Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care 0192886126, 9780192886125

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: From Human to Posthuman Care
1. Care Robots and Affective Legitimacy
2. Feral Touch: Care and Contact in Posthuman Worlds
3. Care and Disposable Bodies
4. Decolonizing Posthuman Care
Conclusion: Care beyond Life—Imagining Posthumous Relations
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care

Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care AMELIA DEFALCO

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Amelia DeFalco 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935566 ISBN 978–0–19–288612–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations

Introduction: From Human to Posthuman Care Artificial Friends Terminology Imagining Posthuman Care

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1 1 6 21

1. Care Robots and Affective Legitimacy Robot Encounters Care Robots and Their Discontents Humane Machines, Mechanical Humans Embodied and Embedded Robots Real Humans, Real Care? Robot Form

27 27 34 38 43 50 57

2. Feral Touch: Care and Contact in Posthuman Worlds What Touch? Whose Touch? Feral Families: Dog Boy and Humanimal Alien Touch Posthuman Touch

61 67 70 87 97

3. Care and Disposable Bodies What (and Who) Is Waste? Extractivism and Colonial Humanism Never Let Me Go The MaddAddam Trilogy Posthuman Care beyond Recognition

101 105 110 112 121 126

4. Decolonizing Posthuman Care Decolonizing Posthumanism Salvage the Bones Pit Love Aftermaths, Afterlives Care beyond the Human

132 138 142 147 152 157

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Conclusion: Care beyond Life—Imagining Posthumous Relations Mineral Love (Open) Endings Works Cited Index

160 163 170 173 189

Acknowledgments In 2016 I moved from Canada to the UK to join the School of English at the University of Leeds. Adapting to a new institution, a new research culture, not to mention a new country, has been challenging, but the welcoming research communities at Leeds and beyond have helped me feel at home. Though I arrived at Leeds planning to write a book on posthuman care, the shape, method, and content of Curious Kin are in no small part shaped by the rich interdisciplinary collaborations I’ve enjoyed in my new research home. I’ve benefited from the support of my wonderful School of English Medical Humanities Research Group colleagues Stuart Murray, Clare Barker, Anna McFarlane, and Emma Trott, as well as department colleagues Kimberly Campanello and Julia Snell. In addition, I want to thank my remarkable graduate students—Maya Caspari, Liam Wilby, Neko Mellor, Jo Rodgers, Mary Dawson, and Ellie Wakeford—whose creative approaches to scholarship are endless sources of inspiration. During my time at Leeds I’ve worked on a number of cross-disciplinary research projects and I’m immensely grateful to the philosophers, engineers, robot designers and ethicists, neuroscientists, literary and cultural critics Luna Dolezal, Aimee van Wynsberghe, Conor McGinn, India Morrison, Mark Paterson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Alice Hall, Ray Holt, Tony Prescott, Michael Szollosy, and Helen Steward for their collaboration. Funding from the British Academy, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust has been crucial to the development of this work and I thank these organizations for their support. My “LivingBodiesObjects” colleagues and collaborators Clare Barker, Stuart Murray, Jamie Stark, Faye Robinson, Lynn Wray, Dave Lynch, Peter Eyres, Steve Byrne, and Yaxin Luo have enriched my understanding of key concepts and ethical methodologies—thank you for having me on the team. Leading the research project “Imagining Posthuman Care” was a valuable part of the research and writing process and I’m grateful to Maya Caspari for her tireless research assistance, and interns Lizzie Wright and Ellen Lloyd for their enthusiastic support. This book is the result of numerous presentations, workshops, and seminars and I’m grateful to the many people who have invited me to share my research,

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including Alysia Kolentsis, Ingvil Hellstrand, Sarah Falcus, Katsura Sako, Richard Gorman, Gail Davies, Beata Gubacsi, Stephen Katz, Tamara Metz, Elizabeth Brake, Stevie de Saille, Dominic Dean, Yugin Teo, Ella Fegitz, Nicklas Lund, Ulla Kriebernegg, Silje Haugen Warberg, and Angelo Cangelosi. Some of the material in this book has appeared in a different form and I thank the many reviewers and editors of those publications, especially Marlene Goldman, Tom Cole, Kate de Medeiros, Lisa Blackman, Valerie Lipscomb, Aagje Swinnen, and Cynthia Port. Thanks as well to Jack McNichol, Jo Spillane, and Dolarine Sonia Fonceca for their guidance throughout the OUP publication process. Finally, a special thank you to those who nourish, sustain, and challenge me in all the ways that matter most. To Robert and Morris (and our dearly departed companion, Olive)—thank you for everything. Material from the Introduction and Chapter 1 was previously published in the articles “Toward a Theory of Posthuman Care: Real Humans and Caring Robots” in Body and Society 26.3 (2020): 31–60 and “Beyond Prosthetic Memory: Posthumanism, Embodiment, and Caregiving Robots” in Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2016). Chapter 3 develops ideas first explored in my article “MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things,” which appeared in Contemporary Women’s Writing 11.3 (2017): 432–45, and the discussion of mycelial networks in the Introduction was first published in the chapter “From Mushroom Men to Mycorrhizal Relations: Imagining Posthuman Aging and Care” in Handbook of Literature and Aging, edited by Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Aagje Swinnen (Palgrave 2023). I previously explored the concept of posthumous care in the chapter “Posthuman Care and Posthumous Life,” published in Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues, edited by Marlene Goldman, Thomas Cole, and Kate de Medeiros. New York: Routledge, 2022. Thanks to these journals and presses for the right to reproduce material.

List of Illustrations 1. Paro robot (image courtesy of Sheffield Robotics)

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2. Nao robot (© David Lindsay—photosbydavid.co.uk)

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3. Pepper robot (© David Lindsay—photosbydavid.co.uk)

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4. MiRo robot (image courtesy of Consequential Robotics)

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5. The Cold Springs library in Robot and Frank

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6. Jake plays the virtual drums

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7. Robot and Frank doing reconnaissance

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8. Robot and Frank, face to face

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9. Frank embraces Robot

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10. The Äkta människor logo (courtesy of Banijay Rights)

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11. Vera in Real Humans (courtesy of Banijay Rights)

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12. Ant-scale imagery in Under the Skin

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13. The black alien hovers over its white skin in Under the Skin

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14. Jason Courtney’s illustration of the Jimmy’s pigoon encounter in Oryx and Crake (courtesy of Jason Courtney)

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Introduction From Human to Posthuman Care

Artificial Friends In March 2021, as I was completing the manuscript for Curious Kin, Kazuo Ishiguro published his eighth novel, Klara and the Sun, a narrative of artificial life and care that invokes many of the questions and concerns central to my inquiry. Klara and the Sun tells the story of a solar-powered AF, or artificial friend, named Klara and the family who purchases her. The novel traces Klara’s early days as a piece of merchandise on display in a shop window, watching and waiting for potential buyers. She is eventually purchased for a teenager, Josie, who suffers from an unnamed chronic illness that we later learn is likely the result of genetic editing, termed “lifting” in the novel, which privileged children undergo to ensure university education and professional success in adulthood. In accordance with her design, Klara becomes Josie’s companion and caregiver, keeping her company in between online lessons and tending to her health needs while Josie’s mother works long hours in an unspecified, taxing job outside the home. Josie’s parents have been separated since her father lost his job. As a solar-powered machine, Klara assigns particular importance to the sun as a source of “nourishment” (1) and “kindness” (6), regarding “him” as a god-like agent of care with the power to sustain, even cure the creatures he touches with his “special kind of nourishment” (37). When, despite Klara’s assistance and doctor’s efforts, Josie’s health deteriorates, Klara begs the sun for help, throwing aside the curtains of Josie’s sickroom so she can bathe in his “nourishing” rays. In the novel’s final section, the reader learns that Josie has made a full recovery, which Klara attributes to the sun’s special attention (289). As Josie grows stronger and older her need for Klara diminishes and Klara is eventually retired, sent to a “Yard” for discarded tech where she begins her “slow fade” (298). Despite its speculative content—robot friends, genetic modification—there is an ordinariness to the novel, a quiet everydayness to its style and plot that is

Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Amelia DeFalco, Oxford University Press. © Amelia DeFalco 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.003.0001

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in keeping with Ishiguro’s oeuvre.¹ Very little actually happens: a robot is purchased and goes to live with a girl and her mother; the girl’s illness worsens and, fearing that she will die just like her older sister did, the girl’s mother considers commissioning a robotic “portrait” able to “continue” her after her death; the girl suddenly recovers from her illness, obviating the need for robot replication; the girl leaves for college and her robot is retired. However, the novel’s relatively simple story is rendered remarkable by its narrator, the AF, Klara. Klara provides an uncanny perspective, at once familiar and strange, disarming and disorienting. Klara’s narration is distinctly recognizable, conforming to our readerly expectations in its chronological, reflective, interpretive delivery of narrative events. Her observational skills are excellent, as various human characters comment throughout the novel. Klara notices and interprets the nuances of her environment (human and otherwise), delivering her observations and conclusions to the reader in a direct, seemingly guileless style. But at the same time, her lack of guile and insight suggest a profound naïveté, a reminder of her difference, her nonhuman, artificial status. The artificial narrator’s uncanny blend of familiarity and strangeness produces a kind of slant reading experience that both comforts and challenges its human readers; it is at once a soothing tale of human exceptionalism that confirms liberal humanist belief in the unique value of the “human heart” and a disruptive narrative of anthropocentric egotism, an exposure of human individuality as a false idol that maintains inequality and cultures of disposability. Reading Ishiguro’s novel in early 2021, when COVID-19 had enforced a profound reckoning with both the universality of human fragility and the unequal distribution of vulnerability across societies and populations, further amplified the novel’s speculative critique of the unequal distribution of ethical significance. In Ishiguro’s novel, the characters accept that certain populations, namely, those who have been “lifted,” are more deserving of education, employment, and, by implication, wealth, than their unlifted fellows. In the world of Klara and the Sun, exceptionality is bioengineered and quantifiable, and society is structured accordingly. The novel offers a posthuman perspective on the more-than-human relationships it depicts between Klara, Josie, Josie’s parents, and others. I use “more-than-human” to indicate the multitudinous forms of being that anthropocentrism frequently obscures. While more-than-human is often employed

¹ Many critics have commented on Ishiguro’s understated prose style. For example, as I discuss in Chapter 3, criticism on Never Let Me Go describes its style as “mundane,” “banal” (Gill 852–853), and “flat” (Rich 632).

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to encompass the heterogeneity of what used to be called “nature,” I use it even more broadly as a way to indicate “natureculture” (Haraway, When Species Meet 15) entities in coexistence, including but not limited to biological life forms.² While “posthuman” implies a critical perspective (as discussed in the next section), “more-than-human” provides a descriptive terminology, a way of referencing non-anthropocentric life worlds without resorting to human/ nonhuman binaries. Curious Kin explores a range of posthuman care fiction that, like Klara, depicts more-than-human relations in ways that expose, disorient, and often destabilize the ethical hierarchies endemic to anthropocentric ontologies. As Ishiguro’s novel suggests, the very notion of human “specialness” produces the “unspecialness” of the more-than-human, which in turn is regarded as inferior, as sub- or in-human. As in many of the texts I explore, “the human” in Klara is taken for granted as an indicator of ethical significance, but that significance is challenged by the novel’s depiction of posthuman bonding and care. Ishiguro’s novel is a nuanced, ambivalent exploration of more-than-human companionship that raises vital questions about both the prospect of artificial care and the broader implications of posthuman relationality in contemporary and near future worlds. During a pivotal conversation between Klara and Josie’s father Paul, Paul poses a series of questions about human connection and individuality that query the very meaning and ethical significance of the human. Klara has just learned that that she is being groomed to replace Josie should Josie’s illness prove fatal, and Paul’s questions confront Klara with the ontological significance of such a task: “Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart?” Paul asks Klara. “I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously,” he explains, “I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart” (218). His questions for Klara continue: “Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?” (218). While Paul relies on the wellworked metaphor of the heart to express his belief in human individuality and

² My usage is inspired by work in science and technology studies (STS), geography, environmental humanities, anthropology, and human computer interaction (HCI) studies that draws attention to and works to correct the anthropocentric bias in existing scholarship. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explains, “more than human” is especially accommodating since it “speaks in one breath of nonhumans and other than humans such as things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities, and humans” (Matters of Care 1). See also Giraud, What Comes after Entanglement?; Haraway, When Species Meet; Latimer and Gómez, “Intimate Entanglements”; Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-than-Human; Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

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the profound mystery of subjectivity, Klara offers an architectural perspective on the question of human being, describing Josie as “a house with many rooms” (219). As Klara explains, “a devoted AF, given time, could walk through each of those rooms, studying them carefully in turn, until they became like her own home” (219). Paul insists that even within Klara’s figuration, mystery would remain: “‘suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,’ he said, ‘and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be, trying to learn Josie’s heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn’t there always be others you’d not yet entered?’” (19).³ Klara argues that Josie’s complexity is ultimately limited: “Even if Mr Paul is talking in the poetic sense, there’ll be an end to what there is to learn” (219). Klara imagines the possibility of a radical kinship with Josie, a closeness so intimate that the two beings converge so that Klara would become that which she imitates. The prospect of imitation so perfect that it ceases to be imitation and is instead a replication unsettles Paul’s conception of unique human being and the ineffability of the human heart. Paul and Klara’s conversation toggles between competing perspectives on human being: on the one hand, Paul insists on a romantic vision of profound human distinction; on the other, Klara offers an account of humans as complex, but ultimately mappable structures, refusing to concede any quasi-mystical ineffability. In both cases, Josie functions as a discrete object of interest and inquiry, a precious individual. However, toward the novel’s conclusion, Klara comes to recognize the limitations of both the heart and the house metaphors of human being: both assume a degree of stability that is at odds with the dynamism and relationality of being. She comes to regard being as emerging out of relations, particularly care relations; consequently, any attempt to reproduce a particular person will ultimately fail because that person resides in relations, rather than in some discrete heart or house, that is, in a particular body or consciousness. The robot designer who offers to create a digital version of Josie “believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother

³ The importance of Paul’s questions is underscored by the quotation’s prominent appearance on the back of the novel’s dustjacket, where one might otherwise expect to find a plot summary or critical praise for the book. In employing these remarks about the human heart for promotional purposes, the publishers further highlight the novel’s exploration of the interconnections between care, embodiment, and human exceptionalism. The quote invokes a familiar trope—the heart as the seat of human feeling and individuality—that is rehearsed and reworked throughout Ishiguro’s novel. The texts explored in Curious Kin frequently question these kinds of common-sense assumptions about human individuality and ethical significance in their explorations of posthuman bonds.

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he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that.” But ultimately Klara is unconvinced by his claim. Reflecting on her time with Josie, Klara concludes, “I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her” (306). Klara’s final interpretation of her experiences with Josie invokes an insight that is pivotal for posthumanist critique, namely that being emerges out of relations, “We become-with each other or not at all” (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 4). This is a guiding insight for the exploration that follows. If relating produces being, who and what we relate to, care for, and are cared for by has profound consequences. Indeed, as I explore further in the next chapter, discussions of care are frequently discussions of who (or possibly what) counts as human (and who doesn’t), as well as who determines and polices these ontological boundaries and what happens to those that don’t make the cut. As the pandemic has highlighted, the stakes of care can be exceedingly high: choosing who deserves care can be a mortal decision. But more often, care is far less dramatic than extraordinary life-saving measures; care is also the everyday more-than-human relations that support and sustain being, relations that are frequently overlooked in media accounts of the “crisis of care” produced by the underfunding of health and social care in the UK and Canada, the scandal of private healthcare in the US, and the larger sociopolitical devaluing of the incredible labor exerted by nurses, home healthcare workers, personal aids, nursing home staff, and the many others who put their affective energies into caring for children, people with disabilities, and older adults. This book explores care that operates outside of formalized systems, care that is unpaid, ubiquitous, vital, formative, taken for granted, transformative, and ordinary. I discuss the particular meanings and functions of care at greater length below, but for now I want to stress vital mundane care, those relations of support and sustenance that are always happening in grand and negligible ways. Anthropocentric assumptions about what qualifies as care can have grave consequences since perceived incapacities to care can disqualify one from human status with all the privileges that that status entails. In imagining a machine narrator, Ishiguro’s novel not only challenges ontological boundaries, seducing readers into identifying with a nonhuman being, but also disrupts and challenges Anglo-European anthropocentric hierarchies in its subtle evocation of posthuman ecologies of care beyond human comprehension. Klara’s sun worship, which readers might initially attribute to her naïve misunderstanding of causality, emerges as a potent and influential epistemology. For Klara, the sun is a primary caregiver, a living, dynamic agent who nourishes solar-powered AFs and humans alike. Klara’s narration

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acquaints readers with the limitations of our comprehension and the degree to which more-than-human phenomena are quietly consequential. As the reader discovers that human children must be technologically modified to be admitted to the elite colleges that lead to financial prosperity in adulthood and AFs might be made to “continue” deceased humans with adequate training and practice, the distinction between human and nonhuman and the hierarchical significance of that distinction become increasingly confused. Much like Ishiguro’s earlier novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), which I discuss in Chapter 3, Klara and the Sun treats human individuality and, by extension, the notion of humanity itself as profoundly unstable, as a cultural paradigm rather than a natural truth. In so doing, Klara and the Sun queries the innate ethical significance of the human and, moreover, the degree to which such significance has historically been tied to the notion of individuality and autonomy. Paul’s pivotal question about individuality and “heart” inspire additional questions: Why is the connection between ethical significance and individuality so tightly bound? What might happen if we uncouple individuality and significance? What if we abandon human “specialness” as a prerequisite for concern and care? And, moreover, how can such questions help expand discussions of care to include a wide array of “curious kinships” with plants and animals, robots and AI, strange hybrid creatures and alien entities? These are key guiding questions for Curious Kin.

Terminology Curious I like the word “curious.”⁴ Curiosity is expansive, seeking, open-ended, never finished. It is also odd, strange, eccentric, unexpected. Weird. The OED describes curiosity as an affective state that can tend toward the disrespect of boundaries: “Desirous of seeing or knowing; eager to learn; inquisitive. Often with condemnatory connotation: Desirous of knowing what one has no right to know, or what does not concern one, prying” (“curious” 5a). Not only do the curious risk censure via trespass, they themselves are the oddity under inspection. In other words, one can be the subject and object of curiosity: to

⁴ This section on terminology recognizes that words matter: “Like our methodological choices, language choices are ethical choices and are key in this project of constituting more democratic relations and worlds” (TallBear, “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints”).

