaimo characterizes as “material memoir,” peeling back the assumptions of these tropes to locate their anxiety not in the infiltration of the body by outside elements, but in awareness of the body as always already infiltrated and therefore impossible to discretely bound. Schweblin’s novel thus becomes a powerful lens through which to critique the binary speciation in which material memoir deals, and a lens that directs our attention away from this obsessive battle against contamination, towards the need to reevaluate the very body that this genre seeks to protect and defend.

Material Memoir

Material memoir is, Alaimo writes, a genre that critiques divisions between scientific, “expert” knowledge and direct, personal, popular knowledge, “offering up personal experiences as ‘data,’ as the author examines her own life story through a scientific lens” (87). It is a form of “trans-corporeal autobiograph[y]” that insists “the self is constituted by material agencies that are simultaneously biological, political, and economic” (ibid). In practice, the kernel of a material memoir is the author who is sick, or who has been sick, or who feels sick. (Less commonly, the memoir may deal with the

225 sickness of family members, as in Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural

History of Family and Place.) She interprets the world through the lens of her sickness, which is not to say that she reads her sickness into it, but that she paints a portrait of a whole world and says, “This is the world that produced my sickness.” Narratives of sickness, of personal history, of local history, and of environment are drawn together in a way that implies but cannot ever quite point to an attribution. As Alaimo explains, “at present it is not feasible to trace the exact causes of cancer or other environmentally generated illnesses within an individual” (88), and so, though the material memoirist may present scientific studies suggesting the carcinogenic properties of toxic chemicals, or the devastating effects of radioactive discharge, “there is a chasm, a vast lack of proof, between these scientific facts and the murkier realm of the individual case history” (ibid).

Therefore material memoir is always a genre of doubt, of indeterminacy, a form of discourse, which, as Lawrence Buell writes, “is of allegation rather than proof” (659).

Sometimes sickness itself serves as a bodily allegation: while Sandra Steingraber, in

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, recounts her experience with bladder cancer, and Refuge focuses on the death of Williams’s mother from breast cancer, other material memoirs deal in ailments that are unclear, unnamed, or even disputed. Kristen Iversen, in Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, describes the “chronic fatigue, fever, and swollen lymph nodes” from which she and her brothers and sisters suffer. “No one has any answers for us,” she says

(286). In Body Toxic, Susanne Antonetta outlines a list of complaints: “Every vital system of my body disrupted: an arrhythmic heart, a seizing brain, severe allergies,

226 useless reproductive organs” (203). Mel Y. Chen, whose Animacies contains a chapter that engages in tropes of material memoir, variously describes their condition as

“multiple chemical sensitivity,” “heavy metal poisoning,” and “mercury toxicity”

(197)— disputed diagnoses that, though they insist, “I am not invested in tracing or even asserting a certain cause of my intoxication,” attempt to contain and locate their array of symptoms.

I use the term “locate” advisedly. The material memoir has several goals, but the principal of these is to locate: to situate bodily suffering in a spatiotemporal setting that legitimates and explains it; to excavate the landscape and/of the past in search of the toxins that, invisible at the time, have leaked out of their spatiotemporal setting to infect the narrator. Problematically, however, the indeterminacy that is characteristic of the material memoir means that it is impossible to definitively separate what is symptom from what is not. This is true not only of the place that the memoir depicts, but also of the memoirist’s own body, and those of others: Iversen’s fatigue, Antonetta’s bipolar disorder, a neighborhood girl who died of bone cancer, the allergies and headaches of a childhood neighbor who later suffers from brain tumors, memories of a strange taste in the water— all of these are produced, examined, included as evidence of something.

Alaimo describes the MCS sufferer as a “sort of scientist, actively seeking knowledge about material agencies, and, simultaneously… the instrument that registers those agencies” (130); the material memoirist, too, probes her body for traces left by a toxic landscape. Alaimo also notes that the MCS autobiography can only be written “after one has concluded that one suffers from MCS, since without that epistemological frame, no

227 one would ever imagine including such things as copy machines, perfume, or insecticides in one’s autobiography or personal history” (131), and the same is true of the material memoir: its archive is assembled through the presumed link of contamination, and the

“characters” that populate it— animals, industrial waste, medications, toxic mold, radiation— would, without that link, seem radically out of place. Antonetta’s account of her childhood illustrates this element of the genre: “While I grew up,” she writes,

the quartersized frogs I spent my early childhood catching, housing in

shoeboxes and letting go disappeared, along with the horseshoe crabs, the

snapping turtles, clams, most of the valuable fish like fluke. They left

while my puberty came, as if my womb itself released them… Chemicals

like DDT and chlordane are endocrine disruptors, which cause things like

defeminization of females and demasculinization of males,

hermaphrodism, blurring of sex characteristics; loss of species through

loss of reproduction (26).

The memories of girlhood mingle with environmental anecdote and stand alongside scientific research as interrelated; on the following pages, Antonetta blends anecdotes about family life at the seaside into a list of “tales of cause and effect,” facts about radiation exposure and the result of contact with pesticides and other industrial chemicals. These facts are, their inclusion implies, a part of her life.

Later, Antonetta recounts nearly being trafficked into prostitution as a teenager, and her lack of shock or outrage: “Was [my body] ever mine? My world had made a new air for me to breathe and a new water for me to drink. I had growths in me that did not

228 belong, thoughts in my head that didn’t seem in any way to be mine; I was foreign, infiltrate” (184). Contamination is literal and metaphorical at the same time, in what is possibly an act of conflation: her body is contaminated by toxic air and water, colonized by tumors that she perceives as alien in her body and manic ideas that are likewise not

“part of her”; the sociopolitical colonization of women’s selfhood is woven in amongst these, in the indifferent acceptance that men might penetrate both Antonetta’s body and her agency. It is, in this passage, not entirely clear if the reader is meant to understand

New Jersey’s contaminated air and water as responsible not only for Antonetta’s health problems and bipolar disorder, as she suggests elsewhere, but for her struggles with addiction— “there’s no way to end the generations of poisoning,” she writes: “the years my landscape poisoned me, the years that, to compensate, maybe, I poisoned myself”

(187)— and for her sense of self-alienation. This is how Alaimo understands the text: an argument that “the substance of place, in this case, one of the most toxic places in the

United States, is not separate from [Antonetta’s] body, her psychology, or her self” (102).

Yet at this point, we must question what kind of substance Alaimo is indicating when she speaks of the “substance of place” or suggests that “the supposedly inert ‘background’ of place becomes the active substance of self” (ibid). Industrial chemicals may contaminate the material body, but it is a category error to argue that they can perform the same action upon self or psychology. This is not to argue that self is separable from flesh, but to note that they are not the same type of object. Self may be essentially intertwined with environment (indeed, I believe it is) but it has no cells for toxic matter to penetrate. Yet

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Alaimo is right to emphasize that, in spite of this fact, the contaminated self plays an important role in the material memoir.

Midway through Body Toxic, Antonetta describes an incident in which her grandfather attempted to molest her when she was ten years old (170). The nominal rationale for the incident’s inclusion has to do with devils: the Jersey Devil that haunts the toxic Pine Barrens, the monsters created by the land. One wonders if Antonetta is cognizant that its theme is in fact contamination. More than the memoir’s final chapter,

“Self-Portrait in a Nuclear Mirror,” in which Antonetta repeats a series of well-known facts about Los Alamos and the atom bomb while describing herself as her parents’

“Yucca Mountain, their [nuclear] waste repository” (225) (in the previous chapter she writes that she wants “[her] cousins and [her] to line up and be the Radium Girls, glowing lightly in the womb, the neck, and in the brain” (196), similarly attempting to situate herself within a lineage of contamination) the jarring episode with her grandfather organizes the book. It does, in fact, depict a form of toxic worlding; at the instant her grandfather exposed himself, Antonetta writes, “[t]ime became space and swam past me physically, through and around” (ibid). The bedroom becomes an “altered space” that ends as soon as she exits it; it is an experience of boundary collapse and profound dislocation that demands a reconfiguration of environment and self. But it is not attributable to industrial chemicals, which raises the question of whether what the book is communicating has to do, regardless of Antonetta’s convincing case for the ecological toxicity of New Jersey, with the existence (or not) of that toxicity at all. Its titular Body

Toxic is, rather, the body that feels toxic: that feels unstable, “infiltrate,” as though its

230 walls have failed under assault. This feeling is produced as evidence that the body is toxic. It is easy to see why, in a narrative whose defining feature is doubt, the very intimacy of feeling— its inability to be displaced from the body, subjected to the discurisfication of experts— would make it seem the most reliable proof.

In this sense, the prologue of Porochista Khakpour’s 2018 account of chronic

Lyme disease, Sick (which situates itself somewhere between material memoir and straightforward memoir of illness17) is revealing: “I have never been comfortable in my own body,” Khakpour begins (5). She describes “dysmorphia,” “otherness,” her experience of national displacement, before arriving at illness. “Only decades later did I confront something that may have been there the whole time: illness, or some failure of the physical body due to something outside of me… Illness taught me that something was wrong,” she writes, “more wrong than being born or living in the wrong place… At some point, with chronic illness and disability, I grew to feel at home. My body was wrong, and through data, we could prove that” (ibid). Yet, at the same time: “To find a home in my body is to tell a story that doesn’t exist” (6). Embedded within this explanation is an acknowledgement that contamination (in this case the perceived infection that, as with toxic infiltration, is amorphously located in the past— “[I]t is unlikely I will ever know

17 Chronic Lyme disease, which advocates argue is a lasting condition caused by an initial Lyme infection, is a controversial diagnosis that is sometimes placed in the category of environmental illness, either by doctors who understand disorders in that category to be factitious (Beaman) or by Lyme sufferers who experience environmental sensitivity. Khakpour’s memoir encompasses the material agencies that she understands to be involved in her illness, including political events (167), environmental toxins (166), and chemical factors (175-6), yet Sick deviates from the material memoir in focusing primarily on the body of the sufferer rather than the external environment. 231 when I contracted it,” Khakpour says, “just as it is unlikely I will ever be rid of it entirely” [3]) provides a narrative lens through which to make threatening, frightening, and otherwise unintelligible experiences cohere.

A tension that recurs frequently in the material memoir is that between acceptance of that which cannot be named or located and a narrative that qua narrative is an act of naming and location. “Does it need a name?” an acupuncturist asks when Khakpour wants to know what’s wrong with her. “A part of me felt like it absolutely did need a name, that that had been a missing element of my life for many years,” Khakpour relates

(122), yet later repeats the acupuncturist’s rhetorical question as a way of answering a boyfriend’s inquiry (125). Similarly, Kristen Iversen asks, “What does it matter, anyway, where my symptoms come from? It could be anything. Allergies, viruses, flu, exhaustion, bad weather, a bad day at the office. Maybe it’s all in my imagination. The uncertainty is frustrating” (301). Yet her uncertainty is not, after all, so very uncertain: the “lingering feeling that this chapter wasn’t supposed to be a part of my story, or my family’s story, or anyone’s story” (ibid)— bodily experience as narrative contamination— is apposed to the assertion that “[g]overnments aren’t supposed to poison their own people” (ibid). There is a cognitive dissonance here, a knowing that is not-quite-knowing, as when Antonetta writes, “I don’t expect anyone to explain what’s wrong with me,” and follows the statement by noting that she “[doesn’t] believe in coincidences of this magnitude, either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air” (203). Perhaps this is what Khakpour means when she writes of telling “a story that doesn’t exist.” And perhaps the story that doesn’t exist is the only kind of story that

232 the material memoir can tell: the story that is not yet (not yet proven) or not quite (not quite explained) and always only potential, one of a multiplicity of ways to draw together events such that they form the coherent interpretation that will imbue available evidence with meaning.

This quality of the potential, the partial, and the dissonant is not immediately visible in the material memoir, which in fact frames its allegations as indictment. Full

Body Burden ends with a call to action on the topic of nuclear management: “To speak out or to remain silent [on the topic of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy] is the first and most crucial decision we can make” (344) Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” is included as a postscript. Antonetta subtitles the epilogue to Body Toxic “Specific

Endpoints of Concern,” and includes in it notes on ongoing pollution and an Associated

Press article describing an American epidemic of chronic illness. Khakpour begins Sick with a statement about the nature of chronic Lyme disease. Living Downstream includes an afterword, “Exercising Your Right to Know,” which encourages readers to contact federal agencies or nonprofit groups to find out more about industrial toxins. The impression is one of certainty, an unspeakable truth uncovered. Yet in Fever Dream,

Schweblin uses the same generic elements of fact-finding, sensing, and suturing to build an atmosphere of uneasiness and even horror, foregrounding the inability of the material memoir to ever quite stabilize into the coherence for which it gropes.

The events that Amanda recount as part of Fever Dream’s narrative (their inclusion dictated by David, the arbiter of what is important and not) are consistent with the anecdotes of shadowy threat that, in the material memoir, conclude with a bringing-

233 to-light— yet in Fever Dream the threat of these events is used to create an atmosphere of dread that the novel does not seek to dissolve. There is a story that David’s mother,

Carla, tells Amanda about the day that David was poisoned, when she took him to an alternative healer who lived in a green house and came away convinced that he was not her son any longer. There is the night when Amanda comes home to find David in her house, then later dreams that she wakes in the middle of the night and discovers Nina sitting in the kitchen— only to be told by Nina that she is not Nina, but David instead.

During the incident that seems to include Amanda’s contamination, Carla tells Amanda that David buries dead animals, and describes scenes in which David may or may not kill a dog and a duck with his mind. Horses go missing. When Amanda visits Carla’s house, she sees twenty-eight graves in the yard, but we are never told what the graves contain. In fact, we are never told anything, or rather nothing is confirmed for us: not what has actually made Amanda sick, or why Carla behaved so strangely, or what poisoned the children of the town. We are left only with the events themselves, so troubling as to demand an explanation that feels almost-present but always a beat away.

From its opening line, “They’re like worms” (“Son como gusanos”) (1 English; 11

Spanish), the novel works to foreground this sense of epistemological unsteadiness, deliberately setting up key points of tension and confusion. We quickly realize that

David, here— if we accept that it is really David, rather than an hallucination, which the failure to format dialogue between him and Amanda in quotation marks may cause us to doubt— is describing Amanda’s contamination (“Like worms, all over,” or in the

Spanish, “Como gusanos, de todas partes”) yet moments later, when she realizes she

234 can’t move, he tells her that “[i]t’s the worms” (“Por los gusanos,” which could more accurately be translated as “because of the worms,” but which maintains the implication of the worms’ existence) (2 English; 11 Spanish), establishing an uneasy oscillation between simile and literal statement and between individual and collective entity that continues throughout the book. (This worm-description is perhaps not incidental; it is reminiscent of Morgellons, a recent form of delusional parasitosis in which sufferers believe that they are incubating and extruding fibers in/from under their skin.) Whatever is in Amanda’s body is both worms and only like worms, is simultaneously a they and an it. Furthermore, David, pushing Amanda to describe the events of the previous days in more detail, tells her: “We’re looking for worms, something very much like worms, and the exact moment when they touch your body for the first time” (“Buscamos gusanos, algo muy parecido a gusanos, y el punto exacto en el que tocan tu cuerpo por primera vez”) (52 English; 42 Spanish). Yet earlier he has told her, “[W]e have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being” (“[H]ay que encontrar el punto exacto en que nacen los gusanos”) (2 English; 11 Spanish). In other words, even as he reiterates that the contaminant both is worms and is like worms, he suggests these are also worms that do and do not pre-exist Amanda’s contamination: that infest her, but are a product of her infestation. They are at once something that has penetrated her body and something that has been created within it.

The uncertain, even paradoxical existence of the worms does not seem to trouble

Amanda or David. What is “important… very important for us all” (“importante… muy importante para todos”) (ibid) is not the worms themselves, which barely occasion

235 comment, but discovering how they got into Amanda. Yet David’s questioning only seems to further confuse matters. He elicits detailed accounts from Amanda about her experiences of driving in the city and the country, the scenes she encounters as she walks past the fields at night, her feelings about his mother— “Are you sure these kinds of comments are necessary?” (“¿Estás seguro de que es necesario hacer estas observaciones?”) Amanda asks dubiously at one point— in the Spanish, even more pointedly asking if “these observations” are necessary. “Do we have time for this?”

(“¿Tenemos tiempo para esto?”) (3 English; 12 Spanish). David confirms that the details are important, but he does not elaborate on their connection to Amanda’s illness. Their importance is solely attendant on David’s evaluation of Amanda’s bodily sensations, or rather by her reported memories of these sensations. “You don’t feel anything?” (“¿No sentís nada?”) David asks her. “There’s no other sensation that could be tied to something else?” (“¿No hay ninguna sensación que pueda estar relacionada con algo mas?”) (86 English; 63 Spanish) Then later: “What is the feeling now, exactly now?”

(“Qué se sienta ahora, exactamente ahora?”) (89 English; 66 Spanish). He wants to know what she tastes under her tongue at a particular moment— “Acidic, or bitter?”

(“¿Ácido o amargo?”) (91 English; 67 Spanish)— and then, when she feels something strange in her hands, if “[she feels] like they’re shaking, or are they really shaking?”

