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Tentacular sex: Gender, race, and science in American speculative fiction

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Tentacular sex: Gender, race, and science in American speculative fiction

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Content TENTACULAR SEX: GENDER, RACE, AND SCIENCE IN AMERICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION by Dagmar Van Engen 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 (ENGLISH) August 2018 Van Engen 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….…………..3 Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….………..7 0. Medusae: Genealogies of Invertebrate Beauty…………………………............................12 1. Sea Slug Theory: Animal Beauty, Race, and Mollusk Erotics in The Descent of Man..…43 2. H. P. Lovecraft’s Degeneration Imaginary and the Starfish Sublime………………….….93 3. Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive……...142 4. Monster Erotica’s Genderqueer Fantasies; or, How to Fuck a Kraken………………….179 5. Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture…..214 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….264 Van Engen 3 Acknowledgments First of all, I acknowledge that this dissertation was researched and written on the Tongva people’s land, currently occupied by the city of Los Angeles. Second, thank you to my wonderful committee. Karen Tongson, for sticking with me to the end, for feedback during my qualifying exams, and for generative graduate seminars at formative stages of my career. Jayna Brown, for generous feedback and enthusiastic support of a grad student outside her home university, and for the much-needed scholarship she puts out into the world. Devin Griffiths, for inspiring me to dig deeper and think harder about 19 th century science, for accessible professional advice, and for thoughtful, constructive writing feedback. Sunyoung Park, for above-and-beyond mentoring labor for a graduate student outside her home department, for cheering me on at conference presentations, and for always pushing me to articulate the implications of my ideas outside the U.S. And Jack Halberstam, for challenging me to my toenails, expecting nothing but my best work, for guidance on how to shape this project, and for encouraging me to pursue this strange collection of biological, squiggly, queer, speculative, and interdisciplinary ideas. I hope this project will eventually honor all of your guidance and labor by growing legs (fins? tentacles?), gaining confidence in itself, and swimming off into a book cover somewhere. Many faculty who were not on my committee also contributed to this dissertation in various ways. Without the wisdom and endless patience of Emily Anderson as director of graduate studies, I would not have made it through this graduate program. Without the mentorship and intellectual virtuosity of Michelle Gordon, I would never have had the confidence to begin articulating my ideas as a project. John Rowe and Kara Keeling gave excellent feedback during my qualifying exams, and their advice was invaluable at the formative Van Engen 4 stages of this dissertation. Bill Handley has been a cheerleader throughout this journey and also guided me through a field exam reading list. Chapter 3 benefitted from encouraging conversations with Ayana Jamieson, the Octavia Butler archive expert, and Zakiyyah Jackson, with whom I wish I had overlapped more during my time at USC. This dissertation began as a seminar paper in Nayan Shah’s graduate course on Race, Gender, and Sexuality in fall 2014. Nayan’s interdisciplinary reading list, classroom conversations, and encouragement provided a home for these ideas to come together in their earliest form. Countless thank yous to Flora Ruiz, Graduate Student Coordinator in the English Department, who calmly puts out fires and patiently answers panicked questions for a living. Flora, you make our world go round. Thank you to Alice Xavier and Clea Kinderton for generous email interviews about writing for-pay ebook erotica; your conversations made chapter 4 far better than it would have been otherwise. Thank you to the Faber Lab at Caltech, for adopting me, lunchtime debates, and allowing me to work alongside you occasionally for the last four years: Sarah, Putt, Ben, Nori, Claire, Neal, Xiaomei, Matt, and Kathy Faber. Thank you to the Huntington Library, where I researched chapter 3 during summer of 2017. Thank you to my undergraduate students throughout the years at USC, who taught me a lot about interdisciplinary thinking and inspired me to be a more collaborative and creative scholar. No one gets through a Ph.D. without support, and I am grateful to the feminist support networks I have been lucky enough to find in LA. Thank you to work dates and coffeeshop conversations about research with friends too numerous to mention. You made writing a less lonely and anxiety-ridden process, and without the reality-checks you provided for my stubborn imposter syndrome, I would have never written a page. Thank you to formal and informal conversations with the Queer Eco-Materialisms Reading Group, especially Athia Choudhury, Van Engen 5 Heidi Hong, and Huan He. Thank you to Gino Conti for a very helpful coffee shop conversation which helped me finally articulate the argument of my dissertation as expressed in my abstract here. Thank you especially to writing group members and others with whom I exchanged writing feedback on large and small portions of this dissertation. You are my mentors, inspirations, editors, hard-question-askers, workshoppers, models, sounding boards, accountability buddies, and lifelines. In no particular order: Chris Belcher, Brittany Farr, Diana Arterian, Ali Kulez, Nadia Raza, Brittany Miller, Corinna Schroeder, Kyunghee Eo, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Stina Attebery, Athia Choudhury, Darby Walters, Sanders Bernstein, Brianna Beehler, Ali Pearl, Amanda Gross, Betsy Sullivan, Kate Jylkka, Shannon Butts, Megan Herrold, and others I am unintentionally forgetting. Lastly, chosen family is particularly important to me. Through the long process of writing, the following people have listened, encouraged, dragged me by the hair, reminded me to take care of myself, celebrated with me, commiserated, held me while I cried, talked me through anti-anxiety exercises, and loved me: Henry Van Engen, Raphaelle Beard, Ali Pearl, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Kyunghee Eo, and Matt Johnson. Ali and Michelle are not only irreplaceable friends but also my Ph.D. witch and astrology guides, introducing me to forms of feminist speculation and support that helped me push to the finish line. Kyunghee has been the brightest of lights, companions, and collaborators in this long Ph.D. ordeal; without her, I would not have made it through a year of this process. Henry is both biological and chosen sibling, and his support means the world to me. Raphaelle has seen me through many stages of life, including this writing process, as my sister (even when I turned in a dissertation and she got married in the same week). And finally, thank you to Matt Johnson, my companion human. I am grateful beyond words for your caretaking labor, delicious cooking, therapeutic animal videos, drives into Van Engen 6 the mountains, suit-fitting expertise, scratches behind the ears, proofreading skills, car- and computer-fixing wizardry, and superhuman thoughtfulness. This dissertation would not have been possible without you. Van Engen 7 Abstract This project traces a genealogy of gender nonconformity and bodily transition in the American 20th century through the generative exchange between scientific and literary representations of invertebrate animal life. Specifically, I argue that genders other than masculinities or femininities have long been present in American culture by historicizing how science and speculative fiction transformed the nonbinary ‘it’ genders of sea creatures from primitivized embodiments of disgust to eroticized avatars of desirability. Tentacular Sex tracks this shift from racial degeneration fantasies in eugenics-era pulp fiction to the queerly transitive bodies of 1980s black feminist fiction to the explicitly transgender eroticization of the tentacle in post-anime internet cultures. Moving from Darwinian science to speculative fiction and back to contemporary biological theories, my dissertation reveals a natural and cultural history of gender beyond masculinity or femininity in the monstrous bodies of biology writing, speculative fiction, and erotica of 20 th century America. Recent LGBT movements are advocating for the addition of gender-neutral personal pronouns (“they,” “ze,” etc.) to the English language to better represent people whose gender identity is not man or woman. My project, a study of how invertebrate animals in Darwinian biology evolved into what I call “it” genders in 20 th century American monster fiction, outlines an understudied historical backdrop to contemporary gender advocacy. Studies of trans representation can benefit from a deepened turn to the history of the nonhuman and to fantastic tentacled creatures that rewrite biology. Without sustained attention to how the history of animal biology shaped American ideals of gender, we risk reinforcing the impression that there is little history to emerging nonbinary genders. There is a history to the gender-deviance of monstrous bodies in American culture, and that history emerges from 19 th century science writing’s Van Engen 8 narratives of race and species. Treating Darwin’s racialized narratives of animal sexualities as a foundational intertext, I search out hidden pockets of possibility in science fictions that rewrite Darwinian animal narratives toward queer alternatives. Until very recently, gender studies historically engaged with biology primarily to critique it, because of the long history of biological justifications for gender, sexual, racial, and ableist violence in Western cultures (Wilson). Yet American conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race emerged from Darwin as much as from Freud or sexology (Grosz). Existing feminist and queer criticism has tended to interpret gender-indeterminate monsters through psychoanalysis, seeing them as exemplars of the abject or the monstrous feminine (Creed). Read through the historical framework of biology, however, invertebrate-inspired creatures in speculative texts provide a history of nonbinary genders that informs the human. The asexual reproduction of some jellyfish, the monoecious bodies of sea slugs, and the polymorphous queerness of octopus limbs transform into literary figures of softness, immobility, transformation, and openness to the surrounding world (Hayward, Roughgarden). My earlier chapters examine how dominant sexual narratives drew on Darwinian ideas to frame racialized bodies, gender nonconformity, and disability as undesirable. Later chapters examine cultural texts that deploy invertebrate life to rewrite this paradigm through queer, trans, and woman of color feminist imaginations. Chapter 1, “Sea Slug Theory: Animal Beauty, Race, and Mollusk Sex in The Descent of Man,” lays out the theoretical and historical framework for the later chapters of the project. I analyze how Darwin’s animal narratives and popular retellings of those narratives shifted Americans’ understanding of species–and race within the human species–as dependent on specific formations of white reproductive sexuality, binary-gendered desirability, and bodily and mental ability. I then re-read textual depictions of invertebrate sex in The Descent of Man Van Engen 9 alongside contemporary transgender theorists to suggest that the slimy, immobile, queer bodies of sea invertebrates in science writing offer alternative modes of desire and beauty–modes that I trace in the literary readings of the following chapters. Chapter 2, “H. P. Lovecraft’s Degeneration Imaginary and the Starfish Sublime,” offers a window into how eugenics-era popular fiction reimagined the late-Darwinian tangle of species and sexuality as narratives of white degeneration anxiety and anti-Asian sexual panics in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s letters. I then point to moments of queer textual slippage in At the Mountains of Madness that gesture toward alien evolutionary futures through invertebrate and amoeba biologies that displace the human and its sciences. Chapter 3, “Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive,” forms the centerpiece of the project, because Butler’s work consciously associates tentacles with genderqueerness. Butler’s late 20 th century fiction and archival notes reimagine invertebrate animal biologies as transgender alien universes through paradigms of bodily transformation. Drawing on extensive archival research in the Butler archive at the Huntington Library, I show how Butler as a working-class black geek examines nonbinary genders within the troubled erotics of colonial relations in the Xenogenesis novel trilogy and the short story “Bloodchild,” both from the late 1980s. Chapter 4, “How to Fuck a Kraken: Cephalopod Sexualities and Nonbinary Genders in EBook Erotica,” traces how self-published speculative fiction available on the Kindle store by Alice Xavier, Clea Kinderton, and others capitalizes on the century’s gradual shift from viewing tentacles as objects of disgust to seeing them as emblems of desirability. These for-pay erotica stories about human women and tentacled alien monsters expand conceptions of gender beyond “masculinity” or “femininity” through the “it” genders of invertebrate animals. My readings of Van Engen 10 these stories propose the erotic as a way of relating to the nonhuman world in fantastic fiction and suggest the nonhuman as a way of undoing trans-exclusive ideals of bodily desirability that can be traced back to popular Darwinisms. Chapter 5, “Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture,” traces how trans-inclusive animated erotica involving tentacles in the genre known to Americans as hentai entered U.S. culture in the late 20 th century and took on new life in the currents of the transnational internet. While the original reception of tentacle porn shows that Americans imagined Japan as a place of sexual strangeness, hyper-phallicism, and titillating nonconsensuality, gradually representations of tentacles became dissociated from associations with the hetero-phallus and were reimagined in queer subsections of tumblr, reddit, and 4chan as a consensual, transfeminine site of sexual imagination. I adapt Donna Haraway’s concept of the tentacular in conjunction with Darwin’s animal narratives to theorize the tentacle as a site of violently pleasurable erotic and racial connection in the internet age. This dissertation uses close reading and archival research to show how 19 th century scientific writings on animal genders and sexualities shaped 20 th century literary representations of monstrous bodies. I contextualize the strange genders of speculative fiction’s monsters within specific animal biologies. My chapters on Darwin’s influence on American cultural discourses and Japanese anime’s influence on U.S. geek cultures use reception research in contemporary periodicals in addition to close readings of primary objects. The chapter on speculative ebook erotica involved email interviews with authors. By braiding together feminist science studies, queer animal studies, and ethnic studies of the nonhuman, Tentacular Sex reexamines American science and literature in terms of transgender representation and rethinks transgender representation in light of the history of Van Engen 11 science. The dissertation demonstrates that 20 th century American culture is full of genders that cannot be described as masculine or feminine once we look beyond the human to the rich genealogy of invertebrate animals in science and speculative fiction. In the book version of the project, I will add a conclusion that engages contemporary invertebrate biology and speculates on the theoretical potential of the tentacular–rather than intersectionality or the rhizomatic–as a paradigm for historical, literary, and scientific entanglement of bodies across difference. This model of the tentacular adapts Donna Haraway’s use of the term to emphasize sticky, spineless embodiment and connection that causes both pain and pleasure. Much like the history of science itself, nonbinary genders as they emerge in representations of invertebrate animals are sites of both violence and eroticism across the American 20 th century. Van Engen 12 0. Medusae: Genealogies of Invertebrate Beauty Many of the lower animals, whether hermaphrodites or with separate sexes, are ornamented with the most brilliant tints, or are shaded and striped in an elegant manner; for instance, many corals and sea-anemones (Actiniae), some jelly-fish (Medusae, Porpita, &c.), some Planariae, many star-fishes, Echini, Ascidians, &c.; but we may conclude from the reasons already indicated, namely the union of the two sexes in some of these animals, the permanently affixed condition of others, and the low mental powers of all, that such colours do not serve as a sexual attraction, and have not been acquired through sexual selection. -Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 301 Cyborg ‘sex’ restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). –Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” p 117-8 [T]he sliding, gently moving caresses of those wet, warm worms upon his flesh was an ecstasy above words – that deeper ecstasy that strikes beyond the body and beyond the mind and tickles the very roots of the soul with unnatural delight. C.L. Moore, “Shambleau, p 20 Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. -Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p 1 This project traces a genealogy of gender nonconformity and bodily transition in the American 20th century through the generative exchange between scientific and literary representations of invertebrate animal life. Specifically, I argue that genders other than masculinities or femininities have long been present in American culture by historicizing how science and speculative fiction transformed the nonbinary ‘it’ genders of sea creatures from primitivized embodiments of disgust to eroticized avatars of desirability. Tentacular Sex tracks this shift from racial degeneration fantasies in eugenics-era pulp fiction to the queerly transitive bodies of 1980s black feminist fiction to the explicitly transgender eroticization of the tentacle in post-anime internet cultures. Moving from Darwinian science to speculative fiction and back to contemporary biological theories, my dissertation reveals a natural and cultural history of gender Van Engen 13 beyond masculinity or femininity in the monstrous bodies of biology writing, speculative fiction, and erotica of 20 th century America. Recent LGBT movements are advocating for the addition of gender-neutral personal pronouns (“they,” “ze,” etc.) to the English language to better represent people whose gender identity is not man or woman. My project, a study of how invertebrate animals in Darwinian biology evolved into what I call “it” genders in 20 th century American monster fiction, outlines an understudied historical backdrop to that contemporary gender advocacy. Studies of trans representation can benefit from a deepened turn to the history of the nonhuman and to fantastic tentacled creatures that rewrite biology. Without sustained attention to how the history of animal biology shaped American ideals of gender, we risk reinforcing the impression that there is little history to emerging nonbinary genders. There is a history to the gender-deviance of monstrous bodies in American culture, and that history emerges from 19 th century science writing’s narratives of race and species. Treating Darwin’s racialized narratives of animal sexualities as a foundational intertext, I search out hidden pockets of possibility in science fictions that rewrite Darwinian animal narratives toward queer alternatives. While queer subcultures are exploring the nuances of emerging gender taxonomies on- and off-line, academic studies of gender in American culture have destabilized the gender binary in principle but remain overwhelmingly organized around categories of masculinities, femininities, or some combination thereof (Najambadi). As a result, scholarship has left unquestioned a narrative that assumes genders other than masculine or feminine are absent in American cultural history. Anthropology scholarship in the 1990s had a robust discussion of “third sex” or “third gender” identities in transnational contexts, particularly in Gilbert Herdt’s Van Engen 14 collection Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (Herdt). 1 But this conversation did not have a lasting impact in literary studies. To address this gap, I turn to fantastic representations of nonhuman beings in speculative fiction that demonstrates how American culture has imagined beyond its own strictures. This genealogy of the ‘it’ genders of invertebrate animals in science, literature, and media highlight how nonbinary genders are already a part of American natural and cultural history. As a guiding figure for this genealogy, I turn to Medusa, who traverses the vastly different textual, theoretical, and historical arms of this tentacular dissertation project. 0.1 Medusa: feminism The Medusa in ancient Greek stories was a woman with hair made of tentacles or snakes, a monstrous figure who caused men who looked at her to turn to stone. Medusa has been a guiding figure in Western feminist thought for a long time. She entered gender studies via Freud, as 1980s and 1990s feminist theory was heavily indebted to Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud’s 1922 essay “Medusa’s Head” reads the figure of the Medusa, specifically her decapitated head after Perseus has killed her, as a sign of castration: “The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something,” specifically a woman’s vulva (69). While the sight of a mother’s vulva incurs this fear, for Freud, ultimately the Medusa’s snakelike hair “replace[s] the penis, the absence of which is the cause of horror”; in response, the cisgender male spectator becomes “stiff with terror” (69). Thus, Freud’s interpretation provides an impetus 1 Herdt cites Darwin’s influence on Western cultures as key to how what he terms “sexual dimorphism” became scientifically and culturally solidified (26). This is a different link between gender and science than the Freudian-sexological connections usually cited in literary studies. Of course, anthropology gender scholarship had its own issues, namely, a colonial-comparativist tradition of disciplinary inquiry. Van Engen 15 to read tentacles as phallic substitutes, and the Medusa herself as a sign of a male viewer’s horror-fear of feminine bodies. The Medusa’s tentacles also open a discussion of sexual desirability. For Freud, when Athena wears a symbol of the Medusa’s head, the “terrifying genitals of the Mother,” she “becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires” (69). Her grotesque, tentacular body “frightens” men partly because of what Freud postulates as the “horrifying effects” of “female genitals,” and partly because she is also phallic. Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers pick up on this theme of the Medusa as a figure of sexual disgust or undesirability. In their introduction to The Medusa Reader, they argue that the Medusa was originally a stunningly beautiful woman who became monstrous and horrifying only when Athena cursed her with tentacle-snake hair, as punishment for sleeping with (or having “been raped by”) Poseidon (2). Thus, the combination of vulva and penis signifiers, and the animal aspects of her body, both function in this line of criticism and theory as sexual disgust or repulsiveness. Barbara Creed’s 1993 book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis takes this line of thinking home, citing Freud’s “Medusa’s Head” to build her theory of the monstrous-feminine based in sexual difference. Creed, who continues to be very influential in studies of aliens and monsters in speculative genres, argues that “when woman is represented as monstrous” in horror films “it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions” or “questions of sexual desire” (7). And finally, enter Hélène Cixous, Algerian-French feminist whose 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” has become canonical to Western feminist theory. Cixous directly takes on Freud’s reading of the Medusa as figure for castration anxiety, and proposes Medusa instead as an icon of feminine presence, beauty, and joy: “Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in Van Engen 16 truth, that women aren’t castrated . . . ? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (885). Thus, Medusa has a history in feminist theory of being simultaneously phallic woman and monstrous vulva, emblem of patriarchy and liberating standard around which to rally. She is caught up in psychoanalysis’ endless circling around questions of the phallus, of castration, and of heterosexual parables of human male and female sexuality. 0.2 Medusa: biology If Medusa is a crux of gender studies’ indebtedness to psychoanalysis, she also offers a way to untangle gender theory from Freudian origin stories. She has come to epitomize questions of sexual desirability not only because she mixes phallus/vulva signifiers, and not only because of a Freudian male horror of cis-female genitals. She is also very nonhuman. She turns men to stone, and her body sprouts serpentine or cephalopod-like appendages that turn her from woman into monster. Her animallike attributes point toward questions of the boundaries of the human, or more precisely, questions of sexual desirability that are made legible through tentacles. While Freud’s long shadow on gender theory makes it tempting to read her hair in terms of the phallus, her hair might also be thought of in terms of invertebrate bodies: soft, writhing, multiple, spineless, gender-indeterminate, phallic yet in excess of the phallus. It is this animal excess that interests me in in Tentacular Sex. What difference do nonhuman bodies make in shifting familiar patterns of psychoanalytic readings of monsters – in particular, attending to specific animal biologies? Why are tentacles so often read as symbols of sexual disgust? When, where, and how did we learn that invertebrate bodies in cultural representations must be erotically horrifying – and how does the history of invertebrate life offer alternate ways to read gender-nonconforming bodies? Van Engen 17 To answer these questions, I propose joining feminist theory’s genealogy of the Medusa with biology’s Medusas. 19 th century Western biology conceptualized Medusa not as feminine monster or cis-genital symbol, but as a name for beautiful invertebrate sea creatures with tentacular bodies. Many of these invertebrate animals reproduce asexually, are hermaphroditic (biologically, producing both large and small gametes), or have life stages in which they transition from nonbinary-gendered to male or female. This biological genealogy of Medusa offers some important historical background for how invertebrates came to function as gender- sexual-racial figures of monstrosity. In the 1758 edition of Systema Naturae, Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus laid out his system of classification for the organic world, still used today as binomial nomenclature. In the section on invertebrates, he named many species of jellyfish after the Greek mythological figure Medusa (Spencer 745). Linnaeus’ name for the jellyfish caught on with 19 th century biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose fascination with Medusa jellyfish yielded a gorgeous series of art plates depicting beautiful jellyfish and other invertebrates’ symmetrical, tentacled bodies (Lankester 413, Haeckel 8). Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz wrote extensively about Medusa jellyfish in the 1850s and 60s, writing that “I can truly say, I have not known in the animal kingdom an organism exhibiting more sudden changes, and presenting more diversified and beautiful images” (Agassiz 315, quoted in Wendel 165). 2 Christopher Irmscher argues that while Agassiz referred to Linnaeus’ Medusa-hair comparison, he also insisted that tentacles were more 2 Deanna Wendel argues that Agassiz “reframes [jellyfish] as objects of aesthetic pleasure (pictures) more than living animals,” criticizing this as a denial of the animal’s subjectivity or agency (154). Wendel’s essay examines how Agassiz’s processes of scientific observation and classification depended on dismembering and killing the animals he studied. See also Irmscher’s book Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science. Van Engen 18 than hair (155). 3 18 th and 19 th century Western biologists were fascinated by the beautiful, tentacled, alien, and sexually strange bodies of jellyfish and other marine invertebrates – bodies the biologists could not always classify as male or female. Rebecca Stott has argued that Victorian England went through an aquarium fad, fascinated by invertebrates’ “constantly- changing, glass-fronted theatre of bizarre and exotic bodies, moving, metamorphosing, interacting and breeding in sensational ways” (“Through a Glass” 307; also quoted in Hayward 166). She argues that invertebrate biology caused sexual panics of a sort during the 1840s when research began to show how common asexual reproduction really was in the sea, such that “sexual reproduction appeared to be nature’s dominant method” (Darwin and the Barnacle xxiii). Both Haeckel and Charles Darwin were drawn to Medusae jellyfish for their alien beauty. Darwin’s The Descent of Man asks, “How, then, are we to account for the beautiful or even gorgeous colours of many animals in the lowest classes?” (302). Noting particularly the “transparency of the Medusae, or jelly-fishes,” Darwin observes that “not only the medusae, but many floating Mollusca, crustaceans, and even small oceanic fishes partake of this same glass- like appearance, often accompanied by prismatic colours” (302). He is ultimately puzzled by jellyfish beauty because he is looking for a pattern of sexual dimorphism to support his theory of sexual selection, and the beauty of jellyfish does not fit that pattern. When jellyfish are male or female, they do not look visually differentiated by gender, and yet are stunningly beautiful – iridescent colors, clear crystalline flesh, long trailing strands, radial body symmetry. The jellyfish are not described as horrifying or disgusting, as symbols of sexual abjection, as tentacles are in 3 “‘The most active imagination,’ Agassiz admits, ‘is truly at a loss to discover, in such a creature, any thing that recalls the animals with which we ourselves are most closely allied. There is no head, no body, there are no limbs’” (155-6). Van Engen 19 the Freudian/feminist theory genealogy. The biologists cannot read this beauty, importantly, as masculinity or femininity, as they try to do with mammals and other vertebrate creatures. 4 Haeckel, “Discomedusae,” from Art Forms in Nature, 8. 4 Of course, sex =/= gender, and Judith Butler taught us that the concept of biological “sex” itself is constructed anyway. For the purposes of drawing an alternate genealogy of beauty through invertebrate biology, I am using the biologists “male” or “female” as masculinity or femininity – because that is how the biologists culturally interpreted animal bodies in textual forms. Van Engen 20 0.3 Medusa: trans In this biology writing, Medusa is not only a way for biologists to name the iridescent, nonbinary beauty of these aquatic creatures. Medusa is also the name for one life stage of many invertebrate species. According to Ralph Buchsbaum’s 1938 reference text Animals Without Backbones, the life stages of jellyfish proceed from larva to polyp to adult (111). It is this adult, the sexually-mature, free-swimming, tentacled animal, who reproduces sexually instead of asexually, that is named Medusa. This familiar form of jellyfish, with a bell-like body and tentacles trailing behind, is the form in which Linnaeus, Agassiz, Darwin, and Haeckel observed and classified jellyfish beauty. Trans theorist Eva Hayward has noted, by way of aside, that this “sexually reproductive stage” of jellyfish “originates from its fancied resemblance to the snaky tresses of the mythological gorgon, Medusa,” and points out their sexualized beauty: their contracting muscles while swimming, she says, have an “undeniable eroticism” (175 “Sensational Jellyfish”). Jellyfish as Medusas, then, are the end stage of a series of morphological and sexual transitions – from asexual to sexual, from bud or polyp to tentacled adult. Their beauty offers a nonbinary concept of beauty that is also in one sense trans. In “Through a Glass Darkly,” Rebecca Stott observes the similarities between Victorian fascination by strange invertebrate bodies and the invertebrates’ non-heterosexual, non-cisgender body plan (in human terms). She argues that Victorians were particularly troubled by the “disturbing” similarities between invertebrate sea creatures and human “sexual body parts” – phallic tentacles, vaginal or anus-like orifices, soft slimy bodies overall (313). According to Stott, these invertebrates presented, to Victorian observers, a “grotesque distortion of the human form”; I would like to add that this distortion of body plans specifically mixes what human observers see as genitallike body parts (313). Tentacles and orifices may appear on the same Van Engen 21 body, the phallus is not one but multiple, and not even a sexual organ as they might expect it to be. Marjorie Garber, Nancy Vickers, and Eva Hayward have all argued for seeing the Medusa as a “phallic woman” in the sense of a trans-ed figure (Garber and Vickers 4, Hayward in-person conversation). Although I am interested in interpreting tentacles as more than phallic signifiers, in some ways Stott’s history of Victorian aquariums draws a line of connection between the 19 th century biologists who see these animals as beautiful, and the feminist/psychoanalytic tradition of reading in which they are cisgender symbols for genitals in a heterosexual family origin story. If Medusa is a figure for invertebrate life and nonbinary beauty, then feminist theoretical texts that go beyond Freud might be used to flesh out this alternate Medusa genealogy. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” for example, includes a reference to what she calls the “lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism)” in the midst of her more famous theorizing about cyborgs (“Cyborg Manifesto” 117-8). Lesbian feminist artist and writer Martabel Wasserman has pointed out Haraway’s debt to invertebrates via her use of spirals and mollusk shells, and argued for connecting Haraway to 1980s goddess feminisms (Wasserman). Even Simone de Beauvoir draws on the nonbinary potential of invertebrate bodies in The Second Sex, where she not only points out that “infusoria, amoebae, sporozoans, and the like” reproduce asexually, but also that “normally hermaphroditic species . . . are common among plants and . . . the lower animals, such as annelid worms and mollusks” (4-5). In a sense, nonbinary invertebrate beauty has been with feminism all along. 0.4 Interlude: feminist science studies Feminist science studies scholars will not be surprised by these links. Eva Hayward, who works at the intersection of science studies, visual studies, and transgender studies, has written a series of essays about the aesthetics, ethics, and embodiment of marine invertebrates. In Van Engen 22 “Fingereyes: Impressions of Cup Corals,” Hayward examines how creatures touch each other across in highly structured spaces like marine biology labs (581). In “Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus,” she asks how octopi look back at human spectators outside the tank or behind the camera (42). In “Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion,” she calls for an aesthetics of diffraction as an ethical way of encountering nonhuman animals. 5 Hayward’s work often invokes the strange genders and sexualities of invertebrate animals in an allusory or parenthetical way. Standing in front of a Monterey Bay Aquarium jellyfish exhibit, for example, she ponders in her Jellyfish essay, “My body knows that I am not in the kingdom of the vertebrates, with all their supposedly predictable binaries” (181). Hayward’s argument in this way pauses poetically to invite readers to muse on the connections between hermaphroditic invertebrate animals and queer or trans human bodies – even though ultimately she is most interested in theories of symbiosis, aesthetic mediation, and the material interface of real-world human and invertebrate bodies. This dissertation is deeply indebted to Hayward’s writing, but is more interested in textual media, speculative representations of invertebrate-like creatures, and exploring a genealogy of invertebrate life across discourses of science and speculative fiction. Instead of allusions to starfish as transfeminine figures, I am curious how invertebrates become legible in cultural production as “it” genders, and how 5 Hayward’s article on jellyfish is interested in the aesthetics of diffraction and the economic contexts of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The essay includes phenomenological interludes reflecting on the author’s embodied experience of interacting with jellyfish at the aquarium, and generally is more interested in real-world ethics of captivity and profiting from animals than in my priorities, how invertebrates are translated into imaginative genres like speculative fiction. In fact, she is explicitly against imaginative “identification” in the context of real-world jellyfish as “a politics of erasure rather than empathy” (177). However, I think speculative fiction is a genre or medium that works differently than physical aquariums. Van Engen 23 biology’s discourses of hermaphroditic bodies produced a particular genealogy of slimy nonbinary genders in monstrous cultural representations. Biologist and trans feminist Joan Roughgarden has also influenced this project. Roughgarden’s 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People offers a biological anthology of non-heteronormative, matriarchal, multiple-gender, and trans animal behaviors in the vertebrate kingdom. She specifically offers a rebuttal to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which I discuss in depth in chapter 1. While she primarily focuses on vertebrate animals, Roughgarden gestures briefly toward marine invertebrates as a branch of life particularly full of hermaphroditic bodies: “Most marine invertebrates, such as barnacles, snails, starfish, fan worms, and sea anemones, are hermaphroditic,” and speculates that because of this proliferation of life, “hermaphrodism is [probably] more common in the world than species who maintain separate sexes in separate bodies” (31). Roughgarden’s aside about invertebrate biology provides one support beam in my genealogy of Medusas as nonbinary, invertebrate genders. Medusa beauty and invertebrate biology are important in part because of how often biology is invoked in American national discourses about gender, sexuality, race, and disability as highly-selective evidence for various forms of normativity. Stefan Helmreich reminds us that “[B]iology, understood as a genre of nature that grounds culture, has often been a reference point for legitimating social relations – for naturalizing power, authorizing forms of life with reference to the moral sturdiness of life forms. Think only of appeals to biology – in social Darwinism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology – to rationalize gender and racial hierarchy” (Helmreich 7). For a long time, gender studies and ethnic studies avoided biology at all costs because it has so often been used to legitimize social violence. Van Engen 24 Yet new work in feminist, queer, and ethnic studies is beginning to examine new relationships between biology and cultural critique. Elizabeth Grosz has criticized the trend in feminist criticism to “regar[d] [nature] primarily as a kind of obstacle against which we need to struggle” (13). Elizabeth Wilson calls for work that “show[s] how biology might not be just the object of feminist criticism, but might be also a source for theoretically and politically astute accounts of subjectivity, identity and embodiment” (285). Banu Subramaniam, trained as a biologist and now working in a women’s studies department, argues that “if science was constructed as a world without women, women’s studies was constructed as a world without science” (10), and in response calls for new research that “imagine[s] a feminist reconstructive project for experimental biology” (4). All of these conversations operate within a tradition made possible by founding mother Donna Haraway’s theory of naturecultures. This dissertation seeks to contribute to feminist science studies by drawing on biological accounts of invertebrate animals to expand gender studies’ engagement with nonbinary trans genders – what I am calling “it” genders. For the purposes of this introduction, I engage biological Medusas in order to complicated feminist theory’s Medusas in search of a deeper attention to the beauty of nonbinary bodies and the eroticism of trans genders. While Medusa’s tentacles have been read as signs of erotic disgust or revulsion (and by extension nonbinary genders more generally), I argue for a turn to invertebrate animal beauty – which in Western biology has not been glossed in terms of masculinity or femininity. So often conceptions of the beautiful in American national discourses only become legible in terms of the gender binary; this is partly how gender-nonconforming bodies become shorthand for erotic disgust or sexual repulsiveness in mainstream cultural forms. Invertebrate beauty offers a different language for beauty, desire, and eroticism via the alien sexualities and soft, tentacled bodies of spineless Van Engen 25 creatures. Medusa is “beautiful,” as Cixous suggests, but she may not always be a woman (even a phallic one). Medusa is also nonhuman, an “it” gender of tentacular embodiment. 0.5 Medusa: scientific racism Medusa’s history in biology also has a darker side. If Agassiz and Haeckel were fascinated by the alien beauty of jellyfish as nonbinary tentacular creatures, they were also (to different extents) famous for their scientific racisms. Agassiz was a central theorist of the 19 th century school of thought known as polygenism, the theory that humans of different races were actually different species that originated from separate ancestors (Gould 42). Stephen Jay Gould called Agassiz “the leading spokesman for polygeny in America” (43), and details how Agassiz’s racial theories emerged out of his “visceral revulsion” toward black people he encountered in the United States (44). Ann Fabian has pointed out that Agassiz is known as the “‘founding father’ of modern American science” (Fabian 103). 6 Agassiz provided an introductory essay for Nott and Gliddon’s notorious 1854 Types of Mankind, which expanded and popularized Samuel Morton’s craniology – a white supremacist taxonomy of supposed physiological racial differences that quickly caught on with white southern slaveholders (Fabian 111). In that essay, Agassiz argues that each realm of the earth has its separate, proper animal species and its separate, proper races of humans, in support of an argument that humans of different races are actually different species, and originated from separate ancestors (Agassiz lxviii, lxxii). Invertebrates appear in this taxonomy only in the arctic zone: “A number of representatives of the inferior classes of worms, of crustacea, of mollusks, of echinoderms, and of medusae, are 6 Fabian points readers toward Frederick Douglass’ 1854 address “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” which rebutted Morton and Agassiz’s claims about polygenism (117). Douglass’ speech explicitly points out that “There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden, Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen” (Douglass 16). See also Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science. Van Engen 26 also found here” (lxi). 7 Agassiz connects the invertebrate Medusa to “a peculiar race of men, known in America under the name of Esquimaux,” of which he generalizes: “The uniformity of [indigenous Arctic people’s] characters along the whole range of the arctic seas forms one of the most striking resemblances which these people exhibit to the fauna with which they are so closely related” (lxi). Invertebrates (including Medusa jellyfish) occupy a strange place within Agassiz’s racial taxonomies here. They existed at the margins of Agassiz’s geographical, cultural, and natural organizational scheme in this essay, creatures he did not bother mentioning (despite his extensive work on jellyfish elsewhere) in Europe, the Americas, or Asia. Ernst Haeckel, too, was more than an artist and taxonomist of pretty jellyfish. His ideas are central to the history of Western science: for example, he coined the term “ecology” and proposed the law that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (Hanken 56). Yet Haeckel openly promoted Aryan racial superiority, and his theories became part of the scientific support for the Nazi regime (Wolpoff and Caspari 324). Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari argue that Haeckel was responsible for using Darwinian theories of evolution to explain racial hierarchies: “Haeckel applied Darwinism through his theory of the competition between racial groups (species, for him) to explain why the extermination and exploitation of other racial groups were the inevitable and desirable consequences of natural selection” (324). 8 Some have accused Haeckel of being more interested in aesthetics than in accurate science. Irmscher, for example, points to anatomical inaccuracies in Haeckel’s jellyfish plates and argues that “scientific seeing is pushed aside by the artist’s conception of nature” (162). James Hanken cites one Haeckel 7 Interestingly, H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness, which I examine in chapter 2, also locates invertebrate life in the arctic, in the form of starfish-like alien scientists. 8 See Juanma Sánchez Arteaga’s “Biological Discourses on Human Races and Scientific Racism in Brazil” for a detailed account of Haeckel’s use of Darwinian ideas for polygenist-friendly white supremacist theories. Van Engen 27 contemporary’s assessment of his scientific legacy that “Haeckel’s early monographs on jellyfish and radiolarians” were “actually almost the only factual contributions Haeckel made to zoology” (Hanken 56). Yet in my view, aesthetic questions beautiful descriptions of animal bodies were part and parcel of 19 th century science, and the part of Haeckel’s work worth examining. Agassiz’s and Haeckel’s Medusas are complicated baroque flourishes within this larger white supremacist context that may grow in different directions from the rest of their work. 9 So the biological genealogy of the Medusa as nonbinary invertebrate beauty is caught up with 19 th century racial science, written by some of the most enthusiastic proponents of polygenism in Western science of that time. Medusa invertebrates were part of the 19 th century work of making racial-sexual monsters, and the speculative fiction I will discuss in the remainder of this introduction engages the queer, trans, inhuman, and racialized aspects of Medusa genealogies. Biological Medusas need intersectional feminist Medusas, then, in order to contextualize and remake these portraits of invertebrate beauty for new purposes; this is why my dissertation turns to speculative fictional Medusas As Banu Subramaniam puts it, racial sciences like Agassiz and Haeckel’s “haunt” contemporary biological knowledge produced in fields that still cite foundational research by these figures, and “the ghosts cannot be chased off unless they are listened to and heard” (225-6). 10 In chapter 1 I examine in depth the function of invertebrate beauty within 19 th century racial, sexual, and species taxonomies. While 19 th century Western biology was deeply invested in racialized ideas about human and animal beauty, biologists did 9 When I revise this dissertation into a book, I ultimately want to reconceptualize chapter 1 (which is currently only about Darwin) into a chapter on 19 th century invertebrate biology and its relationship to racial science that includes Agassiz, Haeckel, and Lamarck. 10 When I tried to research Agassiz’s work on jellyfish for this introduction, for example, I encountered many recent biological articles on jellyfish that cite Agassiz’s research frequently without acknowledging his theoretical contributions to U.S. white supremacy. Van Engen 28 not always know what to do with invertebrates, and could not easily fit them into analogical schemes because of their radial body plans, lack of face, and hermaphroditic or asexually- reproducing bodies. I am curious how invertebrate beauty may function as a snarl within racial- species hierarchies of that time. Invertebrate beauty was considered so alien or strange, in fact, because it was not easily readable in terms of the highly Eurocentric ideals of beauty that were part and parcel of 19 th century scientific racisms. Invetebrates are, if not an exception, then a queer spiral or unruly tentacular mess. They point toward a nonhuman version of José Esteban Muñoz’s call for queer aesthetics as “schemata” or “maps” toward an elsewhere (1). In this respect, my genealogy of Medusas is also inspired by recent work on race and the non/human from Mel Chen, Kalpana Seshadri, Monica Allewaert, Zakiyyah Jackson, Michael Lundblad, Jayna Brown, and Sylvia Wynter. Alex Weheliye has defined racialization as a process of distributing humans “into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human – a process consolidated and legitimized by 19 th and 20 th century racial sciences (3). This emerging body of work on race and the non/human draws on Sylvia Wynter’s writings on the human to argue for a broader range of theories of “the human” in studies of the nonhuman world (Wynter 267). Much like science, the human is not a neutral concept: “humanness” and “nonhumanness” are fields of power along which human and nonhuman subjects alike get distributed. I think alongside those who caution against immediately responding to this problem with a “reparation and restoration” of the “category human,” in Jayna Brown’s words (323). I aspire to Kalpana Seshadri’s call to reorient attention toward “the practice and production of inhumanity” across a range of bodies, although my archive is much different than Seshadri’s (10). Medusa has an inhumanizing history in white supremacist science and cultural representations, yet my response Van Engen 29 in this project is not to avoid the nonhuman. Rather, I examine how Medusa has been folded into racial, sexual, and species projects, which raise intertwined problems of how erotic disgust or beauty gets assigned to some bodies and not others. 0.6 Medusa: speculative fiction Invertebrate life evolved into new forms with the rise of science fiction and horror genres in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. As the genres produced new kinds of monstrous bodies, bodies with tentacles, Medusa evolved into new forms that bear the trace of feminism, biology, and scientific racisms’s Medusa legacies. Late 19 th century speculative fiction in Europe was suddenly fascinated by invertebrates, Stott observes, citing as examples Henry Lee’s The Octopus (1874) and Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) (Stott 306). According to China Miéville, H. P. Lovecraft’s work marks the entrance of tentacles into American speculative fiction during the pulp sci-fi era of the 1920s, the tentacle being “a limb type largely missing from western mythology” previously (though Miéville’s comment misses the tentacular genealogy of the Medusa) (xiv). In 1948, American woman writer C.L. Moore’s short story “Shambleau” projects Medusa into the extraterrestrial worlds of science fiction, positing an alien origin story for Greek mythology: “The myth of the Medusa . . . can never have had its roots in the soil of Earth. That tale of the snake-haired Gorgon whose gaze turned the gazer to stone never originated about any creature that Earth nourished. And those ancient Greeks who told the story must have remembered, dimly and half-believing, a tale of antiquity about some strange being for one of the outlying planets their remotest ancestors once trod” (3). Moore’s story provides an opportunity to pause for a moment on how Medusa in speculative fiction simultaneously embodies 1) the sexual disgust of the Freudian tradition, 2) the beautiful, invertebrate animality of the biological one, and 3) the racialized function of tentacle Van Engen 30 monsters in American culture. “Shambleau” tells the story of a brown-skinned feminine alien with Medusa-like tentacles who feeds on human blood by seducing and entrapping men. She at first takes on familiar science fictional tropes of the submissive, Orientalized alien woman with “brown, soft curves” and “velvety . . . smooth flesh,” appearing “desirable” and “submissive” to victims, and characters describe Shambleau with the pronoun “she” (16). But once Shambleau’s tentacles are uncovered and the victim is seduced, Shambleau becomes “it” or “they” instead (17). The tentacles, “a nest of blind, restless red worms” (17), quickly become the agent of the action and the grammatical subject of the sentence: “The crawling awfulness rippled and squirmed at the motion, writhing thick and wet and shining over the soft brown shoulders about which they fell now in obscene cascades that all but hid her body” (18). As invertebrate-like tentacles become the focus of the story’s horror, the protagonist begins using the language of sexual disgust or “perverted revulsion” familiar to Freudian readings as “thick, pulsing worms clasp[ed] every inch of his body, sliding, writhing, their wetness and warmth striking through his garments as if he stood naked to their embrace” (19). 11 In this sense, Medusa might be a story about slimy tentacles that dominate the man who tries to conquer them; invertebrate “they” being(s) seem to threaten the prototypical white hetero-masculine science fictional hero. Yet Moore’s story also suggests a pleasure in the masculine hero’s submission to the invertebrate Medusa’s seduction. If he is a victim, he is an enthusiastic victim. The protagonist notes that the experience with Shambleau’s slimy tentacles was also one of pleasure: “the sliding, gently moving caresses of those wet, warm worms upon his flesh was an ecstasy above words – that deeper ecstasy that strikes beyond the body and beyond the mind and tickles the 11 Lando Tosaya has read this story within a genealogy of Afrofuturism as a negative example that inhumanizes black women as sexually disgusting (Tosaya). Van Engen 31 very roots of the soul with unnatural delight. . . . [T]he terrible pleasure of Shambleau thrilled and shuddered through every fiber of him” (20). While the end to Moore’s story tries to wrap things up neatly when a friend ‘rescues’ the protagonist from Shambleau’s embrace, the inhuman nature of tentacle sexuality gestures toward a transspecies interaction of pleasure and submission to the nonhuman. Rather than Freud’s interpretation of Medusa’s tentacles as “horror” that “repels all sexual desires,” what might happen if we refuse to assume that tentacle = disgusting and submission = effeminizing loss of control and individuality? Many cultural critics have observed that invertebrate animals look like aliens. Most nature documentaries on deep-sea creatures proclaim how similar invertebrates and fish on the ocean floor are to extraterrestrials. Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith claims that cephalopods are “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien” because of how distantly related they are from humans, and how complex their brains are (9). Stefan Helmreich has argued that marine biology’s discourses of the ocean are “haunted by the figure of the alien,” because of how often marine biologists compare oceanic life worlds to life on other planets (xi). Phenomenologist Vilém Flusser uses science fictional techniques of critical estrangement to “criticize” humans “from the perspective of a mollusk” in Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (10). And Eva Hayward has pointed out the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “allusions” between jellyfish and aliens (163). However, in my view the analogy really goes the other way around. Science fiction as a genre began in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries in a moment when Darwin, Haeckel, Agassiz, etc.’s writings were circulating, and I believe that invertebrate biology became part of the cultural fabric of producing monsters for this reason. Both science fiction and science in the late 19 th century were also arising at the height of European empire, as John Rieder has argued. John Cheng writes in Astounding Wonder: Van Engen 32 Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America that representations of Asianness as alien nonhumans were popular in the inter-war period, historicizing that racial fabric of 1920s and 30s science fiction within the context of the immigration anxieties, anti-miscegenation laws, and Asian exclusion acts such that “Asians became aliens in the political and social discourse in America” (162). Pulp science fiction in the 1920s and 30s – the first texts that consciously used the genre label “science fiction” – was full of stories of white men colonizing dark-skinned aliens on Mars or Venus, with tellingly-named bug-eyed monsters. These insectoid, tentacled, and/or slimy aliens drew on the strangeness of invertebrate life. Medusa as part of a genealogy of tentacle monsters in speculative fiction and film, then, connects invertebrate biology with feminist theory, but also shows how the work of making monstrous bodies through invertebrates was overlaid with late 19 th and early 20 th century racial and colonial projects of othering. This history of invertebrate alien as racialized other has also left its trace in feminist theory. In her first book, Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed reflected on the similarities between “alien” as foreigner and “alien” as extraterrestrial, both about “those who are beyond the very category of the ‘human’” (1). Ahmed draws out the eroticized associations with disgust that cohere around alien as slimy, invertebrate-like other, connecting the alien’s “green slime” with xenophobia: “we are already touched by alien forms (we are touched, in our very withdrawal from the slime of alien skin). Our disgust at the abjection of alien forms allows us to contain ourselves. We shiver and tremble and pull our hands away it is a close encounter” (2). Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza also meditates on the double resonance of “alien,” and calls for a vision of mestizaje that “link[s] people with each other – the Blacks with Jews with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials” (107). Anzaldúa is interested in Coatlicue’s snakelike cosmology instead of Freudian stories of Medusa: “I know Van Engen 33 things older than Freud, older than gender. She – that’s how I think of la Vibora, Snake Woman. . . . Forty years it’s taken me to enter into the Serpent, to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul” (48). Anzaldúa sees tentacle- snakes as emblems of the erotic, too, pointing out that the influence of Spanish colonialism was responsible for transforming stories about Coatlicue into “puta,” for “desex[ing] Guadalupe, taking Coatlalopeuh, the serpent sexuality, out of her” (49-50). At one point Anzaldúa explicitly compares Coatlicue to Medusa: “Coatlicue depicts the contradictory. . . . Like Medusa, the Gorgon, she is a symbol of the fusion of opposites” (69). While Anzaldúa’s serpent sexualities are not the same as the invertebrate “it” genders I am interested in, they are part of this tentacular genealogy of inhuman Medusas and gesture toward non-Eurocentric conceptions of the nonhuman. If Medusa in earlier speculative fiction inherited the racial imaginary of 19 th century Western naturecultures, when Medusas appear in later 20 th century women of color’s science fiction, they take on different meanings and rewrite these earlier “it” monsters. Octavia Butler’s 1987 Dawn, in particular, tells the story of a black woman named Lilith who survives the apocalypse only to be rescue-captured by a species of invertebrate-like aliens, a species covered with tentacles and which transitions into a three-gender system during puberty. Lilith’s first meetings with them directly confront the sexualized, racialized history of disgust surrounding Medusa bodies. What she thought was hair is actually tentacles: “Medusa. Some of the ‘hair’ writhed independently, a nest of snakes startled, driven in all directions. Revolted, she turned her face to the wall” (13). Lilith eventually works through this sexual disgust, and becomes partners with a nonbinary-gendered alien named Nikanj; the second and third books of the trilogy are narrated by their mixed-species children. She compares the tentacles to “big, slowly writhing, Van Engen 34 dying night crawlers,” “small, tentacled sea slugs – nudibranchs – grown impossibly to human size and shape” (14). Butler’s descriptions of the Oankali’s Medusa-like tentacles make explicit how the feminist genealogy of Medusa is indebted to the biological one, and vice versa. Her narrative, which I discuss in depth in chapter 3, places these “it”-gendered Medusas within the scene of colonial conflict that earlier science fiction by Lovecraft and Moore left unexamined or explicitly endorsed. 21 st century Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor also belongs to this Medusa genealogy. 12 Okorafor’s Binti series (2015-7) tells the story of Binti, a Himba girl from rural west Africa whose family are mathematical geniuses. Binti gets a full scholarship to attend an intergalactic university, where (to simplify a complicated plot) she meets Okwu, a jellyfish-like being with nonbinary “it” gender. Okwu’s people are called the Meduse; they have been at war with earth for a long time, before Binti and Okwu form a friendship that ends the war. Binti’s dreadlocks turn into “okuoko” – or blue tentacles, like Okwu’s – so that she can communicate with the Meduse. As a result of this change, some human people reject her or call her unmarriageable: “‘Oh my Gods, is she part Meduse now?’ . . . ‘Maybe she’s its wife’” (Binti: Home 55). In the third book of the trilogy, a doctor tells Binti that if she wants to have children, Okwu will have to bear them, and clearly compares their relationship to marriage in Himba tradition (192-4). Thus, both Butler and Okorafor use invertebrate-like aliens to build more decolonial, queer, and trans-affirmative versions of the Medusa. Butler and Okorafor’s antiracist rewriting of the invertebrate Medusa point back toward necessary critiques of the biologists I 12 When I revise this dissertation into a book, I plan to write a conclusion that will be about the Binti series and contemporary invertebrate biology. Van Engen 35 mentioned earlier. Medusa is both jellyfish and feminist icon, erotic being and nonbinary- gendered “it,” both alien and kin. 0.7 Medusa: It “[H]ave we really finally done away with gender binaries in our historical and analytical work,” Iranian historian Afsaneh Najambadi asks? If it is truly common sense by now that gender is not binary, “[w]hat can we make of the fact that the only categories of gender that run through so much of our gender scholarship are women and men, masculinity and femininity?” (12). Najambadi poses these questions to historians of gender and suggests through the example of Iranian history just how modern, and how Western, the gender binary and its implications for sexuality are. Where Najambadi turns to Iranian history, I look to the invertebrate-like alien worlds of speculative fiction as an undertheorized area of trans inquiry. Science fiction in a Medusa tradition of tentacled “it” monsters can powerfully redirect gendered imaginaries through imaginative building of alien life worlds. Moore, Butler, and Okorafor’s use of the pronoun “it” for invertebrate Medusas opens up a provocative line of critique for me. In the world outside speculative fiction, the word “it” usually indicates a violent refusal to recognize someone’s humanness rather than recognition or respect, linking the nonhuman to nonbinary gender in the reduction of a person to an “it.” Science fiction and horror often refer to nonhuman monsters as “it” in a way that combines senses of thing, animal, object, subhuman, genderless, freak, infantile, inanimate, and queer. “It” uses nonhuman connotations to deny a person’s membership in the category “human.” 13 But I am fascinated by the possibilities tangled up in the pronoun “it.” Where the Lovecraftian monster tradition would 13 Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein write in the introduction to the TSQ special issue on Tranimalities that “the indeterminate pronoun it – which so many of us bore as a marker of our inhumanity, our sexual difference – has been upended by a politics of pronouns” (196). Van Engen 36 treat nonbinary gender or sexual queerness as evidence of racial or species perversity, contemporary authors like Butler sometimes see room for possibility and pleasure to emerge from the intersection of race, species, and nonbinary gender in aliens and monsters. In chapters 4 and 5, I examine tentacular creatures in ebook erotica and anime pornography, media which build entire erotic subgenres out of the invertebrate “it” tentacle. What would it mean to take seriously the intimacy of racialized humans, nonhuman aliens, and nonbinary gender in a SF story? What would it mean to share pleasure with - or as – someone who identified as “it”? Butler’s sex scenes between humans and aliens foreground the pleasure nonbinary aliens produce in and share with others - a major reworking of Lovecraft’s or Freud’s revulsion towards all things tentacle and nonhuman, and a very different move from the kind of desexualized subjectivity and respectability implicit in some trans rights discourses. It is precisely this uncomfortable intimacy between the gender-neutral pronoun “it” and the nonhuman animal that makes monsters and aliens interesting for me. They uncover the complex ways that U.S. culture racializes and sexualizes the tentacle in Medusa genealogies. 