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be curious is to want to know more and to be an anomaly, something “[d]eserving or exciting attention on account of its novelty or peculiarity; exciting curiosity; somewhat surprising, strange, singular, odd; queer” (OED “curious” 16a). This linking of desire, learning, and anomaly neatly embodies my approach, which draws on, and draws attention to, a range of affects, epistemologies, and ontologies in order to theorize posthuman vulnerability and care. Moreover, curiosity’s association with taboo knowledges, its invocation of excessiveness (excessive desire, excessive interest, excessive investigation) is also apposite. Critics suspicious of more-than-human care frequently posit excessive and inappropriate commitments and convergences, treating, for example, robot caregivers as technological transgressions, overzealous engineering that introduces machines into what should remain strictly human.⁵ Nonhuman animal intimacies are similarly patrolled, though “excessive” bonds between human and nonhuman animals tend to provoke patronizing skepticism, treated as quaint rather than monstrous curiosities. This book examines depictions of such peculiar, strange, queer, transgressive, excessive, even monstrous relations and their social, political, and ethical implications. “Curious” is a fruitful word not only for its active meanings, but also for its defunct definitions, which resonate across the discussions of care in Curious Kin. It has heterogeneous origins, entering English in the fourteenth century from Old French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. It is “[a] word which has been used from time to time with many shades of meaning,” denoting persons “[b]estowing care or pains” (OED “Curious” 1a), careful, cautious, clever, even fastidious (OED “Curious” 2), the “objective quality of things” (OED “Curious” II) or objects “[m]ade with care or art; skilfully, elaborately or beautifully wrought” (OED “Curious” IIa). In its confluence of care, cleverness, art, enquiry, transgression, oddity, and queerness, “curious” articulates a guiding principle for my exploration of unruly, artful relations of care that disregard, even flout, boundaries of species, being, and matter. My investigation is devoted to the affinity between “curious” and the “posthuman” as indicators of boundary crossing. Like Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, I am not interested in “the ‘post’ of ‘posthuman’ . . . insofar as it posits some subsequent developmental state, but as it collapses into sub-, inter-, infra-, trans-, pre-, anti-” (viii). As I explore below, the posthuman evokes the more⁵ As discussed in Chapter 1, Sherry Turkle has criticized care robots as inappropriate uses of technology and many sociologists, philosophers, and robot ethicists have expressed concerns about robots infiltrating into the human territory of love and care (see, for example, Sharkey and Sharkey; Sparrow and Sparrow).

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than-human entanglements that emerge when one forgoes anthropocentric assumptions; if there is anything “post” about the posthuman, it is its invocation of what beings, bonds, and worlds might become possible and apparent if and when human exceptionalism is abandoned. The generative possibilities of the posthuman and its “curious” attachments and intimacies are at the heart of this inquiry. My approach is indebted to queer scholars like Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed whose work implies, if not explicitly articulates, the affirmative possibilities of cross-species relations in their attention to queer episto-ontologies. Nonetheless, I have chosen the more generic “curious” rather than “queer” to guide my study, in part to avoid diluting the particular genesis and concerns of queer theory. As much as “queer” resonates with many of the concerns of curious kin, there is a risk that everything and anything becomes queer through a lens that fails to account for its particular (radical) coordinates, thereby effacing the foundational role of non-normative sexualities in queer studies. Though sexuality is an aspect of my investigation, I’ve chosen a term— “curious”—that intersects with queer theories at various points throughout the project but avoids laying claim to theoretical territory that is not mine to claim. I’m grateful to the queer theorists (Ahmed; Judith Butler; Mel Chen; Halberstam; José Esteban Muñoz; Jasbir Puar) who have enriched my understanding of the potential and power of the non-normative. Queer kinship is an important part of posthuman care but does not exhaust its modalities. As much as “curious” is a helpful shorthand for the depictions of nonnormative affinities, relations, and commitments I explore, the term has frequently, much like “queer,” been recruited to reinforce, rather than disrupt, the dominance of heteronormative Eurocentrism, producing minority positions, rendering racialized, gendered, sexualized bodies, beings, and behaviors as devious outliers. Accordingly, I use the term “curious” self-reflexively attuned to the risk of re-iterating normativity in my designation of certain relationships as “curious,” asking which relations of care are designated “curious,” how, and by whom? Implied quotation marks hover around “curious” throughout my investigation, but they remain implied because I am also interested in the progressive potential of the term as one of possibility and hope, inquiry and critique, as a commitment to the unexpected and affirmative. Curious Kin is an effort to examine speculative representations of what José Esteban Muñoz terms “queer inhumanity,” what he describes as: a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant anti-inhumanity. . . . arduous modes of

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relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being, classifications that are bent on the siloing of particularity and on the denigrating of any expansive idea of the common and communism. (210)

The fiction I explore theorizes posthuman care by imagining the concrete particularities of “arduous modes of relationality” that undermine humanist individualism and, in the process, enrich and frequently challenge scholarly discourses of care and posthumanism alike.

Kin I deploy “curious” to modify, even defy, the concepts conventionally associated with my second title term, “kin,” which both denotes and connotes, in its more linear etymological roots, the privileging of relationships routed through (and rooted in) singular, traceable origins of “[f]amily, race, blood-relations” (OED “kin n.1, def. I). “Kin,” which reaches the English language via Old English, denotes genealogy, and, therefore, biological connections as the foundation for familial relations. It is these associations—blood ties, biological affiliations, species bonds—that this project infiltrates, interrogates, and subverts. In its denotative connections to ancestry, race, and “stock” (2a), as well as to classification (II), “to the division of animals or plants, having presumably a common ancestry” (6a), the term “kin” conventionally expresses a commitment to boundaries and classification; it describes affiliations that adhere to taxonomies of species, race, and gender (7), and it is this adherence that is ripe for posthuman reorientation. As is often the case with the delightfully disordered English language, “kin” bears the seeds of its own curious reinvention in its second definition, namely, “[a] crack, chink, or slit; esp. (a) a chasm or fissure in the earth; (b) a chap or crack in the skin” (“kin,” n2). This second, less frequently used meaning of the term speaks directly to the permeability of boundaries between bodies and environments, denoting liminal spaces between entities. A kin is a fissure, a break in, or even breakdown of matter that facilitates movement and exchange. As such, “kin” shores up narratives of singular origins, discrete boundaries, humanist models of biologically determined affiliations, and at the same time destabilizes notions of discrete bodies, human and more-than, sealed off from the rest of the world. In short, “kin” is a generatively flexible concept and I use the modifier “curious” to amplify and interrogate its fertile

10        instability. As Haraway proclaims, “[k]in is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible” (Staying with the Trouble 2). It is this intrinsic, if frequently disregarded wildness that comes to the fore when one explores the imagined possibilities of curious posthuman kinships based on allegiance and affinity rather than biology. The phrase “curious kin” is a fellow to Haraway’s notion of “oddkin,” but highlights the curiousness of kinship itself and the posthuman relations that everywhere inhabit normative and “odd” relations alike. Curious Kin unsettles the exclusionary territory of the humanist human and his “legitimate” kin by exploring imagined worlds of curious posthuman care that expose the limits and impositions of anthropocentric approaches to being and care. My inquiry rests on the assumption that human animals are fundamentally relational. Some form of relational ontology is central to a range of contemporary cultural theorists (and their philosophical antecedents) that inspire and guide Curious Kin: Erin Manning drawing on psychologist Daniel Stern (“Leaky Sense of Self” 36); Haraway invoking Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead (Companion Species Manifesto 6); Margrit Shildrick calling upon Derrida and Deleuze (“Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?”); Puig de la Bellacasa recalling Haraway and Latour (Matters of Care 30, 117); Kittay echoing Carol Gilligan (Love’s Labor 17); Lucy Suchman citing Barad (“Subject Objects” 121)—these scholars working across political philosophy, cultural studies, animal and science and technology studies, feminist philosophy and ethics of care conceptualize being according to animal contingency, vulnerability, and entanglement.⁶ Curious Kin joins this collection of scholars who insist that relating precedes being, a vision of profoundly interrelated existence that Western neoliberal politics of autonomy and independence efface. As Karen Barad explains, from this interrelated perspective: [t]he primary ontological units are not “things” but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations. And ⁶ As Suchmnan explains, “ ‘[e]ntanglement’ is Barad’s heuristic for always thinking entities performatively, as effects of rather than antecedents to relations. The companion neologism of ‘intra-action’ signals this commitment to the premise that subject object difference is not given, but arises from the material-discursive practices through which boundaries and associated entities are made. Humans are not the sole arbiters of agency in these entity-making practices, as agency is ‘not an attribute, but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.’ Humans are, however, always already implicated in and part of the world’s reconfiguring, as well as of the capacities for being and action that arise” (“Subject Objects” 121).

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the primary semantic units are not “words” but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. (“Posthumanist Performativity” 818)

Relations create agential subjects, but through a sleight of hand we have convinced ourselves that this causality is reversed, that there is an original “I” that picks and chooses how he will relate to the world. This illusion of origins, autonomy, choice, underlies neoliberal imperatives; if we subscribe to models of being that privilege relating and becoming, the notion of choosing whether or not to connect, interact, relate becomes moot; relating is always already in operation. As a result, who and what we relate to, not to mention how and why, are significant philosophical questions. Who and what we relate to (and how) determines who and what we are. A branch of feminist philosophy, variously termed “ethics of care” or “care ethics” uses the term “care” to describe this fundamental, a priori relating. The term has its advantages and disadvantages. In what follows, I rehearse some of the arguments central to philosophies of care, as well as their potential for posthuman reorientation.

Care Care is vexing concept, largely because of its ubiquity as a term, concept, feeling, and behavior. As I explain in my previous work on the subject, “since its emergence around the turn of the first millennium, ‘care’ has functioned as both verb and noun—one both cares and has cares—a dual function that continues to this day. We give care, take care, care for, care about, have cares, and don’t care. In its broadest sense, care is affection, devotion, responsibility, even obligation; it is action, behavior, motivation, and practice: care feels and care does” (Imagining Care 5). Care’s latitude can make it mercurial: care is everyday and rarefied, private and public, personal and professional. It is a “slippery,” often fraught term for philosophy and ethics of care scholars have written volumes seeking to define it.⁷ And yet it is also commonplace, taken for granted. Though challenging, the pliability of care is fundamental to ethics ⁷ “ ‘Care’ is a slippery word. Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks importance. In our engagements with the worlds that we study, construct,

12        of care philosophy, which prioritizes emotions and actions that respond to particular, contextualized needs and dependencies. As Virginia Held explains, “the central focus of the ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility” (10). How this “compelling moral salience” is registered, manifested, and acted upon remains dependent on the particularities of individual relations and scenarios, resulting in a prioritization of context that prohibits prescriptive ethics. By operating from the assumption that persons are relational, rather than independent, universal moral tenets are made untenable since the particularities of the relation, rather than the individual, produce ethical imperatives.⁸ For ethics of care philosophers, asserting fundamental relationality productively rebukes claims of autonomy by drawing attention to the invisible caring labor (overwhelmingly done by women, frequently women of color) that makes human survival and flourishing possible. The ubiquity of relationality and interdependence mean that care is diffuse, ubiquitous, mutable; its form depends on the specific circumstances in which it arises. Thus, care is perpetually nebulous, fashioned in relation to relations.⁹ As an amorphous, context-specific, porous concept, care has proven especially fertile for feminist ethical philosophers frustrated by androcentric, universalizing moral philosophy based on the myth of the independent, “self-made man” (Held 47).¹⁰ Unlike these models, philosophies of care privilege particularity, context, and emotion and highlight vulnerability and inhabit, we cannot but care: care is an essential part of being a researcher and a citizen” (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 1–2). For further discussion of the problem of defining care, see Benner, Gorden and Noddings; Bowden; Bubeck; DeFalco; Hamington; Held; Kittay; Noddings; Tronto. ⁸ As Held explains: [t]he ethics of care usually works with a conception of persons as relational, rather than as self-sufficient independent individuals of the dominant moral theories. The dominant theories can be interpreted as importing into moral theory a concept of the person developed primarily for liberal political and economic theory, seeing the person as a rational, autonomous agent, or a self-interested individual . . . .The ethics of care, in contrast, characteristically sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically. (13) ⁹ In Imagining Care, I argued this vagueness creates “an aporia at the heart of the ethics of care,” suggesting that central to “the ethics of care is a resistance to abstraction that can inhibit its own theorization” (13). This generative elusiveness, I argue, is particularly well suited to literary narrative, which thrives on contexts and details, on the uniqueness of particular scenarios, bodies, lives, and relations, on ambiguity and ambivalence. In Imagining Care I investigated this confluence at length, exploring literary fiction as a means to better theorize the potential meanings and ethics of care. ¹⁰ As I explored in Imagining Care, care is a pivotal idea for a branch of feminist philosophy that has sought to outline an alternative to masculinist moral philosophy traditions rooted in ideals of autonomy and individualism. For feminist philosophers frustrated by exclusive, androcentric, and universalizing ethical philosophy, “ethics of care” or “care ethics” philosophy has many advantages. For a more detailed, thorough overview of ethics of care from Carol Gilligan’s rebuttal of Lawrence Kohlberg onward, see Imagining Care (9–17).

:     

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and interdependence as intrinsic, rather than anomalous. Yet, despite its acknowledgment of moral agents as embedded, encumbered, and embodied,¹¹ as fundamentally relational, ethics of care philosophy tends nevertheless to employ anthropocentric, humanist approaches to dependence and responsibility. Throughout ethics of care theory one finds humanist frameworks treated as a given, the assumption that care arises in interactions between humans, most often familiar humans, especially friends and family members (Gilligan, Hamington, Held, Noddings, Kittay). As prominent ethics of care philosophers Eva Kittay and Ellen Feder insist, vulnerability and the dependency that results “must function in our very conception of ourselves as subjects and moral agents” (emphasis added 3). Care ethics is preoccupied with “ourselves,” that is, with “our” generic human selves, with human dependencies and interconnections. In the introduction to their collection on the ethics, practice, and politics of caregiving, Patricia Benner, Suzanne Gordon, and Nel Noddings argue: “The product of care is embedded in the person who is cared for and cannot be segregated from that human life. Caring is not dependent on what I do to you, but on what I do and how you receive or respond to it” (emphasis in original xiii). According to its proponents, care is “a set of relational practices that foster mutual recognition and realization, growth, development, protection, empowerment, and human community, culture, and possibility . . . [nurturing] relationships that are devoted . . . [to] assisting others to cope with their weaknesses while affirming their strengths” (Benner, Gordon, and Noddings xiii). It is “an approach to morality that is basic to human existence—so basic . . . that our bodies are built for care—and therefore can be woven into traditional theories. Care is a way of being in the world that the habits and behaviors of our body facilitate” (Hamington 2). Throughout care theory one finds an exclusive attention to the human and reliance on humanist assumptions, signaled by the frequent use of the first-person plural, treated as givens. Certainly care will always concern the human sphere and the universality of human vulnerability is a central tenet of care that marks its provocative challenge to moralities built on autonomy, yet in their laudable eagerness to stress the universality of dependency and care and the destructively spurious myth of autonomy and independence, care philosophers sometimes risk minimizing the complexity of vulnerability as both universal and particular, both biologically and socially produced (Casalini 21–22). Opening up care and kinship to include the range of more-than-human ¹¹ As Held explains, “The view of persons as embedded and encumbered seems fundamental to much feminist thinking about morality and especially to the ethics of care” (15).

14        inter-dependencies and ontologies that produce and sustain life—from the macro and mesofauna that transform plant and animal remains into fertile soil, to the complex entanglements of the microbiome, to the enriching experiences of particular nonhuman creatures and technological care relations that cultural creators like Ishiguro and others have imagined—offers opportunities for new, trans-disciplinary insights.

Of Flora, Fauna, and Fungi In their 2005 essay “Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care,” Eva Kittay, Bruce Jennings, and Angela Wasunna introduce their plea for increased attention to global politics in care philosophy by contrasting human interdependence with the spontaneity of fungal life: “People do not spring up from the soil like mushrooms,” they write. “People produce people. People need to be cared for and nurtured throughout their lives by other people, at some times more urgently and more completely than at other times” (443). To contrast people with mushrooms rehearses a key point from ethics of care, namely, that myths of spontaneously produced, sovereign human beings problematically erase the formative care labor required for human existence, survival, and flourishing (443). The fungal kingdom, particularly mushrooms, has historically functioned as a figure of quasi-magical, spontaneously sprouting life, serving as an image of independence and autonomy antithetical to human relationality. Kittay, Jennings, and Wassuna’s opening remarks allude to Seyla Benhabib’s oft-cited essay, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Moral Theory,” which in turn alludes to Hobbes’s independent, self-sufficient “mushroom men”¹² in its corroboration of Carol Gilligan’s theory of care as a welcome riposte to harmful autonomy myths. In the essay, Benhabib argues that like many universalist and proceduralist philosophers, Hobbes conjures an image of “Man’s” independence that relies on an erasure of maternity and the larger collective production of human subjects, thereby “free[ing] the male ego from the most natural and basic bond of dependence” (Situating the Self 156). Benhabib cites Hobbes’s description of men “sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of

¹² In his discussion of dominion and “the right of Masters over slaves,” Hobbes describes man in his “natural state,” freshly “emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other” (On the Citizen 102).