(“Sentís que te tiemblan o te tiemblan relamente?”) (102 English; 74 Spanish). The dialogue between David and Amanda comes to form the figure that Alaimo sketches of the chemically reactive/environmentally ill person as both scientist and instrument, in this case not monitoring material agencies around them, but attempting to parse material

236 agencies in the past. In the sense the potential reading of David as hallucination takes on significance: has Amanda created him as a self-who-investigates, an outside observer who can glean meaning from an experience that resists normal meaning-making procedures?

Kroll-Smith and Floyd characterize the chemically reactive as believing that

“their bodies know things.” For those suffering from environmental illnesses, they suggest, “perceiving and knowing are not exclusively activities of the self or the state but are shaped in part by the body and its relationships to environments” (132). The framing of Amanda’s and David’s voices as one seamless dialogue, regardless of how much trust we place in David’s existence, allows the impression that Amanda’s body is being forced to give up its knowledge. Only with David’s prompting can she recognize and give voice to the knowledge that has always been inside her. “It’s happening,” (“Está pasando”)

David warns her, when she reaches into the memory of the afternoon she fell sick, and:

“What is, David? My God, what is happening?” (“¿Qué cosa, David? Dios mío, ¿que es lo que está pasando?”) Amanda asks.

“The worms.

No, please.

It’s a very bad thing.

Yes, the rope [of the rescue distance] pulls tight, but I’m distracted…

What is the feeling now, exactly now?

I’m soaked too. I’m wet, yes, I feel it now” (89)

(“Los gusanos.

237

No, por favor.

Es algo muy malo.

Sí, el hilo se tensa, pero estoy distraída…

¿Que se siente ahora, exactamente ahora?

Yo también estoy empapada. Estoy mojada, sí, ahora lo siento” [65-66].)

Amanda’s body registers that something— the undefined “it” that David refers to— is happening, but requires an interpreter (or, perhaps, a narrator) to place it in an intelligible context. “Don’t you realize what’s happening right now?” (“No te das cuenta de lo que está pasando ahora mismo?”) David asks. “I can’t realize, David,” Amanda tells him

(92)— in the original Spanish text, “No puedo darme cuento” (68), which suggests not that she doesn’t realize, but that she cannot. She has not yet, in that moment, learned to translate the knowledge she will later understand her body as having. Yet the formal structure of their conversation, in which Amanda’s guided journey into her memories is voiced by both herself and David in the present tense, means that the novel represents her as simultaneously knowing and not-knowing. Her constant uneasiness in the past appears to stem from the awareness that she knows something; her body registers symptoms of wrongness, yet she is unable to identify what that wrongness is. David’s authority promises to allow her the relief of classification and thus containment. Yet in contrast to material memoir’s characteristic insistence on offering the clarity of a diagnosis (a literal diagnosis, in the case of Khakpour, who writes that when a doctor diagnosed her with

Lyme, she felt “such a release that it felt nearly violent… This [diagnosis] made sense, deep in my gut” (210), or the location of the self in a contaminated landscape, and

238 therefore a spatial delimitation of toxicity) Fever Dream refuses even the most tentative of verdicts. Perhaps Amanda has been poisoned by what’s in the plastic drums. Perhaps not. The possibility that she has been does not contain or resolve the novel’s multiplying strangenesses, for it never materializes conviction. David’s horror-movie habit of referring vaguely to an “exact moment,” an “important thing,” “this,” “it” not only amplifies the dread that seeps throughout his conversation with Amanda, but also captures more accurately than diagnosis could the sense that if Amanda’s body is a detector, then what it is detecting is not toxins in the environment but a something deeper that is wrong. In doing so, the book asks us to step outside our understanding of what a body can detect, and indeed to radically reconfigure our approach to the question of what a “natural” body is, and what its situation ought to be in relation to a “natural” environment.

World as Womb

As Giovanna Di Chiro and Alexis Shotwell have explored, anti-toxic rhetoric fundamentally depends upon a set of assumptions that arise from “the idea that there is an uncontaminated, pure, natural state that is being affected by artificial chemicals”

(Shotwell 90), and that “toxic chemical pollution is responsible for the undermining or perversion of the ‘natural:’ natural biologies/ecologies, natural bodies, natural reproductive processes” (Di Chiro 2010 201). As Chapter One mentions, the framework that MCS sufferers use to differentiate the world into toxic/nontoxic, safe/unsafe, or pure/impure strongly and uncritically echoes traditional dualistic visions of the world as

239 easily dividable into human/nonhuman and nature/culture, and this same framework is present in the material memoir. Antonetta, in trying to locate the toxic origin of her illness, describes feeling as though DDT trucks “powdered [her] in the womb” (17); though she doesn’t expect anyone to explain her sickness, she says, “I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air” (203). She worries, after she quits using drugs, that she might have done lasting harm to her body, but observing the ailments of family members causes her to conclude that “[a]s children, even in the womb, we changed, charged and reformed by the landscape. I may have pummeled away at my central nervous system and organs and drifts of ganglia but what did it was the small white fish and the blackberries and the air itself” (148). To this list she later adds “the pit lined with plastic and sludge, the slow clouds of DDT, the water my uncle had to take home because it had become part of his family” (207). The water her uncle had to take home is the New Jersey tap water, the water that Antonetta thinks of “[l]ong before they announced the cancer cluster, the autism cluster, the leukemias and breast cancers of

Ocean County” (112), the water that makes her think of “[o]ther places, like Love Canal, where the unborn went seepingly off” (113). But what Antonetta is actually thinking of is not the water, just as she is not actually thinking of the small white fish and the blackberries and the air itself. “The ‘small white fish and the ‘blackberries,’” as Alaimo notes, “exist… as the conveyors of substances lurking within, forming, and harming the body and the mind that Antonetta finds herself to be” (107). What Antonetta is thinking of when she thinks of water is an incident in 1984, when the family’s well was declared

240 unsafe and they continued drinking the water, though “[o]f course my infertility could have happened in my mother’s body, the DDT,” she adds, or “the swimming in Toms

River, by the chemical pipeline leading into the woods (115). In other words, she is using the figures of the fish, the berries, the air, and the water only as stand-ins for the contamination they harbored, and in doing so she highlights the transgression of the perceived boundary between the natural and the unnatural. What seemed natural (and should have been natural) was in fact unnatural. This perception of the contaminant as deceptive and insidious “a grim specter [that] has crept upon us almost unnoticed,” as

Rachel Carson described it (13), the secret threat in “visuals that seemed to signify

‘normalcy,’” as Buell quotes from an analysis of Love Canal coverage, “but [that revealed] the opposite” (645), is repeated even in Iverson’s Full Body Burden, which leans less heavily on anti-toxic rhetoric. Iversen compares the moon— “a thin curl of ribbon,” or “round and full and portentous, a pregnant beacon”— with the “other beacon” of Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant:

The lights from Rocky Flats shine and twinkle on the dark silhouette of

land almost as beautifully as the stars above, but it’s a strange and peculiar

light, a discomforting light, the lights of a city where no true city exists. It,

too, is portentous, even sinister— if only one could have the ability to see

beyond the white glimmer, to see what is really there (12).

This perception of the unnatural as a “sinister” mimic of the natural speaks to an anxiety that prefers to frame itself in terms of invasion, subterfuge, and disruption rather than revelation. The unnatural attacks the natural, disguises itself as the natural, and disrupts

241 the natural, but the basic distinction between the natural and the unnatural remains and must be safeguarded. More than any “natural” itself, it is this distinction (the idea that there is a natural, clearly distinct from the unnatural) that is under threat, a fact that emerges when we consider the sites at which anti-toxic rhetoric has tended to focus its energy— sites that are significantly unstable, and traditionally zones of, in Mary

Douglas’s terms, purity and danger.

Both Shotwell and Di Chiro focus on the ways in which anti-toxic rhetoric has shown a troubling tendency to center around the perceived danger of sexually fluid or gender-unstable bodies, which are presumed to result from contamination. Early alarm, in the 1990s, about the effects of endocrine-disrupting industrial chemicals linked these endocrine disruptors to the “breakdown of the family” and “dysfunctional behavior in human society” and offered the hypothesis that “the hormonal experience of the developing embryo at crucial stages of its development has an impact on adult behavior in humans, affecting the choice of mates, parenting, social behavior, and other significant dimensions of humanity” (Colborn, Dumanoski, and Myers 238). Environmental historian Nancy Langston lamented “Gender Transformed” in an 2003 article on the peril of endocrine disruptors, arguing for the natural biological determination of gender and positioning the reproductive system as the site of both gender and the natural. “Our most intimate reproductive environments,” she writes, “the places that make us most female and most male, the places we are most vulnerable and most natural, may have been hijacked by the residues of our industrial world” (154). Significantly, both Langston and the team of Theo Colborn and Dianne Dumanoski, whose book Our Stolen Future: Are

242

We Threatening Our Own Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? achieved national attention upon its publication, figure industrial toxins as intruders into or disruptors of the home, which Colborn and Dumanoski suggest, in their title, is fundamentally linked to the human and its survival. Industrial chemicals “hijack” the “most intimate” environment, in Langston’s language; they not only “break down” the family and cause

“dysfunction,” but “steal our future,” as the title of Colborn and Dumanoski’s book also suggests, and the cover of which— across numerous editions— features the image of an embryo, the book’s titular future emblematized as embodied biological reproduction, which, after all, seems to be at the center of what Colborn characterizes as “significant dimensions of humanity.”

Much of the controversy surrounding endocrine disruptors has centered specifically around their potential damage to men’s bodies— the phenomenon that Di

Chiro describes as “assault-on-the-unstable-male-as-the-most-terrifying-thing-of-all”

(2010 207). Yet if mainstream anti-toxic rhetoric has fixated on the male body in peril, material memoirs, among whose authors women are heavily overrepresented, often reflect an obverse obsession: toxic interference in motherhood. Susanne Antonetta’s inability to have children haunts Body Toxic; she writes of “the moment when [her] biological children were lost” (115) as though these children had existed within her and been taken, returning multiple times to the theme of infertility-as-bodily-injury, an idea that frames childbearing as the way in which a woman’s body is meant to function. She writes that radionuclides “bear only female children, at least in language, and are astonishingly prolific… As they throw off atomic bits radionuclides decay into other

243 elements: fertile children, daughters” (209). The radionuclides are rendered faintly monstrous in their usurpation of the female body, filling the function that Antonetta can’t, and echoing her observation that humans have “failed to make immortality for our bodies” but have “made immortality for our [nuclear] waste” (208-9)— radionuclides outbreeding and outlasting the human, which has made its women sterile. “Radiation is the alpha and omega of our lives, the beginning and the end,” she writes, by which she means that “in many cultures— Yoruba, Shinto, old Hebrew— my father is dead anyway, lost through the loss of a continuing line of bodily offspring,” and thus Antonetta’s own birth “under a cloud… [t]he daughter of my father, who did not die in the Sea of Japan because we had the bomb” (222) is bookended by the figurative death of her infertility.

The “malfunctioning” female body is positioned as the mortality of the human itself.

Sandra Steingraber does not fare much better in her own discourse of the female body; though Di Chiro praises her as taking “an anti-toxics approach that demonstrates the interconnection of environmental and health problems with gender, class, and racial injustices” rather than “resorting to the discourse of environmental normality to drive home her point” (2010 218), Steingraber has written an entire memoir devoted to motherhood and toxicity, 2001’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood.

In this book, a material memoir in which the author’s physical testimony in rooted in pregnancy rather than sickness, Steingraber combines scientific discourse on the physical processes of pregnancy with meditations on the “mystery” and “miracle” of her condition, frequently likening the pregnant body to the nonhuman world: “[t]he internal anatomy of a human placenta closely resembles a maple grove: the long columns of cells

244 sent out by into the uterine lining… quickly branch and branch again until… the treetops of an entire forest press up against the deepest layers of the womb” (30-1); the placenta is

“a blood-drenched forest,” “the sapwood of pregnancy” (33). “When I look at amniotic fluid, I am looking at rain falling on orange groves,” Steingraber ponders. “I am looking at melon field, potatoes in wet earth, frost on pasture grasses… Whatever is inside hummingbird eggs is also in my womb” (67). At the close of the book, she offers a

“prayer” celebrating the commencement of weaning: “Sleeping girl, I release you from my breast into the world, where the tides run with fish and berry bushes flutter with migrating birds” (283). This “world” is really an ideal world, the prelapsarian “green oasis” of anti-toxic fantasy, which is also figured as the natural body of the mother, in turn identified (as Lawrence Buell points out of the “pastoral-utopian innocence” of threatened landscape) as a purity that is always at risk. There is a long and problematic history to the association of women’s bodies, particularly maternal bodies, with nonhuman nature— “That women’s inclusion in the sphere of nature has been a major tool in their oppression,” Val Plumwood writes, “emerges clearly from a glance at traditional sources” (19), while more recently,

[a] popular green version [of ecofeminism] attributes to women a range of

different but related virtues, those of empathy, nurturance,

cooperativeness, and connectedness to others and to nature, and usually

finds the basis for these also in women’s reproductive capacity. It replaces

the ‘angel in the house’ version of women with the ‘angel in the

ecosystem’ (9).

245

Yet in Steingraber’s work, the implications of these ideas go unexplored, leading to a heteronormativity that even Alaimo— who defends Steingraber by arguing that

“[f]eminism, even gender-minimizing feminisms, cannot turn away from matters of reproductive health and bodily politics” (104)— acknowledges. Indeed, Steingraber’s preface allies itself with such views, marking the body of the mother as “the first environment,” and intrinsically linked to the outer environment of the Earth (x). This

“truth,” as Steingraber labels it— and the threat it implies to the rhetorically powerful figure of the child, who in turn might be contaminated through “the ecosystem of a mother’s body”— “should inspire us all— mothers, fathers, grandparents, doctors, midwives, and everyone concerned about future generations— to action,” Steingraber writes (ibid), reinscribing the centrality of procreation in the anti-toxic narrative, and reaffirming its moral valence.

Yet as with Antonetta’s memoir, which draws together multiple forms of

“contamination,” Steingraber’s book is not really organized around toxic threat. Rather,

Having Faith is concerned with the violation of the natural zone of the maternal body by the artificial, represented not only by toxic chemicals, but by technological intervention.

Steingraber passionately endorses natural childbirth, criticizing episiotomy (the common surgical severing of the perineum) and the use of epidurals. She describes her own experience of labor as “a profound pain… like the chords of a pipe organ filling a cathedral… like an earthquake” (196), and interposes into her account of childbirth the memory of a surviving an avalanche while hiking a mountain (197)— the nonhuman, in its guise as the wild and the sacred, inhabiting the flesh of the mother once more.

246

Steingraber emphasizes the inimitable importance of breastfeeding, one of “the living threads that weave mother and child together” (209), a “daily miracle” that she laments not having experienced with her own adopted mother; having been formula-fed, she comes to believe, might be the source of many of her mysterious childhood ailments

(236-7). Breastfeeding, too, therefore becomes fitted into a familiar story: any deviation from the “natural” results in ill health, emotional problems (Steingraber, as a child, was prescribed Thorazine for “emotional storms” [237]), broken “threads” in the family, and even a kind of desecration of a sacred process that Steingraber compares to Jesus feeding the five thousand with loaves and fish (225). The entirety of childbearing becomes the hyper-natural, the ur-natural, the same “natural” that Langston endorses when she writes of the “intimate” reproductive system as the site of what it means to be natural in the first place.

Material memoir’s fixation on the maternal appears in Fever Dream, as a foregrounding of the maternal body as the site at which anxiety about toxic contamination congeals. Yet in Fever Dream the legitimacy of this anxiety, and the validity of the actions it generates, are rendered ambiguous, as they are not in the material memoir. On the one hand, the novel suggests that the spatiotemporal dislocations of toxic contamination— its counterintuitive, disjointed timelines, its tendency to go unseen— render useless Amanda’s constant calculations of the “rescue distance” between herself and her child, and thus the natural bond that inspires a mother to protect her child. “Is it because I did something wrong?” Amanda wonders about Nina’s contamination (“¿Es porque hice algo mal?”). “Was I a bad mother? Is it something I caused? …When Nina

247 and I were on the lawn, among the barrels. It was the rescue distance: it didn’t work, I didn’t see the danger” (“¿Fui una mala madre? ¿Es algo que yo provoqué?”… Cuando estábamos sobre el césped con Nina, entre los bidones. Fue la distancia de rescate: no funcionó, no vi el peligro”) (169-70 English; 116 Spanish). Carla, too, recalling the incident when David was poisoned, tells Amanda, “It’s just that sometimes the eyes you have aren’t enough, Amanda. I don’t know how I didn’t see it—“ (“Es que a veces no alcanzan todos los ojos, Amanda. No sé cómo no lo vi…”) (19 English; 22 Spanish) echoing Amanda’s later lament that she couldn’t realize what was happening at the instant that she and Nina were contaminated. In other words, the emotions and mechanisms of natural motherhood are undermined by the new danger posed by toxic chemicals. This sentiment is one that Steingraber and Antonetta would find sympathetic;

Steingraber fears the potential dioxin poisoning of her infant by “all the eggs [she] ate during her pregnancy” or by the atmosphere itself, “creating dioxin out of the evaporated vapors of common wood preservatives” (255; 257); at the same time as she writes the maternal body as hyper-natural, the fetus it contains becomes hyper-vulnerable to contamination from DDT, from PCBs, from mercury, from lead, from solvents. Antonetta filters her adopted son’s water, “even to cook rice”; now, she writes, “he eats organic vegetables, freerange chemicalfree meats, everything made in our kitchen, maybe grown in our compostheavy yard,” and she imagines herself grinding up the landscape itself and feeding it to him: “the white emissions from G-P catch like milk in my cups… I feed him strips of the orcas with their body burdens and the sparse blubber of the starved whales”

(240-1). The child is figured as inhabiting a constant zone of threat, one that the maternal

248 body may inadvertently contribute to through even the most basic and “natural” act of provision. Once again, the unnatural presents itself as chameleonic and insidious.

