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Becoming multiple: cyborg aesthetics and the inversion of horror

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Becoming multiple: cyborg aesthetics and the inversion of horror

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Content BECOMING MULTIPLE:
CYBORG AESTHETICS AND THE INVERSION OF HORROR
by
Samantha Elyse Cohen
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
May 2023
Copyright 2023 Samantha Elyse Cohen
Table of Contents
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..iii
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Diffusion Machine: Becoming Surreal………………………………………………18
Chapter 2: The Thing-Part of Us: Abjection as Portal to Inhumanity…………………………..27
Chapter 3: Honey: Consumption into Creaturehood……………………………………………37
Chapter 4: Sordid Origins: Cyborg Love and The Search for Freedom………………………..47
Conclusion: Love Story for the Future………………………………………………………….62
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..66
ii
Abstract
In race- and gender-based hierarchies, full humanity is granted to those whose bodies are
constructed as stable, bounded, and individual. Horror novels, which emerged in 19th century
Britain in response to anxiety around immigration, offer fictive spaces in which to explore
fantasies of invasion and contamination, but by scaring their readers, they ultimately restore the
reader’s belief in national purity and the white heterosexual nuclear family. This dissertation
argues that queer and feminist 20th and 21st century novels and artworks offer structural inverses
to the horror novel; by depicting transformative encounters with nonhuman others that allure
more than they horrify, these artworks and novels imagine relationships of interchange,
inhabitation, and co-penetration which undo stable notions of selfhood and reimagine bodies,
including nonhuman bodies as porous and mutually-animating. Grounded in queer theory and
feminist science, this project considers how art that refigures bodies as sites of exchange and
collaboration, including with nonhuman others, offers viewers and readers sites of sustained
fantasy of invasion and contamination that might move them out of stable, bounded, and
individual notions of humanity.
iii
Becoming Multiple: Cyborg Aesthetics and the Inversion of Horror
Introduction
In the summer of 2022, Pipilotti Rist’s psychedelic-domestic show Big Heartedness, Be
My Neighbor was at MOCA Geffen in Los Angeles, and it became the only place I wanted to be.
I was in a place where I needed a series of dark rooms in which everything around me was in a
state of gorgeous flux, rooms with carpets and floor pillows that held me as I sunk into them.
Rist’s otherworldly music emanated throughout the rooms, soothing while it transported, the
whole thing making it safe to depart the known world.
I wrote that the music was “otherworldly,” but that isn’t right. Everything in Rist’s art is
of this world, only her videos zoom in on closer than the naked eye knows how to see, elements
recombine in ways that refigure the possible. But there is something that makes intuitive sense as
a blue strawberry’s leaves become fins, the fish-fruit of it swimming over me and returning me to
a place I have known. I lie on the carpet for hours. A naked girl and a naked boar crawl through a
field toward an apple, the animals of them eventually swapping places as they bite face-first, and
it is apparent they have the same hunger, are two versions of the same beast. A spotted and
wrinkled human hand slowly fingers a poppy. One person I bring to the show guffaws and calls
this fingering “metaphorical” and I am annoyed. There are reasons, both tender and invasive, to
finger a flower, I want to tell them: the interaction between the finger and the flower means what
it means. At the same time, I understand this person’s need to distance themself from the weird
feelings this space provokes. Namely, I feel turned on—by the flower-fingering, sure, but also by
the close camera work on the movements of the earth—on the veiny leaves moving over me, on
fresh red blood blooming into huge clear water, inner eyelids enwombing me as I travel through
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them, their capillaries opening and becoming webs. An aged hand strokes dirt toward me, over
me, like I am dead.
It is an amazing feeling, to be turned on by the movements of water and sand, by a finger
stroking a field of clovers, and to simultaneously feel comforted, even mothered, by the textures
of leaves and woods and petals combined with skin and tissue. When I go to Rist’s talk at the
museum, she says that she seeks to caress objects with her camera in order to explore an erotics
of the female gaze: “probably it’s not that we want to see how people have sex but instead see
how it feels to be involved.” I feel affirmed in my being turned on by the earth-images in this
show, not that I need it. I am ready for this feeling, maybe. I have been working on this project in
which I’m trying to think through sex and the ecological together, to think through how the body
can be recast or remade as an earth-thing, and Rist’s show helps me. Also this time, I have come
to the museum having eaten one psilocybin mushroom because I want to come as not just-me.
Through the Wise Woman Maria Sabina’s The Life I have come to understand mushrooms as
speaking beings, as “saint children” with “Language,” which I understand to be, for her,
something like the language of God or the language of the earth, a language that has none of the
arbitrariness of the semiotic, a language in which the signifier and the sign are a perfect whole. I
feel like one mushroom will be enough to help collapse of sign and signifier as I enter the world
of Rist’s similarly-collapsed language, wherein a finger is a finger, a flower is a flower. I am a
sensitive system.
This same summer I heard Dodie Bellamy read from her new book Bee Reaved at the
new arts complex on Beverly. She said that neither horror nor pornography is taken seriously
because both act on the level of the body, rather than on the intellect, and therefore both are
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feminized. In her interview at the Geffen, Rist says, “when people come to a museum, why
would you just show them something they could see at home, instead of inviting them with their
whole body?” It is a feminist aesthetic impulse to invite the body into the white box of the
museum, to heal the persistent Enlightenment-era tear of the mind/body split and its attendant
division into thinking, rational humans and those who are something other—emotion, body,
labor power. Rist’s show is helping me feel what it is like for creatures to engage without
hierarchy, with total openness to transformation. Skin interacts with leaf, blood interacts with
water—creatures are broken down into their elements, and then they mix. We mix. Everyone out
in the world is afraid to become each other but not here, not in Rist’s house. Video pixels of dirt
cover my body while I lay on a pillow that feels like the belly of a giant and I feel swaddled;
blood oozes into water and I feel turned on. I curl up inside a flower, mushroom Language
shutting out analysis, instead letting me feel the carpet of its pollen, the cool skin of its petals.
I return to the museum and bring another friend, one who isn’t afraid of feeling. Within
minutes she says, “This is how we could have made the world. We messed up so bad.”

The Inversion of Horror
For my PhD field exams, I read 19th century horror novels, these works that once worked
on the body but are no longer scary, canonized and analyzed to death and able to be received
with the intellect alone. Or maybe this isn’t right: maybe they are only not scary to me because I
want for the women of Dracula to wriggle out of their corsets and sitting rooms and learn to
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feed, because I am enraged on behalf of Frankenstein’s monster at the clean white British village
that shrieks and recoils at a body made of disparate parts. I am a reader, maybe, who has always
understood the monster as an embodied representation of Otherness, as a bundle of the social
traumas that are terrifying to gaze upon, and I have therefore always seen the potential of the
monstrous to root out and expose everything in the spaces between binaries, to upend hierarchies
and lure the human toward engaging with whatever her culture has pushed to the edges or
repressed.
British horror novels in the 19th century, I realized reading for my exams, were about the
disintegration of the body, or else of the social body, often as a result of the monster’s seduction
of women. They are stories of intrusion or contamination of the white nuclear family, or the
white village, or the white nation, by the not-quite-human. Dracula seduces the pure and virginal
British wives-to-be who are visiting the Transylvania castle, on the edge of what is Europe and
what is not; he transforms them into bloodthirsty monsters. Frankenstein’s monster, created in a
laboratory and made of disparate parts, terrorizes the good British village after being refused
access to space around the hearth. In Skin Shows, Jack Halberstam writes about the ways in
which 19
th
century monsters are queer-coded or marked as immigrant or of-color. For
Halberstam, the gothic novel is a “technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant
subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (3). Here is
Halberstam on the vampire:
The anatomy of the vampire… compares remarkably to anti-Semitic studies of Jewish
physiognomy-peculiar nose, pointed ears, sharp teeth, claw-like hands- and furthermore,
in Stoker's novel, blood and money (central facets in anti-Semitism) mark the corruption
of the vampire. The vampire merges Jewishness and monstrosity and represents this
hybrid monster as a threat to Englishness and English womanhood in particular.
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In other words, the gap between the white, British, cishet reader and the queer,
immigrant, non-human monster is what makes horror both scary and safe: the monster may lure
the reader, compelling her to turn the page, but the same reader’s fear-response secures her own
normativity, purity, and impenetrability. Julia Kristeva writes about the abject as that which takes
a person “beyond the scope of the possible”—of course this is horrific; of course this is alluring.
Horror arises from the liminal, from what is on the border between human and animal or human
and thing, from boundaries that are leaky, from Otherness or potential transformation into
Otherness, from the inability to remain intact, stable, or whole.
In this project, I will look at art and literature that, like horror, works on the level of the
body, but that inverts the effects of horror—that makes non-human penetration or contamination
of the body complex, interesting, rich, transformative. I am interested in how, rather than reifying
the paranoid impulse to solidify and reinforce the body’s boundaries, then, such work creates a
template for how to transform, how to get mulchy, which is to say, how to exist with the
discomfort of disruption, deep communion, re-composition, inhabitation, and flux, how to find
pleasure and curiosity in intimacies with nonhuman and even monstrous others. Halberstam
writes, “Within the traits that make a body monstrous - that is, frightening or ugly, abnormal or
disgusting - we may read the difference between an other and a self, a pervert and a normal
person, a foreigner and a native” (8). In the texts and artworks I gather here, there is intimacy
between the human and nonhuman, but instead of offering the reader comfort in her own solidity
and purity by inciting a fear-response, these texts bring the ugly, abnormal, disgusting—the
foreign and perverted—close enough that one has to become a pervert to fully engage. Instead of
affirming good subjectivity, then, these texts refigure subjectivity by pushing their readers out of
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the pure and the known into the pleasures of shifting, inhabitation, mutual penetration and
transformation. Like Rist’s work, the texts I gather here work on the body, combining the
nonhuman with the human in ways that provoke disgust, anxiety, and fear, but that ultimately
refigure the human, creating new embodiments that could feel monstrous but instead offer new
potential intimacies, new insights, new re-figurations of the possible.
On Solidity and Penetrability
Back in 2012, this male painter A_____ invited me to a silent dinner for artists. I remember I was
happy to be invited, to be known as an artist. The dinner was at a giant gallery that was also a
living space, off San Fernando Road in Los Angeles. After the dinner, I walked around the
gallery with A_____, and then sat on a couch in his room talking about art. He moved close and
leaned in to kiss me at some point, but I told him I wasn’t interested in that. He responded by
crawling on top of me. We ended up in a kind of pushing war and what I remember is that when I
finally shook him off and got out the door, he yelled, “Why won’t you just fuck me?”
Obviously there is a lot to be upset about in this encounter, but part of what upset me was
that I somehow thought I had outgrown being assaulted; there was a part of me that believed I
could achieve my way out of being seen as a resource to men—that if I were understood as an
artist, a lesbian, perhaps a genius, I would also be understood as autonomous, individual,
cohesive, whole. In demonstrating that I was a resource, I felt my identity as an artist canceled
out; the invitation to this art community event did not happen because of my work or because
anyone was curious about my ideas, but because I seemed fuckable. I had somehow thought I
could prove myself out of having to question why I was in the room, and what I what I was left
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with was shame—for believing this in the first place, sure, but also because I couldn't shake that
there was something about me that would always scream available pussy and never genius artist.
Given the tension between fuckability and genius, or even fuckability and like community
member, it makes sense that second wave feminists would seek solidity. Andrea Dworkin is often
misremembered as having said that all heterosexual sex is rape. While feminists can be quick to
correct the record on this, it was this misquote that resonated with the holographic quality
between rape and sex in my own young life and that made me seek Dworkin out. I feel about
Dworkin the way many people feel about their mothers—embarrassed over many of her later
conclusions (and, specifically re: Dworkin, ashamed of her carceral turn toward the end) but
immediately defensive when people talk shit. Even Dworkin's early arguments, particularly in
Intercourse, sometimes feel unhinged, extreme, produced by a brilliant intellect hijacked by
emotional trauma. And yet some of the ideas from this book re-mothered me. I don’t know how
else to say it.
What I have particularly held onto is how Dworkin describes the ways in which “the
community” is present in the heterosexual sex act. She neutralizes the word “community” here,
so widely coded positive, to just mean, the dominant group, the meaning-making collective,
those inducted into the linguistic system, reproducing signs and further entrenching them. For
Dworkin, sex is something creative. All sex between a man and a woman produces and reifies
hegemonic narratives of men as subjects and women as objects. For Dworkin, “Alone, together,
a man fucks a woman; he possesses her; the man and the woman experience it as such. Neither
appears to know that the community participates in the fuck, giving it its power as possession.”
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I will admit, I have never fucked a man—only boys, when I was a girl. I was a girl at
Midwest state school fraternity parties, there was punch designed to black me out. I drank it.