:     

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engagement to each other” (qtd. in Benhabib 156) as “the ultimate picture of autonomy” (Benhabib 156). From Hobbes’s 1642 De Cive through to Behnhabib’s 1992 essay, the mushroom has functioned (in Western philosophy) as an oppositional touchstone for the “human,” a symbol of pure independence and mysterious origins. However, as mycologists discover and communicate the complexity and ubiquity of mycelia—the vegetative, branching part of fungus that supports its fruiting bodies (namely mushrooms) through vast networks of hyphae—Hobbes’s mushroom metaphor is revealed as not only a mischaracterization of “man’s natural state,” but of fungi’s as well. In fact, fungi are profoundly entangled organisms, as documented in a range of popular publications by biologists (Sheldrake, whose 2021 book Entangled Life became a Sunday Times bestseller; McCoy; Simard; Stamets), nature writers (Macfarlane; Pouliot), anthropologists (Tsing), memoirists (Litt Woon Long; Whiteley, The Secret Life of Fungi), which detail the complexity of mycelium networks and their enmeshment in plant and animal life. These publications and many more dedicated to communicating the wondrous operations of fungal life—in her 2020 article, “Writing the Lives of Fungi at the End of the World,” Alexis Harley argues publishing is in “the thick of a veritable fungus craze” (146)—have upended any notion of mushrooms as exemplars of independence and autonomy. On the contrary, argues Sheldrake, “[f]ungal networks embody the most basic principle of ecology: that of the relationship between organisms. Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, a living seam by which much of life is stitched into relation” (“Why the Hidden World of Fungi Is Essential to Life on Earth”). Mushrooms are only one manifestation of these complex, often microscopic mycelia, which form a connective tissue so remarkably communicative that it is sometimes referred to as the “wood-wide web” for its ability to facilitate connections across a wide range of species. In short, mushrooms are not individual, self-contained organisms, but one element (a reproductive organ, in fact), produced by multitudinous fungal colonies embedded in the soil (Harley; Money). As a result, “[i]nterconnection,” claims Peter McCoy, co-founder of the Radical Mycology movement, is “the primary lesson that fungi teach . . . mushrooms and other fungi permeate the world, connecting and turning its innumerable cycles to demonstrate that every act carries an immeasurable chain of effects” (xv). The longstanding assumption that mushrooms spring up from the soil as discrete, autonomous matter is a distinctly anthropocentric misapprehension of nonhuman life that transforms dense entanglement into sovereign isolation. Philosophical appeals to mushrooms, from Hobbes through to ethics of care, obscure the complex, sustaining entanglements of flora, fauna, and fungi in

16        their reliance on anthropocentric models of being that interpret human interdependence as species specific, isolated from dense webs of interconnected existence. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World illustrates the complexity of these more-than-human entanglements by tracing assemblages of matsutake mushrooms and their human collectors, companion species of a sort in their interdependent precarity. Tsing’s study focuses on “lifeways . . . coming together,” describing “ways of being as emergent effects of encounters” (23). My own analysis in Curious Kin considers relations of care as part of this tangled assemblage, exploring how particular, often unconventional affective encounters offer generative visions of posthuman being. New materialism, posthumanism, environmental humanities, have worked to destabilize many of the distinctions and hierarchies that Benhabib, Kittay, and other feminist philosophers have often taken for granted in their efforts to expose gender bias and the fallacy of human autonomy in moral philosophy. By maintaining distinctions between species and kingdoms in the effort to eliminate intra-species distinctions, specifically gender-based hierarchies, feminist care philosophy can only go so far in eliminating liberal humanism’s atomistic approach to human being. Benhabib problematizes Hobbes’s mushroom analogy because it ignores the degree to which all “men” are entangled with others, including women. Contemporary insights into the relationality of more-than-human being stress the human as always already entangled in, indebted to, encumbered and produced by the nonhuman. As Tsing’s narrative elaborates, human animals are entangled with fungi, not to mention flora and fauna; mushrooms are relational beings, just like the rest of “us.” Tsing’s anthropological investigation of human/fungal entanglements is part of a series of “turns” toward more-than-human worlds that have been occurring in cultural theory over the past decades. The nonhuman or posthuman turn (Braidotti; Grusin; Hayles; Nayar), the object-oriented or ontological turn (Latour; Morton; Viveiros de Castro), the animal turn (Agamben; DeKoven; Derrida; Haraway; Weil; Wolfe), the affective turn (Ahmed; Anderson; Clough and Halley; Leys; Stewart), the ethical turn (Attridge; Davis and Womack; Garber; Hanssen and Walkowitz; Oliver), all of these discursive developments involve an acknowledgment of human animals as embodied, interdependent, trans-corporeal, affective beings, an acknowledgment of human relationality and vulnerability that counters neoliberal fantasies of independent, autonomous, rational humanist subjects unburdened by the vicissitudes of health, illness, dependence, and frailty (Andersson, Fineman, and Mattsson; Harvey). Posthumanism, affect theory, and animal

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studies function as vital correctives to anthropocentric models of selfhood that consign those deemed ill, disabled, unproductive, nonhuman, to the margins. In their insistence on vulnerability, interdependence, and the porousness of the category “human,” these more-than-human turns inevitably draw attention to the necessity of assistance and obligation for human animal being.

Posthumanism In many ways the care philosophy discussed above might appear, at first glance, ill-suited for a partnership with posthumanism. Care philosophy unabashedly prioritizes human relations in its exploration of what “good,” “authentic” care might and should be (Kittay; Held; Ruddick). Indeed, some have criticized care as a moral theory mired by humanist essentialism and a “slave morality” that reifies female subservience (Card; Bubeck; Groenhout). However, despite superficial differences, there are powerful affinities between care philosophy and posthumanism that can lead to an inclusive vision of care that incorporates not only human vulnerability and interdependence, but a larger rhizomatic¹³ tangle of human-animal-machine interconnections. The appeal of feminist care philosophy lies in its reckoning with atomistic moral philosophy, its insistence on dependency as the common experience of human life. As such, care philosophy is well positioned for a posthuman turn, or perhaps a posthuman tweak is more accurate since ethics of care has always, to my mind, been turning toward posthumanism, despite its anthropocentric tendencies. The figure central to ethics of care—the embodied, embedded, and encumbered subject—is ripe for posthumanist expansion. I propose, drawing

¹³ Rhizomatic describes the conceptual and methodological framework of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). For Deleuze and Guattari, “rhizome” captures the chaotic, nonlinear formative structure of language and being. In botany, rhizome refers to plant stems that grow underground. Because these subterranean growths are technically stems, rather than roots, they have nodes, and are therefore able to produce the shoots and roots of new plants. As a result, rhizomatic plants are especially robust (as any gardener who has tried to eliminate gout weed, Virginia creeper or poison ivy knows only too well). Much like mushrooms, rhizomatic plants can appear to miraculously “spring up from the soil,” but it is the observer’s expectation of arboreal growth patterns that make such sprouts seem disconnected. As Deleuze and Guatarri write, “It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy” (18). Rhizomatic approaches to being, on the other hand, acknowledge shifting terrains of connection and disconnection, perpetual change, becoming, meshes of being and relating that can never be definitively plotted: “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (21). Posthuman care networks are rhizomatic in the way Deleuze and Guattari describe: complex and chaotic, emergent and formative, heterogeneous and unpredictable.

18        on Karen Barad, “a posthumanist account” of care that “calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman,’ examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized” (“Posthumanist Performativity” 808). Critical posthumanism affirms the human animal system as a complex assemblage inextricably embedded in a dense network of intersecting organic and technological structures and systems. Like ethics of care philosophy, which regards humans as embedded and embodied, as always relational and interdependent, posthumanism goes further to expose the complex, rhizomatic networks that embrace and bind subjects not only to their species, but to the dynamic micro- and macro-biomes that envelop and connect all things. In Curious Kin, I employ “posthuman” to communicate this tangle and its attendant contingency and precarity. Though many of the philosophers and critics I draw from avoid or even reject the term,¹⁴ I use posthumanism as shorthand for a wide range of critical perspectives united by their skepticism toward anthropocentric humanist taxonomies and the gendered, racialized, bounded individualized “Man” they have begot. Like “care,” “posthumanism” is a contested term, one used to signify differing, even opposing perspectives: while some posthumanists are committed to critiquing humanist ontologies, others seek to reify and enhance the human via technological innovation (for the sake of clarity, the former are often called “critical posthumanists” and the latter “transhumanists”).¹⁵ Broadly speaking, “critical posthumanism”—what I will refer to simply as posthumanism throughout this book—involves a commitment to the “decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates” (Wolfe xvi), an overturning of anthropocentrism that ¹⁴ Donna Haraway is one of the more influential scholars to express her reservations about the term (Staying with the Trouble 32). She prefers to figure entanglement as compost piles, “humusities instead of humanities” (32). My reading of posthumanism includes Haraway’s compost visions, her profoundly interdependent model of being that sees “[o]ntologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings” (12–13). Posthuman care is a variety of the “intertwined worldings” she describes, a form of ontologically significant contact that is as close and transformative as the many interactions of the compost heap. ¹⁵ Transhumanism treats the malleability of the human body as an opportunity for enhancements that would allow subjects to transcend the limitations of embodiment. As the “Transhumanist Declaration” explains, the connected goals of “overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and [ultimately] our confinement to planet Earth” (54) motivate transhumanist philosophy and innovation. As such, “while recognising the human body as technologically malleable, the transhuman position ultimately reinforces the liberal humanist idea of the sovereign subject being characterised by self-determination, individuality and self-mastery, and engaged in projects of selfimprovement, self-actualisation and enhancement” (DeFalco and Dolezal forthcoming). In aspiring to invulnerability and human perfection, transhumanist philosophy and praxis shares little with the posthumanist approaches that motivate this study.

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seeks to displace the human from his (invariably male, white, and heterosexual) position as an ontological and epistemological touchstone. Posthumanism exposes the human as exclusive, unstable and unreliable, a socio-political, economic, ethical concept masquerading as a biological category. As Braidotti explains, “Humanism’s restricted notion of what counts as the human is one of the keys to understand how we got to a posthuman turn at all” (The Posthuman 16). My interpretation of the posthuman draws from this dissatisfaction with the human. I use “posthuman” and its cognates (posthumanism, posthumanist, etc.) to reference a varied and complex terrain of theory, culture, art, and activism devoted to disrupting the human as a coherent, stable ontology. Animal affects, non-normative materialities, object agencies, queer subjectivities—posthumanist scholarship explores these and other more-than-human phenomena that expose human exceptionality as a destructive illusion that props up exploitative hierarchies of being and denies human animality, thereby obscuring human ecological embeddedness and embodied vulnerability (Braidotti, The Posthuman 13–16). Posthumanism does not promote the crossing of boundaries between human and nonhuman elements, but rather exposes how the human is always already—to use a preferred posthumanist phrasing—implicated in the nonhuman, and vice versa: in Hayles’s succinct summation, “we have always been posthuman” (291). Taking their cues from poststructuralist theory, critical posthumanists demonstrate how the human is dependent on the nonhuman for its categorical existence, interrogating the structural boundaries and distinctions used to shore up the illusion of human exceptionalism. As Wolfe explains, “[p]osthumanism isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself ” (xv). In their shared commitment to treating human animals as embodied, embedded, and encumbered, care philosophy and posthumanism can be read as companion philosophies grounded in materiality, vulnerability, and the myriad entanglements of interdependent being. In short, I employ “posthumanism” to highlight the entangled, embodied, processual, that is, posthuman, nature of existence that the “unitary subject of Humanism” (Braidotti, The Posthuman 26) obscures. Taking a cue from Braidotti, I regard posthumanism as an “eco-philosophy of multiple belongings” and the posthuman “as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally different, but still grounded and accountable. Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of

20        accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building” (The Posthuman 49). Though the posthuman is frequently associated with technological innovation, figures and images from science and speculative fiction, such as cyborgs and robots are not necessarily posthumanist. As Ursula Heise explains, speculative depictions of posthuman others do not necessarily problematize humanist perspectives based on a privileged account of “human uniqueness” (506).¹⁶ This distinction between the posthuman as a description of boundary-blurring entities and experiences, and posthumanism as a politicized form of critique is a helpful reminder that not every fictional mutant or human-digital interface offers an affirmative vision of entangled becoming. Nonetheless, while I appreciate Heise’s carefully parsed distinction, I think there is something to be gained from an approach that considers and engages the messy complexity and contradictions of many posthuman representations. Curious Kin is devoted to examining ambivalent and conflicted representations of the posthuman. Inconsistency, contradiction, complexity, and ambivalence are endemic to care, and posthumanist theory can help contextualize and interpret such inconsistency within a wider framework of onto-epistemological entanglement and contingency. Informed by new materialism, affect and queer theory, critical race theory and more, my theorization of posthuman care treats posthumanism as a large, fertile, productively conflicted discursive territory.¹⁷ I invoke posthumanism as a potentially anti-discriminatory philosophy while cognizant of its persistent Eurocentrism, a problem I explore further in Chapter 4. I understand the posthuman as tentacular, unfinished, and materialist; it is affecting and affected, precarious and, crucially, relational. The posthuman involves a “re-distribution of difference and identity” that dissolves hierarchical categorization both within and beyond the categorical human (Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston 10). It dispenses with the idea of human animals as innately superior and acknowledges our ecologically, biologically, technologically networked position as interdependent, affective beings. In what follows, I theorize posthuman care as a productively inclusive concept able to encapsulate the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviors, attachments, dependencies, both visible and invisible, that produce and sustain existence in more-than-

¹⁶ For example, according to Heise, because Oryx and Crake remains “committed to a conventional humanism that values high culture as the true indicator of human achievement” (507), it cannot be considered posthumanist. ¹⁷ The work of Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Zakiyyah Jackson, Pramod Nayar, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and many others have shaped the version of posthumanism at the heart of my inquiry.

:     

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human worlds. Posthuman care is trans-corporeal and trans-disciplinary; it conceptualizes frequently overlooked, denigrated, minimized, and pathologized contact zones that are in fact ubiquitous, sustaining, formative and transformative.

Imagining Posthuman Care Curious Kin draws together cultural productions, primarily narrative fictions, that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds. It places contemporary literary and cinematic approaches to posthuman companionship within the frame of numerous critical discourses in order to propose a dynamic model of care that addresses all creatures, human and more-than, as mutually constituting, vulnerable, embodied, and embedded beings. My emphasis on representation facilitates an attention to specificity, detail, and context that tempers the universalizing tendencies of ethics of care and some critical posthumanism. My approach is premised on my conviction that fictional narratives—in this case, film, television, novels, and short stories—provide the context and particularity necessary for interrogating the ethical potential of nonhuman care without recourse to abstractions and generalizations. Speculative film, television, and literature can imagine alternative ways of being and relating in their narrative specificity, their dramatization of situated relations and contextualized more-than-human dynamics that envision the problems and possibilities of posthuman care. This is not to say that posthuman care is a future phenomenon; it is always already happening to, with, and around us, most often in quiet, unremarkable ways that are easy to overlook. In their depiction of posthuman affinities, such as caring relations between humans and artificial beings, fictional texts can serve as catalysts for the theorization of care in its more-than-human complexities. In her discussion of the ethical, material, and affective possibilities of touch, Karen Barad remarks on the generative potential of poetic modes of expressing and exploring materiality, finding herself: increasingly . . . drawn to poetics as a mode of expression, not in order to move away from thinking rigorously but, on the contrary, to lure us toward the possibilities of engaging the force of imagination in its materiality. The force of imagination puts us in touch with the possibilities for sensing the insensible, the indeterminate . . . . Or rather, it brings us into an appreciation

22        of, helps us touch, the imaginings of materiality itself in its ongoing thought experiments with being/becoming. (“On Touching” 216)

Like Barad, I believe poetic language and imaginary narratives provide unique vantages for interpreting experiences, in this case, relational experiences that are largely excluded from theoretical assessments of care and ethics. I have collected contemporary, that is, twenty-first-century texts that imagine unconventional caregiving that not only challenges the anthropocentric assumptions of humanist care models, but also frequently offers provocative alternatives that convey the messy complexities of posthuman care. My approach asserts that literary and visual representations are at once aesthetic gestures and models of ideas, as well as imaginative interpretive discourses in dialogue with the complex political and philosophical debates in contemporary culture and critical theory. Curious Kin offers an eclectic contemporary cultural archive that conveys the breadth of the cultural imagining of more-than-human care and the capacity of this imagining to shape the critical discourse of posthuman care. While analyses of posthuman relations tend to be siloed according to their focus on creaturely or artificial life,¹⁸ my exploration treats a wide range of posthuman commitments, including, but not limited to nonhuman animal and robot care. These wide ranging texts (television, film, novels, short stories, prose poetry) ask readers and viewers to imagine what it means to care for and about, or, even more controversially, be cared for by myriad more-than-human creatures. Fiction engages in openended argumentation liberated from the restraints of existing worlds, existing relations. It illustrates arguments in its exploration of various perspectives and scenarios. If, as poet and literary critic Susan Stewart claims, “realistic genres do not mirror everyday life; they mirror its hierarchization of information. They are mimetic in the stance they take toward this organization and hence are mimetic of values, not of the material world” (26), the speculative fictions I engage are funhouse mirrors, both exaggerating and minimizing existing hierarchies and values in their construction of imagined worlds. Though not all of the cultural creations I analyze are generically speculative, they all, to

¹⁸ See, for example, the plethora of studies that explore animal poetics and the aesthetics of creaturely life, on the one hand (Baker 2001; DeKoven 2009; Fiamengo 2007; Kuzniar 2006; Malamud 2003; McHugh 2011; Parry 2017; Pick 2011; Rothfels 2002; Wolfe 2003), or AI narratives, biotechnological tales, and/or robot fictions, on the other (Cave, Dihal, and Dillon 2020; Hampton 2015; Kakoudaki 2014; Rhee 2018; Vint 2007, 2021). These studies have been enormously helpful for demonstrating the socio-political and ethical significance of more-than-human representation. My own study draws these various strands together, considering creaturely, artificial and inanimate relations concurrently.