Yet though Fever Dream echoes this fear of the unnatural that eludes or corrupts maternal instincts, ultimately it reveals its underlying threats to be of another nature.

These threats undermine and destabilize the novel’s use of tropes drawn from the material memoir, calling into question the utility of these tropes. David and Nina are unquestionably poisoned by something that neither Carla nor Amanda can protect them from, and there are physical consequences of this poisoning: red eyes, clumsiness, white spots, pink and scaly skin. However, the horror and uneasiness that suffuse the book do not arise chiefly from this poisoning, but from the cure for the poisoning offered by “the woman in the green house” (“la mujer de la casa verde”), the alternative healer to whom people in the town turn. This woman is “not a psychic… But she can see people’s energy, she can read it… She can tell if someone is sick, and where in the body the negative energy is coming from” (“No es una adivina… [p]ero puede ver la energía de la gente, puede leerla… Puede saber si alguien está enfermo y en qué parte del cuerpo está esa energía negative”) (21 English; 23 Spanish). When David is contaminated, Carla takes him to the woman, who proposes that she “move David’s spirit to another body”

(“[mudar] el espíritu de David a otro cuerpo”) so that “part of the poison would also go with him. Split into two bodies, there was the chance he could pull through” (“parte de la intoxicación se iba también con él. Dividida en dos cuerpos había chances de superarla”)

(26-7 English; 26-27 Spanish). This soul migration would cause complications: “The transmigration would take David’s spirit to a healthy body, but it would also bring an

249 unknown spirit to the sick body. Something of each of them would be left in the other”

(“La trasmigración se llevaría el espíritu de David a un cuerpo sano, pero traería también un espíritu desconocido al cuerpo enfermo. Algo de cada uno quedaría en el otro”) (29-30

English; 28 Spanish). He would thus be, according to the woman, a “new being” (“nueva forma”), or rather more than one new being: “David’s body, and also David in his new body” (“El cuerpo de David y también David en su nuevo cuerpo”) (38 English; 34

Spanish). The woman emphasizes that Carla is still responsible for “the body,” even without David in it; at the same time, she refers to David’s body post-migration as David, and Carla as his mother, raising the question of how one ought to think and speak about the now-multiple Davids. Carla refers to the body in her keep as her “new David. This monster” (“mi nuevo David. Este monstruo”) and insists that he “doesn’t belong to [her] anymore” (“[y]a no [se] pertenece”); when Amanda tells her, “Carla, children are forever,” (“un hijo es para toda la vida”) Carla replies, with a faint hint of condescension,

“No, dear” (8 English; 15 Spanish). The “natural” or conventional biological bond between mother and child is called into doubt: how can children not be “forever,” when what is biologically done cannot be undone?

Into this complicated situation is brought the possibility that Nina, too, is not exactly what she seems. Her seemingly innocuous child-habit of referring to herself in the first-person plural— she “has always been convinced that lords and ladies speak in the plural,” Amanda explains— takes on another, more disquieting interpretation. An incident in which Carla shows up at Amanda’s house, claiming that David is inside it, and pointing to Nina’s room, also suggests the possibility that Nina is not entirely Nina.

250

David is later discovered in Amanda’s room, and that night Amanda dreams that Nina tells her that she, Nina, is David. The latent confusion about the identity of both children is heightened when the Amanda of the present tense realizes that David is telling her about scenes he could not have witnessed, moments when only she, Carla, and Nina were there. “How do you know that’s what happens?” (“¿Cómo sabés que eso es lo que pasa?”) she asks. “Do you see it, were you hiding there?” (“¿Lo ves? ¿Estabas ahí escondido?” (119 English; 84 Spanish). She receives no explanation.

Certainly Carla seems convinced that there is a chance Nina might harbor part of

David. It is strongly implied that she has been attempting to locate David’s soul and return it to his body, perhaps by arranging for other children to undergo the same process of migration. When Amanda falls sick, Carla confesses, “I checked all the kids [David’s] age… I follow them without their parents’ knowing. I talk to them, take them by the shoulders to look them right in the eyes” (“Revisé a todos los chicos de su edad… Los sigo a escondidas de sus padres, les hablo, los tomo de los hombros para mirarlos bien a los ojos”) (146-7 English; 101 Spanish). Ultimately, she takes Nina to the woman in the green house while Amanda is ill, telling Amanda, “[W]hen I find my real David… I won’t have any doubt it’s him… You have to understand that Nina wasn’t going to make it many more hours” (“[C]uando encuentre a mi verdadero David… no voy a tener dudas de que es él… Tenés que entender que Nina no iba a aquantar muchas horas más”) (164

English; 112 Spanish). The novel’s conclusion strongly suggests that Nina is left in

David’s body: when Amanda’s husband visits the town after her death, David climbs into the backseat of his car, crossing his legs in the pose that Nina has adopted throughout the

251 book, “hand reaching slightly toward Nina’s stuffed mole, covertly,” as Amanda, watching supernaturally through her husband’s perspective, sees “those other eyes”

(“esos otros ojos”) in David’s own (182). Someone must be in Nina’s body, as well;

Amanda’s husband says that though Nina is recovering, “there’s something else, and I don’t know what it is. Something more, within her” (“hay algo más y no sé qué es. Algo más, en ella”) (177 English; 120 Spanish). But it is unclear who or what this something is.

In this narrative, it is not contamination that leads to bodily confusion, but the cure for contamination, or rather the key to surviving it. The “migration” that occurs in the green house makes a mess of what are meant to be “natural” connections and divisions, raising the possibility that a mother might not be [able to be] the mother of her own child, that a girl might be partly a boy, or a boy a girl, or that both might be more than one person and therefore a girl and a boy at the same time. Even more than these possibilities, migration raises the question of what it means to be a mother or a child, to be one or the other gender, to be a person, and whether these qualities and relationships are fixed or subject to change— whether there can be such a thing as a “son who is no longer [his mother’s] son” (“hijo que ya no es su hijo”) (160 English; 110 Spanish), or a boy who has a girl inside his body, or a girl who goes away and comes back with more self inside her than there was when she left. In short, “migration” disrupts the natural order of the body and the natural order between bodies in a way that is similar to the proposed effects of toxic contaminants. Some elements of the altered David whom Carla describes, in fact, resemble the autistic child who often figures as the spectral terror

252 driving anti-toxic campaigns. (Antonetta specifically and repeatedly cites fears of “autism clusters” in discussing toxic New Jersey, and Chen engages in pseudoscientific speculation about the link between vaccines and autism.) Following his migration, David takes a long time to start speaking again, and then speaks little by little. “But really,

Amanda,” Carla says,

the way he talked was so strange… Strange can just be the phrase ‘That is

not important’ as an answer for everything. But if your son never

answered you that way before, then the fourth time you ask him why he’s

not eating, or if he’s cold, or you send him to bed, and he answers, almost

biting off the words as if he were still learning to talk, ‘That is not

important,’ I swear to you, Amanda, your legs start to tremble (96).

Perhaps David has been rendered in some way neuroatypical by toxins, and Carla has spun a fantastical narrative out of her inability to accept this. David himself, after all, describes himself as a “normal boy” (“un chico normal”) (40 English; 35 Spanish), and when Amanda, remembering a developmentally disabled girl she saw in town, asks, “Is there part of you in her body?” David replies, “Those are stories my mother tells” (“Estas son historias de mi madre”) (52 English; 42 Spanish). Yet the book seems to lend credence to Carla’s story, as much as it also depicts her as driven partly mad by her desire to find David’s soul and thus restore his originary wholeness or authenticity. She believes, David tells Amanda, “it is all her fault, that changing me that afternoon from one body to another body has changed something else. Something small and invisible that has ruined everything” (“toda es culpa suya, que cambiándome esa tarde de un cuerpo a

253 otro cuerpo ha cambiado algo más. Algo pequeño e invisible, que lo ha ido arruinando todo”) (160 English; 110 Spanish). While David states, with seeming authority, that

“[t]his isn’t her fault,” that the problems in the town are “something much worse” (“algo mucho peor”) (160), Carla’s belief seems to concisely articulate the fear at the heart of current anti-toxic thinking: literally, the fear of contamination. This is not the fear of toxins themselves, but the fear that conceptual categories in the world are not firmly divided from each other but instead unstable and leaky, prone to collapse at the least disturbance— that objects (including, but not limited to, objects in the mirror) may be less solid than they appear, and that the structure our society is built upon is revealing itself as patchy and unsustainable. It is, in short, a classic case of the uncanny (see

Chapter One), here what we might term the toxic uncanny.

In using the term “toxic uncanny,” I do not mean to imply that this is a state of being created by the toxic. That is the impression given by many material memoirs.

Antonetta describes “the world of chemicals,” by which she means the world of industrial chemicals, as a separate sphere whose focus is “the restructuring of the carbon atom, the building block of life, into new and insidious molecules that could penetrate and alter the basic functioning of the body” (199)— the toxin construed entirely in terms of two characteristics, mutation and infiltration, the ability to transgress the boundary of a person and subvert the normative set-up it found within, the ability above all to change. “A new thing had just been born,” she quotes I.I. Rabi as saying upon the first test of the atomic bomb, then adds: “Like Michelangelo’s ceilinged God we stretched out our hands. And brought them back burning. Different, atomically charged” (218-9). Steingraber writes in

254

Living Downstream, on the topic of dioxins and furans (which can be produced by incineration, including forest fires): “Dioxins and furans are not the natural-born children of fire. They are the unplanned, unwanted offspring of modern chlorine chemistry” (218).

That is, toxins not only cause the corruption of procreation, but they are themselves

“unplanned” and “unwanted” products of an artificial procreation, in contrast to the

“natural-born” children18 who existed “until the 1920s and 1930s, corresponding to the advent of organochlorine production,” when widespread dioxin contamination began to register (ibid).

Throughout Living Downstream, Steingraber utilizes the family farm as embodiment of the heimliche world that preceded these toxic conditions, emphasizing the age of its land— the “ancient tributaries” that connect to the “old Mississippi River valley” (2), the “ritual” of turning fields over after the harvest, which “offers [her] a connection to the past” (4) When she returns in September to be present for this ritual, she considers that when she is touching Illinois soil, she is touching the long-since- churned-over miles of prairie grass, conjuring a picture of the rural heartland that is distinctly post-Columbian in its vision of American emptiness, and which calls to mind

William Cronon’s observation that “wilderness represents a flight from nature,” that it is founded upon “a thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang” (10). The impression one receives is of an ever-receding ancestral time when time functioned

18 Given that “natural-born” can refer to children born out of wedlock— children born “naturally” of the body, regardless of their legal status— the distinction that Steingraber is making seems confusing unless her sole purpose in using the phrase is to emphasize the natural-ness of earlier dioxins, in contrast to those produced by industrial processes. 255 properly, a time akin to the scene Iversen describes of herself and her sister playing innocently as children, when they would “bounce across the plank and race across the field, full speed, before the sun sets and the ghosts come out” (4)— the ghosts being toxicity, as Iversen suggests through her juxtaposition of this sentence with the history of the Atomic Energy Commission’s founding of Rocky Flats. The pre-toxic era is fundamentally a natural time— indeed, Steingraber’s descriptions in particular evoke the mythologization and sacralization that Cronon sees underlying the concept of

“wilderness”— before toxicity sabotaged the previously unproblematic speciation of reality.

What I am arguing, however, is that toxicity reveals this speciation to have always been incoherent. The toxic uncanny is a mode of revelation, as is the nuclear uncanny to which it is linked. Material memoirs acknowledge the discomforting uncanny of the toxic, but attempt to account for this by characterizing it as a quality of modern contaminants, Antonetta’s “new and insidious molecules,” and therefore as an external threat that can be eliminated, or at least contained. If one understands the toxic uncanny as itself a form of contamination, an external force disrupting the conceptual body into which it has leaked, then it is not necessary to view the body itself as in need of re- evaluation.

Schweblin’s innovation lies in highlighting the destructiveness that results from this attitude towards the toxic. Not only is Carla consumed— perhaps driven to terrible acts— by her need to restore some whole, “real” version of David that would be undisrupted, unpolluted, and complete, but David himself seems yoked to a quest that

256 would allow him to trace, isolate, and expel the intruder. When Carla describes one of the incidents in which David seemed to draw animals to him and engage them in silent communion before burying them, she tells Amanda that she “asked [him] about the dog several times, and each time [he] replied that the dog wasn’t the important thing” (“[se] preguntó por el perro varias veces, y que cada vez le contest[ó] que el perro no era lo importante”) (106 English; 76 Spanish). There is an implication that David did to the animals what he is doing to Amanda: interrogating them in an effort to discover the

“exact moment” at which they became contaminated by toxins, and thereby understand

“the important thing,” which seems linked to a coherent theory of the town’s uncanny deterioration. Too, in the final pages of the book, Amanda’s husband sees that David has begun tying objects in his house together— pictures arranged so that each “hangs from the previous one… tied with the same thin rope” (“cuelga de la anterior atada por el mismo hilo sisal”) (176 English; 120 Spanish) and other objects that “are hanging from rope, or are tied together with it” (“cuelgan de hilo sisal, o atadas entre sí”) (179 English;

122 Spanish). Amanda tells David, “It seems… like, in your own way, you were trying to do something with the deplorable state of the house and everything in it” (“parece que, a tu manera, estuviste tratando de hacer algo con el estado deplorable de la casa, ye todo lo que hay en ella”) (ibid). This tying-together suggests a desperate need to arrive at or maintain some structure that will prevent the literal disintegration of everything around him. His use of rope is particularly evocative, perhaps implying a pulling that is the opposite of the “pushing” that David describes himself as performing on the animals, the

257 children, and Amanda.19 The book uses the term “push” without defining what it means for David to “push”— empujar— someone or something; it seems to be a form of dislocation in time that allows them to review the past and the future, but which also inevitably ends in their deaths. One interpretation is that David is struggling to rearrange the pieces of the world into their “proper” places by this pushing and pulling.

Interestingly, the term that Amanda uses to describe the material with which David ties things together (rope, hilo) to describe the invisible cord that binds her to Nina, with which she measures the rescue distance. David’s tied-together objects therefore mirror the “natural” bond between mother and child, which the contamination has revealed as always unstable, contingent, and in need of construction. His efforts to replace or render concrete the lost connective structure only point towards the fact what is happening in the town can’t be resolved by locating the source of the contamination. The real danger lies in the unreliability of all previous structures. “The rope cannot break” (“Eso [cortando] no puede pasar con el hilo”), Amanda insists frantically, “because I am Nina’s mother and Nina is my daughter… This rope can’t break, Nina is my daughter. But yes, my God, it’s broken” (“porque yo soy la madre de Nina y Nina es mi hija … Ese hilo no puede partirse, Nina es mi hija. Pero sí, Dios mío, se corta”) (171 English; 116-7 Spanish).

Later, she describes the rope as “slack” (“suelto”), suggesting that the rope is neither broken nor unbroken, but that something else has occurred: perhaps that there is no longer anything to tie the rope to, on one or both sides, that the body/ies of Amanda and/or Nina are no longer solid enough to sustain such a connection. To attempt to re-

19 I am indebted to Kim Le for this insight. 258 lasso these elusive bodies, to push and pull at them in an effort to make them materialize in the desired places, is fundamentally misguided— a child’s idea of how to cope with the “deplorable state” of the conceptual house in which they live, or find that they can no longer go on living. Yet because Fever Dream is a horror novel, no character steps forward to offer the obvious solution: what is needed is a total renovation of the house.

The Toxic House

The consensus view amongst those who investigate environmentally ill bodies and the bodies of those who suffer from environmentally-induced disease seems to be that these bodies represent a radical and productive response to the uncanny house of

Western liberal humanism. Alaimo, Kroll-Smith and Floyd, and Michelle Murphy argue that the environmentally ill subject in particular transcends conventional understandings of the discrete body, and is in a sense more advanced: open to new, trans-corporeal, and perhaps posthuman/ist interpretations of the relationship between self and other. Murphy writes that the “abjection” of bodies with multiple chemical sensitivity “force[s] a rematerialization— of self, body, and illness— by people whose unruly bodies continue[] to react to the built environment,” and that these bodies “[are] captured by other connections and practices, producing new knots of possibility for inhabiting bodies”

(157). “For the chemically reactive,” Kroll-Smith and Floyd offer, “knowing a body is inseparable from knowing the chemistry immediately surrounding it” (123); these individuals reject the “commonsense” accounts and frameworks of embodiment that jar with their own experience, and therefore “encourage a new way of knowing the physical

259 self and its relationship to local environments” (87). Alaimo suggests that “environmental illness offers a particularly potent example of trans-corporeal space, in which the human body can never be disentangled from the material world” (115), and indeed that multiple chemical sensitivity “may well be the quintessential example of… trans-corporeality, as those who are chemically reactive experience their selves as coextensive with the material world” (116). Chen describes their environmental illness as providing

“reminders of interdependency, of softness, of fluidity, of receptivity, of immunity’s fictivity and attachment’s impermanence”; episodes produced by environmental illness, they writes, force them “to rethink animacy” (202-3).

