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UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Alien Invasions, Vulnerable Bodies: Science Fiction and the Biopolitics of Embodiment from H. G. Wells to Octavia Butler Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qr256tg Author Diaz, Rosalind Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California 1 Alien Invasions, Vulnerable Bodies: Science Fiction and the Biopolitics of Embodiment from H. G. Wells to Octavia Butler By Rosalind Diaz A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Katherine Snyder, Chair Professor Mark Goble Professor Mel Chen Fall 2018 1 Alien Invasions, Vulnerable Bodies: Science Fiction and the Biopolitics of Embodiment from H. G. Wells to Octavia Butler © 2018 Rosalind Diaz 1 Abstract Alien Invasions, Vulnerable Bodies: Science Fiction and the Biopolitics of Embodiment from H. G. Wells to Octavia Butler by Rosalind Diaz Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Katherine Snyder, Chair This dissertation turns to alien invasion narratives to elucidate the social, ethical and political consequences associated with the modern body as an entity with clearly defined borders. The imperatives of liberalism and neoliberalism constitute the modern body as a white, male, heteronormative body, navigating appropriate relationships to production and consumption. How does the human body emerge as a bounded entity in science and science fiction from the nineteenth century onward? Alien invasion narratives offer a fruitful way to trace this concept and its development over time. These narratives model proper ways of attending to one’s body as well as proper ways of defending oneself—and, by extension, the planet—from alien invasion. The present inquiry focuses on three different alien invasion narratives, beginning with H. G. Wells’s influential The War of the Worlds (1897), before moving to consider a pair of twentieth- century American texts: Philip Kaufman’s film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling (2005). This project connects these fictional narratives to biological understandings of the body and to the biopolitical formations that govern embodiment. Each of the three chapters foregrounds a different biopolitical apparatus: immunity, quarantine, and addiction, respectively. These three concepts all focus on the body’s relationship to a “foreign” entity or substance. Immunity defines the body’s natural ability to fend off germs, while quarantine attempts to protect the body from germs and other harmful encounters; addiction represents the body’s failure to keep out the category of substances known as drugs. Each of these concepts further entails a theory of how interior and exterior relate to each other, which is at once biological and biopolitical. Each is invested in monitoring the boundary between interior and exterior of the body. The event of alien invasion illuminates the deployment of these concepts in order to re-constitute humanity as whiteness, police the borders of the bounded body, and fend off the incursions of non-normative modes of embodiment. The War of the Worlds and subsequent alien invasion narratives such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers deploy biological discourse in order to address the question: who can claim membership in the supposedly universal category of “the human”? Fledgling’s intervention into this tradition points toward the queer utopian possibilities of disrupting the category of the 2 human. Rather than asking who rightfully belongs to the category of the human and who has earned the right to participate in the continuation of the human race, Fledgling asks, who is protected by invoking such a category? What if the category of the human did not need to have rigidly defined boundaries? What if interdependency and fluidity were not understood to be fatal flaws in the body? Fledgling reveals that doing away with the premise that the body must remain bounded does indeed disrupt white hegemony and heteronormativity, along with the normative construction of “health.” However, the novel figures this disruption not as a catastrophe, but as a necessary step towards queer utopia. i Table of Contents Introduction: The Menacing Tentacles of the Abject Other 1 1. Invaders of the Body Politic 13 2. Aliens in the Age of Gunk 39 3. Flesh, Blood, Venom 68 Bibliography 96 ii Acknowledgements This project owes much to the encouragement, enthusiasm, and brilliance of many people. Katie Snyder’s keen insights, curiosity, and unfailing generosity of spirit helped keep me on track throughout the long process. My interest in contemporary literature and embodiment first took shape in her seminar on the post-9/11 novel. The current form of this project reflects the profound influence of Mel Chen, who encouraged me to seek out the intellectual experiences that sparked the questions at the heart of this dissertation. Mark Goble provided invaluable assistance with the broader landscape of contemporary fiction. Jac Asher’s example has inspired me to grow as a thinker and educator over the last six years. Thanks are also due to my fellow graduate students, particularly Ianna Hawkins-Owen, Julia Havard, and Aileen Liu, and to all of the undergraduate students that I have had the pleasure of teaching and mentoring. My parents, Katie and Ricardo Diaz, fostered my lifelong interest in Darwin, H. G. Wells, and nineteenth-century science. I am constantly inspired by my prodigious sister, Ren (it’s a good thing there are two of us) and buoyed up by Bobby Dunne’s unflagging support, smart advice, and sense of humor. 