0.8 Tentacular Sex Having laid out multiple tentacular genealogies of Medusa, it is time to return to Donna Haraway. Haraway’s 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene proposes the tentacular as a way of moving beyond singular, self-contained conception of individual embodiment. She uses tentacular beings – both scientific and speculative – as ways to examine how to live with one another on a damaged earth in the legacy of colonial and capitalist environmental destruction to humans and nonhumans. Haraway’s central figure for “tentacular thinking” is not H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu (although the name invokes Lovecraft), but the Pimoa cthulhu spider that lives in Northern California forests (31). She also draws on the invertebrate Van Engen 37 lives of worms that live in compost piles, suggesting that we make something liveable out of the trash heap of capitalism: “The worms are not human; their undulating bodies ingest and reach, and their feces fertilize worlds” (34). Haraway’s book is most interested in politicized questions of ecology and aesthetics, in questions of “multispecies response-ability” between beings like corals and humans (56). I began writing this project long before Staying with the Trouble was published (and also before I was aware of Eva Hayward’s work on invertebrates). Yet Haraway’s tentacular thinking has become a central part of this project in its later stages. This dissertation is not primarily an ecological project, but it is true that jellyfish and cephalopods have been blooming in increasing numbers as the oceans warm, prompting sensational clickbait-y headlines about our future octopoid overlords (Doubleday et al. R387, Stone). I take up Haraway’s concept of the tentacular and zero in on the highly erotic connotations the tentacle has acquired in contemporary American culture – for example, in the ebook erotica I discuss in chapter 4, and the Japanese anime pornography I analyze in chapter 5. In this sense, tentacular sex is a slimy paradigm for historical, literary, and scientific entanglement of bodies across difference. If the tentacle is a model for entanglement in a sticky, traumatized, joyfully multispecies world, it is also a model for erotic connections, for pain and pleasure, for soft, spineless, bottom-y sexualities. It prompts questions of how nonhuman creatures and speculative imaginations might expand – or are already expanding – narratives of bodies and desirability. “Tentacular Sex” examines the travels of the tentacle as it transformed from primarily a signifier of horror and erotic disgust, into new instantiations of erotic nonhuman worlds and trans embodiment. How do erotic media (or cultural texts about nonhuman sex) open up questions of “multispecies response-ability” that include desire and sexuality, rather than a desexualized ‘ethical relation’ to nonhumans? How Van Engen 38 does tentacular sex (as a queer adaptation of Haraway) provide a stickier, more embodied, more erotic model for decentralized/nonlinear connection than the rhizome? Staying with the Trouble also engages the Medusa, although in a different way than I do. Haraway briefly proposes Medusa, more specifically her representation in a particular 7 th century BCE plate from Rhodes, as the heroine of the Cthulhucene world. The Gorgon’s “snaky locks,” she says, “tangle her with a diverse kinship of chthonic earthly forces that travel richly in space and time” (52). Haraway invokes feminist critiques of Medusa as female monster, but also points out a different invertebrate genealogy of Medusa embodiment: “from the blood dripping from Medusa’s severed head came the rocky corals of the western seas, remembered today in the taxonomic names of the Gorgonians, the coral-like sea fans and sea whips, composed in symbioses of tentacular animal cnidarians and photosynthetic algal-like beings called zooanthellae” (54). Thus, Haraway’s Medusa genealogy centralizes symbiosis and fractious ecological communities. The patriarchal violence of the Medusa’s “blood dripping” severed head also leaves a positive genealogy in species of symbiotic corals, cnidarians with stony exoskeletons that can reproduce sexually or asexually, and that derive their beautiful coloring from smaller symbiotic creatures (the zooxanthellae), the absence of which produces coral bleaching. My Medusa genealogy in speculative fiction honors Haraway (and the tentacular creatures that inspire her) before pivoting to the trans specific resonances of invertebrate beauty, the “it” genders, the multiple tentacular arms of invertebrate Medusa’s interventions into interdisciplinary nonhuman fields. Like Shambleau’s tentacles, Medusa’s tentacles take on a life of their own and become “it” or “they,” a multiplicative politics of nonhuman pronouns and collective being. Tentacles can be multiple forms of being in a jellyfish genealogy rather than Van Engen 39 ruled by a singular head (as in the Greek origin story), since jellyfish do not have a central nervous system but rather “radially distributed nervous systems” that used to be known as a “nerve net” (Katsuki and Greenspan R592). Like Butler’s invocation of Medusa, invertebrate tentacularity is deeply erotic and produces pleasure out of (and for) bodies that have historically been rendered disgusting, horrifying, or a source of revulsion. Tentacularity understands questions of the erotic grotesque as intersecting with questions of the racial grotesque, both heirs of 19 th century Western speculative fiction and science. Tentacular sex is multisensory, as Eva Hayward and Deanna Wendel have noted, since jellyfish sensory systems are synaesthetic by comparison to humans’ (Wendel 168, Hayward). Medusa beauty is not necessarily always positive. It has problematic family of origin issues in 19 th century biology, and it has translated into Lovecraftian racial monsters as well as decolonial, queer Butlerian ones. 0.9 Chapter outline This dissertation uses close reading and archival research to show how 19 th century scientific writings on animal genders and sexualities shaped 20 th century literary representations of monstrous bodies. I contextualize the strange genders of speculative fiction’s monsters within specific invertebrate animal biologies. My chapters on Darwin’s influence on American cultural discourses and Japanese anime’s influence on U.S. geek cultures use reception research in contemporary periodicals in addition to close readings of primary objects. The chapter on speculative ebook erotica involved email interviews with authors. My earlier chapters examine how dominant sexual narratives drew on Darwinian ideas to frame racialized bodies, gender nonconformity, and disability as undesirable. Later chapters examine cultural texts that deploy invertebrate life to rewrite this paradigm through queer, trans, and woman of color feminist imaginations. Van Engen 40 Chapter 1, “Sea Slug Theory: Animal Beauty, Race, and Mollusk Sex in The Descent of Man,” lays out the theoretical and historical framework for the later chapters of the project. I analyze how Darwin’s animal narratives and popular retellings of those narratives shifted Americans’ understanding of species–and race within the human species–as dependent on specific formations of white reproductive sexuality, binary-gendered desirability, and bodily and mental ability. I then re-read textual depictions of invertebrate sex in The Descent of Man alongside contemporary transgender theorists to suggest that the slimy, immobile, queer bodies of sea invertebrates in science writing offer alternative modes of desire and beauty–modes that I trace in the literary readings of the following chapters. Chapter 2, “H. P. Lovecraft’s Degeneration Imaginary and the Starfish Sublime,” offers a window into how eugenics-era popular fiction reimagined the late-Darwinian tangle of species and sexuality as narratives of white degeneration anxiety and anti-Asian sexual panics in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s letters. I then point to moments of queer textual slippage in At the Mountains of Madness that gesture toward alien evolutionary futures through invertebrate and amoeba biologies that displace the human and its sciences. Chapter 3, “Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive,” forms the centerpiece of the project, because Butler’s work consciously associates tentacles with genderqueerness. Butler’s late 20 th century fiction and archival notes reimagine invertebrate animal biologies as transgender alien universes through paradigms of bodily transformation. Drawing on extensive archival research in the Butler archive at the Huntington Library, I show how Butler as a working-class black geek examines nonbinary genders within the troubled erotics of colonial relations in the Xenogenesis novel trilogy and the short story “Bloodchild,” both from the late 1980s. Van Engen 41 Chapter 4, “How to Fuck a Kraken: Cephalopod Sexualities and Nonbinary Genders in EBook Erotica,” traces how self-published speculative fiction available on the Kindle store by Alice Xavier, Clea Kinderton, and others capitalizes on the century’s gradual shift from viewing tentacles as objects of disgust to seeing them as emblems of desirability. These for-pay erotica stories about human women and tentacled alien monsters expand conceptions of gender beyond “masculinity” or “femininity” through the “it” genders of invertebrate animals. My readings of these stories propose the erotic as a way of relating to the nonhuman world in fantastic fiction and suggest the nonhuman as a way of undoing trans-exclusive ideals of bodily desirability that can be traced back to popular Darwinisms. Chapter 5, “Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture,” traces how trans-inclusive animated erotica involving tentacles in the genre known to Americans as hentai entered U.S. culture in the late 20 th century and took on new life in the currents of the transnational internet. While the original reception of tentacle porn shows that Americans imagined Japan as a place of sexual strangeness, hyper-phallicism, and titillating nonconsensuality, gradually representations of tentacles became dissociated from associations with the hetero-phallus and were reimagined in queer subsections of tumblr, reddit, and 4chan as a consensual, transfeminine site of sexual imagination. I adapt Donna Haraway’s concept of the tentacular in conjunction with Darwin’s animal narratives to theorize the tentacle as a site of violently pleasurable erotic and racial connection in the internet age. Read through the historical framework of biology, invertebrate-inspired creatures in speculative texts provide a history of nonbinary genders that informs the human. The asexual reproduction of some jellyfish, the hermaphroditic bodies of sea slugs, and the polymorphous queerness of octopus limbs transform into literary figures of softness, immobility, Van Engen 42 transformation, and openness to the surrounding world. Much like the history of science itself, nonbinary genders as they emerge in representations of invertebrate animals are sites of both violence and eroticism across the American 20 th century. By braiding together feminist science studies, queer and trans animal studies, and ethnic studies of the nonhuman, Tentacular Sex reexamines American science and literature in terms of transgender representation and rethinks transgender representation in light of the history of science. The dissertation demonstrates that 20 th century American culture is full of genders that cannot be described as masculine or feminine once we look beyond the human to the rich genealogy of invertebrate life in science and speculative fiction. Van Engen 43 1. Sea Slug Theory: Animal Beauty, Race, and Mollusk Erotics in The Descent of Man “No one who has had the opportunity of observing the courtship of snails will be in any doubt about the seductiveness with which these hermaphrodites move and display themselves as they prepare and accomplish their dual embrace.” (Louis Agassiz, De L’Espèce et de la Classification en Zoologie, quoted in Descent of Man p 304) This chapter investigates how Darwin’s reframing of the human in the late 19 th century produced a legacy of species discourses that impose heterosexuality, patriarchal competition, gender binaries, and European racial categories onto the nonhuman animal world. If the boundaries of the human in Western cultures have been legislated through race, as Sylvia Wynter argues, The Descent of Man naturalizes white masculinity as the apex of evolutionary processes through comparative animal-human rhetorics. The theory of sexual selection positions heterosexuality, the gender binary, patriarchal aggression, and ableism as the mechanisms through which white humanness achieves its status. Sexual selection theory epitomizes the intersecting functions of race, gender, sexuality, species, and ability in dominant American cultural imaginations. In this chapter I analyze Darwin’s representations of invertebrate animals as productive moments of tension within 19 th century European life taxonomies. The Descent of Man narrates the gender and sexual lives of birds, snails, fish, jellyfish, and monkeys through prescriptive comparisons to humans of different races, outlining a shifting definition of the “human” that hinges on a European-specific sense of “beauty.” I argue that Darwin’s narratives of animal genders and sexualities in Descent of Man offer a portrait of the ways that nonbinary gender and nonreproductive sexualities have the potential to disrupt the white-centric, reproductive-futuristic logics of “survival of the fittest” – logics that have become widespread in American culture in Van Engen 44 the wake of Darwin through Herbert Spencer’s popularization of the phrase. Aquatic invertebrate animals in particular offer a different archive for reimagining Western conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race because of the ways they confounded dominant racial-sexual paradigms for interpreting the nonhuman world. Here is one genealogy of animal beauty that looks to descriptions of invertebrate animals in 19 th century science to outline a nonhuman and nonbinary sense of beauty. 1.1 Survival of the Fittest: Whiteness as Ability Darwin lives on. Today his theory of natural selection casts an outsized shadow over American culture, from ongoing faux-debates over evolution to the “survival of the fittest” ethos that continues to legitimate late capitalism, and from biological arguments about animal sexuality that pepper mainstream political conversations about marriage equality to racialized distinctions aimed at naturalizing socially made hierarchies. There is an annual internet culture phenomenon called the “Darwin Awards” that satirically celebrates acts of supreme failure and stupidity. Darwin has not died, not fully, not yet. In the academic humanities he has enjoyed a resurgence, buoyed up by the tide of animal studies, theories of the posthuman, the emergence of the concept Anthropocene, and the turn to the nonhuman. Elizabeth Grosz goes so far as to claim that Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection offer a new, more viable model of social change for feminists that might invigorate feminism through a reorientation toward an unknown future, seeing in Darwin’s theory a model of transformative change (8). Darwin evolves. But if Darwin provides a model of ethico-political change, then what kinds of change has he left to us as his legacy? What, according to Darwin and Darwinists, are we changing from, and what are we evolving towards? Van Engen 45 Darwin’s better-known text On the Origin of Species (1857) argues that species evolve over time and share a common ancestry with all existing forms of life. He researched similarities and differences of contemporary bird species in the Galapagos islands and drew conclusions about the history of how those species came to exist in these forms. Darwin’s theory of natural selection in On the Origin of Species argues that species adapt over time, and that creatures who are best adapted to thrive in a given environment most influence the next generation because they are most likely to reproduce. The text I primarily work with in this chapter, the less- frequently-cited The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), redirects the earlier arguments about nonhuman animal evolution in Origin of Species to explain racial, gendered, and anatomical differences among human beings, and explains the theory of sexual selection in much more depth. Descent of Man addressed 19 th century European and American debates on race, specifically claiming that all human races evolve from a common ancestor but, Darwin argues, nonwhite races can be classified as separate sub-species of the human (Descent of Man 204). 14 The problem with Darwin’s theory of natural and sexual selection as radical, transformative change might be encapsulated in a passage toward the end of The Descent of Man. After arguing that humans came to be the way they are not through divine invention but through the slow, random process of evolutionary change, Darwin writes this puzzling sentence that at first seems 14 Monogenesis and polygenesis were prominent mid-19 th century Euro-American theories of race: polygenism was the pro-slavery claim that human beings of different races were descended from separate ancestors, and monogenism (the anti-slavery side) arguing that all human beings were descended from the same ancestor. These scientific debates were central to political struggles over slavery, and were frequently used as evidence on all sides. Darwin saw his theory of evolution as resolving the mono/polygenesis debate in favor of monogenism: “Finally, we may conclude that when the principle of evolution is generally accepted, as it surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (Descent of Man 210). See Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause. Van Engen 46 to contradict the egalitarian implications of the rest of his work: “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future” (689). Darwin’s words address contemporary Victorians who may be anxious or skeptical of his arguments, and reorient the unsettling potential of his theory of natural selection toward a Victorian “pride” in European “Man”’s place of power over the rest of the human and nonhuman world. If it is true that the theory of natural selection ties human beings to (ostensibly) unpalatable nonhuman origins, in this passage “Man”’s rise from these unsavory beginnings appears a matter of improvement and success. In this trajectory of ascension, European humans alternately approach and distance themselves from kinship with nonhuman animals and nonEuropean humans. The Descent of Man explicitly endorsed Thomas Malthus’ proto-eugenicist ideas of population control in the context of both species and race. In one of the clearest examples, Darwin argues for curbing the reproductive potential of the “inferior” and cultivating the mental capacities of the “better class of men,” which he maps onto “civilized” peoples: “If the various checks . . . do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde . . . We must remember that progress is no invariable rule” (166). Here, Darwin endorses the anxiety that white “civilized” people will lose their place atop world hierarchy if reproduction is not carefully curated to prioritize the fittest members of society. While the phrase “survival of the fittest” was Spencer’s invention, the ideas are present in The Descent of Man in different form. Darwin goes on to imply that cultures with “high intellectual and moral faculties” are the ones that conquer, enslave, and dominate all others because of innate qualities: Van Engen 47 It is very difficult to say why one civilised nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely, than another. . . . We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, on the number of the men endowed with high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence. Corporeal structure appears to have little influence, except so far as vigour of body leads to vigour of mind. 166. The announcement that intellectual capacity – not empire and slavery – makes some nations “rise[]” over others endorses the association between whiteness and evolutionary progress, and erases European genocides and conquests that made this association historically convincing to some. 15 The social Darwinist logics that linked empire, whiteness, and fitness are present in The Descent of Man, not just retrospective additions to it. Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s 2009 history Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution reframes Darwin’s oeuvre in the context of British abolitionism as a humanitarian commitment to human and nonhuman justice (DOM intro xiii). But Desmond and Moore also show how Descent of Man departs from Darwin’s earlier-life radical politics to sympathize with his cousin Francis Galton’s proto- eugenical ideas (xlv), Thomas Malthus’ anti-Irish theories of overpopulation (lii), and the backlash against the British white women’s movement (xlviii), lending credence to the text’s hierarchical tendencies. According to Desmond and Moore, “the [modern] distinction between Darwinism and Social Darwinism would have been lost on the author of the Descent of Man” 15 In Darwin’s Plots Gillian Beer reads Darwin in opposition to Malthus, arguing that “[t]o Malthus fecundity was a danger to be suppressed,” while “[t]o Darwin fecundity was a liberating and creative principle” (29). But her reading is based primarily in Origin of Species, and the language in Descent of Man is much more clearly in sympathy with Galton and Malthus. Van Engen 48 (liv). Desmond and Moore point out that this distinction has more to do with the desires of contemporary readers than with the text itself. 16 By the time he was writing The Descent of Man Darwin was consciously sympathizing with the Galtons and Malthuses of the scientific world in a way that is less obvious in Origin of Species (DOM intro xliv). Of course, the eugenics movement only existed in embryonic form when Descent of Man was published. Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement, was Darwin’s cousin, and published Hereditary Genius in 1869 just two years before Descent of Man (Desmond and Moore xlvii). While these ideas did not originate with Darwin alone, their resonance in The Descent of Man carries the logics of whiteness as ‘fitness’ through the 20 th century, where Darwin remains by far the most influential and well-known 19 th century scientist. 17 Descent of Man is an important text for understanding how 20 th century American culture took up and imagined Darwinian theories of natural and sexual selection. 16 “The shielding of Darwin’s corpus only increased in the wake of the eugenics horrors of the Second World War; indeed, the desire to divorce Darwin’s ‘pure’ science from any supposed perverted consequences in the twentieth century explains the vehemence of many debunkings of Social Darwinism’s alleged successor, sociobiology. Social Darwinism is decried as a sullying of pure Darwinism: its ‘prejudices’ were superimposed on Darwin’s science by racists, sexists, and eugenicists. Yet . . . . [s]cience is a messy, socially embedded business, Darwin’s particularly so; and while hagiographers may venerate the founding documents of their professions, the historian’s task is to trace the contingent influences in the production of such works. In Darwin’s case, race, Malthusian insights and middle-class mores were central to his theorizing” (lv). In other words, if later readers often recast Darwin’s ideas as safely innocent of eugenics and social Darwinism, allowing evolution to appear as a neutral theory of nonhuman science rather than a politicized theory of the human, this was because the racial “horrors” of the 20 th century produced a tempting ahistorical narrative of an innocent theory of natural and sexual selection maliciously co-opted by “racists, sexists, and eugenicists.” But in Desmond and Moore’s reading, Darwin’s text actually had a lot in common with the Malthusian and Galtonian equation of evolution, white supremacy, and ableist “fitness”. 17 See Lois Cuddy and Claire Roche’s Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940. Van Engen 49 Lennard Davis points out in Enforcing Normalcy that Darwin’s theories were crucial to the eugenics movement, “lay[ing] the foundation for . . . the idea of a perfectible body undergoing progressive improvement,” an “improvement” that was simultaneously racial, gendered, and ableing (7). Davis sees this language of the ‘fittest’ as relegating disabled people to the detritus of evolutionary processes in Darwin’s writing: “Darwin’s ideas serve to place disabled people along the wayside as evolutionary defectives to be surpassed by natural selection” (7). This framing of evolution as a process of gradual death for disabled and nonwhite people who refuse to assimilate is key to why whiteness as fitness is central to sexual selection theory. To reproduce successfully in heterosexual pairings is to survive, and to reproduce successfully is to pass on able, ‘fit’ racial traits to the offspring that ensure survival. 18 Of course, “whiteness” did not exist in Darwin’s time in the way it does in the 21 st century. Rather, modern racial, gender, and sexual concepts emerged in part out of species discourses in the late 19 th century, when “whiteness” was congealing out of the contradictions of “civilized Man,” or implicitly, just “Man.” I am drawing on Gail Bederman’s book Manliness and Civilization here, which points out how Darwin’s ideas catalyzed an evolving set of racial and gendered associations around the term “civilization” in the late 19 th century. In this period, popular American receptions of Darwin’s ideas construed civilization as a racial, gendered, and “millennial” concept: “Civilization denoted a precise stage in human racial evolution – the one following the more primitive stages of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism.’ Human races were assumed to evolve from simple savagery, through violent barbarism, to advance and valuable civilization. But only white races had, as yet, evolved to the civilized stage” (25). “Savage” and “civilized” in 18 Sterilization and other forms of reproductive control over the disabled, people of color, and poor women is also part of the history of ableism in Western cultures. Van Engen 50 this view functioned as gendered racial terms that transformed whiteness into “advanced[ness]” along an evolutionary scale. “Savage” by the late 19 th century functioned as a catch-all term that flattened all non-European peoples into variations on the same basic essence – the “savage” – defined by evolutionary unfitness and temporal distance from white European Man. “Savage” as a racial category erased geographical and cultural differences and replaced them with temporal and fitness distance from “civilized Man.” So Darwin’s theory of natural and sexual selection, epitomized in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” was a crucial part of how in the late 19 th century, Western scientific discourses codified “fitness” into a quality of whiteness and masculinity. Darwin’s works and their popular reception assumed evolution functioned on a cultural and racial level as much as on a species scale of slow, long-term change. This shift from species to race transformed whiteness into a form of able-bodied and –minded fitness; if white people dominated other races, in this line of thinking, it was because they had evolved into the most fit race through gradual improvement. Under the late-19 th century European logics by which conquest became seen as competition for species survival, and whoever won was the “fittest,” this equation between white masculinity and fitness emerged as a new way of scientifically accounting for the radical material and political disparities among races, nations, and genders that Europeans were responsible for in the first place. Not empire, genocide, slavery, and class exploitation, but a benevolent faith in their own racial ‘fitness’ justified Europeans’ governance of those they found less ‘fit.’ This idea of able white masculinity as fitness, as I will argue, depended on heterosexuality, reproduction, and the gender binary as much as on Victorian conceptions of masculinity as aggressiveness and physical and mental prowess. In order for (as the logic went) the ‘white race’ to evolve over successive generations and become what Europeans believed was Van Engen 51 the fittest, most ‘advanced’ people on the planet, marriage, reproduction, and heterosexuality had to function as mechanisms for reproducing the race as much as reproducing the family. This is why the eugenics movement would consider masculinity in women, femininity in men, homosexuality, intersex people, and interracial sex as dangerous to white fitness as disabilities. The ‘savage’’s distance from Europeans, The Descent of Man suggests, was evidenced by his gender, sexual, cultural, and ability divergence from white European upper-class norms. I am interested in this moment toward the end of Darwin’s career (when he was writing Descent of Man) and at the beginnings of the eugenics movement (when Galton was writing but had not yet coined the word “eugenics”) because this moment in the history of Western science consolidated many of the links between race, gender, sexuality, species, and ability American culture is still working through. Darwin was a complex thinker, and there is a tension in his writing between moments of eugenically-sympathetic language and moments where he is more invested in sprawling, multidirectional, nonhierarchical models of growth through random mutation . I am most interested in Darwin’s teleological moments in The Descent of Man, because I believe they have helped American culture intertwine whiteness, heterosexuality, fitness, and the human in their contemporary intersecting forms. These logics are more present in The Descent of Man than in other Darwin texts – for example, in the Origin of Species chapter on sexual selection and in Darwin’s studies on orchids. 19 The Descent of Man is where Darwin made his case for human 19 See Devin Griffiths, “Flattening the World: Natural Theology and the Ecology of Darwin’s Orchids.” Van Engen 52 evolution and for seeing human races as biological subspecies. 20 21 So when I argue that Darwin’s teleological racial-species hierarchies have saturated 20 th century American culture, I am referring to the proto-eugenical logics within The Descent of Man, not necessarily to all of Darwin’s oeuvre in the same way. How under Darwin’s name did certain ideas about race, gender, sexuality, species, and ability get transmitted to twentieth century American literary culture under the heading of “survival of the fittest”? 1.2 Evolutionary Futures and Colonial Time What does “survival of the fittest” have to do with time? To return to an earlier question, if Descent of Man provides a model of political futurity, what does it propose moving from and towards? To answer this question, I examine Darwin’s models of futurity and pastness alongside the temporal logics of colonial anthropology. I begin with Elizabeth Grosz’s Time Travels, a collection of essays that uses Darwin to argue for a feminist theory oriented toward futurity, 20 Descent of Man also validated the status of white gentleman Victorian scientists. Desmond and Moore point out that “While promoting a Malthusian ruthlessness, Darwin, the reclusive patriarch, cocooned with his inherited fortune, never had to compete himself…. In the Descent of Man he effectively justified a body of rich intellectuals, freed from daily work, gentlemen (not women) whose status gave science its imprimatur, and who could contribute to the progress of mind. The book lent evolutionary credentials to Victorian middle-class gains, not to mention sexual, ethnic and nationalist rankings” (liii-liv). The text is full of careful tiptoeing around the sensibilities of white gentlemen who needed to be reassured that their nonhuman heritage was not going to endanger their comfortable place atop racial, imperial, and capitalist world systems. 21 Even if those attitudes were widespread or almost unquestioned among European cultures in the mid 19 th century, and even if 19 th century science studies seems to accept those views as inevitable, they were not. Contemporary authors and scientists of color, like American black political leaders Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass, challenged Darwin’s (and, even more so, his polygenist contemporaries’) eugenically-sympathetic racial logics in print (Douglass “The Claims of the Negro,” Delany Principia of Ethnology). See also Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science. Darwin’s work may compare favorably against the extremism of scientific slavery apologists like Nott, Gliddon, and Agassiz, but there are alternatives to the coloniality of Western science: indigenous peoples had the right to represent themselves in science rather than being represented by someone Desmond and Moore admit “never really knew” them (xxxix). I am not arguing for an ahistorical reading of Descent of Man – I am simply arguing for a historical reading that is not exclusively limited to the circle of other white male thinkers. Van Engen 53 pleasure, and the biological. Grosz’s arguments organize feminism around a futurity open to indeterminacy and change, reconsiders ‘nature’ as a dynamic site of “transformation and upheaval” rather than the raw substrate of culture (8), and espouses a kind of “sexual difference” inherited from Irigarayan feminism. Grosz is interested in Darwin’s imagination of the political “unknown – what is new, what might not have been” (1). Her call for a reexamination of the nonhuman resonates my interest in the nonhuman world as a world of imaginative relation to human genders and sexualities, and I am enthusiastic about her reconceptualization of biology as more than a metonym for unmediated essence. Where Grosz turns to Darwin as a philosophical source for her orientation toward an indeterminate future, however, I depart from her line of thought. Grosz does not see proto- eugenical sympathies in Darwin’s work, but a series of “movements of difference, bifurcation, and becoming that characterize all forms of life” (17). The theory of evolution is useful to Grosz as a source of open-ended futurity, not as teleology that subsumes futurity into linear progress or hierarchy: [Darwin’s] work develops an antihumanist . . . understanding of biological dynamics which refuses to assume that the temporal movement forward can be equated with development or progress. His work affords us an understanding of the productivity, the generative surprise, that the play of repetition and pure difference – the ongoing movement of biological differences and their heritable reproduction through slight variation, which he affirms as ‘individual variation’ – effects the becoming of species. 17-18 For Grosz, the potential of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in which mutations can transform life in unpredictable ways offers a model of nondeterminative futurity– a beautiful framing of political life. Evolution in this reading is the difference between being and becoming, and Van Engen 54 grounds philosophies of becoming in the nonhuman world. To evolve is not necessarily to progress toward an ideal form of whiteness, masculinity, or humanness, if this is the case. Gillian Beer likewise reads in Darwin a model of growth and antiprogressive profusion that complicates the rigid life taxonomies and static hierarchicalism that Darwin’s polygenist opponents upheld. Like Grosz, Beer argues that the forward motion implied by evolution cannot be reduced to a singular direction or a vertical hierarchy: Evolutionism has been so imaginatively powerful precisely because all its indications do not point one way. . . . [T]he ‘ascent’ or ‘descent’ of man may follow the same route but the terms suggest very diverse evaluations of the experience. The optimistic ‘progressive’ reading of development can never expunge that other insistence that extinction is more probable than progress . . . . 6 Beer argues that Darwin’s view of life in Origin of Species “eschews the simplicity of hierarchy. Neither the ladder nor the pyramid is a useful model for him” (93). Beer and Grosz see natural selection as a radically decentralizing theory of life that would seem to preclude associating ‘survival of the fittest’ with particular human genders, races, or body types. But what I find puzzling about this account of Darwin’s futurity is precisely its linearity: there can be ascent or descent along the “same route,” there can be progress or regression, but not multiple directions, and not the kind of horizontal relationality that produces egalitarian ontologies of life. Evolution does “not point one way,” but the way Beer describes this phenomenon implies that there can only be two ways. There can be movement in several directions, and forward movement is not a given, true, but toward what and away from what do Darwin’s metaphors suggest this futurity works? The answer, I believe, is white ‘Civilized’ masculinity, which in The Descent of Man he construes as full humanness. Van Engen 55 Theories of natural and sexual selection are theories of time as much as of species. In order to come to his conclusions about ‘survival of the fittest,’ Darwin analyzed differences among contemporarily co-existing animal species and using those differences to make claims about the history of previously-existing animal species. He makes this underlying logic explicit in Descent of Man, a logic not unique to Darwin but certainly championed by his work: “The lower members in a group give us some idea how the common progenitor was probably constructed” (55). In other words, if a researcher wanted to know what pre-homo-sapien human ancestors looked like, he (white male researchers) should examine what Western scientists considered “lower” forms of contemporary human life. The resulting vision of human ancestry is already pre-conditioned by a view of whiteness and masculinity as evolutionary success. Descent of Man uses this logic to explain human evolution. In a familiar colonial anthropological move, Darwin explains the history of how human physical differences arose by surveying, cataloguing, and analyzing what he sees as physical differences among contemporarily-existing human people of different races – usually colonized and indigenous peoples. He writes, “Judging from the habits of savages and of the greater number of the Quadrumana, primeval men, and even their ape-like progenitors, probably lived in society” (83). Of course, the very ‘cataloguing’ of physical differences through the discourses of ‘science’ is what produces race as physical, visual difference in the first place. 22 What I’m interested in is the all-too-familiar colonial move of drawing data from differences in the present and making claims about how things were in the past. My analysis here is influenced by Johannes Fabian’s argument in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Objects that colonial knowledge structures map temporal 22 See Poole’s Vision, Race, and Modernity, and the research of Morton, Nott, and Gliddon. Van Engen 56 difference onto geographical and spatial difference. Fabian argues that anthropology (and, by extension, colonial disciplines more generally) operates through a “denial of coevalness” which he defines as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (31). In other words, in order to create knowledge about the history of European cultures, white anthropologists produced nonwhite peoples existing in the present with the researchers as “primitive,” as relics of a white past rather than contemporary modern cultures temporally coeval with Europeans. This colonial logic that transforms geographic or cultural distance into temporal distance is an explicit premise of Darwin’s methodology. In a section analyzing differences in beauty and marriage customs among human cultures, Darwin states, “[W]e are chiefly concerned with primeval times, and our only means of forming a judgment on this subject is to study the habits of existing semi-civilised and savage nations” (640). And, in a passage I cited above explaining his theory of developmental reversion, he claims, “The lower members in a group give us some idea of how the common progenitor was probably constructed” (55). In other words, existing nonEuropean and disabled peoples give Darwin evidence for what European peoples looked like in the evolutionary past, according to the logic that white European civilizations are more ‘advanced’ or evolved than the peoples they colonized, enslaved, and then construed as ‘savage’. In order to make claims about how human beings evolved from other species, Darwin drew evidence from contemporarily existing nonEuropean people, interpreted them as the past of white European cultures’ present, and extrapolated backwards more broadly to human kinship with nonhuman species. This was as true for disability as it was for race – Darwin’s ideas about evolutionary regression are based in examples that today we would call mental or physical disabilities. The theory of evolution is the broader, planet-wide context for Fabian’s theory of Van Engen 57 colonial time, and Darwin’s theory of evolution would not exist without the colonial temporalities Fabian identifies that make Darwin’s contribution to Western science a theory of race and ability as well as a theory of species. Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot be a viable model for a theory of political futurity because of the coloniality of time and the racial and ableist logics that form the fabric of his theory of natural and sexual selection in Descent of Man. Grosz and Beer read Darwin as a non-progressive, non-teleological thinker of evolutionary time and radical futurity that precluded readings of his theories as eugenical or anthropocentric. However, the potential of futurity and growth they see in Darwin takes place on the foundation of a broader colonial-racial temporalization of difference that transforms white able humanness into an evolutionary apex toward which all other forms of life flow uphill, like a weird reverse gravitational pull. The problem with seeing Darwin as a theorist of antiprogressive futurity or change is this tying together of whiteness, civilization, masculinity, and ability under the logics by which European men assumed they were the most evolved forms of all life and then applied that assumption to the 19 th century biologies and anthropologies they themselves created. Descent of Man produces a kind of dual directionality that can contain evolution or regression, toward or away from ‘civilized Man’ as the ‘fittest’ to survive. The language of futurity itself is compromised to in discourses of evolution because of the way that Darwin’s links between whiteness, masculinity, and ability in Descent of Man cast a shadow over what he could imagine as ‘evolved’ or ‘less evolved,’ ‘higher’ or ‘lower’, future or past. 1.3 Race, Gender, and Animal Beauty So far this chapter has been concerned with the racial and ability modes of the theory of evolution that are relevant to both natural and sexual selection. But now I turn to questions of gender and sexuality that are specific to the theory of sexual selection as it is most fully Van Engen 58 expressed in The Descent of Man. Darwin’s colonial and eugenical trajectories that subsume white masculinity into ‘fitness’ and survival require very specific forms of sexuality and beauty to continue reproducing ‘civilized Man’. The comparative rhetorical strategies in The Descent of Man offer a wealth of insight into the late 19 th century European conceptions of beauty, gender, and heterosexuality that still adhere to “survival of the fittest” in American culture today. A series of gendered and racialized aesthetics make Darwin’s transformation of whiteness into fitness possible in The Descent of Man, particularly the aesthetics of birds. The Descent of Man contains a whopping 160 pages on the plumage, coloration, mating dances, nesting habits, and songs of birds, which function as vehicles for Victorian valuations of gender, sexuality, and race. Birds epitomize the kinds of animal aesthetics Darwin is interested in: “On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have” (408). Birds’ senses of beauty closely resemble European beauty ideals and closely approach his conception of the “human,” if the “we” in this passage speaks to Victorian audiences. Darwin derives this aesthetic kinship primarily from comparisons between birds and human women: “This is shewn by our enjoyment of the singing of birds, and by our women, both civilized and savage, decking their heads with borrowed plumes, and using gems which are hardly more brilliantly colored than the naked skin and wattles of certain birds” (408). Here, birds are similar to European beauty ideals because women’s fashions at the time were characterized by display and ornamentation, and also involved incorporating actual bird feathers into dresses and hats in ways that resemble birds’ feather patters. However, not all birds appeared beautiful to Victorian audiences. Descent of Man’s aestheticization of bird and human women racialized beauty according to 19 th century European Van Engen 59 ideals through an extended series of analogies between animal genders and human aesthetics Darwin found strange. Darwin argues that seemingly ugly bird ornaments bear the same distant relationship to European beauty ideals as do nonEuropean cultural practices of piercing and scarring: “[W]hat are we to think of the dull-coloured comb of the condor, which does not appear to us in the least ornamental?” (479). His answer is that while condors’ “knobs and various fleshy appendages” do not at first appear beautiful, his readers should defamiliarize their senses of beauty through comparison to nonwestern human cultures’ vastly different aesthetics: “[W]e remember that with savage races of man various hideous deformities – deep scars on the face with the flesh raised into protuberances, the septum of the nose pierced by sticks or bones, holes in the ears and lips stretched widely open – are all admired as ornamental” (479). These comparisons between condors’ heads and “savage races’” practices of body modification distances both condors and nonEuropean people from the human by estranging them all from the European beauty ideals that more conventionally beautiful birds resemble. Both condors and “savage races” here become associated with “hideous deformities” rather than the “taste for the beautiful” that he uses as a positive comparison with other birds. This racialized concept of what is ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ determines an animal’s evolutionary position by comparatively evaluating its beauty in terms of European aesthetics. But not all animals are the same. Darwin’s comparisons imply that only vertebrate animals are capable of appreciating beauty: [The sense of beauty] has been declared to be peculiar to man. I refer here only to the pleasure given by certain colours, forms, and sounds, and which may fairly be called a sense of the beautiful; with cultivated men such sensations are, however, intimately associated with complex ideas and trains of thought. When we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his Van Engen 60 graceful plumes or splendid colours before the female . . . it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner. (115) Darwin here is taking the position, very controversial at the time, that birds can appreciate beauty and experience desire, not just humans. And this involves a concomitant implication that birds have more complex ideas than previously supposed, complicating scientific teleologies that link whiteness, humanness, and masculinity with fitness. Birds have the potential in this passage to perform gender and sexual forms that Europeans found pleasing and analogical to their own experiences. Yet to make this argument Darwin analogizes bird desire to the beauty senses of nonEuropean peoples in a way that elevates birds while relegating nonEuropean peoples to the subhuman. Birds can appreciate physical beauty because nonwhite peoples also have differing beauty standards than European ones (and by implication are similarly distant from white humanness), the logic goes: “Patterns of this kind are employed by even the lowest savages as ornaments; and they have been developed through sexual selection for the adornment of some male animals” (115). The “pleasure thus derived from vision and hearing” is shared across human and nonhuman species, Darwin argues. He attempts to defamiliarize European tastes by contrasting them with nonEuropean cultures’ differing beauty ideals in the most condescending way possible: “The taste for the beautiful, at least as far as female beauty is concerned, is not of a special nature in the human mind; for it differs widely in the different races of man . . . . Judging from the hideous ornaments, and the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it might be argued that their aesthetic faculty was not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, as in birds” (115-6). There is a curious logical slide in this passage between arguing that the capacity to appreciate beauty is not the exclusive province of humans because “savages” have Van Engen 61 differing beauty tastes, and arguing that “savages” do not have the capacity to appreciate beauty and are not fully human because they do not have the capacity to appreciate what Darwin considers beauty. It is not surprising perhaps that Darwin suspends nonwhite, nonwestern peoples in a nebulous space that is somewhat human and somewhat not human, nor is it surprising that 19 th century racial-species logics were contradictory. And of course the birds themselves do not bear out the gendered and racial stratification that Darwin attempts to uphold. 23 What I am drawing attention to here is the way that Darwin’s shifting definition of the “human” hinges on a European-specific sense of “beauty,” or a capacity to experience pleasure when confronted with what Europeans consider “beauty.” This is what allows birds to appear more human than people of color in Descent of Man. This European-specific definition of beauty and the way it is used to legislate the ‘human’ furthermore hinges on images of female beauty, masculine appreciation thereof, and the heterosexual reproductive system on which the theory of sexual selection hangs. Whiteness, humanness, European beauty ideals, and heterosexual desire intertwine into a shifting constellation within the logics of ‘survival of the fittest.’ Because Darwin’s definition of beauty is highly gender- and racially-specific and dependent on Victorian sexual vocabularies, Descent of Man legislates species hierarchies through their comparative distance or proximity to European hetero-patriarchal gender, sexual, and beauty ideals. This defining of evolutionary progress according to the ability to experience pleasure when confronted with European ideals of beauty places vertebrate animals and human people of color into a shared but not equal or 23 In the species he’s interested in, male birds appear to be much more strikingly ornamented than female birds, which has the potential to upend the European gender and beauty ideals on which the theory of sexual selection depends. He recuperates this potential disruption through a language of female “coy[ness],” “passiv[ity],” and choosiness (257). See Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow. Van Engen 62 equivalent ontological orbit around the “human.” In fact, Darwin’s sense of beauty, pleasure, desire, gender, and the “human” is so European-specific that he is more willing to accept aesthetic kinship (and therefore species kinship) with brightly colored birds than with nonEuropean peoples. Darwin’s racialized descriptions of ‘savages’ as closer to vertebrate mammals and practicing less evolved genders and sexualities than Europeans is a central rhetorical strategy in his explanation of sexual selection theory. Descent of Man performs a strange series of logical pirouettes in order to validate human kinship with birds, monkeys, deer, and other nonhuman species, while also validating the racialized anxieties of his white male Victorian audience. In one telling place where he engages these skeptics, Darwin acknowledges that his conclusions will be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Feugians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind – such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch… 689 Darwin’s moment of recognition of human kinship here is entangled with a racialized feeling of “astonishment” and tempered by his imagination that the south American people he was encountering were his “ancestors,” not his contemporary neighbors. Seeing indigenous peoples whose aesthetic practices are very different from his (“bedaubed with paint,” yet strangely interpreted as “possess[ing] hardly any arts”), Darwin must conclude that they are distant from his status as a ‘civilized’ European man, and therefore relics of his own evolutionary-racial Van Engen 63 ‘past.’ To have nonEuropean beauty and gender ideals in this sense is to become “like wild animals” or like European “ancestors.” Descent of Man manages the potentially distasteful reactions of his Victorian readers to being evolutionarily related to indigenous South Americans by deflecting the question of inter- racial kinship with the question of human-animal kinship. Darwin encourages readers to take comfort in the fact that they are related not just to ‘savages’ but also to monkeys who display apparently more palatable forms of relation to Europeans: He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. 689 Here, Darwin proposes that the idea of kinship with nonhuman mammals should ease the “distast[e]” white Victorian readers experience at the idea of kinship with nonEuropean human beings. The “savage”’s lack of humanity is evidenced not only by his strange aesthetics but also by his presumed failure to uphold the masculine Victorian ideals of fatherhood, marriage, and family (“practices infanticide,” “treats his wives like slaves,” “knows no decency”). In suggesting he would “as soon” share kinship relations with “heroic little monkey[s]” than with a “savage”, Darwin implicitly frames nonhuman vertebrate mammals as closer to humanness than indigenous South Americans. Descent of Man demonstrates human kinship with certain nonhuman animals by a cognitive estrangement process that relied on white British perceptions Van Engen 64 of nonEuropean peoples as already distant, hardly kin. Read this way, the project of Descent of Man could be read as a diversion from 19 th century European debates on kinship between human races toward comparatively more palatable European intimacies with birds and monkeys that supposedly displayed more sympathetic gender, sexual, and beauty senses. Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” unravels the naturalized linkage between “Man” and “the human” Darwin is drawing on in his comparisons between monkeys and indigenous South Americans. Wynter argues that the advent of the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, and the colonial era in Europe ushered in a very specific, local genre of the human, secular “Man,” that has been “overrepresented” as the human itself. Wynter’s essay provincializes this genre of the human, and shows how within this colonial assemblage indigenous peoples and black diasporic people were made to function as the nonhuman, irrrational foil to a fully human, rational European “Man.” She shows how ‘Man’ was co-constitutive with the rise of Western science, colonialism, and slavery, and argues that Western science has used “rationality” to delineate humans, animals, Europeans, “Indians/Negroes,” colonizers, colonized, scientists, and laypeople (306). 24 In the invention of Western science, in other words, European scientists determined what was “rational” or “human” and what wasn’t by mapping irrationality and nonhumanness onto the rest of humanity and then building theories of species and race up from that premise. Wynter historicizes how Western 24 Full passage from Wynter: “It is, therefore, as the new rational/irrational line (drawn between the fundamental ontological distinction of a represented nonhomogeneity of between divinely created-to-be-rational humans, on the one hand, and divinely created-to-be irrational animals, on the other) comes to be actualized in the institutionalized differences between European settlers and Indians/Negroes, that the figure of the Negro as the projected missing link between the two sides of the rational/irrational divide will inevitably come to be represented in the first ‘scientific’ taxonomy of human populations, that of Linnaeus, as the population that, in contrast to the European (which is governed by laws), is governed by caprice (Linnaeus 1735). So irrational that it will have to be governed by others” (Wynter 306). Van Engen 65 science defined itself through the dehumanization of indigenous and black diasporic peoples in order to produce a human subject, “Man,” who then became the apex of Darwin’s “organic scale” of life. So when Darwin writes that “Man” shares a sense of beauty and a relation of kinship with birds and monkeys, “Man” is a very European-specific conception of the “human” both within the text and in the material history that made possible the invention of Western science itself (689). I am more interested than Wynter in the function of gender, sexuality, ability, and beauty within this history of race and Western science. The centrality of proto-eugenics, antimiscegenation panics, and sexual selection theory in the late 19 th century means that normative European forms of binary gender, heterosexuality, and able bodies were necessary for – literally – reproducing this genre of the human and ensuring its fitness for survival. To return to Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization supplements Wynter’s theories by suggesting how gender and sexuality were crucial mechanisms within shifting 19 th century European ideas of race. For Bederman, “pronounced sexual differences” in men and women of different races were what demarcated the “savage” from the “civilized” man or woman, the ‘irrrational’ from the ‘rational’ person in Wynter’s terms: “[A]s civilized races gradually evolved toward perfection, they naturally perfected and deepened the sexual specialization of the Victorian doctrine of spheres. ‘Savage’ (that is, nonwhite) races, on the other hand, had not yet evolved pronounced sexual differences – and, to some extent, this was precisely what made them savage” (28). Through these sexual-gendered ideas of racial differentiation, civilized Man appeared as “the most manly ever evolved,” whereas “gender differences among savages seemed to be blurred” when they did not measure up to Victorian ideals (25). Hence, the gender binary, heterosexuality, masculine aggression, feminine passivity, and able-bodied mobility all function as mechanisms Van Engen 66 of race in Descent of Man as they demonstrate to Darwin’s audiences a person’s location on a scale of “civilized” to “savage.” 25 1.4 The Trouble with Hermaphrodites Within the comparative universe of Descent of Man, which aligns nonhuman mammals and birds with non-European senses of beauty, my entry point is the place of hermaphroditic, asexually reproducing, androgynous, or otherwise nonbinary animals within this gendered, sexual, and abled structure of evolutionary ‘fitness’. If normative European forms of binary gender, heterosexuality, and able bodies were necessary for – literally – reproducing the genre of the human, then what does Darwin make of the myriad invertebrate animals that do not fit this paradigm? Within Descent of Man, Darwin’s rhetorics change when he discusses invertebrates. Instead of comparisons between human ‘savages’ and vertebrate mammals, animals like mollusks, starfish, octopi, and sea slugs appear so alien that he cannot imagine racialized human analogies to their behaviors. Within Descent of Man, hermaphroditic invertebrates pose problems to the theory of sexual selection, which relies on archetypes of masculine aggression and feminine passivity. They therefore have the potential to loosen the links Darwin’s legacy has left in American culture between whiteness, reproduction, the gender binary, heterosexuality, and fitness. If sexual selection theory weds Victorian gender-sexual paradigms with racial and species survival, aquatic invertebrates challenge these links because invertebrates constitute 25 See also Deborah Poole’s argument that women, especially colonized non-European women, were frequently central figures in European scientists’ projects of taxonomization. At the very moment when 18 th century sensorial and moral definitions of race “were giving way to a modern – and more visual – understanding of race as fixed biological or physical ‘types,’” gender was a principal vessel though which Europeans “consolidated” their ideas about racial ‘types’ (Vision, Race, and Modernity 87). Van Engen 67 entire lifeworlds not structured by a male/female binary, heterosexual reproduction, or bodily mobility. How do nonbinary genders become stumbling blocks for sexual selection theory, and why are hermaphrodites a problem for a species evolution in these terms? In Descent of Man’s account of sexual selection, species become more and more gender differentiated over generations. For Darwin, “secondary sex characteristics,” or bodily morphological differences used to distinguish a species’ males from females, are reproduced and gradually exaggerated through female animals’ sexual choice. Highly gender dimorphic species, in this light, appear highly evolved, and gender variance will eventually disappear because it is unattractive to heterosexually reproducing animals: “As variations which give to the male a better chance of conquering other males, or of finding, securing, or charming the opposite sex, would, if they happened to arise in the female, be of no service to her, they would not be preserved in her through sexual selection” (Descent of Man 278). So femininity in male animals and masculinity in female animals is so deeply unattractive as to exclude an animal from the dating and reproductive pool. Darwin uses deeply gendered language to describe these gender-inappropriate sexual traits, in this case ‘masculine’ traits in female animals: “conquering,” “charming,” “service,” “securing.” This is more than a linguistic bias toward heterosexuality, and more than a norm. Sexual selection theory ingrains extreme binary gender differentiation into the core of species as a survival mechanism, so that to be gender or sexually variant is to be unfit – to not survive. Joan Roughgarden’s 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People takes the field of evolutionary biology to task for uncritically accepting heteronormative, gender binaristic, and misogynistic assumptions in Darwin’s theories. As an Van Engen 68 evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden finds tropes of heterosexuality and masculine competition overemphasized in studies of animal genders and sexualities: “I find that competitive tooth-and- claw narratives about nature have been greatly exaggerated, that all sorts of friendships occur among animals, many mediated by sexuality, and that many social roles are signaled by gendered bodily symbols. . . . When a gender binary does exist, the difference is usually slight and sometimes reverses gender stereotypes” (Roughgarden 5-6). Roughgarden argues that Darwin dealt with the unmanageable diversity of animal genders and sexualities “by privileging the narrative of the handsome warrior, relegating everything else to exceptions” (Roughgarden 166). She reserves particular vitriol for scientists’ overemphasis on competition, deceit, theft, and mimicry among animals as a form of projecting normative monogamy, masculine aggression, and female passivity onto a wide variety of animal behaviors (Roughgarden 168). 26 Roughgarden backs up my claims about Darwin’s scripting of animal genders and sexualities in terms of Victorian racialized aesthetics with extensive catalogues of animal behaviors drawn from evolutionary biology (although she does not spend much time on the European-specificity of those aesthetics). 27 26 Roughgarden proposes as an alternative to sexual selection the idea of “social selection,” in which animals cooperate (rather than only ever competing) in order to gain access to resources, mating opportunities, and social bonds (Roughgarden 6). She also points out Darwin’s seeming ignorance of homosexuality, gender multiplicity, or any functions of mating aside from reproduction (Roughgarden 167). 