The emphasis in all of these accounts is on newness: the ways in which environmental illness functions as or demands a rebellion against outdated modes of being a body, and instead brings the body in line with current theoretical trends of thinking the human as inseparable from its environment. Yet few accounts of environmental or environmentally-induced illness, certainly in the genre of material memoir, seem to bear out this reconceptualization of the human. Rather, material memoirs seem birthed by anxiety surrounding the failure of the body-boundaries that are supposed to exist, and marked by a commitment to reconstructing those boundaries. In fact, as Kroll-Smith and Floyd note, victims of environmental illness “are apprehending their bodies using the rational, Enlightenment language of biomedicine” (34), endorsing the authority of mainstream Western science (with its humanist emphasis on objectivity) by appropriating its language and schemata to enframe experiences that science resists accounting for, and in so doing affirming science’s fundamental models of the body. The

260 refusal of mainstream science to acknowledge the legitimacy of environmental illness

(from debated diagnoses such as multiple chemical sensitivity, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and chronic Lyme disease to the alleged effects of toxic contamination at sub-clinical doses) does not provoke a reciprocal refusal on the part of the environmentally ill to acknowledge the legitimacy of mainstream objective science.

The MCS sufferers whom Kroll-Smith and Floyd interview frame their illness in conventional medical terms: toxic chemicals activate the immune system and cause “an inappropriate inflammatory process that then lacks the immune component that turns off the activation”; in MCS, “the central nervous system senses a chemical danger that could in high enough doses cause an injury or disease… In an effort to save the organism, the sensing organ ups the volume of its output” (124-5). “I prefer ‘RUDS (reactive upper airways disease) with toxic encephalopathy,’” one MCS sufferer clarifies. “To a nonscientific friend, I will simply say that I’m ‘chemically sensitive’ or ‘chemically reactive’” (127-8). Chen characterizes their experiences of chemical sensitivity as deriving from mercury toxicity, only briefly acknowledging that “Western medicine’s ambivalent materialization of heavy metal intoxication as an identifiable health concern”

(198).20 A great deal of importance is placed on articulating experiences of illness within the conventional schema of the body— indeed, the tendency of many medical professionals to characterize MCS as a psychogenic disorder or a problem of

20 It is worth noting that this statement is inaccurate; heavy metal toxicity, and specifically mercury toxicity, is fully legitimated in Western medicine as a health concern. However, Chen’s symptoms, and the sources proposed for them, do not align with any conventional understanding of such intoxication. 261 somatization (that is, a condition originating in the mind) is violently rejected by MCS sufferers, who frame these suggestions as being labeled “crazy” (Kroll-Smith and Floyd

117), being told it’s “all in [their] heads” (132), or as a suggestion that their illness is not real (95). This suggests a resistance even to the collapse of Cartesian dualism and to the idea that the mind is a material part of the body, and while Kroll-Smith and Floyd would like to read MCS as a subversion of medicalization, suggesting that “[a]pprehending modern problems as biomedical is a potent rhetorical strategy for deflecting attention from the possible social sources of troubles” (61), they ignore the ways in which this is exactly the effect achieved by the insistence of the environmentally ill on articulating their illness in biomedical terms. Reading a case history of an MCS sufferer, they argue that her story “deflect[s] attention from a clinical appraisal of the physical body to a critical appraisal of the social body” (62), and that her story renders environmental illness as “a once healthy body protesting imperfections in the production of modern material life” (ibid). Yet, in fact, environmental illness recenters attention on the physical body because of its conceptualization as a disorder, a form of biological damage. Kroll-Smith and Floyd note the “pathophysiology theory” that they write “keeps the focus on the external environment as the source of [the sufferer’s] misery” (63) without considering what pathophysiology entails— the fact that the victim, in this case, “includes an account of how [initial chemical overexposure] changed her body, rendering it susceptible to violent reactions from minute, subclinical exposures to unrelated chemicals found everywhere in her environment” (62-3). Other accounts of environmental and environmentally-induced illness almost invariably echo this case study in citing an initial

262 overexposure as the site of bodily transformation. The sufferer of MCS searches for an incident of industrial contamination (81), crop-dusting (75), pesticide use (62), Agent

Orange encounters (129), and chemical changes in home and office environments that seemed trivial at the time, but later are understood as injurious in effect.

The willingness of environmental illness advocates to point to— and indeed rely on— bodily or subjective experience as “evidence,” in spite of their adherence to medical models, is often highlighted as a major departure from humanist norms and a reshaping of the human subject. In some ways, the groundwork for this strategy, and for the eagerness to accept it, has been inadvertently laid by the work of narrative medicine, as represented by scholars such as Annemarie Mol who thoughtfully attend to the

“multiplicity of reality” (6) that manifests in interactions between patient narratives of disease and clinical examinations, and which presents a challenge to the model of the body “established as an independent entity[, a] reality all by itself,” and of the object of medical discovery as “a single disease, residing inside the body” (36). Narrative medicine’s important and valuable insistence on taking seriously subjective experience as an ontologically relevant aspect of the bringing-into-being in disease has the unfortunate potential to introduce confusion: how ought subjective experience to be weighed against objective information? Can subjective experience supersede clinical data, and ought it to?

Alaimo characterizes the material memoir as a critique of the divisions between popular and “expert” knowledge, a place where the author offers up “personal experiences as

‘data’” and “examines her own life story through a scientific lens” (87); the genre allows the possibility of “refusing the oppositions between objective scientific knowledge and

263 subjective autobiographical rumination, between the external material environment and the inner workings of the self” (95). Kroll-Smith and Floyd see environmentally ill bodies as having found a voice, in resistance to “the Cartesian revolution [that] successfully silenced the authorial voice of the body” (52). They suggest a “heretic” bent to the environmentally ill tendency to seek truth within “a deliberately rational practice” while basing that practice on “human experience” (98).

Yet the case of Mel Chen draws attention to the problematic results of this

“heretic” tendency, and forces us to re-examine the premises on which it is celebrated.

They attribute their multiple chemical sensitivity, as I have mentioned, to mercury poisoning caused either by dental fillings or allergy shots preserved with mercury (198).

The fact that both of these items have been clinically proven not to cause mercury poisoning (Rathore, Singh, and Pant; Behrmann) means that this attribution ought to elicit pause. Scant pages later, they claim that “a significant number of accounts tie childhood autism to the neurotoxicity of environmental mercury, with much attention to vaccines”

(211), citing several books whose claims have been overwhelmingly debunked

(Vedantam; Specter). How ought we to respond to such claims, which feed into and reinforce what Dennis Flaherty has described as “perhaps [] the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years”? The “evidence” or “data” of Chen’s body is not in dispute; however, something has gone badly wrong in the situation of this popular, subjective knowledge within a rational, objective framework when it leads us into positions where

264 the “voice” of the body can simply assert whatever it likes, in the face of all other forms of evidence, and expect the assertion to be accepted as true.21

There is more than a hint here of what Val Plumwood describes as “the feminism of uncritical reversal,” in which what has traditionally been figured as hegemonic/masculine (reason, the objective) is rejected, and what has traditionally been figured as subaltern/feminine (nature, the subjective) is afforded primacy, without any serious attention being paid to the dualism that has created such a hierarchy in the first place. At the same time, Chen (in common with the environmentally ill people whom

Kroll-Smith and Floyd describe) does found their theory of suffering upon “rational explanations borrowed from the profession of medicine” (Kroll-Smith and Floyd 34), endorsing the fundamental privilege of this framework. Kroll-Smith and Floyd’s explanation for the fact that “the environmentally ill are likely to apprehend their somatic misery using the technical language of biomedicine rather than some variation of New

Age knowledge” (ibid) is that environmental illness is experienced “in the presence of consumer items commonly regarded as safe and in ordinary environments commonly regarded as benign” (34-5). However, a number of problematic assumptions are required to endorse this idea; one could as easily argue that the environmentally ill ought to turn away from biomedicine, having been made sick by biomedically approved objects and environments. Not only do they not engage in this rejection, but the radical, integrative

“refusal of opposition” that Alaimo describes in fact preserves the elemental tenets of

21 Chen’s assertions appear, in fact, to have gone unremarked-on. As of this reading, I have not yet encountered an academic review of Chen’s book that mentions these claims. 265 rational humanism: in a strange appropriation of Ryle’s regress22, the subject-observer recedes further in and regards the sensational realm of the body as appropriate object.

The dualisms between subject/object and rational/natural are therefore not refused, though their lines are redrawn; the environmentally ill subject argues for the admissibility of their private sensations into the realm of legitimate object-data, but does not challenge the model of the discrete subject distinct from its surroundings, either in a material or in an ontological sense, which is what one suspects that Alaimo, among others, would really like it to do.

Alaimo describes the standard medical paradigm of the modern body as being one in which “the human body is sharply delineated from the background of the environment— magically sealed, impermeable, isolated” (107). This is not strictly accurate, as the standard medical paradigm is certainly conscious of the permeability of the modern body when it comes to viruses or bacteria, and even where classical cases of contamination are concerned; what Alaimo is gesturing towards is the failure of this paradigm to account for what we might perhaps call quantum cases of contamination, the strange interactions that occur at much smaller levels, and whose effects are sometimes

(certainly in the case of radiation) probability-based— and, perhaps, the inability to conceive of a contamination that is not contamination: that is neither, in other words, negative nor a distinct event, but merely an ongoing part of the constitution of human and

22 The philosopher Gilbert Ryle points out the “infinite regress” present in models of the mind that suppose every act to be the product of conscious reflection. The regress lies in the fact that conscious thought must be the product of a mind that knows how to reflect, and that knowing how to reflect must be the product of a mind that… etc. 266 nonhuman bodies. This material reality of this quantum inter-contamination is a major blow against the structural integrity not only of the standard medical paradigm, but of rational humanism more generally. Yet it is not something that the environmentally-ill worldview imagines or accepts. The foundation of environmental illness not only requires a discretely bounded ontological subject to assert authority over the unruly material of the body, but also understands trans-corporeal interchange as sporadic events that damage or corrupt that body. The fact that environmental illness is attentive to the environment and its ability to leak into the body does not mean that it offers a significant challenge to the view that body and environment are (or should be, or are naturally) separate.

Kroll-Smith and Floyd argue that a necessary strategy that allows the environmentally ill to reclaim humanness involves “shift[ing] attention from an exclusive focus on their bodies to a careful reconsideration of what are acknowledged as safe, clean places” (73)— in other words, from the body to the environment. Attentiveness to the environment, or to the body-as-environment (as Alaimo argues that “the process of remaking one’s domestic space blurs the commonsensical outlines of the human body”

[118]) is a key factor in perceptions of the environmentally ill body as radical. Yet, in fact, the examples Kroll-Smith and Floyd offer display the opposite preoccupation. The environmentally ill are deeply concerned with the dysfunction of their own bodies, meticulously recounting every indication of disease with a hyperchondriacal attention in the sense that Catherine Belling reads hypochondria, as a “too-close— and therefore overwhelming and distracting— account of its text, the subject’s lived body” (139).

Belling suggests that the hypochondriac is “not delusional, apprehending what is not

267 there at all, but rather overattentive, seeking and finding ills that have not (yet) become more immediately evident” (ibid). The lists of symptoms with which Kroll-Smith and

Floyd are presented are astonishing in their attentiveness. One patient reports:

chronic chemical bronchitis,… nasal congestion, digestive problems,

circulation problems in hands and feet, synovitis in one toe and possible

hip joints, extreme sensitivity around root surface of teeth… irritability,

impaired memory, recent allergies to dust mites and mold. The above

complaints are unchanging; with prolonged exposure, I experience

extreme fatigue, flulike feeling, pressure on sinuses, headache, and

neuromuscular twitching that interferes with sleep” (100).

Patients are also deeply concerned with mapping their bodily symptoms onto toxic chemicals that might have provoked them; another patient creates a careful table that correlates symptoms and irritants, linking “body vibrates” to “newsprint” and “synthetics in clothing,” “difficulty concentrating” to “computers,” and “pain in neck gland” to

“forced-air systems” (101). This need to create what Belling terms “a coherent story”—

Belling specifies diagnosis, but within the diagnosis of environmental illness, the individual engages in the subdiagnoses of sensitivity— that accords bodily sensation and perception of significance is intelligible within a larger order-marking impulse that characterizes environment illness. Kroll-Smith and Floyd note that a distinct element of the environmentally ill identity involves the need to “reorder and reclassify” or

“reorganize [a person’s] thinking about their bod[y] and environments” (98). Indeed, one element that separates environmental illness from hypochondria is the fact that Belling

268 characterizes hypochondria as “mental distress caused by uncertainty about the meaning of actual somatic experience” (16), while the environmentally ill are, by definition, certain about the meaning of their somatic experience— a certainty that both produces and is produced by the reorganization of body and environment that takes place.

Significantly, however, this reorganization does not result in a trans-corporeal view that understands the body and environment as non-separate and continually interacting. It results, instead, in a view in which the sovereignty of the body is threatened by an impure environment.

Alaimo, in her analysis of Rhonda Swillinger’s photographic studies of the environmental ill, remarks that “Swillinger’s compelling photographs of people inhabiting these ‘deviant’ spaces conjure what cannot be seen: the pernicious spaces of

‘normal’ human habitation that are riddled with toxins” (122). The deviant spaces in question are the isolated locales to which the people in question remove themselves: white rooms, wooden saunas, trailers in the desert. Alaimo’s argument is that these photos ask us to “see, smell, or imagine the invisible toxins that permeate everyday life,” causing us to “question the safety of normal, early twenty-first-century human habitats”

(ibid). Yet in fact what the photos suggest is the possibility and value of a “safe space,” something that is deeply embedded in the environmental illness narrative. Alaimo’s focus is on Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, but more media attention has fallen on electromagnetic hypersensitivity, whose sufferers have relocated to rural West Virginia, within the National Radio Quiet Zone (Stromberg). In both cases, sufferers seek to resolve their illness by settling in uncontaminated environments, or by protecting

269 themselves from a barrage of perceived contamination with porcelain or aluminum barriers (Alaimo 118). Murphy notes that this search for safe space follows “a peculiar late-twentieth-century, middle-class obsession with safety” that involves “equating the reduction of ‘risk’ with moral goodness” (166), and works to “displace the site of disability from the body into the environment,” displacing pathology from the person to the environment (167). Implicit in this approach is a general consensus about what constitutes contamination— one in which Alaimo participates when she refers to everyday life’s “invisible toxins.” What are these invisible toxins? Environmentally ill people do not agree. For those with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a “toxin” could be anything from soy ink in someone else’s pen and electromagnetic waves from a TV set

(Kroll-Smith & Floyd 35) to grocery stores (95), Scotch tape and felt-tip markers (100), aspirin and plastic phones (103), isopropyl alcohol (91), perfume and mold (81), or simply, as one subject sums it up, “[l]iving in Louisiana” (101). For those with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, it may be a variety of electrical appliances, cell phones, or proximity to power lines. Very rarely do sufferers offer a framework that links trigger substances together, or that differentiates them from substances with an equal or greater propensity for harm: non-ionizing radiation, for example, of the sort involved in cell phones, microwaves, and other appliances, occurs naturally— and, to boot, in its more destructive ultraviolet form. Yet UV light can be used as a naturopathic therapy, and indeed this is one of the therapies Porochista Khakpour experiments with after leaving

Los Angeles for Santa Fe, where her “full-time job [is] wellness” (220) and she also

270 works with a “Hoshin bee guru,” a “critical healer” whose practice involves providing live bees to inject Khakpour with what Khakpour acknowledges is “venom” (222).

So many toxins, and so little consensus. Nonfiction author Eula Biss, whose On

Immunity operates as a sort of material memoir without sickness, investigating the social and material environment the governs the decisions she must make about the body of her son, sheds light on this confusion when she notes the obvious fact that “[t]hough toxicologists tend to disagree with this, many people regard natural chemicals as inherently less harmful than man-made chemicals. We seem to believe, against all evidence, that nature is entirely benevolent” (39). Biss notes that many of the claims made by Rachel Carson about the carcinogenic power of DDT have not subsequently been borne out, and that DDT remains one of the world’s most effective means of controlling malaria— a disease that has experienced a resurgence, buoyed by the stigma attached to DDT and its use. Malaria is, one supposes, “part of, as Rachel Carson would say, ‘a natural system in perfect balance,’” as Biss writes, characterizing “a variety of preindustrial nostalgia” that she admits to finding seductive (115).

