12th New Materialisms Conference:
Intersectional Materialisms. Diversity in Creative Industries, Methods and Practices
Maynooth University, August 26-28, 2024
Our team members Esther Muñoz-González and Ana Chapman participated in this conference with tw thought-provoking papers. Read their abstracts below:
Esther Muñoz González: “Otherness: Posthuman Discourse and the Queer Body in Pew”
In conjunction with the Enlightenment normative, cognitive, and rational sense of the human, Luciano and Chen distinguish two inflections of the term Posthuman: the affective one, linked to the ability to feel for others, and the understanding of the human as a species, which aligns humans with other forms of life and encourages a material connection, although still maintains hierarchical differences. (2015: 195). The figure of the queer body has repeatedly unsettled the human norm to the point that they have been excluded from the very notion of full humanness (2015: 188). Luciano and Chen favor the term “nonhuman” in the context of queerness, not as an endorsement of nonhuman concepts, but due to its “familiarity, as a common descriptor of the focus of new critical developments” (2015: 196). Catherine Lacey’s third novel, Pew (2020) is set in an unnamed town in the American South, where a church congregation discovers a mysterious figure sleeping on a pew. This person has indistinguishable gender, age, and racial identity. The townspeople grapple with contradictory perceptions of Pew’s identity and disclose their worries and confidences in conversations that are essentially monologues since Pew always remains silent. As the novel progresses, Pew’s presence becomes more and more disturbing for the town community. The purpose of this talk is to analyze the characterization of Pew as a mirror in which the other characters project their fears, combined with the increasing distrust people feel when unable to categorize Pew within a strict label. The analysis traces the intersection of the inherent questioning and revision of the traditional definition of the human being encompassed in Posthuman thought in the story to discuss contemporary fears of otherness linked to concepts such as queer identities, trust, innocence, transparency, and human waste.
Ana Chapman: “Helen Marshall ’s The Migration: The Aesthetics of Nonhuman Metamorphosis, Environmental Entanglements and the Posthuman Wound”
Helen Marshall’s novel, The Migration portrays a near-future apocalyptic world afflicted with global climate change and biological transformations. Floods and an unnerving immunological disease threaten human kind as an individuating biological force. In a non-binary nature-human portrayal, the narrative allows new ways of understanding human “matter” as fluid and embedded in its environment. Barad’s theories on new materialism provide insights into postanthropocentric “more-than-human relationality” observable in the narrative. Moreover, the example of human “matter” being transformed by disease, brings about mental and body trauma to humanity. New organic changes pose questions on relational, transformational and unstable materialism to the human body. With this new metamorphosis of the corporeal, ethical encounters, ontological and epistemological debates (i.e. Barad’s ethico-onto-epistem-ology) are present and hence, human bodies become ground for critical analysis of the anthropocentric, questioning traditional scientific approaches to the body. Drawing on ecocriticism and on authors such as Derrida, Braidotti and Barad, the novel will be examined in its inclusion of human trauma that goes beyond the biological anguish of not being central to evolution (Peters 2020) and in the trauma of human’s core sense of self where nostalgia of recovery has no place. I propose that the wound caused on the novel’s characters becomes the site for dissembling the anthropocentric paradigm and consequently points towards a nonhuman egalitarian system where nature’s embedded and relational modes transcend the boundaries of its biological individual expressions.