27 My critique of Roughgarden is that while she masterfully unwinds Darwin’s gender and sexual logics, she spends no time acknowledging the racial and colonial hierarchies that form the fabric of his theories of natural and sexual selection – and hence the gender and sexual logics that he gifted to the 20 th century. The last half of Evolution’s Rainbow, in fact, makes a fairly standard anthropological move of cataloguing gender and sexual variance among non-European human cultures in order to justify Western human homosexuality and transgender existence. My intervention into Roughgarden’s argument, therefore, is to put gender and sexual critiques of Darwin’s theories of evolution back into contact with racial and colonial critiques of Darwin, which were absolutely inextricable in Descent of Man. Van Engen 69 As Roughgarden suggests, sexual selection theory in Descent of Man operates through an investment in aggressive masculinity, but also requires explicitly focusing attention away from evidence of female animals’ sexual and gendered adaptations. Female animals in this sense cannot appear as ‘fit’ under the lens of sexual selection as male animals, because Darwin’s research methods explicitly privilege male animals’ adaptations: The female often differs from the male . . . The females of most bees are provided with a special apparatus for collecting and carrying pollen, and their ovipositor is modified into a sting for the defence of the larvae and the community. Many similar cases could be given, but they do not here concern us. There are, however, other sexual differences quite unconnected with the primary reproductive organs, and it is with these that we are more especially concerned – such as the greater size, strength, and pugnacity of the male, his weapons of offence or means of defence against rivals, his gaudy coloring and various ornaments, his power of song, and other such characters. (Descent of Man 242, emphasis mine) For the moment I am bracketing the equation of femaleness and maleness with specific reproductive organs, although overall I am invested in de-binarizing and de-cisgendering animal genders. Instead, I am interested in Darwin’s definition of secondary sexual characteristics – the hinge of his entire argument about sexual selection – as masculine characteristics. Not only does he project human masculine aggression and feminine passivity onto animals, selectively ignoring a wide world of gender variance, as Roughgarden points out. He also construes secondary sexual characteristics by definition as masculine traits, which de-sexualizes female animals, dismisses their capacity for labor (“collecting and carrying pollen”) and “defence” (note that he says “of the larvae and the community” rather than “against rivals”), and ignores the evolutionary Van Engen 70 ingenuity required to evolve specific bodily shapes. Not surprisingly, this results in a circular argument that male animals are “more modified” than females through sexual selection, because “the males of almost all animals hav[e] stronger passions” (Descent of Man 256). Darwin cannot conceive of female animals as sexual beings rather than reproductive beings in the ways he imagines male animals experiencing desire and sexuality. Sexual selection, gendered fitness, and sexuality itself are by definition masculine projects within The Descent of Man. Darwin’s gendered sense of fitness requires bodily ability, mobility, and sensory perception as much as it does stereotypes of feminine passivity. Masculine sexual agency and aggressiveness – in sexual selection, required for a species to evolve more specialized gendered traits – hinges on the capacity for male bodily mobility and the capacity to immobilize female animals. Darwin is particularly interested in animals that evolve specialized limbs with which the male animal holds the female animal in order to procreate: “When the male has found the female, he sometimes absolutely requires prehensile organs to hold her,” and some species “have their legs and antennae modified in an extraordinary manner for the prehension of the female” (Descent of Man 244). So some species of moths have evolved bodily traits that allow the male animal to immobilize the female animal in order to impregnate her, intertwining mobility, masculinity, sexual violence, and reproduction into a common thread of sexual fitness. Sexual selection requires male sensory perception and female sensory deprivation, as well, in the cases where: “the two sexes follow exactly the same habits of life, [but] the male has the sensory or locomotive organs more highly developed than those of the female” (Descent of Man 244). In animals that display these traits, the main purpose of the male’s extra limbs or eyes is “to prevent the escape of the female before the arrival of other males, or when assaulted by them” (Descent of Man 244). Darwin’s fascination with male animals’ specialized abilities suggests the extent to Van Engen 71 which sexual violence, masculine aggression, gender binaries, and ableism make possible the survival of species within the logics of sexual selection. Darwin primarily applies this gender-binaristic theory of sexual selection to insects and what he terms ‘higher’ species, or vertebrates. But ‘lower’ species – usually marine invertebrates – do not follow this pattern as frequently. Roughgarden points out in Evolution’s Rainbow that aquatic invertebrates like “barnacles, snails, starfish, fan worms, and sea anemones” and many fish species are more likely to be hermaphroditic (30). She argues that “something unusual favors hermaphrodism in plants, on coral reefs, and in the deep sea,” lending support to my argument that aquatic invertebrates in cultural texts are a particularly rich imaginative site for queer, trans, and nonbinary forms of being (Roughgarden 31). Her argument that hermaphroditism is actually “more common” among animal species than sex-separated binary bodies (or “gonochorism”) suggests that Darwin overlooks hermaphroditic animals’ evolutionary success, but might have written their narrative otherwise. In other words, The Descent of Man’s interest in binary gender differentiation is disproportionate and unsupported by wide swaths of the animal kingdom. In the 21 st century, in fact, jellyfish and octopi have thrived in oceanic conditions of pollution and global warming, suggesting that a new, invertebrate-centric narrative of animal genders is timely and overdue (“Sensational Jellyfish”). 28 In Descent of Man’s account of sexual selection, however, the more a species evolves, the more complex and ‘advanced’ it becomes, the more gender dimorphic, patriarchal, and 28 Roughgarden defines “hermaphrodite” as “an individual body who makes both small and large gametes at some point in life,” and distinguishes between simultaneous hermaphrodites (animals who do this at the same time) and sequential hermaphrodites (animals who do this at different or alternating times) (30). She is more interested in sequential hermaphrodites in species like fish that gender-cross multiple times in their lives. Van Engen 72 heterosexual it seems. Less complex forms of life, Darwin argues, more often reproduce asexually or take “androgynous” or “hermaphroditic” forms: With animals belonging to the lower classes, the two sexes are not rarely united in the same individual, and therefore secondary sexual characters cannot be developed. In many cases where the sexes are separate, both are permanently attached to some support, and the one cannot search or struggle for the other. Moreover it is almost certain that these animals have too imperfect senses and much too low mental powers to appreciate each other’s beauty or other attractions, or to feel rivalry. Descent of Man 301 Here, Darwin frames monogendered and asexually reproducing species as “lower classes” of life that have “too low mental powers” to experience binary-gendered heterosexual forms of attraction. To be any gender other than male or female is to be less evolved, undesirable, and distant from the human apex of the evolutionary system. The proto-eugenical logics of this text transform gender nonconformity into reproductive unfitness. Furthermore, this passage construes nonbinary sexual systems as the loss of masculine sexual prowess, the unfortunate inability to comprehend “rivalry” or to “struggle for the other.” Less patriarchal sexual and gender systems, in other words, are undesirable because of their defamiliarization of Western patriarchal, heterosexual, and gender binary norms. Even more, hetero/sexism in this passage depends on mobility, the ability to “search or struggle for the other” rather than being “permanently attached to some support” like mussels and other sessile animals, which marks the centrality of bodily mobility to Darwinian conceptions of masculinity. Darwin’s narration of invertebrate genders and sexualities in The Descent of Man confirms the place of animals with nonbinary gender/sex systems at the bottom of 19 th century scientific life hierarchies that elevate Western gender and sexual norms as the pinnacle of evolution. Van Engen 73 The Descent of Man resolves the problems invertebrate reproduction pose to sexual selection theory by devaluing their aesthetic sensibilities. Essentially, because animals like sea anemones, starfish, mollusks, and nudibranchs do not fit into the binary gender, heterosexual reproduction, and male competition required for sexual selection, Darwin has to argue that they do not experience desire or appreciate beauty like vertebrates do. This, by implication, excludes nonbinary genders and the nonheterosexual sex they have from the capacity for desire or appreciation of beauty. Darwin acknowledges the beauty of many invertebrate animals, which are often “ornamented with the most brilliant tints, or are shaded and striped in an elegant manner.” However, these kinds of beauty cannot be related to sexuality or desire because invertebrate species either do not have binary genders, do not allow for masculine sexual aggression or mobility, or otherwise do not participate in sexual selection: “[W]e may conclude from the reasons already indicated, namely the union of the two sexes in some of these animals, the permanently affixed condition of others, and the low mental powers of all, that such colours do not serve as a sexual attraction, and have not been acquired through sexual selection” (Descent of Man 301). Beautiful coloration and visual display can only incite sexual attraction for Darwin if the animals in question are binarily gendered and if sex takes the form of a competitive male actively searching out passive females to immobilize and then impregnate. Nonbinary-gendered beauty in these animals cannot qualify as sexual ‘fitness’ under this logic. Instead of opening up the challenges that hermaphrodites pose to sexual selection theory, The Descent of Man glosses over the beauty and sexualities of these animals by rating them as mentally incapable of desire. Darwin acknowledges the promising idea that “[i]t is conceivable that two hermaphrodites, attracted by each other’s greater beauty, might unite and leave Van Engen 74 offspring which would inherit their parents’ greater beauty” (Descent of Man 304). However, he quickly walks back this hint of nonbinary desires: But with such lowly-organised creatures this is extremely improbable. Nor is it at all obvious how the offspring from the more beautiful pairs of hermaphrodites would have any advantage over the offspring of the less beautiful, so as to increase in number, unless indeed vigour and beauty generally coincided. We have not here the case of a number of males becoming mature before the females, with the more beautiful males selected by the more vigorous females. If, indeed, brilliant colours were beneficial to a hermaphroditic animal in relation to its general habits of life, the more brightly-tinted individuals would succeed best and would increase in number; but this would be a case of natural and not sexual selection. Descent of Man 304-5 Several things are going on in this analysis. First, Darwin assumes that “lowly-organised” minds cannot experience or desire beauty in the ways that more complex brains can. Second, he assumes that beauty serves no sexual function unless it occurs in binary gendered animals. Third, the passage takes for granted that sexual competitiveness and agency cannot exist in genders other than male within a hetero-patriarchal system. And finally, the text denies beauty and desire period to hermaphroditic animals, which, if they are beautiful, must be accidentally so, and not evolved that way to be sexually attractive in this underwater universe. Darwin adds that choice and agency are meaningless for hermaphrodites: “[a]ll these worm-like animals apparently stand too low in the scale for the individuals of either sex to exert any choice in selecting a partner, or for the individuals of the same sex to struggle together in rivalry” (Descent of Man 306). The section eventually concludes that beautiful colors in invertebrates must be solely for protective purposes if they are not for sexual purposes. Van Engen 75 So failing to adhere to the gender binary, and therefore failing at heterosexuality, feminine passivity, and masculine aggressiveness, constituted a serious threat to evolutionary fitness for invertebrate animals according to The Descent of Man. Hermaphroditic and asexually- reproducing animals failed to become ‘higher’ species in Darwin’s view because they did not practice the kinds of genders, sexualities, or socialities that lent themselves to sexual selection. If binary gender differentiation, masculine aggressiveness, feminine passivity, and bodily mobility were key to becoming more evolved (and were also indicators in colonial anthropology of which peoples were more ‘civilized’ than ‘savage’ 29 ), then nonbinary gender as it manifested in invertebrates had to be relegated to the lower tiers of the species scale in order for sexual selection theory to cohere as a whole. Masculine whiteness cannot be reproduced as the apex of evolutionary fitness if there is no binary gender/sex system on which to base it. And if a species, like barnacles or mussels, lives anchored to a stationary surface or otherwise does not have limbs for locomotion, it is impossible to enact the kind of mobile, aggressive masculinity required in sexual selection theory for species to evolve. To frame the threat hermaphroditic animals and asexual reproduction pose to sexual selection, I turn briefly to Lee Edelman, whose critique of heterosexual reproduction as the figure for hope and futurity is a convenient tool with which to loosen the ties sexual selection theory tightens between heterosexuality, the gender binary, futurity, ability, and survival. In No Future, Edelman argues that queerness has historically been positioned in Western societies as the refusal of a future “for the children,” a wasteful refusal to make more humans that under the logics of evolutionary theory would amount to a death wish (Edelman 3). Evolution through sexual selection provides a handy justification for normative Western genders and sexualities: 29 See Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization Van Engen 76 heterosexuality must exist in order for the human species (and the unmarked whiteness Victorians imagined as the ‘human’) to survive, and nonreproductive sexualities, nonbinary genders, disability, and miscegenation threaten this survival of whiteness as evolutionary fitness. Edelman is not interested in Darwin, nor in disability or race as meaningful elements of sexuality. However, his portrait of reproductive futurity and the immense cultural significance of the Child grafts neatly onto Darwin’s almost desperate investment in certain forms of reproduction, genders, and beauty as mechanisms of evolutionary fitness. Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity offers a useful tool for uncoupling reproduction, futurity, and ability in the discourses surrounding sexual selection. 30 Alison Kafer has linked Edelman’s theory of reproductive futurism to disability in Feminist, Queer, Crip, reflecting frequent stories of strangers who assume that people with disabilities have no future (2). To return to Lennard Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy, the intersectionality of the categories ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ as they appeared in the eugenics movement inspired by Darwin links nonbinary gender, disability, and nonwhite races. According to Davis, eugenicists in the early 20 th century who drew on sexual selection theory “group[ed] together all allegedly ‘undesirable’ traits,” citing one definition of the “unfit” as including “the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess” (Davis 9). So sex workers, mentally disabled people, physically disabled people, the chronically ill, and those who fall by the wayside of state policing all come together under 30 I should mention that I depart from Edelman where he takes the queer critique of reproductive futurity to the end of refusing all politics in general. I am in alignment with Jack Halberstam’s critique of Edelman’s apoliticism and debasement of femininity in The Queer Art of Failure. I think that political imagination is a matter of survival for the queer, trans, racialized, femme, and/or dehumanized forms of life I am interested in in this project. I am using Edelman critically and strategically here. Van Engen 77 the term “unfit.” Davis recounts that the Department of Applied Statistics at University College in London collected data on “‘hermaphroditism, hemophilia, cleft palate, harelip, tuberculosis, diabetes, deaf-mutism, polydactyly (more than five fingers) or brachydactyly (stub fingers), insanity, and mental deficiency’” (Davis 9). It might appear illogical in contemporary terms that these wildly varying “deviations from the norm” were grouped together under the singular heading of “the unfit.” But I want to spotlight the presence of “hermaphroditism” in this list, not to argue that it does not belong in this category alongside physical and mental disabilities, but to explain why it does belong according to the logics of sexual selection theory. Within Descent of Man, hermaphroditism functioned as physical unfitness because it hampered an organism’s ability to reproduce fit offspring in heterosexual, binary-gendered sex acts, hence failing to reproduce human whiteness as fitness. Nonbinary gender – hermaphroditism in Darwin’s terms – functions as a reproductive, sexual, and gendered form of unfitness within sexual selection and therefore constitutes a failure at the nexus of whiteness, binary gender, and heterosexual reproduction. 1.5 Speculative Invertebrate Metaphors In claiming that nonbinary invertebrates do not experience beauty, Darwin’s rhetorics make a tantalizing analogy between invertebrate animals, human femininity, and plants. In a potentially radical trans-species framing of beauty and desire, he hints at nonbinary desires through analogies between humans and invertebrate animals. Essentially, Darwin argues that the beautiful colors of jellyfish cannot be sexually alluring by comparing it to the Victorian ideal of innocent, white feminine beauty and the beauty of autumn trees turning colors. In his view, none of these creatures intentionally create visual displays for sexual purposes: “[T]hough it adds to the beauty of the maiden’s cheek, no one will pretend that it has been acquired for this purpose” Van Engen 78 (Descent of Man 302). Brightly-colored sea slugs, presumably like trees, do not by definition exhibit sexual displays or appreciate their own beauty: “[T]he extreme beauty of the Eolidae (naked sea-slugs) is chiefly due to the biliary glands being seen through the translucent integuments – this beauty probably being of no service to these animals. The tints of the decaying leaves in an American forest are described by every one as gorgeous; yet no one supposes that these tints are of the least advantage to the trees” (Descent of Man 302-3). But why wouldn’t trees experience some form of beauty as part of their sexualities – how can any human observer be certain of that? And why not sea slugs or Victorian women either? I am not trying to make a biological claim about the science of tree reproduction here. Instead, I am pointing out a gap in Darwin’s imaginative logic around invertebrate, nonbinary, feminine, and plant desires as similarly illegible or improper, a gap that queer and feminist readers might imagine into for our own purposes. Darwin has to jump through a convoluted set of hoops in order to account for the vivid colors of jellyfish and sea slugs. In a text deeply invested in animal beauty, this dismissal of invertebrate desires makes little sense. I want to open up this seemingly illegible space in order to excavate nonhuman and nonbinary forms of beauty and desire. Hermaphroditic invertebrate animals within Darwin’s own argument demonstrate the possibility of genders, sexualities, and bodies that do not bear out the gender/sexual systems of evolutionary heterosexual fitness. They threaten the links between masculinity, whiteness, reproduction, and ability that continue to plague dominant American discourses today. In “Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion,” Eva Hayward hints at the gender and sexual indeterminacy of aquatic invertebrates within a broader argument about animal captivity and the politics of human viewership. Citing Rebecca Stott’s study of Victorian aquariums, “Through a Glass Darkly,” Hayward argues that the “transitional sexes” Van Engen 79 and “sexual indeterminacy” of barnacles and other invertebrates, for Victorians, “illustrated a horror of compounded forms, organisms, and sexes woven together in disconcerting ways” (“Sensational Jellyfish” 166). Jellyfish and invertebrates carry with them this sense of sexual and gendered threat to Western hetero-binary reproduction into the 20 th century, along with the rest of the legacy of 19 th century science that adheres to Darwin’s name. Where Hayward examines the possibilities for human encounters with invertebrate animals through visual art, I historicize these encounters within 19 th century biology to contextualize their destabilizing potential. The history of Western science is crucial to understanding how the human came to be understood as separate from the animal, how the human came to be understood as implicitly white, how non-European peoples came to be understood as closer to animals than Europeans, and how the human acquired its modern biologically-inflected contexts of binary gender, heterosexuality, and patriarchy. Some animals within this history function differently than others, as I have argued: the way that Western cultures naturalize heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, and binary gender are indebted to comparisons with certain vertebrate land animals. Whereas mammals and birds tend to confirm these normalized forms of life, as Stott points out, invertebrate sea animals did not offer Victorians reassurance that their ways of life were natural, evolutionarily beneficial, or based in kinship with nonhuman animals. Somehow, aquatic invertebrates registered instead as unnatural and gender deviant. Queer scholars have unpacked the ways that ‘nature’ is a highly constructed human concept and provides no reliable basis for arguing that some human genders and sexualities are more natural than others. 31 However, only certain kinds of nonhuman animals allowed Western culture to 31 See Morton’s Ecology without Nature, Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender, and Halberstam’s “Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation.” Van Engen 80 naturalize human heterosexuality, monogamy, and binary gender. While queer theorists have historically responded to this problem by separating human genders, sexualities, and races from animals and science, it is also possible to trace different genealogies, different imaginative (rather than naturalized or essentialized) relations between humans and the nonhuman world. It would be difficult to build up our current architecture of heterosexual, patriarchal, white, and gender-binaristic norms through analogies to invertebrate sea animals rather than land-dwelling vertebrates. I want to acknowledge here Elizabeth Grosz’s theorization of Darwin in connection with feminism. Grosz argues that feminist studies has made a mistake in separating human culture and society from all relation to the biological and the nonhuman, which she understands not as “static fixity,” but as a field “imbued with activity, with . . . forces and unpredictabilities” (Time Travels 8). Grosz proposes a theoretical turn to Darwin as a way of redressing this field history of an allergic reaction to all things nonhuman (Time Travels 30). I agree that gender and sexuality studies have much to learn from a turn to Darwin as a theorist of gender and sexuality, but I disagree with the way Grosz uses Darwin, especially with her uncritical use of sexual selection theory and sexual difference. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Grosz argues that Darwin’s sexual selection theory and Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference both bridge nature and culture, and together have the potential to reinvigorate contemporary feminism. Sexual difference, a concept from 1980s French feminist theory, argues that the corporeal, cultural, and social differences between cisgender men and cisgender women are absolute, irreducible, universal, the primary form of human difference that supersedes all others (Becoming Undone 145). For Grosz, this system of anatomically-grounded binary difference finds scientific basis in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, insofar as both Irigaray and Darwin Van Engen 81 see sexual dimorphism and heterosexual reproduction as the engines driving all life on earth and all other forms of difference in terms of both biological reproduction and cultural creativity (Becoming Undone 143). And it is true that these concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection have much in common. However, Grosz’s reading of Darwin as a theorist confuses the problem with the solution. The last few decades of intersectional feminist theory have critiqued sexual difference as white- centric and misleadingly universalizing, and queer theory and transgender studies have put the concept of sexual difference to rest as heteronormative, essentializing, and transphobic. 32 Instead of rehearsing this field history in detail, I will instead point out that Grosz’s joining of Irigaray and Darwin, sexual difference and sexual selection, depends on an elision of precisely the concept I have been tracing through The Descent of Man and through this dissertation: the erotic life of nonbinary genders. While Grosz’s claim that Darwin makes biology dependent on taste and aesthetics is intriguing (Becoming Undone 141), her concept of sexual appeal and taste seem to rest exclusively on increasing binary gender differentiation, in addition to leaving unchallenged The Descent of Man’s Eurocentric conception of beauty. She writes, “Sexual selection privileges some members of one sex within a species over others in the struggle to attain desirable sexual partners,” which over time “differentiate[s] the sexes more and more from each other in appearance,” and the cycle repeats (Becoming Undone 158). Essentially, Grosz’s argument for marrying Irigaray and Darwin to connect feminism with biology rests on an 32 See Crenshaw “Mapping the Margins,” Lorde Sister Outsider, Butler Undoing Gender, Salamon Assuming a Body, Prosser Second Skins. An earlier chapter in Becoming Undone goes so far as to make this unambiguously transphobic claim: “However queer, transgendered, and ethnically identified one might be, one comes from a man and a woman, one remains a man or a woman, even in the case of gender-reassignment or the chemical and surgical transformation of one sex into the appearance of another” (Becoming Undone 109). Van Engen 82 equation between binary gender differentiation and sexual attractiveness, an equation that has driven transphobic stereotypes that gender nonconformity is by definition unattractive for a very long time. Instead of endorsing this equation of binary gender and sexual attractiveness, I want to draw out of Darwin’s work the rich productiveness of imagination as a mode of relation between human and nonhuman animals – specifically, the register of imagination that is animal analogies. Devin Griffiths recently argued in The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins that Darwin’s work marked a shift in 19 th century Western science by which narrative, analogy, comparison, and imagination became a crucial part of the scientific method rather than unscientific processes proper to art, culture, and society. For Griffiths, “Darwin recognizes the productive relationship between imaginative labor and the extension of knowledge” (Griffiths 211). While this analogical method has dropped out of most modern scientific writing, I see Darwin’s kind of imaginative engagement with animals through analogy as a fruitful way of engaging with the nonhuman world deeply in touch with contemporary queer studies of animality (Chen and Luciano). Whereas animal studies proper is invested in decentering the human and avoiding anthropomorphization and identification (like much of Hayward’s work), Griffiths (following Jane Bennett) argues that anthropomorphism is not necessarily anthropocentrism, if personification, analogy, and narrative can help reveal something about the nonhuman world and its agency (Griffiths 254). Roughgarden likewise argues that nonhuman animals are more than a teleological justification for human behavior, and states that “parallels can sometimes be drawn between how people behave and how animals behave, as though animals offered biological cultures resembling ours. I’m quite willing to anthropomorphize about animals” (Roughgarden Van Engen 83 4). Putting Roughgarden into conversation with Griffiths, I am interested in how humans imagine animals in order to re-imagine ourselves through analogies, because all forms of anthropomorphization are not equal – especially in speculative genres like science fiction that form the basis for the rest of this dissertation. Centralizing the imagination as an interface between humans and animals puts my work squarely under the umbrella of what Michael Lundblad describes as animality studies, which is different from animal studies in that it “prioritize[s] questions of human cultural politics . . . in relation to” the politics of human-animal relations, rather than abstracting and disembodying the human as one unified entity (Lundblad 12). Weaving together Griffiths’ reading of Darwin’s imagination with Roughgarden and Hayward’s theories of trans animality, my project embarks on a different set of analogies between humans and animals, not the land-dwelling vertebrates evolutionary biology sees as most closely related to humans. Mammals especially have most frequently formed the basis for comparisons between humans and animals in political arguments over what constitutes natural or proper human genders, sexualities, and races. For example, proponents of marriage equality in the U.S. have pointed to bisexual bonobos and dolphins as evidence that human queerness ought to be seen as natural or normal. However, comparisons with large mammals, especially apes, have also historically been used to support racist scientific theories that supported American slavery and segregation. Mel Chen points out in Animacies that the “long history of British and European associations of apes and monkeys with African subjects, fed and conditioned by the imperialist culture of colonial relations” and “an abiding evolutionary mapping which temporally projected non-European peoples and nonwhite racialized groups onto earlier stages of human evolution,” effectively tinges representations of large apes in contemporary American cultural Van Engen 84 production with the history of Western racism and racist science (Chen 97). Animal analogies are not neutral or apolitical even within the realm of human cultural politics. However, animal analogies need not only be drawn from land vertebrates and mammals. Invertebrate sea creatures like jellyfish, squid, and sea slugs are evolutionarily far-removed from humans and at first glance bear little bodily similarity to humans (“Sensational Jellyfish” 177). But it is a very queer kind of kinship to feel more connected with biologically distantly-related starfish and jellyfish than with biologically closely-related apes, ungulates, and other mammals. If queer theory has taught us anything, it is that chosen family is just as valid as biological family, and this insight sheds light on human connections with the animal kingdom as well as human families of origin. Whereas Grosz centralizes human straight cisgender women’s connections with sexually dimorphic animal species, because she sees gender binarism as the limit of sexual attractiveness, I prioritize connections between trans, gendernonconforming, and nonbinary human and hermaphroditic invertebrate animals. I am calling for queer/trans kinships with nonhuman animals in the spirit of what Hayward and Weinstein call “tranimalities,” which “have the transformative power to interrupt humanism and its sexually differentiated legacy” (Hayward and Weinstein 201). I am indebted in this argument to Lundblad’s 2013 book The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Lundblad argues that, historically, ideas about “animality” drove early 20 th century American negotiations of race, gender, sexuality, empire, and capitalism in what he calls the “discourse of the jungle.” But he points out that this particular kind of animality depends on an equation between what Darwin considered “‘higher animals’ – such as nonhuman primates” and what Darwin construed as “‘lower humans’” – which The Descent of Man categorizes as Afro-diasporic peoples, indigenous peoples, and disabled people, Van Engen 85 among others (Lundblad 22). In the rhetorics required for Darwin to make this move, it is most frequently vertebrate animals, mammals, birds, and reptiles that Darwin uses to dehumanize peoples of color and disabled people through colonial comparisons, not invertebrates or single- celled organisms. This has affected the way 20 th century American science fiction represents race, species, and gender. Invertebrates, sea creatures, and other animals that Darwin would have considered “lower” function much differently within the life hierarchies American culture has inherited from 19 th century science. Like water sliding off a slick coating, the masculine aggression, gender binaries, and racialized human analogies that populate The Descent of Man’s descriptions of vertebrate animals do not adhere to aquatic invertebrates in the same way. The invertebrate animality they embody renders them resistant to white hetero-patriarchal gender and sexual imaginations. These simpler animals so utterly confounded Victorian scientists’ expectations of what (hetero)sexuality, (patriarchal, binary) gender, and (white) race ought to be that Darwin could not imagine human analogies for their behavior. These are the imaginative analogies this dissertation investigates. What alternate conceptions of desire, beauty, pleasure, and sexuality do animals like anemones, barnacles, and starfish offer? What might an aesthetics of snails look like? What models of desire, attraction, beauty, and pleasure emerge from the sexualities and genders of nonbinary invertebrate animals, many of whom live in water, that do not depend on the human gender binary or heteronormativity? These are the questions that the remaining chapters of this dissertation will take up through readings of 20 th and 21 st century American speculative fiction. The monsters and aliens in the science fiction texts I examine embody and reimagine the kinds of invertebrate aquatic nonbinary animalities Darwin does not fully account for in The Descent of Man. These monsters and aliens hold enormous potential as imaginative sites for human genders Van Engen 86 and sexualities that do not depend on sexual selection theory’s equation between whiteness, heterosexual reproduction, fitness, and the human. There is one place in Descent of Man where Darwin accounts for the possibility of desire between invertebrate nonbinary-gendered animals, drawing one sentence from Louis Agassiz’s De L’Espèce et de la Classification en Zoologie. Darwin concedes that snails do practice a kind of “courtship,” “though hermaphrodites” (Descent of Man 303), and quotes this passage from Agassiz describing the erotic quality of the snails’ movements: “No one who has had the opportunity of observing the courtship of snails will be in any doubt about the seductiveness with which these hermaphrodites move and display themselves as they prepare and accomplish their dual embrace” (Descent of Man 304). 33 Darwin observes that snails are capable of “some degree of permanent attachment” or pairing he usually reserves for descriptions of bi-gendered vertebrate species. While neither Darwin nor Agassiz follows up on the implications of this observation, there is a potential queer and trans scholars can recuperate here that might expand and eroticize representations of nonbinary genders in American culture. In the rest of this dissertation I open up this hint of evidence of the erotic lives of nonbinary invertebrates through readings in speculative fiction that imagine into Darwin’s silences and expand on his animal analogies. Gillian Beer’s Darwin Plots argues that Darwin’s language contains a kind of uncontrollable potentiality that can be redeployed for other purposes: “Darwin’s methods of argument and the generative metaphors of The Origin lead . . . into profusion and extension. The unused, or uncontrolled, elements in metaphors such as ‘the struggle for existence’ take on a life of their own. They surpass their status in the text and 33 Agassiz is one of the foundational theorists of scientific racism, and had extensive arguments with Darwin in print over the theory of evolution. Darwin frequently cites his biological studies in Descent of Man. Van Engen 87 generate further ideas and ideologies” (Beer 7). Metaphors and analogies as argumentative methodologies contain within themselves the possibility for mutation and surprise. They are unruly textual strategies that open Darwin’s theories up for what Beer saw as philosophies with which Darwin would have disagreed: social Darwinism, eugenics, Nazism, but also queer, trans, feminist, and antiracist imaginaries in the 21 st century (Beer 13). Griffiths likewise sees analogy, especially as Darwin uses them, as “a form of entangled reference that makes it possible to radically reshape apprehension of the world from the ground up” (Griffiths 228). I use Beer’s and Griffiths’ concept of the uncontrollability and potential of analogy to take seriously the position of invertebrate animals within Descent of Man, animals that open up Darwin’s work to a range of queer, trans, and feminist engagements with the nonhuman. These animals’ genders and sexualities utterly eluded Darwin’s efforts to enshrine heterosexuality, patriarchy, and gender binaries as the crown jewels of evolutionary processes and hence of European racial-species logics. Snails, starfish, jellyfish, worms, and other animals that do not bear much apparent bodily similarity to human beings frustrate the logics of heteroreproductive futurity and masculine aggression that are central to sexual selection. These are slow-moving, sticky, soft, malleable, unstructured by internal skeletons, full of orifices, and register as genderless and sexless in terms of the binary gender and sexual criteria 19 th century Western science used to evaluate species’ “high” or “lowness.” Yet they are not genderless or sexless if gender is not limited to a dichotomy of masculinity and femininity. Slimy invertebrates have genders that challenge binaries and sexualities, and evade containment within Western human constructions of desire and sex. Slimy invertebrates are queer for many reasons: some, like starfish, have orifices that confuse the functions of excrement, ingestion, and sexual penetration. Some, like worms, have bodies Van Engen 88 that are essentially a fleshy tube without much else attached. These creatures do not have backbones, which opens their bodies up to conceptual rhymes with spinelessness and softness and femininity and limp-wristedness in different ways than the vertebrate animal homosexualities that have dominated “gay rights” rhetorics in the United States and animal studies’ focus on vertebrate mammals closely related to humans. Slimy invertebrates do not register on the radar of Western patriarchal gender/sex formations in which arousal can only register as hardness or stiffness, rather than softness or wetness. Slimy nonbinary invertebrates possess the capacity for desire and pleasure once we start centralizing the erotic universe of nonbinary genders rather than assuming they are nonexistent, undesirable, or unnatural. There is something to learn from the crass visual similarities between a clam, a flower, and a human vulva; between a worm, a geoduck, and a human penis; between a starfish mouth and a human anus. These animals might have non-reproductive body parts that resemble human anatomy, but they are not actually male or female, and therefore establish distance between binary gender, heterosexuality, and genitalia. Marine invertebrates bear an immense amount of discursive power to wreak havoc on dominant Western gender/sex logics. Analogy is about transformative imagination. The Oxford English Dictionary defines metaphor using the prefix “meta” – “denoting change, transformation, permutation, or substitution,” and the Greek word “ϕορά” or “carrying,” from the stem word “to bear, carry” (OED). So “metaphor” implies a transformative act of carrying an idea from one realm to another, or the way that one idea permutates as it is borne into another realm of meaning. This concept of metaphor is not always a positive thing: Darwin’s analogies in The Descent of Man demonstrate the violent potential of metaphors as falsely equivalent or objectifying forms of comparisons. What I am suggesting is a trans-formative re-deployment of human-nonhuman Van Engen 89 metaphors that carry some of the radical gender and sexual potential of invertebrate aquatic animals into human worlds. There is a realm of potential that can be re-appropriated from nonbinary invertebrate genders and sexualities in The Descent of Man. For example, Hayward’s speculations on starfish and jellyfish excavate the creative possibilities of metaphor, analogy, and imagination as particularly trans ways of relating to nonhuman animals – invertebrate nonbinary sea creatures in particular. Hayward is ultimately more interested than I am in “the real,” extra-linguistic presence of the starfish, and in fragmented, reflexive techniques of filmic representation that discourage human identification with these animals; her work falls more under the umbrella of animal studies than animality studies (“Starfish” 79). Her attention to languages of comparison, however, takes up precisely the imaginative gap I see in The Descent of Man between genderqueer humans and aquatic invertebrates. Hayward takes seriously the possibilities of similarities between humans and aquatic invertebrates that The Descent of Man did not fully imagine analogically. Animal analogies, as forms of relation between humans and nonhumans, have the potential to open up new possibilities for queer, trans, and nonbinary lives. I am interested in the uses to which starfish are put, and the ways in which invertebrate bodies in their soft, fleshy, tubular anatomies resonate in surprising and perverse ways with human bodies in desperate need of resignification, remapping, regeneration, and, most of all, reimagination. My project imagines into the nexus of apparent impossibility around the erotic and imaginative universes of nonbinary invertebrates. This disidentificatory reading of Darwin speculates into Darwin’s silences around hermaphroditic and asexual animal analogies. I trace what Darwin doesn’t say about aquatic invertebrates in The Descent of Man in order to outline the shape of the nonbinary genders and sexualities that function as dark matter within his theory Van Engen 90 of sexual selection. Darwin does not follow through on the implications of hermaphroditic invertebrate animals experiencing desire, pleasure, or beauty. But what would those invertebrate sexualities look like if he allowed them to challenge 19 th century associations between whiteness, heterosexuality, binary gender, and evolutionary fitness? If starfish, anemones, sea slugs, and coral experience pleasure and beauty, how might these slimy sexualities rewrite trans and nonbinary human life? How has 20 th century American science fiction taken up and redeployed these nonbinary invertebrates, and what do these reimaginings offer queer and trans politics today? Darwin’s portrait of invertebrate genders and sexualities is the theoretical framework for my readings of 20 th century American science fiction. I am invested in theories of political imagination as is much recent scholarship in queer theory and cultural studies, but I want to explore alternatives to the paradigms of futurity and temporality that are so difficult to disentangle from sexual selection when taking nonhuman life into account. In American science fiction written in the wake of Darwin (and in Darwin’s texts themselves), the future and the past are so saturated with Victorian ideas about primitivism, civilization, savagery, and (by the 20 th century) eugenics that it is difficult to base theories of imagination in evolution and futurity. I am suggesting a turn away from the language of temporality and futurity that queer studies has celebrated for the last ten years, and a turn toward the kind of horizontal, contemporary intimacies and forms of relation that refuse the entire colonial project of time manifest in The Descent of Man and its afterlife. 34 34 See Lothian “Deviant Futures,” Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place, Freeman Time Binds. In an earlier section of this chapter I analyze evolutionary time Descent of Man in terms of Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects, which argues that colonial science took contemporary objects of study and transformed them into relics of the past. Van Engen 91 The alternatives I imagine are more based in analogy or metaphor in the spirit of a radical horizontality or contemporaneity that refuses the logics by which futurity equals ‘fitness,’ and refuses the temporally-organized ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, ‘savage’ vs. ‘civilized’ paradigms that transform metaphor into teleology. Darwin’s metaphorical language is deeply embedded in the human hierarchies of Victorian British culture, but a speculative reading of his political syntax of analogy offers a productive way to bridge the differences between queer theories of futurity and queer theories of the nonhuman. Analogy and imagination may be human beings’ only way of accessing the nonhuman world through language. As Akira Lippit has argued, humans have no unmediated access to animals, and the invertebrate animals I am most interested in cannot by definition become liberal subjects of human representational politics. 35 Analogy foregrounds the centrality of imagination as a way humans relate to nonhuman beings. As a form of queer, trans, and feminist political imagination, metaphor draws on the unruly diversity of the nonhuman invertebrate world without assuming equivalence or transparent neutrality. The syntax of analogy and the methodology of imagination as a way of understanding human-nonhuman relations does not depend on futurity or pastness, fitness or unfitness. It is a political grammar of the present that allows for mapping a broad range of relationships onto human and nonhuman beings, not just colonial comparisons with land vertebrates. What do I have in common with a five-armed starfish? What can we learn from the genders and relationality of anemones? What would it mean to reimagine my body as tentacles or 35 Lippit’s term “animetaphor” is relevant to but different from the kind of metaphors I am trying to describe here. Lippit is concerned with the way that the figure of the animal signals Western philosophers reaching towards the limits of the expressible, the linguistic, and the self (Lippit 1113, 1118). However, I am less interested in animals’ supposed lack of language (a claim that biologists more and more are debunking) than in how humans imagine animals through the mediation of language. Van Engen 92 antennae or feelers as a way of orienting myself in the violently confining world of human white- hetero-cis-patriarchal gender? Aquatic, invertebrate, and simple forms of nonhuman animality, because of their nonbinary genders, asexual reproduction, and nonphallic sexualities, function at the bottom of 19 th century scientific racial-species hierarchies. When they appear in American science fiction texts, they are one of the ways that queerness, femininity, and gender nonbinariness register in American racialized sexual imaginations in the wake of Darwin’s The Descent of Man. Van Engen 93 2. H. P. Lovecraft’s Degeneration Imaginary and the Starfish Sublime Introduction H. P. Lovecraft, wayward child of the pulp tradition, long considered unworthy of study in the academy, is enjoying a resurgence – for better or for worse. Far from the marginalized writer he used to be, Lovecraft has achieved mainstream pop cultural status and a resurgence of academic interest. As Carl Sederholm and Andrew Weinstock put it in a recent collection of essays on Lovecraft, it “appears we are living in the ‘Age of Lovecraft,’ a cultural moment in which the themes and influence of Lovecraft’s writings have bubbled up from the chthonic depths of 1930s pulp writing to assume an unexpected intellectual and cultural influence” (3). Lovecraft has become somewhat of a poster child for the schools of thought known as object- oriented ontology or speculative materialisms, championed especially by Graham Harman. Some of this new wave of Lovecraft criticism has taken the form of arguments for more respectability and canonization, extending horror critic S. T. Joshi’s longstanding claims that Lovecraft is a serious writer worth serious study. But the critical discussions closest to my interests in Lovecraft are those that take up Lovecraft’s racism. These conversations either argue defensively that Lovecraft’s toxic personal views should not be understood as separate from the value of his fiction (Joshi A Life 586), or argue that Lovecraft’s investments in eugenics and deep-seated racist beliefs irretrievably compromise his fiction (Frye 239). I think, to an extent, in these discussions the field is spinning its wheels in anxious self-reflection about whether or not academics should be studying this celebrated racist in the first place. For me, the question is not, is Lovecraft racist, and can his fiction be somehow rescued? Rather, the question should be, what kind of racist is Lovecraft, and what do his stories say about the legacy of evolution, science, and science fiction he has left in U. S. culture? What does Lovecraft’s toxicity tell us about how race, Van Engen 94 gender, species, and disability were intertwined in the 1920s and early 1930s? I believe Lovecraft is worth studying not because he is less racist than he is accused of being (he isn’t), but because he is a crucial thinker of the degeneration panics stewing among the American public around this time – the ideas the eugenics movement brewed out of Darwin’s theories. In this chapter I take up the way Lovecraft imagines degeneration, evolutionary regression, and miscegenation across the evolutionary scale of animal(ized) life. Lovecraft’s fiction offers a spectacularly anxious imagination of the white male human as a precarious, threatened position constantly slipping toward everything it is not: brownness, blackness, femininity, queerness, and disability. Whereas Darwin’s ‘Man’ is optimistically oriented upwards toward the heights it has not yet scaled, toward ‘advancement,’ Lovecraft’s human looks down a slope toward its eugenicist demise. Lovecraft’s futurity for the human is in a negative key, convinced of the inevitability of its own end through the same evolutionary processes that produced him. (And Lovecraft’s humans are almost all male.) Like eugenics more broadly, it is a paranoid attempt to stave off a threatening future of degeneration. While Lovecraft’s texts derive their pleasure from precisely the morbid horror of the disappearance of whiteness and the human (or what these stories present as that horror), they represent racialization, disability, animality, and queerness as sites of contaminating danger and threatening evolutionary futures. This is Darwinian mutative futurity parked on the downhill rather than the uphill slope. This chapter examines how Lovecraft’s stories at the height of the eugenics movement used tropes of fishlike monsters and Asian-white interracial sex to envision the degeneration of whiteness. I also look to Lovecraft’s use of starfish and amoebas for alternate alien evolutionary narratives. I take up the degenerative imaginary of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” situating its Van Engen 95 parable of miscegenation horror within the context of the eugenics movement, changing immigration laws, and the intense xenophobia circulating in the 1920s. I then examine the 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness for its alien evolutionary universe populated by winged starfish-beings that migrated from another world to start the human species as a science experiment gone awry. This genderqueer starfish sublime is ultimately compromised, however, by Lovecraft’s recuperation of queer animal excess into familiar tropes of civilization and savagery. Whereas “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” imagines white humanness devolving into frogs and fish, dramatizing the purported effects of miscegenation on white populations, At the Mountains of Madness has very little to do with human evolution at all, instead using invertebrate animals to propose an alien evolution. 2.1 Atavistic Imaginaries Both “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and At the Mountains of Madness require some background context for the political and cultural scene out of which Lovecraft’s work arose in the 1920s. Lovecraft’s fiction is notorious for its implications that extraterrestrial overlords, backwoods covens, and racialized monsters are plotting to eradicate the human species. Lovecraft is paranoid about the end of the human – the end of white men specifically (which to Lovecraft were equivalent). Lovecraft was far from alone in this atavistic imagination. Contemporary pulp authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs also imagined race, animality, and disability as a sliding evolutionary scale of advancedness and primitivity from which white civilization sought to escape. 1920s and -30s American fiction is full of these regression fears. Lovecraft was fixated on the possibility of atavism, and critics have covered how his biological horror stories generate a sense of horror from this degeneration imaginary. Sophius Reinert points out the prominence of atavistic thinking in Lovecraft’s work in his essay on Van Engen 96 Lovecraft, economics, and eugenics, observing that Lovecraft’s “preoccupation with atavism – of evolutionary throwbacks, survivals and regressions – in modern industrial society” were central to his work, and deeply influenced by the surrounding eugenicist and social Darwinist cultural climate (256). 36 Likewise, Brooks Hefner argues that Lovecraft’s animalized ethic bodies constitute expressions of white anxieties about degeneration in the 1920s. White eugenicists, he argues, represent degeneracy as “not only knowable, but . . . also explicitly written all over the faces and bodies of immigrants and other nonwhites” (661). This “writing” on the bodies of non-white characters in Lovecraft’s degeneration stories is presented as animality. In her book Atavistic Tendencies, Dana Seitler defines atavism as the projection of bodily features coded as race, disability, and queerness as evidence of regression. The human, in this construction, is always tipping backwards into the animal, and might slide there at the slightest provocation. For Seitler, the atavistic eruption of animal traits within human bodies in American modernity signaled a return to an evolutionary pre-modern past: “By embedding overlapping individual and prehistorical pasts in a temporal continuum, the animalized human body becomes at once the end point of a (perhaps failed) evolutionary trajectory – an atavism” (130). This is one way that (white) literatures represent (nonwhite) human cultures as primitive through animallike descriptions as well as signifiers of pastness (Fabian). Seitler notes that this “retrogressive animalism” included ideas that “prostitutes and lesbians [had] genitalia like that of orangutans,” and “sexual perverts, the brows of apes” (7). In this way, Darwinian tropes of species, racial, and sexual regression were reimagined in early 20 th century American science, literature, and culture, the legacy of Darwin’s cultural reception in 36 Reinert draws on Lovecraft’s personal papers to show that Lovecraft’s ideas about atavism, regression, and biology were derived in large part from his readings of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s advocate (257). Van Engen 97 America in the eugenics movement and popular(ized) science writing. Seitler’s connections between race, gender, animality, and time in this period are foundational to my thinking on Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s writing emerges from a stew of cultural, political, and scientific concern about the precarity of white masculinity within paradigms of evolutionary ‘progress’ and racial hygiene. When Lovecraft was writing his most famous stories, quasi-scientific white supremacist texts like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and Charles Davenport’s eugenics research (all of which built on theories of evolution) were circulating in the American public sphere (Cuddy and Roche, Frye 238). These texts made popular, and apparently verified scientifically, the idea that national progress and well-being depended on white racial purity, white women’s reproduction, the pruning of problematic familial lines, restricting non-white immigration, sterilizing of women of color and disabled people, and generally curating the nation’s whiteness. Donna Haraway calls eugenics in the 1920s a “movement to preserve hereditary stock, to assure racial purity, to prevent race suicide” (55). According to Lois Cuddy and Claire Roche, Darwin’s ideas and Herbert Spencer’s interpretation of them helped make the eugenics movement possible (12-13). American literature in the early 20 th century followed suit, coalescing around concerns about heredity, genetic determinism, racial ‘improvement,’ and the sexual and racial curation of the nation. Lovecraft did not invent these ideas, as Lovecraft apologists are quick to point out. But he was instrumental in popularizing and spreading them in science fiction and horror genres. Lovecraft was enthusiastic about eugenics and paranoid about his own racial status. Many of his stories spring from this anxious postulation of the end of white human men through the viral Van Engen 98 incursion of nonwhite peoples, nonhuman animality, and disability. Bennett Lovett-Graff names “The Horror at Red Hook” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as especially exemplary of his eugenicist horror. Lovett-Graff notes that U.S. culture in the 1910s had solidified ideas of biological inferiority and racial difference through new developments in the science of genetics that appeared to confirm conservatives’ beliefs that “anatomy was destiny,” that “individuals were the cumulative products of their unvaried, randomly generated genetic heritage,” and were “stuck within that heritage” (177). In this light, Seitler’s description of the widespread fears of atavism and degeneration that gripped white Americans during this period makes a lot of sense. Intertwined with (or shaped by) these popular sciences of eugenics and atavism were the political and legal battles that raged over immigration in the 1920s. Lovecraft’s xenophobia is legendary, and (I will argue later), of a particular flavor when it was directed at Asian immigrants. Critics who write about Lovecraft’s xenophobia usually refer to the fact that he wrote his most virulent biological horror stories in the years just after the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, a landmark law. In Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of North America, Mae Ngai lays out the history of this act as a “comprehensive restriction law” that was the first to establish “numerical limits on immigration and a global racial and national hierarchy” favoring northern European immigrants over the entire non-European world (3). While previous acts had limited specific Asian populations, this law defined almost all Asians as a group “racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship” (7). The eugenics movement was central to the passage of this law: eugenicists were called to congressional hearings as experts, according to Ngai, and helped usher in a new era of restrictive attitudes toward non-white immigrants (24). Whereas previous generations of scientific racists believed in Lamarckian theories of the transmission of acquired traits (e.g. while Irish Van Engen 99 immigrants are of undesirable stock, they can be improved through uplift), “eugenicists were strict biological determinists who believed that intelligence, morality, and other social characteristics were permanently fixed in race” (24). Of course, this opportunity for improvement was rarely extended in the same way to non-European immigrants, but things closed down even more in the mid-1920s. In Ngai’s words, “[i]f Congress did not go so far as to sponsor race breeding, it did seek to transform immigration law into an instrument of mass racial engineering” (27). Xenophobia and eugenics, in other words, were not separate phenomena, as they are sometimes treated in Lovecraft criticism, but historically intertwined. Atavism, eugenics, and xenophobia depended on constructions of animality as the evolutionary past of the human, but animality of a different kind than Michael Lundblad writes about in The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Lundblad’s book maps out the ways that representations of animality in the early decades of the 20 th century served as figures for shifting American conceptions of human instincts, primitivity, violence, and naturalness in the wake of Darwin’s establishment that humans are closely related to nonhuman animals. For Lundblad, “the behavior of ‘real’ animals comes to represent ‘natural’ human instincts, particularly in terms of violence and heterosexuality” (4). This construction of animality is in line with Social Darwinism, a school of thought using concepts of evolutionary competition, survival of the fittest, and natural instincts to justify colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy as acts of group survival. But in the degeneration imaginary I see in Lovecraft’s writing, animality (envisioned through evolution) is framed as regression toward the racialized, the animal, the feminine, the disabled. This resembles more Seitler’s definition of atavism and the eugenics movement’s identification of certain physiological traits as degenerative. If, as Lundblad demonstrates, Social Van Engen 100 Darwinism uses Darwinian animality as justifications for heterosexuality, empire, and capitalism as natural (e.g. my animal instincts are telling me to survive), Lovecraftian-eugenicist conceptions of animality are unnatural as improper reversions toward something the human used to be. In other words, being animal is something to be avoided rather than indulged in as a rationale for domination. I see eugenics as a future-oriented phenomenon, an anxious stance of attempting to ward off future threats to whiteness, ability, and masculinity. The goal is to escape animality, racialization, and femininity, to free white family lines from possible contaminations. In Social Darwinism, animal instincts and survival of the fittest are beneficial forces – one just has to act in tune with one’s inner animal nature to survive. In eugenics, however (and in Lovecraft), these Darwinian logics are a threat: nature is not good enough, animal instincts might kill you, and human scientists need to intervene in nature to ward off the threats it poses. The degeneration imaginary sees white male humans as constantly in danger, on the lookout for evidence of animality within their bodies, and in need of civilization and eugenics to escape from their ‘savage’ animal instincts. Lovecraft’s place within this degeneration imaginary is a very particular one. While contemporaries were imaging vertebrate mammality as the threatened end of white humanity, Lovecraft extended his animal imagination to creatures including fish, frogs, slime, and amoebas. His writing intervenes into the racialized animal anxieties of 1920s and early 1930s white America by displacing and extending the range of nonhuman animal life used to figure degeneration and atavism, with different implications for the sexual and gendered vectors of racialization. His horror stories are about nature gone wrong, development gone awry, and things existing which should not, or existing in a time when they should not. I now turn to specific Lovecraft texts that reimagine atavism and twist eugenicist logics for new, weird ends. Van Engen 101 2.2 Degenerating Amphibians and Island Queerness Lovecraft’s 1931 story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is recognized as an anxious horror story about degeneration. In this story, a young white man from New England visits a run-down, isolated fishing town called Innsmouth on the coast of Massachusetts. But there is something wrong in Innsmouth. Several generations ago, a sailor named Obed Marsh met the Kanaka Maoli people of Hawaii in his travels across the Pacific, and learns of the aquatic beings they (fictionally) worship – the Deep Ones, an undersea race of fish-frog people. When he brings knowledge of the Deep Ones back to Innsmouth, the townspeople began worshipping and interbreeding with the Deep Ones, and in exchange receive long life, wealth, and a thriving fishing industry. The descendants of these fish-frog-human pairings, however, gradually devolve into fish-frogs themselves over the course of their lifetimes. While young, people from Innsmouth appear human. But as they grow older, they develop bulging eyes, fins, slime, and scales in ways Lovecraft frames as evolutionary regression. They eventually disappear from land to live full-time in the Deep Ones’ underwater city. The story essentially is a warning tale dramatizing the end of whiteness as the end of the human, and cautioning that interspecies and interracial miscegenation will lead to degeneration into fish-frog amphibians. It might at first appear that “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is a narrative about interspecies sex between humans and frogs rather than interracial sex between white New Englanders and indigenous Hawaiians. Yet the racialized framework of evolutionary degeneration that permeates the text makes the fish-frog people and the Kanaka Maoli people much closer in nature than a less-eugenicist story would have it. Innsmouth’s atavism takes the form Seitler describes as an eruption of visible animal characteristics on the human body: after learning of his Innsmouth heritage, one character “began to study the mirror with mounting Van Engen 102 alarm” (loc 5252), and eventually admits he has “acquired the Innsmouth look” (5276). Another character from outside Innsmouth describes the town’s residents in degenerative terms – again, expressed as the eruption of animality onto the human body: “There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today . . . . Some of ‘em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young” (4268). These physical features with which Lovecraft characterizes residents of Innsmouth later in their lives continues evolving into more obvious fishlike or froglike characteristics: lidless eyes, gill slits, disappearing ears, webbed fingers, a fishlike smell. The end of the narrative describes Innsmouth people at the fullest extent of their animallike degeneration in terms of this racialized atavism. Innsmouth people move in animal gaits and speak in animal sounds: “flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating – surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight” (5170). While their forms are “anthropoid,” their heads resembled fish, and their skin is “shiny and slippery” with “scaly” backs and gills on the sides of their necks (5170). The narrator names them in orientalist terms, too, joining the horror of their animallike atavism to the horror of the racialized foreigner: “a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare” (5170). This glimpse of the creatures solidifies previous hints and grafts together humanoid forms and fishlike-froglike animals into one figure of degeneration. In case this is not enough of a hint, Lovecraft makes it clear that readers should feel disgust at these beings explicitly because of “race prejudice,” adding (through the mouth of a character from outside Innsmouth) that, “I don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks Van Engen 103 myself” (4244). 