The shadow of this “natural system in perfect balance” hangs long over environmental illnesses of all kinds. The quest for a “clean” space that Zwillinger’s photographs summarize suggests the effort to locate and achieve such a balance. The environment, for the environmentally ill, is conceived of as a broken object— an analogy

I use to gesture towards a particular meaning. Recent critical theory has fostered a liberatory discourse that arises from the work of Heidegger and Schopenhauer, one that focuses on the tool or part that draws our attention only when we are incapable of using it

271 as we see fit, or rather on the part that refuses to be a part, the “breaking point” that enables the formation of a distinct identity. These “willful subjects,” in Sara Ahmed’s terms, are “bodies in protest,” as Kroll-Smith and Floyd refer to the chemically reactive subjects who “break” in the atmosphere of the modern world. However, my interest is not in the tool, but in the notion of what it is to be broken. The broken object breaks insofar as it fails to perform a specific task, which is not necessarily an action, but a way of being a thing. “Brokenness” here designates a lack of ontological completeness. For a broken hammer (to draw on Heidegger’s example), there are two identities available: it can be a broken hammer, or it can be something altogether different, in which the old standards of completeness no longer apply. The environment, in this sense, is “broken” when and insofar as it does not conform to its expected standards of purity/completeness (in this case the elusive “natural”ness). It draws attention only insofar as it does not fulfill what are ultimately human expectations about its normative nature. For example, Mel Chen provides an illustration of environmentally ill geography:

“Largely two quarters of the animated agents of the metropolis— that is,

motor vehicles and pedestrians, but not the nonhuman animals or the

insects— can be toxic to me because they are proximate instigators. The

smokestacks, though they set the ambient tone of the environment, are of

less immediate concern when I am surviving moment to moment” (201-2).

This is a world that has been divided along the lines I have previously outlined as typical of the material memoir, with the “natural” (nonhuman animals, insects, the plant life that does not even merit a mention) functioning as safe, and the “artificial” (humans

272 themselves, their motor vehicles, the distant smokestacks) as toxic. As Chen continues a description of their journey through the hazardous city, they evince no awareness of the non-toxic, natural world, and particularly no awareness of trans-corporeal interchange with it. The “exterior” environment with which they interacts comes to consciousness only as an adversary: contaminated, and therefore functioning as contaminant.

When Body Toxic is read through this lens, it’s clear that Antonetta’s small white fish and blackberries and air and water are marked by their failure to behave as en- natured— in other words, as “nature” would have them be and behave. Beyond their ability to contaminate (which is, in turn, a function of their own contamination, their perversion from natural to artificial), they are also agents: they “did it” to Antonetta, committing a violent intentional act that we would not normally assign to fish and blackberries and air and water. Similarly, Antonetta’s other toxins have agency:

“[h]ydroxyl will enter the molecular structure of DNA and take what it needs and leave another you” (207). The whole agential landscape is insidious and uncanny. Toxins

“[hang] in the water, nest[] in the soft tissues of the fish” (27). When non-toxic environments do appear in narratives of environmental illness, they are not only green

Edens of the sort that Cronon and Buell criticize, but also passive, inert: more likely to be penetrated than penetrating. Steingraber, early in Living Downstream, paints a portrait of the food chain that encourages the reader to see themselves as “standing at the beginning of a human food chain…You have eaten food that was grown here. You are the food that was grown here. You are walking on familiar ground” (3). However, the rhetorical emphasis of the book is undeniably placed on the parallel contamination of human and

273 nonhuman bodies, rather than in their intercorporation. “I wonder where the chemicals sprayed in these fields when I was growing up here now reside,” Steingraber muses. “On what mountainside, in what forest or lake bottom, in whose bodies do they lodge now?”

(179) Human and nonhuman are both vulnerable to the ontological threat of violation, which is to say the threat of brokenness.

If the contaminated (broken) environment ceases to function as environment, a proposition I mean in a double sense— the contaminated environment ceases to be

“environmental” in that it is perceived as “unnatural,” and yet it also ceases to correctly perform its role as exterior, in that it now threatens to leak in— then it makes sense that

Kroll-Smith and Floyd suggest that the MCS body causes the onlooker to wonder if, in fact, the environmentally ill person is human. “Why is this body different from ours?”

Kroll-Smith and Floyd imagine the onlooker asking. “Is he or she human like us?” The result is that, they write, “those with MCS are in a struggle to be accepted to be human”

(73). And, in fact, the contaminated human is often represented as the human that threatens to no longer be a human (Ferebee, forthcoming). Infiltration by the other endangers the autonomy and the internal coherence that are central to humanist understandings of the self. Elements of the environmentally ill commitment to legible brokenness, in the form of medical authentication, are intensely legible in this context: being a “broken” human is a way of insisting on one’s relationship to humanness, and perhaps even a basis on which to demand a recognition of humanness that has been more amorphously withheld in the pre-sickness past. (It is no coincidence, one suspects, that

80% of those diagnosed as environmentally ill are women [Coyle].) Much depends, then,

274 on establishing a legitimated brokenness (an “approved” way to be broken), for without this classification, the environmentally ill person’s relationship (as a non-normative body) to the human is unclear. Yet the framing of environmental illness as “illness” reasserts the normativity of the body that is not trans-corporeal. The articulation of environmentally ill experience within a humanist framework— characterizing that experience in the language of the rational, scientific observer and attributing it to violations of bodily sovereignty— is part of a complicated negotiation in which the environmentally ill person affirms their allegiance to such a framework, and therefore works to maintain its hegemonic authority.

At the same time, as I wrote in Chapter One, the sensitivity/hypersensitivity of the environmentally ill person often seems to function as less an inability to tolerate the chemical or the electromagnetic than as a more general, almost supernatural awareness

(evoking the “sensitivity” of the clairvoyant) of the threat of ideological contamination.

This is visible in Alaimo’s claims regarding the ability of environmental illness (and its depictions) to “conjure what cannot be seen”— contamination— and prompt us to sense the “invisible toxins” that fill our lives, where language itself suggests a supernatural power on the part of the environmental illness. It is also visible in the way that Alaimo and others discuss the lay expertise both of those suffering from environmentally illness and of material memoirists whose illness is environmentally induced— for both categories of environmentally-associated illness are seen to produce “ordinary experts” who assume what Kroll-Smith and Floyd describe as “a responsibility… for knowing the body and its relationship to environments” (121-2). This expertise is afforded

275 considerable weight; Alaimo characterizes it as a form of counter-memory that is therefore “an important ethical practice” (95). Though one element of this practice is amateur scientific research, a far greater emphasis is placed on “common sense” interpretations of lived experience (Di Chiro 1997 216) and the “authoritative voice”

(Kroll-Smith and Floyd 133) or evidence of the body itself. The victim of environmentally-associated illness, in other words, is understood to possess an intimate, often occult, and untransferable knowledge that to which others do not have access. This knowledge is perceived as a warning that the environmentally ill offer to those who do not and cannot sense the danger: Kroll-Smith and Floyd suggest that the citizen-experts of environmental illness are among the first to understand and act upon “the incapacity of normal science to reach consensus on the scope and severity of complex, uncertain biospheric dangers” (202), and Murphy sees the histories of environmental illness she describes as drawing attention to “our ability not only to notice but also to do something about the health effects of chemical exposures”— exposures that, she emphasizes, lurk

“even in unexceptional spaces of relative comfort” (179). Environmentally-associated illnesses are therefore positioned as a detection of the earliest, subtlest hints of a contamination that is already spreading, calling to mind Belling’s analysis of an interview with director David Cronenberg on the topic of his film The Fly. An early scene in the film sees the protagonist, Brundle, experience what Cronenberg describes as “a classic moment in the history of anybody’s individual disease… you feel something or see something, and even though it’s a small thing it’s a very, very wrong thing” (185).

Belling sees this moment— the symptom of disintegration, “[g]eneral cellular chaos, a

276 revolution”— as a moment at which Brundle “sees himself as an other, and as a monstrous other,” an experience that is, for the hypochondriac, “always vividly imminent” (ibid). That is, the wrongness of the “small thing” suggests a future in which the self is not the self, and perhaps in which the human is not human: a future that is perhaps also the present.

The language used by Cronenberg recalls that of Schweblin, whose Carla is convinced that “[s]omething small and invisible” (“algo pequeño e invisible”) has changed, and in so doing “has ruined everything” (“ha ido arruinando todo”). Carla sees this small-but-very-very-wrong thing as being “related to the children in the waiting room, to the death of the horses, the dog, and the ducks, and to the son who is no longer her son but who goes on living in her house” (160), but she does not see environmental poisoning as the source of this small thing. Rather, she sees the “thing” as the small disorder that portends the larger disorder— a disorder that she herself effected in

“changing” David from one body to another, thus splitting the human atom. Though she tells herself, David says, “[t]hat whatever has cursed this town for the past ten years is now inside [him]” (“[q]ue lo que sea que haya maldecido a este pueblo en los últimos diez años ahora está dentro de [él]”) (162), she is not referring to the toxin that has made

David toxic, but to a larger spiritual contamination caused by David’s existence. David himself fixates on understanding the toxic poisoning, but he attributes to it a much greater, almost ontological importance. Somewhere in the nature of the contamination, he thinks, is “the important thing.” Both he and his mother are obsessed with finding a way to restore the wholeness of a world that has been broken: making the unheimliche

277 heimliche again. Fever Dream thus suggests that its central narrative, which had seemed to be one of environmental contamination, is in fact about a different form of contamination: the leakages and transgressions that disrupt the continuity of the normal, that hint at a conceptual framework on the verge of collapse.

Through this lens, the narrative of environmental contamination itself becomes legible as one whose central focus has always been disorder: the deviance of all things, their failure to remain in— as Alaimo characterizes the deviance of the environmentally ill— their proper places. This is not, in the end, very surprising: Mary Douglas points out in her classic study, Purity and Danger, that “dirt is essentially disorder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment” (2). And in keeping with Douglas’s observations regarding the association of physical dirt with metaphysical contamination, the landscapes of environmental illness narratives might be accurately described as “fallen,” in the sense of

St. John’s Babylon the Great, which is “a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit” (a description that could easily be applied to toxic contamination). The association of naturalness with virtue has a long history, and Steingraber for one condemns a proposed environmental violation, a waste incinerator, on the grounds that it

(and the mere discussion of it, and the manufacturing industry it supports, and the mindset that subsidizes incineration) is “obscene,” in contrast to the “glorifying” music of

Vaughan Williams, which she listens to while reflecting on the issue, or the river redhorse, an endangered fish that rests “quietly in a current of water, even as I am resting here on the earth,” or her family farm, “a greatly abridged version of its earlier self,” but

278 a persistent emblem of the purer past that appears as a literal guiding light in the distance:

“[w]hen the music ends,” Steingraber writes, “I’ll be able to see its lights as I walk out of this field” (2010 233). “Obscene,” in Steingraber’s usage, is a judgement that partakes simultaneously of morality and aesthetics, as indeed the etymological history of the word, which designates what content is too offensive to be depicted onstage, would suggest. As a judgement, it seems particularly significant. What Steingraber is doing in this moment is making recourse to a moral-aesthetic-natural order that she feels has been lost, drawing on metonymy to gesture towards a literal collapse of categorical division: just as the obscene has leaked its way onto the stage, so the toxic has leaked into nature, the nonhuman into the human, matter out of its proper place.

Intramigrations

If it is tempting to read the environmentally ill body as a salvific figure, this is not because that body offers a road towards a more trans-corporeal or posthuman/ist consciousness, but because it confirms our beliefs about the world’s correct operations, and posits a problem whose solution will reinstitute those operations. At the very least, it functions as St. John’s voice from heaven, instructing listeners to “Come out of

[Babylon], so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not share in her plagues”— offering, in other words, the possibility of a moral-aesthetic-natural safe space.

Fever Dream’s depiction of its posthuman/ist figures is ambivalent, to say the least. David is described as physically peculiar, red-eyed and pink-skinned, with white

279 spots and few eyelashes. His behavior is sinister: though he claims that he was burying the animals that dropped dead in his presence, and that “[b]urying isn’t the same as killing” (“enterrar no es matar”) (103 English; 74 Spanish), we know that he did something to them, if only “pushing”-and-pulling them into the requisite positions, as he does to Amanda. Carla is afraid of him, and through her eyes we see him as the changeling she perceives him to be, alien, distant, deformed, and not normatively child- like. In his obsession with locating “the important thing” and restoring the world to its natural order, he withholds both information and empathy from a dying Amanda. He is not a reassuring or attractive person— not someone the reader might instinctively want to be.

Yet the novel hints at an ethical stance grounded in the patchwork person David not-very-comfortably exemplifies. When Carla brings David to the woman in the green house who will “migrate” his soul to another body, the woman emphasizes to Carla that

“even without David in that body, [Carla will] still be responsible for it, for the body, no matter what happen[s],” and that Carla must “be willing to accept his new being” (30)—

“su nueva forma,” forma being a word that can connote both a body and a way of being.

Carla violates this adjuration almost immediately, when she— to Amanda’s later disbelief— won’t pick the new David up, hold him, or even touch him. She regards the

“new David” only as a “monster,” and though she acknowledges (or perhaps only echoes the woman in the green house’s explanation) that David is now two Davids, “David’s body and David in his new body” (“El cuerpo de David y también David en su nuevo cuerpo”) (34) with “something of each of them… left in the other” (“[a]lgo de cada uno

280 quedaría en el otro”) (29-30 English; 28 Spanish), she insists that there can only be one

“real David,” and her responsibility is to him. The possibility that part of David is in Nina does not inspire her to treat Nina with love and fondness, but (it is implied) drives her to allow, if not orchestrate, Nina and Amanda’s poisoning and Amanda’s death. She, not

David, is Fever Dream’s truly sinister character, for she is incapable of perceiving that a world in which people she loves dwell in and through a multitude of bodies is one in which she has a responsibility to all of them: to every body that they may have been, may be, might yet be a part of. “Is there part of you in her body?” Amanda asks David (“¿Hay parte tuya en ese cuerpo?”), remembering the severely disabled child whom she saw crying in a store (52 English; 42 Spanish). It’s not clear if even David knows the answer, or how he could answer for the people that he might become, now that he is unmoored from the easy markers of skin and selfhood. He might be that girl. She might be him.

They might, each of them, carry a trace of themselves.

This is a kind of contamination. A substance moves through multiple bodies, muddying the issue of where they start and it ends, making it difficult for us to define and regulate the “real,” the “original,” the “natural” state of things. Sometimes the substance is harmful. Sometimes it is hard to rule on: delivering both positive and negative effects.

Mostly, it requires from us a new way of relating to ourselves and to that which is not ourselves, and a reconsideration of the boundary between those two elements. Though our “souls” may not migrate, everything else does— one might say, from our cells to our selves— and much of that which is “us” has its own identity, toxic or nontoxic, transitory or lasting, of which we may form only a part. What are our responsibilities to the

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“monsters” that we have always been, in this case? What invisible ropes link us together— or is our task to find a way of living free of ropes, in the strange spatiotemporalities where we still require rescue, but are no longer (troublingly or reassuringly) quite so far apart?

Fever Dream ends with Amanda’s husband returning to the city, having turned his back on David (who may also be Nina, and whose “[e]yes desperately seek out

[Amanda’s] husband’s gaze” [182]). His journey accrues shades of dread: “He doesn’t see,” Amanda says, “the soy fields, the streams that crisscross the dry plots of lands, the miles of open fields empty of livestock, the tenements and the factories as he reaches the city” (“No ve los campos de soja, los riachuelos entretejiendo las tierras secas, los kilómetros de campo abierto sin Ganado, las villas y las fábricas, llegando a la ciudad”)

(183 English; 124 Spanish)— the indications of environmental disaster. He is indifferent to the traffic and the pollution it produces. Finally: “He doesn’t see the important thing: the rope finally slack, like a lit fuse, somewhere; the motionless scourge about to erupt”

(“No ve lo importante: el hilo finalmente suelto, como una mecha encendida en algún lugar; la plaga inmóvil a punto de irritarse”) (ibid). At the last, we are granted a definition of “the important thing,” and it is the failure of what has held things together (or stretched them apart) in the past. However, the slack rope that has previously marked order is now a dislocated fuse, perhaps promising or counting down to what the Spanish text describes as a “plaga inmóvil a punto de irritarse,” an immobile plague about to excite itself. This cryptic image seems to suggest the toxins that lie sown in the soy fields, waiting to arise and inflict their poisonous effects. Yet at the same time there is the rope, burning itself

282 down to some affective explosion (se puede irritar— one can excite— strong emotions, just as is the case in English) that will unleash a “plague” previously imprisoned, paralyzed. There is a profound sense of danger, but also anticipation, the “fuse” prompting the reader to an indrawn and unreleased breath. This ambivalence is, perhaps, the most appropriate possible note for the book to end on, dealing neither in the utopian hybrids nor in the Biblical impurities that so frequently characterize narratives of environmental illness. In their place, Fever Dream simply says: a collapse is coming.

Something new waits for the world to collapse around our ears.

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Conclusion. Queerer Things Were Yet to Come

Hilary Brougher’s 1997 film The Sticky Fingers of Time opens with a series of black-and-white images that center around nuclear testing: grains of sand stir, still- smoldering ash drifts downwards, smoke rises, a mushroom cloud rises in the desert.

“Big changes often come in small packages,” the film’s lead character, Tucker Harding, muses in voiceover. “Like an atom blossoming in the desert.” A slow pan reveals that she would know: she has just published a newspaper story that declares itself to be “A report from the… HOME OF THE H-BOMB,” describing her experience of a 1953 nuclear test.

