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 1 Copyrighted by Kristin Michelle Ferebee 2019 2 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. i 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. ii 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 iii 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 iv 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 v 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