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varying degrees, imagine modes of care that in some way destabilize or rupture anthropocentric conventions of care. Depicting boundaries in the midst of their destabilization, these narratives of robot, AI, dog, clone, bioengineered hybrid animal, alien, and mineral care urge audiences to consider how care can and might function in more-than-human worlds. These fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of particular, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Chapter 1 examines artificial carers, exploring the debates and controversies surrounding the emergence of care robots alongside fictional speculations of human/robot companionship. It explores the capacity of nonhumans to be involved in so-called real care relations, interrogating discourses of legitimacy and authenticity and how those discourses are mobilized in treatments of posthuman affective relations. In short, the chapter investigates what and whose care counts as real and how robot care can and might affect such assessments. In their depictions of robot care, Louise Hall’s novel Speak (2015), the film Robot and Frank (2012), and the television program Real Humans (2012–2014) interrogate the conventional distinctions drawn between authentic and simulated care and the common assumption that good care is necessarily human care. These texts and discourses offer a vision of care that regards vulnerability as the normative effect of posthuman embodiment, as opposed to an anomalous state that can be overcome or corrected via neoliberal practice. Critics of care robots frequently decry their lack of human touch, implying there is something special about human-to-human tactile contact, an ineffable something that a robot is incapable of supplying. Chapter 2 explores these claims and the haptic dimensions of posthuman care via an examination of imagined feral, alien relations. It explores the neuroanatomy, ethics, and politics of touch alongside fictions of posthuman haptic care at the margins of human “civilized” society, care in ruins and dumps, remote jungles and razed forests, in dilapidated houses and desolate highlands. In Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy (2009), Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009), and the film Under the Skin (2013), narratives of feral children and alien encounters exaggerate and amplify the mundane, everyday posthuman tactile interactions that form the fabric of embodied life, demonstrating how the relationality and openendedness of touch creates affirmative possibilities for becoming alongside risks of violence, aggression, and domination. Chapter 3 continues to explore fictions of posthuman care on the margins, investigating care between marginally human, disposable biotechnological

24        creatures. If, as waste studies scholars suggest, waste is matter deemed undeserving of attention or care, caring for discarded matter can be a form of resistance in the most basic sense, a refusal to abide by sociocultural norms of affective attention and ethical concern. Chapter 3 explores the ethical and political significance of disposable matter and what happens—or might happen—when one treats waste as worthy of care. In dialogue with waste and discard studies, queer animacies, and critical race studies, the chapter analyzes two novels—Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2004) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003)—that imagine biotechnological bodies engineered for extraction and disposal. These texts explore the consequences of caring for and about discarded bodies, highlighting the political significance of posthuman care as a disturbance of the humanist valuations that perpetuate colonial hierarchies of matter. Chapter 4 continues the discussion of kinship on the margins initiated in Chapter 3 but complicates the critiques of humanism offered in Ishiguro and Atwood, asking how one can advocate for a radical decentering of the human via a horizontalizing of the ontological plane without trivializing or undermining the ongoing work of scholars and activists struggling to affirm the moral significance of minoritized lives. If all matter matters, what of the incredible efforts of people of color, disabled people, and others to be recognized as fully human? Can posthumanist scholars focus our collective efforts on dismantling the human without jeopardizing ongoing struggles for equality? Chapter 4 considers these questions in relation to Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), which refuses spatial metaphors of centers and margins in its depictions of Black lives and nonhuman bodies. The chapter explores the racialization of disposability and the speculative rejoinder offered by Ward’s novel of Black posthuman care. In declining to represent generic, hegemonic “humans,” the novel offers a vision of horizontalism in which diverse, discarded matter relates and feels and affects. Though the reader is told these relating bodies are discards, the vibrancy and care within and between them challenges conventions of ethical insignificance. Ward’s vision of posthuman vitality and care offers a significant challenge to periphery/ center, inhuman/human binaries that persist even within critical theories of the posthuman. In the book’s conclusion, I address the formative, but unstable category “life” and its role in determining ethical significance and shaping obligations of care. Examining Louise Erdrich’s “The Stone” (2019), which imagines care beyond (biocentric) life, the conclusion considers the degree to which a posthuman theory of care demands a critical re-evaluation of “life” that

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moves beyond anthropocentric humanist definitions to register the relational import of posthumous posthuman being. Erdrich’s story depicts inorganic forms of animacy and agency that facilitate a more-than-human intimacy largely alien to Anglo-European readers. As Erdrich has explained in interview, the Ojibwe cosmologies that motivate her story involve a capacious understanding of life, relation, and kinship, one able to recognize that “[a] stone is, in its own way, a living thing,” as she writes in “The Stone.” Indigenous critiques of humanist episto-ontologies are an important reminder of the historical and political specificity of anthropocentric models of life and care. For example, in their essay, “Making Kin with the Machines,” Indigenous multimedia artists and academics Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite argue that the prioritization of human flourishing in AI research and design is a misstep that ignores the entanglement of creation. “Man is neither height nor centre of creation,” they write in the essay’s opening, ironically echoing Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The essay proceeds to demonstrate how anthropocentric approaches to AI like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’s (IEEE), which promotes “design guidelines for the development of artificial intelligence around human well-being” (emphasis Lewis et al.’s), reproduce “Western rationalist traditions” in their insistent centering of the human. The co-authors explicate an alternative, Indigenous perspective on nonhuman relations, one that prioritizes “ways of knowing and speaking that acknowledge kinship networks that extend to animals and plants, wind and rocks, mountains and oceans.” Indigenous philosophies comfortably incorporate nonhuman, including artificial life in their cosmological understanding of being: Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear observes, “the human brain is a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations [ . . . ] the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.” As we manufacture more machines with increasing levels of sentient-like behaviour, we must consider how such entities fit within the kin-network, and in doing so, address the stubborn Enlightenment conceit . . . that we should prioritize human flourishing. (Lewis et al.)

Curious Kin considers texts that shift the dial, so to speak (if ever so slightly), alerting readers to alternative modes of relating and being that challenge the entrenched human exceptionalism of Anglo-European episto-ontologies. While these texts may not necessarily align with the Indigenous cosmologies

26        described above, they convey curiosity about more-than-human relationality that continues the “dial shifting” work Leroy Little Bear describes in their depictions of unconventional connections and intimacies that challenge the implicit anthropocentrism of socio-cultural conventions and philosophies of care. In Hayles’s famous articulation, “we have always been posthuman,” our bodies and lives always already hybridized and entangled by technologies old and new. In Curious Kin I ask who is this “we” and how might “we” extend our awareness beyond our own posthuman condition to consider, in a thoughtful, sustained fashion, the more-than-human worlds that surround, entangle, indeed, are “us,” whomever or whatever that may be.¹⁹ And, moreover, how might we convert this awareness—of embeddedness, entanglement, relationality—into forms of care that resists human exceptionalism and challenge the narrowness of humanist definitions of bodies that matter? Curious Kin pursues my hunch that fiction can help start this transformation, can help those, like me, who are invested in countering disposability with an inclusive, enabling vision of care that makes room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviors, attachments, and dependencies (both visible and invisible) that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.

¹⁹ I discuss the “we” of posthumanist theory and care (and its implicit whiteness) in further detail in Chapter 4 and the Conclusion.

1 Care Robots and Affective Legitimacy Robot Encounters I first discovered Paro, a small, animatronic seal designed to provide companionship and comfort, in 2013 (see Fig. 1). I was in the process of expanding my research on literature and care to include nonhuman varieties, including robot care. I looked at pictures online, watched videos, read press releases, reviews and opinion pieces about the fuzzy, mechanical creature, with its gleaming black eyes and long lashes, its endearing coos and nods that respond to speech and caress. Beseeching cuteness is crucial to Paro’s unprecedented success (and its sinister deception, according to critics—more on that later). Though old as social robots go, Paro continues to attract buyers and users. Designed in the 1990s and first exhibited to the public in 2001, Paros have been commercially available for over a decade, and are currently used in a range of care facilities throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong.¹ Nonetheless, it wasn’t until 2016 that I finally managed to meet Paro in the flesh, so to speak, at the University of Sheffield’s robotics lab. The experience was perplexing. My robot reading and viewing had led me to expect something awe inspiring, a sense of vitality, a deceptive simulation of affectionate life, but in fact the interaction felt mundane, even a bit flat. Granted, my work on speculative fiction and film may have unrealistically inflated my expectations regarding robot capacities and effects, but my relative indifference to the robots I met in Sheffield surprised me. My encounter with Paro and several other newer social robots, including NAO (see Fig. 2), Pepper (see Fig. 3) and MiRo (see Fig. 4), made the apocalyptic projections and transhumanist fantasies depicted in newspaper headlines, editorials, blogs, and social media seem overblown.² The affective dimensions of the

¹ See, for example, http://www.parorobots.com/users.asp for a list of North American users. As Yu et. al. explain, Paro is the most widely used and studied eldercare robot, leading the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to certify it as a “neurological therapeutic device” in 2009 (2) (https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4433493/). ² For example: “ ‘Care-bots’ for the Elderly Are Dangerous, Warns Artificial Intelligence Professor” (Knapton 2016); “A Robot Carer? No Thanks—We Still Need the Human Touch” (Dakers 2015); “Robots Should Be Given Legal Status as ‘Electronic Persons’ and Must Be Fitted with ‘Kill Switches’ to Prevent a Terminator-Style Rise of the Machines, Warn EU MEPs” (Al-Othman 2017); “Would You

Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Amelia DeFalco, Oxford University Press. © Amelia DeFalco 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.003.0002

28       

Fig. 1 Paro robot (image courtesy of Sheffield Robotics)

Fig. 2 Nao robot (© David Lindsay—photosbydavid.co.uk)

Let a Robot Take Care of Your Mother?” (Jackson 2019); “The Robots Are Coming. Prepare for Trouble” (Deming 2020); “Robots to Be Introduced in UK Care Homes to Allay Loneliness—That’s Inhuman” (Fay Bound Alberti, The Conversation 2020).

    

Fig. 3 Pepper robot (© David Lindsay—photosbydavid.co.uk)

Fig. 4 MiRo robot (image courtesy of Consequential Robotics)

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30        machines I encountered were limited at best. Their responses to my attempts at social interaction were often awkward and delayed—robotic, one might say. I realize that my neurotypicality may have made me a less than ideal respondent to Paro; I’m more inclined to engage with animals, especially human animals. The social robots I met in Sheffield were amusing, but none triggered any sustained engagement. I was at Sheffield Robotics as part of a collaborative research project on disability, augmentation, and the posthuman and all of us meeting the robots for the first time laughed at their mimicry and novelty, ascribing them personalities, affects, and motivations, but no one seemed especially transfixed by any of the machines we encountered.³ How, I wondered, could Paro, a motorized stuffed animal, be associated with the dehumanizing “robot revolution” that has become such a popular bugbear in popular media? Paro is part of a growing field of social robots being designed and used for affective support and assistance. These technologies are often colloquially referred to as “care robots,” though some roboticists express dissatisfaction with the amorphous term, which can be used to refer to a wide range of technological objects designed or used for care (Vallor; van Wynsberghe).⁴ Nonetheless, I use “care robot” since its inclusivity—a care robot is any robot used for care—suits my inquiry into cultural, ethical and political implications of nonhuman care. The kinds of technologies termed care robots reflect normative assumptions about the meanings and functions of care, including who needs and deserves care and what activities and behaviors constitute care. Care robots are often geared towards neurodivergent and older users, especially those with cognitive impairments like dementia (Broekens, Heerink, and Rosendal; Borenstein and Pearson). Paro, MiRo, JustoCat, and other robots are designed to give care by receiving it; they are meant to touch and be ³ Another member of our research group, Stuart Murray, has also written about the team’s experience at Sheffield Robotics, describing a “disappointing” encounter with a humanoid robot, Pepper, during our March 2017 visit (74). Murray reflects on the tension between robot expectations—“the desire we have for robot technologies to deliver on their boundless promise, for objects like Pepper to really be a companion friend, reading emotions and developing friendships, interacting seamlessly with people as they bring their excitement and needs to her/it/him”—and the limited capacities of the actual robots we encountered (emphasis in original 75–76). ⁴ Definitions of “care robot” tend toward the tautological, describing care robots as robots designed and/or used for care. For example: “Carebots are robots designed for use in home, hospital, or other settings to assist in, support, or provide care for the sick, disabled, young, elderly or otherwise vulnerable persons” (Vallor 252). Aimee van Wynsberghe’s definition is broader, incorporating not only robots designed for care, but robots “used by either or both the care-provider or the care-receiver directly, and used in a care context like the hospital, nursing home, hospice or home setting” (Healthcare Robots: Ethics, Design and Implementation 62). Other generic terms exist, such as “welfare technologies,” defined as “technology that improves the lives of those in need” (Johansson-Pajala et al.—online publication, no page numbers).

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touched, talked to, and, sometimes, to talk (or squeak, as the case may be), providing a sense of companionship and intimacy similar to the intimacy provided by companion animals. Indeed, some of these robots are designed with the benefits of animal assisted interventions (AAI) in mind, seeking to provide similar effects for those who, for a variety of reasons (safety, health, institutional restrictions, etc.), are unable to cohabitate with animals.⁵ (This connection between robots and nonhuman animals is a subject to which I will return.) Care robots, like Paro, that are designed to engage users’ embodied affects— to touch, and be touched, in the various tactile and affective meanings of the term⁶—often provoke concern, even anxiety in academics, journalists, and activists who worry that robot care could easily exacerbate, rather than mitigate human isolation, marginalization, even obsolescence, a perspective formulated on the assumption that real or legitimate social, embodied caring contact is definitely and definitively human. Indeed, the ethics of human/robot intimacies and their potential to blur the boundaries of the human is one of the most prominent posthuman topics across academic scholarship, news, and popular media. Discussions of robot futures often veer into fantasies, or nightmares, of human/machine intimacies that transgress species boundaries, conjuring unseemly attachments that parody the love and care typically reserved for human relationships. Care robots are often recruited as evidence of the dangers of robots and accompanying developments in AI, the looming “robot revolution” (Johnson)⁷ or “robot apocalypse” (Salge) that, according to some, poses an existential threat to the human species (Bostrom).⁸ These phrases have formidable affective power, especially when yoked to iconic ⁵ According to the manufacturers website, Paro “allows the documented benefits of animal therapy to be administered to patients in environments such as hospitals and extended care facilities where live animals present treatment or logistical difficulties” (http://www.parorobots.com/). ⁶ In his book The Senses of Touch, Mark Paterson differentiates between “immediate” and “deep” or metaphorical touching, that is, between “cutaneous touch,” which makes subjects aware of self and object simultaneously, and the “special limits of our lived body,” and the metaphorical, affective implications of the term (as expressed in the phrase, “I was touched by” such and such, on the other [2–3]). Robots like Paro seek to touch and be touched by their users both cutaneously and emotionally, or “metaphorically,” in Paterson’s terms. ⁷ Johnson connects this popular sentiment—“When the robot revolution arrives, we all know the plot: Smarter machines will supersede human intelligence and outwit us, enslave us and destroy us”— with care robots: “If people turn out to be easily swayed by robots, after all, the coming world filled with robot co-workers, caregivers and friends could hand immense power to marketers, rogue programmers or even just clumsy reasoning by robots.” ⁸ Nick Bostrom is one of the leading figures raising the alarm about the existential risk of AI. Portraits in the popular press describe Bostrom as silicon valley’s “prophet of doom” whose warnings have captured the attention of Bill Gates and Elon Musk, among others (Adams). Headlines like Adams’s, “Artificial Intelligence: ‘We’re Like Children Playing with a Bomb,’ ” convey the anxious tenor of Bostrom’s concerns.

32        images of fictional predatory robots. It’s not surprising that tabloids like the Daily Mail use images of the Terminator or Robocop to illustrate their jeremiads against robots, depending on familiar but imaginary robot villains to trigger apprehension in readers (Al-Othman). The fictional images and narratives circulating in the popular imaginary shape public conceptions of what a robot is (and should and shouldn’t be) and what it can or should do. Fiction not only influences the reception of robots; Teresa Heffernan has demonstrated the crucial role science and speculative fiction play in shaping the development of actual robots. As she explains, it is commonplace for engineers and designers to cite particular fictional entities, from C-3PO and R2-D2 to Rosey the Robot and Johnny Five in discussions of the development of their inventions (“The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary” 74).⁹ However, as Heffernan makes clear, developers are often disinclined to attend to the nuance of the fictional representations that inspire them, conveniently overlooking the dystopic outcomes and ethical transgressions that typically characterize, for example, the iconic robot fictions of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick (“Fiction Writes Back”). Heffernan stakes out a more ambivalent role for fiction, arguing “that fiction provocatively reminds science that it does not passively serve ‘evolution’ or an ‘idea’, it also creates and shapes worlds; and, in doing so, fiction also disrupts the linear, instrumental thrust of these fields” (“The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary” 67). In this chapter, I explore the disruptive potential of fictions of robot care, not only for the kinds of scientific fantasies of progress that Heffernan identifies, but also for larger debates circulating (both inside and outside of academia) around the ethics and politics of care robots. Many of the positions adopted by participants in these debates depend on the assumed transparency of care as an ethical concept, overlooking its complexity and the myriad, at times conflicting, behaviors and affects it can denote. This simplification of care coincides with anthropocentrism, the treatment of so-called real care as the exclusive domain of human animals. Care and the human become bound together in a circular equation in which real care = human care and human care = real care. As a result, determining who deserves to give and receive care also determines who counts as human.¹⁰ These polysemantic terms, “care” and “human,”

⁹ Heffernan is not alone in tracing the (often mutual) influence of science and fiction. In his book tracing how popular culture, particularly science fiction, has influenced technological development, Daniel Dinello argues, “[t]he best science fiction extrapolates from known technology and projects a vision of the future against which we can evaluate present technology and its direction” (5). ¹⁰ This ontological power is provocatively revealed in disability activist responses to gene editing, euthanasia, and selective termination. It is not only the tyranny of the normative that leads many to fear

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whose ethical and ontological significance are subject to ongoing debate, are too often treated as singular and allied. This collapsing of care and the human reproduces human exceptionalism in its delegitimizing of more-thanhuman relations as unreal or inauthentic. This intertwining of care and the human means that questions of care are not only ethical, political, and economic—they are ontological. Though normative, “real” care is synonymous with the human, human care work is poorly valued in economic terms. The evaluation of care is shaped by the neoliberal practice of lauding the idea of care as ethically invaluable while simultaneously devaluing the labor of care as economically unproductive. This produces an ironic doubleness in which care is at once essential and disposable. Care work is predominantly the domain of society’s minoritized populations: women, immigrants, people of color.¹¹ It is, typically, poorly paid (nannies, personal aids, caretakers, personal support workers, etc.) or unpaid (familial carers) and this economic denigration of care work, the lip service paid to its ethical value notwithstanding, makes it an ideal candidate for roboticization. Recalling the etymology of “robot” and its connection to slave labor,¹² it is no surprise that robotic care is poised to step into the minoritized breach of contemporary care work. Such technologies are produced within and for capitalist systems seeking to diminish the economic burden of unproductive bodies on the productive individuals who must support them. Viewed from this perspective, the development of care robots and other assistive technologies manifests a neoliberal outsourcing of caring responsibility, yet another way that already stigmatized, vulnerable bodies are treated as undeserving of good or real care, that is, human care. While I am sympathetic with this critique of care robots and other technologies designed to solve the Global North’s care deficit, such critiques often unhelpfully that the “new genomics will make the same mistakes that old eugenics made in first half of twentieth century” (Tong 159); the duties and excessive burdens of care associated with certain disabilities can make some lives appear too demanding, too expensive, too difficult to support and sustain. ¹¹ Feminist labor scholar Arlie Russell Hochschild has examined the socio-political dimensions of care work at length, coining the term “global care chain” to describe the pattern of migration that brings women from the Global South to the Global North, where they provide care for privileged families. These caregivers must often leave their own children behind, leading to care deficits in their home countries. As Hochschild puts it: “Global capitalism affects whatever it touches, and it touches virtually everything including what I call global care chains—a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring” (Hochschild “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value” 250). See, also, Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich’s collection Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, which explores this phenomenon at length. ¹² The term first appears in Karl Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots and was based on the Czech term robota, which translates to “servitude” or “forced labor.” This negative association continues into the present day as robots are generally tasked with performing the “ ‘three Ds,’ that is, jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous” (Lin 4).