Tucker is unaware as yet of the “big changes” that are already happening in her body, brought in packages too small for her to see: radioactive fallout from the test she witnessed has caused her cells to mutate, rendering her capable of traveling in time, and her death— occurring both in a few minutes and more than forty years in the future— will scatter her bioelectric “code” (the DNA, the film tells us, of the soul, yet at the same time a physical property of cells) throughout time, where it will become incorporate in other body/souls, past, present, and future, and “infect” them with its mutation and its gift. Tucker’s lover, Ofelia (who hails from the far future), is one of these bodies, as is the woman who will become her lover, Drew (who hails from the 1990s). There are others, “time freaks” both “natural” (made of Tucker’s code or its derivatives) and cybernetic (implanted with technological devices) who live in nonlinear time. At first,

284 living in nonlinear time seems to mean simply living out of order, a life in which one may meet someone who knows you but whom you do not yet know, witness as an adult a formative scene from one’s childhood, or read a news clipping about one’s own death.

This interpretation of nonlinear time is, in other words, the uncanny time of the toxic, which is marked by spatiotemporal dislocation, as Joseph Masco and Rob Nixon observe.

Indeed, the dislocation of Tucker’s murder— which for the bulk of the film has already occurred, yet goes on to be eventuated in the 1990s before reaching its original site in

1953— is very similar to the type of “temporal ellipsis” that Masco associates with the nuclear. This, he writes, is what separates “a nuclear attack and the actual end of the world,” as well as radiation exposure and radiation effect (28; 32). He describes this as

“an acceleration of time” (11), juxtaposing it with the “contraction of space” that accompanies it, yet perhaps we would do well to remember that spacetime is one continuum, and that characterizing any process in its dimensions as acceleration or contraction does not capture the strangeness of what the toxic causes to occur, which fundamentally resists classical narratives of spatiotemporal movement. Uncanny spacetime does not accelerate or contract. It distorts, disperses, entangles, and erupts. The term “ellipsis” points towards this effect; Nixon’s account of environmental violence that

“is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence” that is “incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2), also captures something of this disorienting picture.

Yet in The Sticky Fingers of Time, this back-and-forth, even with its peculiar speeds and motions, does not fully capture nonlinear time’s nature. “Time,” Tucker

285 writes in the opening scene, “has five fingers. One is the past, two is the present, and three is the future…” “And four is for what could have been,” Ofelia says over her shoulder, completing the concatenation, “and five for what yet could be.” This rather fanciful picture of time’s dimensionality seems at first only a poetic figure. By the film’s conclusion, however, it has taken on substance and import, for Drew has arrived in early

1953 to prevent Tucker’s irradiation, thereby ensuring a paradoxical situation wherein she herself ought not to exist, or ought not at least to possess the ability to time travel

(which she obtained through her contamination with Tucker’s mutant code). This situation is at once both what could have been (an alternative version of the past that

Drew creates) and what yet could be (a future that Drew makes possible for herself and

Tucker). It is in this logically impossible space made up of tangled past and future, wherein one lover is a little bit literally made of the other, who is not quite the same woman that her lover fell in love with, that the two women achieve the lesbian idyll that constitutes the film’s closing note.

Critical analysis of The Sticky Fingers of Time has tended to center around the film’s representations of race, probing the fraught figure of Ofelia— a black woman from the future who, with her white lab coat and prehensile tail, is at once scientist and animal— and her role as too queer, perhaps, even for this queer movie, with its celebration of vintage white lesbianism. It’s true that Ofelia threatens to overtake the film’s protagonists, warping the narrative around her; Frances Negrón-Muntaner suggests that Drew and Tucker are portrayed as victims and creators where Ofelia, who seeks to ensure Tucker’s death and thereby her own creation, is “victimizer, engineer,” phallic

286

(her tail substituting for that other appendage) and destructive, granted “mastery of the physical universe” but all the more sinister for this power (428). Ofelia is also the most posthuman/ist of the films characters, being positioned not only as humanimal but as transhuman— she has discovered a way to extend her “code,” and thereby her consciousness, into the bodies of “damaged” people, and thus functionally exists in three bodies (two of whom are white, perhaps allowing the film to play out a fear of what

Negrón-Muntaner describes as “the contaminating potential of [Ofelia’s] blackness”).

Characters who fail to possess the “correct” number of bodies and minds often appear as threats to ontological order, for reasons that I have discussed both here and elsewhere

(Ferebee, forthcoming). At the same time, The Sticky Fingers of Time presents us with a complication: when asked why she hates Tucker, Ofelia tells Drew, “I can’t hate Tucker, any more than you can hate me. After all, we’re in this together. We’re made of the same code.” The three women are, in a sense, overlapping persons: intra-acting elements of a body other than that of the human subject, at the same time as they are not dissolved into the oneness of it. Consequently they are “drawn to each other,” as Ofelia puts it; “the pull of the code is stronger than blood.”

Code, in The Sticky Fingers of Time, thus becomes a way of visualizing a kind of inter/intra-connectedness that is explicitly opposed to what Michael Warner terms

“reprosexuality,” the “interweaving of heterosexuality, biological reproduction, cultural reproduction, and personal identity” (9) that produces and regulates the order of straight relationships, here emblematized by that genealogical lubricant, blood, which is supposed to be the strongest of liquids, but no longer is. In its place, The Sticky Fingers of Time

287 offers a unexplained watery gel that appears on the faces of those who’ve time-traveled—

“time travel,” Elizabeth Freeman notes, “produces a different set of bodily fluids from those considered vital to biological reproduction” (123), and the “stickiness” of this particular fluid suggests the queerness of the transtemporal relationships that code lubricates. These are relationships of identity (as Freeman points out, Tucker and Drew, both writers, are played by actresses who resemble one another), of antagonism, of sexuality, of self-discovery, and of forms of reproduction/contamination that disrupt spacetime: a way of being-other-bodies that encompasses multiplicity (Ofelia’s minions), engendering (the scattering of Tucker’s code), and the nonhuman (Ofelia attempts to thwart Drew by transferring her code to a cactus, where the dis- and re-embodied half of her can live without the capacity to interfere in Ofelia’s plans). This queer ontology demands a new understanding what the human constitutes and can constitute it, one that works to overpower and dismantle reprosexuality, much like the film’s paradoxical and penetrating new temporal “fingers.”

Such a queer ontology, I argue, offers a solution to the problems that I have discussed throughout this dissertation— in other words, a re[en]vis[ion]ed conceptual schema that can, at least in part, alleviate the dread, anxiety, and social confusion created by the collapse of Western liberal humanism. This conceptual schema is thus posthuman/ist, arising from my observations of the ways in which narratives of contamination betray the failure of the human as a means through which to organize and articulate the most urgent tensions of the Anthropocene era. Yet it is also a schema that specifically and necessarily emerges from queer ontology on account of the fundamental

288 entanglement of humanism and reprosexuality. As much as humanism is rooted in colonialism and its hierarchies of race— as Sylvia Wynter has examined in her work on the “coloniality of being,” where she discusses the mobilization of the Western

“universally applicable mode of being human” (299) in the colonial enterprise— it is also, and not separately, rooted in the logic of reprosexuality, which, in its governance of normative relations between oneself and the world, simultaneously governs and must govern the normative boundaries of the self. Unmooring these boundaries requires understanding their origin in the particular knot of “gender… the family… notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body” (6) that Warner characterizes being- queer as positioning itself against. With this understanding, I propose to use this space to sketch a new category of being, and to explicate the ways in which this category of being

“fingers” (touches— which is to say contaminates— and penetrates) reprosexuality’s humanist divisions. I call this category the anthropoqueer.

***

The word “anthropoqueer” owes its construction to the term “genderqueer,” which appeared at the turn of the twenty-first century (a 1995 edition of In Your Face newsletter by gender activist Riki Anne Wilchins features one of the word’s earliest appearances; Wilchins would go on to edit a 2002 anthology entitled GenderQueer:

Voices Beyond the Sexual Binary) to describe those who identify as outside of the gender

289 binary— those whom Kate Bornstein also refers to as “gender outlaws.” At the heart of genderqueer identity is a refusal of the Western conceptual structure of gender and its normative performance; genderqueer people may enact this refusal through insisting on the legitimacy of a lack of gender or an alternative gender, or by disrupting the binary structure of gender in other ways, thus “queering” gender. Already, in this sense, to be genderqueer is to trouble human-being, for humanism requires that the human body be gendered according to a binary, and instances in which this is not the case have caused

(and, in many places, continue to cause) unease and ontological insecurity, resulting not only in the surgical “correction” of intersex children (now increasingly recognized as a human rights violation), but also in violence against transgender people, who are often perceived as disturbing the binary through gender transition. Threats to the binary have historically been framed as forms of illness, in other words as a human body that is impaired or deficient, not functioning or whole— as in the case of Edward De Lacy

Evans, who was born Ellen Tremayne23 in the 1830s and married three times to women before being labeled “insane,” subject to a “cerebral mania, which has caused the insane desire for marrying women, and which of a necessity produces dementia” (Chesser 384).

Being “healthy in mind and body,” in this case, was attendant upon Evans adopting an

“appearance entirely feminine” (ibid), thus demonstrating that the dysfunction of the body responsible for his literal dis-order (the transgressive possibilities that he had

23 As modern transgender and lesbian identities did not exist at the time of Evans’s life, debate continues to surround the most appropriate way to discuss and describe him (Chesser). As such, I have chosen to refer to him as being born into a female identity, but will use male pronouns, as he lived a predominantly male life. 290 introduced) had been resolved, and that the “natural” structure of gender could continue to be perceived as such.

Elizabeth Reis, in her history of intersex bodies and their treatment in America, describes one potential threat to the gender binary, intersex people, as constituting

“bodies in doubt.” The question of correct behavior with regards to intersex people has always been, Reis notes, “entangled with shifting ideas and tensions about what was natural and normal, indeed, about what constituted personhood or humanity” (x). Bodies have to be policed to ensure the maintenance of ontologically requisite divisions: in early modern America, “monstrous” births worked to clearly divide the human from the natural and supernatural worlds, as well as enforcing racial hierarchies — such births were often associated with bestiality, demonic presences, or interracial desire (Reis 3-7)— while gender came to be the more unstable, and therefore the more urgently policed, definition as time passed. Reis observes that the factors involved in ascertaining the “true” sex of an intersex individuals were increasingly, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those that would ensure the protection of reprosexuality. Gender assignment and surgical options were selected to assure heterosexual desire, penetrative sex, and happy marriage

(Reis 123), and the interests and behavior of intersex patients were evaluated for conformity to normative gender stereotypes. (One case discussed by Reis involves a young intersex girl whose gender was affirmed by doctors on the grounds that she possessed the “qualities of neatness, orderliness, and compliance” and “idealized her mother… aspired to be a nurse or a secretary, and fantasized about meeting boys, kissing boys, and of ‘having intercourse with her future husband’” [120].) Intersex individuals

291 who were sexually attracted to men were identified as women; meanwhile, what Reis describes as the “impulse to ensure that women would be penetrable” prompted surgical reshaping of female-assigned intersex bodies to allow “normal” heterosexual sex (56), perhaps lending weight to Monique Wittig’s later suggestion that “‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems” (57). Well into the twentieth century, doctors involved in treating intersex patients continued to view the possibility of motherhood as “an essential component of successful adherence to femininity” (Reis 148)— as potently suggestive of the imbrication of gender identity and reproduction as considerations of enfranchisement and inheritance in earlier eras had been of the imbrication of gender identity and political agency.

Gender, in other words, is not merely a way of organizing bodies, but a way of organizing desire, organizing power, and organizing reproduction— not only biological reproduction, but cultural reproduction, as Warner’s definition of reprosexuality suggests.

As gender and its counterpart, the concept of innate biological sex, have become

(relatively) less naturalized through the work of trans activists, the social construction of these categories has become more widely accepted, to the extent that even anti-trans authors argue, as Elinor Burkett did in a 2015 New York Times editorial, that “what makes a woman” is not a body but “having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities, and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.”

Burkett’s attempt to re-reify gender is deeply problematic, (indeed offensive, as well as ahistorical and universalizing), but it marks a mainstream shift away from the assumption

292 that gender describes a natural condition of the body, an order that there is no use arguing with.

At the same time, the human/nonhuman binary has retained its naturalized status as a way of organizing bodies. Or: perhaps “organizing bodies” is a bit of a misnomer, for dividing what is human from what is nonhuman requires not merely the classification of entities, but their creation. Where do I (the human) start and the world (the nonhuman) end? Richard Feynman, as Karen Barad notes, commented in one of his famous lectures on the inherent falseness of the idea that any such easy dividing line exists. Bodily boundaries are enacted, Barad goes on to argue, through “specific bodily engagements with the world” (156), and not only once; “human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity” (172)— the intra-activity of matter. The concept (or, perhaps, convention) of humanness is thus not a way of organizing bodies, but a way of organizing matter: a way of organizing matter into bodies. The successful naturalization of these bodies, and the near-unthinkability of not being one of them, is such that we have taken as given the choice between the human

(that is, universal Western humanist subject) and the nonhuman. As was (and is) the case with those “bodies in doubt” who could not immediately articulate themselves as conventionally gendered, or who resisted articulating themselves as such, the being who suggests liminal human/nonhumanness causes discomfort, and is likely to be read as a

293 failed, nascent, or defective example of either category24 in an effort to deny the possibility of any intermediate or extrabinary existence.

By posing the possibility of an anthropoqueer category, I seek to refuse the human/nonhuman binary and open both the rich space of uncertainty and overlap between these categories as well as the undefined potential of an identity beyond the two that currently shape our perception. Anthropoqueer, as a descriptor, opts out of determining a precise spot at which the human ends and the nonhuman begins; it does not adhere to a humanist understanding of the human as autonomous subject uniquely endowed with agency and rights, but instead adopts a posthuman/ist attitude in which agency is unfixed, contingent, and, in the words of Barad, “an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (178), therefore equally available to all bodies. (As subjects and objects do not “preexist,” Barad argues, agency can only be “‘doing’ or

‘being’… Agency is about changing possibilities of change” [ibid].) The anthropoqueer also, notably, does not begin from a definition of the human that endorses normative models of the human body or subject. Nora Vincent’s 1999 assertion that the “human body is a machine”— one that either functions or doesn’t, that comes with a complete or incomplete set of parts— is not applicable; nor is the discrete and coherent subject whose participation in other subjectivities is perceived as a violation (Ferebee, forthcoming).

Jamie Madrox, with his “dupes” who emerge from his body to full independent sentience

24 Though I have primarily dealt here with cases of people who would tend to be characterized as “failed humans”— who are almost-human-but-not-quite— the trope of the “failed nonhuman” also exists, most often in the form of the tragic animal whose attempts to perform humanness are unsuccessful and alienate them from their nonhuman identity. 294 and are absorbed back into his body and consciousness, would be labeled anthropoqueer; most, if not all, mutants would fall into this category, particularly those who, like Cary and Kerry Loudermilk also do, treat both bodily and subjective boundaries as fluid, or those who, like Magneto, assimilate the nonhuman into their bodily assemblages, or who, like Venus Dee Milo, have assumed a radically nonhuman form. Animal, who prefers not to be held to the standards of the human, might well prefer such a description, and while

Borne was never human to begin with, Wick— who is and is not quite human— could adopt it as his own. Certainly, the piecemeal subjects of Schweblin’s Fever Dream would qualify, as they combine and recombine the traces of other selves who[m they] have been in their bodies.

At the same time as I offer these examples of fictional characters, I also contend that the anthropoqueer has implications for the real world, and for our current era. Indeed, in using the term anthropoqueer, I am not only gesturing towards a queering of the human/nonhuman binary that the anthropos (that which is human, in contrast to gods or animals— an etymology that recalls Bruno Latour’s suggestion that modern humanism’s birth of the human is simultaneously the birth of the nonhuman, “things, objects, or beats,” and “the equally strange beginning of a crossed-out God” [13]) represents, but also acknowledging the strong association between this term and the Anthropocene.

Anthropoqueerness is far from unique to the Anthropocene; however, as I have demonstrated over the course of the preceding chapters, it has taken on increasing reach and power as we question what it means to be anthropos in the Anthropocene. The term

Anthropocene, designed to indicate the agential power and ensuing responsibility of

295 humankind in this geological era, has been accused of recentering the human as site of unique agential power and rhetorically divorcing that human from the nonhuman world

(Davies). Yet an alternative interpretation might read the anthropos as that which this era threatens, both literally (as in predictions that anthropogenic effects might eliminate the conditions for human life while enabling other forms of life to flourish) and figuratively

(as in the threat the Anthropocene poses to the humanist subject). Certainly, though the

Anthropocene is often framed in terms of nonhuman life in peril— the mournful polar bear that, as Ursula Heise notes, has become synonymous with climate change in spite of the more complicated views of indigenous Arctic people (238-44)— but, in reality, it is the human that the Anthropocene finds most embattled. The same material marker that has been proposed as the Anthropocene’s formal starting-point, the radioactive isotope, also serves as the era’s most compelling and persistent bogeyman: a reminder of our inseparability from the nonhuman world, and that this inseparability does not merely take the form of bodies dependent upon each other’s behavior, but in fact involves the ongoing [re-]constitution of our bodies from amongst and in opposition to other bodies: a constant re-statement of where I end and the Other begins. The radioactive isotope is not only indifferent to bodily boundaries, but can also alter us at what is often understood as the most essential level of ourselves: the genetic code that is popularly believed to serve

“as the digital instructions for making a human being” (Rose 45). It can settle in our bodies, becoming a part of us that we do not accept as part of us. It contaminates us.