Weekend after weekend, I wandered around frat houses blacked out in $9 crop tops from Rave
among girls who knew how to bare necks and shoulders and still look expensive, untouchable. I
ended up letting boys do what they wanted to my body while I was blackout drunk, or already
sleeping, or using my trauma-produced dissociation skills to leave it. This sounds obviously like
rape now, post-#metoo, but in college in 2001 it just felt normal, if surprising, what was
happening to my body, even when it had happened before. I had internalized that I was a
community resource. But I was also there because I wanted some things—experience, Real Life,
pleasure, affection, intimacy, to be desired, to surrender to someone else’s desire, to collide with
something, to be undone. In her new book On Freedom, Maggie Nelson writes about how girls’
socialization not to articulate their desires, even to themselves, leads young women to throw
themselves into situations in which something will happen to them. Nelson writes of finding
"euphoria and relief in tossing [her own] drunken, twenty-something body upon the whims of
late-night New York City” (102), making herself a public resource, but one who might just be
used in exactly the way she can’t say she wants. It was stupid to think the frat house was a place
where anything interesting, anything generatively transformative, might happen to me. It was
just where I was invited; I didn’t know yet, how to find other invitations, or how to just show up.
Possibly nowhere is the fuck more Dworkinian than in the frat house: this group of boys
who call themselves brothers, who’ve jerked off together in hazing rituals and gone through what
I imagine to be arcane ceremonies designed to help them become extensions of the same body
like Jesus and god and the wafer, who, based on long legacies of whiteness and class solidarity
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get to drug and fuck the girls who belong to them. Or the girls, like me, who don’t—who
genuinely believe they don’t like name brands because they lack context to even understand the
power a Prada baguette bestows, who have been raised among a community who taught them
only to look pretty. Also of course, who pressure each other to fuck, by any means necessary,
who bully each other when they don’t fuck, who ceremoniously name the girls they’ve been
with, along with each act – who fuck alone, together. And so of course I believe it is possible for
people who believe themselves to be men and women to fuck in ways that do not reify these
categories, but I also know about sex that solidifies the story of gender, that makes men active,
agentive and strong, that makes women pleasure-receptacles.
Masculinity is defined by solidity. I taught a fashion theory class in my twenties,
back when I was too much made of holes, too deeply unsolid, too coded as fuckable to feel good
teaching. Two years before, at the same institution, while I was a TA in grad school, my professor
explained the world of Neuromancer to our class as: “you could create a completely realistic
version of Sam that talked and moved and looked just like her—and then you could fuck it.” But
when I was insecurely teaching my fashion theory class, we talked about the construction of
masculinity via starched collars and high necklines, covered skin and squared curves, loose hair
buzzed clean, gestures and vocal cadences made decisive and even. The masculine body, styled
after a kind of phallus — crisp, linear, unidirectional, decisive, whole—and above all,
impenetrable.
Whereas Dworkin’s conclusion is that all penetration is inherently violent because it
disrupts wholeness, cohesion, and individuality, I want to suggest that it is precisely in search of
these disruptions that many of us turn to sex. I think of the wash of oxytocin that happens in the
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queer sex I have—all the other mysterious chemicals that make me feel, post-sex that someone
has become my ancestor, my child, my sibling, the unknown-to-me chemicals that seal us in a
disgusting-beautiful pod that feels as though it has the power to spread and touch every single
thing around us. In queer sex, the community being brought to the encounter changes, and so
what the sex means and does can change, too. We meet for drinks beforehand and invoke
community: Angela Davis, Monique Wittig, the characters from The L Word, Marx, Edward
Said, Donna Haraway. We name, casually, who we are calling forth into our encounter. And,
while it varies by degree and kind, we also all bring gender trauma—we are doing the work,
together, of re-gendering ourselves, recoding what our gender means, how it feels. We need to
bring new social meanings to sex, and do.
What I want to recuperate from Dworkin is specifically the naming of the presence of the
community in the sex act—the seriousness with which she takes the production of subjects and
objects, selves and non-selves. I want to ask what we might produce if we make the community
more specific—if we, instead of refusing to exist for the community, allow ourselves to exist for
a community, if not the dominant, resourced one. I want to ask how things might shift if we stop
seeking solidity and impenetrability, if we instead seek a different community, a new system of
signs, a refusal to remain intact. I think of Elvia Wilk’s essay on Granta, “This Compost: Erotics
of Rot,” in which she writes, “everyone’s got holes. Breathing is reproductive; it births the
atmosphere. Shit is reproductive; it births the atmosphere. Dying is reproductive; it births the
atmosphere.”
In Testo Junkie, Paul Preciado points out that binary gender includes “’man,’ the perfect
model of the human, and ‘woman,’ a reproductive receptacle,” and that “in the sovereign regime,
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masculinity is the only somatic fiction with political power” (73). This is a question, for me: how
can the somatic fiction of receptivity, of femininity, begin to have political power? How might
social relations be structured if people of all genders accepted our penetrability, even found
delight in it, if we all sought to be sometimes inhabited, sometimes undone? I like that Preciado
calls masculinity a somatic fiction; it feels like it offers a job to fiction writers, to write gender
another way.
The Inversion of Horror
Ideas of the self as always-already multiple, inhabited, a network of actors are already
common in feminist science, perhaps beginning with Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg
Manifesto.” Haraway contends that feminism should stop looking toward the goddess—or
toward purity, restoration to wholeness, return to Eden, and more toward the cyborg, which
allows new connections, recombination of established categories, blurring of boundaries.
Haraway argues “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their
construction” (7). This is the inversion of horror in that the confusion of boundaries is precisely
what is horrific in horror—something has gotten in which compromises integrity of the self. A
poltergeist leaps into the girl and reanimates her body according to its will, a clown lives in the
sewer among the clean suburban community’s hidden shit. In horror, the poltergeist must be
exorcised, the clown must be killed, the body or the community must be restored to purity and
wholeness. But nostalgia for some original purity or wholeness, Haraway argues, is always a
dream of white heterosexuality, one which perpetuates racial and gendered hierarchies.
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This makes sense. In my required literary theory class during the first semester of my
PhD, the professor Anthony Kemp lectured to us about “scientific racism,” a popular theory in
the 19
th
century which posited that the original Aryan race had been contaminated by racial
mixing—that before Aryan women had been seduced by men from other continents, the Aryans
had been ten-foot tall genius “god men.” According to Kemp, this “science” inspired dreams of a
return to such a state of purity, and these dreams formed the foundation of the Nazi party—a way
of simply eliminating people who were considered degenerate, the gene part of that word central.
Without the contaminating genes of people of color, queer people, Jews, Romani people,
disabled people, even in existence, without their monstrous seductive power, Aryans might be
able to re-purify their gene pool, return to their imagined ideal state: ten feet tall, white as snow,
with, I imagine, the intellectual acuity of a MacBook Air, the solidity of glaciers.
In her 2020 book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, critical
race and environment theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson builds upon these ideas, looking at texts
that “creatively disrupt the human–animal distinction and its persistent raciality,” examining the
ways in which the figure of the Black woman has been historically constructed as the threshold
between human and animal, thereby reifying the categories of whiteness and maleness as
distinctly human. Rather than trying to solidify the reality of Black women’s humanness, though,
Jackson seeks the potential for “blackness’s bestialization and thingification” to engender “more
imaginative multispecies worlding” outside of what she calls the “current hegemonic mode of
“the human.”
Political Science professor Jane Bennett writes that we fundamentally misunderstand our
relationship to the world when we fail to see ourselves as heterogeneous assemblages, when we
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think of “matter as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert” and “pars[e] the world into dull matter
(it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings).” Her project is, by clarifying how we are already plural,
how our food, our waste, our electrical signals, etc., are active and agentive within and around
us, to “encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively
things” (2). In other words, we don’t have to be environmentalists to save the earth if we stop
seeing the earth as environment, or ourselves as static and separate. In Toxic Animacies, Mel Y .
Chen questions the very animateness of the body—for Chen, the body might be lifeless, inert and
only animated by what it takes in. Chen moves beyond the suggestion that the body is porous,
receptive, and changeable, suggesting instead that toxins, food, chemicals, etc., are what is
agentive, what is animate and animates, what “queers and enlivens.” Chen charts the ways in
which the bodies of Black children are constructed as “toxic” via lead poisoning in water or from
putting painted toys (the wrong objects) in their mouths, whereas white children are constructed
as whole and pure, to the extent that some of their parents insist they not even be inoculated,
which is to say penetrated by something external. Privilege includes privilege to be singular,
separate, pure; contamination is defined now, not genetically, but by what is taken in, or allowed
in—corn syrup, vaccines, lead.
For all of these thinkers, rather than move toward purity, toward full humanness, toward
solidity, toward wholeness, it is our multiplicity, our inhabitation by the nonhuman which
actively works against colonization, binary gender, and other systems of hierarchy and power. It
is by seeking out the encroaching or inhabiting nonhuman entity—technology/machine, toxin,
micro-monster—that we might conceive of ourselves as multiple, as in-flux. It is possible that
this collective re-conception might change us, render us less solid, less static, more possessed,
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less human. But as Haraway, Jackson, Bennett, Chen, and others demonstrate, this kind of
remixing, this kind of open and invitational way of being, might yield new forms and new
pathways to life for more kinds of creatures. Plus, purity and solidity so easily become a kind of
deadening obsession, and one that, as for Dworkin, can so easily lead to carcerality.
I am interested in naming an art and writing aesthetic in which characters yearn for non-
cohesion, for blurring with other characters, for being dismantled and reincorporated into a
collective—a kind of fiction that wants impossible communion with the more-than-human world,
wants re-composition, wants mulching and composting and transformation. This writing is
sometimes fannish, characters dismantling over obsession with an unattainable lust object;
sometimes surreal, characters entering dimensions where perceptual shifts can occur; and
sometimes deeply ecological in a way that moves beyond cli-fi into spiritual, physical, and erotic
communion with animals and land. I will call this the cyborg aesthetic. It is an aesthetic that
works against stable, the cohesive notions of selfhood that Haraway and Jackson contend are
patriarchal and colonial, and toward collectivity; out of linear logic and toward the inclusion of
dreams and divination and the unconscious, out of propulsive, work-oriented reality and toward
the ecstatic, the embodied, the communion. It is a kind of ecriture feminine for late capitalism,
one that is concerned not only with anti-patriarchal writing but with a writing that undoes the
very notion of identity, unmakes the stable self, flattens—or disperses—humanness into multiple
and malleable earthstuff.
For Kristeva, the monster is “what disturbs identity, system, order, what does not respect
borders, positions, rules.” Horror beckons, but, centrally, it frightens more. It affirms wholeness
and purity (contingent on heterosexuality, cisness, ethnonationalism, and whiteness) by scaring,
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by reinforcing counter-identification with the monstrous. The texts and artworks I gather here
invert the genre of horror by making the monstrous more alluring than scary, by offering
narrative depictions of inhabitation by drugs, intimacy with insects, animal transformations,
human-animal DNA mixing, and new kinds of multispecies collectives as modes of
transformation of self alongside and into other selves, such that social relations, including with
the nonhuman, themselves transform.
A Note On Storytelling
Hierarchy, I feel, the use of each other as resources, comes from the solidification of the
individual, from obsession with purity and impenetrability. And yet fiction is still so frequently
character-driven. What would a bildungsroman look like, I want to know, in which a character
comes of age into a non-self, a network, an ever-changing collection of chemicals and parts?
What would a love story look like, in which two characters collaboratively re-make each other
and then move on to engage in this mutually constitutive work with something or someone else?
So often, fiction that does work like this is relegated to the margins. Reading Eric
Bennett’s Workshops of Empire for Viet Thanh Nguyen’s class in a PhD seminar, I learned that
this is not coincidental, but historically produced and even intentional. The book charts the
history of creative writing workshops as they emerged during the Cold War out of anxiety around
communism as a way of reaffirming the wholeness, integrity, and fundamental goodness of the
liberal democratic capitalist individual. The workshop emerged to “do the work of humanistic
synthesis,” Bennett writes…“Creative writers were to be stewards of the wholeness of the
person” (27). Experimental art was seen as indicative of total social breakdown; it was an ethical
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obligation, the founders of the Iowa workshop and their funders believed, for the good of the
nation, to clean up the lines, end the fragmentation, offer a single coherent meaning, and restore
the integrity of the self that "modernity had split…into catastrophic halves” (19). This resonates
with Dworkin’s claims around sex, the belief that the creation of the closed-system individual
free to enact its will is something to strive for and protect.
The solidification of the individual at the center of literature, along with the relocation of
the writer from the city to the university, was meant to allay fear around change, fear of, Bennett
writes, “women with short hair, voting rights, and cigarettes, of atonal symphonies and dirty
jazz” (23). The gendered and racialized implications here are painfully obvious—if queer and
female and Black artists were unstitching too many neat knots in the social fabric, opening too
many eyes toward those unsolid artists on the margins who were making art to collectively work
out from their socially-ascribed positions as use-objects—then art must be restored to the white
male bourgeois subject. The re-location of creative writers to the university worked in direct
opposition to the experimental art, such as the dis-articulation and improvisatory play and
innovation aimed at collective liberation in 20th century Harlem. By institutionalizing the field
of creative writing within the academy, the workshop model was able to restore meaning-making
to the white family man protected from the influences of the city—from “hoboes angling for a
free ride, queers and perverts” (37). Literature was to have values and these values were to be
aligned with the reification of the whole, complete, liberal, capitalist, democratic, and free
subject. By restoring belief in the individual, institutionally-supported literature was meant to
restore social hierarchy, and to keep the aesthetics and bodies and politics of the queers and
perverts—not to mention the women writers and writers of color—at the margins.