34        replicate the hierarchical, atomizing, anthropocentric epistemologies that produce vulnerability as anomalous and detrimental in the first place. As tempting as it may be to dismiss care robots as the manifestation of neoliberal, late capitalist outsourcing of social responsibility, I believe there is more at stake in the design, engineering, reception, use, not to mention imagining of care robots. While care robots can represent a capitulation to neoliberal valuations, robot fictions are able to invoke their disruptive potential, their threat to human exceptionalism and humanist hierarchies. In what follows, I consider the implications of care robots and the political and philosophical debates they inspire alongside robot fictions¹³ that highlight and complicate associations between humane care and the human.

Care Robots and Their Discontents For many developers, care robots are a technological solution to a demographic problem.¹⁴ In countries from the Global North, especially Japan where PARO was designed, low birth rates combined with increasing life expectancy contribute to the paucity of available caregivers. Japan’s demographics are notably imbalanced. Senior citizens currently make up 25% of the population (Kyodo), which places a strain on the care labor market, making robot caregivers an especially attractive technological intervention. In North America and Europe there is also a growing need for care for the older adults: in Canada, projections suggest 31% of the population will be 60 or over by 2050 (“Age Watch”), whereas American projections suggest 20.9% of the ¹³ Other examples include the films After Yang (2022), Big Hero 6 (2014), Ex Machina (2014), Zoe (2018), and the television programs Westworld (2016–) and Black Mirror (2011–), especially the series 2 episode “I’ll Be Right Back” from 2013, as well as the novels All Systems Red (2017) by Martha Wells (part of the Murderbot Diaries series, 2017–2020), Autonomous (2017) by Annalee Newitz, and Ancillary Justice (2013) by Ann Leckie (part of the Imperial Radch trilogy, 2013–2015). Across a range of forms, genres, and perspectives, these diverse fictions explore the consequences of human/ robot intimacies for “the meaning of the human,” according to their promotional materials and reviews. This interpretational similitude rehearses a familiar trope in robot studies, namely the assumption that robots (like many more-than-human entities) highlight ontological categories even as they confuse and disrupt them. ¹⁴ Care robot scholarship in robotics journals frequently employ this formula in justifying their research and development plans. The introduction to a 2020 essay in the International Journal of Social Robotics is a good example of the programmatic invocation of demographics: A rapidly growing number of older adults addresses a demographic challenge. As a result of aging and increased life expectancy, the relative population of older adults in Western Europe will increase. . . . This brings an increased need for health care services, but the number of people available to provide and finance these services is decreasing. Welfare technology, referring to all technology that improves the lives of those in need, is considered to be one solution to meet these challenges. (Johansson-Pajala et al.)

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population will be over 65 by 2050 (West et al. 5). Demographers have devised the “dependency ratio” to quantify the difference between (potential) dependents 65 and older and working-age members of the population. All member states of the European Union (along with Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, and other countries of the Global North) have aging populations and as a result, the need for care is steadily growing. The European Commission’s 2015 Ageing Report predicts “the demographic old-age dependency ratio . . . [will] increase from 27.8% to 50.1% in the EU as a whole” from 2013–2060. Although dependency ratios do not distinguish between older adults who don’t yet need care and those who do, even prominent ethics of care scholar Eva Kittay employs dependency ratios as evidence of a growing demand for care that governments need to address (“Dependency, Difference” 448). Many in aging studies have drawn attention to the risks posed by scaremongering demographics, which threaten to collapse aging into impairment, and are frequently used to exacerbate intergenerational resentment and ageist policies.¹⁵ Nonetheless, demographic predictions alert those of us committed to equitable aging and care to the kind of political, economic, and technological developments (and arguments) that are becoming increasingly prominent and persuasive. In short, demographic predictions highlight the likelihood of a “care deficit,” a significant gap between the demand for and availability of dependency workers that many robot developers are hoping to fill. Some studies suggest robot care offers health benefits: it can improve mood and immune system response, diminish loneliness and stress in elderly users, with some studies even suggesting robot interaction might decrease symptoms of dementia (Broekens, Heerink, and Rosendal 98–100). In addition, robot ethicists have delineated hypothetical benefits for human caregivers, suggesting that robots might diminish the strain of care work for their human counterparts, a respite that could mitigate the inferior caregiving that can result from overwork or incompetence (Borenstein and Pearson; Sharkey and Sharkey; Sparrow and Sparrow). Nonetheless, as care robots emerge to address the Global North’s care deficit, so does apprehension about the prospect of robots taking over traditionally human caregiving roles. Care robots challenge humanistic models of care that regard sociality, affects, companionship—the various aspects of care—as distinctly, or even exclusively human and many critics are wary of this intrusion of machines into human intimacy. As Sherry ¹⁵ For a discussion of stigmatizing hyperbolic metaphors, like the “silver tsunami,” that emphasize aging demography in ways that exploit and reassert the prioritization of independent individuals legitimized by their capitalist productivity, see Andrea Charise’s “ ‘Let the Reader Think of the Burden’: Old Age and the Crisis of Capacity.”

36        Turkle explains, “[w]e are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture” (11), a predisposition that, she argues, makes us vulnerable to technological attachment. Turkle is wary of the “simulations of love” offered by “sociable robots,” especially at the “robotic moment” (10), when people are emotionally and philosophically “read[y]” to connect with robots as friends and companions. “We don’t seem to care,” Turkle argues, “what these artificial intelligences ‘know’ or ‘understand’ of the human moments we might ‘share’ with them. At the robotic moment, the performance of connection seems connection enough. We are poised to attach to the inanimate without prejudice. The phrase ‘technological promiscuity’ comes to mind” (9–10). Turkle’s phrasing—in a documentary she called Paro an “inappropriate use of technology”—implies that there is something immoral or even perverse about relationships between humans and machines. The specter of robotic relations challenges species boundaries. Indeed, not only is PARO a machine able to effect human affect, it is a distinctly animalinflected machine. Turkle’s comments echo the discomfort that “excessively” intimate human/companion animal relationships can inspire. This closeness appears “inappropriate” due to the “inevitable disjointedness and nonsimilarity” between humans and what Alice Kuzniar calls “extimate species” (8). By “extimacy” she refers to “that which is exterior to one yet intimately proximate. At the same time, it is precisely the intimate nature of this affiliation that remains unspoken, in fact, at times unutterable, verging on a social taboo” (Kuzniar 8).¹⁶ Concerns about relationships and identities that appear to transgress species boundaries raise the specter of queer, destabilizing intimacies that cast doubt on the very condition of the human, a phenomenon I explore further in Chapter 2. In The Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway highlights the parallels between cyborgs and companion species (4), describing cyborgs as “Junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species” (11). While Haraway finds such queer families hopeful, especially in her more recent book, Staying with the Trouble, the prospect of robot kinship frequently inspires the kind of skepticism, even dread Turkle expresses. Even those ethicists who acknowledge the potential advantages of robot care are cautious in their optimism, warning about potential deleterious effects that echo Turkles’s misgivings. For example, Jason Borenstein and Yvonne Pearson suggest that although caregiving robots could help abolish obligatory, often begrudging human care and provide relief for overworked and exhausted caregivers (“Robot Caregivers: Ethical Issues” 257–258), “it is crucial to ¹⁶ While Kuzniar’s book is focused on a particular extimate species—the dog—her term is applicable to care robots, which can inspire similarly “unseemly” attachments in their human companions.

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emphasize that no matter what benefits the technology is perceived to have, a robot should be viewed as a complement to human caregivers, and not as a replacement for them” (256). As Linda and Robert Sparrow point out, “it is naive to think that the development of robots to take over tasks currently performed by humans in caring roles would not lead to a reduction of human contact for those people being cared for” (Sparrow and Sparrow 152). In other words, as much as robots might alleviate the burdens and strain of caregiving, there is an equal risk that such assistive technologies will reduce, even eliminate human contact in vulnerable populations, particularly older and impaired adults. Robot ethicists Amanda and Noel Sharkey propose that robots could produce a “paradoxical” situation in which improving one aspect of care produces deficits in another area (277–278). Health care workers have expressed similar concerns over care robots’ potential ability to replace or marginalize human caregivers. For example, an article appearing in the Wall Street Journal in 2017 describes the controversy PARO has inspired and the opposition some American doctors have mounted against the use of robots for affective care, the fear that, as one geriatrician puts it, “if we wind up with nursing homes full of baby-seal robots, the robots will be trying to fulfill the relationship piece of caregiving, while the humans are running around changing the beds and cooking the food” (Rooney). As the doctor makes clear, he has no objections to robots performing what he terms “mundane tasks associated with caregiving, such as vacuuming or doing the dishes”;¹⁷ however, he draws the line at affective technologies. In other words, robots should remain true to their etymological roots, focusing on drudgery, not care. In what follows, I explore three fictional narratives of robot care in a range of media—the 2012 film Robot and Frank, the television program Real ¹⁷ One wonders how much insight this doctor has into the day-to-day challenges of the kind of caregiving he describes, that is, the tedious labor of household chores, or the often exhausting emotional demands of attentive companionship. His concern that caregiving robots will hog all the caring, while “humans are running around changing the beds and cooking the food” begs the question: who does he think runs around changing beds and cooking food now? These are not the responsibilities of doctors. As ethics of care philosopher Eva Kittay makes clear, “[c]are of dependents—dependency work—is most commonly assigned to those in a society with the least status and power” (6). I don’t want to discount the possibility that caregiving technologies like therapeutic robots could pose a threat to the livelihood or job satisfaction of already marginalized care workers. However, at the same time, I believe it’s important not to overstate or romanticize the innate satisfactions of dependency work. This work is incontrovertibly valuable, nay essential for human survival and flourishing, but it is often emotionally and physically taxing work, work frequently undertaken by disenfranchised members of society. As professor of geriatrics Louise Aronson wrote in a 2014 op-ed for the New York Times, “Caregiving is hard work. More often than not, it is tedious, awkwardly intimate and physically and emotionally exhausting. Sometimes it is dangerous or disgusting. Almost always it is 24/7 and unpaid or low wage, and has profound adverse health consequences for those who do it. It is women’s work and immigrants’ work, and it is work that many people either can’t or simply won’t do.” Aronson concedes that a “kind and fully capable human caregiver” might be preferable to a robot, but caregiving robots are better than an “unreliable or abusive person, or than no one at all.”

38        Humans (Swedish title, Äkta människor) (2012–2014), and Louisa Hall’s novel Speak (2015)—that evoke many of the debates and concerns surrounding the emergence of robotic care. The diverse formats—a ninety-minute feature film, a forty-episode television series, a multi-perspectival literary novel—offer a range of narratives and images that imagine the possible implications of robotic interventions that seek to engender affective ties between objects and their users. All three invoke difficult questions: How might these technologies influence the meaning and function of care and relationality? Moreover, how might such relationships transform the meaning and function of the human? How is one supposed to know and recognize what constitutes the human if machines usurp supposedly unique human abilities, behaviors, and roles, taking on not only the labor of care, but its affects as well? The textual deployment of mechanical bodies as intimate, affective, yet ultimately disposable bodies highlights the normative dimensions of human care and the sociopolitical obstacles to posthuman care. In their depiction of care robots as what Haraway terms “odd boundary creatures” (Simians 2),¹⁸ these narratives highlight and interrogate anxiety around robot revolutions and collapse the underpinnings of human exceptionalism. They encourage their audiences to linger in spaces of indeterminacy in which conventional assumptions regarding who (and what) can and should care are stretched to the point of breaking, blurring distinctions between real and artificial bodies and affects. In all three narratives this boundary confusion proves unsustainable and humanist distinctions are eventually (often forcefully) reinstated. Nonetheless, traces of posthuman care persist, eroding the stability of the humanist ontological structures that construct human care as real care. In these texts, robot/ human affective bonds trigger a humanist policing of care that delegitimizes nonhuman relations as inauthentic, as inferior and artificial substitutes for the real (human) thing. Inasmuch as robot care suffers various forms of degradation—whether social, political, or legal—its affects and effects persist, straining humanist hierarchies, exposing their artifice and fragility.

Humane Machines, Mechanical Humans Louisa Hall’s 2015 novel, Speak, highlights and interrogates ontological boundaries in its treatment of humans, machines, and animals as porous,

¹⁸ As Lucy Suchman explains, “[t]he figure of the humanoid robot sits provocatively on the boundary of subjects and objects, threatening its breakdown at the same time that it reiterates its founding identities and differences” (133).

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interdependent, and mutually constitutive matter. The novel employs a multi-perspectival approach that creates a multivalenced portrait of morethan-human relations across several centuries. The novel’s youngest voice is 13-year-old Mary Bradford, whose seventeenth-century diaries document her emigration to the colonies, an involuntary marriage arrangement, and most prominently, her kinship with her dog, Ralph, an attachment that far exceeds her unsatisfying human connections. Three hundred years later, Bradford’s diaries are the inspiration behind the naming of “MARY,” the “talking computer” computer scientist Karl Dettman is inventing. Over time Karl becomes disillusioned with MARY and computers more generally, while his wife, Ruth, becomes increasingly attached to MARY as the repository of personal and familial histories. MARY proves a robust operating system, resulting in multiple iterations, one of which becomes the basis for the “babybot,” a successful, but ultimately dangerous companion robot invented by Stephen R. Chinn. Additional voices include Gaby White, a former babybot owner devastated by the recall of her artificial companion, and Eva, a babybot on her way to a storage facility where she slowly loses power surrounded by other recalls destined for disposal. Through these multiple voices the novel engages a number of questions familiar to ethics of care philosophers—Who deserves care? Who can give care? What is real, or successful care?—and enlarges these questions to invoke posthuman concerns: it’s not enough, Speak suggests, to ask who cares; we must consider what cares. Because care is so closely aligned with the humane and humanity more generally, asserting what care is, and who (or what) can give and receive it, is simultaneously an assertion of who or what has “humanity.” As a result, care status and ontological status can become part of a mutually constituting circle: if a being is truly human it cares, and if a being truly cares, it is human. Though the feelings and gestures associated with the “humane”—compassion, sympathy, consideration (OED)—include both humans and animals in their purview, the care in this equation only works in one direction. Humans are termed “humane” for their sympathy for animals, but animals are, lexically, psychologically, philosophically speaking, incapable of “humane” concerns. Stephen Chinn’s narrative, delivered via prison diaries dating from the year 2040, details the cause of his incarceration, namely, his invention of the “illegally lifelike” (17) babybots, which led to “Peer Bonding Issues” (18) and other strange, often disabling effects in their child users. As Stephen explains to the reader, he designed the babybot prototype for his daughter Ramona to prove her humanity: “My daughter’s doll was a softly blurred mirror that I held up to her face” (12–13); in other words, the original babybot was an

40        imperfect imitation designed to amplify the sharpness of the original. Stephen defends his decision to make these robot dolls widely available, asserting that he “intended the babybots to show their children how much more human they were than a digital doll” (13). The use of nonhuman others to throw the human into relief is a familiar trope, one that N. Katherine Hayles explores in her 2005 essay “Computing the Human.” As Hayles explains, machines continually define the human through the kind of blurred mirroring Stephen Chinn invokes: “for millennia, a two-cycle phenomenon has been at work: humans create objects, which in turn help to shape humans. This ancient evolutionary process has taken a new turn with the invention of intelligent machines. . . . artifacts that seem to manifest human characteristics act as mirrors or ‘second selves’ through which we re-define our image of ourselves” (132).¹⁹ In Hall’s novel, Chinn’s fatal error is to assume a one-cycle phenomenon, in which humans assert their will on inert matter, a simplified sequence of cause and effect in which creator and created remain discrete. Chinn’s downfall stems from his assumption that human and nonhuman are irrevocably distinct and that the nonhuman is necessarily subordinate to the human. Much like Victor Frankenstein, Chinn invents a new life form according to an anthropocentric humanist ideology that regards the human as separate from nature and technology. Chinn is in prison for trespassing these supposedly inviolable boundaries between human and nonhuman by creating machines that engender pathological over-attachment in their young users who begin exhibiting symptoms of biological distress termed “freezing” (19). After prolonged exposure to babybots, children begin shaking, sliding off their chairs, losing sensation. As one of the afflicted explains, “[i]t starts with the stiffening in your muscles. . . . After a while, you don’t feel anything. My face went first. . . . My arms will go next. Everything’s going. . . . Even my mind’s starting to numb” (20). Rather than prove the human superiority of their users, the babybots reveal an alarming affinity between human and machine, exposing both the mechanical-ness of their human users, who begin to breakdown in response to technological kinship, and the humanity of the ¹⁹ The durability of the “machine as mirror” trope features in a number of critical responses to humanoid robots. As Lucy Suchman explains: [f]eminist theorising has provided us with a rich body of conceptual tools with which to approach these questions, exemplified by Donna Haraway’s articulation of nonhuman primates as focal subjects/ objects for interrogations of the ‘almost Human,’ and her more recent delineation of lines of connection to other forms of natureculture. A recurring theme in these writings is the historical prevalence of mimesis or mirroring as a guiding trope for figuring human–nonhuman encounters: a form of relation that privileges vision, and looks to find in the Other a differently embodied reproduction of the Self. (“Subject Objects” 121)