37 The Deep Ones’ contamination of white Protestant New England culture here remains a contamination by Pacific Islander cultures, religious practices, and the fishlike animality that indigenous islanders embody in Lovecraft’s imagination. It is not so easy to separate racialization and animality in the degenerative world of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Through backstory, hearsay, and implication, Lovecraft’s story represents degeneration as the direct result of miscegenation – sometimes explicitly, and sometimes by association. A series of stories from characters that only half-know what is going on in Innsmouth imply that residents acquired the Innsmouth look by intermarrying with Pacific Islander peoples. A ticket agent in Newburyport reports, “You’ve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people” (4268). The ticket agent does not know the real story of Innmsouth’s pact with the Deep Ones, but notices something amiss, and attributes it – partially correctly – to Innsmouth sailors’ social, economic, and sexual contact with Pacific Island peoples. These examples of hearsay and connotation pile up: Captain Obed Marsh, who made the original deal with the Deep Ones, was said to have married “some kind of foreigner – they say a South Sea Islander” (loc 4244). The Innsmouth residents are said to look like “native[s]” and “[ha]ve gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals” (4293). Artifacts connected to the Deep Ones are “of probable East-Indian or Indo-Chinese provenance,” and the religion associated with the Deep Ones is “a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East” (4340). These layers of references to island indigeneity stick with the Old Ones and saturate Innsmouth’s 37 Lovecraft’s racism as articulated in his letters and personal papers was similarly of an unapologetic, straightforward variety. See footnote 7. Van Engen 104 animality throughout the narrative, and do not disappear just because the ticket agent’s story is partially corrected (later, we learn that Marsh’s wife was actually a Deep One, not an islander). So “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” intersects the plotline about animalized degeneration with the narrative mapping of the racialized nonhuman onto Pacific Islands. The degeneration plot is driven by the miscegenation plot, implying that interracial sex causes degeneration and animalization. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” miscegenation causes the entire town to degenerate throughout generations, but also causes people to become more animallike and nonwhite within their own lifetime. Lovecraft’s implication, of course, is that atavism is caused by the original sin of racial mixing. Atavism also connotes disability as well as race and animality, enmeshing degeneracy with this conception of disability as evolutionary regression. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a grocery store clerk who grew up outside Innsmouth describes the town’s problem as disease or disability, “a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced” (4503). He hypothesizes that boarded-up houses close to the waterfront are hiding “a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities” (4503). Words like “specimens,” “warren,” and “as furtive . . . as animals that live in burrows” tie these “abnormalities” to animalized atavism (4500). The clerk attributes the cause to locals intermixing with immigrants: “What kind of foreign blood – if any – these beings had, it was impossible to tell,” but nearby the boarded-up houses by the waterfront, he “sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds” (4503). So the older Innsmouth residents get, the more they grow “abnormalities” and show signs of “queer[ness],” animality, and “foreign blood,” and the closer they physically get to the water – source of all original life on land in evolutionary paradigms. Van Engen 105 Andil Gosine has argued that the sexual and racial legacies of Euro-American colonialisms have rendered reproductive sex between non-white people a threat to ‘nature.’ In the essay “Non-White Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature,” Gosine points to Malthusian constructions of non-white peoples’ sexuality as uncontrolled and over-fertile and traces how Western environmental movements draw on colonial sexual fantasies as they construe ‘wilderness’ in non-western places as in need of saving from the pollution and overpopulation threats of black and brown peoples (154). Crucially, Gosine traces the legacy of sexualized racial formations and Malthusian overpopulation concerns to contemporary xenophobias: “Subsequent to the fall of European empires, these anxieties took shape as anti- immgiration discourses (‘Yellow Fever,’ ‘Asian Invasion,’ etc.) . . . . Calls by groups such as the Sierra Club . . . to curb immigration and regulate the sexual reproduction of people in the Global South are merely a restatement of white nationalist ideals as a commitment to nature” (157). Such racialized overpopulation fears are another manifestation of eugenics-era white fears about race suicide and non-white population overwhelm, like Madison Grant’s or Oswald Spengler’s. Gosine’s connection between white supremacist sexual-reproductive control mechanisms and environmental or animal rhetorics help explain the links between sexuality, Asianness (or Pacific Islanderness), and ocean animality in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Animality, race, and sexuality are linked not only through the evolutionary trajectories I have traced so far but also through the register of eugenics that is population control, which has historical roots in colonial sexual formations. Gosine provides a different kind of link from racialized gender and sexual formations and ecological or animal imaginations, showing how white ‘nature’ appears under threat from the sexualities and reproduction of peoples of color in immigration panics and conservationist rhetorics. Van Engen 106 Why queerness – or why are degenerate Innmsouth residents in partial fish-frog form described as making “queer[]” sounds? Essentially, the immigration fears Lovecraft is responding to in this story are sexual fears as much as racial fears. Degeneration in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is queer because the townspeople who become fish-frogs have committed the sexual impropriety of intermarrying with the nonhuman Deep Ones, and the racialized animality they embody. Immigration acts passed in the U.S. in the first few decades of the 20 th century barred large numbers of Asian women from entering the U.S., which Nayan Shah has argued created male-male intimacies among Asian laborers and had a queering effect on American imaginations of Asian masculinities. In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe reminds us that the racialization of Asian immigrants has always also been “a gendered formation,” because of those gendered restrictions and also because of the “concentration of Chinese men in ‘feminized’ forms of work,” among other factors (11). While I do not see homosexuality or even homosociality in Lovecraft’s story, I do think that the narrative’s Pacific Islander cultural and geographic references carry with them the gendered and sexual improprieties attached to Asian immigration in the U.S. more broadly during this period in which Asian men became racialized as effeminate. This is in addition to the fact that the story constructs miscegenation as queer within the terms of a eugenicist sexual paradigm that values white racial purity. 38 39 38 See Samuel Delany, “Some Queer Notions about Race.” 39 Tracy Bealer argues that the Deep Ones “are, for all intents and purposes, racially marked immigrants overtaking and . . . polluting and degrading Innsmouth’s Anglo Saxon stock” (45). I agree with Bealer that this is a story about immigration panics, but I do not see the animality of Lovecraft’s representation of non-white immigrants as simply a metaphor for racialization. The eugenicist fears activated among white writers in this period included fears of becoming animal, fears of becoming non-white, and fears of becoming disabled all as part of the same evolutionary paradigm of degeneration. Mixing with non-white peoples might make white New Englanders less white as a population, but it also (in Lovecraft’s imagination and eugenics more broadly) made them less human and more animallike. These things are not separate. Van Engen 107 So it makes sense that Lovecraft imagined Innsmouth residents – descendants of mixing between white New Englanders and indigenized fish-frog beings – as “queer” and dangerous because of their sexual connections with the Deep Ones as conduits of island indigeneity. After implying that the white Innsmouth population must have intermarried with Pacific Islanders at some point in their history, the Newburyport ticket agent describes their physical alterations as they devolve into fish-frogs as queer: “Some of ‘em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut,” implying that animal traits and racialized physical morphologies must be the result of sexual misbehavior of some kind (4252). The large numbers of fish off the coast of Innsmouth are also “queer,” the people who stay at the hotel in Innsmouth are “queer” and “unnatural,” the Kanaka Maoli and the Deep Ones are “queer,” and the jewelry associated with the Innsmouth religion is of a “queer foreign kind” (4277). In fact, the word “queer” appears a remarkable 22 times in the story. Queerness here does not mean positive or liberatory in a more contemporary sense, but more sexual deviancy. In Lovecraft’s eugenicist imagination, to have sex with a fish-frog or a Kanaka Maoli person would be equally strange and deviant. The queering of Innsmouth is also the animalizing and Asianizing of Innsmouth. Lisa Lowe writes of Asian immigration history in the United States that, “[t]hroughout the twentieth century, the figure of the Asian immigrant has served as a ‘screen,’ or phantasmatic site, on which the nation projects a series of condensed, complicated anxieties regarding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence of the national body” (18). So far, Lovecraft criticism has not sufficiently attended to the specificity of anti-Asian (much less anti-Hawaiian) racism as opposed to other forms of racism. Lovecraft’s portrayal of Pacific Islanders in this text is a form of these ‘yellow peril’ fears, but it is so steeped in island references that the fears it projects are different than fears about Chinese laborers or other east Asian immigrants. Van Engen 108 Everything in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is about water, and the dangers that can come crawling out of (or sailing off of) it into the white spaces of New England. According to the town drunk, the island on which the Kanaka met the Deep Ones was originally an underwater city pushed up from the sea bottom by volcanic activity (4636). Aquatic animality, like the Deep Ones, comes from islands in this story, especially from Pacific islands. While we never learn the exact name of the island where Marsh meets the “Kanakys,” the story of their encounter references a broad swath of Pacific Island geography: ships called the “Sumatry Queen” and the “Malay Pride,” e.g. (4612). “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” imagines indigenous Pacific islanders as fishlike and aquatic, specific forms of animalized degeneration not equivalent to land mammality. Around the time Lovecraft was writing, in early 20 th century America “Kanaka” was not only a name for native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli), but also functioned as a general term for Pacific Islanders. These laborers were not present in the U.S. in the same numbers as Chinese laborers, but they were present. Although Kānaka Maoli is more properly an identity term used by indigenous Hawaiians, and “kanaka” means just ‘man’ in Hawaiian (Kauanui), Lovecraft’s use of the term draws on this contemporary generalized usage. The label “Kanaka” also has a history in the coerced labor Pacific Islanders were forced into on plantations in Australia in the late 19 th century, in a practice known as “blackbirding” (“Blackbirder,” “Kanaka,” “Pacific Island Labourers”). Pacific Islanders – including Hawaiians – were also visible in American public discourse in the early 20 th century because of the recent American conquest of Hawai’i (1893/8), Guam (1898), and Samoa (1898), and as the U.S. built military bases on these and other Pacific islands (Spickard 7). The imagination of Pacific Islanders in US popular culture at this time represented particular colonial imaginations of the ‘South Pacific.’ Van Engen 109 New England newspapers in the 1920s were full of exoticizing serial fiction travel stories about ‘South Pacific’ islands that narrated the white voyager’s wonder at pristine island beaches and/or described thrilling brushes with dangerous island ‘savages’ (Powers, Grimshaw, Kyne). The word ‘kanaka’ appears in these stories as a generalized ethnic category for native Pacific islanders, including but not exclusively Hawaiians. Nonfiction articles and serial fiction in newspapers in the 1920s demonstrated awareness of the U.S. conquest of Hawai’i and the existence of plantations on many islands that depended on coerced labor from other pacific islands. Lovecraft’s use of the term ‘kanaka’ to describe a confused swath of Pacific Islander peoples, then, is not unique. J Kēhaulani Kauanui has historicized and surveyed the history of Hawaiian diaspora, showing that, while Hawaiians are not usually described as a significant diasporic population in US public discourse, Hawaiians were present on the west coast of North America as early as 1785, long before the US overthrow of the Hawaiian nation (140). Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of historical scholarship, Kauanui traces the presence of Hawaiians in British Columbia in the 1880s, California, and other parts of the Pacific coast in logging, mining, fur trading, the gold rush, whaling, and other industries (Kauanui 141-2, Spickard 2). These Hawaiians left their names on settler towns and landmarks on the Pacific northwest (e.g. “Kanaka Flat, Oregon”) (Rose 28). Chelsea Rose observes that it is difficult to track down information on these communities in official censuses, which often did not bother to report accurate data on women and non-white people in newly-colonized territories in the 19 th century, and certainly did not recognize indigenous peoples’ sovereignty (27-8) I do not know if Lovecraft was aware of the presence of Hawaiians and other indigenous islanders in the continental United States; given his white supremacist positions, I doubt this would have Van Engen 110 mattered to him. But I want to connect “kanaka” as a vaguely-defined people in Lovecraft’s text not just to the generalized ethnic term for Pacific islander laborers in Pacific plantations, not just to island native characters in US serial fiction, but also to the Kānaka Maoli people present both on and off the Hawaiian islands, including in the continental U.S. where Lovecraft was writing. Thus, the islands most closely associated with the Deep Ones and Innsmouth’s oceanic degeneration problem are the Hawaiian islands. The town drunk, Zadok Allen, tells the protagonist that the town got “queer” because Obed Marsh met “Kanakys” on a “volcanic island” presided over by a chief with the Hawaiian-sounding name “Walakea.” On this “little islet with queer ruins,” where Innsmouth’s pact with the Deep Ones first emerged (4636), the “natives” were known for hauling in enormous catches of fish and wearing “queer” gold jewelry with carvings resembling the Deep Ones, which Innsmouth people eventually start wearing as well. Allen attributes this to an evolutionary return to aquatic origins and sea animality, like the fish and frogs the Deep Ones resemble: “Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts – that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin” (4662). So the story frames the effects of white contact with indigenous Hawaiians as evolutionary degeneration into aquatic or amphibious animality. Racial mixing for Lovecraft reverts white people to a state of crawling around on fins instead of walking upright. Lovecraft’s story exemplifies and extends Lowe’s ‘yellow peril’ fears, transposing them slightly: Hawaiian indigeneity becomes associated with fishiness, and contact with Kanaka Maoli people causes white New Englanders to become inhuman. In his classic study Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, Maurice Lévy points out how many of Lovecraft’s fictionalized New England towns are seaports, positioned on the edge of an ocean “whence anything could come” (36). The sea, Lévy argues, “is never a friendly, familiar Van Engen 111 element” for Lovecraft, instead “concealing nauseous horrors” (40). Lévy sees the sea in works like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Call of Cthulhu” as a symbolic repository of otherness, the dark abyss, the threshold of the unknowable cosmic horror that comes to undo the comforting fictions of humankind. I think Lévy is right, and the aquatic nature of the monsters in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is partially due to the alienness of sea creatures like fish and frogs in post-Darwinian imaginations, and partly to the figure of the abyss that Lévy sees in Lovecraft’s oceans. But the ocean is also the site of maritime cross-cultural contact in the age of Western imperialisms, as postcolonial theorists like Glissant, Gilroy, and Ingersoll have pointed out. At least since Moby Dick, the sea in American literature has been a site for connecting monstrosity with racial mixing and cross-cultural contact. When Lévy describes the sea as a site of horror for Lovecraft because “anything could come” from its expanse, he is describing the pantheon of subterranean, deep-sea aquatic monsters that populate Lovecraft’s pantheon – octopus-faced Cthulhu, the fish-frog Deep Ones, etc. But Lévy might also be describing the contact with non- Western cultures that occurred in seaport towns. Sailing ships are where Innsmouth sailors travel to the Hawaiian islands and meet worshippers of the Deep Ones and Dagon. The ticket agent in Newburyport sees Innsmouth as a home to a dangerous mixture of cross-cultural currents because the sailors who live there come into contact with “queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everwhere else, and [the] queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ‘em” (4268). The New York neighborhoods where Lovecraft lived and wrote about in his letters are seaport neighborhoods, close to the industrial docks where people and cargo from all over the world enter and mingle with white New Yorkers. The sea is a site or a conduit of horror in Lovecraft’s stories not just because deep sea creatures appear monstrous and distant from Van Engen 112 humans in the legacy of Darwinian evolutionary biology, or because sea creatures register as more evolutionarily primitive than land animals to Lovecraft. The sea is a conduit of horror because it brings shiploads of non-white immigrants to America’s shores, the coast an unguarded perimeter vulnerable to sexual and racial intrusion. These fears among white Americans, after all, instigated the 1924 immigration restriction act a few years before “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” So when Lévy writes that Innsmouth residents “are the fruits of unclean weddings between marine monstrosities and the young girls of the town” that “corrupts the individuals of a healthy race” (56-7), these marine monstrosities are both strange sea animals and strangers from non-white or non-Western parts of the globe. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” braids together Darwinian aquatic animals that carry the threat of species degeneration and Pacific Island cultures that carry the threat of racialized degeneration. These threats become braided together through the figure of water, the ocean, and the sailing vessels that traverse them. Innsmouth stages Lovecraft’s imagination of the primal scene of Darwinian and eugenicist devolution, both species and racial fears of degeneration (which are of course never separate in this place and time), through the figure of the sea coast and the aquatic half-human, half-animal hybrid that threatens white America with sexual, cultural, and racial overwhelm. The alienness of the sea animal and the alienness of Pacific Islander humans both threaten to drown the anxious whiteness (or more precisely Anglo- Saxonness) posed by the eugenics movement. And, even more insidiously, Pacific Islanders appear so distant from the true human for Lovecraft that they must have just crawled out of the ocean in evolutionary time (4662). This is how Asian immigrants become fishlike and froglike in Lovecraft’s degeneration imaginary, and partly how queerness attaches to aquatic animality in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Thus, against the backdrop of the eugenics movement, Van Engen 113 immigration panics, and the American conquest of Hawai’i, Samoa, and Guam, The Shadow Over Innsmouth positions native Pacific islanders as queered, animalized, disability-carrying figures within colonial imaginaries of the period. The text imagines oceanic coasts and island peoples and ecologies as vulnerable sites that exposed white America to sexual, racial, and species threats. Other critics have identified the links between miscegenation fears and degeneration anxieties in Lovecraft’s work, as well as the links between fears about animality and fears about people of color. For example, Bennett Lovett-Graff has pointed out the connections between the story’s anti-immigrant sentiments, eugenicist anxieties, and animal imaginations. He is right to point out how, for Lovecraft, “immigrants served as the perfect post-Darwinian symbol of the thin line dividing human being from animal,” particularly because of what he saw as their “uncontrollable animal sexuality” that threatened supposed Nordic constraint (184). My intervention, however, is to point out how Lovecraft specifically does this through the animal metaphors of fish and frogs (vertebrate aquatic animals) and Pacific Islander indigeneity (as opposed to other forms of racialization). Not all forms of racism, and not all forms of animalization, function in the same way. The criticism also does not acknowledge the presence of actual indigenous Pacific Islander laborers in western North America in the decades preceding this story’s publication. Critics are more likely to mention Chinese immigrant laborers, which aren’t the Asians represented in Lovecraft’s story, nor was China ever a U.S. colony in the ways that islands like Hawai’i are. The specificity of Pacific Islander racialization and of Kānaka Maoli as the specific peoples imagined in the story as the origin of animalization deserves mention. Finally, Lovecraft critics have ignored the connection between animality and Pacific Islander racialization in the narrative danger posed by the sea in this story. I instead focus on Van Engen 114 how the sea functions as one big connective border with everything that is imagined as ‘outside’ white Protestant New England society: Asians, indigenous islanders, sexuality, disability, and the animalized ‘threat’ of evolutionary degeneration. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” tells us how American xenophobia and eugenics anxieties in the 1920s generalized animality and human peoples of color into one sexualized and racialized threat from the outside. Through sea animality and coastal setting, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” ties together xenophobia, racialized degeneration, miscegenation anxieties, and concerns about evolutionary species regression. It envisions the way the degeneration imaginary functioned on all these fronts in intersecting ways. While other critics see race and animality in degeneration literature at this time as separate, I prioritize the mutual constitution of race and animality through evolutionary sexual imagination. Sederholm and Weinstock’s introduction to The Age of Lovecraft sees animalization, the precarity of the human, and racism as a “paradox” in Lovecraft rather than one seamless view of racialized evolution in line with eugenics theories. In their words, “the paradox of Lovecraft is that he could on the one hand hold such noxious views concerning race and on the other assert the relative insignificance of the entire species. What good is being atop the racial totem pole, one may ask, if one’s entire civilization is doomed to decline and the achievements and powers of other species far outstrip those of one’s own?” (37). Jed Mayer’s essay in this volume likewise sees race and animality as separate topics, a position I see as untenable because of the legacies of colonial anthropology and (social) Darwinism in U.S. culture at this time. In “Race, Species, and Others: H. P. Lovecraft and the Animal,” Mayer reads Zadok Allen’s story as an undoing of anthropocentrism and a displacement of the human. He claims that the “animal characteristics” of innsmouth residents “are so pronounced as to suggest Van Engen 115 a concern with issues of kinship that go well beyond the racial issues that are usually addressed in analyses of the story” (124). While the plot of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” “clearly reflects the author’s own fears of miscegenation,” Mayer argues, critics should move instead toward a reading of how the story “subvert[s] anthropocentrism” (125). These essays in The Age of Lovecraft propose to solve the problem of Lovecraft’s racism with animal studies, or with a redirection toward the animal and the posthuman. Mayer’s argument curiously frames a reading attentive to race as mutually exclusive or at least separate from an animal studies reading, calling for attention to both without deeply engaging the co-constitutiveness of racialization and animality within the eugenicist, post- Darwinian imaginary of Lovecraft’s era. My project, however, is predicated on a deep examination of the close relationships between animality and racialization in American science fictional imaginaries. There is a deep, mutually imbricated relationship between American ideas about animality and American racisms in the wake of Darwin (Lundblad). In other words, racial thinking in this eugenicist, post-Teddy Roosevelt era understood whiteness, brownness, blackness, animality, disability, and gender nonconformity as sliding points on one continuous scale along which people could progress or regress (and these points could be triangulated differently for different purposes – not necessarily set or fixed). If the human referred to white men, and non-white peoples and vertebrate animals alike were understood as less evolved than white men, fears about becoming brown and fears about becoming animal (and becoming disabled or feminine) are not the same, but deeply related and inextricable through the concept of atavism. As Zakiyyah Jackson, Neel Ahuja, and others have argued, questions of the animal should not be used to skip over the troubling morass of human cultural politics, (Jackson 215, Ahuja viii). I draw inspiration here from Ahuja’s critique of the “ruse of transcendence” in this Van Engen 116 style of animal studies or posthumanist critique, a ruse that “assum[es] that turning attention from the human to the nonhuman could bypass Marxist, feminist, critical race, and postcolonial critiques of imperial systems” (viii). So while Mayer reads Lovecraft’s racism and decentering of the human as “paradoxical[],” I argue that racism and animalization in degeneration narratives of the 1920s make perfect sense within the logics of the eugenics movement’s anxieties. An animal studies reading does not rescue the story from a reading of its racial politics. In fact, Lovecraft’s racism in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” might be read as even more virulent from one perspective than other stories more based on vertebrate land mammals, because fish as aquatic animals were evolutionarily farther distant than, say, large apes or dogs. In a twist at the end of the story, the narrator escapes Innsmouth but discovers that his own family heritage traces back to Innsmouth and the Deep Ones, and in the last paragraph of the story he expresses a desire to join his extended family underwater. Critics seem divided on whether this allows a productive opening into readers identifying with the atavistic figure of the indigenous fish-frog, or a deepening of the story’s horror such that Innsmouth’s danger infects the narrator himself – the purportedly safe vantage point from which readers had watched Innsmouth from a safe distance. I am less interested in whether or not this ending makes the story better than in the fact that it frames the Innsmouth look – the danger of racial-species degeneration – as contagious. Or, rather, the story’s ending by which the narrator comes into the light of self-knowledge implies that anyone reading might discover in their own family tree aquatic, animallike, disabled, or non-white origins: a significant source of concern for white Americans in the 1920s. As Lovett-Graff argues, this ending bears strong similarities to Lovecraft’s own anxious struggle with his heritage. Lovecraft was anxious to prove his biological worth after discovering that he had a Welsh ancestor who was a “full-blooded Celt” Van Engen 117 (rather than Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon), whose ancestry he blamed for his various illnesses (178). Lovett-Graff reads this ending as biography: “What was a public allegory of immigrant sexuality and its threat becomes a private allegory . . . of the family past and its promise . . . . Lovecraft finally comes face-to-face with his own degenerate origins (born of woman and a diseased father)” (188). While I do not want to read the story as a straightforward allegory for Lovecraft’s psyche, I agree that it dramatizes the openness and vulnerability of white masculine eugenicist positions to everything that they strove to extricate themselves from: Asianness, animality, disability, disease, poverty. The openness of the white nation at its coastal borders to aquatic threats – human and nonhuman – and the openness of the white body to sexual threats from without and racial threats from within. In the “great watery spaces [that] opened out before” the narrator as he learns of his kinship with the Deep Ones, the danger is of contagion and seduction: the Deep Ones “planned to spread” beyond Innsmouth, and the narrator feels “one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways” (5252). Lovecraft frames the idea of joining the Deep Ones in their underwater city as a forbidden desire, the danger of attraction that lies behind repulsion: “The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I . . . awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror” (5276). Queerness here, for Lovecraft, is not only the horror of the strange or the foreign, but the forbidden possibility of the eugenicist awakening to desire his own degeneration into animality, multiraciality, and social bonds with Others. Tellingly, the very last detail in the story describes the narrator’s plan to find and liberate his cousin (who was incarcerated in a mental institution) and escape together to join the underwater society of Deep Ones (5276). In spite of Lovecraft, perhaps, I find a hint of the possibility of queer community Van Engen 118 formation here – an imagined underwater refuge among the reefs for the animallike, the queer, the indigenous islanders, the multiracial, the disabled, and the divine. In the narrator’s grandmother’s “phosphorescent palace” surrounded by “strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences,” misfits and degenerates might be “welcomed . . . with a warmth” that has been missing above the surface (5252). The condition for living forever and achieving community in Lovecraft’s universe is the end of the human, and the end of whiteness. In the contexts of my interests in aquatic animals, it is hard for me to see this as entirely a bad thing. 3.1 Queer Geology and Alien Evolution Not all Lovecraft stories take place within the same degenerative paradigm as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In the 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft tells a different kind of story, the story of a scientific expedition to Antarctica gone terribly wrong. Scientists from the fictional Miskatonic University travel to Antarctica intending to drill samples of rock and ice, but instead stumble upon subterranean caverns full of animal and plant fossils that completely contradict the historical assumptions of biologists and geologists. The scientists find much more than they ever intended to: the relics of an ancient, highly evolved race of Old Ones, barrel-shaped, starfish-headed and -footed, tentacled beings who flew to earth from another planet aeons ago. They also uncover the Old Ones’ city, an ancient civilization that died long before humans or mammals ever existed, which provokes considerable anxiety about the place of the white male scientists in the world as they see it. The expedition digs up the bodies of Old Ones that appear dead, but actually turn out to be hibernating. Some of the scientists dissect one of the Old Ones to study them, but the Old Ones wake up, kill those members of the expedition, and run away into their city. The rest of the narrative is devoted to the protagonist attempting to discover what happened and follow them. The novella is framed as a warning tale, Van Engen 119 a classic Lovecraftian move that reveals all the forbidden details purportedly to discourage readers from wanting to find – or release – the terrifyingly exciting monsters unearthed in the tale. Miéville notes that At the Mountains of Madness is unique in Lovecraft’s canon in that its monsters “actually submit[] to the scientist’s gaze (and the vivisector’s scalpel),” whereas in other Lovecraft stories the monster-aliens overwhelm the men of Western science who try to pursue them. But I see the scientists’ failure and insufficiency in the face of what they find on the dissection table as the more important narrative. Much of At the Mountains of Madness is devoted to scientific puzzlement about the strangeness of the geological and paleological record that the Old Ones represent. As a narrative about a scientific expedition gone wrong, the whole text is framed as a failure of western scientists and white male rationality in the face of their nonhuman, extraterrestrial objects of study. In this “unknown Antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law” (59), the scientists knew that “something – chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness – was woefully awry” (45). Across the entire region, rocks, animals, and evidence exist where and when they aren’t supposed to. In the words of the narrator, “existing biology would have to be wholly revised” in light of these perplexing fossils and rocks (23). The land and fossils provide evidence of “contradictions in Nature and geological period” that prove whole disciplines of science massively incorrect (11). Basically, no life at all should exist on earth in the ancient rock where the geologists find fossils of the Old Ones’ civilization. Nature is not as it should be, the Old Ones should not exist, and something is wrong with science and time. The rocks, animals, and plants the scientists find fossilized in the site are contradictory, inexplicable, and queer with respect to the scientists’ known laws of nature. The protagonist Van Engen 120 repeatedly notes his failure in the face of an unruly nonhuman world as queerness: “I felt queerly humbled as a geologist” in the face of a landscape marked by strange or unnatural body cavities: “curious cave-mouths” and “natural orifices” that seem to have been “shaped . . . by some magic hand” (40). While the word “queer” at the time was a synonym for unnatural or strange, it also registers the deviance of science, time, species, and evolution in ways that resonate with contemporary queer theories of time and the nonhuman (Queering the Non/Human, Seymour, Halberstam, Chen and Luciano). The subterranean, orificial, and “unnatural” nature of a landscape in improper time and place renders the geologists’ encounters with the Old Ones’ city and the surrounding landscape very queer (11). The result is a white man of science off-center and unsure in the face of the “queer Antarctic haze” of an “utterly alien earth” (42). Lovecraft imagines this unnatural, untimely ‘nature’ not just through misplaced rocks but through contemporary invertebrate sea animals. The narrative catalogues the Old Ones’ physiology in loving taxonomical detail, firmly situating the story in the stylistic quirks of science writing. Readers, then, experience the scientists’ epistemological failures along with the scientists, since the Old Ones are almost impossible to visualize with the details Lovecraft gives us. When the geologists first find the Old Ones’ apparently inanimate bodies, they are not sure if they are plants or “overgrown specimen[s] of unknown marine radiata” (19). Their bodies are composites of terrestrial invertebrate animals: they have five “light grey flexible arms or tentacles” similar to the “arms of primitive crinoid” (certain species of sea stars), and bear other similarities to invertebrates: “tapering tentacles or tendrils,” “wiry cilia,” “flexible yellowish tubes,” “gill-like suggestions,” and a “greenish five-veined membraneous triangle” that serves as a “paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot” (20-21). They resemble “echinoderm[s],” “crinoid[s],” and “radiata” (20). Importantly, the Old Ones’ bodies bear a consistent five-limbed or five-pointed Van Engen 121 pattern that the geologists describe as a “starfish-arrangement”; their heads are “five-pointed starfish-shaped” objects atop their bodies (21). (Their architecture and art also take a five-pointed geometrical pattern that mirrors their body structure.) While some other science fictional texts used invertebrate-like, slimy animals to construct aliens or monsters (e.g. Wells’ Martians in The War of the Worlds), Lovecraft’s use of starfish to craft alien or monstrous bodies is highly unusual for the period in which Lovecraft is writing, and signals an alternate formation of animal imagination. This invertebrate scripting of the Old Ones’ bodies makes them nonbinary-gendered and asexually-reproducing, too, like their terrestrial counterparts. The scientists learn that they “multiplied by means of spores – like vegetable pteridophytes” (61), and have “spore-cases at the tips of the wings and evidently develop[] from a thallus or prothallus” (24). This setup leads to a social and familial system entirely alien to American domestic and political ideals: “Being non- pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life; but seemed to organize large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and . . . congenial mental association” (62). (Naturally, this leads to a “probably socialistic” form of government (62).) So in At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft extrapolates what hermaphroditic or asexually-reproducing invertebrate species might look like if they formed a sentient, complex society that humans could recognize on their own terms. In other words, the Old Ones’ sea star, mollusk-like, tentacled bodies capitalize on the gender and sexual strangeness of invertebrate genders and sexualities with respect to normative American sexual formations. At the Mountains of Madness imagines the lives of starfish in anthropomorphized terms through the imaginative work of speculative fiction. Besides describing the shape of their bodies and the text’s debt to biology writing here, I want to Van Engen 122 emphasize that the invertebrate sea animals through which Lovecraft assembles the Old Ones’ bodies transforms the nonhuman beings that rebel against the scientists as sexually and socially queer as well as temporally strange, rather than other animals that could more easily be used to construct a heterosexual, binary-gendered social structure for the aliens. Lovecraft accomplishes this alien reimagination of starfish in a kind of queer loop or fold in evolutionary timelines. Whereas the Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” resemble fish and frogs (vertebrate species), the Old Ones bear similarities to mollusks, sea stars, and octopi from “some palaeologean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation” (23). Here, Lovecraft figures alien and queer evolution as invertebrate evolution, mollusks and starfish out of their time in the world. The text frames the existence of the Old Ones and their city as an aberration in evolutionary time, both natural and cultural: “some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth’s history whose outward ramifications . . . had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom” (45). Lovecraft’s ancient starfish aliens are incredibly advanced beings in terms of evolutionary time, but extrapolated from invertebrate animals very low on the species hierarchy as post-Darwinians imagined it. There is a queer fold in evolutionary scales here by which starfish and mollusks become ‘higher’ beings than humans, skipping whole realms of the evolutionary scale. The Old Ones function as sources of horror at first because they supplant the imagined place of humans as the apex of evolutionary processes in the imagination of this time and place. They offer an “alien evolution” unlike “this planet had[] ever bred,” queering and science-fictionalizing Darwin to imagine the possibilities of invertebrates taking over the world (57). In other words, At the Mountains of Madness imagines creatures lower on the evolutionary scale – starfish, worms, mollusks – as evolving independently on an alien planet Van Engen 123 into something far more intelligent than humans, without going through the intermediary stages of vertebrate mammals or reptiles. None of the criticism I’ve found discusses the specificity of invertebrate animals’ evolutionary connotations in connection with the Old Ones’ society. The aspect of Lovecraft’s story that displaces human supremacy in favor of starfish overlords is to an extent true to Miéville’s description of Lovecraft’s oeuvre as a “career-long depiction of an indifferent universe in which humans are, at best, inquisitive grubs” (xiii intro ATMOM). However, humans in ATMOM are even less than “inquisitive grubs,” insofar as the story alienizes human evolutionary origins, reducing us to inquisitive grubs originally created somewhat accidentally by the Old Ones. Later in the story we learn that the Old Ones originated from another planet. They are not just odd, weird, or queer in terms of evolutionary time. They are literally an invasion from another planet’s evolutionary trajectory, and in fact created life on earth as we know it today. In other words, At the Mountains of Madness provincializes, animalizes, and artificializes European human life by subjecting it to the older, more advanced, more colonial forces of the Old Ones’ genetic and biological experiments: [T]he builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in . . . rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells . . . rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life . . . . They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young – the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred. 57 Notice this displacement of life on earth in general – Darwinian evolution - by an alien evolution. Unlike “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the horror here is not moving backwards or forwards along a racialized evolutionary scale of life. Rather, the horror is that that entire Van Engen 124 Darwinian scale of life was itself unnatural, created by beings who evolved on another planet. (And note that Lovecraft imagines creation and slavery alongside one another, positioning the Old Ones as both “makers and enslavers” of terrestrial life.) The story reduces earthly life to “plastic groups of cells,” while complex multicellular and vertebrate life forms become the products and subjects of an alien species. The horror (or wonder) of this displacement of the human and of Darwinian evolution as a whole becomes even clearer when Lovecraft reveals that humans were created as a kind of science experiment, probably a failed one, that was allowed to survive more out of accident than design. In other words, the Old Ones are not just better scientists than the Antarctic expedition geologists – the human scientists are essentially intergalactic lab rats. In the following description, the protagonist is learning about the Old Ones’ history through their murals and architecture, and discovers his own humbling origin story: These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life-forms . . . were the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked, because they had not come into conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakeable. 63 First of all, the text here frames human evolution as an accident of benevolent neglect by superior beings, created but “suffered to develop unchecked” rather than by design. Timothy Murphy observes that this passage is “a radically deflationary creation story for the human Van Engen 125 species” that makes humanity “an unintended by-product of another species’ livestock breeding program” (168). Yet it is more than species-based livestock: human evolution here becomes precisely the kind of negative mutation that eugenicists set out to eradicate from white bloodlines. Lovecraft frames human beings as a whole in the kinds of terms eugenicists used to describe people of color: “primitive,” “buffoon[ish],” “simian,” and livestocklike (“used sometimes for food”). The passage invokes the practice of human chattel slavery and white scientists’ animalization of peoples of color, a racial as well as species othering. Homo Sapiens here, including or especially white people (since Lovecraft, like a good eugenicist, imagined the human as whiteness), becomes the low point of someone else’s evolutionary scale rather than the pinnacle of their own. The horror in At the Mountains of Madness’ alien evolutionary imagination is in part the horror of colonial reversal, somewhat like H. G. Wells’ alien invasion novella The War of the Worlds, but more extreme. At the Mountains of Madness imagines human life not only overwhelmed by an alien race of conquerors, but in fact created by that alien race in the first place, decentering human evolution as the accident of higher beings who treat humans like Europeans treat the indigenous peoples they conquered and enslaved, and/or like scientists treat their lab rats (intertwined through the history of Western medical experimentation). So Lovecraft imagines these alien colonizers as invertebrates – overgrown sea stars with alien social structures, sea-bed creatures scientists thought of as far lower than human levels of sophistication, but in fact come around to supersede the human as such. This story is different from “The Shadow over Innsmouth” because it is not a parable about human evolution at all – white New Englanders are not backsliding into animality because they have intermixed culturally or sexually with non-white peoples. Whereas “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” imagines white human beings backsliding along a (post-)Darwinian eugenicist scale of life, At the Mountains of Van Engen 126 Madness is a story about alien evolution envisioned as invertebrate evolution. The human scientists are not in danger of becoming Old Ones or slipping ‘backward’ into animality, disability, or Asianness. They are not socially, culturally, or sexually intertwined with the alien beings in ways that Lovecraft envisions as miscegenation, and the humans themselves do not degenerate within the narrative. Lovecraft positions them as outside scientific observers of the Old Ones’ culture with limited contact (the city and civilization are dead, except for the couple of Old Ones that unfreeze from hibernation, but the humans never actually meet them). Rather, the story centers the Old Ones’ evolutionary arc, which Lovecraft positions as alien to the terrestrial narrative that Darwin and his descendants tell. This is an alien evolution that supplants human evolution. Not the degeneration or slow death of the human, but the displacement and decentering of its existence in the first place. The story’s sense of horror and wonder derives from this displacement of origin, and this makes it a very different reimagination of evolution. 40 2.3 Amoebic Immigrants However, the end of the novella walks back some of this promise of the alien genderqueer starfish, giving this novella more in common with The Shadow over Innsmouth than at first glance. The Old Ones have left behind a city and a series of underground tunnels that the humans explore. Unfortunately, they have also left behind their lab-created enslaved beings, the protean Shoggoths, who rebelled against their masters and ended the reign of the Old Ones on earth. Whereas the Old Ones are a source of awe, fascination, and by the end admiration, Lovecraft represents the Shoggoths as the ultimate embodiment of horror, the thing-that-should- not-be, a sheer force of un-being. Shoggoths are large, amoeba-like, amorphous masses of slime 40 This is not to say that Lovecraft does not connect the Old Ones’ city to human cultures. (See appendix – I have a whole section written about mirage and orientalism in At the Mountains of Madness, but I can’t figure out if it belongs in the argument or not, and if so, where.) Van Engen 127 and darkness without the Old Ones’ redeeming qualities of civilizedness or science: “They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing and speech in imitations of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion” (64-5). Rather than starfish, these beings appear to be large amoebas, or at least very simple multicellular beings, even farther down the evolutionary scale than the starfish and octopi which form the basis for the Old Ones. 41 The Shoggoths eventually become dangerous to the Old Ones and overthrow their masters because they “acquir[ed] a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence” (64). The implication in the story is that, for Lovecraft, the failure was not the practice of slavery or the mistreatment of lab animals, but the mistake of giving those enslaved creatures too much liberty, agency, and intelligence, which caused them to overthrow their masters and kill off the Old Ones’ civilization (or perhaps the creation of Shoggoths in the first place as evidence of decadence). The narrator’s final description of the Shoggoths combines their amoebalike animality and their imitative stance with respect to the Old Ones’ master-colonizer position: “Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes – viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells – rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile – slaves of suggestion, builders of cities – more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative – Great God!” (p 91) The story ends with the human protagonists running away from a shoggoth that has survived (after killing the reanimated Old Ones the humans uncovered) and chases them down in the depths of the alien city. 41 Shoggoths also reproduce asexually, like the Old Ones (“reproducing by fission” 64). Van Engen 128 Many critics have noted the similarities between the Shoggoths and Lovecraft’s racist descriptions of immigrants in his personal writings. Shoggoths are dark, threatening, huge beings. Miéville connects the Shoggoths to Lovecraft’s much-cited New York letters: “The Shoggoth’s ‘shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles’ is the logical extension (literally ad nauseam) of Lovecraft’s dehumanizing, subhumanizing vision of the masses. Is it a coincidence that the Shoggoth . . . is compared to a subway train, a working-class, ethnically heterogeneous conveyance?” (xxiii intro ATMOM). Essentially, the Shoggoths register all of Lovecraft’s fears about racialized immigrants and the degeneration he worries they will cause in the white nation. This parallel clearly reflects Lovecraft’s professed racial politics – he supported extending Jim Crow laws into the northern United States, and supported Hitler (183 Lovett-Graff). Although he died before the worst Nazi atrocities came to light, he was okay with exterminationist eugenics to an extent, and as Miéville puts it, even before concentration camps existed, “Hitler’s attitudes were no secret” (xviii intro ATMOM). Lovecraft’s racism is legendary and well-supported in both his biography and his texts, and the Shoggoths clearly invoke these politics. 42 42 In his letters Lovecraft professed himself a proud biological racist, to the extent that he was capable of writing the following words to Reinhardt Kleiner in 1915: As to races, I deem it most proper to recognize the divisions into which Nature has grouped mankind. Science shows us the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryan over all others, and therefore it becomes us to see that his ascendancy shall remain undisputed. Any racial mixture can but lower the result. The Teutonic race . . . is the cream of humanity, and its wanton and deliberate adulteration with baser material is even more repulsive to consider than the elaborately staged racial suicide now being conducted . . . . Selected Letters 17 This creed became more poetic and figural in his anti-miscegenation stories like The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but the underlying message did not change. Expressed against Asians, Lovecraft believed that “the virtual destruction of Japan will have to be effected in the interests of Europea safety” and that the Chinese posed a threat as “probably . . . the exterminators of Caucasian civilization” (Selected Letters 90). He proclaimed himself to be “99.0% Teutonick” (274), and fantasized himself as a “chalk-white conqueror” of Aryan stock despite his dark hair; many critics have observed the internal contradictions of his racial beliefs when applied to his own heritage (Selected Letters 156, Lovett-Graff 188). Lovecraft endorsed Mussolini advocated Van Engen 129 However, I also see the Shoggoths as embodiments of colonial mimesis, a different register of animalized racism. Lovecraft emphasizes their mimetic capacities over and over, and describes their bodies as “shapeless” except when they decide to “imitate[e]” the Old Ones’ ears, eyes, and mouths. In another section of the novella Lovecraft writes that the Shoggoths “hav[e] no language save” the Old Ones’ language, and “had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters” (97). This recalls for me the racist claims justifying colonialism that colonized peoples have no true culture or language of their own, and therefore need the colonizer’s culture; hence, Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimesis. The geologists in Lovecraft’s story eventually discover a section of the city where the Shoggoths have decorated the walls with art and murals instead of the Old Ones, and Lovecraft describes their art in classically colonialist terms: “there was a sudden difference . . . in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it. This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail . . . . [It] seem[ed] more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition” (88). Here, Lovecraft transposes white dismissals of the art of indigenous, colonized, and peoples of color as imitative or “parody” and involving a lack of “skill” or “delicacy” with respect to European masters. In distinction to the Shoggoths’ colonialized figurations as imitative protoplasmic masses, Lovecraft recuperates some of the potential the Old Ones had earlier in the narrative by rendering them more analogous to the white male scientists who are observing them. Once the Shoggoths have taken the place of the ultimate racialized-species other, the Old Ones are free to for fascism, and believed that genocide was justified for the sake of art (208). Passages like these in Lovecraft’s letters provide clearly-justified fodder for critical ‘debates’ about the extent of Lovecraft’s racism in his fiction. Van Engen 130 appear as benevolent masters, well-meaning civilized men of science. In the part of the story where the narrator draws this conclusion, he reframes the Old Ones from alien invertebrate figures of awe and horror to strange-looking “men of another age and another order of being,” relatively similar to how the scientists see their own position in the world (92). In contrast to the Shoggoths, Lovecraft makes it clear that the Old Ones “had not even been savages – for what indeed had they done?”, reframing their actions in a more relatable light. Rather than “savages,” the Old Ones then are granted the titles of “men” and “scientists”: Scientists to the last – what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn – whatever they had been, they were men! 92 Here, the entire potential of the story’s compelling portrait of the Old Ones’ untimely existence that upends and displaces Western science (and life on earth in general) now gets resolved into the Western, rational, masculine analogy of the Old Ones as “men” and “scientists.” Rather than alien sources of strangeness, no longer queer invertebrate beings who utterly displace white humans from the apex of evolutionary processes and colonial geographies, the Old Ones suddenly become a stand-in for the white male scientists themselves, figures of identification rather than aversion. Once the Shoggoths take their place as racialized figures of horror and fear, the Old Ones become relatable for Lovecraft’s narrator through their capacities as scientists and slaveowners (or slave-creators, as they grew the Shoggoths in their labs), through their struggles with their rebellious creations. This figure of the enslaved-colonized Shoggoth affects the alien evolutionary arc that the earlier part of the novella sets up. If the Old Ones are still disturbing to the geologists, they are Van Engen 131 disturbing not just because they are older and more advanced than humans and hence displace Man at the apex of evolutionary scales of life, but because they were better colonizers and slaveholders – and scientists – than white Europeans ever were. Or, at least, they were until the enslaved Shoggoths rose up and overthrew the Old Ones’ civilization. Lovecraft constructs this capacity to dominate as the field of trans-species relationality, the source of the scientists’ ability to feel kinship with the alien Old Ones at the end of the story. For some context, there is more to Lovecraft’s paranoid, racist and xenophobic imagination of non-white immigrants outside the pages of his published stories. Lovecraft spent a short period of his life living in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood of New York, Red Hook. There, biographers and critics argue, Lovecraft’s racism intensified as he funneled economic and romantic unhappiness into hysterically hostile feelings toward his neighbors that belong among any of the most racist writings in the Western canon (Tyree 140). Almost all critics who write about Lovecraft (those who do not ignore this aspect of his history, that is) quote the letters he wrote while he was living in New York during this period. Reprinting and recirculating these noxious words seems to be a ritual in Lovecraft criticism that I’m not sure I want to reinforce, but they are highly relevant to my arguments about the Shoggoths, invertebrates, and racialized animal analogies more broadly. Lovecraft’s letters are not just background to his stories – they are science fictions in their own right. In the most well-known of these letters from Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long in 1924, Lovecraft imagines Asians and non-white immigrants in New York more generally as a threatening force of inhumanization that threatens to undo all the racial ‘progress’ Lovecraft and other Social Darwinists saw in Anglo-Saxon civilization. Many critics have cited the following Van Engen 132 passage from a 1924 letter to Frank Belknap Long as among the clearest examples of Lovecraft’s hysterical racial stance. Here is how Lovecraft describes a lower East side neighborhood: The organic things – Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid – inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They – or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed – seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses . . . Selected Letters 333-4 Here, Lovecraft calls his immigrant neighbors in Red Hook ““monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of pithecanthropoid and amoebal” (cited in 28 Lévy). Pithecanthropus refers to, according to the OED, a “hypothetical” species in the evolutionary scale between apes and humans (“Pithecanthropus”). Yet Lovecraft combines this half-ape, half-human hybrid with amoebas, single-celled organisms that practice asexual reproduction (splitting). Amoebas are not technically a part of the animal kingdom (according to current or older taxonomies of life) – they are protozoa, simpler forms of life even than plants, and certainly farther distant from humans in terms of biological taxonomy or in Darwinian evolutionary time. Lovecraft calls the combination of pithecanthropus and amoeba “monstrous” out of racial motivation, but of a particular kind, because of the unnatural, nonlinear, queer merging of primate and protozoa: an unimaginable hybrid being, in terms of morphology or aesthetics. (What does a half-amoeba, half-primate being even look like?) This is not a simple racism, and it is not even animalization. This is a different (and horrible) tangle of evolutionary time, a fold if you will, between apedom and Van Engen 133 protoplasm, that weirds evolutionary life scales as a contradictory (within its own logic) effort to distance non-white immigrants in Lovecraft’s neighborhood from humanness. Bennett Lovett-Graff connects these letters’ amoeba analogies to the frog-fish-like Deep Ones of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (182). But I think they have more to do with the amoeba-like Shoggoths of At the Mountains of Madness. What Lovecraft accomplishes in the Shoggoths and in his letter to Long is a new distribution of racialization, disability, gender, and animality along an already-existing evolutionary scale. Whereas more prosaic forms of racism animalized non-white peoples as mammallike (Lundblad, Seitler), Lovecraft’s imagination constellated animality and race differently – imagined contemporary racial categories as distributed along a broader swath of nonhuman life with greater distancing and dehumanizing effects. While Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of Tarzan) and Sax Rohmer (author of the Fu Manchu series) were imagining mammality as the threatened end of white human supremacy, Lovecraft extended his racialized animal imagination to creatures including fish, frogs, slime, amoebas, and even trees. Instead of apes and cats, now non-white immigrants could function as slime, ooze, protoplasm, or amoebas. This constitutes an inversion of evolutionary timelines as eugenicists understood them and of the logics of atavism as Seitler theorizes them. This is not the eruption of supposedly mammallike traits (e.g. fur) in human bodies (e.g. hirsuteness) as regression, but the transposition of entire populations into monocellular liquid masses far distant from the closer realms of biological relation. Not a ‘missing link’ argument, in other words, but a transposition of the simplest forms of life on earth into the imagined, scientifically constructed separation zones between human races. The Shoggoths and amoeba analogies demonstrate that Lovecraft used monocellular life to dehumanize peoples of color, but it’s not quite animalization, if amoebas and slime aren’t part of the animal kingdom. Van Engen 134 And I think the key is collectivity. In the Shoggoths and in his letters, Lovecraft imagines communities and groups of immigrants as protoplasmic groups of monocellular or very simple organisms. His letter cites not only amoebas but also “viscous slime,” “slithering and oozing” beings, “degenerate gelatinous fermentation” that “ooze[s], seep[s], and trickle[s]”, and something like a bubble of liquid pus: “vats, crammed to the vomiting point . . . and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness” (cited in 29 Lévy). This liquidity depends on collectivities of single-celled organisms in addition to conceptions of toxicity, disease, and decomposition. Lovecraft writes of the communities he is trying to inhumanize, “The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating” (29 Lévy). Rather than generalize all dehumanization into one mass of generic animality or objectness here, notice the specificity of how Lovecraft’s anti-Asian imagination depends on conceptions of collectivity, monocellular protozoan life, liquidity, disease, and monstrous cross- taxonomical combinations of life. (Diseases themselves are bacteria or viruses, simple forms of life that inhabit the human body parasitically.) If this is atavism, it is a very different kind than white supremacist cartoons of Asian simianness or felineness. Lovecraft’s degeneration imaginary here collectivizes, monocellularizes, and asexualizes (in the sense of asexual reproduction, not human asexuality) immigrant life. This Asian imaginary is highly related to disease and toxicity in ways that recall Mel Chen’s and Neel Ahuja’s work. The Shadow over Innsmouth describes the degenerating, racially mixed, ‘contaminated’ spaces of Innsmouth as disease-ridden, leprous, and disfigured, clearly associating nonwhiteness, nonhumanness, and disability. In the 1924 letter, Lovecraft calls nonwhite Asian immigrants not only animal comparisons like “worms” and “deep-sea unnameabilities,” but also “gangrenous vileness,” a “leprous cataclysm,” a “perverse infection,” Van Engen 135 and the “grotesque” (334). Perhaps the last line of this letter’s paragraph can best encapsulate Lovecraft’s imagination of Asianness as disability or infection within eugenicist imaginaries: I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay . . . a yellow leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point . . . . Selected Letters 334 Here, disease and disability render the Asian body queer as corporeal signs Lovecraft attaches to racial difference. The Asian body in Lovecraft’s (and eugenicists’) imagination in the 1920s was a porous body, a body full of leaking orifices, a carrier of disease and toxicity, a body that is dissolving into the molecular level or massing together into a crowd. What would it mean to read this passage while keeping in mind Chen’s admonitions to not stigmatize disability, illness, or toxicity in the process of critiquing racism? In “Unpacking Intoxication, Racialising Disability,” Chen calls for attention to “not only the critical boundaries of the toxic versus the non-toxic,” but also the “categorical blurrings in that production of the toxic” (29). I do not seek to recuperate Lovecraft’s clear anti-Asian racism here, but rather to elucidate its logics and pull apart the fabric of his picture of the Asianized nonhuman. It is not enough to call Lovecraft a racist and leave it at that. Rather, it is important to flesh out what kind of racial, sexual, and ability logics are constituted by these passage, because they are significant to the differential ways that Asians Van Engen 136 were racialized through nonhumanization as diseased, collective, porous/queer, and unsuitable for white eugenics and public health initiatives. Neel Ahuja argues in Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species for more attention to the fact that empire and racism do not operate solely on or through the human, or as he puts it, “the apparent exteriority of the subject (the worlds of body, physical matter, and interspecies exchange) has more often formed the center of the politics of empire than its excluded outside” (ix). Ahuja analyzes the deployment of public health and disease prevention as technologies of racialization in immigration policy, observing how supreme court decisions in the early 20 th century, for example, “compare[] bacterial and viral species to military enemies” in a case that concerned “yellow fever or Asiatic cholera,” pinning disease and illness to sources outside the United States’ borders (1-2). Ahuja notes the rise of disease screening at US borders and the exclusion of people who had contagious diseases from immigration acts around the turn of the 20 th century, enfolded within the many Asian exclusion acts (18). In fact, these fears of disease were central to public discourse around the American annexation of Guam, Hawai’i, and other islands in this period (18). According to Ahuja, “the purported universality of imperial public health was betrayed by its circulation of racial fears of disease. This made the microscopic bodies of viruses and bacteria into the very matter of racial differentiation, the lively conduits of debility and death that threatened a dangerous intimacy between species and social groups in a globalizing world of empire” (5). In other words, microscopic organisms are a ground and a vector of racialization through both their imagined foreign (alien?) sources of contagion, and in the way they reveal the borders of the U.S. nation and white bodies to be porous and permeable to its ‘outsides.’ These racialized fears of disease were also sexual ones, both because of sexualized fears about nonwhite immigrants and because Van Engen 137 of the intimacies of bodily porosity within the terms of how white supremacy imagined self- contained, presumably masculine, white bodies. Ahuja views in viruses, bacteria, and other transmissible diseases “the queer potential that disease reveals as immanent to life itself” (8). In this light, the queerness Lovecraft’s narrative ascribes to the deep ones and to Pacific islands in The Shadow over Innsmouth takes on new light as not only about the sexual threats projected onto Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants during this time, but also about the sexualized (or at least queered) function of diseases in this eugenicist American imaginary. I see connections between Ahuja’s analysis of race, empire, and disease, and Lovecraft’s construction of a fantasticized, leaking, porous, disease-transmitting, bacteria-like, queered Asian body in his letters. Ahuja’s observation that “the tenacity of race also inheres in its fluid materialization across different contexts and forms of circulation, including . . . viruses, bacteria, and animals” pertains to the racial unconscious Lovecraft reveals in his letters and fiction. That unconscious is one that imagines disease as emanating from immigrants, of non-white immigrants as insidiously permeating US borders, bodies, and communities at the monocellular level, and of white male bodies as queered and disabled by contact with Asian and islander peoples (6, emphasis mine). Lovecraft’s concern with disability, Asianness, sexuality, and animalization reflects the 1920s eugenicist imaginary’s projection of disease, queerness, and primitivity onto the island nations the U.S. was conquering during this period, including but not exclusively Hawai’i. The beginnings of a white tourist industry in annexed Hawai’i would have accentuated these fears as more white travelers came into contact with Hawai’i and other Pacific nations. So in addition to the exoticized fantasies of ‘South Sea islands’ like the ones that circulated in newspapers, horror stories like Lovecraft’s of disease, degeneration, and inhumanization in connection with Pacific islands make (unfortunately) a lot of historical sense. Van Engen 138 2.4 Conclusion: Shoggoth Speculations As Graham Harman sees it, Lovecraft is a theorist of unruly, weird, and queer nature. However, Lovecraft is also, in his weirdness and queerness and investment in the nonhuman, committed to the value of whiteness as the human. Ahuja’s claims are crucial to understanding the cultural work of Lovecraft’s writing, its current popularity in the academy, and the uncritical espousal of his fiction by object-oriented ontologist and new materialist thinkers like Harman and Eugene Thacker. If xenophobia, conquest, and the racialization of gender and sexuality require (not prohibit) a turn to animality, the ‘post’human, and the sublime horror of decentralizing deistic or humanist origins (of the nation, of American culture, of the human), then this leaves us with a genocidal genius, a weirding of Darwinian species and sexual logics without a concomitant undoing of white supremacy and patriarchy. Lovecraft is a deeply troubling and fascinating writer, and, I believe, one of the most important thinkers of the toxic logics of degeneration of the eugenics era. He is Darwin’s heir in the most negative, paranoid, and toxic mode possible. Any connection between Lovecraft’s work and recent humanities conversations around the nonhuman world need to start from an analysis of Lovecraft’s eugenicist philosophy, not sidestep it or abstract it in the way that Harman does. I agree with Miéville’s critique of Harman and OOO more generally as a “deeply politically etiolated posthumanism,” and I think Lovecraft criticism can do better (240 Miéville and Weinstock). Does Lovecraft’s racism create problems for this project’s broader analysis of invertebrate animality as a vector of queer and trans imagination in American science fiction? At the Mountains of Madness offers hints and traces of invertebrate possibilities in the 90 pages of the novella that do not recuperate the Old Ones as masters and civilized scientists. In a generous or motivated queer reading, the final 10 pages might not quite fully close down the trans-animal Van Engen 139 possibilities of the alien starfish who outwit and displace the white male human scientists who try to study them. Literally dead objects of study who spring back to life on the dissection table, the hybrid invertebrate Old Ones carry out what I see as the resistant potential of invertebrate sea creatures with respect to Darwinian attempts to make sense of the world through Western gender, sexual, and racial norms. There is some room in this novella to trace a genealogy of invertebrate possibilities. It is important to ask how animality, the nonhuman, and the decentering of humanism might offer alternative routes through race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability (across species, not just the human) other than the well-worn path through white- supremacist eugenicist imaginaries. I see hints of these alternatives in the fantastic ending of The Shadow over Innsmouth and the unruly middle of At the Mountains of Madness. On a more sober note, these stories show that in the hands of a devoted eugenicist like Lovecraft, aquatic animals like fish or frogs and monocellular organisms like amoebas function quite well as vehicles for racialized and xenophobic species analogies. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s letters in particular evince a paranoia about white human life being evolutionarily related to, or degenerating into, organisms all the way ‘down’ the species scale to the imagined moment when vertebrate life first crawled out of the ocean and flopped about on its fins on land. In Zadok Allen’s words, “human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water- beasts”: like any other animal, we “come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin” (4662). I am fascinated by how the degeneration imaginary in the period Lovecraft is writing, and the evolutionary imagination that continues today, keeps coming back to this imagined moment when our amphibious ancestors crossed the water line and crawled out onto the mud. Lovecraft’s portrait of the Deep Ones in “At the Mountains of Madness” extrapolates some of the implications of human kinship with this ancestor and its imagined scene of Van Engen 140 amphibious transition. Why is this the origin story Americans tell themselves? Why are Western scientists so eager to explain human origins in terms of this endlessly-replayed scene of the heroic anthropomorphized mudskipper? And why does that particular sea creature carry such anxiety for the early 20 th century’s thinkers of degeneration? Lovecraft attaches Asian and indigenous Pacific Islander racialized connotations to that amphibious ancestor, although not all post-Darwinists do. But I am more intrigued by the alien origin story of At the Mountains of Madness, where for a moment before the narrative retrieves its possibilities, humans became the misbegotten progeny of an alien starfish’s failed science experiment. At the Mountains of Madness uproots Darwinian theories of evolution and grafts them onto another planet instead. Or are the possibilities of Lovecraft’s writing in Lovecraft at all? Maybe it was never about Lovecraft alone, but about the Lovecraftian tradition and what later writers have made of his shared mythical universe. If, as Sederholm and Weinstock argue, “we are living in the ‘Age of Lovecraft,” then maybe the takeaway is that later writers have reimagined Lovecraftian invertebrate monsters and done new, queer things with them. For example, the erotica stories of Alice Xavier I analyze in chapter 4 locate themselves explicitly within a Lovecraftian tradition, in a genderqueer tentacled erotica fantasy Lovecraft the eugenicist would have been horrified by. I have not yet found this fanfiction story, but I would like to read a retelling of At the Mountains of Madness from the perspective of the Shoggoths. After all, both humans and Shoggoths were creations of by the Old Ones’ mad science experiments; what would their alliance look like? The narrative of the superintelligent, amoebic laborers who finally got tired of their alien overlords and sit amidst the spoils of their former masters’ city. The story of the Shoggoth insurrection, the slave revolt, the lab rats who fought back, the Frankenstein’s monster who got up off the table Van Engen 141 and threw his master out the window. I would like to read this story; but in the meantime, let this stand as a speculative homage to the Shoggoth’s slimy invertebrate powers to muck things up. Van Engen 142 3. Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive Introduction Placing Octavia E. Butler in a genealogy of speculative writing about monstrous bodies following H.P. Lovecraft is a controversial move. Butler, a working-class black geek, MacArthur genius, and first widely-known black woman author of science fiction, lived in Pasadena, California and wrote her best-known works in the 1980s and 1990s during a time in which science fiction was slowly starting to include more women and people of colors as authors in the “new wave” period of science fiction (Roberts 83). Butler’s works explore the toxic pasts of biology and science fiction through her alien parables, but also postulate new futures in which multiracial, queer people take center stage in exchanges with alien cultures – not the white men who have historically dominated the genre. As Butler described it in a note from the 1990s, her fiction was a response to “[her] own Private Aliens” of these earlier generations of science fiction, “white men of about 30 who drank & smoked too much” (OEB 3037, Box 154). In response, Butler envisioned speculative worlds in which not only the humans were queer, but also the aliens: insectoid beings who impregnate human men with their eggs, long-lived bisexual polyamorous vampires with addictive venom, and the subject of this chapter, the Xenogenesis trilogy’s tentacled invertebrate-like aliens with three genders and natural genetic engineering capabilities. Where Lovecraft is a degeneration theorist who imagines alien scientists as slave masters and sees the disappearance of white humanness as a threat, Butler is a thinker of hybrid futures in which the human race is under threat, but partly of its own doing. In Butler’s universe, in order to outgrow our destructive, hierarchical tendencies, humans must evolve into something newer, queerer, and only partially human. The nonhuman, nonwhite alien worlds that Lovecraft saw as a Van Engen 143 source of horror are, for Butler, a site of alternate possibilities to our troubled here and now – or, at least, of critical estrangement. 43 Yet there are strange similarities between the ways Butler and Lovecraft conceptualized aliens: similarities between Lovecraft’s starfishlike, tentacled Old Ones and Butler’s sea-slug-like, tentacle-covered Oankali, and between Lovecraft’s amoeboid Shoggoths and Butler’s protist-like sentient spaceships. By putting Butler in a genealogy of “it” genders alongside Lovecraft, I am arguing that her work is a strategic response to and rewriting of earlier invertebrate-like monsters, transforming them from sites of body horror to queerly erotic Others. From the troubled ground of colonial relations, Butler’s tentacle-covered aliens grow into hybrid, part-human, nonbinary creatures who thrive in the future of which Lovecraft was horrified. It is no accident that in the third book of the Xenogenesis trilogy, which I will be examining here, the tentacled, nonbinary alien moves from an object of science fiction as a secondary character to the subject of narration as the main character, complete with its own coming-of-age story and romance plot. In this chapter I turn to Butler’s archival notes about science and the Xenogenesis trilogy as the crux of my genealogy of monstrous “it” genders. I argue that Butler’s work in the 1980s reimagine invertebrate animal biologies as transgender alien universes through paradigms of bodily transformation, particularly insect metamorphosis. Instead of understanding the Oankali’s descendants as a dehumanized future, I read Butler’s use of specific animal biologies as a queer 43 In a 1996 interview, Butler said: “Back when Ronald Reagan had just become president, people were talking about winnable nuclear wars. And I thought, if people are falling for this kind of thing, there must be something basically wrong with the human species. So I thought about it, and what I wound up doing, really, was putting the thing I came up with into the mouth of my . . . aliens. I had them arrive right after a nuclear war, so that I could make my point, and I had them tell my character that human beings had two characteristics that didn’t work well together: one, they were intelligent, and that was good, no problem. And two, they were hierarchical. And unfortunately the hierarchical tendencies were the older. And so sometimes the intelligence was put at the service of the hierarchical behavior” (31:43 Akomfrah). Van Engen 144 rewriting of science to build an inhuman trans world. From protists to insects to the HeLa cell line, Butler’s engagement with and transformation of science in Xenogenesis is substantial. I focus primarily on the third book of the trilogy, Imago, and on the scientific research Butler did while writing the series. I conducted archival research for this chapter in the Octavia E. Butler collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I examined Butler’s newspaper clippings, research notes, drafts, outlines, and bibliographical notecards relating to science during the 1980s, and also read many of the scientific sources Butler worked with. Butler took her research process for stories seriously, and read extensively in sources including the Los Angeles Times science column, The Scientific American, introductory biology textbooks, and medical and scientific reference works like The Penguin Dictionary of Biology. She took a research trip to the Amazon rainforest in order to learn more about the plant and animal life of the area, where much of Xenogenesis are set in a futuristic post-nuclear-apocalypse earth. She incorporated contemporary knowledge about cancer, genetics, recombinant DNA, captive animal breeding programs, medical racism, reproductive health, nuclear war, and animal biology (to name just a few avenues of inquiry) into her alien stories from this period, “Bloodchild” and Xenogenesis. Butler was an avid reader and researcher of publicly-available science, and her research was so extensive that Aimee Bahng has argued for seeing her as a black feminist philosopher of science (Bahng). While literary critics of Xenogenesis have mostly been interested in whether or not Butler’s use of genetics and biology make her work essentialist in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, I am most interested in how Butler reimagines biology in particularly queer and trans ways – particularly her use of protists and invertebrate animals. I see her use of science as one of Van Engen 145 inspiration (a term she used multiple times) for her science fiction. 44 This is the story of Octavia Butler’s animal imaginations, the journey of how invertebrate animals travel from her newspaper and science textbook research to her trip to the Amazon to her story notes and outlines to her final published texts of Imago. 3.1 What are the ooloi? Published between 1987 and 1989, the Xenogenesis or Lilith’s Brood trilogy starts with the premise that humans have destroyed the earth through nuclear war, and the Oankali aliens have rescued the remaining survivors onto their ship. Butler’s aliens postulate that humans have a fatal pair of characteristics that caused worldwide destruction: they are both intelligent and hierarchical. As a species, the Oankali are natural genetic engineers driven to interbreed with other species; they look like sea creatures with tentacle-covered bodies and legs, and they have a three-gender social system comprised of male, female, and ooloi. The protagonist of the first book, Dawn, is a black woman named who Lilith acts as an intermediary between humans and Oankali. The Oankali are training the humans to survive on the radically changed earth, but don’t understand or respect human autonomy well in the first book. Lilith mates with and joins a family of Oankali, including an ooloi named Nikanj, and also finds human male partners – an Asian-American man named Joseph, and later a Latino man named Tino. The second and third books of the trilogy, Adulthood Rites and Imago, are narrated by Lilith’s mixed-race, mixed- species children as they grow up, find their own mates, and transform their parents’ societies. Early on, the Oankali enforce a genetic ‘trade’ that effectively merges their species into one – 44 For example, in notes for a speech written sometime before 2007, Butler wrote: “SF, of course, is in no way hamstrung by burgeoning science fact. Just the opposite. SF is stimulated! I sometimes find it difficult to finish science articles on new discoveries because I’m so busy scribbling and considering the ideas they inspire” (OEB 3090, Box 156). Van Engen 146 causing considerable resistance from the humans. In the second book, the human-Oankali hybrid children grow up enough to tell their parents that humans must be allowed to continue as a species, no matter how hierarchical they are, and they establish a separatist colony. The central question Butler’s trilogy asks, from both human and nonhuman perspectives, is: are humans so irretrievably hierarchical and violent as a species that it is necessary to abandon or alter the human to create a more ethical society? While I will discuss all Oankali genders in this chapter, I am particularly interested in the third gender, the ooloi. Butler has called the ooloi her “catalyst sex,” and uses the personal pronoun “it” to describe them. Within the trilogy, Butler envisions a reproductive system in which egg and sperm must be joined within the body of the ooloi, who then carefully crafts an offspring out of the genetic material available. While all Oankali can to some extent “read” genes like texts, the ooloi are the true genetic engineers (or artists) of the species. They are healers, they are memory banks for the species, and they “mix” each Oankali or construct child. The third book of the trilogy, Imago, is narrated by an ooloi, Lilith’s construct child named Jodahs. Most human characters have a hard time accepting the ooloi, particularly heterosexual male characters. While straight white men rule the society most of the humans were born in, the ooloi are the dominant gender in the post-apocalypse world, and this is incredibly threatening to men who see their new position as effeminizing. One black man named Paul Titus, for example, believes that the ooloi “seem male” while “the males and females act[] like eunuchs” – a sentiment Lilith finds deeply “foolish” (89). 45 45 Immediately after their conversation, Paul attacks and tries to rape Lilith, demonstrating that in Butler’s universe straight men remain more of a threat to Lilith than her ooloi partner, Nikanj (95). Van Engen 147 While heterosexual male characters insist on misgendering the ooloi, reading them as male and their sexuality as homosexual, other human characters find the ooloi repulsive and challenging because they are nonbinary gendered. Even Lilith struggles through her reaction of disgust early in Dawn. Before she has become accustomed to Oankali culture, Lilith uses the pronoun “it” as an opportunity to demean an ooloi named Kahguyaht, who is Nikanj’s parent. Lilith feels “disgusted” by the ooloi’s elephant-trunk-like sensory arms, then “[takes] pleasure in the knowledge that the Oankali themselves used the neuter pronoun in referring to the ooloi. Some things deserved to be called ‘it’” (48-9). Lilith’s internal narration here marks the human characters’ collapse of species-based disgust and gender-based disgust, of non-human and non- person. In other words, Kahguyaht is disgusting because it is inhuman, because it is invertebrate- like, and also because it is not masculine or feminine. The gender-neutral and non-human pronoun “it” functions as the crux of this collapse, marking the gender binary as the threshold of species, kinship, and personhood. Lilith does not remain in this place of nonreflective disgust, of course – her narrative in the rest of the trilogy models a pedagogical process of coming to know (and love, in the case of Nikanj) ooloi as nonhuman people and kin. By the end of Dawn, she has formed a strong bond with Nikanj, who slowly learns how important the human idea of consent is over the course of the series. It might be easy to mistake ooloi, a nonbinary gender, for androgyny. But ooloi are not a mix of masculinity and femininity, and the Oankali go to great lengths to distinguish the ooloi from the concept of mixed gender. In Imago, for example, the protagonist Jodahs meets a human named Santos who is part of a resister community (humans who choose to live beyond Oankali control) and clarifies the man’s mistaken impression that Jodahs is “hermaphroditic” (712): “Exactly what the hell are you anyway?” Van Engen 148 “Construct. Oankali-Human mixture. Ooloi.” “Ooloi . . . The mixed ones – male and female in one body.” “We aren’t male or female.” “So you say.” He sighed. 710 A mixture of masculinity and femininity is the closest thing these human characters have to conceptualize the ooloi. Moments like this one are everywhere in the trilogy, in which Butler’s characters educate readers to imagine genders that are not masculinities, nor femininities, nor some combination thereof. Unlike other science fiction works about alien genders like Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the ooloi have a nonbinary gender, not a lack of gender. They are “it” gendered. Unlike more violent men like Paul Titus, in this scene Santos is receptive and strongly drawn to the ooloi. The humans who fall in love with the ooloi, like Lilith, in turn become educators of other humans in understanding the Oankali gender system – and the possibility of nonbinary genders more broadly. And by the third book of the trilogy, when Jodahs becomes the narrator, Butler uses science-fictional worldbuilding and the Oankali’s invertebrate- like bodies to make nonbinary genders not only objects of science fictional estrangement from a cisgender human perspective, but also subjects of the story. Critics have interpreted the ooloi in many different ways, some more compelling than others. They are usually seen as metaphors for something else, particularly other genders or sexual identities, rather than as nonbinary genders in their own right. Here are the most common of those critical trends in a few illustrative examples: 1. The ooloi are phallic. From this perspective, because the ooloi are dominant and penetrate humans neurologically with their sensory hands, they are displaying masculine characteristics. In an essay on colonialism in Dawn, for example, Eva Cherniavsky alludes to Van Engen 149 the ooloi in this way by stating that male and female partners “assum[e] what counts, at least in a phallic economy of human gender, as passive positions in the sexual act” (17). I don’t find this position compelling, because Xenogenesis is precisely exploring alternatives to the hetero-“phallic economy.” 2. The ooloi are ungendered. In this view, because the ooloi are not masculine or feminine, they must not have a gender. The word most often used to describe this view is “neuter.” No less than Donna Haraway does this in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, where she defines ooloi as “a neuter being who uses its special appendages to mediate and engineer the gene trading of the species and of each family” (229). The problem, of course, is that “neuter” implies not only genderless but sexless, sterile, undesirable, and incomplete. Nonbinary gender is not an absence of gender or sex. 3. The ooloi are metaphors for homosexuality. This stance takes issue with representing homosexuality by displacing it onto an alien species’ gender system. Traci Castleberry argues this in “Twisting the Other: Using a ‘Third’ Sex to Represent Homosexuality in Science Fiction,” emphasizing the homophobic logics of human men who cannot acknowledge their desire for the ooloi because it would mean “losing their masculinity” (16). Of course, homophobia is one of the sins Xenogenesis portrays as inherent in hierarchical humans, but the ooloi are more than metaphors for gayness – they are genders in their own right. 4. The ooloi are heteronormative. Conversely, this view says that because there always seems to be one ooloi, one male, and one female Oankali – but never two ooloi – their gender-sex system is heteronormative. Echo Savage makes the claim that Xenogenesis supports the violent resister men’s call to “pair off! one man, one woman,” because homosexuality is Van Engen 150 implicit rather than explicit in the narratives involving a 5-person construct family structure (ooloi, male and female Oankali, male and female human). This reading is a little bit true, and I am very sympathetic to the desire to see ooloi in love with each other. But it undervalues the queer nature of the multiple-gender system: to me, heteronormativity requires a gender binary. 5. The ooloi are metaphors for the fluidity of all gender. This kind of reading accounts for the ooloi characters who undergo bodily transitions and interprets them as theories about everyone’s genders, rather than connecting them specifically to trans people. Patricia Melzer argues that the “‘queer essence’ of the construct ooloi,” who can shapeshift in addition to undergoing metamorphosis, “not only challenges notions of sex/gender/sexuality and the dichotomy of sexual difference but questions the very social order the heterosexual matrix relies on” (239). This point of view is close to mine, but like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble which Melzer cites frequently, it treats trans bodies as only theoretical models for the instability of gender in general, always already recruited into the labor of challenging (cis)gender essentialism rather than allowed to tell other stories or build their own worlds. 6. The ooloi are colonizers. This perspective emphasizes how Xenogenesis mirrors the real- world history of colonial oppression, including sexual coercion, through the rescuer-captor position of the Oankali in Dawn. Aparajita Nanda argues in “Power, Politics, and Domestic Desire in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood” that the Oankali “adroitly camouflage their colonizing intent, enforcing reproductive rights on humans, in a rhetoric of altruistic salvation” that “recalls the European civilizing mission” (775), implicating the ooloi as the primary genetic enactors of this scheme (777). Nanda sees Lilith as using “deviant” sexuality to “give birth to new narratives of dissension” within the colonial scene (784). I am Van Engen 151 sympathetic to this reading in the first book, Dawn, but less so for the second and especially third books narrated by construct children, where parallels to real-world European colonialisms are messier and harder to sustain. 7. The ooloi are enslavers. This reading points to the history of slavery as sexual violence, and argues that the Oankali captivity of humans reflects this history. Cathy Peppers, for example, sees the Xenogenesis trilogy as a rewriting of origin stories, particularly slave narratives. She argues that Lilith’s relationship with Nikanj in Dawn is a “re-creation of the black woman’s ‘choice’ under slavery” (50). This perspective, too, helps explain important aspects of Dawn but can sometimes place moral authority with the wrong characters: the hierarchical, sexist, racist, homophobic humans who hate the Oankali because the ooloi have displaced them from the position of oppressor. The view I propose, instead, is that the ooloi are nonbinary trans characters because of how Butler used animal biology to construct these aliens. The ooloi offer a trans-specific reimagining of invertebrate terrestrial creatures if we do not immediately assume that biology in literature equals essentialism, following feminist science scholars, and instead see biology in Butler’s texts as an intertextual site of queer, trans life. The Oankali metamorphosis process makes all Oankali trans, since they all undergo gender transition (particularly in Imago), but the ooloi deserve attention as nonbinary trans characters within that paradigm. 3.2 Protist Biology 101 In Butler’s notes, the ideas for Xenogenesis began with biology – particularly with invertebrate and single-celled organism biology. In spring of 1983, Butler enrolled in a Biology 101 class at a local LA university. I examined her lecture notes from that class in the Octavia E. Butler collection at the Huntington Library, notes which are full of trivia about the stranger Van Engen 152 branches of the organism classification tree but also ideas for Oankali biology. One page of notes on cell division and asexual reproduction is labeled “XG” in the margins, surrounded by information about parthenogenesis, budding, fragmentation, spores, and hermaphroditic organisms, signaling that Butler was exploring reproductive alternatives to heteronormativity within the world of single-celled organisms (OEB 3224 Box 179). One entry from January 10, 1983, lays out the different branches of the protist family tree on the front of the page: amoebas, flagellates, ciliates, plasmodium, and paramecium. On the back of the same page, however, are notes about Oankali reproduction and the function of the ooloi within that system, exploring in great detail how reproduction might work with more than a binary sex system as an outgrowth of those earlier note pages. Her notes sketch out possible ways that male, female, and ooloi could be necessary for Oankali reproduction in this Xenogenesis universe: “egg and sperm may be joined only within the ooloi body, but cannot mature past the fertilized egg stage until replanted within the female” (OEB 3224 box 179). Butler compares their function to queen bees, to insect pheromones, and to a combination of host and catalyst. Butler’s doodled plans only appear in the early sections of her class notebook when the lecture was covering small, weird organisms like amoebas, bacteria, and protozoa, not on the later pages on vertebrates and mammal reproduction. According to one of the textbooks that Butler read during her research process, Biology: The Science of Life, many of the protists she lists on the notebook pages above reproduce asexually, or reproduce sexually but are not classifiable in biologists’ male or female terms. Paramecia, for example, a tiny, cilia-covered organism, have 8 mating types or genders, indicating that Butler was considering real-world examples of organisms that exceed heteronormative views of reproduction taught for mammal biology (Biology 466). Likewise, the textbook indicates, some species of mold reproduce sexually but cannot be called male or Van Engen 153 female, so biologists use “+” or “-” instead to name mating types (488-9). So while biology has historically been seen in gender studies as a cultural justification for heteronormativity and sexism, these tiny organisms in Butler’s research clearly provided a starting place for her to imagine alien gender systems that exceed a male/female binary. Some of these protists’ morphological qualities directly shaped the Oankali in the published text. Ciliates’ bodies, which are asexually reproducing creatures, are covered in tiny tentacle-like cilia, which Biology: The Science of Life describes as “perform[ing] in a coordinated manner, moving in sequence much like rows of wheat bending before gusts of wind. This coordination is made possible by an elaborate network of nervelike fibers that connect one basal body with the next” (465). The textbook’s description of these cilia resembles Butler’s description of the Oankali tentacles in Xenogenesis. When Lilith meets her first Oankali in Dawn, Butler describes her impression of his sensory tentacles in similar terms: “[T]he hair – the whatever-it-was – moved. Some of it seemed to bow toward her as though in a wind – though there was no stirring of air in the room. She frowned, strained to see, to understand. . . . Medusa. Some of the ‘hair’ writhed independently, a nest of snakes startled, driven in all directions” (13). Likewise, a note from 1984 spells out how amoebas provided ideas for how the Oankali reproduce and function at the species level by dividing: ““The Oankali are a people who divide as does the amoeba when they are mature – when they have 1. Reached a certain population density, 2. Completed their most recent past blending and 3. Found a suitable new partner.” (OEB 3229, box 179). So Butler’s Oankali drew on the weird, queer biology of tiny, simple animals that do not reproduce in ways that resemble “male” or “female.” And examining the ooloi in light of Butler’s scientific research shows a very queer, trans biological imagination at work. 3.3 Imago and insect metamorphosis Van Engen 154 My argument about insect biology and gender transition in Xenogenesis hinges on the title of the third book in the trilogy, Imago. “Imago” not only means “image” in Latin or the Jungian ideal (Sleigh 283), but also the final stage of insect metamorphosis: larva, pupa, and imago or adult. Butler’s 1988 letter draft to Wanda Coleman clarifies that the title Imago has nothing to do with images but everything to do with entomology – that Butler “found the word “imago” in the gloss[a]ry of one of [her] entomology books” (OEB 3190 Box 174). The 1977 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Biology, which Butler used as a reference, defines imago as an “adult sexually mature insect” (144), as does Daly, Doyen, and Erlich’s 1978 Introduction to Insect Biology and Diversity (49). 46 Butler’s notes, outlines, and commonplace books during her research for Xenogenesis use the word “imago” in this context as a stage of metamorphosis: for example, a note in 1984 speculates about what the story would look like if a construct child “must go through at least two stages to reach maturity <Imago>,” and imagining what “Preimagoes” will look like before adulthood (OEB 3229 Box 179). And an early outline explicitly spells out Jodahs’ place within this metamorphosis process: “An imago is an insect that has completed its metamorphosis – a sexually mature creature. Jodas, the ‘imago’ of this final book of the trilogy is also approaching an alarming sexual maturity” (OEB 2995 Box 151). So if the third book, narrated by the construct ooloi Jodahs, constitutes the adult, sexually mature stage of the new construct species, then the trope of invertebrate metamorphosis structures Xenogenesis’s gender parables more fully than critics have realized. Again, Butler’s biological research here served as an intertextual queer inspiration, not (or not only) as genetic determinism leading to gender essentialism. 46 “Arthropods, amphibians, and certain other animals may evolve a distinctive, actively feeding, sexually immature stage that is generally called a larva. The changes in body form from the larva to the sexually mature adult, or imago, are broadly termed metamorphosis” (49 Daly et al.). Van Engen 155 In “Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis, Cathy Peppers has called this genealogy of Imago a “teleological” choice, because Linnaeus defined imago as “the final and perfect form after metamorphosis” (56). Hence, she sees it as a drive toward human “perfection” that reflects eugenicist ideals of stripping away uneven, diverse qualities from the human species (56). However, contemporary usage of the term “imago” in Butler’s entomology research used the term interchangeably with “adult,” not “perfect” (Daly et al.) There’s much more to metamorphosis in Imago than a drive toward perfection in a eugenicist sense, though the book does have its eugenicist tendencies (particularly the ooloi’s disturbing drive to eradicate human disabilities). Furthermore, Peppers focuses on metamorphosis as a species-level allegory, when in Xenogenesis it is represented more as an intimate, bodily experience of gender transition and morphological change. Each Oankali and construct enters a pupal stage in which it almost hibernates and is physically incapacitated – sometimes for months – until it has grown into its new bodily form. This new form rarely involves looking more humanoid. In Adulthood Rites, in fact, the protagonist Akin looks almost human before metamorphosis but is almost entirely covered in tentacles afterward, to the disgust of the human community (500). It is the embodied narrative of metamorphosis in connection to gender transition that I want to pursue here. Insects are not the most obvious animals to use to understand the Oankali. Visually, Xenogenesis compares them to elephants’ trunks (292), night crawlers (14), slugs (304), sea slugs (14), worms (18), snakes (43), leeches (504), and animals like cephalopods with tentacles (163). Lilith’s description of Oankali tentacles in one of the first scenes in Dawn is full of these invertebrate reference points. Realizing that the Oankali’s tentacles are not hair, but bodily appendages, she “imagine[s] big, slowly writhing, dying night crawlers stretched along the Van Engen 156 sidewalk after a rain. She imagined small, tentacled sea slugs – nudibranchs – grown impossibly to human size and shape, and, obscenely, sounding more like a human being than some humans” (14). In Dawn, we learn that the Oankali first blended with a “species of intelligent, schooling, fishlike creatures,” and originally resembled deep-sea creatures: “We were many-bodied and spoke with body-lights and color patterns . . . among ourselves” (63). The ooloi sensory hands in particular look “like a starfish – one of the brittle stars with long, slender, snakelike arms” (110). In Adulthood Rites, the humans develop a slur to describe the Oankali, “worms,” a word which capitalizes on the disgust-inducing cultural connotations of invertebrate bodies (321). The Oankali ships themselves are alive, resemble semi-sentient plants, and divide or reproduce like amoebas (430). So clearly the animal life Butler builds on in Xenogenesis belongs in the genealogy of invertebrate “it” genders this dissertation traces, and sea slugs and worms help her construct alien bodies that are nonbinary. But if the Oankali’s bodies look like nudibranchs or worms, insects are a more apt comparison from the invertebrate family tree for their reproduction, growth cycle, sensory systems, and pheromones. Some of the Oankali who live on the ship and exist in a deeper symbiotic relationship with it have different body plans, visually resembling “caterpillar[s]” with “smooth plates” (452). But more often Butler draws on non-visual qualities. The caterpillar-like Oankali, for instance, communicate – like many insects – “in images, in tactile, bioelectric, and bioluminescent signals, in pheromones, and in gestures” rather than with vocal cords like other Oankali (262). Butler’s commonplace books refer to housefly sensory systems while exploring potential ideas for the Oankali’s tentacles, which combine sight, smell, taste, and touch and distribute the senses all over their bodies. One notebook page from 1983 speculates that “Flies taste with their feet. Consider a situation in which sensory organs may be located anywhere on Van Engen 157 the body. Taste on fingers / Sight on fingers / Smell on skin surface etc” (OEB 3225 Box 179). Many of the entomology textbooks that would have been available to Butler use houseflies as examples in diagrams illustrating metamorphosis (Little). So while most Oankali are not six- legged, antennaed beings with segmented body plans, Butler explored their biology and looked to insects as already-existing nonhuman beings that might defamiliarize the human body in its heteronormative representations in most science fiction. Insect pheromones are a major part of how Butler draws on insect biology in order to create the Oankali’s sexual-kinship system. Pheromones, according to one of Butler’s research texts, are the “chemical substance the release of which into its surroundings by an animal influences the behaviour or development of other individuals of the same species. E.g. sexual attractants in many insect species; queen-bee substance” (Penguin 218). Oankali families traditionally involved three mates: ooloi, male, and female. After the merge with the human species, the new construct families consist of an ooloi (Oankali or construct), one male and one female Oankali, and one male and one female human – five mates total. Pheromones are a crucial part of how these sexual arrangements work in Xenogenesis, both biochemical and social. The ooloi bond with their mates through a biochemical process that many humans in Dawn find abhorrent and coercive, particularly the heterosexual men who lead the resistance against Lilith (195). By the final book of the trilogy, Imago, Butler begins calling these biochemical bonds pheromones. In one scene where Jodahs has hit a rough patch bonding with its mates, its mother Lilith names this insectoid biology as the basis for ooloi relationships: “She smiled a bitter smile. ‘Pheromones, Lelka [name for an adult child]. Your scent won’t let them hate you for long. They can hate us, though. I’m sorry for that’” (690). Ooloi pheromones are how Oankali and constructs form more intense relationships with their mates than ordinary humans can, and these Van Engen 158 pheromones are reimaginings of insect social bonds. Adam Johns has connected Butler’s use of insect pheromones for the Oankali to E.O. Wilson’s use of social insects’ chemical communications as a model for sociobiology, a fairly horrifying 1980s school of explaining normative human behaviors in very selective understandings of biology (389). Biologist Stephen Kellert has likewise pointed to sociobiology’s indebtedness to studies of social insect behaviors (847). While there are grounds for this kind of critique, I’m interested in the wide range of queer connections Butler makes between insect socio-sexualities and human ones – particularly through metamorphosis-as-transition. 47 And queer those insect biologies she did. The insectoid pheromone system also appears in Butler’s commonplace books, where she lists insect pheromones as “inspirations” for her aliens alongside slime molds and HeLa cells (OEB 3109 Box 157 Notecards – Su”). On the notebook page from her Biology 101 lecture, Butler compares ooloi’s biochemical bonding powers to the kinship structures of bees, displacing female bee with ooloi: “Ooloi are accustomed to absolutely having their own way in these matters. Ooloi are like queen bees in one way. They are absolutely essential for reproduction. One and only one per family are tolerated. Unnecessary ones are driven out by the ‘reigning’ ooloi” (OEB 3224). Butler follows this note 47 Johns is correct that Butler read sociobiology extensively and engaged it seriously; this manifests in, for example, the biologically-inflected gender stereotypes of men and women in Adulthood Rites. But she was also a critical reader of the sociobiology she found. In her newspaper clippings, for example, she saved an article titled “Biological Basis for Math Ability Suggested by Study” from 1984, but annotated over the top: “I don’t care if males are bioligically [sic] predisposed toward mathematics – or if girls are biologically predisposed toward linguistics. I care only what is made of these possibilities. . . . This sort of information is all too often used to create dogma, and dogma inevitably creates misery. It is the haven of the ignorant, the cowardly, and the intellectually lazy. It is the enemy of flexibility, thought, intelligence, tolerance and change. It gives an illusion of security while masking stagnation, corruption, rot. It permits people not fit to handle power <the ignorant, lazy, and cowardly> to attain power and frequently, though inflexibly, supports their abuse of power” (Box 275 folder 5). Van Engen 159 about queen bees with a slightly more queer family structure than what appeared in the final published text: “There are not enough couples to involve all the oolois. A parent group may be unbalanced in having 2 males and a female or 2 females and a male <but not both> but Never 2 oolois” (OEB 3224). Here, the ooloi emerge as nonbinary-gendered beings who can be surrounded by as many males and females as they want, but for some reason can never be in love with other ooloi. While critics have mostly seen these biochemical bonds as harmful kinds of relationships, they also constitute a rewriting of the insect biologies they draw on. In the context of Fledgling, Butler’s vampire novel, Rosalind Diaz has drawn on Mel Chen’s theories of intoxication, race, and disability to argue that biochemical bonds in Butler’s work constitute queer forms of intimacy that operate at the chemical and molecular level (Diaz). So Butler’s archive reimagines the pheromones, sensory systems, and social bonds of insects, making them crucial to understanding the trilogy’s multispecies sexualities. Metamorphosis, then, assumes a more central role in how Butler rewrites insect biology to construct an alien trans species. Butler’s notes show that Xenogenesis and the short story “Bloodchild,” arguably Butler’s most radical stories about gender, both grew out of not only the weird biology of invertebrate animals on the pages of textbooks, but also out of fear and disgust toward those same animals. To research Xenogenesis, Butler took a trip to the Amazon led by scientists from UCLA. Along the way she found out about botflies, insects which lay their eggs in a host animal of a different species (OEB 176 Box 154). These botflies became the seed idea for “Bloodchild,” a story about insectoid aliens who impregnate human men. In those same notes, Butler reflects on her efforts to work with phobias and instinctive revulsion in her fiction, reactions of disgust that she pins on invertebrate animal bodies. In notecards from a speech about Xenogenesis called “Living with Aliens,” for example, she writes, “I grew up with a phobic terror of wormy things – slimy things Van Engen 160 that make do without bones and that look as though they also make do without skin. Slugs, night crawlers, maggots . . . Leeches. So naturally I decided to go to the Amazon jungle to research my XG novels” (OEB 176 Box 154). So in Butler’s archive, invertebrate animals offer alternative gender-sexual-social paradigms, but also what she describes as a gut response of fear – “irrational fears” – that her writing attempts to work through. The animals she lists here – worms, slugs, night crawlers, maggots, and leeches – are also the animals that appear in the published text of Xenogenesis as descriptors for the Oankali (14). This connection is important because it situates the human characters’ fear and disgust toward the Oankali (particularly the ooloi) as xenophobias to be overcome, or at least interrogated critically through curiosity. When the human characters in Xenogenesis recoil from Oankali bodies or get squeamish about the ooloi, they are partially responding to the Oankali’s coercion, and partially responding to the “irrational fears” Butler suggests adhere to invertebrate bodies. This fear includes species-based revulsion about “slimy things that make do without bones,” but also attitudes of revulsion toward queer and trans bodies – fears that are connected based on the invertebrate and protist biology she studied. It makes perfect sense, then, that the heterosexual male characters in Dawn express their objections to Oankali treatment in terms of gender and sexual revulsion: “Look at things from Curt’s point of view,” Gabriel said. “He’s not in control even of what his own body does and feels. He’s taken like a woman and. . . . No, don’t explain!” He held up his hand to stop her from interrupting. “He knows the ooloi aren’t male. He knows all the sex that goes on is in his head. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter! Someone else is pushing all his buttons.” 203 Van Engen 161 While the humans have a very legitimate complaint against how the Oankali have held them captive, Butler makes it clear that these human men can only understand their loss of control and domination as effeminization and queering – an understanding Lilith knows better than to agree with. If the men are being held captive, in their view, then the nonbinary-gendered ooloi must be at fault – and their own disavowed desire for the ooloi is intolerable (Savage and Castleberry). 48 This anxious masculine interpretation implicitly draws on the queerness of invertebrate and protist biology, on which the Oankali are based, as ‘evidence.’ Because Lilith experiences genuine connection with the genderqueer ooloi (or at least Nikanj), she too becomes a target of the queer-baiting. The human men react to her position as intermediary by slut-shaming her: “‘I don’t give a shit what you feel!’ [Gabe] said. . . . ‘Strip and screw your Nikanj right here for everyone to see, why don’t you. We know you’re their whore! Everybody here knows!’ [Lilith] looked at him, abruptly tired, fed up. ‘And what are you when you spend your nights with Kahguyaht?’” (241). These same human men call Lilith’s Asian-American male partner a “faggot” (159), and Lilith a “man” because of her bodily strength and blackness (147). Insects have started to trickle into literary animal studies, but rarely with much attention to sexuality in a way that accounts for Butler’s queer rewriting of insect sexualities. Eric Brown’s introduction to his collection Insect Poetics argues that insects are frequently “mark[ed] . . . as humanity’s Other” in Western literary traditions because their social worlds are collective and multiple (xi). Charlotte Sleigh’s chapter in the same collection proposes that insects are representationally unsettling because of the agricultural-industrial history of American 48 There are many examples of this in the trilogy. In Imago, a human resister named João expresses similar attitudes to an adolescent Jodahs: “‘Why do you hate me?’ [Jodahs asks.] ‘I know what you do – your kind. You take men as though they were women!’” João replied. “‘Your kind and your human whores are the cause of all our trouble! You treat all manind as your woman!’” (599). Van Engen 162 entomology, which framed insects as pests. According to Sleigh, entomologists interpreted large queen insects surrounded by smaller, servant-like male worker insects in terms of the monstrous feminine (291). Marina Warner’s book No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock traces a long history of insects in representations of demons and monsters, arguing that “the quest for strangeness, for the monstrous, for the not-human points today towards the non- mammalian, the invertebrate; the cold-blooded” (175). While these works mention metamorphosis as a generally weird or monstrous attribute that insects bring to cultural representations, they do not speak to the kind of use of metamorphosis that Butler enacts in Imago and her commonplace books – as a reimagined basis for gender transition. Butler’s biological research included insets, but also extended to contemporary appearances of transgender humans in biological, medicine, and science-related literature. Butler kept carefully-organized subject files full of newspaper and magazine clippings on scientific subjects of interest to her, many from the Los Angeles Times. In one of the “Medicine: Physical Health” folders, Butler kept a 1988 article called “Transsexualism: A Journey Across Lines of Gender,” by John Johnson (Box 273 Folder 9). Appearing late in the research and publication process for Imago, this article articulates an increase in broader awareness of FTM people, and frames MTF people as more well known among scientific studies. The end of the article describes ongoing research into gender-affirming surgeries in science fictional terms: “Money said his ‘science fiction’ solution for trans-gender problems envisions a time in the next century when the new growth factors that have recently caught the attention of the medical world can be used in revolutionary new ways,” such as (in his words) “medically treat[ing] a grown female in such a way that her genitalia would regress and her body would re-make itself as male. He emphasized that this is in the realm of the fantastic now” (Box 273 folder 9). While the article is Van Engen 163 full of outdated and cissexist language, it demonstrates that Butler was aware of trans people, connected them with speculative literary genres, and included public information about medical transitions in her research for Imago. That research points (albeit problematically) to futuristic ways of imagining transitioning, particularly transmasculinizing genital surgeries that still do not exist as described today. The article’s description of these future surgeries sounds remarkably like how the ooloi regenerate tissue in Xenogenesis – re-stimulating embryonic cell capacities to cause growth. In this light, Butler’s archive takes mundane-world conceptualizations of trans surgeries, explores models for gender and sexuality in the insect world, and then in the text of Xenogenesis, re-envisions all bodies as undergoing transition during puberty, de-exceptionalizing trans experiences. 49 3.4 The Oankali as Trans Species So what does all this mean in the published text of Imago? As I have shown, Butler’s notes and commonplace books demonstrate that she recast the biology of insect metamorphosis as a process of gender transition, transforming the weird biology of protists and arthropods into plans for a queerly trans alien species. Revisiting the text of Imago with this insect biology in mind opens up a new reading of the Oankali as a transgender species by drawing connections between Butler’s extensive scientific research and the text’s depiction of metamorphosis. I will be focusing on the third book, Imago, because while Dawn and Adulthood Rites do include 49 This is not the only mention of transsexuality in the archive. In a 1983 commonplace book, Butler mentions trans issues in relation to the reception of Survivor and Wild Seed, a book starring two shapeshifting and sometimes species-, race-, or gender-shifting supernatural characters. Butler notes of the reception of Wild Seed that she received “complaints about sex in early novel [Sur.] but none about incest, rape, transsexualism & homo. in Wild Seed” (OEB 3183, box 173). In other words, Butler points out the hypocrisy of critics and readers who objected to explicit sex in Survivor, but had no objections to sex in Wild Seed. Van Engen 164 metamorphosis as gender transition, it becomes explicit and much more like a coming-out narrative in Imago. While I am most interested in the ooloi gender, all Oankali and constructs undergo metamorphosis in Xenogenesis – though the ooloi do so twice. Metamorphosis involves drastic physical changes, like the appearance or disappearance of body tentacles, and requires a prolonged period of hibernation or inactivity, like insects. This metamorphosis does not always result in an adult (or imago) who is the gender they were expected to be. One basis for my argument about gender transition here is that all Oankali and construct children are called “eka,” or genderless, and do not have a gender until metamorphosis. Children, like ooloi, receive the pronoun “it,” but the text goes to great lengths to distinguish ooloi (an adult gender) from eka (children without gender). Early in Imago, the protagonist Jodahs is thinking about its eka sibling Aaor while Jodahs is undergoing its own metamorphosis. Jodahs’ internal monologue carefully educates readers in the difference between nonbinary gender and genderlessness: [Aaor] was the child of my Oankali mother, and not yet truly female, but I had always thought of her as a sister. She looked so female – or she had looked female before I began to change. Now she ... Now it looked the way it always should have. It looked eka in the true meaning of the word – a child too young to have developed sex. That was what we both were – for now. Aaor smelled eka. It could literally go either way, become male or female. I had always known this, of course, about both of us. But now, suddenly, I could no longer even think of Aaor as she. It probably would be female someday, just as I would probably soon become the male I appeared to be. 533 In this scene Jodahs is reflecting on its preconceptions about Aaor’s gender, and becoming more aware of Aaor’s true lack of gender as Jodahs starts undergoing metamorphosis. As a proto- Van Engen 165 ooloi, Jodahs is newly sensitive to others’ bodies and to the biochemical world around it. Jodahs reflects that while Aaor looked female, it was not, and could become any gender after metamorphosis. Of course, at this point Jodahs believes it will become male and Aaor will become female. But as the novel progresses, both siblings enter metamorphosis and transition into ooloi. This causes a lot of consternation in the multispecies community on earth, because while there are construct children who are male and female, there have not yet been construct ooloi children. Because ooloi are genetic artists, the new ooloi constructs could be dangerous, and no one yet knows what they will be able to do; therefore, the community had postponed creating them. Jodahs doesn’t just become a gender no one expected it to – it becomes the first construct ooloi of any kind. This is why becoming ooloi during metamorphosis causes so much concern for the family and the community. Imago starts with Jodahs’ first metamorphosis as it discovers that it’s becoming ooloi, not male. Yet because this is science fiction, the family is not upset about the fact of transition in itself – they are upset that Jodahs is transitioning to ooloi, a new kind of being they fear is dangerous. In one scene early in Imago, Jodahs and Nikanj (its ooloi parent, Lilith’s partner) have a conversation about Jodahs’ transition and how they will deal with the community’s expectations. Construct ooloi specifically have the ability to shapeshift, unlike previous generations of Oankali, because of the human species’ gift of cancer and its regenerative abilities. So Jodahs, in the face of familial disapproval, asks if it can shapeshift genders, too: “If I can change my shape . . .” I focused narrowly on Nikanj. “Could I become male?” Nikanj hesitated. “Do you still want to be male?” Van Engen 166 Had I ever wanted to be male? I had just assumed I was male, and would have no choice in the matter. “The people wouldn’t be as hard on you if I were male.” It said nothing. “They haven’t accepted me yet,” I argued. “They could go on rejecting me until the family had to leave Lo – all because of me.” Jodahs’ concern here is that because construct ooloi are banned on earth (until future generations, when the Oankali are more sure that the community is stable enough to handle them), its family will be exiled from the town of Lo or confined to the Oankali ship above the planet if it does not somehow force itself to become male. Nikanj responds by encouraging Jodahs to become what it is, what it wants to be, instead of trying to remake itself into the image of everyone else’s expectations: “I have too many feelings,” [Jodahs] said. “I want to be your same-sex child, but I don’t want to cause the family trouble.” “What do you want for yourself?” [Nikanj said.] . . . . The thought of a lot of other people interfering with me now was frightening, terrifying. I hadn’t known it would be, but it was. “I wouldn’t want to give up on being what I am,” I said. “I . . . I want to be ooloi. I really want it. And I wish I didn’t. How can I want to cause the family so much trouble?” “You want to be what you are. That’s healthy and right for you. What we do about it is our decision, our responsibility. Not yours.” 548 I am struck here by the stereotypical coming-out language in Jodahs and Nikanj’s conversation. Butler’s narration of this scene centralizes the child’s fear of disrupting the family, the striking differences between the child’s actual gender vs. the gender everyone thought it would be, the Van Engen 167 child’s guilt-laden efforts to pass as something else for a while, and the supportive parent’s encouragement of the child to become what it is. This self-discovering narrative is so clearly a coming-out narrative it hardly seems worth mentioning; yet the critical discussion on Xenogenesis does not account for it this way (or hardly at all). Butler’s rendition of this narrative offers a critical estrangement of real-world coming out narratives: the stigma in the child’s coming-out process is not transitioning gender itself, but becoming the first construct ooloi, perceived as dangerous because of its unknown genetic engineering abilities. The position I am taking here is slightly different than Patricia Melzer’s, who is most interested in the construct ooloi’s “trans-morphing . . . bodies that trouble our notions of sexuality and gender” through their “unstable bodies” (224). Melzer sees potential not primarily in the metamorphosis process but in the construct ooloi’s ability to shapeshift in response to their partners’ desires. In Imago, at times, this means that Jodahs sometimes makes its body look more masculine or more feminine depending on which humans it is trying to attract. Construct ooloi’s unstable and relational bodies, for Melzer, are the perfect illustration of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity: Once a potential partner is identified, construct ooloi can change their physicality to correspond to what the partner needs. Their shifting appearance echoes the attempt to reproduce the gendered norm and exposes it as discursively constructed, like drag’s efforts to represent the ideal ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine.’ Gender does not reflect an inner ‘truth’ but is aimed at pleasing the object of desire and therefore can never be stable or static. 239 Melzer is correct that the construct ooloi’s bodies are not stable and can shapeshift, and they do embody a kind of biologized vision of what gender performativity might look like if flesh was Van Engen 168 effortlessly plastic. But while Melzer wants to see this as queer, the relational context of the ooloi’s shapeshifting is also the Xenogenesis trilogy’s at-times heterosexual limitations: when Jodahs makes itself look more feminine, it is to please a masculine human partner, because that is the assumed preference (601). And when Jodahs makes itself look more masculine, it is to please a feminine partner, because the text assumes that is what she would desire (588). This heterosexual imaginary of the shapeshifting is, to me, a limitation of Butler’s construct ooloi, rather than their strong point. (Though the Oankali gender-sexual system is queer in other ways.) Melzer’s account puts the ooloi’s gender entirely in the hands of (presumedly heterosexual) partners, and removes the possibility for any internal compass the ooloi has of its own body and gender. By emphasizing fluidity toward poles of masculine and feminine, Melzer’s argument erases anew the possibility for nonbinary gender, the inhuman “it” I am most interested in. I do not mean to claim that gender is not unstable or fluid, nor do I want to deny that some trans people find constant fluidity and multiple transitions affirming. Rather, I question the premise in some gender criticism and theory that trans bodies are more unstable than cisgender bodies, the common move to point to trans bodies as exemplars of postmodern fluidity or performativity for cisgender consumption and contemplation. While I disagree with other parts of his argument, Jay Prosser made this claim in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality: early work in queer studies, he argues, was “crucially dependent on the figure of transgender,” which it “seized on as a definitively queer force that ‘troubled’ the identity categories of gender, sex, and sexuality” in general (Prosser 21). 