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Of course literature by queers and perverts and “hoboes” is the literature I have been
most drawn to, and this is because it unworks the social fabric, because I felt my teen girl place
in the social structure as use-object so intensely and wanted out of it. But I wanted something
other than wholeness, than respectable subjecthood within a hierarchical system in which some
bodies were always going to be use objects so that others could be free. The art and literature I
write about below is all work that has not received great funding or large readerships.
Zippermouth and Salt Fish Girl are on small presses and neither ever acquired a mainstream or
widespread audience. The Passion According to G.H. was published by a small Brazilian press in
1964 and not translated into English until after the author’s death. When I first began writing
about Julie Tolentino’s performance art, an essay that worked as the seed of this larger project, a
professor asked me if I wasn’t trying to platform work that was “inherently minor.” I am
interested here, intentionally, in what might be considered “inherently minor” aesthetics, and
suggest that there are sociopolitical reasons works with these aesthetics have not been resourced
or platformed; namely, that these books unwork the individual, imagine freedom lies somewhere
beyond the self, beyond the human. It is particularly because they have been considered minor
that I want to devote space to texts and performances in which characters seek recombination, in
which they stay dissolved, in which they produce temporary or fleeting new social structures, in
which the parts of the text or performance never cohere, in which characters fail into multiplicity,
or seek to become multiple.
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Chapter 1: Diffusion Machine: Becoming Surreal
Laurie Weeks’ Zippermouth is a work of autofiction that transforms its reader via its
representation of a lesbian addict who is excessively permeable, her body shifting in response to
images, chemicals, individual words that float into her corporeal atmosphere and root into her
system, animating and re-animating her. Weeks’ narrator never has the sense that she’s a cohesive
individual—instead she’s a mixture of her ingestions, a landscape of moving parts, always at risk
of—and in search of—being inhabited or altered. In her words, she “is many people, each with a
body temperature unique to them. Some are feverish and some hypothermic…some have
diabetes, some have twenty-twenty vision, many are blind” (14). There is no desire in the text for
legibility—instead there is desire for endless disruption, for constant communion—with many
kinds of chemicals, with her unrequited crush Jane. It would feel scary to live as this narrator—
and maybe even to share physical space with this narrator—but in the text, the collection of
moving parts she comprises becomes magnetic, lush, outside capitalist time and patriarchal logic.
With such a porous and ever-shifting landscape of a protagonist, the narrative does not
propel forward but rather stretches, collapses, and swirls time. Poetic and psychedelic
observations interrupt moments of action, and most of the moments of action are inside the
narrator’s brain anyway, or else climaxes are built toward and never quite reached because some
chemical interruption renders them no-longer-important. In a moment of confused obligation, the
narrator invites a homeless addict over to her apartment and then stresses at length about how to
get rid of her. The guest washes her pants in the shower and drapes them, sopping, over the
radiator, makes Jello pudding in the narrator’s kitchen, etc. and as a reader, I love the narrator for
her lack of belief in private space, for her willingness to share her meager resources even if it is
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annoying to do so but I also worry: how will this end? But then suddenly we’re forward in time,
and it’s like the terrifyingly needy houseguest never existed. The result, then, of such an always-
shifting narrator, such a constant changing or erasure of stakes, is a novel of pure observation,
pure feeling, sensation after sensation rendered in the lushest and most chaotic of language.
Here are some of my favorite sentence clusters: On 69: “I hoped this was what was
known as “snapping;” I wanted to snap. In a very deep way, I felt the need to come unglued. I
was too sensitive for this evil world; I wanted a genteel nervous breakdown” On 60: “My mind
was a swamp heaving with green fog, or was it a twister of vicious, miniature wasps, for sure it
was a diffusion machine.” On 63: “Here is my body, a construct of blood and pistons pumping, a
shame machine.” On 162: “The particles of my being balanced delightedly on the light around
me, a host of numberless organisms, homunculi bobbing up and down on the heat’s glassy
swells.” I know it’s odd to list a bunch of sentences like this, but I want to offer a feel for this
text, how the desire for diffusion yields color, gorgeousness; how the occupation by druggy
chemicals frees Weeks’ narrator from cohesion, from the responsibility of agency, from being
wholly occupied by work. In addition, the chemicals free her from individual humanness by
rendering her either machine or creature. She’s a swamp hosting multiple organisms, or else she
is something mechanical simply churning through the inputs. Either way, it’s cyborgian—as
Haraway suggests, Weeks is “embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean
distinctions between organism and machine…structuring the Western self” (52).
The swamp/machine of Weeks’ narrator is taken over by everything that enters: the image
of Vivien Leigh, endless cigarettes, Ritalin, caffeine, heroin, and “shots of adrenaline at the
thought of [her crush’s] name” but she’s a reader, too, and texts are drugs. This resonates, for me,
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with Paul Preciado’s concept of the pharmakon. In Testo Junkie, Paul Preciado posits that we live
in a world controlled by the pharmacopornographic industry, meaning that heteronormativity and
late capitalism demand a constant ingestion of pharmakons. The pharmakon is a concept from
Socrates, “both remedy and poison…matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths…” (Preciado 139)
which find form in contemporary culture in hormones, diet pills, anti-depressants, Botox, fillers,
and other micro-actants meant to help us become good workers and achieve one of two binary
genders. Preciado, taking Haraway’s ideas in a surprising direction, suggests that instead of any
moves toward purity, we might take control of these pharmakons and use them in ways they’re
not intended, a kind of chemical-hacking that liberates the body by re-composing it in a way
counter to what dominant culture defines as beautiful, functional, whole. Throughout the book,
Preciado takes testosterone as a kind of experimental play with his afab body, not with the goal
of becoming male or even trans necessarily, but as a way of messing with the
pharmacopornographic industry—as an embrace of impurity, re-mixing, cyborghood.
Pharmakons, for Preciado, are not just chemicals but might also be advertisements, Hollywood
films, or texts that enter and recompose us.
Remembering Barthes, Weeks’ narrator writes, “Roland said something like photography
is a new form of hallucination, which got me worked up. It wasn’t the meaning or anything; just
certain words were green or lavender beads released from a cold capsule, pinging off my neurons
to spark sensation” (47). In third grade, listening to her teacher read Charlotte’ s Web “[her]
daydreaming mind was like an insect on codeine at the circus…flipping opiated through the air
on a trapeze” (26). After reading The Bell Jar as a teenager, she writes in a fan letter to a dead
Sylvia Plath: “…when you said how the tulips were breathing, I realized I’d always seen them
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breathing too but I was in denial.” Texts open up new portals in this book, as much as chemical
drugs do; The Bell Jar is a hallucinogen which renders Weeks’ narrator capable of witnessing
tulip respiration, Charlotte’ s Web is opium, transforming perception. Reading fundamentally
changes the self, warps and refigures the brain, druglike. An over-proliferation of clean narrative
arcs might make us believe in a singular and cohesive kind of personhood, free to employ and
underpay and use others. Messy day-glo drug texts, though, might stretch our perceptive
abilities, twist the way we see, shift what feels central in a life. “My first ‘lude,” Weeks writes, “I
couldn’t believe it. I was suddenly transparent, just like the world and its workings, which, I now
understood, I had completely misinterpreted.” If the reader accepts the materially re-
compositional power of reading, through Weeks, she is able to experience the perceptual
scramble of a handful of mystery pills while keeping the machine of her own body prissily intact.
In a body always-already contaminated, then, by uninvited pharmakons, sickened, it
seems by office culture, capitalism, compulsory femininity, etc., Weeks’ narrator needs to self-
medicate, to have some say over her own chemical makeup. This is not entirely off from Paul
Preciado’s suggestion in Testo Junkie that, in a pharmaco-hegemonic and misogynistic world, a
world that has violently wrested control over distribution and marketing of the pharmakon away
from “women, colonized peoples, and non-authorized sorcerers” (152), women should just take
some T, undergo full or partial transitions to male, or just play around with their limbic systems
in order to “resist and dismantle the somato-semiotic norm and to invent collectively new
technologies of the production of the subject” (364). Weeks’ narrator is intentional in seeking the
pleasure of dismantling the cohesive self, which for her is also an act of class traitorism—she is
dismantling the self born into a class of people with suburban private swimming pools,
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intentional in seeking the pleasure of being occupied, in joining with who and whatever she can
to form new assemblages.
Addiction narratives are uncommon among women writers—while young readers
especially are willing to traverse the trippy recesses of the minds of William Burroughs and
Henry Miller, there is still something grotesque and terrifying about a woman undone by
horniness, desire, and need. There is something interesting about a once-solid man who is willing
to be occupied by the toxin, penetrated by the needle, composed of multiple drug beings who
compromise his agency and integrity, influencing his thoughts and actions. But a woman seeking
even further surrender of agency, more disintegration, less control can feel crazy, scary, sad.
There is more physical risk, too, making these narratives less likely to be written: the
perpetually-broke, addicted, disintegrated and starving woman is obviously more open to rape
and murder, and is less likely to have a nice girl who is willing to take them in. There is
something, then, about the perceptions of the inhabited girl that feel particular—if drugs are
feminizing in their disruption of cohesive selfhood, Weeks offers a female narrator who unmakes
patriarchal logic from a place of being further feminized.
In “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” Leo Bersani defines phallocentrism as “above all the denial
of the value of powerlessness in both men and women…of a more radical disintegration” or
“self-shattering.” Rather than understanding the problem of binary gender, then, as one in which
women are too penetrable, Bersani frames the problem as one in which the pleasures of
penetration—of becoming powerless or multiple, of being inhabited, of coming undone at the
hands of another, of taking it—are denied. It is harder, in some ways, for women to articulate
such desires when their penetrability becomes so synonymous with powerlessness, to name
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desires for hole-ness rather than wholeness in a world that is trying always-already to undo their
cohesion. For Bersani, though, anxiety around disruption of the self, allegiance to cohesion over
transformation, stems from a privileging of the masculine, from masculine logic. Weeks’ narrator
is literally outside phallocentrism in that there are no men in her world—she is a lesbian, friend
to the girl junkies—and so she’s found a way to open her body and brain to what might enter,
without men being included on that list, and can narrate from a position of inhabitation and
occupation outside of the cis-hetero framework.
“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” Haraway writes. For Weeks’ narrator, as for
Haraway, there is no going back from this, nor should we want to—it is the machine-organism
who can undo the notion of pure humanness that always relies on an objectified Other in order to
preserve itself. In the midst of a blinking and swirling and vaporizing miasma of image and
feeling, then, it might get lost that Zippermouth is a political novel, one with an anti-capitalist,
anti-work stance. Weeks’ narrator yearns for a tunnel out of working, yearns for fucking,
collision, inhabitation, and communion with animals. At her temp job, as kind of a typing task
rabbit, the narrator escapes to the bathroom to do bumps of coke, and then sits at her desk
maniacally typing the name of her crush: Jane Jane Jane Jane Jane while blurting out platitudes
to her boss in corporatese. On the subway, the narrator feels as though all the men in business
suits are copies of her dad, before realizing they are, like, seven years younger than her: “It’s like
these kids woke up in their little spaceship pajamas and stepped into the paradigm of successful
manhood standing like an open sarcophagus next to the bed, an animatronic container for their
lives…I felt bad for them.” (79). She critiques the “worker garments, the snickering tangerine
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suits on the women, the judgmental black jackets, the blast of frustration from a pseudo-
psychedelic scarf, the vicious and frantic click of spiked heels on the sidewalk” (79). The
pseudo-psychedelic scarf is pseudo because it is evident its wearer not tripping outside of linear
narrative time and capitalist logic the way the narrator is, because she is fundamentally just
replicating the paradigm wearing a kicky accessory. Workers, here, are the opposite of
psychedelia, the opposite of color and observation and openness and commingling and
disintegration, and yet they are able co-opt it. There is a kind of circular logic here to capitalism’s
demands— one must appear cohesive and solid in order to work, and work in order to appear
cohesive and solid. Weeks’ narrator is disgusted by wealth, by the middle-class future she is set
up to occupy. She looks around her, as a teen, at suburban homes with pools, at what she
perceives as ugly wealth, and plans to “be poor, pay cheap rent for [her] garret; [to] be
incandescent, thermonuclear with the Joy of Art and Living Free” (138). Seeking collision and
constant transformation and accurate language with which to describe the world is the opposite
of seeking cohesion and the replication of pre-fab identities that professional life requires.
Angela Carter has had some interesting things to say on psychedelia and capitalism. In an
1985 TV spot, the interviewer, smiling, asks Angela Carter to confirm that she “has said” that
she’s a socialist, as though socialism is a quirky personality trait a woman has claimed rather
than a serious ongoing political commitment from a writer/intellectual. Carter appears galled and
the interviewer backpedals, stating that the magic of Carter’s work, its surrealism, doesn’t feel
like political writing. Carter responds, “The restructuring of the way that we perceive reality is
an essential part of…being a socialist, or why bother?…You’re not a socialist because you think
it’s a good idea for the world to be endlessly recapitulated just the way it is.” Zippermouth does
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this work of restructuring reality, does surreal work which offers a way of scrambling the
perceptive abilities that the hierarchical structures of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy
have ingrained. This resonates with Ranciere’s idea that the “political act not only disrupts, it
disrupts in such a way as to change radically what people can ‘see’: it repartitions the sensible; it
overthrows the regime of the perceptible” (cf Bennett 107). It is important to my project that
work which stretches perception beyond the real, offers intimate connections with or
transformations by the nonhuman are inherently political works.