The Anthropocene begins with the human contaminating the nonhuman: most popularly, with radioactive isotopes infiltrating sedimentary rock, detectable as a “golden

296 spike” in the stratigraphic record. Yet what defines the Anthropocene is the nonhuman contaminating the human, or rather the growing awareness of this contamination— our inability to sustain what Latour describes as a process of “purification,” one that does not stop, and in fact enables (through its repression), the proliferation of hybridity (11-12).

Not only have we “never been modern,” as Latour contends, but, as Donna Haraway acknowledges, we have never been human (Haraway & Gane). The Anthropocene foregrounds this condition for us. And though the dominant response has been to double down on ideas of the human as “naturally” discrete and coherent subject, as my analysis here shows, this also acts to create the conditions of possibility in which we can acknowledge and mobilize our own contamination through the model of anthropoqueerness: an identity that rejects purification, and that seeks to reverse or subvert anthropocenic logics, queering— as well as our own bodies— the Anthropocene itself.

***

In 2014, Jordy Rosenberg accused queer theory of having turned “away from the queer social subject to the abstraction of the queer object” (np), equating queerness with

“aleatory nature” and arguing against what Alexander Galloway describes as “queer atonality,” the idea that “queerness can be abstracted to mean deviation as such, aleatoriness as such, or openness as such, and thus, through such extreme abstraction, queerness may be assigned as a proper monicker [sic] for biological and even ontological systems” (np). As someone who is proposing a queer ontology, and specifically positing queerness as a resistance of the subject/object division (a division that Rosenberg is

297 largely uncritical of, noting only in passing the potential value or exploring the implications of its embeddedness in Enlightenment modes of inquiry), I wish to contest many of Rosenberg and Galloway’s claims. However, at the same time, I agree with their opposition to the increasing use of “queer” to signify mere deviation, chaos in place of order. As such, in contesting these claims, I aim to make clear that the term anthropoqueer does not simply mark an abstract “queering” of the notion of humanness, but offers a substantive response to the conditions of reprosexuality, which, as I have argued, are deeply entwined with the function of humanism.

The primary force of Rosenberg’s critique is leveled at materialist ontologies that he feels equate the queer with the elemental and casts “the elemental [here she means

‘molecular’] as a kind of cellular ‘ancestral realm’— one that signals futurity and primitiveness all at once— embedded within the subject.” This then produces an

“ontologization of the molecule that is authorized, in part, by some sense… of its putative queerness or its inherently resistant nature,” and that divorces questions of ontology and queerness/resistance from their social situation. This complaint is not unwarranted; my own critique (in Chapter Four) of the extent to which dualistic narratives of environmental illness are read as radical by scholars because of their deviation from mainstream experience should suggest that I am deeply concerned with uncritical tendencies within the field of the environmental humanities. When Timothy Morton

(whom Rosenberg singles out) speaks of “queer ecology,” or Stacy Alaimo writes that the

“queer biology” of intersex cells within the human body, asexual reproduction in nature, and the 28,000 sexes of Schizophyllum “contests not only the content and the

298 ramifications of normative hetero-biology, but its claim to objectivity and neutrality” (5-

6), surely we must pause to probe what “intersex” signifies for a cell, whether floral and faunal reproduction materializes within the same matrix of material-discursive forces as human reproduction, what we mean when we talk about “sex” in the context of fungi, and to what extent describing ecology as “queer” has something of the anthropomorphic to it.

If we are to accept that gender is a way of organizing bodies, desires, power, and reproduction— that a larger reprosexual ideology in fact enmeshes gender with a host of other (human) sociocultural factors to regulate the position of subjects within hierarchies— then we must also accept that we seldom have grounds on which to describe nonhuman bodies as inherently “queer” or “straight.”

This is not, however, to say that the nonhuman world cannot participate in queerness. Jack Halberstam’s critique of the “straightening” of wildlife narratives to reflect reprosexual principles (32-42) is an example of the force with which the nonhuman world can be mobilized when we do not attribute queer narratives to it, but also refuse to allow straight narratives to be attributed to it, as has historically been the case. In this case, the nonhuman emerges as queer through its resistance to the reprosexual (or, as Halberstam puts it, “reproductive heterosexual”) project. To say as much is not to attribute an essential queer quality to the nonhuman, or indeed to imply an anthropomorphic intentionality that underlies this resistance. Rather, it is to acknowledge yet again the absurdity of enforcing a clean division between what is human and what is nonhuman. Rosenberg observes that Enlightenment empiricism emphasizes the separation of the subject and the object sufficiently to constitute objective “modern”

299 knowledge, and argues that the isolation of objects from their social context constitutes just such a “disembedding,” yet at the same time as he decries this separation of subject and object, he also seems to assume that they are entirely separate kinds of creatures— that the material, the molecular, the subatomic cannot be queer, because they cannot be social, except perhaps through their utilization qua objects by the proper subject, which is to say the human. His final quotation, a passage drawn from Samuel R. Delany’s

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, emblematizes to him a future in which the subject/object split is not “utter, irreversible.” Yet this passage is entirely anthropocentric

(focused on memories associated with a boathouse and on a dream of an unfinished city), and ends on a note he repeats, somewhat confusingly, as evidence of the object’s re- enfolding: “We lived in relation,” he emphasizes; “someone held his hand.”

It would seem that what Rosenberg really objects to is not “the ontological turn,” but rather any ontological turn that challenges the privileging of the human— and, here, a specifically humanist human, coherent and discrete, who alone has access to the realm of the social. I do not take issue with his critique of object-oriented ontology, which fundamentally imposes a rather flat, limited, and anthropomorphizing imagination of nonhuman “life” upon the objects it studies, and which I suspect Rosenberg is right to describe as engaging in primitivist fantasies of some immanent truth that is resident only in the sublime and diasporic Eden of things. However, Rosenberg’s persistently dualistic attitude prevents him from seeing that while merely indulging in enthusiasm about objects may not be radical, and indeed stands to reaffirm damaging beliefs about objective knowledge and the material world, it is not only possible but necessary for

300 ontology to make a queer turn in order for us to challenge the foundations of reprosexuality.

And, indeed, to a certain extent ontology, or what Barad describes as “onto- epistemology” (insofar as ontology and epistemology cannot be separate if one is unwilling to take as given the order of the material world) always involves an ideological commitment. José Esteban Muñoz, on the topic of performance scholarship, describes the difficulty involved in discussing “an object whose ontology, in its inability to ‘count’ as a proper ‘proof,’ is profoundly queer” (6). The queer has often, by necessity, been liminal, fleeting, ephemeral, or evanescent; in the case of queers of color, often “locked out of official histories and, for that matter, ‘material reality’” (9). Muñoz’s work resists normative demands that evidence, culture, text, and indeed bodies materialize in certain ways. For him, the queer is positioned as counter to reprosexual “counting.” The queer is what cannot count, because the logic of reprosexuality depends upon its exclusion; and because the queer cannot count, “within straight time, the queer can only fail… The politics of failure are about doing something else, that is, doing something else in relation to something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (1996 174). On an ontological level, we might say that the queer fails because it is always doing the wrong being: because the queer is always being something else, something else in relation to something that is missing in straight spacetime.

Ontology is not natural. To coopt the words of Donna Haraway, it is discourse, not the living world itself. Sylvia Wynter has emphasized this in her history of the modern conception of human-being, where she identifies the ideological functions that

301 various iterations of ontology have served. Elizabeth Povinelli emphasizes it when she writes of the 2013 struggle concerning the being or nonbeing of indigenous Australian rock formation Two Women Sitting Down, noting that “[i]n the presence of Two Women

Sitting Down, ontology’s claim to provide a general account of beings reveals a biological bias” (50). Who gets to be depends on what types of being “count.” In

Povinelli’s example, the biological bias of ontology privileges Life over Nonlife; living things can have being, but nonliving things cannot. For Wynter, there is the privileged

Western humanist subject, Man, and the human Others who function as incomplete or deviant humans (IV 174), a categorization that is also increasingly predicated upon biology: “the only still extra-humanly determined order of difference which was left available in the wake of the rise of the physical and, after Darwin, of the biological sciences,” and that can therefore “be supraculturally and extra-humanly ordained” (177).

What Wynter is arguing is that the biological comes to occupy the axis of ontology precisely because it appears natural— indeed, it creates the natural through its strategic regulation of the material world. Warner’s observation that “the heterosexualization of society” was a “fundamental imperative for modern colonialism” (7) takes on new meaning here; the ordering of bodies (or, as I have pointed out, the ordering of matter into bodies) is the key task of biology, and a key task, too, of the religious systems that

Wynter identifies biology as having replaced.

Warner links heterosexualization and colonialism together in a modernity that he describes as “the historical epoch of repro-narrativity: the notion that our lives are somehow made more meaningful by being embedded in a narrative of generational

302 succession” (ibid), that indeed “involves a relation to self that finds its proper temporality and fulfillment in generational transmission” (9). While this timeline is perhaps a little dubious25, modernity has certainly seen the institutionalization and universalization of this narrative— one that is also, Warner notes, naturalized— via “the obligatory heterosexual rationale in which it is asserted that if everyone were queer, the race would die out” (ibid). And while it lies outside of his experience, any cis woman, queer or not, could relate the certainty with which she is assured she will feel a hunger for children on the basis of what is perceived as her biological sex. The ordering of matter here conjoins biology, teleology, and the regulation of desire in a manner that not only recalls Susanne

Antonetta’s invocation of “many cultures” in which “[her] father is dead anyway, lost through the loss of a continuing line of bodily offspring”— reprosexual failure as literal unbeing— but also gestures towards the linkage of reproduction and futurity that has become a key and much-debated point of queerness.

The reproduction in question when we discuss reproduction and futurity is of a very specific sort; reproduction is one of those rare words that has come to take on two almost contradictory meanings, in this case both “duplication” and “the generation of something new.” The reproduction of an image is expected to be an exact copy, but a child is perceived to be something new. The reproduction implicated in reprosexuality binds these two definitions together: though the figure of the child presents itself as embodying a necessarily unknown and motive future, it stands in fact for a generation of

25 Although perhaps Warner is referring to the dominance of this ideology to such an extent that alternative social roles previously available to those who were not embedded in this narrative (religious positions, for example) came to no longer offer comparable prestige or meaning. 303 self-similarity that is, Lee Edelman argues, “the telos of the social order… the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11). Hope, which in its very nature

“reproduces the mandate of futurism,” Edelman writes, “is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (4). To not desire the reproduction-perpetuation of the present is not-human, that is, and insofar as refusal of that present (of the future as telos-of-present) is “unthinkable,” it is a universal present: akin to the universal human subject whose desires are naturalized to the point that deviation cannot be read as authentic ex nihilo experience, but only as the result of cultural contamination. The present, too, is natural, or if it is not, this is again because of contamination: literal contamination, but also conceptual contamination, the slow leakage of categories and the collapse of their walls. “The amplification of natural systems under industrial production,” Rebekah Sheldon writes, “has put into crisis the border that kept the agential subject conceptually distinct from his passive objects and made apprehensible the autonomy and vitality of the nonhuman and the non-living” (17).

Therefore, Sheldon argues, the figure of the child comes to function as a form of containment of a threateningly proliferative “nonhuman vitality,” a “safe space of human prosperity and a return to manageable nature” that “forecloses the mutational in the reproductive” (5-6). The reproductive becomes an assurance of “human vitality,” that is, of human continuance: the promise of the stable human subject, ensuring the viability of the humanist agenda. One need only look at the science fiction genre for an example of how entrenched is this appeal— while there exists energetic work being done in science fiction (particularly by creators from or focusing on communities who have been

304 traditionally been sidelined in the genre) to grapple with challenges to humanity,26 the majority of mainstream sci-fi narratives continue to situate themselves in the near-to- distant future without imagining any alterations to the idea of human-being that are not figured as threat. Indeed, these narratives often work to reify the humanist subject and shore up its universality— Sheldon describes how narratives of environmental disaster utilize the child to signify “the future we (adults) threaten, the connection to nature we

(adults) have corrupted and the human spirit whose ingenuity will overcome the (adult- made) disasters of the present” (39). The child is therefore not only the one for whom we work to achieve the telos of the social order, as Edelman suggests; the child is the telos of the social order, insofar as the child is the fulfillment of humanism— it is only to this extent that the child is able to foreclose the mutational.

Sheldon’s use of the term “mutational” to describe what the child forecloses is of particular interest here, insofar as its use positions the mutant as what is excluded from the reproductive and therefore opposed to it. (This concept offers a strong way to read mutation in the Marvel universe, where no two mutants are wholly similar, and the progeny of two mutants may manifest an entirely different mutant embodiment or even be human.27) On the one hand, Sheldon is speaking more generally here of mutation, marking both the potential transfiguration of matter and the potential for other forms of

26 Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us is one example, as is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice series of novels, though the latter concerns alien life; James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, particularly in its adaptation as the SyFy/Amazon television series, offers rich engagement with posthuman/ist themes; the Australian television series Cleverman, which blends traditional indigenous beliefs with science fiction, is an interesting case. 27 This was the case for Magneto’s grandchild, Luna Maximoff, the daughter of a mutant and an “Inhuman” mutate, as revealed in Fantastic Four #240 ([87]). 305 change. On the other hand, she also clarifies her interest in the specifically material potential, noting Deleuze’s belief that “the creativity of matter lies in its indeterminacy”

(29), and labeling this indeterminacy “the ‘queerness’ of matter,” advocating for the usage of this term on the basis of indeterminate matter’s opposition to “linear causality structured by filiation and patrimony, against the conflation of futurity with reproduction, and towards mutations and nonorganic becomings” (31).

This seems to be precisely the sort of application of “queerness” to which Jordy

Rosenberg objects: the queer object and the molecular queer, indeed the elemental queer insofar as we might term matter elemental. Yet at the same time, the basis on which

Sheldon ascribes this term to matter is not deviation or aleatoriness. Rather, she is arguing that matter can be queer insofar as it refuses the prescribed beings that reproduction selects for. There is nothing in this reading that opens itself to the primitivism that Rosenberg criticizes, for Sheldon figures matter not as a site of return to the “natural,” but explicitly as a resistance to the nostalgia for the “natural” that reproductive humanism (perhaps the best term to describe the deployment of reprosexuality against the threat of the nonhuman) ideologizes. The future offered by the child, Sheldon makes clear, is in reality a fantasy of the past, and of a return to the

(humanist) order that is threatened by the “overanimation” of the nonhuman (a category that includes the cyborg and the non-living). It is the promise of “the return of a calculable future guided by human sovereignty over Earth’s abundance” (152). In contrast to this, matter’s indeterminacy makes possible not only hybridities and agential uprisings that threaten the ability of humanism to maintain an ontological hierarchy, but

306 also implicates in its hybridities the capacity of humans themselves to turn [in]to proscribed beings.

Matter is queer when it eventuates an opening of straight ontology’s outside, when it enables being the something else that is excluded under reproductive humanism’s mandates. Turning to the elemental is a turn towards this opening, and a turn away from the normative logic that has always governed our ontological making. This ought not be a turn that rejects the historical-political discursive in favor of the “pure,” “unmediated” material world, though Rosenberg rightly fears this, for opposing or exposing the ideological line that separates the human from the nonhuman is to denaturalize the nonhuman as much as the human. We can find no objective refuge from the instability of being in the elemental. Indeed, on the contrary, the deeper into elementality we dig, the more we are confronted by forms of being that are precarious, ephemeral, contingent, and probabilistic, resisting the most rigorous attempts to account for them within current epistemological and ontological models. When Karen Barad (whose use of the phrase

“queer performativity” Galloway questions) turns to quantum mechanics, it is not out of a primitivist impulse, but because she recognizes that debates surrounding the implications of quantum mechanical experiments have the potential to quite seriously challenge the hegemony of the ontological practices through which reproductive humanism perpetuates itself. Barad is also careful to note what too many theorists choose to ignore, which is the post-Cartesian general agreement that thought and meaning are not immaterial objects, and that therefore there we can find no subjective refuge from the elemental. “Discursive practices,” she writes, “are specific material configurings of the world through which

307 determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted…

Discursive practices are the material conditions for making meaning,” and meaning in turn “is an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility” (335). Too, the matter through which discursive practices are enacted is “not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (336). In this sense, under Barad’s model, the material/elemental turn not only opens the possibility of being something else, but in fact goes a step further in suggesting an onto-epistemology in which there is no such thing as a thing at all, and one is always becoming. Indeterminacy becomes the axis of ontology, and the creativity that Deleuze remarks on is not the capacity of an agent to make something else, but the reflexive capacity of matter to make and be made in ongoing iterations. This not only destabilizes the dualisms and hierarchies upon which reproductive humanism depends, but also, less obviously, points towards new processes of reproduction that render nonsensical reproductive humanism’s claim to natural supremacy.