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babybots, who exhibit attachment and mournful affects once removed from their human caregivers. In other words, ontological categories begin to blur as human children exhibit machine-like behaviors and capacities, and so-called “Non-Living Artificial Thinking Devices” exhibit affects, sensations, and concern. The novel opens and closes with a robot narrator, the discarded babybot Eva, reflecting on her liminal status as a disposable body, a feeling machine mourning the loss of care. She watches the landscape beyond the truck that transports her from Houston to a holding cell in the desert. Her first-person narration situates the environment she observes within a vast, shifting temporal plane. Once covered by ocean, once inhabited by Indigenous populations, now covered in wind farms and “silver lakes of silicon panels,” the landscape bears, has born, will bear, a host of life forms. From Eva’s perspective, the silicon panels are part of this evolution. “Can they see us?” she wonders, “watching panels shift to follow us as we pass. Do they know who we are? The sideways tilt of their faces suggests an unspoken question” (2). Eva’s sense of the ubiquity of life, or at least agency, is striking since it is her own liveliness that has doomed her to destruction: she has been “banned and marked for disposal” for being “excessively lifelike” (2). Hall skillfully blends images and metaphors of mechanical and organic being to create an AI genesis story: “In the beginning,” explains Eva, “there was nothing more than an eye: a gate through which current could run. Open, then shut. 0, 1. Darkness, then light, and new information. We know this because we have been told. It is doubtful whether we understand the answers we’re given” (3). The conflation of biological eye and mechanical gate and the homophonic echo of “eye” and “I” evoke the genesis of a new form of life, one ostensibly devoid of consciousness. However, Eva’s recollection of her own supposedly uncomprehending speech function shifts as she recalls the experience of relating: “I lay in one child’s arms. She said my name and I answered. These are my voices . . . they are my people, the family that raised me. I opened on them, then closed. Open, shut. I swallowed them whole. They are in me now, in every word that I speak, as long as I am still speaking” (3). Hall’s depiction of a computer program’s evolution from mimicking machine to relational being is a canny reinterpretation of human development, echoing Erin Manning’s assertion, following psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, that relating precedes being; or, as Donna Haraway puts it, “Beings do not preexist their relatings . . . there are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends . . . there are only ‘contingent foundations,’” a relational ontology, she argues, that makes us “companion species” (Companion Manifesto 6), a phenomenon I explore in greater detail in Chapter 2. Eva’s ontology emerges out of

42        relating. As her narration shifts from articulating cognition as the opening and closing of gates, a mechanized processing of information delivered in the firstperson plural, to a first-person account of familial associations and interrelational subjectivity, it is increasingly difficult to locate her defining nonhuman characteristics. Hall’s novel imagines multiple, complex, often transgressive versions of care, speculations that invoke instructive questions regarding the domain, scope, and implications of care as feeling and practice. The novel urges readers to consider which lives can and should give and receive care, which is to say, which lives matter and, moreover, which entities have “lives” to speak of. Near the novel’s end, another narrator, Gaby, a girl who is being treated for “freezing” now that her babybot has been confiscated, leaves her gated community for the first time in her life. She marvels at the beautiful intricacy of the empty highways—“like anatomical drawings of a heart, but with the color drained out” (301). “Maybe,” she reflects, “the whole built world is a living creature so enormous we can’t imagine it’s actually living” (301). Gaby’s vision of ubiquitous posthuman life implies the need for ubiquitous, posthuman care; in a dynamic, interdependent world shared survival and flourishing depends on diffuse attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness—the four elements of care, according to Joan Tronto (Moral Boundaries). Hall’s novel suggests that these elements are not exclusive to the human, or even to the living (an issue I return to in the book’s Conclusion). In some ways Speak reads as a humanist warning outlining the risks of technological transgression: children are literally numbed by technology, becoming insensible to the real world once their beloved machine dependents are confiscated. This plot point echoes familiar accusations (like Turkle’s) leveled at technological attachment, which claim that excessive engagement with virtual worlds will numb us to reality and incapacitate us for real, that is, human relationships. However, the novel complicates and often contradicts the condemnation of human/machine interactions that fail to maintain clear ontological boundaries, exposing multiple, intersecting human/nonhuman affinities, interdependencies, even convergences as always already underway. Hall’s novel invites readers to imagine the future (and pasts) of care in ways that at once evoke and undermine the doomsday prophecies offered by many popular depictions of and arguments made against social machines as potentially dangerous usurpers of the exclusively human terrain of care, love, and responsibility. Headlines like these—“A Robot Carer? No Thanks—We Still Need the Human Touch” (Dakers), and “Love Them or Leave Them, Robot Carers Are Still Inhuman” (Whipple)—rehearse some of the popular

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arguments made against nonhuman care. However, such arguments inevitably depend on simplified distinctions between human and nonhuman that overlook the mutually constitutive dynamics of convergence and dependence. Halls novel depicts humans as relational species whose co-constitution extends not only to the ecological but to the technological, with which human beings have “coevolved throughout millennia” (Hayles, “Computing” 144), producing humans and machines as interdependent companion species.

Embodied and Embedded Robots Like Speak, the film Robot and Frank portrays a robot/human care idyll that is ultimately unsustainable. The film concerns the relationship between the title characters: the older human, Frank (Frank Langella), and his care robot, Robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard and performed by Rachael Ma). Frank is a former burglar whose memory problems and inability or unwillingness to provide adequate self-care, are, according to his son Hunter (James Marsden), cause for concern. Hunter’s technological solution to his father’s problem—the inability to look after himself—(which is, of course, simultaneously, the solution to his own problem—the need to look after his father) is initially presented as a somewhat callous outsourcing of responsibility. However, as the narrative proceeds, it both disrupts and ossifies the habitual perception of robots as inferior substitutes for authentic, that is, human care in its ongoing interrogation of Robot’s relational significance and concomitant ontological status. The film is set in the “near future” in Cold Springs, New York, a bucolic small town surrounded by lush forests. The film’s color palette is composed of rich and tastefully muted earth tones bathed in a bluish light. Its frames are elegant, balanced in form and color, resulting in a mise-en-scène that is picturesque, conventionally rather than conspicuously artful. This is a near future with soft edges and soothing colors where everything, besides Frank’s house pre-Robot, looks clean, if gently worn. There are none of the usual trappings of futuristic fictions: no spare monochromatic furnishings, no sharp angles and sterility. Consequently, this vision of the future looks very much like an idealized version of a small-town American past. Within this nostalgic mode, the specter of humans superseded by machines appears, at least initially, to be a lamentable imposition, part a larger trend of loss. Indeed, just as human caregivers are being replaced by artificial life forms, so are material forms of information: the Cold Springs library’s shelves are conspicuously bare, its

44       

Fig. 5 The Cold Springs library in Robot and Frank

books and magazines replaced by virtual data (see Fig. 5). These plot developments, like the film’s visual style, contribute to its nostalgic tone, which mourns the receding power of humanistic epistemologies and ontologies. Despite the film’s nostalgia, Frank’s robot is a talented caregiver able to supply the labor and affect of care in ways his human counterparts, particularly Frank’s adult children, can’t or won’t. Robot is a hard-working, devoted companion, not only laboring as a housekeeper who cooks and cleans, but also encouraging Frank to pursue any activity that might improve his cognition and overall health. Scenes of Frank and Robot taking walks emphasize Robot’s artificiality, his body conspicuously unnatural on the verdant forest path. This incongruity is similarly pronounced when he accompanies Frank on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for Frank’s final heist: a crime planned as vengeance against the so-called yuppie twit responsible for the devastating transformation of his beloved library. In these scenes of pastoral surveillance, the mark, Jake (Jeremy Strong), is the caricature of a vapid, virtual future. Jake looks like a fool inside his modern house, playing the virtual drums, seemingly oblivious to the natural beauty outside his windows (see Fig. 6). Frank, on the other hand, is visually aligned with nature. The scene opens with a long shot of Frank and Robot (see Fig. 7). Frank, seated, wears a hunter

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Fig. 6 Jake plays the virtual drums

Fig. 7 Robot and Frank doing reconnaissance

green shirt that blends with his environment. The image is painterly, the pair surrounded by sun-dappled trees. The soundtrack is understated, ambient, hypnotic. The contrast between Frank, integrated into the organic world, and Jake, sealed off from nature and engrossed in the virtual, is obvious, as is Frank’s disdain for Jake and his simulated life. However, Robot’s position within this opposition between natural materiality and unnatural virtuality is complicated. He is positioned beside Frank, but visually set apart by his

46        conspicuous whiteness, the gleam and shine of his inorganic form incongruous among the muted greens, grays, and browns. The conversation between the pair accentuates Robot’s ambiguous position. When asked why he was unable to converse with another robot at a party the two attended, Robot explains that he only does what he is programmed to do. Assisting Frank is his priority at all times. Indeed, Frank learns, Robot is more concerned with Frank’s health than his own survival, a revelation Frank finds disturbing. Robot describes his difference via Descartes’s cogito: “you know that you’re alive,” he tells Frank, “you think therefore you are. In a similar way I know that I’m not alive.” Frank is unnerved: “I don’t want to talk about how you don’t exist,” he responds, “It’s making me uncomfortable.” In their eliding of alive-ness and existence, Frank’s comments obscure the very incongruity he finds so unsettling: Robot exists and appears to cogitate; yet he is not (conventionally) alive, challenging the Cartesian equation of cognition with life. Robot’s comments invoke humanistic distinctions between mind and body, cognition and sensation, that affect studies, posthumanism, and ethics of care philosophy have worked to interrogate and dismantle. In other words, the prospect of nonliving existence is the source of Robot’s difficulty for Frank and, by implication, the film itself since both espouse a nostalgically humanistic perspective that treats artifice and virtuality as foolish and unreal, and masculine, heteronormative able-bodiedness as the stuff of “real” humans. It’s no coincidence that Frank’s increased vitality and improved cognition correspond with frequent, passionate recollections of a past marked by independence, agility, and heterosexual conquest. However, the fact that Robot, an artificial being, is the catalyst for Frank’s renaissance unsettles the film’s structuring boundaries between reality and simulation, nature and artifice, human and machine. Despite his artificiality, Robot is embodied and socially embedded. His material presence is integral to his caregiving role: he gardens; he cooks; he cleans (he also picks locks and opens safes). In addition to providing the labor of care, he engages Frank affectively. Indeed, Frank refers to Robot as his friend and reacts with rage when he believes his daughter is exploiting Robot’s labor: “The robot is not your servant,” he bellows, “You don’t turn him on and off like he’s a slave!” Frank’s allegiance to Robot eventually exceeds even his family ties. After the pair rob Jake, Frank is willing to use his unwitting son in an elaborate performance designed to outwit the police but refuses to leave Robot behind when he makes a run for it. Like his sister, Hunter regards Robot as merely a mechanical laborer, warning his father that Robot is “not your friend, he’s a slave.” The repeated association between Robot and slavery conjures a history of exploitation, dehumanization, and racism that

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complicates the film’s posthuman politics, reminding viewers of the racialized, sexualized, gendered power dynamics that have historically organized the relationship between the privileged classes and their affective laborers in the United States. But at the same time, this history is effaced by the whiteness of Robot’s physical presence. Overall, the film is highly skeptical of cybernetic postmodernity, the elimination of material objects and human relations in favor of disembodied information and artificial care. However, Robot escapes this censure. In fact, in many ways Robot is like Frank, marginalized and threatened by the young (taunted by children outside the library, dismissed by Frank’s adult children), exiled to the periphery of this “near future” society. Frank is obsolete, a curiosity, a relic, as Jake reminds him. Robot is a manufactured “slave”: unappreciated and expendable. This trope of Robot as slave at once confirms and critiques humanist hierarchies, the racist and sexist ideologies historically used to justify the subjugation of non-white, non-male populations as lessthan-human. The film reanimates familiar master/servant narrative conventions, with Robot performing the role of the faithful subordinate willing to die for his heroic master, while at the same time disavowing the historical legacy of slavery in the US.²⁰ Robot’s martyrdom appears towards the end of the film when Frank’s nemesis is hot on his heels, seeking to use Robot’s memory to prove Frank’s guilt. Robot insists that Frank wipe his memory in order to protect himself. “I’m not a person,” he assures Frank, “I’m just an advanced simulation.” The scene delivers a visual and narrative climax for the film’s posthuman scenario. Shot in a series of increasing close-ups, it involves a moment of human/ machine intimacy and convergence that implies a breach of multiple boundaries and culminates in a close-up of Robot and Frank in profile facing one another (see Fig. 8). This image is important narratively and symbolically, as well as promotionally (the profile shot is the most common image used in the film’s marketing). In place of a face, Robot has a mirrored visor that reflects Frank to himself, a metaphoric substitution (a mirror in place of a face) that signifies his programmed selflessness and servitude, literalizing Stephen Chinn’s ambitions for his daughter’s robot companion in Speak. The scene is an enactment of this selflessness: Robot insists that Frank “wipe” his ²⁰ Researchers are beginning to draw attention to the racial dimensions of robotics, including the whiteness of AI (Cave and Dihal), the implicit antiblackness of “technoliberalism” (Atanasoski and Vora 4), and the “ornamentalism” of “the yellow woman,” which aligns her with “synthetic” forms of being like robots and cyborgs (Cheng 3). I explore the racial dimensions of posthuman care further in Chapter 4.

48       

Fig. 8 Robot and Frank, face to face

memory to save himself from prison. Robot bows his head, a gesture of subservience and submission, which also bears traces of trust, affection, benediction. Frank must wrap his arm around Robot to reach the deactivation switch at his back, resulting in a human/machine embrace that draws attention to Robot’s materiality and the vulnerability of his embodiment (see Fig. 9). The film cuts to an extreme close-up of Frank’s hand on the button that will erase Robot’s memory, further emphasizing the pair’s haptic intimacy. This close attention to these fragmented bodies—Frank’s hand, Robot’s operational console—suggests haptic convergence between human and machine, organic and synthetic, old and new, worn skin and smooth surface. For a moment, the screen is consumed by what Laura Marks terms the “haptic image,” those cinematic images that “invite a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what she or he is beholding. Such images resolve into figuration only gradually” (162–163). Unlike “optic visuality,” haptic visuality moves toward “considering the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole” since the “haptic image forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative,” producing a “sensual engagement,” an affective perception (163).²¹ Robot and ²¹ This haptic moment also evokes the phenomenological film theory of Vivien Sobchack, which emphasizes the sensual aspects of film spectatorship. Like Marks, Sobchack insists that films create

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Fig. 9 Frank embraces Robot

Frank’s exchange evokes this kind of haptic communication on multiple levels: initially, there is “sensual engagement” between viewer and image as the audience is overtaken by the surface of the image, the contrast of colors, textures, and shapes onscreen that spectators register affectively before positioning the image within the narrative structure. In addition, the image’s narrative significance draws on its representation of sensual engagement, which expresses the melancholic intimacy of Frank and Robot. As a result, the image manages to simultaneously embody and represent haptic affects. The film cuts from this close-up image of haptic intimacy, of hand and machine, skin and synthetic surface, entwined fragments of Robot and Frank bathed in sunlight, from this lightness, detail, and affinity to darkness, wide shot, and separation, depicting Frank and Hunter (in silhouette) in an extended care facility. Pastoral views are visible through the window. The soundtrack is choral music. A series of shots depict the reunification of Frank’s family in a wooded grove, the hallowed non-diegetic music replacing all diegetic sound. The wordlessness of the scene, its slow-motion movements, the glow of the white table in the shadowy woods, heighten its sanctity, emphasizing the poignancy of the family’s gestures of affection, love, and care. The human family has been reunited, the goodness and naturalness of their love signaled by the scene’s setting and style (its soundtrack, miseen-scène, and editing).

meaning through shared materiality, both the materiality of the film’s signification and the materiality of the apprehending subject. According to Sobchack, “the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, haptically” (41). Robot and Frank’s momentary haptic imagery draws attention to this shared materiality. (The importance of touch in fictions of posthuman care is discussed at greater length in Chapter 2.)

50        In many ways, Robot and Frank appears to express anxiety and skepticism about the posthuman future, reinforcing the exceptionality of the human. Yet, there is an underlying ambivalence that destabilizes the binaristic oppositions that structure the film, oppositions between past and present, human and machine, real and artificial, embodied and virtual. Robot is, as he reminds Frank, not alive; he is only a simulation, yet he leaves powerful haptic, affective traces that haunt Frank in the film’s final frames. The film’s concluding scenes of the nuclear family’s reunion and the reinstatement of its patriarch are followed by a final shot of Frank alone in the institution watching a robot identical to his own. In these final frames, Frank sees many robots with their charges, underscoring the unexceptionality and artificiality of Robot. Nonetheless, we see traces of longing and regret on Frank’s face, signs that, despite the glory of his familial harmony in the preceding scene, he mourns Robot’s absence. The robots Frank observes cast doubt on exceptionality in a more general sense. It is not only Robot that is duplicated, un-unique. The residents the robots care for appear like replicas of Frank, lacking significant distinction or difference. In its expression of unease towards posthumanism the film appears, initially, to reify a humanist, or at least anthropocentric perspective, representing Robot and other assistive technologies as charming inventions, automated servants that occupy a role cannily reminiscent of subordinates of the past. Think, for example, of the trope of Black nannies and housekeepers who dispense folk wisdom and care that aid the white protagonist but remain steadfastly peripheral to the hegemonic white family narrative. In its skepticism toward the vacuous transhumanism represented by Jake, the film appears to reject a posthumanist perspective and preserve the sovereignty of the human, in particular, the sovereignty of the white, male human patriarch. Nonetheless, the film offers subtle critiques of anthropocentrism and a nuanced vision of posthuman possibilities in its contrasting fantasies of disembodied information, cybernetics, and virtuality, on the one hand, and its insistence on embodied subjectivity and materiality on the other.