I am including the longest sentence in the book here. Somehow a willingness to write
such a long sentence, along with its mess, its dream logic, bucks what are usually publishing’s
encouragements toward legibility, propulsion, and ease. The sentence begins with a description
of the narrator’s lazy domestic habits, in this case her failure to put her clean laundry away,
which means that the clean clothes mix with the dirty clothes on the floor of her apartment,
creating an endless cycle of laundry which never yields clean clothes. It could almost be a joke
out of Broad City but in Weeks’ hands, the sentence winds and flips until it somehow ends in a
vision of living in a relationship of deep reciprocal care with the animals, all of whom are
female, loving, and in charge. Somehow this vision of reciprocal care with animals emerges out
of the laundry neglect, out of the refusal of cleanness—out of a resistance of work, of dailiness,
of money:
So usually I ended up rewashing after approximately one month the so-called clean items
along with the newly soiled ones, by now there being no difference except to a forensic
psychologist, which clearly I am not though I admit it’s been a dream of mine, but what hasn’t,
but my point is that these repeated extra washings, which rarely resulted in wearing, incurred, if
you thought of it in terms of yearly output, untold extra financial expense and who knows what
social cost due to unsightly outfits being thrown together in desperation, so that what started out
as a happy and hopeful occasion—the impulse to pull myself up from the muck of paralysis to
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cleanse and renew myself at the Lourdes of the Laundromat—somehow managed to add yet
more poundage to the anvil of demoralization dragging me further each day into a primal
bubbling stew of self-disgust that had once been a shallow fount of pristine warm springwaters in
which I gurgled, a naked cherub laughing and waving my fists, waiting to be kissed by the
elephants, giraffes, and wildebeests that came to the oasis where I lay because they wanted to
play with me and help—the elephant, so emotional and washing me gently with warm mists from
her trunk; the giraffe, also gentle plus tenderly putting her lips to mine with leaves from the
forest canopy; the wildebeest, she says to me, “Do not wander too far from your herd, I saw on
the Discovery Channel what happens when weaker animals wander too far from the herd.”
After this sentence, the animals erupt into a joyful song calling on each other to stop
being so gentle and instead kill all the humans, who are killing the earth. The disintegration of
the narrator’s self has also created a disintegration of language, time, story, and the sentence
itself in which the Laundromat can collide organically and seamlessly with an animal pond of
feminist care, where a failure at domestic work yields dreams of a nonhuman-led anticapitalist
uprising. The reason it would feel scary to live as this narrator is not because dissolution is
unpleasurable—to the contrary, her world feels closely observed, colorful, dynamic and alive—
but because of capitalism can only safely accommodate those with the privilege and ability to
replicate the “paradigm of successful manhood,” those who do not witness tulip respiration, who
are not aware of the vital materialist collectives occupying their bodies—who can stay static.
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Chapter 2: The Thing-Part of Us: Abjection as Portal to Inhumanity
Clarice Lispector’s 1964 Passion According to G.H. features a narrator initially obsessed
by staying static, constructing her life around being the “paradigm of success” Weeks’ narrator
mocks, until she has a transformative interaction with a cockroach in her maid’s room. This
interaction forms the action of almost all 189 pages of the novel. G.H. is, at first, horrified by the
cockroach, but after a failed attempt to kill it, she begins to become transfixed by it, prompting
her to abandon her sense of identity and move—in ecstasy and terror—toward, what she calls at
various junctures, “disorganization,” “fragmentary visions,” “disorientation,” “absence of form,”
“dissolution,” “a new way of being,” and terrifying passion. Others have written about this novel
as one in which G.H. enters the realm of the feminine and explores the uncanny, but I want to
extend these analyses and suggest that the novel demonstrates the ways in which, within
patriarchy and racial capitalism, humanness itself is constructed around a notion of identity
designed to suppress desire for co-mingling, transformation, and interdependence with the
nonhuman, and expression of the thing- or animal-self. In The Passion According to G.H.,
organized and cohesive identity—which belongs primarily to white men, but for which everyone
aspiring to be fully human must strive—depends on the containment of femininity, blackness,
and animality.
I want to return to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s idea that “black female flesh persistently
functions as the limit case of ‘the human’” (4), thereby reifying the categories of whiteness and
maleness as distinctly human. For Jackson, seeking the potential for “blackness’s bestialization
and thingification” to engender “more imaginative multispecies worlding” outside of what she
calls the “current hegemonic mode of “the human,” might disintegrate existing hierarchies,
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reroute interspecies relationships, and open up new relationalities with the nonhuman. In Passion
According to G.H., it is through the horror of suddenly imagining herself through her Black
maid’s gaze that G.H., previously obsessed by her own “clean and correct” (23) identity, is
shocked into movement outside of bounds of her carefully constructed humanness, and it is there
that she understands love, along with inhumanness, for the first time.
Having been born into wealth and having gained public recognition as a sculptor, G.H. has a
level of economic and social privilege that allows her a cohesive and legible identity. She writes,
“I exude the calm that comes from reaching the point of being G.H. even on my suitcases.”
These embossed suitcases return throughout the text, luxury possessions emblematic of a legible
identity, a cohesive self that not only travels, but can arrive in different contexts intact. Her
identity is affirmed and solidified through an interpellative cycle: “what others get from me is
then reflected back onto me and forms the atmosphere called ‘I’” (19). G.H. sees the “I” as a
fiction, the self as a shifting collection of elements (for what else is an atmosphere?) that must be
held together by arrangement, reflection, and monogrammed suitcases; however, rather than find
freedom or pleasure in conceiving of the “I” as a kind of collection, as Weeks’ narrator does,
G.H. clings anxiously to the fiction of her identity, works at it constantly. “I did organize myself
to be comprehensible for myself,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been able to stand not finding
myself in the phone book” (20). G.H.’s whiteness, childlessness, recognition for her work, and
overall cohesion allows her to occupy a place in the social order somewhere between masculinity
and femininity: “And as for men and women, what was I?” G.H. correctly understands her social
position as at least close to one that is reserved for men, and in her constant strive toward
solidity, her goals for herself, she, in Bersani’s terms, adopts a patriarchal logic. I read the novel,
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then, as a journey out of masculine logic and anxiety about achieving solid and impenetrable
personhood and into feminine logic and the embrace of creaturehood, intimacy or
interchangeability with thingness. G.H.’s
journey into femininity, into loss, is indeed prompted by the imagined gaze of the absent Black
woman, her maid Janair. Janair is absent in the novel in more than one way: the novel takes place
in the maid’s room after Janair has permanently left her post, rendering her absent-yet-present in
the novel’s events, but also it is only upon entering the room that G.H. begins to think of Janair
as an observing, thinking person—Janair has been absent to G.H. during the entire time she has
worked for her. Suddenly, in her physical absence, G.H. realizes that “Janair had the features of a
queen” and that she “used her as if she had no presence” (33). Via a charcoal drawing on the wall
of Janair’s room, which G.H. reads as a portrait of herself, G.H. feels intense discomfort in the
truth she feels Janair has revealed, noting that Janair is “the first truly outside person of whose
gaze I was becoming aware” (32). It is under this “outside” gaze that G.H. begins to see herself
as a “blown-up and doltish figure” (31). The maid’s room in G.H.’s house is both of the house
and outside of it, its occupant serving to arrange and order Janair’s things. It is where Blackness
is contained, Blackness which serves to order but which cannot be part of the order, and it is
through the imagined gaze of the Black woman Other—through this horrifying moment in which
the Black woman is understood to have a gaze—that G.H.’s own humanness starts to unravel.
Rather, though, than seeking humanness for Janair, who she had formerly understood as use-
object, G.H. comes to embrace inhumanness for herself. It is partly, it seems, that she intuitively
understands that humanness always depends on dehumanizing someone, but it is also that
humanity itself suddenly looks “doltish.” The gaze of the racialized Other
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prepares G.H. for the gaze of the animal, or pre-animal, cockroach to “exist” her (language has
been lost or is insufficient, new transitive verbs must be created), to lose the fiction of her
identity. Her categories have been broken down; G.H. no longer knows where a gaze might come
from, what it might teach her. What is revealed is that white patriarchal solidity exists in order to
cover the truths of love, plurality, (in)humannness, pleasure, inhabitation, the interrelation and
even interchangeability of human and nonhuman creatures, knowledges like that “the continual
breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence” (99). After she convenes with the
cockroach, that is, G.H., like Plath and Weeks, can witness the tulips breathing.
Lispector’s cockroach is visually feminine:
“composed of layers and brown layers” of “pure seduction” out of which perpetually oozes a
substance that G.H. calls “the white matter” or “the white thickness.” It is through the portal of
the cockroach that identity dissolves: “Is G.H. on my suitcases still I? No.” (24) G.H. loses what
she realizes is “useless identity” (187). She feels aware that this identity-loss will prevent her
from continued legibility and social recognition, but “won’t resist the will to enter the mysterious
fabric, into that plasma…” (100). She is becoming, as Jane Bennett would have it, a self “who
lives as earth,” becomes “the jizz” of “various materials.” Moreover, she realizes: “What I once
wanted as a miracle, what I called a miracle, was really a desire for discontinuity and
interruption” (178). I am reminded here of Bersani’s definition of phallocentrism as the “denial
of the value of…radical disintegration”—in the cockroach’s white-thickness-oozing layers,
Lispector enters the vulvular and begins to allow herself the pleasure and knowledge of blurring
into the Other. For a long middle section of the book, the
cockroach becomes a portal to a desert, in which G.H. has a kind of reverse-biblical experience,
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one in which she “lost [her] human setup for hours and hours.” If Eve was expelled from deep
communion with the earth’s creatures by eating the wrong fruit, G.H. is restored deep
communion by eating the wrong insect—however, like both Eve and Haraway’s cyborg, it is not
a return to innocence or purity she longs for, but a deeper knowledge. If Eve’s knowledge-
through-eating somehow catapulted her into patriarchal capitalist order and rendered her unable
to talk to non-human creatures, G.H.’s knowledge-through-eating leads her to nonhierarchical
existence with the nonhuman: “Ah, prehuman love invades me. I understand, I understand!”
(119) . Through eating the “paste” of the cockroach and letting it mix with her own “paste” she
comes to lose “the world as [she] had it” and enters a new world, a realer world.
If Janair’s imagined gaze, then, makes G.H.
curious about animal intimacy, then, the cockroach—itself at the border of animal and thing—
thingifies her. Here, thingification becomes part of what Jackson calls “multispecies worlding.”
G.H. narrates, “It cannot be bad to have seen life in its plasma. It is dangerous, it is sinful, but it
cannot be bad because we are made of that plasma” (152). This distinction between badness and
sin feels crucial—as the social structure G.H. clung to breaks apart, previously held-together
linguistic and narrative signs break down and morph. What G.H. comes to learn through this act
of sinful ingestion often directly contradicts biblical teachings, particularly that desire, and even
desire that leads to consumption beyond what is necessary, is the route to godliness: "My
eagerness is my most initial hunger: I am pure because I am eager” (144). Need, openness,
hunger, curiosity, and communion are what is good — God, in Lispector’s novel, exists in the
vulvular, in the layered and pulsing, in the hunger.
Hunger is the key, for G.H.—not abstinence or restraint—to deep
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interrelationship with each other and god: “we suffer from being so little hungry, though our
small hunger is enough for us to deeply miss the pleasure we would have if our hunger were
greater…the more we need, the more God exists. The more we can take, the more God we shall
have (157)”. Some literary critics have written about the “cannibalism” of the cockroach as an
ethical failure of the text, arguing that for all of the travel into the realms of the ecstatic feminine,
eating the Other is a problematic solution. But I instead argue while this is obviously not a vegan
text, to read G.H. eating the cockroach as simply an act of cannibalizing the Other feels not only
like a failure of imagination but a fundamental misunderstanding of the ways the spiritual exists
within the material in this text, and of the roles hunger and consumption play in deep
interchange. G.H. eats the cockroach and in eating, becomes the cockroach and discovers she is
“as unclean as the roach” (70), that “being alive is inhuman” (181). In other words, to be human
is not only “blown-up and doltish,” is not only a privilege relying on the inhumanity of others,
but is also a kind of deadening. Stasis and legibility become, in this text, a kind of unaliveness—
merging with cockroach paste, ingesting the cockroach paste as pharmakon, restores G.H. to life.
Deleuze and Guattari write about multi-organism—and nonorganism—collectives as
assemblages, “living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent
presence of energies that confound them from within.” Jane Bennett extends this idea in order to
say that bodies enhance their power when considering themselves as heterogeneous assemblages.
Specifically, she makes a case for “food as a participant” in the human-nonhuman assemblages
that constitute a body (38), using Nietzsche and Thoreau to chart ways in which “eating
constitutes a series of mutual transformations between human and nonhuman materials” (40),
and to draw “a profound relationship between eater and eaten” (43). Bennett queries: “What dif-
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ference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various
and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the
upper hand?” G.H. and the cockroach have such an encounter, one with seduction and depth, one
that make them a “living, throbbing confederation.”