1 Introduction: The Menacing Tentacles of the Abject Other In H. G. Wells’s short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1905), a diffident and retiring Englishman encounters a carnivorous orchid. The protagonist, orchid collector Winter- Wedderburn, is a “shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man” but becomes “bright and garrulous […] in the glory of his strange adventure” (51, 60). He purchases a mysterious orchid at a London auction. In the climactic scene, the orchid’s “exultant tentacles” attempt to penetrate and consume him, but he is rescued with the help of his housekeeper, his “remote cousin” (58, 51), who destroys the orchid hothouse. This science-fiction story depicts white masculinity fending off the tendrils of an exotic orchid. The exultant tentacles of the orchid are intertwined with the tendrils of empire— emerging networks comprising the transport of physical goods, the transmission of information, and the influence of power reaching across the globe. Winter-Wedderburn tells the story of the original collector of the strange orchid with relish. This original orchid-collector died while abroad in an unspecified location, traveling in “the Andamans and the Indies” (51). Winter- Wedderburn reports that his body was found in a mangrove swamp, and that “every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches” (54). Eventually Winter- Wedderburn discovers, to his personal peril, that the orchid-collector was actually drained of blood by the very orchid that Winter-Wedderburn has purchased. The story adopts a whimsical tone, combining the trappings of amateur botany with the prurient pleasures of sensationalist fiction, and yet it also depicts a truly disturbing vision of monstrosity. Elements such as the stolid, practical figure of the housekeeper and the playful alliteration of Winter-Wedderburn’s name contrast with the descriptions of the orchid itself. The orchid occupies a liminal state between liveliness and deathliness that strongly suggests Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of “bare life,” biological life that is alive but not invested with humanity and thus can be “killed and yet not sacrificed” (8). The opening paragraph of the story points out that all orchids begin as “brown shrivelled lump(s) of tissue” and that it is difficult to tell a dead orchid from a dormant one (50). The strange orchid combines this liminal deathliness with an uncannily human-like agency. The housekeeper observes that its aerial roots look like “little white fingers…trying to get at you,” and associates them with the corpse of the original orchid- collector (55). Later the orchid “[clings] with the grimmest tenacity to its victim” (59). It ought to be a plant, an object of the collector’s interest— but instead the plant appears to be interested in collecting the collector. Through its encounter with Winter-Wedderburn, the orchid threatens to transfer its deathliness to Winter-Wedderburn himself, entwining him in its tentacles and attempting to drink his blood. The narrator refers to the unconscious man as “the inanimate body” (59). After its defeat, the orchid appears to die and rot rapidly. Its flowers begin to brown immediately and by the next day it is “black […] and putrescent” (60). By the next day, all of Winter-Wedderburn’s orchids lie “shrivelled and prostrate” in the ruins of the orchid hothouse (60). Even in defeat, however, the orchid remains threatening: a shriveled orchid is not reliably a dead orchid, as the opening of the story establishes. The orchid disturbs the borders that separate life and death, plant from predator, civilized society from primitive outpost. Conveyed by the orchid-collectors across the borders of England, it then penetrates the skin-boundary of the human body. The strange orchid refuses to remain quiescent in the realm of bare life. Instead, it attempts to contaminate English society with its deathliness. 2 The orchid is at once a menacing and seductive object. Winter-Wedderburn clearly desires and takes pleasure in the collecting of orchids, referring to the strange orchid as “his new darling”; he reacts to the “overpowering sweetness” of its scent with an “ecstasy of admiration” (57). Orchids are legible as raced and gendered symbols of empire: white men travel into the heart of the jungle to collect these delicate, beautiful, and yet savage orchids, which they display in their greenhouses back in England.
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