50 Octavia Butler’s work, I believe, provides a different narrative of trans bodies, particularly nonbinary trans bodies. She 50 As Prosser points out, Judith Butler herself criticized this overemphasized use of trans bodies as the ultimate example of her theory of performativity in “Critically Queer” (Prosser 24). Van Engen 169 devotes an entire novel to the construct ooloi’s coming-of-age narrative and love story – sometimes devoting time to destabilizing the normative assumptions of human characters, but the ooloi also have rich lives, culture, politics, social worlds, relationships, and biological sensory worlds outside of that task. And even within the text of Imago, this gender-based shapeshifting is not so limitless as Melzer makes it sound. Jodahs, as the first construct ooloi, is able to change its bodily shape, including taking on the appearances of masculine and feminine Oankali (547-8, 598). But it can also develop the appearances of other species: for example, developing “frog”-like webbed fingers and toes (591-2), or allowing its body to become “green, scaly, and strange,” almost reptilian (610). Jodahs’ sibling Aaor’s trans-species shapeshifting is even more extreme. Without mates, it wanders between appearances to the point of almost losing its identity: it “grew fur again, lost it, developed scales, lost them, developed something very like tree bark,” then became an invertebrate “near mollusk” with no eyes or face (674). Construct ooloi’s shapeshifting has as much to do with gender as it does with species. The endless bodily plasticity the construct ooloi are capable of, furthermore, are actually a source of consternation and danger for construct ooloi, who gain a measure of stability and control over their bodies by living with mates. Jodahs’ sibling Aaor experiences a particularly painful subadulthood because it cannot find mates to stabilize its bodily form, and therefore struggles to retain structural integrity to the point of endangering its life. It shifts without control from fur to scales to tree bark, and eventually into a mollusk-like form in which it “could not speak or breathe air or make any sound at all,” requiring the help of family members to recover (674). Jodahs worries about Aaor during this period: “Something had gone seriously wrong . . . . It kept slipping away from me – simplifying its body. It had no control of itself, but like a rock Van Engen 170 rolling downhill, it had inertia. Its body ‘wanted’ to be less and less complex. If it had stayed unattended in the water for much longer, it would have begun to break down completely . . . . Aaor as an individual would be gone” (681). In other words, the unrestrained shapeshifting is incredibly painful and would eventually lead to Aaor’s disintegration and death. Even Jodahs worries that its shapeshifting capabilities will cause it to become “like the sky, constantly changing, clouded, clear, clouded, clear,” even “hateful to one partner in order to please the other” (598). Here, Jodahs’ concern about his shapeshifting abilities after metamorphosis – specifically, shapeshifting into masculinity or femininity – registers as a fear that it will be unattractive to mates. On the other hand, the non-construct ooloi have a more stable nonbinary appearance which is very attractive to their mates, Jodahs reasons: “Nikanj looked the same all the time and yet all four of my other parents treasured it” (598). Of course, I acknowledge that Butler’s narration of this shapeshifting and partnered desires follows a heterosexual script here, assuming that becoming masculine to please a feminine partner will cause it to be “hateful” to its masculine partner. But my point holds that within the logic of Xenogenesis, ooloi do not find completion by continually allowing their bodies to endlessly vacillate between poles of masculinity and femininity. Rather, nonbinary appearance, for the ooloi, is valuable in itself after the transition period of metamorphosis. For example, when Jodahs interacts with its human mates, Jesusa and Tomás, it is Jodahs’ body tentacles and nonbinary sensuality that attract them, not human gender binaries. When Jesusa first touches Jodahs, she is attracted to its clearly nonhuman, nonbinary body tentacles in their own right, rather than being attracted because Jodahs has shapeshifted into masculinity or femininity to please her: “I took her hand and held it for a while, examined it with body tentacles. This startled her, but it did not bring out the phobic terror some Humans are Van Engen 171 subject to when we touch them that way. Instead, she bent to get a better look at my body tentacles. They were widely scattered now, and the same brown as the rest of my skin” (634). Jesusa does not disavow her interest, like some of the resister men. After exploring Jodahs’ tentacles, she actively asks it to touch her, inviting intimate contact: “‘Touch me,’ she said. I touched her thigh, and her body flared with sexual feeling” (634). Jodahs has not allowed its body to transform into a human heteronormative fantasy object. Instead, it is a brown-skinned, part-human alien with ooloi gender and lots of clearly alien tentacles. The scene intensifies because of these tentacles: “She . . . touched me again, let the sensation we shared guide her so that her fingertips slid around the bases of some of my sensory tentacles. She stopped an instant before I would have stopped her. The sensation was too intense” (635). The scene becomes more intense, and Jodahs sleeps with Jesusa and her brother Tomás for the first time that night, again dominated by tentacle erotics: I lay down and moved close against Tomás so that all the sensory tentacles on his side of my body could reach him. Linking into him was such a sharp, sweet shock that for a moment, i could not see. When the shock had traveled through me, i became aware of Jesusa watching. I reached up and pulled her down with us. She gasped as the contact was completed. Then she groaned and twisted her body so that she could bring more of it into contact with me. Tomás, not really awake yet, did the same, and we lay utterly submerged in one another. 642 So it is not endless shapeshifting into masculinity or femininity that makes the construct ooloi the most erotic, queer beings in the book. It is their nonbinary, tentacled bodies in themselves, after metamorphosis, when they are not transforming into masculinity or femininity in an attempt Van Engen 172 to please impossible heterosexual partners. 51 And the eroticism of their bodies, in Butler’s universe, depends in large part on their invertebrate animal-like body parts, the tentacles, simultaneously audio-visual-tactile receptors and sexual connectors. 3.5 Trans Biology and HeLa But biology in Xenogenesis is not all cool, queer invertebrate life. As many critics have pointed out, the Oankali-human relationship also draws on the history of the HeLa immortal cell line. Very early in the first book of the trilogy, Dawn, Lilith wakes up in a sealed room where she is observed by unseen Oankali, and quickly discovers a scar on her stomach where her captors have taken a sample of something from her body: “She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge” (6). Butler’s narration here invokes the history of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman from Baltimore in the 1950s whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent and became the multi-billion- dollar HeLa immortal cell line and biomedical industry (Brown 321). In fact, in some ways the entire Oankali-human relationship is structured by the HeLa story. The Oankali see cancer as a “gift” because of its regenerative capacities, and Lilith’s body has a particularly strong inclination for this “gift.” In the hands of the ooloi, Lilith’s cancer turns into the medical wonders of regenerating lost limbs, a capability the Oankali did not have before meeting humans. In fact, Lilith’s “talent” for cancer heals her ooloi partner’s body when no one else could because Nikanj’s sensory arms needed to be regenerated. The biology that Butler draws on, and rewrites, 51 Compare this to transphobic human resister men who react to Jodahs’ shapeshifting with fear, disgust, and/or disavowal. When Jodahs heals a resister named João and “grow[s] breasts” to please him (601), João reacts with an all-too-familiar (and dangerous) reaction: he “ignore[s]” Jodahs’ body during the day,” and “caresse[s] it at night” (601). Van Engen 173 in this series is not apolitical or neutral. It has a genealogy of both sexually strange protists and invertebrates, and the history of antiblack medical experimentation in Western science. Butler’s commonplace books in the archive grapple with these twin possibilities: the queerly trans life forms beyond the vertebrate world, and the violent legacies of biology and medicine. In the early stages of imagining what the Oankali would look like, in a 1982 notebook, Butler explores the potential of HeLa cells and protist reproduction as the basis for the Oankali’s growth as a species. He La cells were famous for reproducing quickly and non-heterosexually, and ostensibly contaminating other cell lines with Lacks’ blackness, as Jayna Brown has pointed out (337). Butler, in turn, uses her speculative notes to imagine what HeLa cells might become in the hands of nonhuman aliens like the ooloi: “The HeLa cell line is immortal with no hint of senescence. It is biological <a.o.p. ‘spiritual’> immortality. It is endless, uncontrolled reproduction. If it were endless, controlled reproduction…? Consider” (OEB 3179). For Butler, cancer in the hands of the ooloi might become a controlled process of regeneration (marked by a question mark), but made possible by the original theft of Lilith’s tissue sample without asking. In the same note, Butler blends these stolen cancer cells with protist reproduction as models for Oankali growth. What might happen when asexually-reproducing human cells merge with asexually-reproducing nonhuman life forms?: “The slime mold at times gathers and becomes slug like, then plant like. Then spores, then, again, amoeba-like creatures in search of food and beginning again to divide as they find good hunting. One form invades a host and slowly replaces it – feeding on it & dividing” (OEB 3179). Slime molds, as Aimee Bahng has argued, are organisms that can be both individual organisms or collective multicellular organisms, and Butler drew on them extensively in her biology research and planning for Xenogenesis (Bahng). This notebook page speculates about the possibilities of slime mold’s Van Engen 174 spore stage of reproduction, compares them to amoebas (which “divide” to reproduce?), and juxtaposes them with HeLa cells’ own forms of reproduction. 52 Butler’s note ends by entwining the two into what she calls “a HeLa/slime mold type organism,” such that the Oankali become a hybrid future comprised of both biology’s history of antiblack violence and its queer protist possibilities. “‘We’re the future,’” an unexplained note at the top of the page says. If Xenogenesis explores what humans might look like once they evolve into something that is “no longer human at all,” that future is made possible both by the coercion of the past and the queer inhuman biologies of the protist world. Returning to Butler’s archival notes and commonplace books also prompts harder thinking about how racism affected Butler’s scientific research process outside of the HeLa/Henrietta Lacks story. The Biology 101 lecture notes I examined earlier, on which she scribbled plot ideas for Oankali reproduction, was not only a source of positive inspiration. Butler eventually dropped out of that class because she did not feel smart enough to attend, felt that she couldn’t keep up, and struggled to earn money through writing while attending class at the same time. In a note from 1984, a year after the 1983 biology class experience, Butler wrote of her experience in the biology lecture: “The return to school was such a blow to my ego – and my self-righteousness. There I could see my own intellectual inadequacies magnified and spotlighted. I was beaten down to a level I had almost forgotten. I had forgotten that I once 52 In a different commonplace book, Butler more explicitly extrapolates from the practices of amoeba division to the Oankali drive to merge, divide, and seek out new exchanges: “The Oankali are a people who divide as does the amoeba when they are mature – when they have 1. Reached a certain population density, 2. Completed their most recent past blending and 3. Found a suitable new partner” (OEB 3229). She imagines the oankali as a “Society that divides, ameboid fashion after reaching a certain population density – one half either leaving the home/ship on another home/ship built by all of mined, salvaged, and otherwise collected raw materials or joining with another people” (OEB 3229). Van Engen 175 considered myself too lazy, stupid, and indifferent to accomplish anything. I had forgotten what a disastrously bad student I was – even when I did well” (OEB 3229, nb p 70). Butler had been taught to feel as though she was not smart enough to take college-level science classes. Sami Schalk argues that these notes reflect the antiblack racism and ableism she experienced in her education in the Pasadena school system in the 1960s as a working class black girl with dyslexia (Schalk). This internalized racism exists in stark contrast to Butler’s institutional contexts in universities today. In 2018, Butler is posthumously lauded by scholars across the board. Conferences are organized in her name, special issues of journals are being dedicated to her work, and her papers are housed at the prestigious Huntington Library, where I did the research for this chapter. And yet very close by in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Butler’s educational experiences as a student before she was well known reflected a very different racial, economic, disability, and gendered context of exclusion from the very institutions in which she is celebrated today. In the face of this, Butler’s notes express a determination to learn and make something new and useful out of the troubling histories of science. In the same 1984 note, Butler explores what she can make of the biology class she dropped out of: “I wouldn’t have asked knowingly for the beating I took, but there was reason to consider it worthwhile. My interests were redirected. I was introduced to facets of anthropology and especially biology that set me afire. I still burn – very happily. I’m a writer” (OEB 3229, nb p 71). Her phrases “set me afire” and “I still burn” articulate the relationship between science and speculative fiction as one of ignition or transformation or spark. The commonplace books and published fiction both look to biology, but make something new out of it – both the histories of abuse and the alternative possibilities of nonhuman life. “Burn[ing]” models science as inspiration, as raw material to be transformed, not Van Engen 176 as authority. In a notecard for a speech on Xenogenesis, Butler puts it this way: “Another inspiration is the challenge to take something horrible and do something good with it” (OEB 3109 Box 157). Her notecards list “cancer” and “Henrietta Lacks – He-La Cells” as examples of inspiration material (OEB 3109 Box 157), as well as symbiosis, slime molds, and insect pheromones (OEB 3109 Box 157). Like the ooloi gender, science for Butler provides a catalyst for story ideas: “I should read science in the same way I read book reviews: to see what’s new That will give my mind much to incubate and ferment” (OEB 3226). Science here is not a limit on her creativity (as in some schools of “hard” sci-fi) nor a ground for essentialism, but the condition of possibility for her creativity, its fertilizer, its catalyst. The words “incubate” and “ferment” suggest that science reading functioned as raw material that ripens, digests, or chemically changes through speculation into something new and useful. In Butler’s archive and published works, to be a writer of science fiction is to “burn” with science in both pleasurable and painful ways, and to create something new out of that trans/formational process. 3.6 Conclusion: Trans futurity Butler’s musings on science as inspiration, and science fiction writing as a transformational burning, offer a very different view of the relationship between biology and Butler’s fiction than the endless discussions of essentialism, sociobiology, and genetics that have dominated the critical conversations on Xenogenesis. Science in Butler’s works is neither an unquestioned origin nor a legitimating authority nor an essentialist plague to be avoided at all costs. It is an intertext, a conversation, and a source of ideas to be transformed into queer, antiracist alien futures. Her reconceptualization of insect and protist biology into nonbinary trans alien figures, the ooloi, offer striking connections to feminist science studies, as well as queer and trans studies of the nonhuman today. If Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein call for the animal Van Engen 177 turn to be “transformed, transacted, or transduced” (196), Xenogenesis and Octavia Butler’s commonplace books prefigured this call by establishing transformational relationships between contemporary biology and nonbinary alien futures. The Xenogenesis series offers more than a new way of seeing the relationship between science and science fiction, however. It also offers an important site for thinking about trans futurity. Although transgender characters have been a part of science fiction literature and fandom for a long time, trans futurisms are new to science fiction studies, which is in the midst of reorienting itself as a field toward the marginalized imaginaries of science fiction by and about women, people of color, queer people, disabled people, and indigenous peoples. Instead of yet another realist coming-out memoir or reality TV show, speculative fiction as a genre can imagine whole new planets, alien cultures, or future societies in which gender transition is the norm rather than the exception. Black women’s speculative fiction is (or should be) at the forefront of this conversation, particularly work by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and N.K. Jemisin. Butler’s Xenogenesis stands out as a trans future about nonbinary trans genders, but trans theory and activism already provide the ground for thinking about trans as orientation toward the future, as about movement, transition, political change, and imagining our bodies otherwise. Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah’s introduction to the first issue of TSQ acknowledged trans as a kind of futurity: [T]ransgender does not simply critique present configurations of power/knowledge; it is engaged with all manner of unexpected becomings, oriented toward a future that, by definition, we can never fully grasp. . . . [T]ransgender studies is emerging as a vital arena for exploring the evolving nature of our species-life at a historical moment of rapid Van Engen 178 technological and environmental change that calls into question some of our most fundamental notions of what human life means and may come (or cease) to be. 9 Crucially, their definition is inextricably linked with exploring the boundaries and afterlives of the human, appropriately for Xenogenesis. Very briefly mentioning Butler’s work, Eva Hayward’s keyword essay “Transxenoestrogenesis” calls for understanding “trans” as a form of “shared vulnerability to one another, our bodies open to the planet” (258). In this emerging body of scholarship, trans futurity is bound up with the nonhuman, with intersectional understandings of the animal world and our environmental surroundings. So as some speculative notes toward trans futurisms, I propose looking deeper at Octavia Butler’s trans/formational scientific imagination. Reading Imago in connection to Butler’s scientific research makes Butler’s most erotic aliens a parable of nonhuman, nonbinary trans life deeply indebted to the queer possibilities and coercive legacies of Western science. Van Engen 179 4. Monster Erotica’s Genderqueer Fantasies; Or, How to Fuck a Kraken [I]f you are curious about what sex could be like with creatures of fur and fang; or scales, gills and feathers. . . . If it has a human level of intelligence or better. If it can communicate with a language. If it is sexually mature for its species. Then you should be able to fuck it. Not that something like that exists in our known reality. But that is what fiction is for, right? -E.M. Beastly, preface to Monstrous Lust: The Forest of Lust Collection I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. -Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” Introduction In Christie Sims and Alara Branwen’s erotica story In the Velociraptor’s Nest, a human woman walks into a cave and falls in love and lust with a dinosaur. Dinosaurs might sound like surprising lovers for an erotica story, but this genre known as monster erotica is full of fantasies of human beings having sex with, as author E. M. Beastly puts it, “creatures of fur and fang[,] or scales, gills, and feathers” (Beastly). The genre usually involves cisgender human women or men having sex with creatures that resemble classic horror film monsters: bigfoot, dinosaurs, merpeople, centaurs, dragons, etc. Although the genre has only received very clickbait-y, sensationalist media coverage, and no scholarly attention whatsoever, monster erotica at its best is a rare look into the ways that humans fantasize about sex with nonhuman (fantastic) creatures (Spitznagel). In stories by Clea Kinderton, Alice Xavier, and Kylie Ashcroft, the genre excavates the nonhuman world in order to displace, exceed, and complicate Western human gender and sexual norms. Van Engen 180 Monster erotica as a genre is a campy, woman-centric, very queer group of texts that exploit fantasy, science fictional, and horror nonhuman beings as sites of superhuman desires. The genre draws its roots from slash fiction, romance novels, and horror and science fiction literature. Much like slash fiction, monster erotica is dominated by women authors, and uses the science fictional framework to imagine more fulfilling forms of sexual and emotional intimacy (Penley 125). The ebook erotica I analyze in this chapter are self-published works written between 2011 and 2015 available in the Amazon Kindle store. Monster erotica sold rapidly and profitably for a few authors like Sims and Branwen in its boom in 2012 and 2013 before Amazon decided to censor many of the stories, making them harder for readers to find (Spitznagel). 53 In In the Velociraptor’s Nest, when a large green dinosaur blocks the protagonist’s exit from a cave, she experiences the raptor as a source of gender confusion: “[The] scaly creature . . . must be the baby velociraptors’ mother. Or father. Or aunt, or uncle or cousin. All she knew was that it was big, fierce, scaly, green – and standing. Right. There” (Sims loc 82). As ridiculous as human-velociraptor sex may sound at first, these androgynous reptiles are a source of intense desire in the story. Like the velociraptor, the animals, monsters, and aliens in monster erotica 53 During this time span, Amazon’s ebook market saw a spike in monster, alien, and paranormal erotica – 2011 was the year that Fifty Shades of Grey and Virginia Wade’s Cum for Bigfoot series were published. By 2013, however, Amazon began cracking down on the especially explicit or obvious examples of pornography in its ebook catalogue, targeting monster, bestiality, rape, and incest fantasies in particular (Spitznagel, Kinderton email to author 7/14/16). Many monster erotica authors discovered that their entire catalogues had been taken down from the kindle store without notice, seriously cutting into income that many authors depend on for a living. Authors have slightly altered their titles, covers, and book descriptions to seem more innocuous, but their works are no longer searchable on Amazon’s site except by directly searching for the titles or authors’ names word for word. Furthermore, Amazon’s vague content guidelines that purportedly disallow all pornography (while, of course, allowing the company to profit from erotica sales) allow Amazon to pull explicit works from its Kindle store at any time without warning (citation). Less-respectable genres like monster and BDSM erotica are more vulnerable to these unpredictable takedowns than vanilla, heterosexual, human-only erotica to (Spitznagel). Van Engen 181 stories often do not appear legible to human gender and sexual dichotomies, but register instead only as “big, fierce, scaly, [and] green.” Monsters in American cultural production have a history of being read as avatars of hypermasculinity, racialized others, or the monstrous feminine (Skin Shows, Black Frankenstein, The Powers of Horror, etc.). And monsters composed of nonhuman animals relatively closely related to humans, especially mammals, birds, and reptiles, are more likely to receive masculine or feminine pronouns. Yet it requires a critical lens already bifurcated by the gender binary in order to see monsters as only masculine or feminine when they draw on the rich metaphorical world of nonhuman animals that often exceed the M/F gender binary. Trans scholars Eva Hayward and Joan Roughgarden have begun exploring how more distantly-related nonhuman beings – octopi, mollusks, monocellular organisms, invertebrates – exist in different relationships to human beings and bear different representational weight in human American culture (Hayward, Roughgarden). Darwin’s representations of animal beauty from chapter 1 provide my critical framework to explain how different forms of invertebrate or vertebrate animality register in American culture as masculine, feminine, or gender deviant. A turn to the nonhuman, to animals, monsters, and aliens, offers rich opportunities for fleshing out the possibilities for gender beyond the vocabulary of masculinities and femininities. Monster erotica, a set of stories that are simultaneously horror, fantasy, science fiction, and pornography, provides my archive of these nonhuman alternatives to binary human gender. Science fictional creatures far removed from the realm of the human often receive the pronoun ‘it,’ marking how the gender binary often functions as the threshold of personhood for both human and nonhuman beings. Narrating gendered personhood as ‘they’ or ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ implies genders that are multiple, objectlike, animallike, and nonhuman as well as gender Van Engen 182 deviant. These ‘it’ genders are not totally alien to terrestrial life, however – they live in gender- nonconforming humans as well as invertebrate aquatic animals that are frequently hermaphroditic or asexually-reproducing, alien to normative American understandings of gender and sexuality. Monster erotica explores genders that are neither masculine nor feminine but monstrous, starfishlike, anemonelike, jellyfishlike, or crablike. This chapter traces the appearances of nonbinary genders through representations of animality in 21 st century speculative ebook erotica. I explore queer feminist monster erotica ebooks from Kylie Ashcroft, Clea Kinderton, and Alice Xavier that imagine human sex with nonhuman monsters. In these stories, the vocabulary of aquatic plants, animals, and spaces opens up the stories’ narratives of gender and sexual experimentation. I turn to the archive of speculative fiction erotica for lessons on how to live in a deviantly-gendered body in this world, how to describe genders that exceed languages of masculinities and femininities (as many, varied, and capacious as those languages are), genders that are “monstrous”, “alien,” “green,” or “slimy.” Stories like Mating with the Jungle Tentacle Plant, Alien Seed, and Stranger Tides use nonhuman monsters to open up human genders and sexualities to gender-crossing positions of ecstatic pleasurability, and aquatic invertebrate monsters in particular figure as superhumanly dominant and nonbinary-gendered objects of fantasy. They dissociate masculinity and dominance by rerouting power play through the nonhuman. I am most interested in monster erotica that features monsters, aliens, or dinosaurs that are inflected by the kind of aquatic and invertebrate animality I examined in Darwin, monsters that displace and hopelessly complicate the cis-gender binary on which heteronormative porn depends. 4.1 Monstrous Tops, Ecstatic Bottoming Romance and erotica as genres remain overwhelmingly white, cisgender, straight, and thin- Van Engen 183 centric. The humans are usually represented as white in the cover art; in many stories the text also represents the human characters as white, but in some stories the humans are racially indeterminate in the text, as in Xavier’s work. The bulk of KDP monster erotica is ostensibly straight, usually featuring a cisgender white female protagonist who is captured by, and then falls in love / lust with, a male monster, although a large and significant subsection feature male-male romance. Most of the stories are about, in Virginia Wade’s words, “monster cock” and its heightened possibilities for heterosexual female arousal within the realm of speculative sexual fantasy (Wade). And perhaps white patriarchal heterosexuality has become so tired within mainstream straight porn that, in order to generate a meaningful, fresh, powerful erotic thrill, it has to turn to the nonhuman to meet its own demands – it has to exceed itself as such. Yet some of the monster erotica produced from 2011-2014 was very queer. Some stories that are labeled as heterosexual in romance and erotica subgenre labeling conventions exceed heterosexuality or are only tenuously so, given the centrality of the nonhuman and the unruly erotic possibilities of monstrous nonhuman bodies for human bottom genders and sexualities. Stories about monsters resembling plants and invertebrate animals allow nonbinary genders a space to play in what was often marketed as heterosexual (or sometimes gay male) erotica or romance. Once the protagonist’s sexual partner and object of fantasy is not human, once we are talking about “monster cock,” it is no longer a question of a penis penetrating a vagina at all, but of a claw, tentacle, vine, tail, horn, reptilian tongue, flower, wing, or ambiguously-sexed monster genitalia that resemble neither vagina nor penis. It is this nonhuman excess that fascinates me – the ways in which penetration is not only about phalluses in these stories, but about the wide universe of speculative, monstrous, alien, or animal bodies whose morphological, magical, or technological features expand the meaning of topping/bottoming and far exceed the paltry human Van Engen 184 male penis of heterosexual porn, which can only appear insufficient and mundane in comparison. Seen this way, monster erotica as an archive is a set of fantasies of dominant nonhuman – or better, superhuman – lovers who fulfill all the desires and needs of their human bottoms that cannot be met under the auspices of white patriarchal heterosexuality. What unites the monster erotica stories in this archive, whether they feature a cisgender male or female protagonist, is an investment in a joyful, ecstatically pleasurable bottomhood – submission to the nonhuman monster or alien as the ultimate top/dominant sexual fantasy, in a way that displaces the gender of the human protagonist. For Clea Kinderton, “Monsters are almost by definition more powerful than any ordinary human – more ‘alpha,’” which is why they are used in this genre to imagine superhuman doms who are (often, or for most authors) simultaneously nurturing, caring, and protective of their human subs (email to author). The way these stories represent the nonhuman as an overpowering, dominant object of desire, however, renders the gender of the protagonist unimportant through an overwhelming investment in top/bottom, dom/sub power dynamics. In monster erotica, in other words, the human/nonhuman power dynamic grafted onto the sub/dom power dynamic largely overrides the gender of the human protagonist, offering a whole new set of gendered and sexual possibilities. What matters is no longer whether it is a woman-centric or man-centric sexual fantasy, a straight or gay erotica story, or what human body part is receiving the monster’s topping. It matters, rather, that a monster is fucking a human in highly aggressive, dominant, or overriding ways. Monster erotica about primarily submissive human protagonists in a society that devalues these positions offers a very productive set of fantasies. Although there are monster erotica and alien romance stories that do painfully insist on their own heterosexuality, in the stories I examine in this chapter the monster-human dynamic overshadows the genital morphology, gender identity, and sexual Van Engen 185 orientation of the human protagonists. While these erotica stories are not always explicitly marketed as LGBT erotica or romance, their archive of bottom fantasies exceed the limiting parameters of heterosexuality and binary gender by centralizing the nonhuman. In defining monster erotica as a bottom archive, I am indebted to Nguyen Tan Hoang’s theory of bottoming as a position in A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Nguyen calls for a revaluation of bottomhood in relation to femininity and abjection within gay Asian-American cultural production. He points out that “Top-bottom roles” bridge “gay male sexual practice” as well as BDSM and lesbian communities (7), while also cautioning that “the stakes” of bottoming “are differently constituted for women, queers, and people of color” (18). I want to follow up on Nguyen’s attention to bottoming as “receptivity,” as a position and practice that crosses (differently) a range of gendered and racialized bodies: receptivity, in his analysis, is “an active engagement that accounts for the senses of vulnerability, intimacy, and shame that one necessarily risks in assuming the bottom position. Such a shift in terminology also forces a reconfiguration of physical, sexual, and social hierarchies” (17). In other words, bottoming as a sexual and ethical position values and rescripts vulnerability from a condition of weakness or powerlessness to an active engagement with others without attempting to transcend the feminizing or stigmatized connotations that attach to bottoming in American cultures. For Nguyen, it is imperative to “disarticulate the conflation of bottomhood with social disempowerment” (69). But this positioning is about more than literal sexual practice (although his analysis and mine both centralize actual sex acts and explicit fantasies). Bottomhood for Nguyen is “a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form” that provides for a new “model for coalition politics” by centralizing “vulnerability and receptiveness” in interpersonal and collective relations (2). Nguyen’s book Van Engen 186 specifically excavates gay Asian American male cultural production as a way of understanding the particular pressures and pleasures that come with this gender-sexual identity in American culture (and I do not want to erase the specificity of his archive nor the effects on Asian American gay men in particular), but also offers his theory of bottomhood up to “minoritarian political projects” outside of Asian American cultures. Nguyen’s analysis of bottoming in gay male porn hinges on, as the title suggests, the camera’s view from the bottom’s point of view in gay male porn that appears to fetishize normative phallic masculinities. While gay male porn appears to “privilege[] the experience of the top,” it actually “stage[s] the fantasy scenario from the bottom’s point of view” and “invite[s] viewers to identify with the bottom” (10). Nguyen’s concept of the view from the bottom sheds light on the work that monster erotica stories do: centralize the human bottom’s pleasure and experiences (of whatever gender). I have not found a single monster erotica story that is narrated primarily from a top’s point of view. 54 This encounter from the human submissive’s point of view highlights the sensory experience of being erotically and physically overpowered by a superhuman being. These sensations of ecstatic bottoming form the backbone of these very popular and profitable stories. I use the concept of “bottom” as a gender-inclusive, identitarian-crossing position for sexual passivity, receptivity, powerlessness, stigmatized, or nonphallic sexualities. “Bottom” in Western human sexual practice crosses queer male and female communities in addition to BDSM sexual practices, bridging genders as well as species in the stories I examine. It registers with the abjected space of anal sex that gay male theorists of masochism like Leo Bersani write 54 Or, more precisely, narrated from the monster’s point of view for more than a paragraph or two. See Roman E. Pyre’s Serpent Lover for an example of brief monster-POV narration. Van Engen 187 about (Homos). “Bottom” and “submissive” are terms that connote spatial lowness, corporeal excretal and sexual orifices, and social-cultural-sexual devaluation, yet in BDSM practice they actually offer positions of power within negotiated powerlessness. “Bottom” also connotes the bottom of the sea, the sea floor, the ocean bed, where many of the invertebrate aquatic animals I am interested in live. What do nonbinary invertebrates like barnacles, mussels, and octopi offer to American sexual imaginaries? On the sea bottom, hermaphroditic invertebrates like anemones, clams, snails, and crustaceans live out their slimy, backboneless lives so alien to colonial analogies with vertebrate land mammals and birds. In the monster erotica archive where nonbinary monsters draw on invertebrate aquatic animality, spatial lowness, bodily lowness, under-waterness, and sexual under-ness all come together to value softness, receptivity, pliability, vulnerability, immobility, and other stigmatized forms of pleasure. Monster erotica stories use the nonhuman to figure fantasy dominance in different ways to open up new, fantastic, ecstatic forms of human bottoming. My goal in theorizing bottoming in this way is to create more daylight between things that are usually understood as equivalent under white supremacist hetero-patriarchy: topping/bottoming, penetrating/penetrated, masculinity/femininity, butch/femme, dominance/submission, penetration and phallic sexuality. Some psychoanalytic feminist theories of the phallus have at times collapsed these terms into one another, making any and all forms of penetration – by any gender of person, by any body part or toy, of any body part on the receiving partner – inevitably a phallus, a metonym for a cis-male penis (Irigaray). But many queer sexualities loosen these connections between masculinity and topping, dominance, and penetration, and, of course, disrupt the entire division of sex acts into mutually-exclusive categories of topping and bottoming. Van Engen 188 I want there to be more space – culturally, theoretically, politically – for ecstatic queer bottoming. While in gay cisgender male communities the “top/bottom” binary can seem like the problem terminology to get away from – it sounds limiting, constricting, and can oversimplify relationships and sexual practices – in the context of transgender studies and BDSM practice it offers a refreshing, differently-gendered set of language for social and sexual positions. It provides a differently gendered set of concepts than butch/femme for sexual receptivity and the ecstatic giving-up of power. Masculinity need not immediately imply dominance, nor femininity submission (Musser). Of course, more broadly, I believe in the project of breaking down binary conceptions of gender and sexuality. But my purposes here are to create more room for receptiveness, vulnerability, and powerlessness through the figure of the superhuman alien dom that transposes submissiveness onto the human as a whole, not just onto femininity. 55 One example of monster erotica/romance that exemplifies ecstatic bottoming is Lyn Gala’s Rownt series, including Claimings, Tails, and Other Alien Artifacts, a M/M alien captivity romance that figures power play across a human-alien, prey-predator divide rather than a F/M 55 A word about consent: most monster erotica plotlines are nonconsensual fantasies, usually involving the monster capturing the human, forcing the human to have sex with him/it, and gradually developing feelings and a human-compatible sense of respect and mutuality. The genre labeling conventions of online erotica call this “dubious consent” or “dubcon” or “reluctant,” although obviously within the realm of feminist political praxis this would more properly be called nonconsensual or rape fantasies. These stories fall into the historical trend within women- authored pornography and romance that uses nonconsensual or partly-consensual plotlines to legitimize or give psychological cover for repressed or monstrous desires. Feminist SF author Joanna Russ proposes the concept of sexual fantasy as a way of explaining the prevalence of rape and injury plotlines in women-authored pornography: “[S]exual fantasy can’t be taken at face value. . . . Translated into real life, the ‘hurt-comfort’ theme,” or fantasies about one partner being injured and requiring comfort from the other, which serves as an excuse for sex, “would simply be pernicious,” much like nonconsensual fantasies (which are common among survivors of sexual assault) (88). Russ’s conception of sexual fantasy offers a way of understanding fantasies of forcing or dubious consent in monster erotica stories, of how dubiously-consensual plot setups serve as a thin layer of legitimization for intense illicit desires. Van Engen 189 binary. Gala’s trilogy uses the speculative possibilities of alien biology to open up new possibilities for human queer eroticism, imagining the Rownt as a purple-skinned, dominant species that completely separates intimacy, sensuality, and pleasure from reproduction. Gala’s story remaps bodily erogenous zones away from an exclusive focus on genital sexuality and imagines a fantasy world in which submissives are valued and highly respected rather than stigmatized. My focus here is not on realistic representations of, or real-world acts of, zoophilia, or human sex with nonhuman animals. Rather, I am interested in the wide world that speculative fiction offers to this area of inquiry, the queer non/human. Speculative erotica offers fantasy accounts of what human sex with nonhuman beings might be like in ways that do not bear the same ethical weight as realistic bestiality porn. Speculative erotica in particular takes readers through a weird and wild – and very queer – ride through sex and gender with imaginary nonhuman beings. These are fantasies, but they have a lot to say about how humans imagine ourselves through fantasies about nonhuman animals with important implications for how race, gender, and sexuality lace that non/human boundary with political pitfalls. 4.2 They: Tentacles and Multiplicity I now turn to a subgenre of monster erotica that features plant-based monsters that trouble the line between animal and plant life. In Kylie Ashcroft’s Mating with the Jungle Tentacle Plant series, a sentient alien plant and its offspring capture and fuck a series of human women. The narrator of books 1 and 3 is a scientist attempting to study the plants, and the narrator of book 2 is a college student on spring break. These stories take place in a colonial framework, involving a white woman visiting a South American rainforest and discovering illicit pleasures there. But they narrate Western science trying (and failing) to contain and quantify the nonhuman and Van Engen 190 nonwestern worlds that constitute its objects of study – a story about scientific specimens that turn on the scientist. Ashcroft’s tentacle plant erotica imagine South America as a monstrous space of gender and sexual unruliness that is dangerous and alluring to white Western subjects, and unravels the colonial sciences they bring with them. In Mating with the Jungle Tentacle Plant, a white American scientist goes on a research trip to the Amazon in search of the ontalya, a plant used by the imaginary indigenous “Topnomee” people and sought after by Western scientists for its “revolutionary medical properties” (loc 2). The plant, however, has almost been destroyed by deforestation. Elizabeth, the scientist, hopes to be the first Western scientist to actually locate samples of this plant, and cooperates with the Topnomee to find and, hopefully, cultivate the plant once it is found again. Her scientific eye is at first coded with standards of evidence, testing, documentation, and objectivity that locate the story firmly within a Western scientific paradigm. When she first finds the plant, “Always the scientist, she pulled out her camera [and] snapp[ed] pictures of the flower, the vine, the trees. She took photos of the soil where the vine took root and dozens of macro photos of the magical flower. She wanted to capture every detail as soon as possible, as if the plant may dissolve back into myth and memory” (loc 48). The plant life of the Amazon here is braided together with rhetorics of disappearing indigeneity, demonstrating the intimately linked functions of empire and environmental destruction. Elizabeth’s stance toward the flower begins as objective scientific inquiry, but quickly moves toward the inappropriately erotic and physical, disrupting the orderly, distanced progression of the science. As she sniffs the flower, it overpowers her disembodied rational approach and pushes her into a deeply embodied place of sensuality: Elizabeth “couldn’t stop smelling” the plant. “She wanted more, to inhale this bizarre scent until there was nothing else to smell . . . . Van Engen 191 Then suddenly she felt like something popped in her head, a shiver of pleasure bursting through her body. Elizabeth stepped back from the plant, feeling a little dizzy, every inch of her body tingling” (loc 73). Soon this feeling turns to explicit “horn[iness],” and makes it impossible for her to continue her work (loc 97). Her state of plant-induced distraction suffices as an excuse for extravagant scenes of self-pleasure and partnered sex with the alien plant. The vines are usually described alternately as vines, tendrils, and tentacles, have large pink flowers that emit some sort of powerful aphrodisiac when the protagonist sniffs them, and function simultaneously as phalluses, bondage restraints, vibrators, fingers, and floggers. Mating with the Jungle Tentacle Plant begins as a story about colonial Western science seeking to prove, with evidence and disembodied objective methods, the “mythical” claims of indigenous medical knowledges in the face of disappearing rainforest and purportedly disappearing native peoples. But by the end of the narrative, Western science has broken down into sheer, arational, gratuitous (white) feminine pleasure as a relation between human and nonhuman animal-plant. Elizabeth leaves the scene of the vine plant several climaxes later, impregnated with the alien plant’s offspring as “the next step in the evolutionary chain,” crossing and skipping over large areas of organic life in Darwin’s evolutionary life scale (loc 170). But she also leaves it without any of her samples, and the only living specimen of the vine plant withered and dead. The pink flower she had put into a tupperware was dried and dead, when a short time before it was healthy and alive enough to fuck her (this is apparently a result of its self-sacrificial reproductive process, not framed as an act of Elizabeth’s destructiveness). From a Western scientific point of view, “[t]he trip was a waste. She would go back empty handed and the research would end” (loc 170). Yet what replaces her scientifically-obtained evidence and samples is the offspring of the plant itself, implanted in her body: an intimate body of evidence obtained through sex rather than Van Engen 192 an isolated and decontextualized specimen in a tupperware. The story narrates the displacement of masculinist Western scientific ways of engaging with the nonhuman world with intimate, feminized, highly erotic methods of engagement. Ashcroft narrates Elizabeth as a heterosexual white woman who equates sex with men, and who experiences desire (at first) as the yearning for “a large hard cock between her legs” (loc 73). But despite this heteronormative starting point, the story’s use of the plant as a figure of desirability that produces more pleasure than the protagonist has ever experienced before displaces penetration from phallic masculinity and reproduction from the vertebrate M/F gender binary. Tentacle plant erotica imagines the nonhuman world as a site of nonbinary desires in a way that would not be possible with stories about monsters resembling vertebrate mammals like Bigfoot or Centaurs; in this respect they are a good example of the ways that nonbinary gender functions within Western scientific imaginaries in the wake of Darwin. Much like Butler’s ooloi, the alien tentacle plant takes the pronoun “it,” and is often described as a “thing” and a “creature” (loc 121). It is simultaneously one entity and many entities - Elizabeth has a hard time figuring out how many of the plants there are as they are immobilizing her. The mix of vegetal and animal qualities produce an alien-monster that exceeds description within human Western heteronormative gender binary codes: “A flash of green, and then a thicker vine was coming towards her, slithering much slower, as if it was moving cautiously and watching her. This was no plant – this was something else, some sort of creature. It slid up between her ankles, the tip of it rising up in the air as if it was glancing over her body behaving more like a tentacle than an inanimate plant” (loc 121). The sheer strangeness of the vocabulary of penetration frequently used in written erotica attached to plant subjects/nouns is valuable as a linguistic-erotic intervention: “The vine inside her pulsated, massaging her insides as it slid in and out of her Van Engen 193 dripping pussy” (146). 56 Simultaneously bondage restraints, vibrator, phallus, and scientific specimen, the vine plant imagines the distanced nonhuman objects of Western scientific study coming to life and crossing the objectivity barrier to penetrate and pleasure the researcher. In Ashcroft’s sequel, the plant monster transforms into a slimy invertebrate hybrid creature more animallike than plantlike. Bred by the Jungle Tentacle Plant 2: Breeding in Paradise, a white cisgender woman on spring break visiting Brazil encounters the human-alien hybrid offspring of Elizabeth from Mating with the Jungle Tentacle Plant and the ontalya plant. The alien vine plant’s offspring is a small tentacle monster resembling terrestrial invertebrates: “The creature . . . . was a blob of flesh, with two black eyes the size of olives poking out of a bump that must be the creature’s head. Instead of arms or legs, it seemed to have hundreds of tiny little hot dog sized appendages. . . . [T]he skin had a pale tint of green accented by patches of pink flesh” (loc 319). The “creature” takes nonbinary form: Ashcroft never describes it with masculine or feminine pronouns, and its body has nothing resembling a penis or vagina. Instead, it has indeterminate “hot dog sized appendages” that develop into “long, thick tentacles” that bind the protagonist Kaycee, penetrate her, and vibrate against her body. These tentacle monsters, like the vines, create hyperbolic levels of pleasure through bodies that exceed species categorization and make no sense within the terms of the gender binary that makes white cis- hetero patriarchy function. They offer penetration without penises, and multi-functional “appendages” capable of binding, vibrating, penetrating, or stroking. In this women-centric, feminist erotica genre, the tentacle monster imagines an ultimate pleasure-producing entity unanchored to the constraints of realistic bodies, species, and genders familiar to readers, and it 56 This is highly reminiscent of the scene in the zombie film The Evil Dead (1981) where a girl wanders into the woods and gets captured, strapped down, and raped by a tree’s vines, except Ashcroft’s vines are full of green leaves and flowers rather than dry and wintry. Van Engen 194 does so through turning to invertebrate animality. The slimy body of the hybrid “creature” in Jungle Tentacle Plant 2 pulls from the invertebrate aquatic genders and sexualities I discussed in chapter 1: its body is “slick,” it is a “blob of flesh” that does not appear to have a backbone, and instead of vertebrate animal arms and legs it has “hundreds of tiny . . . appendages” (loc 319). It fucks Kaycee in a running shower rather than in a dry space, making it at least amphibious if not aquatic. Tentacles in Ashcroft’s story offer pleasures above and beyond the cis-gender binary and transform what appear to be heterosexual erotica stories into deeply queer fantasies of human women’s sex with nonhuman, nonbinary, and often extraterrestrial beings. Ashcroft’s fiction is a set of fantasies about nonhuman animals whose tentacle bodies render them nonbinary and invertebrate, that resist Western scientific knowledges through eroticism. Understanding the value of these queerly nonhuman erotica stories requires a turn away from psychoanalysis and toward a theoretical framework that encapsulates species and race as significant factors in gender and sexuality. While it might be tempting to view these tentacle- vines as penis analogues, there is much more to these stories. To put it bluntly, tentacles, horns, tails, vines, and paws are not necessarily phalluses, and to see them as such is to cover over the perverse trans-species remapping of bodies that is going on here. While queer and feminist theorists have redeployed psychoanalysis in ways that account for feminine sexualities and queerness, I want to insist that there is more to penetration and dominance than the phallus, especially once we are no longer wholly in the realm of the human. Furthermore, as David Eng and Michael Lundblad point out, Freudian psychoanalysis arose out of a specific turn-of-the- 20 th -century historical period at the center of European empires, although it has historically been deployed in the humanities as an abstracted, placeless, and dehistoricized set of ideas. Freud’s work (like Darwin’s in Descent of Man) trafficks in the coloniality of time that transformed non- Van Engen 195 European contemporary peoples into primitive relics of a European past (Eng). To expand our conceptions of gender and sexuality, I argue, requires stepping outside of the limiting paradigms of the Oedipal family drama and the anthropocentric and androcentric rubric of the phallus. There are so many more stories we could tell about human genders and sexualities other than those Freud has left us as his legacy. Darwin’s portrayal of invertebrate genders and sexualities in Descent of Man is the place I turn for alternative stories, stories that complicate vertebrate gender-binary reproductive temporalities and resist the racialization of time. Through the lens of Darwin’s invertebrate analogies, the alien tentacle plant and its hybrid offspring offer imaginative expansions of normative American genders and sexualities through a speculative and genderqueer turn to the nonhuman. This genderqueerness is about multiplicity as much as invertebrate animality. The alien plant monsters in Ashcroft’s series are nonbinary because, in part, they are so multiple. To invoke Luce Irigaray’s rhetorics in This Sex That Is Not One, tentacle monsters are a nonbinary gender that is not one. Irigaray’s canonical essay uses the anatomical metaphor of labia as a fleshly metaphor for what she sees as the duality and self-presence of women, as opposed to what she considers the singularity and outward-oriented directionality of men (Irigaray 28). Unfortunately, in doing this, as Gayle Salamon points out, Irigaray frames heterosexuality as more ethical than homosexuality, conflates gender with genitalia, and sees sex and gender as irreconcilable, naturalized corporeal difference (Salamon 144). 57 While it may seem strange to reuse and disidentify with This Sex That Is Not One in a dissertation on nonbinary genders, I want to take up her valuation of sexualities, bodies, and genders that are plural to show how the alien tentacle plant’s body offers an alien, extra-human speculative metaphor for gender and 57 See also Judith Butler’s critique of the concept of sexual difference in Undoing Gender. Van Engen 196 sexual multiplicity. The multiplicity of sexuality, desire, pleasure, selves, and bodies that Irigaray proposes is not limited to heterosexual cisgender straight human women having vanilla or solo sex. People with all kinds of bodies and genders “ha(ve) sex organs more or less everywhere” (Irigaray 28), can penetrate and be penetrated, and have bodies and sexualities that are “plural” (28), which of course undermines the stability of the corporeally-grounded binary system of human difference she is interested in. 58 Ashcroft’s tentacle monsters literalize Irigaray’s concept of gendered, sexual, and corporeal multiplicity by taking it to its nonhuman, nonbinary, alien extreme. Tentacle monsters and vine plants also queerly displace and remap the genital-centricity of Irigaray’s metaphor of the sex that is not one (and the concept of sexual difference) by transforming limbs of locomotion and structural support into objects of pleasure – clearly an extension of Irigaray’s claim that women’s bodies have erogenous zones everywhere. In other words, tentacles are not actually reproductive organs in the invertebrate animals these monsters are drawn from, and therefore they offer a nonbinary and queer set of corporeal metaphors rather than one that naturalizes binary gender as genitalia. Ashcroft’s human female protagonists are overcome with desire for multi-limbed alien beings whose bodies are essentially writhing masses of pleasure- producing tentacle-vines. Nonbinary because nonhuman, nonphallic because multiple, the alien tentacle plant stories envision a fleshly encounter with queerly-multiple bodies that provide ecstatic experiences of penetration and bottoming uncoupled from the singular limitations of hetero-patriarchal sex with cisgender male bodies. These sublime experiences with powerlessness, bondage, and multiple penetration by an alien being take the queer seed of 58 I do not want to erase intersex humans from this equation, by the way, nor do I mean to conflate being intersex with being nonbinary. Van Engen 197 Irigaray’s concept of gender and sexual multiplicity and grow it to its nonbinary, nonhuman, speculative potential. And Ashcroft’s stories accomplish this by using nonhuman bodies – plants and inverterbrates – sufficiently distant from vertebrate mammalian norms to disentangle sex and gender from their naturalized hetero-patriarchal, gender binary normative forms. This concept of gender nonbinariness as animal multiplicity is especially visible in the finale to Ashcroft’s series, Mating with the Jungle Tentacle Plant 3: The Final Breeding, in which the third generation of the original tentacle plant is now human-appearing. The creature passes as a human man in order to infiltrate the laboratory where Elizabeth (the scientist from book 1) works, and seduces her assistant. However, the creature shows its true nonhuman form through a scene that playfully imagines the perception of a (singular) penis into a writhing, multiple mass of tentacle appendages that cover its body. As the creature’s body multiplies and transforms, the appendages that sprout from its body migrate from what would be a human’s genital area to cover the rest of its body: Through her cloudy haze, she noticed that what hung between his legs was not a penis. It was much longer and thicker, and it moved like a snake, slithering in her direction. Trish opened her mouth to ask what it was, but her jaw just hung open as another strange appendage appeared, this one growing out of his side like a tentacle. It was green, and thick, the tip tapering off into a point. Then there was another coming from his other side. Then another. And another. And another. Soon there were so many wiggling tentacles coming out of him she couldn’t count them all. Loc 458 The multiplicity and the nonhuman nature of the tentacle plant hybrid here make it much more than a cisgender human man. The language of “snake[s]” and “[strange appendage[s]” and “tentacles” and the color “green” here use the nonhuman world to disrupt hetero-cis-normative Van Engen 198 expectations that a person who looks like a man will have a penis by multiplying the limbs and expanding their purpose and location away from just genitalia. Ashcroft’s writing here displaces the heteronormative, genital-centric mapping of bodies to stage the multiplication of nonbinary gender – not just from one to two, but into vast multiplicity, from “he” to “they,” from human to tentacle creature. Ashcroft’s Jungle Tentacle Plant series is intensely colonial, as the title word “jungle” suggests. Each installment in the series involves a white woman visiting the South American rainforest and discovering illicit pleasures there, reminiscent of many white travel narratives to colonized lands. While the first book deconstructs the coloniality of Western science by staging its failure from within, the latter two books do not do as much of this work. Tentacle plant erotica imagines nonwestern spaces (especially South American rainforests) as monstrous sites of gender and sexual unruliness that are dangerous and alluring to white Western women, following familiar colonial sexual scripts but – in the case of Ashcroft’s book 1 – complicating them. 4.3 Anemone Genitals, Nonbinary Invertebrates Monster erotica as an archive is, in many cases, filled with racialized sexual stereotypes that draw on mammalian vertebrate animals and appear more straightforwardly heterosexual. Wade’s Cum for Bigfoot series, for example, the most well-known example of this genre, draws on primitivist tropes of indigenous masculinities, antiblack hypersexual stereotypes, and 19 th century scientific racist links between indigenous peoples and nonhuman large apes in a captivity narrative that capitalizes on the fear and pleasure of white women (Wade). But there is much more to the genre than heteronormative Bigfoots. Monsters based on nonbinary invertebrates, aquatic animals, and plants have a much different relationship to the racialized gender and sexual Van Engen 199 stereotypes that plague Bigfoot stories. While analogies between nonhuman primates and human peoples of color have historically functioned as crucial elements of scientific and other racisms (Chen), aquatic invertebrates are far enough away from humans on 19 th century scientific scales of life that they were never the contested ground on which Victorian scientists battled out the question of whether nonEuropean peoples were, in fact, human or not. Simply put, 19 th century racists rarely accused nonwhite peoples of being octopus-like or anemone-like, rather than ape- like or horselike. Aquatic invertebrate animals, therefore, have a critically estranging effect on human sexualities and genders that do not get filtered through the Western history of racialized dehumanization in the same way. In monster erotica, then, stories about getting fucked by a giant slug or an alien sentient plant means something quite different from stories about having sex with a gorilla- or chimpanzee-like Bigfoot. In this section I analyze Alice Xavier’s story Alien Seed, which capitalizes on nonhuman animality as a site of desire using invertebrate and aquatic animal bodies to displace American gender and sexual norms in a way that is not so closely tied to the racialized threshold of the human. The cover of Alien Seed depicts a light-skinned woman in black lingerie leaning diagonally across the frame, the entire scene washed in a blue-green filter. 