The spiritual/consumptive relationship in The Passion According to G.H. reminds me of
Braiding Sweetgrass, a book by Native American ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, which mixes
indigenous knowledge, myth, autobiography, and western ecology, which I read for the first time
with my students during my last semester at USC. My students and I noted that the book was the
first “environmental literature” we had read that didn’t make us feel guilty or leave us with a list
of things we should stop doing. Instead, we felt envy for the relationships Kimmerer described
having with the nonhuman world—we wanted to speak to plants, to have a mutually loving
relationship with a garden. Kimmerer is upset by factory farmed grocery store meat, sure, but she
is equally upset by strawberries trapped in plastic rather than plucked from a vine in a dirt patch,
strawberries chatted with or prayed over before being ecstatically consumed. The problem for
Kimmerer is not what we eat but our lack of relationship to the creatures we consume, the feeling
that they are inert and the way this cuts us off from our own creature-selves, makes us inert. The
book does not suggest that we should minimize our footprint—that is, try to use less or stay out
of nature, thereby even more deeply alienating ourselves from the nonhuman world. Instead, it
invites us to transform our relationship with the earth, to create deep, observant, joyful, and, yes,
hungry relationships to the more-than-human world. One detail of Kimmerer’s book my class
felt struck by was that not only are human pronouns in most native languages ungendered, but
humans share a pronoun with all other animate beings—frogs, strawberries, wind. Inanimate
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things have a separate pronoun. The distinction in language, then, is not between man/woman or
human/nonhuman but between living/non-living. There is nothing special and separate about
humans. This is the primary realization G.H. has during her reverse-biblical journey as well: “I
know it seems I am taking away your and my humanity. But it’s the opposite: what I am wanting
is to live from that initial and primordial thing that was exactly what made certain things reach
the point of aspiring to be human” (169).
This embrace of inhumanness is where G.H. arrives. Upon her deep communion with the
cockroach, G.H. "had thousands of blinking cilia and with my cilia I move forward, I protozoan,
pure protein.” She describes her most beautiful discovery as that “the world is not human, and
that we are not human” and writes, “Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery
is that “the inhuman is the best part of us, it’s the thing, the thing-part of us.”
Here’s Bennett, defining vital materialists against environmentalists: “a more materialist public
would need to include more earthlings in the swarm of actants. If environmentalists are selves
who live on earth, vital materialists are selves who live as earth, who are more alert to the
capacities and limitations — the ‘jizz’ —of the various materials that they are.” Understanding
the self as ever-reconfiguring earth jizz has the potential to yield an environmentalism in which
the environment is not merely passive; if we understand both the “environment" as a collection
of co-actors and ourselves as “environment,” it is not just that our responsibilities to non-human
beings change, but that our desires for interacting with them do. Jizz is sticky, liquid, malleable
in its shape, but it is also hungry, ready to recombine to create life.
In her inhumanity, G.H. writes, I started to love the abyss of which I am made” (152). At the
novel’s end, she writes, “I had deheroized myself…the world independed on me” (189). At the
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end of the novel, G.H. is no longer a hero, which is to say, no longer a protagonist, no longer the
center of the story. This verb independed could mean that the world had ceased to depend on her,
but it could also mean a kind of merging between herself and the world, one in which everything
is paradoxically independent and interdependent simultaneously. “My life is more used by the
earth than by me,” G.H. writes, “I am so much greater than whatever I used to call ‘I”” (127).
Inside white patriarchal logic, the social order is structured around fear of being used—the goal
becomes to be human, which is to be positioned to use others. Inside cockroach-logic, though,
G.H. is paradoxically both used and greater than. Her dissolution has permitted her to enter a
state of being-with, of belonging to the earth and other creatures that is somehow both ecstatic
and “neutral.” I didn’t know
when I set out to write about Lispector as emblematic of cyborg aesthetics that Helene Cixous
considers Lispector a prime example of ecriture feminine. For Cixous, ecriture feminine is a
political form of writing, one which deliberately abandons arcs and unified endings, instead
finding cyclical or open forms that enable the writer to access that which has been repressed by
the culture and which lies beyond masculine logic. Indeed, The Passion According to G.H. has a
cyclical structure that, for Cixous, has the potential to “destroy the form of the family structure”
and replace it with an “endless circulation of desire from one body to another, above and across
sexual difference, outside those relations of power and regeneration constituted by the family.”
According to Cixous, “Most women…do someone else’s—man’s—writing, and in their
innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that’s in effect masculine.” I
like thinking about Passion According to G.H. as a journey from masculine logic into ecriture
feminine, one in which it becomes clear that ecriture feminine can express different kinds of
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truths than clear character-driven arcs, can unleash not only the feminine but everything that the
constructions of humanity and cohesive identity suppress, particularly animality and thingness.
The novel, then, reverses a liberal logic toward inclusion of women and Black women into
personhood, into solidity and coherence, reverses a Biblical dominance or stewardship of non-
human life, or any kind of patronizing discussion of “ethics” in favor of an embrace of hunger
and desire. “I am celebrating my neediness,” G.H. writes.
Unlike fiction that celebrates the total containment, freedom, and goodness of the
individual, The Passion According to G.H. offers fiction that liberates the individual from the
endless fight for humanity, a humanity which always depends on the inhumanity of someone else
— G.H. can live while the “maid-arranger” Janair arranges a life for her to live inside. It’s not
merely that neither is happy, or that this setup is unjust, but that it keeps everyone striving toward
becoming a set of embossed initials, prevents everyone from seeing the world’s “blinking cilia,”
from finding vaginal portals to biblical deserts, from hearing the earth’s breathing, from "going
toward the greater hunger.”
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Chapter 3: Honey: Consumption into Creaturehood
Hunger as a catalyst for transformation into creaturehood is at the center of Julie Tolentino’s
Honey. But whereas G.H.’s transformation happens via the uncannily thing-like and horror-
inducingly invasive and inexterminable cockroach and its “paste,” Tolentino’s happens via the
fuzzy, collective, life-sustaining and endangered bee and its honey. Here is the performance, as I
watch it now on video: A viscous stream flows from a rod near the high gallery ceiling. It
burbles, undulates, becomes something both solid and transmogrifying, something that is no
longer quite honey, something alive. Julie Tolentino stands, naked on top and swaddled from the
waist down, on gallery floor, head back and mouth open, receiving the stream into her mouth
where it gathers into a glowing swamp, thick and burbling. Tolentino’s throat visibly rises and
lowers in a series of constant swallows, but the honey stream flows perpetually into it and the
swamp does not drain. Tolentino swallows, blinks, the hint of a wince: it is unpleasant.
Tolentino’s lover and longtime collaborator Stosh Fila aka Pigpen stands on a ladder, squeezing
honey out of a plastic bottle directly into Tolentino’s mouth. She remains here—receiving,
swallowing—for five full hours. Fila is clearly delivering pain,
but is delivering pain tenderly. Fila’s motion is a gentle squeezing, a careful creation of the initial
burble from which the honey-cord generates, a monitoring of the stream and of Tolentino. This
combination of pain-delivery and tender care is commonly at the center of, and therefore evokes,
both BDSM play and also queer bedside care during the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s, the
world in which Tolentino came up as an artist and activist at the forefront of ACT UP. While I’m
not going to linger there, I do want to situate Tolentino in that context, as an AIDS-era queer
activist who, unlike other performance artists she’s collaborated with, such as Ron Athey and
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Vaginal Davis, is not the object of much theory. But she’s one of the kissers on the Gran Fury
Read My Lips poster that was plastered all over Chicago in 1990 and still taught in contemporary
art history survey courses, and so her body is permanently coded as the body of an AIDS activist,
and as the body of a lover.
HONEY is, first, an experiment in radical receptivity—it is durational, public, power-
bottoming: Tolentino takes it and takes it and takes it. But what she’s taking is possibly the least
phallic object imaginable; it’s fluid and labial in its movement, as it flows it creates shapes in
hyperbolic rather than linear space, it’s produced by a queen-led species with dispersed agency.
If this is a BDSM scene at all, or a penetration, it is a queer one. While displays of penetrability
and passivity in male performance art—such as in the work Matthew Barney and Ron Athey—
feel, if not shocking, than at least fresh and liberatory, it seems impossible for a performance of a
woman’s passivity or penetrability to feel like anything other than a re-inscription of patriarchal
norms. Barney opens his cavernous ass hole and penetrates himself with objects in art museums;
women have done similar things, albeit mostly vaginal, in peepshow booths and on strip club
stages forever. I don’t say this to diminish the importance of performances of male penetrability,
or to negate the possibilities for anal penetration to, in Paul Preciado’s terms, “create a short
circuit in the division of the sexes” (Testo 71) by re-constructing the male body as penetrable, but
rather to highlight the difficulty for a femme-presenting performance artist to re-signify the body
or shorten the circuit that divides the sexes via her own penetration. Preciado writes that the
West’s two main orifices are “a mouth that emits public signs and an impenetrable anus around
which it winds a male, heterosexual subjectivity, which acquires the status of a socially
privileged body” (72). But if privileged male subjectivity can be undone via anal penetration, to
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anally-penetrate a woman is pointless—a woman’s body is already humiliated, already conceived
of as penetrable—why bother? On the other hand, to try to seal her body off, to make it
unfuckable, while perhaps offering an empowering image of female solidity, of a femme existing
only for herself, would also reify phallocentrism in Bersani’s terms, offering a kind of
assimilation to an oppressive culture that defines receptivity and openness as weak, that denies
the pleasures of becoming undone. But Tolentino’s mouth, for these hours of HONEY, refuses to
assimilate to phallocentric logic by emitting public signs—instead it swallows and swallows.
What it swallows though is a product created by a non-human (and specifically insect) public,
and via this queer and non-human oral penetration by honey, Tolentino is able to re-signify
femininity and find ways to separate penetration from domination all together. In this
performance, Tolentino shows how a combination of receptivity (bottoming) and care (topping)
have the capacity to push the human out of individual subjectivity and into collective, while also
refiguring dominance and submission, humanness and objecthood or animality.
If a kind of sex happening in the performance, it’s worth noting, is also group sex: in
other iterations of the piece, Tolentino has permitted anyone in the gallery to climb the ladder
and squirt into her mouth. Unlike with say, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, these honey-squeezers were
only given the tools and the proximity to enact the process of penetration-by-fluid in the exact
way Tolentino orchestrated. Instead of a piece, then, in which Tolentino demonstrated an
audience’s capacity for cruelty, she created a piece in which participants were able to feed her
potentially-perverse desires, thereby becoming part of a collective as the same time as they
underscore the ways in which tops, too, are ascribed to a pretty rigid role: one in which care and
attention is requisite (I have to think, particularly in this piece, that there's a serious risk of
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choking and that the Heimlich might not work). In the iterations of HONEY performed with Fila,
too, agency, clearly, is shared. Tolentino’s body clarifies this: in her hands are speakers; she is
controlling the music, directing it by lifting her arms and pointing, like a robotic conductor
powered by an internal feelings-based mechanism. She asserts, therefore, her own orchestration
of this scene; she is not simply passive; she is the artist. Fila is visibly the assistant, the service
butch, to this scene. I want to read this scene, then, as one in which intentional bottoming is able
to yield a different kind of body—in this case a communal body comprising Pigpen, honey, Julie,
music—and maybe even the absent bees. That is, I want to read Tolentino’s performance as a
kind of queer bottoming that engenders a complication, rather than a surrender, of agency,
transforming and even merging the selves involved, rather than only, using Bersani’s term,
shattering them.
If how and whether lesbians have sex at all is one of the great unanswered pop-mysteries,
how cisfemme and transmasc queers have sex is more confounding: there both is and is not a
perceived capacity for penetration, depending on who is looking and what they see. Tolentino
and Fila’s bodies together, then, offer the blurry impossibility and the necessary innovation of
lesbianism at the same time as they invite more heteronormative interpretations: masculine
penetrator, feminine bottom. In some ways Tolentino’s performance seems like both an attempt
and a refusal to answer the question of how and whether lesbians have sex, which is always a
disingenuous question anyway: what I imagine people mean when they wonder this is: is anyone
even sufficiently humiliated, resignified, or transformed by the sex? What they mean is: does this
sex have a product?
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Tolentino often appears in her performances—though not in HONEY for obvious reasons
—with her abundant hair grown out and covering her face and all sides of her torso. The hair is
curly and sometimes matted; it is hair that gestures toward the existence of a human-animal
threshold, toward the desire to exist there. Her movements often fall between animalistic and
machinic—slow waves or quick jerks, writhing, crawling, falling. If, as Simone de Beauvoir’s
famous line goes, “one is not born a woman but becomes one,” Tolentino becomes, is in the
process of her performance, something else, something both pre- or post-human. In Tolentino’s
performances, Fila is cast either as an assistant/service top or else as a twinning collaborator,
following and mimicking Tolentino’s movements, evolving into a new kind of creature alongside
Tolentino. And so perhaps this is not lesbianism—or perhaps this is how lesbianism, and lesbian
sex, has always-already functioned—as a collaborative making of new, non-woman selves, as a
collaborative unlearning of womanhood—both the shame and the obviousness of penetrability—
that might traverse through animal, cyborg, other genders. As Monique Wittig writes in the
classic but no-longer-cool The Lesbian Body: “a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman,
a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society.”