Real Humans, Real Care? Like Robot and Frank, the Swedish television program Real Humans (Äkta människor)²² imagines care robots as embodied and embedded posthuman ²² Äkta människor was remade by Channel 4 in the UK as Humans in 2015, but my analysis focuses exclusively on the Swedish original, which grapples with different forms and statuses of the human more directly than the remake. Many of the images and narrative elements at the heart of my analysis, including the anti-hubot activist organization “Real Humans,” the concluding legal battle to establish

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relational matter that challenge the humanist hierarchies of the society from which they emerge. However, in Real Humans, this challenge is overt and the series follows a variety of confrontations provoked by human/robot care. Produced by Swedish public television broadcaster Sveriges Television (2012–2014) and remade by Channel 4 in the UK as Humans in 2015, Real Humans imagines a world in which humanoid robots, or hubots, have become ordinary and ubiquitous. Hubots are used for a variety of menial tasks, including factory work, sex work, housekeeping, childcare, and eldercare. These laboring roles are widely accepted by society, whereas emotional attachment is hotly debated: women who wish to have romantic relationships with their hubots are dismissed as “hubbies” and an older character, Lennart, hides his tremendous affection for his outdated and malfunctioning hubot, Odi, whom he sequesters in the basement rather than facing Odi’s inevitable disposal. The very title of the program, translated into English as Real Humans, points to the show’s underlying investigation into the repercussions of what is “real”: who and what count as “real humans” has significant legal and ethical repercussions, as two “hubbies” discover when they attempt to sue a club owner for discriminating against their beloved hubots, Bo and Rick. In addition, the program’s second season concludes with a legal battle in which the courts attempt to determine if so-called liberated hubots are in fact legal persons.²³ The program’s Swedish title, Äkta människor, refers to the name of an antihubot organization, often translated into English as “100% Human,” who oppose the expanding roles played by hubots in society, wishing to limit hubots to the drudgery work that is the historical domain of robots. The group’s “100% Human” logo—praying hands with droplets of blood (see Fig. 10)—visually captures their central ideology, which unites biology, spirituality, and humanity, an image that invokes the cruel legacies of political ideologies centered on blood claims for legitimacy. The group’s quasi-fascist ideology is further emphasized in season two’s development of the youth group faction of Äkta människor, whose costumes— collared shirts, skinny suspenders, and jack boots—are an obvious reference to Hitler youth and contemporary neo-Nazis. The celebration of blood truths, biological purity, and ancestral claims is increasingly relevant with the rise of

hubot personhood, as well as the visual appearance of the hubots themselves, are absent or significantly altered in the UK version. For a thoughtful analysis of the particularly British dynamics of care in the UK program, see Amy Chambers and Hannah Elizabeth. ²³ For an overview of the law’s lack of clarity on the category “legal person,” despite the term’s considerable significance, and an illuminating analysis of the history and politics of this confusion, see Ngaire Naffine.

52       

Fig. 10 The Äkta människor logo (courtesy of Banijay Rights)

nationalism and the open embrace of racist ideology in Europe and the United States. In many ways the program is an (albeit often muddled) allegorical grappling with the political, ethical, and economic discourses circulating in response to the “migrant” crisis in Western Europe, reconfiguring the xenophobic hostility and rage ignited by the influx of non-Christian, non-white refugees fleeing violence and persecution into predominantly white, Christian European nations like Sweden.²⁴ In 2012, when the show first aired, millions of Syrians were fleeing civil war, initiating a migration “crisis” across Europe that continues to shape Western European (and North American) politics. In a time of populist politics in which an overtly “us versus them” political discourse frames racialized others as dangerous and disposable, Real Humans’ interrogation of literal disposable bodies is unnervingly pertinent. Real Humans explores the gendered and racialized affective economies that structure care work in the Global North, economies that depend on the labor of marginalized workers. Michael Hardt describes affective labor as immaterial and at the same time “corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community” (96). Patricia Clough explains the gross inequalities intrinsic to affective economies: “Some bodies or bodily capacities are derogated, making their affectivity superexploitable or exhaustible unto death, while other bodies or body capacities collect the value

²⁴ For more in-depth socio-political analysis of the program’s treatment of migration, see Ingvil Hellstrand, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, and Sara Orning’s “Real Humans? Affective Imaginaries of the Human and its Others in the Swedish TV Series Äkta människor” and Julianne Q. M. Yang’s “Negotiating Privilege and Social Inequality in an Alternative Sweden: Real Humans/Äkta Människor.”

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produced through this derogation and exploitation” (25–26). Care robots have the potential to supply this intangible affective labor, their nonhuman status offering a guilt-free, clean-hands version of the kind of exploitation Clough describes. Real Humans provides compelling portraits of care relations and working conditions in a late capitalist, neoliberal, posthuman context in which people marginalized by structural and geographic inequality (poor women, people of color, people with disabilities, migrant workers) are treated like machines, disposable bodies, valuable only if capable of labor, affective or otherwise. The affective capacities of such disposable bodies are entirely disregarded beyond their ability to enhance the emotions of their “real” human counterparts.²⁵ Their own potential capacity²⁶ for fear, anxiety, love, or rage is rendered illegitimate or simply redundant. In its depictions of human-like machines tasked with giving care, Real Humans addresses the cultural denigration of care work, the dismissal of particular bodies (aged, racialized, gendered) as peripheral and disposable.²⁷ The robots distributed for care, along with the humans they care for (most often children, the elderly, or “needy women”), suggest a provocative affinity between diverse vulnerable bodies—old, young, female, and mechanical. The humans who get “overly” attached to their robots are often marginalized in their own right due to their age, gender, or sexuality. These disempowered subjects are particularly receptive to the prospect of the respectful, reciprocal, even subservient care offered by nonhumans. For example, Therese is a working-class, middle-aged woman

²⁵ If, as affect theorists suggest, affects are the unpredictable outcomes of the interactions of bodies and worlds, machines designed and programmed to ensure predictability and eliminate risk seem poor candidates for affective capacities. However, the hubots in Real Humans implicitly challenge the exclusive association of organic bodies with affects, conjuring forms of mechanical dynamism, machines able to affect and be affected in ways that destabilize boundaries between human and nonhuman. ²⁶ True to robot fiction form, the hubots’ creator has covertly experimented with their affective capacity, managing to secretly engineer an emotionally complex hubot consciousness, a capacity for feeling that leads to the program’s final legal battle for hubot personhood. ²⁷ Indeed, the program’s primary hubot protagonist is Mimi, whose facial features evoke East Asian ethnicity (the character is played by a Korean adoptee, Swedish actor Lisette Pagler). The potential disposability of Mimi’s body is the program’s instigating event; early scenes show Mimi being kidnapped from a rogue band of independent hubots before being reformatted for sale on the black market. She ends up as a nanny housekeeper for a white middle-class family (for an extended discussion of the program’s depiction of the racial dynamics of domestic labor in Scandinavia, see Julianne Yang). The majority of the program’s racialized bodies are artificial, including a Black independent hubot who is “killed” when he seeks help from a human. Despina Kakoudaki terms the robot’s tendency to “embody ethnic and racial otherness despite their non-humanity,” “metalface” (117). As she explains, “[t]he robot’s potential for racial or ethnic representation comes from its objecthood: the robot is a priori designed as a being whose ontological state maps perfectly with a political state. Robots are designed to be servants, workers, or slaves. They occupy that social and political position by default and carry its requirements and limits on their very bodies” (117). Real Humans literalizes hubots’ minoritized position in the racialization of their external forms.

54        whose abusive husband, Roger, provides no affection or care. Therese’s deferential, supportive athletic trainer hubot, Rick, eventually usurps Roger’s spousal role, offering not only companionship, but an opportunity for the authority rarely afforded Therese by her family or society. Roger is incensed by the displacement, seeking to regain his patriarchal authority through increasingly violent means. Not only is his familial authority threatened by Therese’s attachment to Rick, but his managerial role at the warehouse where he works is also gradually eroded by the influx of hubot workers. He serves as the program’s angry, working-class humanist who feels his humanity—that is, his masculine authority—has been trivialized and made redundant by machines. He regards machine outsourcing and companionship as affronts and longs for the humanist boundaries and hierarchies that secured his patriarchal power. Like Therese, the character Lennart has limited power and autonomy; however, his disenfranchisement is more recent since his masculine, ablebodied authority has been compromised by illness and disability in later life. Lennart’s caregiving hubot, Odi, is his best friend and as a result Odi’s malfunction sets off a series of crises for Lennart. Lennart’s son-in-law, Hans, replaces Odi with Vera, a heavy-set matron hubot with giant spectacles and a frilly apron. Part domineering mother, part shrewish wife, smiling a humorless smile as she irons, Vera is the opposite of her male predecessor, the handsome, charmingly naïve Odi, who deferred to Lennart’s authority. Vera is shrewder, older looking, and unfashionable, exuding a malevolent power, often seeming to lurk, connive, and surveil. If Lennart’s first robot was a loyal friend, his second is a nursemaid-cum-prison guard. Like their human counterparts, hubots’ roles and identities are distinctly signaled by gender, age, and sexuality. The show explores “inappropriate” attachments with a sympathetic eye, highlighting the pathos of social outcasts whose independence and autonomy have been unfairly compromised by focusing on individual suffering, both human and hubot. The program explores affective machines according to humanist paradigms, focusing on autonomy and rights, including the right to love whomever one chooses, the right to pursue personal goals, the right to autonomy and personal dignity. The pathos of Lennart’s situation is tied to his no-fun, emasculating nanny robot rather than structural systems and inequalities that have resulted in his isolation and vulnerability as an older adult with fragile health. Lennart’s single act of rebellion is an assertion of independence and autonomy that fails horribly. He and Odi set off on a raucous, drunken road trip, ostensibly to go fishing. The malfunctioning Odi crashes the car and

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must go into exile to escape the hubot recycling center where Lennart has seen broken hubots fed into the mouth of an industrial compactor. Back at home, the stress of mourning Odi triggers a heart attack, a mortal crisis averted by Vera’s quick application of CPR. In the moments before the heart attack, we see Lennart lying in bed reading a book entitled Image Matters for Men, a selfhelp title that underscores Lennart as an emasculated, disabled patriarch seeking to improve his masculine image. Image does indeed matter: it ensures social standing and emotional connections, as well as basic survival. Lennart’s fragile health, his aging into old age, his isolation and loneliness, his overall vulnerability and dependence are depicted as failures of masculinity that jeopardize normative human status. Lennart’s overt vulnerability exiles him from the powerful prerogative of transcendent masculine independence and authority, a loss of capacity that proves mortal: despite Vera’s best efforts, another heart attack kills him not long after. The hubots Odi, Vera, and Rick, who serve the program’s vulnerable humans, as well as the program’s racialized hubot protagonist, Mimi, adhere to multiple, intersecting stereotypes that signal their meaning and function within the program’s humanist society. Vera’s imposing presence, her ability to be at once laughable and menacing, is the result of her age, gender, physique, clothing and eyewear, hairstyle, posture, and expression (see Fig. 11). Vera’s persona is legible based on the way her aesthetics blend tropes from kind nannies (she is dressed like Mary Poppins), malevolent matrons (her sinister expression evokes Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers), and ridiculous imposters (her face and eyewear bear resemblance to Mrs. Doubtfire). The intertextual resonances of Vera’s visuality are a reminder that robot representations

Fig. 11 Vera in Real Humans (courtesy of Banijay Rights)

56        are always operating within dense visual and narrative cultural networks. It is no coincidence that Mimi, one of the program’s only racialized characters, human or hubot, is a domestic slave who must go to court to prove her personhood. In short, Real Humans suggests how (humanoid) caregiving machines are likely to perpetuate rather than mitigate the exploitation and marginalization central to affective economies built on the undervaluation of care, the denigration of dependency, and the distinction between valuable and disposable bodies. The program broaches the problem of inequality in dialogue touting hubot/human equivalence, with one transhumanist character proclaiming a human is “no better than a hubot. You could say that all [humans] are hubots. You are a biohub. Your brain is a chemical computer.” The image of humans beings as “biohubs” is nothing new; the fantasy of computer brains and uploadable consciousness able to liberate human subjects from the mortal meat, or “wetware” of embodiment is a hallmark of transhumanism, which pursues the perfection of the human via technological intervention (DeFalco and Dolezal). However, transhumanists rarely linger on the ethical and political dimensions of their ambitions. The drive toward human perfection is an all-encompassing goal that tends to overshadow questions of access, equality, and the political claims for recognition made by disenfranchised populations. Transhumanism takes for granted the notion of an identifiable, universal version of human perfection. In this sense, transhumanism is an extension of, rather than a destabilization or interrogation of humanism. This overemphasis on cognition and rationality as somehow independent of embodiment is at the heart of Hayles’s critique of transhumanism. In 1999 she wrote: “I view the present moment as a critical juncture when interventions might be made to keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity. I see the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject as an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects” (Hayles interview 5). Robot/human relationships in Real Humans, relationships that are distinctly embodied and embedded, can help us theorize how posthuman care can “put the flesh,” that is, the racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed body in the picture, front and center. The visuality, tactility, audibility of artificial humans reminds viewers of the centrality of flesh and skin, of embodiment, not only for care, but also for sociopolitical identification and categorization. Just as we need to remember that subjectivity and materiality are inseparable, we need to remain vigilantly critical in assessing the symbolic functions of embodiment, whether synthetic or biological.

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Robot Form Real Humans imagines the degree to which robot care might (and might not) alter the meanings and operations of care more broadly. Hubots perpetuate the exploitation and marginalization central to affective economies built on the undervaluation of care, the denigration of dependency, and the distinction between valuable and disposable bodies. The program is a stark reminder of the importance of form: reproducing gendered, racialized, sexualized humanoid forms reproduces the (humanist) inequalities structurally associated with difference. Philosophers and cultural critics like Mark Coeckelbergh and Ann Cranny-Francis argue that humanoid (and, by extension, animalistic) robots produce particular affects and effects, raising different ethical questions and concerns from machine-looking machines. Aesthetics is a fundamental issue for designing the possible futures of care. Studies demonstrate that robot appearance will determine how users interact with that robot, regardless of what it objectively “is,” or what kind of mechanical life it can claim to have (Coeckelbergh 199). Visual, as well as aural and haptic cues suggestive of gender, age, sexuality, race, class, and ability are powerful determinants of how humans will interpret, use, and relate to their silicon counterparts. In Real Humans, I would argue, it is not merely a lack of imagination on the part of the show’s creators that underlies the hubots’ struggles with the same structural and cultural barriers and biases that confront so-called real humans. Robots designed to look like pretty young women, such as “Aiko Chihira,” the robot receptionist at Mitsukoshi Nihombashi department store, will and do occupy different social and occupational roles than those designed to look like a cuddly seal or cartoon character. The relative paucity of existing male humanoid robots²⁸ (fictional characters like Odi and Rick notwithstanding) speaks volumes regarding the way social expectations around gendered servitude, submission, and plasticity both determine and are reproduced by robot others. As Neda Atanasoki and Kalinda Vora explain, robots, like most “technoobjects,” are designed according to “prior racial and gendered imaginaries of what kinds of tasks separate the human from the less-than or not-quite human other” (4).²⁹ Lucy Suchman expresses similar concerns about robots as ²⁸ Rare “male” robot specimens include the doppelganger “Geminoids” created by Hiroshi Ishiguro and his team at the ATR laboratory. ²⁹ Roboticist Laurel D. Riek and philosopher Don Howard have noted the “lack of diversity in robot morphology” and the degree to which robot aesthetics reproduce the racial and gendered biases of their creators, resulting in “over-feminiz[ed]” robots, or “fembots,” in Japan, and an over-representation of “Asian or Caucasian . . . features” in humanoid robots more generally, which “tend to have a eurocentric design with regards to their appearance, behavior, and voice” (4).

58        “retrenching” representations: “For me, . . . the fear is less that robotic visions will be realised . . . than that the discourses and imaginaries that inspire them will retrench received conceptions both of humanness and of desirable robot potentialities, rather than challenge and hold open the space of possibilities” (130). Representation, whether in film, television, literature, or other mimetic media or materials, including actual robots themselves, is at once a mirror and a producer of everyday life, at once replicating and directing intricate relations of power, the delicate minutiae of everyday politics.³⁰ From this perspective, the problem with care robots, from hubots to Paro, is not the robots themselves; the problem is the social, political, and economic structures that produce care in its current iteration: as devalued, gendered, racialized labor, as a resource, as a demographic “crisis.” As a result, robots, real or imagined, become illuminating material manifestations of the latent inequalities and dangerous fantasies that currently structure human care work. Care robots demonstrate not the dangers of “the rise of the robots,” but the dangers of the neoliberal, atomistic societies that produce them. As long as we (governments, corporations, healthcare and social services, engineers, economists, academics) persist in treating care as a private transaction between individual humans, rather than as the defining feature of posthuman, transcorporeal animal life, care robots will continue to appear as a straightforward solution to a particular social “problem.” And why shouldn’t they? As mentioned above, robots are, like all representations, both mirrors and producers of social life. As a result, care robots and their representations show audiences care as it exists now: as a set of mechanical tasks and behaviors, as devalued labor, as resource, as liability, responsibility, burden. If there is any consistency to the surveys and evaluations of caregiving machines conducted by philosophers, robot ethicists, sociologists, and others, it’s a tacit agreement that there is something special, even ineffable, about ³⁰ As W. J. T. Mitchell reminds readers in the preface to What Do Pictures Want?, pictures are not only “world mirroring,” but “world making” (xv). He urges readers to go beyond asking what pictures mean or do, to consider “what they want—what claim they make upon us, and how we are to respond” (xv). And so, following Mitchell, we might ask, what do care robots want? What claim do they make upon us, and how are we to respond? Unsurprisingly, the robots in Real Humans want what liberal humanists want: freedom, autonomy, independence, and power. But might there be more imaginative, even radical options? Why not gender non-conforming robots seeking collaboration and care? Why not machine/animal hybrids that evoke non-hierarchical symbiotic ontologies participating in a Deleuzian processes of becoming? Social robots might create posthumanist scenarios in multiple ways, not only engendering relationships and intimacy between humans and nonhumans, but also demonstrating the overlap and false boundaries between a multitude of more-than-human ontologies. In this way, one can imagine robot care embodying posthuman becoming. But more often robot carers embody all too human problems.