59 While the woman on the cover appears light-skinned in the blue-green light of the UFO’s engines, inside the text the protagonist of the story is never racially identified or phenotypically described. It is important to me to leave a distinction between white and racially neutral here. Although many white readers may read the story and assume a racially-unmarked protagonist is white, it may be incorrect to describe that protagonist as white as a critic if she is not otherwise specified. Xavier (who 59 Xavier designs her cover images in relatively tame and generic ways in order to avoid Amazon’s censorship red flags, leaving the steamy monster sex for inside the text (Spitznagel). Van Engen 200 identified herself to me only as a “woman” (email)) has left some wiggle room for more inclusive genderqueer fantasies, and in other works she does put people of color on her covers and writes in Aztec precolonial cultural universes – for example, in Serpent God’s Virgin. Alien Seed is an alien abduction narrative in which the narrator gets abducted by a UFO while driving in the desert, and wakes up in an examination room aboard an alien ship. The aliens appear small, innocuous, little green men when they first interact with her, but they soon transform into utterly fantastic monster-beasts that resemble fish, squid, panthers, wolves, ogres, and an amorphous thing Xavier describes as an “alien kraken.” It is in these fantastic bodies that the aliens carry out their sexual experiments with the narrator. Their monstrous bodies are specifically-constructed and extensively-researched personas based on human erotic literature – they are fantasy projections of human sexual imaginations, implying that Western sexual universes involve monstrosity and nonhuman animality. Alien Seed is a story in the genre of monster erotica that is also about monster erotica, about the nonhuman potential of queer and nonbinary desires like the narrator experiences. After the aliens transform into monsters, Xavier presents them as extremely desirable because of their nonhumanness, rather than in spite of it, in a way that literalizes the expression “fuck like an animal.” Xavier repeatedly describes sex with aliens in the story as “mating,” “breeding,” and “mounting,” in classic monster erotica vocabulary. One of the aliens the narrator has sex with is panther-like, and the story represents her desire for the panther as because of his catlike qualities, not in spite of them. For example, as the panther-beast “mounted” the narrator “like a lion mounting a lioness,” his nonhumanness ignites her desire in the language of internal animality. She says she is so turned on that she “might as well have been an animal,” again demonstrating how the nonhuman is a part of human desires (250). The panther’s penetration of Van Engen 201 the narrator “fulfill[s] all [her] animal wants,” his sexual prowess and his animality becoming almost synonymous. Through this nonhuman fantasy universe, Xavier transforms humanness into bottoming or submissiveness, while the monster-alien creatures become synonymous with superhuman tops, far more dominant and overpowering than any homo sapiens could be in real life. Through the extended analogy of the sexual animal, the M/F hetero binary here has transposed into animal/human as top/bottom or dom/sub in a way that centers the human sub’s desires, creating a beautiful fantasy of ecstatic speculative bottoming. The panther in Alien Seed appears to be cisgender and male: he receives masculine pronouns and draws on vertebrate mammal forms of animality closely related to humans that have traditionally been used to naturalize heterosexuality, patriarchy, white supremacy, and binary gender. But other monsters in the story invoke a different range of nonhuman animality. A few scenes later, Xavier introduces readers to a new monster she describes as a “tentacle-faced swamp beast” that “looked like it was out of some Lovecraftian nightmare,” resembling a mixture of sea creatures (170). It is simultaneously octopuslike, feline, and fishlike: “Long, slick tentacles protruded from his face, undulating idly as blazing yellow eyes stared down hungrily at my bound, naked form. His long, thick body rippled with muscles and was covered with dark, shimmering scales. A long finned tail swished behind him, like that of a cat ready to pounce” (170). Part squid, part fish, part cat, this monster is a mixture of different animals – some vertebrate, some invertebrate, and hence occupies an in-between representational space, not quite the unqualifiedly cis-male fantasy of the panther beast. Xavier sometimes describes this monster as “he” and sometimes as a “thing.” The swamp beast, therefore, invokes a different history of racism as animalization through this naming of Lovecraft, and a more complicated relationship to racialization, masculinity, and animality than the panther. The swamp beast falls, at best, Van Engen 202 messily into the category of “male.” Xavier sometimes describes the swamp-beast using masculine pronouns, and he does have a penis (unlike other monsters). But she more frequently describes him as a “beast” or “creature” or “thing” in ways that avoid gendered pronouns altogether. The swamp-beast’s connection to fish, octopi, and squid also imbue him with some of the gender and sexual variance of nonhuman animality, since these animals’ sexual behaviors frequently complicate Darwinian white-hetero- masculinist sexual systems. The swamp-beast is a complicated condensation of species, gender, and racial formations, not exactly the clear-cut invocation of the bestialized man of color trope I see in Bigfoot erotica. As I argued in chapter 1, in American culture in the wake of Darwin, vertebrate land- dwelling mammals closely related to humans are the animals most likely to be used in racial stereotypes that animalize people of color. Aquatic, invertebrate, and hermaphroditic animals less closely related to humans on Darwin’s evolutionary scale hold different imaginative possibilities and are less tightly tied to Western colonial-racial languages of parahumanity. So in the text of Alien Seed, it is the panther, the wolf, and the ogre – which resemble mammals and vertebrates – that most conjure up the toxic tropes of the bestialized or hypersexualized man of color. They are also the ones Xavier most clearly describes as cisgender male monsters. On the other hand, the monsters that resemble octopi, sea serpents, fish, or various aquatic invertebrates are more likely to be illegible to the racialized gender and sexual categories that are, in part, the legacy of 19 th century Western science. So it is the last alien-monster of the story, a creature Xavier describes as an “alien kraken,” that most interests me. This is the final monster of the story, and it resists the language the narrator has to describe desire, bodies, genders, races, or species: Van Engen 203 Behind the ogre and the wolf-man lurked something worse, something huge. I felt paralyzed. I’d never seen anything like it. The tentacle-faced swamp beast was nice and tame compared to this. It was some sort of deep sea nightmare beast, with a long, serpentine body ridged with fins and covered in glistening green skin, and a horrifying jawless maw. It reared up before me, and I was staring into the many glowing eyes of a kraken. Long, slick tentacles whipped about and wicked-looking spines bristled. I took in the scent coming off the monster’s skin, and it smelled like darkness and the ocean. L 280 This monster is not black or white, but green. It is neither male nor female, but receives the gender-neutral (and nonhuman) pronoun “it.” The masculine pronouns, cis-male descriptions of genitals, and racialized color schemes that populate other monster erotica stories do not function well here, because the kind of aquatic animality that the kraken embodies that renders it resistant to white hetero-patriarchal gender and sexual imaginations. The kraken is specifically a “deep sea nightmare beast” who possesses “fins” and “slick tentacles” reminiscent of fish and squid, and “smell[s] like darkness and the ocean.” Again, aquatic animals and especially invertebrate animals invoke nonbinary genders and sexualities. Within the text of the story, this registers in the way that Xavier describes penises and tentacles as mutually exclusive: “I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t have one of those cocks… or one or more of those tentacles, filling and violating me soon” (293). No other monster in the story gets described as having tentacles instead of a penis. While it would be possible to read this in a psychoanalytic paradigm as yet more phallic imagery, this would be an impoverished reading that cannot account for how nonhuman animal imagery shapes human racial, gender, and sexual formations. The nonhumanness of the alien kraken permits it to register in the narrator’s sexual universe as Van Engen 204 nonbinary, and it is the most erotically overpowering object of desire in this hyperbolically erotic story. As I have been arguing, invertebrate and aquatic animalities channel queer, trans, and nonbinary genders and sexualities that confound the racial-species hierarchies cemented by sexual selection theory. The most convincing evidence for this claim appears in Xavier’s description of the alien kraken’s body, which channels precisely the nonbinary and aquatic animals that confused Darwin in Descent of Man. In the penultimate moment of the biggest sexual climax of this hyperbolic erotica story, the narrator is “straddling the creature’s slick, serpentine body,” lost in pleasure (loc 370). At that moment, the kraken’s genitalia finally emerge from the interior of its body, from its mouth rather than from between its legs; indeed, it is unclear whether or not the kraken even has legs. In this respect, Xavier is displacing the hetero-cisgender mapping of genitalia and bodies naturalized by Darwinian interpretations of vertebrate mammals. The kraken’s maw is a ferocious site that taps into the superhuman topping fantasies I mentioned earlier, but not in a way that is masculine: “It was the stuff of nightmares. Countless yellow eyes gazed upon me, feasting upon my vulnerable form, hungry and lusting. Rings of silver fangs circled its jawless maw. Strange feelers and appendages flexed and contracted, and . . . . even more fangs emerged, like the rows of new teeth in a shark’s mouth” (loc 380). Through these comparisons to fish (“shark’s mouth”), insects (“feelers”), and lamprey (“rings of silver fangs,” “jawless maw”), Xavier establishes the kraken’s nonbinariness through references to aquatic and invertebrate animals. The kraken is dominant, nonbinary, and extremely eroticized. Van Engen 205 Much depends here on the kraken’s genitalia, which resemble yet more invertebrate aquatic animals. The genitals are amorphous: they protrude like a phallus and yet are multiple, less like labia and more anemone- or tentacle- like: Then slowly, a twisted glowing tongue emerged from the darkness of its maw. I gasped as it unfurled – it was not one appendage, but hundreds, all glowing, flowing and undulating as if they were underwater. They drifted closer to me, and I saw that there was an iridescent silvery liquid beading on them. The creature was ready to mate, and I was ready for it to mate with me. I don’t think I’d ever needed anything so urgently or profoundly before. (388) This monster’s sexual organs register a profound erotic pull toward nonbinary sexed bodies and nonhuman animality, specifically toward invertebrate and aquatic forms of nonhuman life. The “appendage” here moves as if they are “undulating” “underwater” like a sea anemone (which are usually hermaphroditic species in real life) or like octopus arms. The genitalia appear not penis- like but more precisely a “twisted glowing tongue,” and the “hundreds” of appendages rather than one. This monster’s sexual organs, which again appear at the biggest sexual climax of this story, reveal the rich imaginative potential where nonhuman, queer, trans, and nonbinary sexualities intersect in a kind of underwater, invertebrate, slimy world of desires. And invertebrate, aquatic, and exoskeletal forms of nonhuman life would appear lower on a Darwinian species hierarchy than mammals, reptiles, or vertebrates because of their nonbinary genders and sexualities. So Alien Seed’s figuration of the kraken-beast defies the gender binaries and phallic aggressiveness that make Darwin’s racial-species schemes and “survival of the fittest” logics possible. The kraken-beast capitalizes on the gender and sexual diversity of the nonmammalian and Van Engen 206 invertebrate life to intervene in the racial-species hierarchies that American speculative fiction has inherited from 19 th century science. The alien kraken’s body and its effects on the protagonist of Alien Seed present a speculative and extraterrestrial embodiment of this multiplicity seated in a nonbinary gendered nonhuman being. It makes a difference that this is not realistic erotica: the alien kraken is a figment of Alice Xavier’s imagination, and therefore it does not bear the representational burden of defining what an entire gender’s sexuality is supposed to be based on what kind of genitals that gender is supposed to have, or what kind of pleasure is supposed to be assigned to those genitals. The kraken’s anemone-like genitals are an imaginative nonhuman animal metaphor for what bodies, desire, gender, and sexuality might look like when they are exploded from the all-too-human, mundane strictures of white hetero-cis patriarchy. A glance at these stories through a critical Darwinian lens reveals these monsters to be inhumanly sexual, spinelessly gendered, nonbinary rather than hetero-phallic creatures of pleasure. 4.4 Conclusion: Trans-Monstrous Erotics I am interested in monster erotica from Alice Xavier because Xavier’s work (and Ashcroft’s) dissociates sexual dominance from masculinity. Alien Seed and the Jungle Tentacle Plant stories make more room for nonbinary genders by rerouting human eroticism through the nonhuman animal and plant world. These stories demonstrate the powerful confluence of invertebrate and aquatic animality, nonbinary gender and multiplicity in the bodies and behaviors of these monsters. The sheer campy strangeness of these erotica stories, of humans getting fucked by a plant vine or an octopus-fish-anemone-like creature, offer a vibrant world of imagination to queer, trans, and nonbinary sexual imaginaries, one not limited by the mundane constraints of human bodies and normative gender-sexual regimes in the ‘real’ world. While it may appear to Van Engen 207 be a weakness that the stories only depict cisgender men and women as protagonists, this reinforces my argument that expanding the possibilities for human gender and sexuality in American culture is enriched by a detour through the nonhuman and the extraterrestrial. In fact, I am more enthusiastic about that than if the story were a more realistic erotica story starring transgender humans. Why limit ourselves to the mundane world, if gender nonconformity is not only human? Wild, monstrous, extra-human genders lie in wait in the pages of ebook monster erotica. To expand the possibilities for genders other than butch, femme, masculinities, or femininities, one very fruitful direction to take is to indulge in a decadent, slimy trip through the nonhuman speculative world, where beings need not be human, porn need not be realistic, and people can be neither “he” nor “she” but “they” or even “it.” In this universe, penetration need not involve phalluses, but a range of body parts human beings don’t have in the mundane world. Bottoming and submissiveness need not label a body “feminine,” topping and dominance need not attach to “masculinity,” but humans and aliens or monsters instead. Sex with a nonhuman being need not be labeled “bestiality,” people of all genders can become pregnant with an alien’s seed, captivity and submission to an alien body can be an experience of sublime pleasure in powerlessness. In this world, alien limbs can be simultaneously genitals, bondage restraints, floggers, and (perhaps) phalluses. What might sex and gender become when they are no longer human? This is the question that monster erotica, at its best in Xavier’s work, explores. What can sex become when it no longer involves men, women, masculinities, femininities, humans, or even vertebrates? In E.M. Beastly’s terms, what might feathery, scaly, slimy, furry, exoskeletal, or incorporeal creatures add to our understandings of gender and sexuality (Monstrous Lust)? Van Engen 208 I want to conclude with some thoughts on monstrosity, desire, and trans bodies as suggestions about the potential of monster erotica as a genre. In her 1994 essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Susan Stryker calls for reclaiming the toxic associations between being trans and monstrosity: “I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster” (240). Stryker’s piece focuses on connections between gender-affirming surgeries and Frankenstein’s monster’s stitched-together body, while monster erotica author Clea Kinderton is interested in the cis-normative, transmisogynist gazes that render non-passing transfeminine bodies monstrous. Kinderton, who identified herself to me as a “white, bisexual, polyamorous, pre-op trans woman (mtf),” shared some really beautiful insights into her investment in writing monster erotica in an email. For Kinderton, writing about monstrous bodies is a way of grappling with the way her own transfeminine body has been interpreted as monstrous (I quote with permission): [A]s a trans person, I have always felt like a monster. I identify with them because they’re misfits and outcasts, feared and hated by others simply because they’re an ‘unnatural’ mix of things that shouldn’t be mixed together. So in a way monsters have always felt like ‘my people’. A monster isn’t going to reject me over the way that I look because its standards of beauty are utterly foreign. It allows me to suspend my disbelief that another ‘person’ could desire me as intensely as they do. (email to author, 7/14/2016) Not all monster erotica authors or readers are trans. But Kinderton’s connection between monster sex fantasies and being treated as monstrous oneself shed light on the imaginative potential monster erotica holds for queer, trans, and feminist sexual politics in the U.S. today. The same Van Engen 209 human-centric standards of desirability that render monsters disgusting or wrong in the eyes of many commentators also render a variety of human bodies undesirable, disgusting, or wrong – trans bodies, fat bodies, bodies of color, disabled bodies, elderly bodies, etc. Kinderton also writes BBW (Big Beautiful Women) erotica, and expressed similar investments in how monster porn might create more sexual space for people with bodies less frequently represented as desirable in mainstream porn. Both Kinderton and Stryker (in very different intellectual-creative arenas) suggest that rethinking the monstrous as erotic rather than repulsive offers a way to reimagine the sexual politics of trans, especially transfeminine, bodies under white cis-hetero-patriarchy. This is a different move, I believe, than the psychoanalytic call to understand desire and disgust as twin impulses, as Julia Kristeva does in Powers of Horror and George Haggerty does in Queer Gothic. The simultaneity of desire and disgust when directed toward transfeminine bodies is what causes so many deaths of trans women in the U.S. (especially trans women of color) by straight cisgender men who feel somehow tricked. The stakes of reconceptualizing the politics of desirability are very high, indeed. For Kinderton, it is difficult to identify with most realistic erotica because of the difficulty projecting herself into them enough to suspend disbelief. Kinderton writes, “I struggle writing heteronormative romance simply because it seems absurd to me that I would ever find myself in that kind of relationship; I find it easier to imagine falling in love with an orc or a minotaur, of bonding over our mutual strangeness with a yeti or a ‘creature from the black lagoon’” (email to author 7/14/2016). Kinderton upends the standards of believability and protagonist identification that are more usually applied to discredit monster erotica authors rather than praise what they’re doing: she suggests that trans people and others who struggle to see their bodies as desirable are Van Engen 210 already unlikely to identify with realistic mainstream porn, and may be particularly well situated to identify with nonhuman speculative fantasies instead. This is a different kind of response to the problems of mainstream porn than the burgeoning world of queer, trans, and feminist porn in realistic genres being produced by places like The Crash Pad – although that is very important work (see The Feminist Porn Book). But Kinderton’s response is a speculative one rather than a realistic or indexical approach to representation and inclusivity: “So I’ve created my own little kingdom, with my own ‘knights’ (shaggy, scaley, hooved, and horned), people I can relate to, and who aren’t so quick to reject me for being different” (email to author 7/14/2016). I am not a sociologist, and I make no quantitative claims about readership here. But I think Kinderton has a point – that feeling monstrous and fantasizing about monsters have much in common, and this might be the starting point for a new politics of the erotic, a new kind of monstrous desirability. Tristan Taormino points out in her introduction to Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica (a paper collection published by Cleis Press) that “[o]ur language is . . . severely limited when it comes to describing the bodies of trans people, bodies that don’t conform to norms and may not look like other bodies. How do we eroticize these bodies, talk about them in dirty ways, worship and respect them?” (xiii). I’d like to suggest that the language of the nonhuman, especially invertebrate or aquatic animals and the monsters based on them, is one underexplored answer to Taormino’s question. The urgent project of “eroticiz[ing]” trans bodies in non-exploitative ways need not be limited to terrestrial, mundane-world genres. In fact, once the constraints of realistic fiction are removed, entire worlds and universes in which gender, sexuality, race, and bodies mean different things become available to our imaginations. Although human bodies cannot literally become octopus’ or aliens’ bodies, imagining octopi and aliens might help imagine trans human bodies differently, breaking the stranglehold of misogyny, Van Engen 211 cissexism, racism, heteronormativity, and ableism that delimit the politics of desirability - or at least loosening that stranglehold for a moment, long enough to catch a breath or two. Kinderton and Stryker’s insights into trans embodiment, desire, and monstrosity are a response to the Eurocentric aesthetics Darwin uses to analogize human-animal relationships in The Descent of Man. The monster erotica stories I examine here, and the trans, gender- nonconforming, and nonbinary genders they eroticize, reroute Western sexual aesthetics that privilege white, human, mammal, vertebrate, cisgender, thin, and able bodies. When Kinderton says that, “as a trans person, [she] ha[s] always felt like a monster,” the politics of desirability she identifies as a problem are an outgrowth of the gender-binaristic aesthetics I analyze in chapter 1 (email to author 7/14/16. 19 th century Western science has left American culture with a potent set of tools for dismissing huge ranges of bodies as undesirable, as sexually unfit: fat bodies, black and brown bodies, disabled bodies, intersex bodies, trans and gendernonconforming bodies, elderly bodies, fem dom bodies and masc sub bodies. These registers of the politics of desirability are the legacy of sexual selection theory’s reshaping of the landscape of gender, race, and desire in American culture. The legacy of sexual selection theory makes possible the dismissal of a whole range of bodies as undesirable: disabled bodies and fat bodies because physically unfit or incapable of mobility, elderly bodies past some mythical sexual prime, bodies that are neither masculine and aggressive nor feminine and passive, intersex, trans, and gendernonconforming bodies that complicate the cis-gender binary which Darwin’s legacy helped naturalize as a matter of reproductive and sexual survival. Erotic stories about trans and nonbinary monstrosity like Xavier’s, Kinderton’s, and Ashcroft’s are monstrous because they portray monsters having sex with humans, yes. But they are also monstrous because they eroticize gender nonconforming, soft, pliable, invertebrate, Van Engen 212 slimy, nonbinary, nonhuman bodies that Darwin saw as evolutionary regression, primitivity, or failure. I am proposing here a monstrous aesthetics of the erotic heavily invested in invertebrate, aquatic, and nonbinary animality that powerfully responds to the Darwinian, and later eugenical, politics of sexual fitness that evolved into today’s politics of desirability. There is a history to undesirability and the de-eroticization of certain bodies, and The Descent of Man is one crucial element in that intersectional history. One way to respond to this politics of desirability is to privilege an aesthetics of ugliness or reclaim the word “ugly” for bodies denied European patriarchal standards of beauty. Yetta Howard’s work on ugliness and lesbian aesthetics is a powerful reply to white hetero-patriarchal cis-normative ideals beauty (cite dissertation). Simon Watt’s conservationist movement, The Ugly Animals Project, takes up the cause of endangered animals that do not get much popular attention – and hence not enough scientific funding – because they are not as “cute” as pandas or as beautiful as bald eagles: worms, hagfish, slugs, dung beetles, toads, lamprey, blobfish (The Ugly Animals). Mia Mingus’s keynote address for a 2011 Femmes of Color symposium, reposted on her blog Leaving Evidence, argues for decolonizing love and bodies by doing away with the concept of beauty altogether: “Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? . . . What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel? . . . What if we let go of being beautiful, stopped chasing ‘pretty,’ stopped sucking in and shrinking and spending enormous amounts of money and time on things that don’t make us magnificent?” (Leaving Evidence). Mingus’ call to move toward “magnificence” rather than beauty is an eloquent and powerful response to the politics of desirability. I respect by each of these interventions. Van Engen 213 However, what I am proposing is more in line with another side of the body positivity movement, which seeks to reorient the ways that our culture inscribes fat bodies by reclaiming their beauty, power, and desirability – for example, Virgie Tovar’s Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love, and Fashion. I am also thinking alongside Laverne Cox’s hashtag campaign #transisbeautiful, which pushes back against cis-normative beauty standards (instagram), and Buck Angel’s documentary series Sexing the Trans Man, which portrays transmasculine bodies as objects and subjects of desire (Angel). Also, Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow’s insights into disabled bodies and desirability in Sex and Disability. I seek to redirect and reclaim the notions of beauty to redirect the cultural currents that render some bodies desirable and others not. I seek to eroticize bodies that have been rendered un-erotic through the support of science. So when the protagonist of Kinderton’s or Ashcroft’s stories narrates her internal process of overcoming feelings of disgust for the monster and gradually emerging into full-throated desire for the creature, much more is going on than a nonconsensual fantasy of forbidden desires – although these stories are also that. These moments where the human cisgender man or woman slowly gives in to the overpowering attraction of the monster imaginatively expands the territory of the erotic, the desirable, the beautiful to encompass gender nonconforming, nonbinary, nonhuman, aquatic or invertebrate bodies. What sexual selection theory and the politics of desirability have rendered undesirable, these stories reclaim as powerfully erotic, highly desirable sex partners through a turn to the nonhuman. Van Engen 214 5. Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture In an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2008, Hugo award-winning science fiction author Lois McMaster Bujold mused on the seductive dangers and promises of the internet by naming the transcultural phenomenon of anime: “Wikipedia is so dangerous… You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in [Japanese] anime” (Williams 1F). Tentacle porn, Bujold suggests, is the hidden temptation that unsuspecting browsers might stumble upon the interconnected, transnational, erotic, weird internet. Tentacles are the inappropriate browser history that one must hide in order to present a respectable face to the professional world. In June 2017 a Newsweek reporter from Texas got into trouble when he posted a screenshot of something unrelated with a tab of anime pornography clearly visible in the background. Trying to explain away the gaffe, the reporter helpfully explained that he was “trying to convince [his] wife that ‘tentacle porn’ existed,” although the site he was viewing did not actually involve tentacles (“Journalist Tweets Porn Tab Photo”; Menegus). Tentacle porn anime epitomizes the strange, untranslated, excessive sprawl of the internet’s guilty pleasures in American culture today. It has become a joke, a limit case, and for some a beloved center of fan culture. It marks an influx of surprisingly queer(ed) and trans(ed) erotic imagery into hetero-patriarchal, white-dominated geek culture through the medium of invertebrate animals. But how and why did tentacle porn anime become so sensationalized in American internet culture? How did the genre enter US culture, how did it change as it crossed national, linguistic, and sexual borders, and how has this genre influenced American imaginaries of Asia and Asian genders and sexualities in particular? When, exactly, did we learn that tentacle equals hetero-phallus, and what other, queerer, nonhuman possibilities does the genre offer? This Van Engen 215 chapter traces a genealogy of the genre of anime tentacle porn with its trans possibilities as it travels from Japan into the US via internet culture. I work through the tensions of how these images circulate in US culture: orientalist exoticism, queer and trans possibilities, fragmented looping, rewriting and reblogging. My goal is to trace how the transpacific tentacle in transgender-centric erotica might unsettle naturalized paradigms of animality in American culture. This is a story about the internet, about the wild, tentacled, sometimes-wonderful creatures that swarm and entangle viewers in its weirder depths. In the process, this chapter sprawls over the Pacific, across genders, across internet platforms, and across academic fields much like the cephalopods who star in the anime themselves. In line with Donna Haraway’s concept of tentacular thinking, my argument has its tentacles in many different entangled discourses, geographies, and time periods, but comes together around the common body of invertebrate animals and the erotics of trans cartoon porn in the fraught reception sphere of Japanese animation in Western contexts. I am interested in the power, possibilities, and drawbacks of the tentacular internet as a paradigm for intimate, violent interconnectedness in the 21 st century. I will take a dive into the history and reception of anime in the US since 1990, before trawling through visual analysis of tentacle porn videos and internet recirculation of their imagery on places like tumblr. I ask how these images register with trans, queer, and orientalist tendencies in English-language internet cultures. Understanding how Americans came to imagine “tentacle porn” as the embarrassing butt of an internet joke or the reducto ad absurdum of weird porn begins offline, with the entry of anime into US fan cultures in hard copy form. My analysis in this section draws on both scholarly criticism on anime and on Van Engen 216 my own reception research in newspapers and magazines, and in fact treats scholarship on anime itself as a type of reception study. 60 5.1 Hentai Goes to America Anime entered US markets and spawned its own fan communities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, generally outside traditional channels of theater screenings and TV broadcasts, with bootleg-circulated VHS copies of titles like Akira and Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend. By the mid-1990s, commercial video stores like Blockbuster and Tower Records were selling large quantities of anime, and even Disney signed onto the boom by acquiring the rights to Miyazaki Hayao’s oeuvre (Collins 64, Newitz 2, Span B01). Under-the-table fan-subtitled and -screened copies of anime continued, though, and the increasing presence of online fandoms ensured that new anime still circulated through almost primarily pirated means. 61 By the time I started high 60 I use the terms “tentacle porn anime,” “tentacle hentai,” and sometimes simply “pornographic anime” or “erotic anime” interchangeably, keeping in mind that “hentai” is an American genre term for Japanese subgenres sometimes called ecchi, 18+, R-18, or ero anime and manga. I choose terminology American fans and scholars use because my subject of inquiry is those American fan, scholarly, reviewer, and public reception of these media objects, rather than the East Asian circulation and reception of the same videos. Also, I do not speak Japanese, and have not researched Japanese queer, trans, and feminist internet cultures to find out how those spaces understand tentacle porn, or whether it is of any interest to queer and trans Japanese anime fans at all. Tentacle porn anime is an underresearched area in English-language scholarship available in the U.S., and if new media scholarship exists in Japan on this subject, it has not yet been translated. This is an important direction for future studies. 61 While anime did exist in the US before the 1990s, at least since AstroBoy, anime’s current boom in popularity began in the early 90s with VHS technology and the widespread popularity of video rental and retail stores (Napier Impressionism 6). But even before major chains carried anime in significant numbers, anime circulated informally/unofficially among fan communities on home-subtitled, rerecorded tapes. Annalee Newitz observes in one of the earliest academic articles on US anime fandoms that while anime videos were available to rent at Blockbuster, most fans ‘get their anime from each other” through “networks of fans who use home multimedia technology to subtitle anime brought from Japan” and then circulated through fan communities (3). Susan Napier notes that before the age of widespread internet streaming, anime fandom often involved fans crammed “physically in a room interacting around a scratchy tenth- generation videotape” (“Anime Fandom” 52). The advent of home internet usage also made this boom possible – through fan message boards, forums, and by the 2000s under-the-table Van Engen 217 school in 2000, anime was something you watched primarily with other geek friends through less-than-legal venues online, hopefully with subtitles or dubbing. This US anime boom was aided enormously by one New York based company, Central Park Media, which operated from 1990-2009 and distributed some of the most viral and notorious titles, especially Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend (based on Toshio Maeda’s manga of the same name) (Yadao). 62 As the US distributor and promoter of Urotsukidōji, Central Park Media was at the center of mainstream American culture’s evolving perception of anime as a genre about sex, violence, and other topics inappropriate for animation as a medium. Urotsukidōji was presented to US audiences as a shock-value apocalyptic series about demon underworlds erupting into the human world with abundant human-demon sex scenes: part science fiction, part horror, part pornography. CPM distributed lots of other titles, but many argue that its success took off with Urotsukidōji (Collins 64, Yadao). The company’s Anime 18 adult line was a major part of its financial success in the nineties, according to its own marketing executives (Bennett 25). In fact, scholars Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy have argued for a direct relationship between the transnational anime boom and the alternately sensationalized and disavowed subgenre of pornographic anime, known in the West as “hentai”: in their words, anime porn “became the secret cash cow of the foreign anime business,” and downloading and streaming technologies (Pollack 2.32, Everett-Green C9, Naper Impressionism 16, Denison “Anime Fandom” 451). 62 Central Park Media (CPM) was a US distribution company that “b[ought] the rights to Japanese videos, hir[ed] production companies to dub them into English, and distribut[ed] them across the country” (Cooper 13.3). CPM was at the head of the wave of new video technologies as they became more widespread. One executive stated in a 1994 New York Times article that the company “exploded” through video retail and rental channels, especially compared to the distribution patterns of large Hollywood studios (Nichols D16). One CPM spokesperson in a 1995 article cited sales as “doubling yearly” over the first five years of the company’s existence (O’Connell R14). Van Engen 218 Western companies used its profitable “titillation” to “manufacture controversy” that contributed to sales and to the “popular misconception that all anime is pornographic” (Anime Encyclopedia 182). Clements and McCarthy point out that because of this media- and marketing-driven sensationalism linking anime to horror porn, “many [Western] viewers’ first encounter with Japanese culture [was] hence with niche-area pornography aimed at a tiny subset of the Japanese population” (Anime Encyclopedia 182), although in Japanese sales “pornographic anime are a minority area, crowded out four-to-one [in 1997] by other video genres” (The Erotic Anime Guide 84). 63 From this perspective, anime more broadly became popular and profitable in the West because of, not in spite of, its seedy underside of weird sex. And yet the industry itself, many anime fans, and most anime scholars all spend a significant amount of time disavowing anime porn as an unimportant subgenre and insisting that not all anime is like that trashy stuff. The American release of the award-winning film Princess Mononoke sought to distance Miyazaki’s work from the more violent and sexy reputation anime had gained in the wake of Legend of the Overfiend (The Erotic Anime Guide 82). Central Park Media itself fought against the sensationalist image of anime it helped create in attempting to market its non-pornographic lines. CPM managing director John O’Donnell, interviewed in 1995, claimed that US audiences’ biases about anime as “X-worthy ultra-violence and explicit sex” made his job selling videos difficult (Collins 64). O’Donnell insisted in the interview that only “‘an extremely small percentage of anime is porno,” a questionable claim for a company that became successful for the Urotsukidōji series O’Donnell is distancing himself from here (Collins 64). Tim Park, writing in The Ottowa Citizen in 1998, blames companies like CPM itself for these kinds of misperceptions because 63 See also Napier Anime p 63-4. Van Engen 219 their marketing strategies played on the “sex sells” truism (Park A14), while Clements and McCarthy in The Anime Encyclopedia blame “the massed ranks of the Western press – quality as well as gutter – [that] had already decided that Japanese animation was nothing but sex and violence” (Erotic Anime Guide 6). Even fans themselves make this respectability claim for the genre, emphasizing that anime is not just porn. Saitō Tamaki’s chapter on Western anime fans in his foundational book Beautiful Fighting Girl quotes a Minnesota fan who defends the honor of anime fans by insisting that it’s not all porn: “‘Of course there are some fans who only want to watch adult-oriented anime. Did ‘anime’ make them that way? I can’t believe that. If there weren’t any anime, that bunch would just watch live-action porn’” (54). Legitimizing otaku culture by debasing porn, 64 this fan insists that “‘I watch anime because the depth of the stories and the complexities of the characters pull me in,’” sounding as defensive as the hetero male Playboy consumer who insists he reads the magazine for the quality of its articles (54). While many anime critics have refuted the idea that anime is only about sex and violence, I wonder what gets lost in this urge to displace the negative connotations of anime onto the stigmatized subgenre of anime porn. If, in Saitō’s words, anime should not be seen as “full of sexual taboos” simply by virtue of being anime, then what kinds of sexual taboos are in operation here, and must de-sensationalizing anime involve desexualizing it, dressing it up in film festival best and leaving the tentacle porn to the disavowed corners of America’s browser history? What does a sex-positive and porn-positive critique of orientalism in Western anime reception and fandom look like? 64 Otaku is an originally-derogatory term later reclaimed by members of fan communities in Japan to name highly-dedicated fans of anime. Saitō invites readers to be critical toward stereotypes surrounding the term: for example, isolated, male, childish, inability to have a ‘real’ sex life, and having no social life outside of anime (41). Van Engen 220 This disavowal of pornographic anime makes a lot of sense given the orientalist tone of much North American anime reception, which often blows out of proportion the horror-porn subgenre of anime en route to grand generalizations about Japanese culture and Asian misogyny stereotypes. Paula Span wrote in The Washington Post in 1997, for example, that “in Japan, a significant proportion of anime is for adults only. It can be sexual or grotesque – the rape of female characters by tentacle demons is a favorite theme – and it can be vividly violent” (Span B01). Robert Everett-Green in the Globe and Mail in 1996 critiqued the series Oh! My Goddess! for ending “not in a Western-style egalitarian partnership, . . . but in a match with a submissive goddess-woman who knows how to take care of the shrine (or home),” attributing the misogyny of one series as evidence of the backwardness of Japanese society more generally (Everett-Green C9). American anime scholar Susan Napier critiques the “disturbingly frequent” scenes spectacularizing “the torture and mutilation of women” in pornographic anime, although she cautions that this trend should not be used to generalize about all anime (64). I could go on. Clements and McCarthy remain to my knowledge the only scholars who have written a book-length work on hentai, in their 1998 The Erotic Anime Guide. My arguments in this chapter build on Clements’ description of the racialized imaginary of Japan in these kinds of reviews: We are not sick-minded individuals if we watch Overfiend, but the Japanese (yes, all of them) are because they made it. The average Western viewer has never been to Japan, but has grown up reading stories and articles about the incredible culture and lifestyle of these inscrutable aliens. . . . The Japanese, we immediately assume, must be very strange if they prefer animated porn to the ‘real’ thing, if they find underage girls sexually attractive or if they continually ‘demand’ more scenes of abuse and perversion. In Van Engen 221 actuality, it is the non-Japanese consumers who are the weird ones, because they are the ones who have volunteered to impose these traditions on themselves. 21 Although he is not citing any particular specific fans or fan surveys here, Clements traces how Japanophobia and Japanophilia are two sides of the same coin in Western anime reception. Americans import more pornographic anime than Japanese markets support, watch it in fits of guilty pleasure, then publicly disavow the weirder, sexier corners of anime while implying that Japanese are more perverse and misogynistic for having produced the stuff. Anime critics have differing views on the extent to which orientalism shapes American reception of anime (in general – not just hentai), but it is a factor in this image of anime as a hypersexual and violent genre. Saitō has argued against the perception that otaku (in and outside of Japan) are childlike, perverse, and unrealistic in their genders and sexualities: all too ready to “escape from reality,” “immature,” and “unable to distinguish the real form the imaginary” (“Otaku Sexuality” 227). His arguments about otaku sexuality track closely the gender and sexual formations of orientalism, as he critiques long-standing Western psychoanalytic stereotypes of Japan as “infantilized”, “immature,” “repressed sexually,” and characterized by a “Lolita complex” (BFG 6). Emma Pett has demonstrated how British censor boards and reviewers made sense of anime’s sex scenes through the logics of orientalism (Pett). Pett draws on Gary Needham’s essay (about non-animated Japanese film) “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism,” which critiques US marketing and academic strategies that transformed mainstream Japanese films into niche cult markets in the postwar period through “typical fantasies of the ‘Orient’ characterized by exoticism, mystery, and danger” (9). Chi-Yun Shin and Kayleigh Murphy have both traced how American distribution and production companies’ marketing of Japanese films portrayed Japanese cinema as a whole as strange, gory, and Van Engen 222 pornographic (Murphy 196, Shin). Murphy argues that ‘the films that achieve wider release are those that export their films’ taboo subject matters” in their promotional strategies (Murphy 196). Shin’s essay “Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’” concludes rightly, echoing Said, that these marketing strategies “reveal[] far more about Western perceptions and obsessions about the East Asian countries rather than what people or societies are like there” (Shin). Napier, Annalee Newitz, Susan Pointon, and Pett have suggested various lines of complication in reading Western reception of anime as orientalist, because anime has followed a different trajectory than non-animated Japanese films in Western audiences. Pett argues for a distinction between orientalist marketing (by companies), censorship (by ratings boards), and fans themselves, pointing out that fans’ “complex and nuanced appreciation for Japanese media” differ significantly from the “negative and simplistic assumptions made by the ‘mainstream’ press and BBFC examiners’ reports” (Pett 5-6). Newitz argues that, because Japanese media have achieved their own (cultural) empire too, “Japanese animation fans in America are, in many ways, . . . being colonized by Japanese pop culture, rather than the other way around” (11). Pointon likewise suggests that “the recent success of imported Japanese animated videos into the United States provides a striking contrast to” the model of American “cultural imperialism” in media (43). Napier goes the farthest by arguing that the pleasure that American fans experience in consuming and community-building around Japanese media sometimes interrupts, rather than confirms, orientalism (Impressionism 10-12). Of course, Needham’s “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism” puts limits on Napier’s view of pleasure, arguing that “the pleasures derived from, and the academic approaches to, Asian films cannot be divorced from their connection to historical discourses that have indeterminately shaped and distorted East/West self/other relations” (8). In response to Pett, fans can be Van Engen 223 orientalist, too, especially in the pride some white fans proclaim in their knowledge of Japanese culture and language. I agree with Newitz that Japan’s media empire is hardly powerless in this transnational scenario, but I wonder how many American (white) fans would think of themselves as being colonized, rather than as the careful curators, collectors, and experts of a non-Western culture’s entertainment products. Said defined orientalism in part as an operation of knowledge and power characterized by a “confusing amalgam of imperial vagueness and precise detail” that confirms the authority and power of the white Western expert, an operation that includes sexual knowledge and representation (50). Of course, this chapter is not a sociological study of fans, who may or may not be orientalist. 65 Rather, I want to acknowledge this crucial context of orientalism as a key element in the sexual politics of tentacle porn I investigate here. 5.2 Asian Racialization and Anime in the U.S. 65 Who are American otaku, or anime fans, and how many of them exactly are white men? Newitz wrote in 1995 that “while quite racially mixed as a group, otaku are overwhelmingly male, particularly in the U.S.,” and this seems to be the scholarly consensus (4). White anime fans dominate mainstream cultural representations of geekdom in the U.S., but these mainstream cultural texts do not devote as much attention to Asian American fans. In my online research later in this chapter, it is far more difficult to ascertain who, exactly, are the tumblr, reddit, and 4chan users who exist behind a username and/or nonrealist profile image. On top of that, I am writing about porn, and it is incredibly difficult to find information I can rely on of who exactly are the viewers, purchasers, commenters, and rebloggers of the images and videos I’m interested in. Even though a few anime scholars make generalizations about how anime and manga fans are supposedly mostly heterosexual, I am suspicious of their faith in these assertions and in fans’ willingness to answer a researcher’s questions truthfully in often homophobic, etc. geek culture environments. I am left with the online record of lot of anonymous internet denizens who are enthusiastic about tentacle sex imagery and who identify themselves only through a username or tumblr handle without providing personal information. The only group I do have information about is the r/consentacles users, because the moderators of that page have run and posted public results of an informal survey of users’ gender and sexual makeup, and found that 50.5% identified as some flavor of the LGBT spectrum; 83% identified as “man,” ~8% “woman,” and ~8% trans, genderfluid, or “none of the above” (these last two are hard to read from their pie graph) (r/consentacles). The survey does not ask questions about race or ethnicity, which tells me that the moderators do not consider race a meaningful factor in hentai fandom, and may be white. It tells me less about the makeup of users who post on the site themselves. Van Engen 224 Mainstream America’s reactions to anime in the 1990s sometimes followed familiar patterns of panics about sexual and violent media corrupting young people. As Pointon narrates it, the anime boom “disturbed American observers who wonder why a generation should forego the politically correct texts of its own culture to engage so passionately with foreign imports suffused with an inordinately high content of sexual sado-masochism and graphic violence,” referring to the stereotype that Japanese media is all about weird sex and violence (44). But if anime porn has been represented as a symptom of the supposed dangers of anime’s effect on American youth, then what is it about this genre that renders it so easy to sensationalize in the first place? Why are Asian, animated, interspecies, nonrealistic, and trans-inclusive sex seen as so perverse – in Japanese, hentai – in the first place? Why do Americans perceive the kinds of sexual fantasies these series sometimes represent as “unconventional erotic practice” that must be disowned and displaced onto other cultures (Ortega-Brena 20)? Not all anime is pornographic and violent, yet it is still necessary to challenge scholarly respectability claims and the broader stigmatization of certain kinds of sexualities, genders, and pornography. To do this, let me take a brief trip through the racialization of Asian genders and sexualities in the U.S. Western anime scholarship does not seem interested in Asian American studies or ethnic studies, but there are important connections between U.S. anime reception and the racialization of Asians, Asian Americans, and Asian cultural texts in the U.S. through gender and sexuality. Asian American feminist and queer scholars have critiqued stereotypes of Asians in Western media that weave together a familiar cast of characters: the hyperfeminine submissive woman, the feminized man, the childlike sexualities of orientalism, etc. Celine Parreñas Shimizu asks in The Hypersexuality of Race “how . . . hypersexual women’s representations as dragon lady, prostitute with a heart of gold, and dominatrix unify differing eras of the yellow peril in the first Van Engen 225 half of the twentieth century and the model minority in the last half” (3). Richard Fung points out in “Looking for my Penis” that Asian sexual stereotypes can be “competing and sometimes contradictory,” ranging from “Japanese and somewhat kinky” to “Filipino and ‘available’” to “‘Oriental’ and therefore sexless” (236). Shimizu, Fung, David Eng, Eng-Beng Lim, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Lisa Lowe, Mel Chen, and many others have explored the queerness of Asia and Asian America as a whole with respect to dominant white American heterosexuality, from the 19 th century rhetorics of opium addiction to the dangers of all-male immigrant labor communities to exoticized travel narratives up to the present day. Asia has functioned as a convenient imaginative locus of sexual otherness for American imaginations for a long time, so it is perhaps not surprising that American (multiracial) anime fans would be seen as sexually deviant for watching Japanese animation. 66 Given the history of Asian racialization as sexually exotic, weird, repressed, misogynist, and queer(ed) in American culture, it is hardly surprising that American anime fans started calling pornographic anime by the name “hentai,” a Japanese word meaning sexual perversity in general, not a genre category. Japanese fans (until recently at least) know pornographic anime by a host of other labels – adult, 18+, R-18, ero, ecchi, etc. The recategorization of all pornographic anime as “hentai” in the West signals, to me, the ways that Asian sexualities in general have been constructed as perverse with respect to white Western norms. Ortega-Brena notes that 66 Nguyen, Shimizu, Fung, and genderqueer porn performer Jiz Lee have written extensively about how these racialized genders and sexualities function in film and video porn (A View from the Bottom, The Hypersexuality of Race, “Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,”). In Japanese contexts, Queer Japanese critic Katsuhiko Suganuma has argued that Japanese and American queer cultures have developed in relation to one another over the course of the 20 th century, and orientalism is a part of that, as a sexual and gendered way of racializing huge swaths of the globe as othered, as a foil for white Western identities. See also Pflugfelder’s Cartographies of Desire. See also Kyunghee Eo’s dissertation prospectus, whose arguments about orientalism as childlike queered/feminized sexualities have influenced my thinking here. Van Engen 226 “hentai” is often associated in American minds as “a deeply offensive genre characterized by preposterous graphic violence,” with “substandard animation, ample dwelling on unconventional erotic practice, a fixation on rape and non-consensual sexual violence, and often preposterous scenarios” (20). Marc McClelland explains in “A Short History of ‘Hentai’” that the word “hentai” appeared in Japan with these contexts of sexual deviance in the Meiji period as Western medical and scientific texts like Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis were translated into Japanese and became popular (2). Interestingly, the dictionary definitions McClelland cites for “hentai” in Japanese offer this definition of “perverse” in between two others that resonate strongly with tentacle porn: “1/change of form or shape,” and “3/ metamorphosis (as in the change from caterpillar to butterfly or in a chemical reaction)” (2). Seen this way, Western anime and manga fans’ use of the term “hentai” not only implies that all animated Japanese porn is perverse, but also associates the genre’s perversity with the themes of transformation and animal metamorphosis that frequent the genre’s erotic tropes and transgender themes. Anime’s reception in the US as perverse, hypersexual, and hypermisogynist needs to be read in terms of American racial formations and specifically racialized stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans. Yet turning to the nonhuman and the speculative shifts this frame of representation. There are important differences between human hentai set in the mundane world and nonhuman or transspecies erotic anime that is also science fictional, tropes that do not always collapse neatly into familiar stereotypes of submissive women, queer men, and childlike Asians (though science fiction in the US can be all too full of these stereotypes). While there are more hypersexualized Asian girls and Asian locations in these videos, there are also – as anime scholars have puzzled over – plentiful images of hypersexual white girls in non-Earth or European-esque settings, tropes that acquire new meanings in American reception contexts conditioned by anti-Asian Van Engen 227 racisms. 67 Many anime girl characters, furthermore, appear replete with completely nonrealistic bodily traits like purple or green hair and demon or robot morph forms. There are no madame or m. butterflies in the erotic anime imagery I’m going to explore in this chapter. Instead, a host of beautiful fighting girls, androgynous heroes, teenage superheroines, giant robots, and a wild bestiary of demons and tentacle monsters fill the sexual imaginaries of pornographic anime. While some aspects of hentai offer confirmation in American contexts of orientalist fan stereotypes of Asian cultures as full of misogyny and perversity, other aspects trouble them and take on new forms in queer, trans, and feminist internet cultures. 5.3 Tentacle Porn and U r ot s u ki dōj i Reception The tentacle subgenre of pornographic anime takes up a disproportionate amount of space in American popular understandings of anime as about violence and weird sex. Instead of avoiding it, I want to excavate how tentacle porn came to epitomize the purported dangers, weirdness, perversity, and misogyny anime (and by extension Japan) offers in American mainstream discourse. Japanese critic Saitō notes in Beautiful Fighting Girl that “tentacle porn” is primarily an American genre term that bears “considerably pejorative connotations,” defining it as “adult-oriented anime containing scenes in which a female is violated by a monster with giant tentacles” (193). An American Film International critic observed in 2006 that, in the US, 67 See Napier’s Anime for a discussion of anime critics’ debates on the non-Japanese appearance of many anime characters and settings. Napier notes that “American audiences new to anime . . . consistently want to know why the characters look ‘Western,’” and glosses animator Oshii Mamoru (of Ghost in the Shell) and critic Ueno Toshiya’s view that “this deliberate de- Japanizing of the characters is in keeping with their view of anime as offering an alternate world to its Japanese audiences,” even “a deliberate effort by modern Japanese to ‘evade the fact that they are Japanese,’” in Oshii’s words (25). Napier nonetheless concludes that even blond-haired, blue-eyed anime characters are “drawn in . . . ‘anime’ style” (25). I have not yet seen critics take up the implications of white American fans drawn to Japanese anime that circulate Asianized images of whiteness. Van Engen 228 “Anime is viewed as an arena in which young males can live out their most violent sexual fantasies” in part because of tentacle erotica series (Sharp 32). Erotic anime and tentacle porn of course do not have the same reception or connotations surrounding them outside the US media spheres I focus on here. There is a longer history to speculative pornography in Japan, at least since the 19 th century (late Edo) genre of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which featured creative and sometimes fantastic or horror-themed sex scenes (Papp 72-3). It seems almost a ritual in Western descriptions of hentai to link tentacle porn with Hokusai’s 1824 woodblock The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, an image of a woman having sex with two octopuses, although the connection is usually articulated at best loosely in the criticism (Napier 21, Pointon 50). SF/horror anime also draws on long histories of Shinto, Taoist, Buddhist, and other traditions of demons and spirits that do not always draw the distinct divisions between evil vs. good supernatural beings that many Western traditions do (Papp). Combining the erotic, the horrifying, and the weird are likewise not unique to animation in Japanese cultural history: the 1920s-1930s (Taishō/early Showa) popular culture phenomenon of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) built on newly-translated European sexology to produce literature “devoted . . . to the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous”; modern Japanese literatures of perversity were influenced by imported European conceptions of what constituted ‘perversity,’ which runs counter to essentialist assumptions of Japan as a self-contained, Othered source of weird sex (Reichert 114, Pflugfelder 290, McLelland, Suganuma). More recently, the 1970s/80s pinku eiga genre laid further groundwork for weird, low-budget, speculative porn for Japanese audiences (Sharp). And Yaoi (boy love) manga has for a long time been a part of Japanese culture, using speculative genres to make room for narratives about sexual minorities. Van Engen 229 But on what exact basis did anime tentacle porn become the ultimate emblem of misogyny and violent sex, the bugbear of respectable anime fans and scholars? How and why did tentacle porn become queered, a lightning rod for sensational coverage of anime as embarrassing and inappropriately sexual, at least by mainstream Western standards? Maeda and Takayama’s Urotsukidōji series had a lot to do with it. What Clements calls the “tits and tentacles” genre was epitomized by Toshio Maeda’s manga and Hideki Takayama’s anime adaptation based on it: Legend of the Overfiend, La Blue Girl, Demon Beast Invasion, and other Central Park Media titles constitute the “original and the best” of the tentacle porn genre (Clements 81). Clements (an otherwise nuanced and de-stigmatizing commentator of anime porn) says that the “truly disgusting perversion, degradation and misanthropy of his works” are what gained him this acclaim and success (81). Let’s take a moment to examine what kinds of sex acts, genders, and explicit representations generate this impression of tentacle porn hentai as “truly disgusting perversion,” as the kinds of sexual dangers that generated fear-fantasies of Japan’s ‘invasion’ of US youth culture (Pollack 2.32). In my research for this chapter, rather than close reading the Urotsukidōji series as a visual text in isolation, I conducted reception research in North American newspapers and magazines in the 1990s early in the Western anime boom. My object in this section is less Legend of the Overfiend itself than the anxieties, desires, and fantasies it provoked in North American imaginations. This series has been the object of considerable angst, scrutiny, and infamy. Its blend of apocalyptic horror, demon and tentacle monster porn, and teenage heterosexual romance became a focal point (or at least the butt of jokes about otaku) for pornography and white youth-corruption panics as well as fannish defensiveness. It was either the reason you hated anime, or the charge you had to defend yourself against in order to Van Engen 230 legitimize your love of anime. It was also the starting point for how tentacle porn acquired the formidable reputation it has in American culture. 68 Urotsukidōji’s first installment came out in Japan as an OVA (original video animation) in 1989, and was released in the US on home video in 1993 through Central Park Media. The first installment, titled in English Legend of the Overfiend, tells the story of Nagumo, a high school student, his girlfriend Akemi, and two separate demon underworld realms that compete to wreak havoc in the human world. To distill the sprawling, tentacular plot considerably, after Nagumo and Akemi have sex for the first time, Nagumo transforms into a massive, Godzilla- sized tentacled demon who heralds the apocalypse and rebirth of the world as we know it. Nagumo’s scenes of epic devastation, like many apocalyptic anime, scan across a devastated Tokyo that recalls the destruction of the atomic bomb. Newitz reads Nagumo’s tentacle destruction in this series as a phallic metaphor for nuclear devastation (9-10). And compared to some later series, tentacles in The Overfiend do tend to look more like penises, complete with head and semen-like emissions, and framed in a heteronormative and patriarchal narrative (9-10). The series offers a grimly conservative and male-centric view of sexuality as a fundamentally destructive force that, if unleashed from its repression, will bring about the end of the human world. It includes some explicitly porn-style sex scenes, yet most of the video falls more in the genre Americans would call horror. 68 Emma Pett and Jonathan Clements have both done important work outlining the reception of Urotsukidōji in Britain, tracing the series’ tangles with the British Board of Film Classification, British reviewers, and media coverage that created an image of the series as dangerous to children and the amoral epitome of all anime in general (Pett 2). Here, I build on their work by sketching some of the American reception of the series, because Legend of the Overfiend cast a disproportionate shadow in both countries. Van Engen 231 U.S. periodicals and CPM’s marketing in the 1990s emphasized The Overfiend’s grotesque horror, perversity, and sensational titillation, and used these qualities to generalize about anime’s effects on youth and anime as a whole. A 1996 article in the New York Times introduces anime to readers as a “stylish, futuristic, violent, sex-filled genre,” and relies on examples from Urotsukidōji to illustrate this point (Cooper 13.3). A 1995 article in the same newspaper describes Urotsukidōji as “an adults-only cartoon” “featur[ing] grotesque monsters from another world forcing bizarre sex on cute teen-age earthlings,” while envisioning these erotic monsters and anime girls invading the U.S.: “One thing is clear. . . The invasion of the giant robots, sex-crazed demons and voluptuous yet vulnerable co-eds is just beginning” (Pollack 2.32). A 1993 CPM advertisement in Animerica: Anime & Manga Monthly featured a sensational cover blurb from the Village Voice announcing that “Urotsukidōji is exemplary of the darkest and most disturbing side of Japanese animation” (2). The Central Park Media “Perfect Collection” version of the entire Urotsukidōji series draws prospective buyers’ attention to “the sickest, most bizarre, disturbing and wondrous release to pass [the reviewer’s] viewing station in quite some time” (Perfect Collection). A review in the British venue Sight and Sound drew connections between the Overfiend’s “formula heroics, facile science fiction futurism, slavering monsters and tediously repetitive violence” and immature teenage sexualities: “animated fantasies of the Manga school [that] have everything to satisfy the adolescent mind,” namely “startlingly graphic cartoon porn” (Kermode and Green 62). These accounts use Urosukidōji to depict anime as attractive or dangerous because it is perverse, violent, and sexual, displacing perversity, violence, and sexuality onto Japanese rather than American media. These generalizations and sensationalisms also made their way into academic writing on anime and hentai. Joel Dahlquist and Lee Vigilant call the Urotsukidōji series, rather Van Engen 232 condescendingly, “an incomprehensible phantasmagoria punctuated by teen girls suffering rapes in all available orifices from the tentacle-penises of demons,” attributing the US success of anime porn as a subgenre to this series (93). Mariana Ortega-Brena glosses the Urotsukidōji series as “an epic, hyper-violent and nihilistic take on what is presented as the ultimately cosmic power of the sexual drive and energy” (19). This coverage is, to be fair, justified when it portrays Takayama’s series as an apocalyptic carnival of sex, terror, violation, and the spectacle of tortured women’s bodies. But its reception in this vein received disproportionate attention from Western publics concerned and titillated by the series’ sexualized dangers, and became somehow emblematic of Japanese animation. Jonathan Clements describes The Overfiend’s embarrassment to anime fans and scholars this way: “The Overfiend series presents a problem for anime apologists. Its shock value is guaranteed to elicit a reaction from an audience, and it is a guaranteed bestseller with profits that can fund less popular releases, but it simultaneously generates adverse publicity for anime as a whole” (58). 