But Tolentino is pretty clearly trying to become a product of nature, gesturing with her
hair and her movements, that, if she is society’s product, she is pushing against her own shrink
wrap for a way out. (This is visible in later performances in which she and Fila both cut their
bodies and press their bleeding wounds together, obviously seeking new sites of penetrability
and genetic mixture). Here, Tolentino is swallowing mass quantities of a substance from nature, a
substance produced by bees. Which prompts me to ask the weird question: what is honey?
Specifically, what is honey at this quantity?
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Honey is not only a product of nature, but it is a product of intimate cross-species
interactions between bees and plants. Bees rub their bodies against flowers and suck floral
nectar, which they then alchemize and regurgitate. These interactions are weird: they are either a
kind of eating-and-transforming (in opposition to eating-and-shitting), or else a kind of sex-and-
production (in opposition to sex-and-reproduction). In this way, the bee has a sort of social and
nurturing/feeding potential which the cockroach does not. The cockroach allowed G.H. to
connect fully with the most abject form of inhumanity, with a disgust-producing, horror-invoking
being quite close to thingness, but the bee is social, fuzzy, performing a life-giving function for
plants and everyone who eats them or breathes their oxygen. The bees that make honey are called
“worker bees,” and they do work, but their work is to nuzzle into the cushiony centers of
gorgeous, good-smelling flowers and suck out literal nectar. Their work, most likely, is driven by
desire. It is a work of “going toward the greater hunger” (Passion) and consuming with attention
and openness to mutual transformation. It is a lusty work, a—to borrow a term from Annie
Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ Ecosexual Manifesto—“pollen-amorous” work. The bees who
engage in this work are sterile, non-reproductive in the traditional sense, and they are female,
meaning that honey is made via a kind of interspecies lesbian sex/eating (in which both of these
terms “lesbian” and “sex” are unstable in the ways “lesbian sex” always is). Flowers and their
bee-pollinators are models for how this consumptive sex might be transformative, too, in that the
flowers and bees coevolve: bees’ probosci elongate as floral caverns deepen over generations of
sex/eating; some orchids develop bee-like color patterns in a kind of jouissance-fueled lesbian
merging. Like straights and gays might do with lesbians, the scientific community questions the
rubbing and trading of genetic material that happens between flowers and bees—they call it
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pseudocopulation—but they are generally unable to account for the visual similarity and
precision of fit between flowers and their bee pollinators in satisfying ways.
Honey, therefore, works on a metaphoric level in Tolentino’s performance. But the
performance might work, too, on a physical level. Honey is hailed for its curative properties in
the Koran and by homeopathic practitioners, and it is usually prescribed in small quantities.
What does it produce to swallow gallons of honey? If a tablespoon of honey (a product of the
bodies of flowers and bees) is relaxing, healing, and system-cleansing, what does a gallon of
honey produce? Might it actually work, in this context, as not only a metaphor but an actual
agent of transformation? Might it cleanse Tolentino of toxins? Might it infuse her, even, with
bee-ness? Because honey cannot pour cleanly into a mouth from a great height, Tolentino’s face,
chest, and hair are coated in dark amber goo: she looks birthed via a literal golden shower. What
has she been birthed as?
In BDSM parlance, subspace is a particular emotional landscape a person might occupy
while in a state of submission to a dominant. Scientists explain the physical changes that occur in
subspace via a combination of precise description of chemical and hormonal shifts plus drug
metaphors: In the words of psychologists Sprott and Randall, the body begins “producing
morphine-like drugs” and enters “a “trance-like state” wherein “the submissive may feel out-of-
body, detached from reality.” In other words, something physical happens in subspace, which is
both understood scientifically and not. Their study attempts to understand sub drop, a period of
depression, exhaustion, and colds or headaches which some BDSM participants have reported
experiencing in the days following intense play. They initially attribute these feelings to the
“grief or bereavement” of no longer being in-scene, but after using medical research to explore
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the causes of sub drop, they conclude that after time spent in subspace, “one’s self, or a central
identity, is changing in some way. And that change involves a loss of the old self, the old
identity.” If this is true, it feels possible that Tolentino’s core self—and the chemicals which feed
her brain—changes after hours as a submissive half-naked swallower.
Bersani, with less aim at scientific accuracy, pre-echoes Sprott and Randall’s ideas,
writing that bottoming leads to “a radical disintegration of humiliation and the self.” Indeed, this
durational honey swallowing requires a sublimation, or transformation, of the self: the body’s
responses—likely discomfort, pain, gagging—have shut down; in her mechanized swallowing
Tolentino becomes un-personed, reduced to organismal function. Gut Feminism, in which
Elizabeth Wilson calls for a reintegration of biology into feminist understandings of the body,
cites studies that observe that bulimics lose the gag reflex and develop the ability to vomit
without the use of any external stimulus, the way others of us might pee—by positioning
ourselves at the appropriate angle to the toilet and letting go. Desire, that is, and practice, change
biology—changes how the body works, what it conceives of as its functions. Queer desire, desire
to submit to nature and her lover, has turned Tolentino’s body almost purely into a honey-
swallowing mechanism, but maybe it’s turned into something else, too, something bee-like. And
humiliation has been disintegrated, too. Bottoming, receptivity, and openness look strong and
gorgeous. Tolentino, it seems, has enacted a kind of receptivity and penetrability free of
humiliation; she has gotten outside phallocentrism where topping is feeding/care more than it is
domination, where submission is will for transformation. Describing another performance,
Tolentino writes that she “experienced the corporeality, the sensuality of fantasy, weightlessness,
abandon. The sensation is tender and filled with palpable sexual tension too. A kind of falling.”
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José Esteban Muñoz, shortly before his death, introduced the notion of a “brown
commons” as a communal affective state that can be tuned into by those who have “been
devalued by the world outside their commons,” as a world of generative Otherness that exists for
those able to locate it. These commons, Muñoz writes, are “not about the projection of the
individual but instead about movement, of flow and impulse to move beyond singular
individualized subjectivities.” They are “human non-human collectives” and “queer ecologies.”
Tolentino, indeed, has a devalued body in a U.S. context—queer and Salvadoran/Filipina—and
via her performance, her individuality dissolves into a kind of processual multi-organismic
creature—Fila, bees, flowers, honey, Tolentino. Brownness and its shame, for Muñoz, are
generated by “vulnerability to property, finance—capitalism’s overarching mechanisms of
domination.” While Tolentino may be dominated by capitalism in real life, she does not respond
by becoming a dominator; instead, in this performance, she arranges to be dominated by
something else—by honey, and by a lover/feeder who is also tapped into the commons. “Brown
commons are not made,” Muñoz says, “instead one becomes attuned to them” I’d like to argue
that in HONEY, though, through ingesting the product of lesbian eating/sex between bees and
flowers, Tolentino becomes attuned to the brown commons, has created a queer ecology with the
bees and the flowers and her collaborator/lover. Attuned to the brown commons, she becomes
bee-like, a product, opposite of Wittig’s terms, of nature and the collective as opposed to a
product of society. That is, domination by a caring and tender lover and by a burbling stream of
honey offer a way out of domination by capital, even if only during this moment in which she is
“attuned.”
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In a later performance, after Tolentino has become a bee, an audience enters a white tent
by working its way between two inflated labial protrusions, reverse-birthed into a bright womb.
The bodies of the performers are mostly thin and dressed in loose-fitting black clothing. Many of
them have a similar haircut: shaved closely on the underside and loose and wild on top, giving
them a look that is once masculine and feminine, constructed and natural. They are not clearly
recognizable as male or female but angle toward a futuristic gender. The bodies engage in fluid
movements which feel organic, spontaneous. While Tolentino is the author of the piece, the
dance doesn’t feel choreographed. Instead, this is a performance of receivers, of bottoms moving
alongside and against one another, provoking a web of movements. It is orgiastic: bodies sliding,
writhing, moving multiply as one and then parting to move as many. She describes the piece as
being authored by a hivemind. Imbued with bee-ness from her HONEY performances, Tolentino
pushes at an answer for what the endgame is for undoing gender, for radical receptiveness and
responsiveness, for a lesbian practice that might include all kinds of bodies: it’s a hive, a
collectivity, a body that thinks and acts together, to create something spontaneous and alive,
something worth watching, something that hails its audience to want to join in. While G.H. begs
the reader to hold her hand intermittently throughout the text, she is essentially alone—alone in
the maid’s room, newly illegible to all humans she has known, very alive but fully abject.
Tolentino, on the other hand, becomes multispecies or insect-like through a social process, one
aided by a collaborator and which involves witnesses who themselves might transform, whose
“self, or a central identity” might “chang[e] in some way,” a way in which BDSM bottoming
might make possible, but that witnessing art makes possible, too.
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Chapter 4: Sordid Origins: Cyborg Love and The Search for Freedom
Larissa Lai’s 2002 spec-fi/fabulist novel Salt Fish Girl is set in a 2044 North America in
which all towns have been taken over by corporations. If a person is lucky and also respectable
—a word that comes up frequently, and is frequently troubled—they can live within the bounds
of a corporation, earn a comfortable salary, and retire with a pension. Those who don’t find—or
don’t want—a corporate job live in the anarchistic Unregulated Zone, where “law-abiding
corporate citizens…are not supposed to go” (14), a space with strange medicines and wild foods,
a place of both poverty and relative freedom. The novel’s narrator Miranda is born to 62-year-old
Aimee Ching, a woman who, despite her husband’s protests, eats a fruit from a durian tree in the
Unregulated Zone and becomes pregnant. The novel takes seriously that the eater and eaten form
a co-agentive assemblage in the way Jane Bennett suggests. Bennett urges us to consider food
“as actant inside and alongside intention-forming, morality-(dis)obeying, language-using,
reflexivity-wielding, and culture-making human beings” (39). In Miranda’s conception, the
durian is not an inert resource but an active agent; not just a “food” but a living being. Durian has
been completely outlawed, but Aimee has tried the fruit once, when her grandmother “smuggled
one in from Hong Kong” in a time “before the absolute power of the Big Six” (14). Her intense
craving for durian then, is ancestral and familial at the same time that it is rooted in desire for
what is beyond the law, for what is outside corporate control, for what is not packaged and
sanitized, for what stinks. Aimee, perhaps, is attuned to the brown commons.
Other kinds of contagion and influence come through ingestion as well. Miranda is born
with an intense cat-pee smell reminiscent of durian, and her father takes her to the Unregulated
Zone frequently for unauthorized treatments. There, she drinks “an infusion made by pouring
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water into a jar packed with live, angry bees” (59), a soup made of embryonic chickens “still
sleeping in their eggs,” and fat red pills that made her “scream and laugh like a hyena at anything
anyone said, funny or not” (60). Miranda’s body then, activated by non-human creatures or
earthstuff, becomes a vessel for anger, collectivity, liminality, animality. She is diagnosed with
the Dreaming Disease, a strange condition in which people remember their past lives, carry
strange scents, and feel called to the sea. The Dreaming Disease is also said to be contracted
through the soles of the feet walking on the chemical-laden earth; the body in this novel is
permeable, is a vessel that can be reanimated by both wild things and chemical things. What is
acting in the body is not just an I but something more plural.
Of her mother’s choice to eat the durian that impregnates her, Miranda narrates: “My
father said wild things weren’t safe. She knew that. She wanted it anyway” (14). The danger of
wild things, as both Jane Bennett and Mel Y . Chen have demonstrated, is that they act, that they
have will, that they are not inert. This is a novel in which communing with wildness, even just
through eating, allowing wild things to be agentive within the body, to mutually-penetrate and
co-act can produce new life forms—Miranda, the child of a post-menopausal woman and a
durian, is born with leaky fistulas on either side of her head, a strong smell of cat pee that
permanently surrounds her like a cloud, and memories of past lives. Salt Fish Girl is an
anticapitalist novel, then, in which intimacy with wildness, queer love, connection with past lives
and dreams, and not-quite-humanness are modes of escaping corporate control, decimation of the
earth, and oppression of workers and women.
In the past life Miranda unceremoniously remembers, she is Nu Wa, the mythical Chinese
goddess who created humans from clay. In Lai’s version, Nu Wa is a mermaid. The book has two
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narrators in alternating chapters—Miranda and Nu Wa—and it is as the stories unfold that the
reader realizes that Miranda is a reincarnated Nu Wa, that Nu Wa’s memories are the “former
lifetimes” (70) Miranda remembers. Miranda is not aware that remembering past lives is at all
strange until she learns she is afflicted with the Dreaming Disease which lures its sufferers to
“compulsive(ly) march into the rivers and oceans, unable to resist the water’s pull” (71). This is a
novel, centrally, about becoming other-than-human, returning to the earth or to the sea. In Salt
Fish Girl, it is through embracing animality and hybridity that characters can escape the total
corporatization and control of their lives.