Indeed, the entire notion of “reproduction” presupposes a determinate thingness, the existence of a discretely formed entity with a distinct beginning and end— an entity that can and must be replicated in order to ensure the continuance of its template. Thus the importance of autonomy to the humanist model is directly linked to that model’s obsessive reproductive regulation, the need to strictly control when and how bodies whose separation is so vigilantly maintained may be allowed to touch. Sterility cuts one off from this possibility of touch, and from what we might say is the only approved avenue of penetration or contamination: the leakage of fluid from the body (from both male and female bodies, in the form of ejaculate and amniotic fluids), fluids forming

308 what Irigaray describes as an unceasing argument against “solid mechanics and rationality” (113)— an idea that is profoundly erroneous in terms of science, but which gains weight when understood as a metaphor for what Elizabeth Grosz describes as the fluid’s “refusal to conform to the laws governing the clean and proper, the solid and the self-identical, its otherness to the notion of an entity” (195)— and the leakage of genetic material from one body to another, the literal overlapping of bodies at a site often equated with the biological language of personhood. When we make the turn towards a model of the world in which the isolation of bodies— the very basis of their body-ness— is no longer so absolute, reproduction cannot maintain its privileged position. A new range of material and discursive intimacies appear.

In The Sticky Fingers of Time, we see these new intimacies enacted through the anti-reprosexual biological material of code, which suggestively echoes generational reproduction in its anti-linear pseudo-genetic recombination of self “stuff.” Where the blood of generational reproduction can only flow in one direction, and is strictly contained by the economic, political, and religious structures that sanction its straight contact, code (with its “stronger” pull) queers everything it touches through its endlessly proliferative becoming, emblematized by the paradoxical situation of characters at the end of the film, when it is no longer possible to determine who co-constitutes who, or how. I mean that code literally queers everything (or everyone) it touches in that it turns them into queers: Tucker and Drew’s first lesbian experiences seem to be with, respectively, Ofelia and Tucker, and, in fact, Tucker frames her first encounter with

Ofelia through an almost trans rhetoric, describing how she left her editor/lover Isaac in

309 charge of her cat while she traveled to Nevada and, when she returned, “in his place she

[found] a woman”— Ofelia. Yet this literal queerness is secondary to, or at the very least part and parcel of, the film’s central theme of queer reproduction, insofar as the chief conflict involves the struggle to control the dissemination of Tucker’s code. Though

Negrón-Muntaner reads Ofelia as a figure who “seeks the destruction of maternal nurturing and the ability to reproduce” (428), in fact Ofelia acts to ensure reproduction, insofar as she is dedicated to preserving Tucker’s death and therefore the contamination- creation of Drew and herself. It is Drew who prioritizes what Negrón-Muntaner describes as “the happiness of the lesbian domesticated couple” (which is possible only when

Tucker finds herself “at home” with a white woman, rather than a dangerous black woman, Ofelia, or Isaac, a “sexually and ethnically ambiguous man”) (430) over the proliferation of code-relations. One could easily read this as a privileging of the autonomous humanist subject over a diffuse network of corporeality, as well as an attempt to preserve the normative reproductive unit— a literally nuclear household, in this case one that is homo- rather than heteronormative— in the face of threats to it. If these are Drew’s goals, then she is ultimately unsuccessful, however. While she saves

Tucker’s life and ensures their domestic bliss, this is only accomplished through further queer proliferation: the creation of the “paradoxical situation” I described, in which the logic of both inheritance and linear time is entirely scrambled. The only clear precepts that emerge are, curiously, those offered by Ofelia and Isaac, the former of whom offered the five-fingered model of time, and the latter of whom warned Drew that in non-linear time, “Whatever you do or don’t do— it sticks.”

310

Isaac’s statement seems straightforward, but is not: intended to discourage Drew from saving Tucker, it at first suggests a very “straight” model of action that privileges permanence and agential power, but on second glance reveals itself to be coyly connected to the film’s title. Actions do not persist; they do not reify; they are sticky. They leave traces. They adhere, or perhaps, as Sara Ahmed describes sticky objects, “become saturated with affect, as sites of personal and emotional tension” (2005 11). Emotion sticks things together; it forms sticking points. In The Sticky Fingers of Time, it literally adheres as the clear gel generated by time travel, which is triggered by moments of extreme emotion— the emotion that allows Drew to paradoxically “stick” to Tucker.

Ahmed’s emphasis on the etymology of emotion, which links it to moving, to motion, is relevant here— emotion moves bodies in [space]time. If actions are “saturated with affect,” we might even understand affect as forming part of Barad’s “congealing of agency,” a stickiness that not only sticks bodies to each other, but that sticks bodies together. This is a stickiness that is profoundly queer, both because its emotions are the

“wrong” emotions (the queer desire that involves desiring queer things, and not-desiring not-queer things), and also because its indeterminacy, its ephemerality, and its relationality (its quality of emerging in relation with or to other things) render it excluded from the reproductive humanist rubric of what “counts.” What’s more, it’s a stickiness that contaminates, which is to say reproduces. Ahmed points out that “to get stuck to something sticky is also to become sticky,” and that even after getting “unstuck,” “an object… may remain sticky and may ‘pick up’ other objects.” Stickiness is therefore “a relation of ‘doing’ in which there is not a distinction between passive or active, even

311 though the stickiness of one object might come before the stickiness of the other, such that the other seems to cling to it” (2005 91). Leaving aside the queer dynamics implicit in the upending of the passive/active dualism (one is reminded of the now-memetic question regarding who in a queer relationship is the “man” and who is the “woman”), this is a queer reproduction that not only reproduces queerness— queers stick together, and queer touch engenders possibilities of queer relationships— but, also in The Sticky

Fingers of Time, doubles as biological reproduction, its sticky material presence made visible by the film’s time-traveling gel. Tucker, Drew, and Ofelia are stuck with each other, being overlapping bodies; Ofelia is stuck with her two additional bodies, into which she has put her code, and with Isaac, whom she “engineered” (but whom she ultimately disavows, cutting off his fingers, and therefore his time-travel implants, in an act that is simultaneously disinheritance and castration). These reproductive relationships upend normative social hierarchies, “sticking” together elements of mother, lover, sister, friend, mentor, and daughter to form the new affective agglomerations that are required to navigate these new kinds of bodies. Matter, in this sense, The Sticky Fingers of Time suggests, is the very essence, or perhaps the elemental, of what is queer.

***

Another meaning of “stick,” of course, is an act or instrument of penetration, and the phrase The Sticky Fingers of Time suggests a sticking or stickiness that may be of this sort. Fingers, after all, penetrate in queer sex; stuck in someone else’s body, they become sticky as part of what is often perceived as “pseudo-reproduction,” the imitation of “real” or “natural” penetrative sex. The importance of the reproductive to the construction of the

312 real and the natural becomes obvious when we consider the distinction between these form of penetration, which centers on the potential for heterosexual reproduction. Here,

“real” and “natural” mean sanctioned: as I said before, this is the sanctioned way for bodies to touch. But bodies do touch in other ways, unrecognized and covertly. The sticky fingering of time bears fruit, as penetration always does, for penetration generates new bodies by its very nature. I am not separate from what penetrates me; it is part of my body, or I am part of its body, or, it is probably most correct to say, we are part of the same shared body, since we are stuck together by no weaker a logic than what keeps me normatively stuck together. Such a body may be transient, or possess more persistence.

Some things are stickier than others. Some penetrations generate more new forms of stickiness: sticky fingerings that make sticky everything they touch.

This creates a problem for the discourse of contamination— one that I have alluded to at various points throughout this work, and one that is present in the idea of stickiness-as-contamination. Contamination has an exclusively negative connotation, one that its synonyms largely share. Bodies that are penetrated (itself usually a negative term) by other bodies are polluted, infected, adulterated. They are corrupted. They are no longer whole or pure. Bodies that may otherwise appear able attract horror when they are characterized as contaminated, as is the case in all of the narratives I have analyzed here, and as is also the case in the real world: Harold McCluskey, the so-called “Atomic Man,” who survived a lethal dose of radiation delivered in an accident at the Hanford Nuclear

Reservation, was regarded with apprehension by his community after emerging from five months of treatment, after his levels of radiation were declared safe (Geranios), and

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Margrit Shildrick has documented the unease that surrounds organ transplantation, in which a foreign body is assimilated into one’s own. This latter example highlights the absence of a neutral term with which to articulate the experience of contamination, of penetration, of not being a discrete and autonomous human subject— of what is an experience not merely of trans-corporeality as Alaimo describes it, but of anthropoqueerness. Anthropoqueerness does not offer a neutral term for contamination, because anthropoqueerness strives to do away with the assumption that there are discrete and autonomous bodies to begin with. We have always been contaminated. We have never been pure, and to assess oneself according to the measure of the “whole” is to engage with an Enlightenment rhetoric of the normal specimen— a rhetoric that assigns ontological privilege to the body capable of reproducing its own hegemony.

To say this is not to deny that contaminated bodies can be bodies that suffer. Even The

Sticky Fingers of Time, with its far-out fantasies of the queer, the transhuman, and the cyborg, acknowledges this: Tucker, in addition to gaining the ability to time travel from her encounter with the H-bomb, suffers from headaches, hair loss, and nosebleeds. It’s clear that she’s a victim of radiation poisoning, as many of those exposed to the H-bomb in real life (most of them, as Freeman points out, not attractive white Americans) became victims of radiation poisoning. If the mutants of the Marvel universe have never evidenced any similar side effects of their radiation-derived powers, the Marvel Comics of the 1990s did see mutants fall victim to the artificially-created Legacy virus, which has been widely read as a “displaced meditation on AIDS” (Ayres)— a different narrative of contamination. Meanwhile, behind the Kampani meltdown that continues to dominate the

314 life of Animal’s People is the shadow of the Bhopal disaster and its enormous toll, while widespread industrial carelessness and the ease with which it has destroyed lives underlies Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream and its material-memoir antecedents, as well as the abandoned city of Borne.

Anthropoqueer bodies are not protected from poison. But neither are they its progeny. The determining factor in the cases I have just listed is not contamination, or rather it is not the infiltration of one body by another one, for, again, none of us possesses a body that precedes or is proof against such infiltration. We are all, as I put it in my introduction, equally exposed. What marks these cases is not the fact of penetration, but the infliction of suffering, typically by hegemonic bodies upon those who are not. Siting this violence in the moment that certain kinds of substances enter the body is not only philosophically confused (and often scientifically inaccurate) but also politically problematic, for it runs the risk of suggesting that responsibility lies with the substances themselves, which, in invading the body, have caused it to be sick. That is: these substances become agential, and in doing so obviate the need to locate a culpable agent elsewhere. Why is a certain body sick? Because something has penetrated it. This

“something” does not quite rise to the level of anthropomorphization that is granted germs in the mid-twentieth-century illustrations that Emily Martin reproduces in her history of the immune system, where armies of small sinister creatures lay siege to a bodily fortress (26-7; 34-5); indeed, part of the ontological horror that appears in accounts of contaminants is their inability to be thus anthropomorphized, their resistance to cohering into any kind of “natural” form, and their ability to nevertheless take on

315 agential qualities. Chemicals seep, they leak, they poison. Radiation damages; it penetrates.

In focusing on the contaminant-as-agent, we reinforce the notion that our bodies are safe so long as we can purify them, and that the zone of our responsibility ends at the skin of our body, or extends to the sanctioned co-incorporate bodies of reproduction: the bound-by-blood family, the wife-and-kids. Contrast this with the posthuman/ist model that suggests we have participated in many different bodies via the intra-action of matter, and that we have no way to predict what bodies the future might find us participating in.

Our non-linear “parents” and “offspring” occupy the world around us; they populate the past and future, and they are not all human, and we have responsibilities to them. I do not only mean that we have responsibilities to (or enter into relationships of responsibility with) our microbiomes, our households, our air, our water, and the living creatures we share the planet with— this is an easy and attractive reading that replicates the unthinking division into natural and unnatural, with the unnatural perceived as intruder. We enter into responsibilities with the “unnatural” parts of our world as well. This requires us not to adopt an attitude of disgust and loathing towards the toxic— an attitude that is not only often rooted in racial and reproductive/reprosexual fears, as Chen has suggested, but that encourages us to turn away from the toxic, to not look. The most valuable contribution that the toxic makes is its ability to force us to look, distorting the world in uncanny ways when we refuse to face it head-on. That is why I have argued here that narratives of toxic contamination are the site at which we can see most clearly the collapse of humanism.

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Yet if toxicity makes visible an onto-epistemological collapse— a collapse not only of theories of being, but of theories that encompass how we (exposed as having never been rational, autonomous subjects) can know anything about the world— it also creates the conditions for what Barad describes as an ethico-onto-epistemology, an “intertwining of ethics, known, and being,” in which the “becoming of the world” is understood as “a deeply ethical matter” (185). The paradoxes and disruptions of the toxic demand that we investigate what part it plays in our bodies— and what part it goes on to play in other bodies, since we cannot fully “unstick” it from ourselves once it has been stuck to us. The heavy metal components in the iPhone I treat as part of my body are sticky from the hands of those who first mined them in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Bolivia (Merchant); traces of my own hands will go with them when they are recycled in the form of other products or, more likely, toxify an industrial dump site in China or poison the bodies of workers who try extracting them. When I consider the relationship between myself and these heavy metals— the deep affection I feel for them in their current form, which allows me to maintain near-constant contact with friends in Australia and England, and the suffering they have produced and will go on to produce— I question not only my willingness to inflict pain on other people’s bodies, but also whether this is a respectful use of the heavy metals themselves. I reflect on the men who profit from this enterprise, who by and large have no material investment in it, and who live, more and more, in secluded enclaves that operate on a principle of divorce: attempting to shield corporate bodies, as much as possible, from the [awareness of the] sticky touch of the outside world. I wonder how strange and disturbing the idea would be

317 to them that a child in Bolivia or China has traces of them in her body, and that these traces are poisonous to her— that traces of them will remain after her death, embedded in the earth, elemental but still sticky with their indifference, breathing out toxicity into the air. When I think about this, it seems to me comprehensible that so much literature of the

Anthropocene era links toxicity with a crisis of humanism. Toxicity destabilizes humanism at the same time that we most need it to exist, because we must be human if we are going to maintain the systems of suffering that we live in. We must sustain a belief in the separability of our bodies, their fixity and their finiteness, the hierarchies that work to constrain our affections and ensure that we don’t stick to other people— that we don’t contaminate them. The signature fear of the Anthropocene is the “quirky” cells that reproduce on their own, after all; the “new life” that comes from nowhere, out of our control and inhuman; the “queer things” that “issue forth from monsters,” as John

Balaban puts it. We fear contamination because it threatens to kill, but also because it is threateningly generative, and because it confronts us with a choice between these two aspects: what kinds of bodies will populate the world, and how will they be treated? How will we honor our responsibilities to the bodies that we can no longer separate into ‘us’ and ‘them’?

***

I have offered an argument for turning towards the anthropoqueer as a way of thinking bodies, and specifically of disrupting the tendency to set the Western humanist subject apart from its environment. However, I have also practiced, throughout this work, what I would characterize as not merely a posthuman/ist but a specifically anthropoqueer

318 reading: that is, a reading that seeks to decenter and denaturalize the humanist subject, but also one that takes seriously the inability and/or refusal of characters to be read through the lens of the human/nonhuman binary and instead works to explore their diverse embodiments, subjectivities, and inter/intra-relations. In doing so, I have emphasized an interdisciplinary perspective that relies on environmental, feminist, disability, critical race, and queer theory. I argue that such a perspective is key in understanding the potential of the anthropoqueer not only to resist reproductive humanism at multiple cruces within its hegemonic network, but also to offer substantial alternative frameworks through which to consider questions of being.

The question with which I would like to close is, then: what does an anthropoqueer reading look like when expanded beyond characters who may immediately be identified as anthropoqueer? While, as I have argued here, the number of narratives involving anthropoqueer characters is increasing, my intent is not to offer the anthropoqueer reading as a means of interpreting only these narratives— that is, only narratives populated by characters who are mutant, multiple, overlapping, contaminated, or dislocated in time, species, or space. Rather, an anthropoqueer reading aims to allow an alternative way of mapping the world, and as such can be used to highlight anthropoqueer beings that are present under the skin of texts. An anthropoqueer reading might track, for example, the ways in which bodily and subjective continuity are challenged by material and psychic loss or contamination in narratives and poetry of the

First World War; it might ask how beings are constituted and re-constituted according to their environmental elements in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia; it might offer a new way of

319 understanding the titular, ambiguously “real” character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or create a language with which to addresses characters in the postcolonial fiction of, among others, Salman Rushdie, Sherman Alexie, and Amos Tutuola whose beings move between the human and the divine and the “real” and the “unreal” in a manner that is difficult to fully account for within humanist modes of thinking. More broadly, an anthropoqueer reading prompts the reader to de-naturalize their expectations about where the boundaries of textual beings lie, and instead search the text for clues that allow them to chart the changing lines of this.

Perhaps it is unfair to call such a search a “reading,” for it is not only that. It is also a practice of bringing certain entities into being, of causing them to coalesce, and therefore a practice of bringing ourselves into being, insofar as a shift in the boundaries of what we are interacting with entails a shift in the boundaries of ourselves. This is the nature, in the end, of exposure: exposure not to danger, but to ontological change. Who are we when we are not human? Who were we, if we were not human? Who will we be?

Literature has always been a site at which to investigate such a brand of question, and as I have demonstrated, the literature of the Anthropocene is already a site where this very investigation has been taking place. We have set ourselves a challenge without knowing it: to allow ourselves to become in ways that are shaped by our recognition of the queer, prolific, and continual re-productions that matter is capable of, or to increasingly find ourselves lost in the realm of the uncanny, trapped in attempts to escape the sticky fingers of what appear to us only as monsters and ghosts.

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