69 This disproportionate focus on misogyny, rape-drenched, torture-laden, and sexually- conservative phallic fantasies in Urotsukidōji overshadows a much broader range of tentacle porn representations that offered more sex-positive, femme, queer, and trans-inclusive visions of tentacle sex – overshadowed, at least, in mainstream newspapers, magazines, and sometimes academic writing, not necessarily in all fan communities. Some of these alternate visions were distributed by the very same Central Park Media, but in my view failed to confirm American eagerness to associate Japanese media and Asian genders and sexualities with misogyny, 69 He cites startling sales data claiming that, in Europe, The Overfiend was the second highest- selling anime video as of the date of writing, second only to Akira (58). This says a lot about what kinds of fantasies of Japanese culture Western audiences wanted to invest in. See Newitz’s “Magical Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm.” Van Engen 233 feminine submissiveness, and hetero-masculine violence. Series like Maeda’s La Blue Girl, for example, did not make as many newspaper headlines or snarky asides in academic articles because they fail to offer a vision of Japan as a place in which (white) straight cisgender men can fantasize about treating themselves to submissive, sexually receptive Japanese women. 5.4 Getting Over The Overfiend If American reception history shows a preconception that anime is all about perverse sex, I want to make a distinction between ‘perversion’ in the sense of the misogyny, rape, and explicit male-centric sexuality a la Urotsukidōji and ‘perversion’ in the sense of the lesbian, transfeminine, and interspecies explicit sexualities of other tentacle series, especially once they become reimagined in online subcultures. The Globe and Mail helpfully offered in a 1996 article that the CPM-distributed series La Blue Girl was “hard to imagine” for North American viewers because it was a story about “a schoolgirl [who] attempts to free her father from an evil spell by having competitive sex with hermaphroditic ninja” (Everett-Green C9). This journalist makes clear a link, in his eyes, between the shock value of 1. animated porn, 2. science fictional porn, 3. the gender deviance of the characters involved, and 4. the Asianness of the genre. What would it mean to approach these works from a queer perspective, by challenging one concept of ‘perversion’ and seeking to inhabit others? What if gender-nonconforming, Asian, and nonhuman porn are not just cause for shock value, but also sites of queer, trans, and feminist speculation? The remainder of this essay will focus on transgender, femme, and interspecies elements of erotic anime, focusing on tentacle sex imagery that figures Japanese pornography as not just as a haven for pedophilia, misogyny, and rape, but as about weird sex in sometimes positive senses. Once we slow down the urge to immediately read tentacles as phallic signifiers of hetero-masculinity and always already nonconsensual, as I argue later, queer, trans, and Van Engen 234 feminist modes of analysis make it harder to put a gender label on the scaly, horned, multilegged, slimy monsters who star in tentacle porn as it (re)circulates in internet subcultures. Partly what is at stake in popular portraits of anime-as-Urotsukidōji is how Asia gets assigned the place of the fantastic as well as the perverse in American racialization, associating weird, speculative representations of sexuality with Japan rather than white America. Yet fantasy and speculation also offer important channels of possibility, and anime critics have pointed out some directions in which to take a rethinking of tentacle porn as strange, nonwestern, hyperphallic porn. In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saitō argues for the power of fantasy in the sexualities of fans (otaku) who invest so heavily in their favorite anime or manga characters that they fall in love with a girl who does not exist in the mundane world. Ortega-Brena likewise has noted the special potential of animated science-fictional porn to offer a range of embodied identifications and fantastic attachments to clearly not-real, speculative objects or acts impossible in offscreen life (18). 70 While Saitō is not writing about hentai and especially not tentacle porn here (instead about the beautiful fighting girl genre), I would like to springboard off his call to rethink the social-sexual stigma of unrealistic escapist fantasy to refuse the ‘real’ as mature, heteronormative, ‘healthy’ sexuality, to “take refuge in a world of fiction” and “find sexual stimulation only in fictional constructs” (BFG 9). 71 70 Side note on porn as speculation: science fictional porn lays bare the fact that pornography as a whole is a fantasy genre, which should not be a surprise (Uidhir and Pratt 3). Dahlquist and Vigilant argue for the power of fantasy and the virtual enabling hentai tentacle porn to offer expanded possibilities compared to non-animated video porn, tracing how websites advertise hentai as “‘better’ than real” (97). For Dahlquist and Vigilant, the clearly speculative aesthetics of tentacle porn exceed the allure of the ‘real’ in video porn, which may not be realistic but sells a fantasy of realness (99). Chapter 4 of this dissertation, on ebook monster erotica, provides more depth on porn as a speculative genre. 71 While I want to credit these critics with their contributions to thinking about speculation and sexuality (and Dahlquist, Vigilant, and Ortega-Brena for rare studies of tentacle porn in academic print), I take issue with their assumptions about what constitutes ‘perverse’ and Van Engen 235 Even in the mid-1990s as anime was booming through hard-copy video channels, series like La Blue Girl (1992-3 in Japan, 1995 in the U.S.) existed that featured women having sex together with or without tentacles – and enjoying it! – in fantastic, science-fictional realms. Western newspaper accounts practically ignored these types of tentacle porn compared to the coverage that The Overfiend got. La Blue Girl is a lighthearted erotic anime series that tracks the adventures of a matriarchal clan of ninja ‘sexcraft’ warriors, the Mido, who do battle with other ninjas and with demons through orgasm control and edging. Whereas in Urotsukidōji sexuality is overwhelmingly a hetero-masculine and world-destructive force, in the universe of La Blue Girl ‘normal’ sex. Saitō’s book forcefully defends otaku sexualities as healthy rather than debased or pathological, a defensive response to the pathologization of these fans by psychologists, academics, media, and sometimes anime creators themselves. Yet as Thomas Lamarre has pointed out, Saitō’s approach hinges on a deeply heteronormative and misogynist construction of the ‘normal’ (256). Saitō has been rightfully critiqued for the normativizing impulse inherent in his critique, impulses that can lead to deeply heteronormative claims like that otaku “choose respectable partners of the opposite sex and . . . have the kind of sex lives one would term healthy” (“Otaku Sexuality” 228). Saitō has also indulged in anti-feminist statements about girl characters, for example criticizing North American heroines for having “butch personalities and lots of muscles – basically, they are ‘men in women’s bodies’ or female parodies of machismo,” which “in most cases . . . is clearly a product of feminist politics” (Beautiful Fighting Girl 7). Japanese feminist critic Kotani Mari has taken Saitō to task for these kinds of approaches to women in anime and manga (see Beautiful Fighting Girl xxiii), and offers alternate, more feminist and queer-friendly approaches in her published essays (including “Metamorphosis of the Japanese Girl: The Girl, the Hyper-Girl, and the Battling Beauty”). Dahlquist and Vigilant, meanwhile, endorse the fantastic possibilities of animated porn but leave in place loaded ideas about non-normative sexualities as if they were self-evident: “Tentacle hentai offers the telegenetic signs of the most perverse and debased sexualities. It opens for fantastic examination a sexuality that transgresses all ‘simulated’ moralities of the ‘real’ world, where tentacle sex between nubile girl-women and cloned boy-men monsters are the order of the day” (99). Like the horrified/titillated newspaper coverage I cited earlier, they make sense of hentai by emphasizing its “most abnormal acts: pedophilic bestiality, sex with machines, sex with cyborgs, sex with dangerous protruding tentacles, and, of course, an endless stream of the most debasing, brutal, and humiliating rape images” (99-100). Science fiction, rape, pedophilia, and BDSM all become the same kind of perversity available for consumption. = Dahlquist and Vigilant follow these assertions with a theoretical endorsement of Baudrillard’s horrifying 1990 essay “Transsexuality” from The Transparency of Evil, which describes trans women as the emblem of illusion, inauthenticity, absurdity, and simulacra (101). Van Engen 236 sexuality is primarily a feminine province, and women’s pleasure is a powerful magical force that can be harnessed for both good and evil. There are few human men and fewer human-human hetero scenes in La Blue Girl: almost all the sex scenes happen either between human women, with solo human woman, or between human women and nonhuman masculine demons. Much like The Overfiend, La Blue Girl’s narrative revolves around human relations with a demon underworld. Yet this time the two worlds mix and have intimate and kinship ties: the protagonist Miko discovers partway through that she is mixed-race human and demon, that her father is king of the demon underworld (the Shikima), and married to her human mother, blurring the human/nonhuman line. In the episodes of the first OVA, Miko never demonstrates attraction to cisgender men of any species, instead centralizing her sexuality around her own self or around other female sexcraft warriors who are her friends. Miko’s episodic adventures almost inevitably involve scenes in which Miko or her friends are captured by tentacle demons and escape by attempting to resist orgasm until another sexcraft ninja can come along and kill the demon. The Shikima demons are blue, green, purple, or bright red demons, some with a singular penis and others with a multitude of tentacles. This series involves transfeminine characters, not just cisfeminine characters, too. Episode 2 of La Blue Girl includes a genderqueer sequence (without tentacles) between heroine Miko and two members of an enemy sex ninja clan, Bosatsu (a cisgender woman) and Ranmaru (who dresses as a man, is voiced by a higher, feminine-sounding voice, and has intersex genitalia). Though gender-nonconforming and masculine-presenting, Ranmaru is not desexualized – in fact, one ninja warrior falls in love with Ranmaru, a cardinal sin in the sexcraft universe. This sequence also unveils a unique, queer weapon of Miko’s sexcraft clan: Miko can grow her clitoris “as big as a penis” and use it to penetrate female ninja opponents in battle or in Van Engen 237 pleasure. After Miko tops Bosatsu using her enlarged clitoris, Ranmaru penetrates Miko with their penis, before Miko reverses the scenario and penetrates Ranmaru’s vagina. By the end of the scene, it is thoroughly disestablished that women must be cisgender, topping must involve men, sex must be heterosexual and violating, and women cannot be agents of sex OR demon fighting in these fantastic anime universes. While anime critics have praised the fantastic or speculative possibilities of hentai, as I mentioned above, I want to move beyond the almost universal distancing and othering move of anime criticism that assumes a cisgender, hetero, and often white male Western viewer who sees Asianness and gender nonconformity as equally alien to the tentacle monsters and giant robots. Saitō, for example, almost exclusively concerns himself with heterosexual male otaku, both in Japan and in the West, who love the buxom teenage girl warriors of anime. Dahlquist and Vigilant, meanwhile, insist on a (white) masculinist distancing from the girl and tentacle monster onscreen that assumes that viewers cannot identify with (or be) the girl/bottom/sub rather than with the monster/top/dom doing the penetration: “The moral distance afforded by tentacle hentai and manga also fosters an emotional distancing. Because this genre is cartoon, it prevents reflexive empathy with, or sympathy for, the horrific violation of girl-women. . . in images of uninhibited violence and ultimate transgression” (100). Here, bottom, submissive, and feminine viewer positions disappear, and race is neutralized into a white-assumptive anime consumer who views the strange Asian sex onscreen from a bemused distance. Finally, Ortega-Brena gives a striking analysis of the phenomenological possibilities of imaginatively embodying the bodies of the fantastic creatures onscreen in hentai. Her analysis of the cross-identificatory erotic gaze in hentai describes her identification with trans and Japanese characters onscreen in La Blue Girl as a fantasy experience that she does not have in real life: “none of my lived-body experience can Van Engen 238 suggest to me what it must feel to be a hermaphroditic sex-craft ninja warrior. However, if I am immersed enough in an episode of La Blue Girl, I can somatically try to imagine it” (28). While I am captivated by her account of the genre’s enfolding of speculation, fantasy, and trans eroticism, I would like to push back on these scholars’ unstated assumption that viewers of these cultural texts must be other than the characters portrayed onscreen, and cannot identify from positions of similarity with the sex happening onscreen. Can criticism acknowledge the power of speculative genres to represent trans and Asian sex lives without framing trans sexualities and Asian bodies as in themselves science fictional? In these accounts, Asianness and transness become rendered speculative and unreal in the process of attempting to rescue hentai from its debasement in mainstream American imaginations. 5.5 Anime Porn’s Trans Imaginary In the analysis that follows, I would like to examine tentacle porn from the centralized position of a trans viewer in Western contexts, while keeping in mind race as a meaningful force both onscreen and offscreen in this trans/pacific tentacular genre. In the spirit of situated knowledges, I first encountered tentacle porn and anime more generally not from the shelves of Blockbuster or at fan conventions, but through queer corners of internet culture on tumblr and other platforms in the last 5 or 10 years. I approach these media objects as a white person who did not grow up with anime as a connection with parents’ or grandparents’ cultures, as a trans(masculine) person who assumes I am supposed to identify with (not express disgust toward) trans people’s sexualities onscreen, and as a science fiction scholar-fan deeply invested in the speculative as a site of possibility. In the rural household I grew up in, my white Christian conservative parents were deeply suspicious of most media except books as potential venues of corrupting their children, but were more likely to label media by or about people of color as Van Engen 239 inappropriately sexual and misogynistic: rap, anime, telenovelas, MTV, and video games, for example, were completely excised from home life. While my upbringing is by no means a generalizeable one, I failed to come into contact with anime (much less anime porn) during the time that most people in my generation did, precisely because of the racialized and sexualized reception of Japanese animation I trace in this chapter. I approach this topic, then, late-blooming and queerly belated in many respects, time-traveling to figure out how tentacle porn found its way from audiovisual ecologies outside the house I grew up in to queer internet cultures today. I am interested in how the recirculation of erotic tentacle imagery links invertebrate animals and trans genders through the speculative possibilities of science fiction. I want to extend Saitō’s arguments about the erotic possibilities of the fantastic to the trans(Pacific)(gendered) ways that tentacle porn resonates, I argue, in American internet culture. Let me start by arguing that American internet cultures create a bridge or overlap (not equivalency) between “transgender” and the anime trope of “futanari.” In Western hentai subgenre conventions, “futanari” generally means hyperfeminine women who have or grow penises while also having vaginas – intersex trans femme characters, if you will. Futanari as a subgenre can involve consensual BDSM or nonconsensual sexual torture scenes in which the woman grows a penis yet remains a woman within the logic, aesthetics, and pronoun usage of the series. (This is sometimes an element of sexual humiliation.) Futanari hentai in the videos I analyze use femme-affirming pronouns, constructing a speculative universe in which it is perfectly familiar (if not always positive) to say “her penis” in the middle of a sex scene, rather Van Engen 240 than pronoun fumbling, calling the character a man, or framing her as undesirable because of her penis. 72 First, some clarifications. “Futanari” is not the Japanese translation of “transgender,” but means something closer to “intersex” or “androgyny” (Isaka 27). Theresa Algoso translates the word into English as “hermaphrodite,” with all the outdated, offensive, and sexological-medical connotations that accompany the word, in her study of Taishō-era androgyny (557). Maki Isaka Morinaga notes that the term originally drew on sexological, pathological, or disease discourses in her study of androgyny in Edo-period kabuki performance, and includes an etymological history of futanari that includes “the number two” (futa) and “a ‘figure’ or a state of becoming” (nari) (253-4, 28). The word does not map directly onto American definitions of “transgender” as an increasingly-mainstreaming identity, or “intersex” for that matter, either. “Futanari” is a contested term, like most LGBT terminology, that some find useful and others do not. Kate Bornstein includes the word in her long list of sexualities and genders beyond L, G, B, T, and Q in My New Gender Workbook (280), but some trans bloggers on tumblr see the term as offensive and prefer not to use it (sloppydraws.tumblr.com). I am writing here specifically about how Western internet cultures interpret, rewrite, and recirculate futanari + tentacle imagery in ways that overlap with categories of transgender, not how Japanese queer cultures or online fandoms interpret and understand the same images. While futanari does not equal transgender, I introduce it here partly because the terms overlap in English-language internet porn spaces where hentai circulates. Sometimes tumblr, reddit, pornhub, and other internet spaces demonstrate the entanglement of futanari and 72 See Tobi Hill-Meyer’s essay in The Feminist Porn Book on trans women, erasure, and the “shemale” subgenre in non-animated Western video porn. Van Engen 241 transgender when hashtagging, crowdsourced categorization, or post titles cross-reference the terms. Also, while hentai’s futanari are not trans women in the mundane-world sense, within the tentacle porn hentai videos themselves futanari do transition into their intersex state, which makes them trans-ed or transfeminized. Futanari transition in a way that is nonbinary, reminding us that transitions take many shapes, forms, and nonlinear directions. The futanari subgenre is part of the reason hentai is associated with ideas about perverse sex. These figures circulate in internet spaces against the backdrop of transphobic pressures that intersect with racialized associations between Japan and perversity. Futunari is queered even within the tumblr hentai world. On the FAQ page for one tumblr I analyze, there is a section addressing what readers should do if they find futanari content disgusting and don’t want to see it anymore. FAQ #8 on “Fuck Yeah Tentacle Porn” reads, “Q: Ugh futa/Please don’t post ‘____’?,” to which the author responds, “If there’s something that’s constantly being posted, like futa for instance, then please download the Tumblr Blacklist app for Google chrome. Type it in, then boom, no more futa. If you don’t run Chrome, I apologize, but the unfollow button is in the corner” (tentacle-mom.tumblr.com). Futanari is the blip in hetero-patriarchal geek culture’s love of hentai for the fantasies of submissive cisgender Asian women it offers. I am struck by the fact that a site devoted to tentacle porn, the apex genre of weird internet sex, and to speculative porn, where theoretically anything could happen – this tumblr has to defend itself further against users who can accept tentacles but are grossed out by transfeminine bodies. Scholarship is pretty skimpy on the topic of futanari, but Ortega-Brena and Katrien Jacobs have written about it briefly. I find it insufficient, however, when these studies cease analysis after mentioning androgyny, gender-fluidity, or the apparent strangeness of “woman” and “penis” coinciding in the same body. Ortega-Brena has observed the fluid quality of bodies Van Engen 242 in La Blue Girl, which “constantly move between dichotomies of male, female; potent, impotent; demonic, human; oppressive, submissive; possessive, possessed; attacker, attacked; sadist, masochist” (27). She argues that the hentai’s “androgynous qualities” and “graphic hermaphroditism” effectively “situate[] the spectators in a world of ambivalently sexed phantasmatic physicality” through the genre’s power of fantasy, generalizing gender- nonconformity and transition into qualities everyone shares rather than ascribing importance to particular lived experiences and bodies (27). Jacobs describes futanari in hentai a “girls with a penis attached to their bodies, presenting an uncanny yet beautifully fitting new organ,” denoting girl-penis as a strange phenomenon (103). She only cites one example of a futanari figure sucking her own “soft” dick, which Jacobs glosses as “a soft and humorous infantile-feminine figure” (103). Yet how does the futanari figure register beyond Jacobs’ critique of male-centric viewership, and beyond understanding transfemininity as “infantile” and “humorous”? Brief allusions to “perversity” or “hermaphrodite” characters aside, there is much more room in hentai scholarship to explore the specific resonances of futanari in tentacle porn with trans speculation, queer geek cultures, and feminist and trans porn studies. 5.6 TransFemme Traces in Internet Subcultures My methodology in the final sections of this chapter is less close reading of the media objects themselves than an analysis of how the videos are framed, labeled, commented, summarized, curated, and excerpted online. I am interested in what the framing of tentacle porn on English-language sites says about how Americans understand, imagine, and experience tentacle hentai. Tentacle porn acquires new meanings as it travels from VHS to online streaming sites to tumblr, reddit, 4chan, and other .gif-circulation sites. The images acquire new associations, emphasize new kinds of perversities, and become new kinds of objects. Through its Van Engen 243 nonlinear journeys, tentacle imagery as clip or gif swims into new oceans and flourishes differently in queer- and trans-inclusive internet spaces. Tentacle anime that involves sex scenes between human women (cisgender and/or transgender) and tentacle monsters is particularly my focus. Because of the misconceptions I believe have been caused by an overemphasis on Urotsukidōji’s violently hetero-patriarchal imaginary as representative of erotic anime, I have deliberately chosen textual examples that privilege scenes between women plus tentacles to shed light on why queer and trans internet spaces would be drawn to this material, although there are plenty of other examples in which cisgender men (human or demon) watch and/or subject a woman to tentacle sex (or rape). 73 Therefore, I trace La Blue Girl, Space Pirate Sara, and other series’ online behavior. Space Pirate Sara is a 2008 hentai series about a spacefaring knight, Sara, and a rival pirate captain, Sylia, who are captured and sexually tortured by a noble family headed by two tweenage sisters. Each episode involves bondage, submission, humiliation, and captivity scenes in increasingly hyperbolic iterations. Episode 1 details their initial capture, episode 2 sees Sara and Sylia grow penises as part of their humiliation, episode 4 introduces the twin sisters’ monster “pet” and the ensuing variations its tentacles add to the sexual narrative. The series ends with Sara and Sylia overcoming their captors and reversing the previous roles of dominance and submission. The “Bonus Episode” video sees Sara become the empress, and Sylia her accomplice and lover. Sara and Sylia, still in their trans-ed bodies, have consensual sex with each 73 To my knowledge there are not many tentacle porn episodes in which human men submit to tentacle penetration, unlike in slash fiction or ebook erotica. In the tentacle porn tumblr I analyze in this chapter, Tentacle-Mom offers confirmation that there is not much M-M tentacle porn circulating in Western internet cultures: #12, “Q: What about guy stuff/tentacle on male?” She seems to have a hard time finding any: “I only have what I have. If I have tentacle on male content, I will post it. If not, then obviously I won’t. Most pictures I find are shota [underage] or don’t meet my standards for quality hence why they aren’t posted” (tentacle-mom.tumblr.com). Van Engen 244 other while keeping their former captors, the girl twins, as sex slaves. This reversal fantasy allows for sex, intimacy, and a relationship between the two main transfeminine characters without the salvific restoration of a male character’s love. The entire series, except for the bonus episode, is a highly nonconsensual fantasy. Streaming video sites offer entire video episodes of Space Pirate Sara but tag them in terms that emphasize specific acts, body parts, and fetishes, tags that allow users to exclude unwanted imagery. Porn categories and tags like these are famously reductive, because they so obviously strip away artistic elements like narrative, style, and character, leaving in their place decontextualized lists of body parts, oddly specific sex acts, locations, identity markers, and numbers of participants (Lee 277). This does not tell users how the video represents trans women and redheads, or whether the video caters to trans women and redheads or to people with trans women or redhead fetishes. But these crowdsourced tags and categories also offer indicators of how imagery is understood in this tentacular online system; in the case of Space Pirate Sara, they associate trans women, lesbian sex, and futanari hentai. The massive aggregator site Pornhub (the world’s unlikeliest site of queer intimacies) offers two episodes of Space Pirate Sara, episode 2 (“Masochist Prisoner Knights”) and the bonus episode. Pornhub’s searchable “tags” section classifies the bonus video as “anime, ass, transgender, futanari hentai, handjob, big tits, clit rubbing, lesbian, blonde, redhead, young, teen, teenager, [and] blowjob” ((https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1549437924). The video is subtitled in English, with the original Japanese audio track. 74 Among a forest of other categorizing language, 74 The video earned a 77% thumbs up rating and has been viewed 538, 463 times as of the moment of writing. For perspective, pornhub’s searchable menu of offerings as of the date of my research lists 24,588 videos under “hentai,” 1591 under “tentacle hentai”, and 1876 under Van Engen 245 pornhub’s tags make visible users’ links between “futanari hentai,” “transgender,” and “lesbian” in the bonus episode. This tells me that some users saw the episode’s trans femmes in relationships with one another as relating to lesbian formations, not gay, bi, or straight male categories into which trans women get collapsed and variously misgendered, fetishized, and stereotyped (although hentai is home to its own menu of stereotypes). Even more, the tag “clit rubbing” attached to this video associates the transfeminine characters’ external genitalia as clits rather than (or in addition to) penises (while tags like “handjob” and “blowjob” allow for the coexistence of “woman” and “penis”). I am not claiming that the video itself avoids fetishizing or objectifying trans women. Hentai’s aesthetics (and anime’s aesthetics more generally) famously depict most female characters in Barbie doll-like proportions, and Space Pirate Sara falls on the more exaggerated end of the “big tits” scale, reinforcing the expectation that trans women in or out of porn must be exaggeratedly feminine, among other issues. But the site’s category tags combined with the almost total absence of men at this point in the video series demonstrate that Space Pirate Sara’s futanari are entwined with internet cultures’ understandings of transfemininity and lesbian transfemininity. The hentai streaming site Kisshentai.net, in fact, notes that, “due to the way it is executed, futanari is most closely related to the yuri genre, both generally feature women as the main characters” (kisshentai.net/Genre/Futanari, emphasis mine). KissHentai’s definition links the futanari subgenre with the lesbian-feature genre of yuri, and likewise recognizes trans women in lesbian contexts. These links are important because of what Tobi Hill-Meyer describes as a transmisogynist double bind in the porn industry between, on the one hand, “‘tranny/shemale “futanari hentai,” although many videos instead use the more offensive heading “shemale hentai” (1196) (pornhub.com). There is a separate “cartoon” section for western-style cartoon porn. Van Engen 246 porn,’ the derogatory phrase used to market trans women porn in the mainstream industry,” and an almost complete erasure of trans women in feminist and queer porn (when she started directing and performing porn ten years ago, thought this is slowly starting to change) compared to the comparative prevalence of transmasculine people (157-8). Futanari hentai does not solve these issues, but does show that expanding porn studies’ view beyond the realist genres that dominate the field yields different representational histories and the different genre possibilities of animated and speculative porn. While I want to point out these bridges with trans internet phenomena, it is also true that many futanari images and videos are tagged with the English word “shemale,” invoking all the violent discourses surrounding that term. Pornhub’s video of Episode 2 of Space Pirate Sara, for example, uses the categories “shemale hentai” and “futanari hentai,” but not lesbian or transgender. The hentai -specific site Hentai Haven also tags the bonus episode in terms lacking trans or lesbian language, but making sure to identify “Big Boobs, Blow Job, Creampie, Facial, Futanari, Hand Job, Loli, Orgy, [and] Rape” (http://hentaihaven.org/space-pirate-sara-bonus- episode/). Nor has hetero-masculinist fandom abandoned futanari or tentacle hentai just because of its trans themes. Hentai Haven’s comment thread is home to users lamenting the fact that the series ended without a heterosexual climactic event – specifically that Sara’s lieutenant Hans (who plays a supporting role) was not sexually rewarded at the end of the series’ narrative arc. 75 The pornographic internet is hardly a queer feminist utopia. Nevertheless, these more 75 In case you’d like to read the comments section itself: “Wait a sec…Hans [Sara’s lieutenant] didnt get rewarded for all his doings? I’m here for you Bro.” Later down the chain, the same user offers that “he should fuck all of them and become the new Ruler,” while someone else replied “Yeah, throughout this entire thing I wanted Sarah and Hans to fuck” (http://hentaihaven.org/space-pirate-sara-bonus-episode/). All of these complaints seek to reorient the transfeminine lesbian sex scenes toward a hetero-male resolution. Van Engen 247 mainstream trends do not and should not eclipse alternate online framings of this media, engagements that see Japanese animation as something other than an endless reaffirmation of The Overfiend’s masculinist apocalypse. 76 5.7 Loops, Fan Art, and Other Recirculating Machines In Netporn, Jacobs makes a tantalizing but not-followed-up-upon observation that futanari hentai imagery “may be reinterpreted or appropriated by other groups” including “queer communities looking for transgender constructions of the female body” (104). I want to follow through on Jacobs’ brief hint to explore how certain internet spaces do, in fact, connect transfeminity and futanari through tentacle porn reblogging. Comment thread, meme, and clip- circulation sites recirculate and sometimes reenvision transpacific tentacle sex in new ways made possible by the medium of the .gif. Trans-ed tentacle erotica offer a window into a cross section of the viral, recirculating, excessive internet that continually spawns the unexpected, remakes the familiar into something weird, and the weird into the familiar. The erotic tentacle in tumblr-style internet cultures ensnares genders and bodies in pleasurable, troubling, and fluid ways. When Space Pirate Sara and La Blue Girl migrate onto the .gif ecology of the internet, the new platforms strip away most pornhub-style categories, narrative, and full video play length in favor of short, recircling .gifs. The decontextualized looping format of gifs allows brief gestures, acts, and moment of pleasure to wander outside the context of an originally nonconsensual or dubiously consensual plotline and unfurl in new contexts. Fuck Yeah Tentacle Porn’s gif posting of La Blue Girl, for example, cuts away narrative framing and leaves short glimpses of red tentacles wrapped around a pelvis and a purple-haired girl’s face leaned back in 76 Almost all anime and hentai streaming happens illegally, under the copyright radar, and a lot of pirated streaming available in the US originates from Asian countries with flourishing streaming economies (Jenkins). Van Engen 248 pleasure (tentacle-mom.tumblr.com, 18/11/2013). The visuals leave the imagery open to new possible narratives: we do not know, for example, who or what these tentacles belong to, or whether Miko wins this sexcraft battle – only that tentacles appear enjoyable in this particular moment. In one Space Pirate Sara .gif, Sara and Sylia appear in their futanari state without their captors, restrained by disembodied tentacles at the arms and legs (tentacle-mom.tumblr.com, 6/4/2013). With each video loop, they are penetrated in multiple orifices, faces displaying expressions of pleasure-pain. Tentacle-mom tags these .gifs as nonconsensual, but the decontextualization of the images excludes elements like the captors or any discernable monster body from the frame, leaving only cycling images of restraint, penetration, and pleasure. Viewers would need to watch the full episode on a different site (to which no link is provided) to understand the action as nonconsensual. Van Engen 249 The 4chan thread “Consensual Monsters” more explicitly theorizes the mechanisms by which .gifs can recontextualize sexual imagery in new ways. Specifically, .gifs and still images sometimes loosen moments of pleasure in tentacle porn imagery from original narratives and rewrite them as consensual if they weren’t in the original video. The “Consensual Monsters” thread begins with a clarification of what kinds of images can be posted: “Anything monsters as long as it’s consensual (or becomes consensual) OR at least appears ambiguous/consensual out of context. IE: no rape, no pain, no tears,” followed by a specific example of an “ambiguous/consensual out of context” image in extreme close-up (https://4archive.org/board/gif/thread/8632643). This gallery of tentacle sex offers up images and clips to a newly curated and reframed feed of consensual tentacles. My intent here is not to erase the existence of rape fantasies in tentacle porn or in anime more generally. Rather, I want to explore .gif porn and specifically consent- themed tentacle sites as places in which tentacle porn imagery can become detached from some of its extremes in nonconsensual narratives, opening up different kinds of engagement with Japanese porn in Western internet cultures than the sensationalizing headlines I examined above. Van Engen 250 Consensual tentacles take a new turn on reddit, where original drawings rather than .gif clips rewrite mainstream associations of tentacle porn with rape and misogyny in favor of multispecies, femme-centric, often queer images of women, women, and tentacles. R/consentacles is a reddit feed where users share original images, videos, and occasionally stories. Most of the postings offer amateur art in the style of tentacle porn, or fan-created images reimagining unrelated animated characters in tentacle sex scenarios. R/consentacles bills itself as “a place for consensual, happy, love of erotica and porn of all things squiggly, grabby, and penetrating. Hentai, stories, CG or manips” are ok, but “no underage or borderline,” and the scenes depicted must obviously depict consent. Like the “Consensual Monsters” 4chan, this site makes explicit a revisioning of tentacle porn as consensual and feminist. The cover image for the reddit, an image of a light-skinned woman in the clutches of a purple, multi-tentacled monster with the caption, “CONSENSUAL TENTACLE SEX! ITS AWRITTEEEEEE! No rape was involved during this intercourse” (https://www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/). Other images do not involve explicit captions indicating that the scene depicted is consensual, but use visual signifiers like smiles and intense facial expressions of pleasure or affection. All come together around a shared fantasy investment in consent. Van Engen 251 R/consentacles’ feed centralizes sex between solo women or multiple women and tentacles. I have not yet found an image on the site of anything remotely resembling human heterosexual sex, bearing out the conclusion that heterosexual vanilla human sex is a rarity rather than the norm in tentacle sex. As brief examples, one post shares an image of a light-skinned woman with brown hair and tail embracing a gray-green-skinned woman with blue hair and tail, both penetrated by dark gray tentacles (www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/). Another post depicts two light-skinned women with purple hair, one cisgender and one trans, encircled by an array of bright blue and pink striped tentacles, a clearly fantastic color scheme (one tentacle even sports a pair of sunglasses) (www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/). In both scenes, the human participants look toward one other, engaging with each other rather than solely with someone outside the frame controlling the tentacles: Van Engen 252 Despite the commonsense wisdom that tentacles are only censor-evading phallic imagery, the images on this reddit depict monster tentacles in so many fantastic colors and shapes – candy canes, octopus limbs, vines, hair, etc. – that it would be an oversimplification to distill them down to the visual morphology of phallic substitutes. For example, some envision tentacles that resemble specific sex toys like bright pink anal beads or rabbit vibrators, or pastel curls of hair in my-little-pony style: Van Engen 253 Still another depicts an Ursula-like femme tentacle monster whose lower appendages have gray- green skin and purple suckers clearly resembling octopus limbs. The variation is endless, and it creates communities around pornographic imaginaries that do not take for granted the absolute value of the hetero-cisgender male body. Compare all of this to the visuals in Legend of the Overfiend, in which pink skin-toned tentacles, glowing ejaculate, and penis-headed tentacles frame tentacle sex as primarily about heterosexual narratives and teenage cisgender boys’ angst. Van Engen 254 Solo girl tentacle monster images like the one above replace the external limbs of a tentacle monster that restrains, penetrates, or strokes a woman’s body with a woman who is half- human (or humanoid) and half-tentacle monster and pleasuring herself, representing tentacle sex as a fantasy a woman can offer herself as well as others offering to her. An image submitted by Palpz depicts the DC comic book character Poison Ivy surrounded by dark green tentacles wrapped around her that bind, choke, and penetrate her, acts which the reddit caption contextualizes as an act of self-pleasure and -dominance: “Poison Ivy tangled up in her own vines” (r/consentacles). These autoerotic tentacle sex images break down the line between human woman/tentacle monster as well as between sub/dom. R/consentacles also generally offers a broader phenotypical range of imagery than tumblr, 4chan, or the original video episodes I examined. Whereas the tumblr and 4chan feed primarily feature gifs from commercially-produced hentai with pale-skinned, anime-style drawings of vaguely Asian or European women, r/consentacles provides fan art of women with Van Engen 255 gray, green, brown, white, pink, purple, etc. skin. It also often features fantastic nonhuman women like vampires, fairies, and video game characters. While some fan art mutes anime-style character drawing and replaces drawings of Asian women with Western-style cartoons of white women, brown women and fantastically-colored dark skinned women also populate the site. To an extent, this reframing of tentacle porn imagery as consensual and girl-centric pushes back on stereotypes of Asian cultures as more misogynistic than white Western cultures, even as white Americans have been the ones watching the most misogynist, nonconsensual tentacle porn anime in disproportionate numbers. Rather than yet another review or article generalizing from Urotsukidōji about how Japanese media is invading America with representations of rape, misogyny, underage sex, and violence, internet cultures that rescript tentacle porn imagery in new settings redirect these stereotypes and reframe tentacle sex from Japanese media as feminist, consent-positive, and sometimes queer. Masculinist Western anime Van Engen 256 fandoms succeed in reinforcing a narrative that Japanese culture as a whole is more chauvinist than the fans’ home culture by cherry-picking scenes, videos, and cultural texts and celebrating these examples’ debasement of and violence against women. This affects academic discourse, too. Newitz’s essay, for example, argues that “In Japan, feminist issues are less openly recognized as legitimate social concerns,” and that “when American fans consume magical girl anime . . . they are enjoying depictions of women which take for granted that women are subordinate to men” (5). In the face of that, certain trans- and queer-affirmative corners of tumblr, reddit, and 4chan detach nonconsensual scenes from their original narratives and celebrate the (consensual) weirdness, genderqueerness, transfemininity, and science fictional settings of tentacle porn through the technology of the .gif and original amateur art. 5.8 A Tentacle is Not (Necessarily) a Penis Hentai scholars, reviewers, and journalists alike have all left untouched the assumed equation between tentacle, penis, and masculinity. A tentacle is a phallic substitute: this claim seems so self-evident in the body of criticism and news coverage that it does not require much proof. Jonathan Clements, like many critics, attributes the prevalence of “penis-substitute tentacles” to the Japanese history of visually censoring images of genitals (21), while Susan Pointon argues that “tentacles have become such a common phallic substitute in pornographic anime that the genre itself is often named after them” (57). Clements and McCarthy together argue that Urotsukidōji (in the form of Maeda’s manga before Takayama’s anime) “is particularly noted for introducing the tentacle as a phallus substitute in order to evade censorship” (Anime Encyclopaedia 181). In her foundational study Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, for example, Napier labels one “demon’s tentacular hair” as a “phallic substitute” without much explanation (75). What would happen if we ease up on this impulse to assume Van Engen 257 phallic imagery in every tentacle, and instead allow some of the more unruly, interspecies, speculative, and trans representations room to breathe? While readings of the tentacle as hetero-phallus are seemingly omnipresent, in futanari hentai penises are more likely to be attached to women and femmes than to men or masculinity. In Space Pirate Sara episode 4, for example, two cisgender women have sex with two trans(ed) women in a variety of configurations with the help of their tentacle “pet”; no men, but plenty of feminized penises and nonhuman participants, are present in the sex scenes. On r/consentacles, penises likewise become associated with femininity rather than masculinity in posts that pair trans femmes or other gender nonconforming characters with striped, purple, hairlike, or vibrating tentacles. Some posts make these transfeminine connections explicit in art labeled both “trans” and “futanari”: Vxwolf1’s post from March 2017, for example, shares an image of a light-skinned, rabbit-eared, smiling trans girl surrounded by light green tentacles and hearts under the title, “Settling in for a fun evening by Pastelletta (futa [trans-girl])” (r/consentacles). Cuttle-cuddles’ post from January 2017 shares an image of a genderqueer light-skinned person with red hair in a mohawk, large breasts, and a penis encircled by deep purple tentacles. The title for this post likewise links futanari with transgender themes: “Nice purple tentacles (My_Pet_Tentacle_Monster) (trans/futa)” (r/consentacles). And these are only examples that explicitly tag images with the word “trans.” Images of feminized penises, disembodied bright- colored tentacles, trans femmes, and solo femmes thoroughly displace the immediate associations between tentacle, penis, penetration, masculinity, and heterosexuality that critics and reviewers take for granted. Tentacle porn goes far beyond the recapitulations of phallic heterosexual parables I hear in newspapers and academic discourse alike. Van Engen 258 My goal in this chapter and in my broader project is to push back against certain strands of 1990s-era psychoanalytic feminist criticism that did groundbreaking work on gendered monsters and aliens, but contributed to the erasure of trans and queer formations of monstrous bodies. In particular, Barbara Creed’s book The Monstrous-Feminine inspired a generation of scholarship still with us today that scours film, fiction, and visual art for endless retellings of the heteronormative oedipal scene, masculine dominance, and sexual difference. This kind of feminist theory has been thoroughly deconstructed by queer studies yet remains stubbornly persistent in criticism of science fiction, horror, fantasy, and other speculative genres. Michelle Ashley Gohr’s essay “Do I Have Something In My Teeth?,” as just one example, gives a Creed- ian gloss of tentacle porn as emblematic of the violence of heteropatriarchy in other films through parenthetical reference to The Overfiend: “[I]n what is disturbingly reminiscent of Japanese tentacle hentai porn (Urotsukidōji, Wicked City, etc.), the alien creatures [in the film] have tentacles with which they violate their victims,” reading all orifices as vaginal and all Van Engen 259 penetration as phallic (36). Napier argues of La Blue Girl that “the only powerful male bodies in pornographic anime are nonhuman ones” – whether “demonic, made of steel, [or] bulging with tentacles” (79). While human men in hentai are indeed disempowered compared to the titan monsters and warrior women surrounding them, if these demonic bodies are no longer human – “made of steel, bulging with tentacles” – why are they necessarily or always male, especially when surrounded by trans and gender-nonconforming characters? What evidence, which theories support these connections? Judith Butler reminded us in 1993 that because the Lacanian phallus is an ideal which no one can entirely embody, it is a “transferable phantasm” whose “naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question” (86). In response to Butler, I am interested in the nonhuman qualities of tentacles that include, but also exceed, the phallus. It is precisely the nonhuman excess of tentacular bodies in hentai that strains, or explodes entirely, their categorization as “male”, “masculine”, “heterosexual,” “phallic,” or other familiar figures in the Western heterosexual matrix. The Freudian allegory these critics recycle breaks down in erotic anime, not exclusively but especially where the bodies concerned exceed the human. It is no longer enough to identify phallic and vaginal metaphors in nonhuman monsters, to recite the familiar story of the castrated woman and the violently anxious man in every new speculative text. 77 This is partly how tentacle porn (and trans women) becomes synonymous with misogyny. Once critics can no longer see genders other than “man” and “woman,” once they have comfortably forgotten that there is (and should be) uncertainty about what constitutes a ‘male body’ or a ‘female body,’ it becomes possible to see all protrusions and penetration as 77 Compare Creed’s approach to Halberstam’s call in Skin Shows for analysis of monsters as hybrid transposable figures of race, gender, sexuality, and economics, while critiquing the “circular system” of some psychoanalytic criticism that sets out to find confirmation of the terms it itself produced (8-9). Van Engen 260 phallic, all cavities as vaginal (no matter how nonhuman), and to attach these images to the stable categories ‘male sexuality’ and ‘female sexuality’ within a heterosexual matrix. It also sidesteps the need to engage with trans and queer readings, or even account for the nonhumanness of the bodies onscreen, or the kinds of animals that form them. Tentacles themselves (in the mundane world) are limbs of touch, feeling, or locomotion on invertebrate animal bodies, multipurpose appendages that offer sticky attachment, sensory openness, and messy entanglement with other beings. 78 These organs become newly queered and eroticized in animated porn. 79 To be clear, all psychoanalytic criticism does not follow this pattern, nor would my research on trans and nonbinary genders be possible without the work of these earlier feminist critics. However, their mode of criticism does not hold up to the light of trans and queer analysis, or account for the transfemininities and genderqueer monsters of the tentacle porn itself. Trans-exclusive psychoanalysis is part and parcel of trans-exclusive feminism. I am curious instead what genders may be present in speculative interspecies sex other than “man” or “woman,” what pleasures and desires a praying mantis, octopus, crustacean, or demon-like 78 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tentacle” as “a slender flexible process in animals, esp. invertebrates, serving as an organ of touch or feeling; feeler” (“tentacle, n.” OED). The latin root “tentaculum” is the noun form of “tentare,” to feel or try (“tentaculum, n.” OED). English- Japanese dictionaries translate the word “tentacle” as “Shokushu/syokushu ( 触手)”, a specialized scientific term for animal anatomy that combines the characters for “to touch” and “hands” (dictionary, Lincon). 79 Clements’ The Erotic Anime Movie Guide acknowledges some of the multiplicitous, queer potential of tentacles, but manages to collapse it into an argument for the efficacy of tentacles as censorship-evading disguises: “The visual grammar permitted by the tentacle is extremely useful to the pornographer. With no restriction on length, it permits penetration without blocking the view. It can also be used as a form of restraint, permitting multiple penetration, sexualised bondage and ease of camera access. Best of all for the tentacle as a pornographic device, while it may often look suspiciously like a penis, to the extent of possessing a foreskin or glans, or even ejaculating upon climax, it is not a sexual organ by definition. The Japanese film-maker can thus show as many as he likes, doing whatever he wishes, without falling foul of the usual censorship restrictions” (58). Van Engen 261 hybrid being might bring to the table. “Tentacular sex” thus means entanglement with the nonhuman, with other creatures, cultures, and imaginaries. Collapsing the rich visual grammar of futanari tentacle hentai into the boxes of the heterosexual gender binary, because tentacle must = penis and penis must = man, seems to me a vast overreading of the original anime videos themselves and of the internet cultures that surround and reimagine them. Fan sites like r/consentacles have taken up and run with the cross- pollination of futanari and transgender, and the queerness of tentacles themselves. If anything, this genre’s online travels show just how pleasurably loose and unstable the apparently natural connections can be – long since theoretically dismantled, yet somehow still going strong – between penis, masculinity, maleness, heterosexuality, and tentacles. 5.9 Conclusion I conclude by tracing my line of thought back to Haraway’s sticky lines of thought in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Haraway’s concept of tentacular thinking is enmeshed with my exploration of the trans/Pacific/gender circulation of Japanese tentacle porn anime in English-language online spaces. Haraway describes “the tentacular ones,” her namesake for the “Cthulucene,” as beings that “tangle” her in speculation and that also form “nets and networks” (31-32). Yet Haraway’s tentacularity is not just about transparent or neutral connection, but also about being “at stake to and with each other” within difference (56). When Bujold recounted her anecdote of getting lost on Wikipedia and discovering the “dangerous” paths of tentacle porn anime, her story serves as an allegory for the violent and pleasurable pathways of the tentacular. The very fact that Asian media, Japanese porn, and queer/trans sexualities register as weird and perverse to Bujold, the Newsweek reporter, and countless others is a sign that the tentacular internet does not necessarily always offer connection in the positive Van Engen 262 sense. Tentacles can hurt. Said himself forecast some of these violent cross-currents in Orientalism itself, where he argued (already in 1978) that “If the world has become immediately accessible to a Western citizen living in the electronic age, the Orient too has drawn nearer to him, and is now less a myth perhaps than a place crisscrossed by Western, especially American, interests” (26). Nor are these violent connections solely a product of a binary ‘West’ vs. ‘Asia’ divide. Ian Condry’s study Frames of Anime reminds readers that Japan’s cultural and economic empire has created a situation in which anime is watched across East Asia, designed and made profitable in Japan, but the labor of the actual animation drawing is now mostly outsourced to Korea, the Philippines, and other East Asian countries historically affected by Japanese colonialism (Condry). These touch points of the tentacular internet, too, are part of the story of tentacle porn. My reception analysis here has traced how erotic anime in American culture is shaped by forces of anti-Asian racialization that associate Japanese media with perversity and imagine tentacle porn in particular as a site of hypermisogyny and weird masculine sex. Combined with the school of psychoanalytic feminist critique I engaged earlier, it is no wonder that tentacle porn in American mainstream discourse so often gets mentioned as a hyperphallic, rape-filled genre targeted at straight teenage boys with unrealistic sex lives. Yet erotic anime videos beyond Urotsukidōji and the internet cultures that have grown up around them demonstrate that tentacle porn also bears connotations of transfemininity, consent, and queerness. At its best, tentacle porn imagery in corners of tumblr, reddit, and hentai streaming sites offers lesbian-inclusive visions of transfemininity paired with the science-fictional possibilities of interspecies speculative sex. Tentacle porn in Japanese anime offers one vein of eroticized invertebrate animals and nonbinary trans genders into American culture, and offers an important reminder that H.P. Lovecraft’s Van Engen 263 racist imagination did not invent the weird tentacle, only made it famous. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This project traces a genealogy of gender nonconformity and bodily transition in the American 20th century through the generative exchange between scientific and literary representations of invertebrate animal life. Specifically, I argue that genders other than masculinities or femininities have long been present in American culture by historicizing how science and speculative fiction transformed the nonbinary ‘it’ genders of sea creatures from primitivized embodiments of disgust to eroticized avatars of desirability. Tentacular Sex tracks this shift from racial degeneration fantasies in eugenics-era pulp fiction to the queerly transitive bodies of 1980s black feminist fiction to the explicitly transgender eroticization of the tentacle in post-anime internet cultures. Moving from Darwinian science to speculative fiction and back to contemporary biological theories, my dissertation reveals a natural and cultural history of gender beyond masculinity or femininity in the monstrous bodies of biology writing, speculative fiction, and erotica of 20th century America. ❧ Recent LGBT movements are advocating for the addition of gender-neutral personal pronouns (“they,” “ze,” etc.) to the English language to better represent people whose gender identity is not man or woman. My project, a study of how invertebrate animals in Darwinian biology evolved into what I call “it” genders in 20th century American monster fiction, outlines an understudied historical backdrop to contemporary gender advocacy. Studies of trans representation can benefit from a deepened turn to the history of the nonhuman and to fantastic tentacled creatures that rewrite biology. Without sustained attention to how the history of animal biology shaped American ideals of gender, we risk reinforcing the impression that there is little history to emerging nonbinary genders. There is a history to the gender-deviance of monstrous bodies in American culture, and that history emerges from 19th century science writing’s narratives of race and species. Treating Darwin’s racialized narratives of animal sexualities as a foundational intertext, I search out hidden pockets of possibility in science fictions that rewrite Darwinian animal narratives toward queer alternatives. ❧ Until very recently, gender studies historically engaged with biology primarily to critique it, because of the long history of biological justifications for gender, sexual, racial, and ableist violence in Western cultures (Wilson). Yet American conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race emerged from Darwin as much as from Freud or sexology (Grosz). Existing feminist and queer criticism has tended to interpret gender-indeterminate monsters through psychoanalysis, seeing them as exemplars of the abject or the monstrous feminine (Creed). Read through the historical framework of biology, however, invertebrate-inspired creatures in speculative texts provide a history of nonbinary genders that informs the human. The asexual reproduction of some jellyfish, the monoecious bodies of sea slugs, and the polymorphous queerness of octopus limbs transform into literary figures of softness, immobility, transformation, and openness to the surrounding world (Hayward, Roughgarden). My earlier chapters examine how dominant sexual narratives drew on Darwinian ideas to frame racialized bodies, gender nonconformity, and disability as undesirable. Later chapters examine cultural texts that deploy invertebrate life to rewrite this paradigm through queer, trans, and woman of color feminist imaginations. ❧ Chapter 1, “Sea Slug Theory: Animal Beauty, Race, and Mollusk Sex in The Descent of Man,” lays out the theoretical and historical framework for the later chapters of the project. I analyze how Darwin’s animal narratives and popular retellings of those narratives shifted Americans’ understanding of species–and race within the human species–as dependent on specific formations of white reproductive sexuality, binary-gendered desirability, and bodily and mental ability. I then re-read textual depictions of invertebrate sex in The Descent of Man alongside contemporary transgender theorists to suggest that the slimy, immobile, queer bodies of sea invertebrates in science writing offer alternative modes of desire and beauty–modes that I trace in the literary readings of the following chapters. ❧ Chapter 2, “H. P. Lovecraft’s Degeneration Imaginary and the Starfish Sublime,” offers a window into how eugenics-era popular fiction reimagined the late-Darwinian tangle of species and sexuality as narratives of white degeneration anxiety and anti-Asian sexual panics in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s letters. I then point to moments of queer textual slippage in At the Mountains of Madness that gesture toward alien evolutionary futures through invertebrate and amoeba biologies that displace the human and its sciences. ❧ Chapter 3, “Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive,” forms the centerpiece of the project, because Butler’s work consciously associates tentacles with genderqueerness. Butler’s late 20th century fiction and archival notes reimagine invertebrate animal biologies as transgender alien universes through paradigms of bodily transformation. Drawing on extensive archival research in the Butler archive at the Huntington Library, I show how Butler as a working-class black geek examines nonbinary genders within the troubled erotics of colonial relations in the Xenogenesis novel trilogy and the short story “Bloodchild,” both from the late 1980s. ❧ Chapter 4, “How to Fuck a Kraken: Cephalopod Sexualities and Nonbinary Genders in EBook Erotica,” traces how self-published speculative fiction available on the Kindle store by Alice Xavier, Clea Kinderton, and others capitalizes on the century’s gradual shift from viewing tentacles as objects of disgust to seeing them as emblems of desirability. These for-pay erotica stories about human women and tentacled alien monsters expand conceptions of gender beyond “masculinity” or “femininity” through the “it” genders of invertebrate animals. My readings of these stories propose the erotic as a way of relating to the nonhuman world in fantastic fiction and suggest the nonhuman as a way of undoing trans-exclusive ideals of bodily desirability that can be traced back to popular Darwinisms. ❧ Chapter 5, “Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture,” traces how trans-inclusive animated erotica involving tentacles in the genre known to Americans as hentai entered U.S. culture in the late 20th century and took on new life in the currents of the transnational internet. While the original reception of tentacle porn shows that Americans imagined Japan as a place of sexual strangeness, hyper-phallicism, and titillating nonconsensuality, gradually representations of tentacles became dissociated from associations with the hetero-phallus and were reimagined in queer subsections of tumblr, reddit, and 4chan as a consensual, transfeminine site of sexual imagination. I adapt Donna Haraway’s concept of the tentacular in conjunction with Darwin’s animal narratives to theorize the tentacle as a site of violently pleasurable erotic and racial connection in the internet age. ❧ This dissertation uses close reading and archival research to show how 19th century scientific writings on animal genders and sexualities shaped 20th century literary representations of monstrous bodies. I contextualize the strange genders of speculative fiction’s monsters within specific animal biologies. My chapters on Darwin’s influence on American cultural discourses and Japanese anime’s influence on U.S. geek cultures use reception research in contemporary periodicals in addition to close readings of primary objects. The chapter on speculative ebook erotica involved email interviews with authors. ❧ By braiding together feminist science studies, queer animal studies, and ethnic studies of the nonhuman, Tentacular Sex reexamines American science and literature in terms of transgender representation and rethinks transgender representation in light of the history of science. The dissertation demonstrates that 20th century American culture is full of genders that cannot be described as masculine or feminine once we look beyond the human to the rich genealogy of invertebrate animals in science and speculative fiction. In the book version of the project, I will add a conclusion that engages contemporary invertebrate biology and speculates on the theoretical potential of the tentacular–rather than intersectionality or the rhizomatic–as a paradigm for historical, literary, and scientific entanglement of bodies across difference. This model of the tentacular adapts Donna Haraway’s use of the term to emphasize sticky, spineless embodiment and connection that causes both pain and pleasure. Much like the history of science itself, nonbinary genders as they emerge in representations of invertebrate animals are sites of both violence and eroticism across the American 20th century.

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Creator Van Engen, Dagmar (author)

Core Title Tentacular sex: Gender, race, and science in American speculative fiction

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/25/2020

Defense Date 05/01/2018

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

Tag Animals,anime,Charles Darwin,H. P. Lovecraft,invertebrates,monster erotica,nonbinary genders,OAI-PMH Harvest,Octavia E. Butler,queer,queer erotica,Science fiction,speculative fiction,tentacular,transgender

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Halberstam, Jack (committee chair), Brown, Jayna (committee member), Griffiths, Devin (committee member), Park, Sunyoung (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email dagmar.vanengen08@gmail.com,vanengen@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-25568

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Document Type Dissertation

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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