As in Zippermouth, respectability is positioned against freedom in Salt Fish Girl—
attachment to respectability makes several characters agents of their own homogenization and
stasis. In the late 1800s, lonely and sick of being unable to connect with the humans she has
created, Nu Wa painfully splits her mermaid tail into legs and becomes a human herself. Newly-
human Nu Wa, in 19th century China, is angry about being set, by her mother, to enter an
arranged marriage at age 15. She says, “I know my mother isn’t personally to blame, that she is
just doing what all good mothers are supposed to do if they want their daughters to live
respectable lives. Note I didn’t say happy” (51). Respectability, in all the novel’s eras and
locations, is a kind of trap, one set to encourage characters to act outside their own instincts, to
dull desire, to create obedient workers and wives. I think of Sophie Lewis’s recent call to abolish
the family, the site of normalization of hierarchy and ownership: “Like a microcosm of the
nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition. Like a factory with a billion
branches, it manufactures ‘individuals’”…it is Nu Wa’s mother, in the novel, who is forced to
become the “agent of [her own] separation” (51) from her young daughter in spite of her desires.
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Tradition and respectability impel Nu Wa’s mother to act against her daughter’s happiness as
well as her own.
There is a line drawn in the novel between those who seek safety—such as Miranda’s
father who will only eat fruit labeled with a Saturna sticker—and those who seek wildness.
Miranda’s father, aptly, is a tax-collector for Saturna. He works in the basement, wearing a
virtual reality-inducing “business suit” that allows him to hunt down tax money in an interactive
Matrix-like world. One day Miranda dons the suit, and accidentally returns money to all of
Serendipity’s citizens, a betrayal of the corporation which results in her father’s dismissal from
the corporation and therefore to her family’s exile to the Unregulated Zone. Miranda’s father
bemoans the loss of the security he’s traded so much of his own body, time, intellect, and life for.
Her mother, though, the one drawn to wild things, doesn’t care. She is excited to open a small
grocery store and sell durians—Miranda’s respectability-oriented father has been exhaustively
looking for a cure for Miranda’s cat pee smell; now they are able to simply surround Miranda
with the fruit that shares her smell, a smell Miranda’s mother loves anyway. There is a kind of
freedom in disregulation, even if there is a loss of security, freedom to run one’s own business, to
stink, to sell the illegal fruit one loves. In fact, Miranda only “suddenly underst[ands]” her family
“ha[s] taken a step down in the world” (89) when an old friend from school comes to visit and
she sees her new life through his gaze. Living without respectability, without the guarantee of
safety, and close to dirt/earth is not inherently displeasurable in this novel, particularly where
poverty in the Unregulated Zone is not policed, not punished, left literally unregulated. Shame,
however, is a powerful motivator to sanitize, to move away from interchange and animality and
toward cleanness and stasis, toward respectability, regardless of happiness.
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The critique of corporatism and capitalism in the novel is one that depicts not only how
workers in these systems are exploited for their labor, but which shows how these systems
sanitize bodies by keeping them discrete, walling them off from the messy exchange of living
things, and keeping them from animality, from their creature selves, selves which are controlled
by being called “diseased.” What is irrational, desirous, and creaturely—what takes characters
out of the realm of work, out of the respectable and toward the stink—is categorized as disease in
the world of the novel. The scientist Miranda’s father calls upon to help her, Dr. Flowers, is
interested solely in advancing his own research and, rather than helping Miranda, he makes her
his assistant and experiments on her in a kind of torture, locking her in a terrifying watery tank
with little room to breathe at the top. He also, it turns out, has been manufacturing human clones
to work in the Pallas shoe factory—this is legal because they are not considered human, the
loophole being that they have 3% saltwater carp DNA—and because they are not considered
human, they are subjected to inhumane working and living conditions. Miranda narrates,
“I could not stop thinking about shoes. Shoes worn by middle-class, middle-aged suburban
women scared of growing old, uninterested in the world they live in except insofar as it can
provide them with beautiful things to reward them for long, treacherous days in office towers
pumped full of fake air” (226).
Work, in the world of the novel, dulls curiosity, turns workers into self-constructing
commodities, dulls curiosity, renders them more legible, more human, but less alive. Nu Wa, in
19
th
century China witnesses an uprising in which “half the women in the factory” are afflicted
by a “hysteria” in which they are “screaming and tearing at their hair” and also “howling and
throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the
damage it was exacting from their…bodies” (123). The women themselves are good workers; it
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something agentive inside the girls, something contagious, something characterized as disease
which is pushing them toward “howling,” toward animality. Their protest is not organized by the
women themselves but occurs spontaneously by something activated within them, something that
refuses to work, that is quickly and contagiously returning to the animal.
Movement toward animality, including toward stink and rot, are ways out of the
exploitation and deadening of corporate labor. "This is a story about stink after all, a story about
rot, how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places,” Miranda narrates on 268. On the
precipice of arranged marriage, Nu Wa as an 18th century teenaged human falls in love with the
daughter of a fishmonger, whom she calls the Salt Fish Girl, precisely because she smells
intensely of salt fish: “the stink of it made me want to live” (56), she says. Stink is associated
with life, with desire to convene, to transform, to be wild—and Nu Wa, former god and creator
of all life, follows stink. Nu Wa and the Salt Fish Girl escape their impending marriages,
patriarchal power, and the known world by framing the Salt Fish Girl’s father for their murders
and escaping in a rowboat to a city where they can start over. Starting over proves difficult—they
have chosen freedom and squalor over safety and respectability—the only choice queer lovers
can make in 19th century China. They sleep on the streets and steal; eventually the Salt Fish Girl
starts doing factory work. A rift grows between them: freedom versus respectability. The Salt
Fish Girl is working herself sick at the factory and Nu Wa begins to “despise and pit[y]” her “for
having given up her freedom in exchange for so little” (120). The Salt Fish Girl, meanwhile, says
she is “working [her]self blind so [they] can live an honest life and [Nu Wa] insist[s] on being a
cheat and a thief” (121). Nu Wa no longer cares about living an honest life; she is enjoying
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finding her way to freedom by slipping her hands into pockets and selling her finds on the black
market.
In Salt Fish Girl, moves toward solidity and away from plurality and interpenetration are
a corporate scam, but rather than move toward wildness, Nu Wa gets seduced by wealth.
Specifically, she is seduced by a beautiful rich woman whom she follows to the Island of Mist
and Forgetfulness, where she loses her language and where time passes swiftly and mysteriously.
Again, it is the agentive substance of ingestion that transforms Nu Wa; the beautiful rich woman
on the island gives Nu Wa a drink that “tasted odd” and which transforms her breathing. Nu Wa
narrates: “With each breath, I felt a new language enter me. With each sip of the drink, I lost
grasp of the old one” (126). Years pass on the Island, Nu Wa speaking this replaced language.
For me a reader, it is horribly anxiety-producing – the Salt Fish Girl has been left in a howling
creature state by herself and Nu Wa is trapped in another dimension, forgetting her. Moreover,
we abandon the central plot for a full chapter, which creates its own anxiety and reveals to me
that I am not yet a cyborg: when will my characters reunite? when will the reality I learned be
restored? I want to know. Despite my own beliefs about myself as a reader, I yearn for
wholeness. When Nu Wa finally escapes, un-aged, she finds the Salt Fish Girl as an old woman
—the Salt Fish Girl doesn’t recognize her until she does, at which point she tells Nu Wa, “I
haven’t forgotten how you abandoned me…I haven’t forgotten who you left me for either. And
now you speak only her language and have forgotten ours” (172). The “ours” might refer to the
larger shared Chinese language they both speak, but also feels as though it refers to the private
language of lovers, to the way intimates rename the world together and share a set of codes and
signs. It is the saddest love story: two girls in late 1800s China, against all odds have escaped
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their arranged marriages for queer love, fighting outside systems of safety to create a home for
themselves, until one of them is seduced away and had her system of signs scrambled. “How
easily we abandon those who have suffered the same persecutions as we have,” Nu Wa notes,
“How quickly we grow impatient with their inability to transcend the conditions of our lives”
(172). Love, in this novel, is not separate from the social conditions in which it exists, or from
the relationships of the lovers to those conditions. Nu Wa and the Salt Fish Girl’s love promised
a giddy promise of freedom outside the patriarchal structure in which they were raised, but
finding themselves impoverished and beholden instead to the structure of capitalism, this
promise dies.
Still, there is never really death in this novel, as much as there is transformation.
Heartbroken after her breakup with the Salt Fish Girl, Nu Wa drowns herself, and becomes “river
water moving through river water” and then becomes fleshy and then becomes “myself again, or
at least one of my selves” (208). The self in this novel is not singular, is not static—it can merge
completely with the earth’s elements and return to singularity, it can shift from mermaid to
human, it can die and be reborn. As Bennett has it, “A lot happens to the concept of agency once
nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans
themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.” Lai shows us what humans as
vital materialities who accept the agency of nonhuman things might look like, might live like. Nu
Wa coils the self of hers that has emerged post-drowning around a durian seed. The
transmogrification of her flesh into durian seed feels collaborative with the durian: “In my tight
grip, something inside the seed seemed to stir. I felt the fruit, the fruit held me. Its strange acids
worked at my flesh…I became the seed and the seed became me” (209). This is evocative of the
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“human-nonhuman collectives” (xix) Bennett evokes, and of the vital materialist self she
proposes. The self here is fluid, sticky, combinative, shapeshifting—is both desirous and holes.
Later of course, Miranda’s mother will feel a pull to the durian tree so intense it is almost as
though the fruit—or the seed that is both Nu Wa and durian—chooses her to birth Nu Wa’s
reincarnation—and she of course is open, has no problem with the unexpected effects of giving
birth to a durian-scented baby post menopause. She wants wildness, and she is open to being
inhabited, open to being fed upon, open to stink. She is accepting of her state of being as vital
materiality, and willing to accept the ways nonhuman actors behave within her.
At age 18, Miranda meets Evie, who is the Salt Fish Girl’s reincarnation. Evie turns out
to be one of the cloned factory workers Dr. Flowers has created to work in the shoe factory. It is
a somewhat radical choice on Lai’s part, to put the Salt Fish Girl’s human soul into what Evie
calls “a patented new fucking life form” (158). There is often a distinction in literature, as well as
in public imagination, between humans with souls, conceived via heterosexual coupling, and
monsters without souls created from disparate parts in a lab. But here, in Evie, there is the human
soul of a character the reader is already attached to, the Salt Fish Girl, living within a lab-
constructed being at the intersection of human, animal, and thing. Because she is 3% saltwater
carp, Evie smells like fish, just like the earlier incarnation of her spirit.
Evie is a good model for Haraway’s cyborg, having run away from the factory, torn out
her tracking device, and renamed herself. The cyborg being Haraway proposes is one who “skips
the step of original unity” (8), accepting her construction within patriarchal and colonial
structures while being pleasurably unfaithful to those structures, remixing them at every
opportunity. In service of this remixing, Haraway recommends collapsing the animal/human
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distinction as well as the human/machine distinction, ditching the “plot of original unity” and
instead “dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival” (8). Evie, the fish/girl/lab product
recounts her escape from the cops, after she tore out her tracking device and was bleeding
everywhere: “I crossed a glacier to throw them off the scent. Just like Frankenstein, you ever
read that one?” (159). Evie is aware of her monstrosity, her composition of disparate parts, her
unnaturalness. But whereas Frankenstein’s horror stems from anxiety about unnaturalness, lab-
creation, immigration, disparate parts, in Salt Fish Girl, “the muck and mud of origins” (268) are
all messy, and those origins which merge with the nonhuman, whether via nature or technology,
whether as a result of a woman craving wildness or a scientist seeking fame and profit, offer the
potential to imagine and enact new ways of being with the world. In an overly sanitized,
corporatized world in which enslaved clones perform hidden labor, the monster is hardly a threat;
instead, whatever might “disturb identity, system, order” (Kristeva’s definition of monstrosity)
feels life-giving, necessary. Haraway writes that “cyborgs…are suspicious of the reproductive
matrix and of most birthing” (67). Without heterosexual coupling as their origin points, Evie and
Miranda are both untethered from Adam and Eve, from Edenic beginnings, from any kind of
myth of perfection or wholeness, and from the attempts at solidity and respectability that come
with full humanness. Like Haraway’s cyborg they are “wary of holism, but needy for
connection” (8).
Still, Miranda has human sensibility and what is liminal or unnaturally made from
disparate parts still feels monstrous. When Miranda, as a child, tries fetal chicken soup as a
potential cure for her pee smell, she recoils but also wonders: “I eat eggs and I eat chickens. Why
should I be so horrified by the liminal state between the two?” (59). It is a good reminder that
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that which is not quite one thing or another, that which lives in between categories, that which is
in flux (in this case from egg to chicken) still offers the potential for horror. This recalls
Kristeva’s definition of the monster as that which…“does not respect borders, positions, rules.
the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4)—it can be hard to integrate, even if you are a
part-durian girl who sometimes grows fish scales in the bathtub. Upon meeting Evie’s clone
sisters, Miranda’s “stomach churn[s]” (222) at their sameness—the uncanniness of tech-
produced humans, of hybrid human-animal-machines, is not magically easy to digest, is still
horror. Even upon meeting Evie, Miranda narrates, “She creeped me out…something sordid
about her origins” (159). It is important, though, that for Miranda, Evie’s allure is stronger than
her creepiness, that they exist in a novel that sees the potential of sordid origins.There is an
acknowledgement here that monstrosity is not benign, that it has the capacity to upend systems,
to kill and uproot, to initiate the “vortex of summons and repulsion” (1) that Kristeva claims is
characteristic of horror. Details of Miranda’s fear and disgust are a reminder that this story could
be horror, but that the real horror is corporatization, its dulling of curiosity and the senses, the
real horror is exploitation of workers until they lose their capacity for exchange, transformation,
and life.
Evie lives, it turns out, in an off-grid collective house full of escaped factory worker
clones, all identical to her but at different ages, some with babies. Their names are all Sonia,
except for Evie who has changed hers. Outside of the Sonias’ house, keeping it hidden, is a
durian tree. Evie feeds Miranda a durian from the tree, and Miranda narrates, “had it been
anyone but Evie offering me this delicacy, and had it been any moment but this, I think I would
have refused. I had always thought there was something cannibalistic about eating it, so I never
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had” (224). She is seduced by Evie into finally tasting the fruit that begot her, but she is seduced
by the durian as well: “An overwhelming sense of wonder compelled” her as she “scooped the
creamy yellow flesh into [her] mouth, felt its taste and odor merge with [her] own” (224). Again,
there is merging; again, the durian is one agent of the interaction. Unknown to Miranda, but
known to Evie, the durian tree shading the house, the one from which she eats, is a similar tree to
the one that caused her birth; the babies of the house are all durian babies, the offspring of
durians and part-fish clones. Because of their joint repulsion-seduction, wherein the seduction
ultimately wins out, Evie and the durian are both progenitors of the baby Miranda becomes
pregnant with. In another story, Miranda might feel tricked into this pregnancy, but in this story,
moves toward wildness, incorporation of it into the body, are already known to be dangerous.
Whatever the consequences, Miranda values, as G.H. does, values “going toward the greater
hunger.”
Haraway offers that “cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction” (5)—In
this novel, it is only girls with sordid origins, fishy girls, girls who are not quite human, cyborg
girls, who might find ways out of capitalism, ways back to creaturehood, new ways of coexisting
with the earth. Miranda is a girl born of a durian and a post-menopausal woman; Evie is a clone
with 3% fish DNA. Evie and Miranda are both cyborgs, both reincarnated creatures with “no
origin story in the Western sense” (8), who “appear in myth precisely where the boundary
between human and animal is transgressed” (11). Haraway’s cyborg is one composed of
disparate parts, in toxic and hierarchal systems, birthed from doing exploited labor (the only
kind, for Haraway), engaged in interchange, swapping, building and breaking down, in a process
of intimate exchange with animals and machines. On 225, Miranda narrates:
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when [Evie] kissed me it was like both eating and drinking at the same time. The stench
that poured from our bodies was overwhelming. It was somewhere between rotting garbage and
heavenly stew. We rode the hiss and fizzle of salt fish and durian, minor notes of sour plum,
fermented tofu, boiled dong quai — all those things forgotten in the years of corporate
homogenization.
In this novel, eating and drinking are wholly transformative and offer the potential for new life.
The union of the two queer of color cyborg lovers restores the life inclusive of stink and rot that
has been contained and sanitized by corporatized North America, as well as the stink of their
ancestral foods that have threatened respectability or else been outlawed. Muñoz’s is clear that
brownness in the brown commons is a result of people “tracking the ways through which global
and local forces constantly attempt to degrade their value and diminish their verve.” The
characters in Salt Fish Girl, as in the rest of the texts here and in our own world, live within
systems that literally force a diminishment of verve, a rigidity of motion, a solidity of
appearance, a restraint of hunger. Muñoz’s brown commons is an imagined utopia, but also a
gesture toward a new way of being, moving, interacting:
The brown commons is not about the production of the individual but instead about a
movement, a flow, and an impulse to move beyond the singular subjectivity and the
individualized subjectivities. It is about the swerve of matter, organic and otherwise, about the
moment of contact, and the encounter and all that it can generate.
In Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis claims that “the liberal individual” was “slowly
erected on the plinths of kinship obligations and family bonds” (11). Lewis asks us to think
“beyond kinship in favor of “kith, or comradeship, or words that have not been invented yet”
(23). Miranda and Evie have abandoned their kinship obligations—Miranda to her own family,
and Evie to Dr. Flowers who positions himself as a kind of father figure—in favor of
multispecies collectives invested in co-creating a new world outside factories, family, and the
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liberal individual. For her part, Miranda accidentally drops a box of durians on her mother’s head
while restocking at their grocery, killing her. It is an accident, and yet Miranda also needs the
freedom of being a motherless girl. Even in this novel with a love story at its center, romantic
love alone, even across centuries and between cyborg queers, is not enough to imagine and bring
about “new ways of being in the world and ultimately new worlds” (Cruising 1): unlike their 19
th

century incarnations, Evie and Miranda have the power of a multispecies collective. The fish-
women clones, durian trees, and cabbages and radishes outside the house are all working on the
project of “build[ing] a free society of their own kind from the ground up” (256). The trees are
not left out of the worldbuilding project, are not resources but collaborators—upon discovering
their power, Miranda’s “head was reeling with new knowledge, with the secret of the trees”
(257).
At the end of the book, Evie and Miranda find the house of rebel Sonias murdered by an
agent of Dr. Flowers, which Flowers justifies by insisting they are “not human” (256) and calling
them “degenerate Sonias” (255), again naming as diseased—or in this case malfunctioning—
anyone who is not working in the way the corporation requires. He has also had the durian tree
cut down, asking “what monstrosities might have come from those births” (256). Monstrosity, of
course, is the goal—new kinds of species mixing, new ways of being earthstuff, new stink, new
holes. Evie murders Flowers—a literal killing of the patriarch. Here’s Haraway again: “ The
main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and
patriarchal capitalism…But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their
origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (10). Evie is part fish and fully cloned and
Miranda was fathered by a durian; and yet, unnatural as they are, they are called to the earth.
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They run together into the woods and see a hot spring, “an ancient ocean bubbling up through the
rocks, salty and full of minerals” and Miranda “scrambles desperately toward it” (269). She is
surprised when Evie follows, also called to the water, both afflicted, apparently, with “The
Dreaming Disease.” In the water, they grow mermaid tails which interlock so that they will live
heretofore at the border of human and nonhuman, at the border of two and one. “We are the new
children of the earth, of the earth’s revenge” (259), Miranda narrates. The “children” that will
collaborate on helping “the earth take over what humans have abandoned” (248) are not discrete,
whole, perfectly formed, or quite fully human. Instead, they are tech experiments gone rogue,
smelling like fish and leaking pus from the fistulas on the sides of their heads, occasionally
growing scales, in love, in flux, alive. Right after Evie and Miranda become an interconnected
mermaid, in the last sentences of the novel, Miranda gives birth to her durian-baby, to the former
“something” that “inside [her] turned and whispered, something long and coiled, a body that had
not yet sprouted limbs, had not yet become definably human” (236).
Maybe, with Evie and Miranda as parents, it never will be.
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Conclusion: Love Story for the Future
I want to end by looking to Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), the book
she published 31 years after Cyborg Manifesto. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway asks us to
eschew both future-thinking and Eden nostalgia, both of which can lead too easily to paralyzing
anxiety or deluded fantasy in favor of becoming curious about and awakened to the present,
forming unexpected relationships, including with nonhuman creatures, focusing less on building
nuclear families and more on making “oddkin.” She writes, “we require each other in unexpected
collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all”
(4). I think of Elvia Wilk’s Granta essay I referred to in the introduction—that what comes in
and out of holes, via breathing, shitting, etc., “births the atmosphere.”
Haraway is also asking us to consider how we are composing the world—to consider
reproduction or production beyond babies, to think on the level of the interaction, with both other
humans and with nonhumans, to consider what we are producing. This happens, she argues, not
necessarily, or not only, by reducing or minimizing our impact, but also by transforming our
relationships with the nonhuman beings of the world, or even moving toward becoming less
human ourselves.
She has abandoned the word “cyborg” in this book, writing instead of “chthonic ones:”
I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and
very unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing
Homo… Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the
material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters… they writhe and luxuriate in manifold
forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake;
they are made and unmade… the world’s great monotheisms in both religious and secular guises
have tried again and again to exterminate the chthonic ones.
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I am curious about the term replacement—chthonic ones for cyborg—around what feels
like a similar concept. To some degree though, I also get it: if cyborg feels machinic, like its
edges are hard, the chthonic feels squishy and muscular, old and creaturely, S-shaped and
swirling. When I first fell in love with Julie Tolentino’s performance art, it was in part because of
her “very unruly hair,” draped over her head and body such that she had no visible human face
(or torso, mostly), because of the way she “writhe[d]…in manifold forms,” because I recognized
her as chthonic even if Haraway’s book hadn’t come out yet, because I felt drawn to her for the
map she offered for how to exist beyond the human. When I first fell in love with Laurie Weeks,
it was based on the flyer for her class, Writing From Inside the Girl Body, where she asks: “What
feral children and other creatures are bound, tongue-tied, in the crawlspace of your psychic
bodies?” Laurie turned out to be chthonic, too, her legs seemingly too long and skinny to hold a
person up, an aging femmedyke on praying mantis appendages. Her pedagogy involved leaving
psilocybin mushrooms out on the table for whoever wanted them and making us hang upside
down to try to free the creatures inside of us from the “humorless prison wards” living in all of
our brains. Communing with psilocybin mushrooms might be low-hanging fruit as far as
interspecies communion goes, but those can inhabit your brain and shift things around, they are a
start. I was too anxious to partake of Laurie’s mushrooms, but it was in Laurie’s class that I was
introduced to the writings of Terrence McKenna, where I began to think about the languages of
both mushrooms and octopi, where I felt permission to be multiple, at least on the page.
I feel I must mention: looking for Laurie’s flyer in my gmail box while writing this, I was
surprised to learn that Julie Tolentino was the person who originally sent it to me, that maybe I
ended up hanging upside down in Laurie Weeks’ living room and learning to unbind all the feral
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children living within me because I was in love with Julie Tolentino’s hair and writhing. Until
now, I didn’t even remember that they knew each other.
This is my own love story, I guess, and the kind of love story maybe we need to become
chthonic, to become cyborg, to learn to conceive of ourselves and our relationships to other
beings in new ways. What possible trajectories might we imagine after falling in love with
someone’s hair, or the way someone’s body moves? How can we avoid wanting to put the person
with the body and the hair inside our house, avoid wanting to contain them in the story of
romantic love, production of new humans, “the family”? There are some options for what we
might do instead. Instead we might a) witness their performances again and again; b) read the
books they’ve read; c) take their friends’ writing classes; d) borrow their house in the desert and
let psilocybin rearrange our neural pathways as we drift on the waterbed they set up right on the
sand; e) try to move like they move; f) find our own ways to move, to be wild, to commune, to
get out of humanness.
Here is another version of my love story. In 2012, I saw Julie Tolentino dancing in a
gallery with her partner Stosh Fila. They were cutting themselves and each other, mixing their
blood, seeking plurality; they were changing where the body might open, where parts might mix.
I was coming from the funeral of a queer person from my MFA program. They were 27. Maybe I
was in a space to need new queer openings, new queer embodiments. I followed Tolentino’s
work ever since. Maybe it is inherently minor, I’m not sure, but it was major for me. It was the
beginning of my semi-obsession with Los Angeles visual artists including Tolentino, Candace
Lin, and Jennifer Moon who, through installation, sculpture, and performance, offer visions for
collectivity, flux, dissolution of hierarchy, reimagining interspecies relationships—this kind of
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performance and installation helped me understand what I wanted to try to do in fiction. I never
tried to engage a deep relationship with Tolentino, never tried to put her in my house, but soon,
she invited me to hers. I was having a hard time, overshared about it on Facebook, and Julie
commented, come pick up the keys to my Joshua Tree house. I went there and wrote, I read her
books, I laid on her water bed just sitting in the sand outside surrounded by creosote, orange and
purple gods in the sky at sunset.
In asking how we might write fiction that un-works the solidity of the individual, that
imagines intra- and interspecies kinships outside the family, and that embraces inhabitation and
interpenetration, I look to this story: a marriage, a suicide, witnessing new openings and
movements of the body, following them. The works I’ve discussed here all embrace productive
communion of the body with micro-monsters or scary others: the cockroach, fish DNA, illegal
durians, mass amounts of honey. In these communions, characters are led outside of legible or
respectable selfhood, and specifically out of work toward replicating systems of hierarchy and
domination. G.H. becomes a mystic, Weeks’ narrator escapes the office into the realm of the
surreal, Tolentino pushes at the limits of the body toward creaturehood, Evie and Miranda
become interlocked mermaids living in a hot spring, escaped from the science lab and the factory
and the toxic family forever. The workshop may have been imagined as a place to create freedom
within the individual, but it is possible to use cyborg aesthetics to be “unfaithful to [its] origins,”
to imagine collective liberations which might start with the pleasures of strange communions,
with the courting of monsters, with the embrace of holes.
Copyright 2023 65
Bibliography
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Creator Cohen, Samantha (author)

Core Title Becoming multiple: cyborg aesthetics and the inversion of horror

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 05/15/2023

Defense Date 05/15/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abjection,cyborg,feminist,feminist science,Monsters,non-human,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,postcolonial,posthuman,queer,speculative fiction

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