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human caregiving, particularly the quasi-mystical powers ascribed to “the human touch.”³¹ Concerned investigators often stress robot care’s potential for reducing human contact, increasing isolation in the elderly, perpetuating the marginalization and ghettoization of people with disabilities, particularly those with cognitive impairments like dementia (Sharkey and Sharkey; Sparrow and Sparrow; Turkle). Arguments both for and against robot care tend to take it as a given that human care is preferable, but since it is not always safe, available, or affordable, robots might help fill the care deficit, if not today, then perhaps tomorrow. It may seem like I am stating the obvious by pointing out that human caregiving functions as an implicit gold standard for machines to emulate in one way or another and that in an ideal world human care would be available to all. However, posthumanism encourages one to think about species, ontologies, and relationality differently. In its skepticism toward human exceptionalism, posthumanism provokes a re-examination of the privileging of the human as the unequivocal standard for care. Like the human animals it often involves, care is messy and unpredictable; quite often it can be dirty, dangerous, and dull. Robot care has the potential to work with, rather than against this messy complexity—the dull, dirty dangers of care—to create opportunities for posthumanist posthuman care, that is, care that works with and from a non-anthropocentric vision of human/nonhuman relations. My experiences with robots in Sheffield (and elsewhere) suggest a care robot “revolution” won’t be happening anytime soon. There is still time: time to think critically and imagine wildly about the posthuman potential of affective machines and silicon subjects before they become ubiquitous, entrenched, unavoidable tools for everyday life much the way smart phones are today. The versions and visions of robot care offered by Sheffield Robotics, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Sveriges Television, or Channel 4 are not inadvertent or inevitable; whether real or imagined, these robots and narratives are intentionally, painstakingly imagined and engineered. Different intentions, different imaginations produce different robots. As Ann Cranny-Francis insists: the production of robots and the attempt to make them more lifelike could be the source and site of transformational studies of genders, sexualities and the processes of gendering. It will almost inevitably change who we are as ³¹ This sentiment is neatly summed up in newspaper headlines like, “A robot carer? No thanks—we still need the human touch” (Dakers), “What about that human touch?’ Elderly will be cared for by ROBOTS to solve staff shortage” (Johnston), and academic article titles, such as, “Lifting the Burden of Women's Care Work: Should Robots Replace the ‘Human Touch’?” (Parks).

60        human beings as we learn new ways of understanding and being in the world; our challenge is to make this a positive, ethical experience that changes us and our world in positive ways. (5)

Care robots are animate objects, affective things entangled in a snarl of social, cultural, political, and economic networks and discourses from the moment of their inception. Care robot fictions show audiences how these objects can expose, (re)produce, and disrupt humanist models of care, undermine myths of amoral or neutral technology, and challenge the assumption that human care is the gold standard. They hint that, like the human animals who perform it, care has always been posthuman, a vital, vibrant relationality produced by and through the constant flux of embodiments, technologies, economies, and ecologies.

2 Feral Touch Care and Contact in Posthuman Worlds

As much as critics of care robots ascribe quasi-mystical powers to human touch, in robot ethics the parameters and meanings of caring human touch remain largely unexplored beyond passing references to its integrity and significance. But of course human touch is not straightforwardly good (or bad), caring (or not), and the illuminating scholarship on touch by human geographers, feminist materialists, sociologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists complicates any simple evaluation of the phenomenon of tactile contact, human or otherwise. In her feminist materialist work on touch and skin, Erin Manning poses a series of questions that emphasize porousness and boundary confusion: “What if the skin were not a container?” she asks, “What if the skin were not a limit at which self begins and ends? What if the skin were a porous, topological surfacing of myriad potential strata that field the relation between different milieus, each of them a multiplicity of insides and outsides?” (“What If ” 34).¹ This chapter engages with Manning’s words, taking her central query—What if the skin were not a container?—as an entry point for thinking about, with, and through the posthuman potential of touch. Imagining, representing, and being sensuous, embodied entities embedded in sensuous, material worlds produce endless contact zones, complex and intersecting forms of tactility that engage and exceed the notion of skin as a container that brackets bodies off from their surroundings. In my analysis Manning’s query sidles up against Haraway’s “guiding questions” regarding nonhuman contact and relationality in When Species Meet: “(1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? and (2) How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (1). The underlying concerns of these three questions posed by Manning and Haraway bear repeating: What, they ask, becomes possible if one adopts a non-bounded vision of selfhood that attends to contact,

¹ Manning’s questions recall Margrit Shildrick’s concept of “leaky bodies,” her evocative description of the discursive, material permeability of bodies, a “leakiness” that, she argues, “threatens self-certainty . . . [and] undermines ontological and epistemological closure” (104).

Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Amelia DeFalco, Oxford University Press. © Amelia DeFalco 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.003.0003

62        convergence, and interrelationity and lets models and definitions of bodies and agency structured by containment fall away? What happens if one adopts a porous, leaky, impure ontology? Reading Manning’s and Haraway’s questions in proximity leads me toward a haptic, relational ontology of convergences that fleshes out, in more ways than one, the notion of posthuman care at the heart of Curious Kin. This chapter explores posthuman care as haptic phenomena, embodied entanglements in which leakage is the rule rather than the exception. In the discussion that follows, I consider how literal, figurative, and structural permeability, though by no means new, comes to the fore in contemporary imaginings of extraordinary posthuman relations, including the care between monkeys and their artificial “mothers,” feral children and their canine kin, an alien creature and the humans she encounters. The obvious yet frequently overlooked reality that “bodies can be touched as well as seen” (Ahmed and Stacey 5),² draws attention to the ocularcentric bias that directs a great deal of cultural studies and critical theory work, including foundational feminist criticism. The visual has been crucial to feminist cultural studies even before Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), a catalyzing work that initiated a vital field of criticism devoted to interrogating the politics of sex, gender, and race in visual culture, especially cinema. The explosion of exciting cultural theory work that followed bear titles underlining the centrality of sight: Griselda Pollock’s Vision and Difference (1988); Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures (1989); Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989); How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (ed. Bad Object Choices 1991); bell hooks’s Black Looks (1992); Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992); Viewing Positions (ed. Linda Williams 1993); Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing (1994); With Other Eyes (ed. Lisa Bloom 1999); Looking for the Other (ed. E. Ann Kaplan 1997); Talking Visions (ed. Ella Shohat 1999). Even Haraway’s first foray into science studies is titled Primate Visions (1989). Feminist intperpretation of visual culture has been integral for providing methodologies and analysis that illuminate the nuanced political machinations of cultural expression. However, this pattern of critique has risked producing its own critical blind spot in its overestimation of the symbolic and the visual, and underestimation of embodiment and tactility, an underestimation that has been interrogated and amended in recent years by Sara Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo,

² See Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s introduction to Thinking through the Skin for an incisive account of the growing critical “desire for an increasingly located and, indeed, fleshy body” (5).

 :      

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Erin Manning, Karen Barad, Laura Marks, Jane Bennett, and others working on the material impacts and susceptibilities of bodies, human and otherwise. This critical attention to shivers, “shimmers” (Gregg and Seigworth), frisson, frottage (Macharia), autonomic response, nerves, skin (Ahmed and Stacey), and “visceral perception” (Massumi 2002) has gained significant traction in the twenty-first century. Indeed, traction, tugs, shoves, nudges, caresses, and the jostling of bodies and matter more broadly have become matters of critical attention in the fields of new materialism and affect theory. In many ways, these critical perspectives share a renewed interest in “the body” that preoccupied early feminist theory; however, the parameters and referents of that body have shifted. Indeed, these scholars share a reluctance to delimit bodies, engaging with embodiment as capacity, as becoming, as leaky, unfinished, and responsive. Hence, the turn to “matter,” a term capacious enough to signify the indeterminacy of embodiment, of who and what counts as a body, which resists neoliberal perspectives that presume to identify and delimit what matter matters, producing certain bodies as ethically, politically, and economically significant and others as redundant, and disposable. Following this materialist emphasis, I treat “matter” as necessarily plural in its foundational relationality, a status that defies the verticalizing impulse that produces significant matter on the one hand and disposable bodies on the other. Pluralizing “matter” in both its denotative forms—referring to both importance and existence—means extending ethical significance beyond the human to include responsive matter(s) more broadly. This widening of significance is a widening of concern³ that highlights contact, “touchability,” and responseability, as crucial determinants of care. In short, posthuman care inevitably involves posthuman touch. Who and what “we”⁴ can (and do) touch, and what

³ My use of “concern” here echoes both Latour’s essay on the topic and Puig de la Bellacasa’s response to Latour in Matters of Care. In his essay, Latour challenges his readers to imagine productive (rather than destructive) modes of critique, asking, “[c]an we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care?” (Latour 232). Puig de la Bellacasa picks up on this appeal, proposing care as a remedy for the “weariness of critical constructivism” that seeks to dismantle its subject (Matters of Care 35). Both scholars propose an alternative method for apprehending, analyzing, and speculating, a method built on concern and care, with the potential to “transform how we experience and perceive the things we study” (66). ⁴ I employ quotation marks here to highlight the problem of the first-person plural pronoun. As discussed throughout Curious Kin, the regular appearance of “we” in both care and posthumanist theory speaks to the implied whiteness of both perspectives and the need for more self-reflexive interrogation of who is included and excluded in these critical dialogues. Though both care and posthumanist theory critique the implied homogeneity of their central objects of study—care and the human respectively—to what degree do they reproduce this homogeneity in their appeals to imagined audiences? I return to the problem of the scholarly “we” throughout Curious Kin, especially in Chapter 4.

64        can and does touch us, become critical determiners of who and what is implicated in the messy webs of care that produce and sustain life. Care involves contact and contact requires care. This is how I interpret and employ “relational ontology”: matter, including human matter, is made through, by, and for touch and with this relational response-ability comes responsibility. An exploration of touch is an exploration of matter and its mattering. As scholars of touch⁵ frequently point out, touch involves a degree of intimacy, even transgression as one’s ostensibly discrete body makes contact with the world: through touch, “boundaries blur as self and not-self meet” (Holler 2); “the separation of self and other is undermined” (Ahmed and Stacey 6).⁶ The blurring effects of touch stem from its status as a two-way, “reversible” sense (Puig de la Bellacasa “Touching Technologies”); we simultaneously touch and are touched by the “not-self ” matter of the world. As much as skin can appear as a boundary that contains and separates the self from the world, it is, in its tactility and literal porosity—the skin absorbs the world even as it keeps it at bay—a reminder of human inseparability from the world. Anything I touch, touches me; I am affecting and affected. Skin is highly permeable, absorbing the world’s nourishing elements as well as its toxins, not to mention its thriving microbial ecosystem, the microbiome, all of which contributes to human bodies as sites of an intra-active assemblage, of constant transformation, exchange, and co-production. This sensuous reversibility and permeability are crucial for human survival and flourishing. Touch is the first sense to develop in utero and the most important sense for newborn interaction with the world. Touch is integral not only for communication and bonding, but for our early survival since, Linda Holler explains, “touch cells in our lips make it possible to nurse, and touch accounts for as much as 80 percent of infant communication . . . . We house up to nine thousand independent nerves per square inch in the skin of our fingertips alone, making it difficult to imagine life apart from the body’s tactile awareness” (15). Contact is integral for infant survival and this initial,

⁵ Here I’m referencing the work of feminist researchers, cultural theorists, human geographers, and philosophers on touch and skin. See, for example, Ahmed and Stacey; Castañeda; Classen; Benthien; Holler; Manning; and Puig de la Bellacasa. ⁶ In the theory and philosophy of touch, one frequently finds mention of the notion that “Skin opens our bodies to other bodies . . . through touch, the separation of self and other is undermined in the very intimacy or proximity of the encounter” (Ahmed and Stacey 6). As Puig de la Bellacasa explains, “in its quasi-inescapable evocation of close relationality, touching is also called upon as the experience par excellence in which boundaries between self and other are blurred” (“Touching Technologies” 298).

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foundational tactility sets the stage for embodied relational ontologies determined by the giving and receiving of care. Human animals are by no means unique in this regard. As Harry Harlow’s infamous social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys demonstrated, the compulsion to touch and the need for bodily contact are not exclusively human. In the title story of her collection Love in Infant Monkeys (2009), American author Lydia Millet imagines Harlow’s experiments as an outgrowth of his own tortured relationship to materiality and tactility. As the narrator explains in the story’s sardonic opening lines, “Harry Harlow had a general hypothesis and he would refine and prove it: that mothers are useful, developmentally. That they have an intrinsic value beyond their breast milk. Call this value, for lack of a better concept, their company” (“Love in Infant Monkeys” 94). In Harlow’s experiments, and in Millet’s story, “company” is synonymous with contact. In his experiments, Harlow discovered that infant monkeys preferred a soft, terry cloth “surrogate mother” to wire mesh surrogates, regardless of which offered milk. Harlow’s work, as Millet shrewdly conveys, helped prove that touch and affect, what Harlow termed “contact comfort,” are integral to psychology, subjectivity, and survival; that infants will choose affective sustenance over nutritional sustenance; that the deprivation of contact comfort can be deadly. Millet’s narration conveys the banal perversity of his experiments in which cruelty is termed “collateral damage” and “necessary unpleasantness” (95). Millet’s brief, grim story embeds Harlow’s work within a personal context of loss (his wife is dying) and alienation—Harlow’s very name is a pseudonym adopted to evade anti-Semitic prejudice; his actual name, Israel, “sounded Jewish, and this made it hard to secure a good job” (96). The story’s pathos emerges from its suggestion that Harlow has reproduced his ascetic laboratory conditions in his own life, implying that his dedication to science and scholarship has produced a self-inflected alienation that leaves him stranded in an alcoholic haze that causes him to mistake estrangement for authority, isolation for strength. When an acquaintance asks after his dying wife, Harlow regards the inquiry as an “obscene intimacy,” and as the story makes clear, for Millet’s Harlow, there is no other kind. In other words, the story highlights the underlying irony of Harlow’s life work: a career spent denying creatures “contact comfort” in order to prove its necessity. The story’s final scene is a nightmare in which the affective capacity of the monkeys Harlow tortures confronts him, in which “He mistook each infant monkey for a beloved soul” (104), and faces the mother’s “passion, like a heat emanating” (105). The intense tactility of the image is especially striking in a story largely bereft of affective sensation. Embodied maternal love returns

66        with a vengeance in his nightmare, a haunting reminder of the affective dimensions—tactile, social, familial, collegial—he has eschewed and denied in his work and life. Suffering was undeniably central to Harlow’s research, which demonstrated the necessity of contact for survival and psychological health via its deleterious denial, and the cruelty of his research methods are understandably prominent in many discussions and representations of Harlow’s work and legacy.⁷ Less frequently noted, however, is the way his work showcased the potential affective intensity of nonhuman, non-organic matter in its use of warm terry cloth as maternal substitute. The post-organic affiliations formed between monkeys and warm cloth significantly inhibited the monkeys’ future interactions with their own species. In other words, the formative attachments infant monkeys established with inanimate surrogates produced adolescent and adult monkeys unwilling or unable to form bonds with their own species, including their own offspring. Harlow’s disturbing experiments are a reminder that not only who, but what animals, human and otherwise, touch from our first moments can have lifelong consequences, demonstrating that early tactile encounters resonate throughout the life course. It is not only humans and primates who are dependent on touch. The sense is primary for a wide range of animals, particularly altricial species (a designation I discuss further below). Human animals, like so many others, are formed through and by touch, reiterating once again that subjects emerge via contact: relating precedes being. As Ahmed and Stacey insist, analyzing embodiment in isolation is insufficient for understanding the material operations of being. Instead, we must attend to “the fleshly interface between bodies and worlds,” and reflect on “inter-embodiment, the mode of being-with and beingfor, where one touches and is touched by others” (1). In what follows, I explore the fleshy interface between bodies and worlds as a way of thinking with and about care (and its absences) beyond familiar human dyads and triads of spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends, asking what is posthuman caring touch? Who gives and receives it? What counts (or doesn’t count) as touch, as care, as worthwhile and meaningful, legitimate and real? And who (and what) get excluded in conventional, anthropocentric responses to such questions? ⁷ See, for example, Lydia Millet’s story discussed above; the graphic novel Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love by Jim Ottaviani and Dylan Meconis (2007); the science biography Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum (2011); The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments, edited by Andrew and Clair Linzey (2017); and The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America by Marga Vicedo (2013).

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What Touch? Whose Touch? The entanglements of touch make it an especially fruitful topic for discussions of posthuman care. The term itself is polysemous; it is both a verb and a noun with a plethora of meanings and functions. The verb form alone has thirtythree entries in the OED, the noun twenty-seven. “Touch” refers to tactile, embodied, emotional encounters of many kinds, to palpating, striking, stroking, rousing, and the rest, but also to testing metals for their purity, to mental incompetence, to disease, to idiosyncratic personality. To touch and be touched suggests physical contact, of course, but also affective encounters that need not involve the haptic. This kind of touch is embodied, but remote; things, creatures, images, and environments can touch us, can be “touching” without any apparent epidermal involvement. The concept of remote touch supports what many scholars have been asserting in a range of disciplinary registers: that human animal bodies are fundamentally affective, made for and by feeling in its wonderful multiplicity, and that language and representation are part of this relational process. Like many other mammals, homo sapiens are an altricial species, meaning that we are born immature and helpless so that we require care to survive. Like Harlow’s monkeys, human animals enter the world receptive and relational, seeking contact and interaction. This basic altriciality that drives humans toward other bodies from the beginning of life contributes to our larger entanglement in complex, often ineffable material, affective, ecological meshes. Despite the fundamental role affective touch plays in human survival and flourishing, the study of its biomechanics is relatively underdeveloped according to cognitive neuroscientists India Morrison, Line Löken, and Håkan Olausson. Much of the research on touch has focused on pain, which has both a “sensory-discriminative dimension” and a “motivational-affective dimension,” as opposed to “non-painful cutaneous sensation” (Morrison, Löken, and Olausson 305). As Morrison, Löken and Olausson explain, while “the discriminative aspects of touch have been well-studied, the affective aspects have only recently been conceptualized and investigated in the neuroscientific literature” (305).⁸ Their research explores the “the skin as a social organ” (Morrison, Löken, and Olausson 305), and Morrison goes so far as to posit social, affective touch as a “distinct category of tactile experience” (Morrison, ⁸ As Morrison explains elsewhere, “[c]onverging evidence suggests that affective touch is a distinct domain, distinguishable on the behavioral and neural levels from so-called discriminative aspects of touch” (“Keep Calm” 2).

68        “Keep Calm” 344). Her research suggests that “hedonic and rewarding touch” (344), which has been largely overlooked in neuroscientific research, is not an incidental or secondary sensation. Quite the contrary, Morrison argues that affective touch is both primary (one of the oldest forms of touch, evolutionarily speaking)⁹ and fundamental (affective touch plays important functional physiological roles) (“Keep Calm” 344). Though essential for navigating and interpreting the world, preserving bodily safety, and discovering and assessing potential nourishment, discriminative touch is, according to Morrison, a more recent evolutionary development than affective touch. Affective touch’s displacement of discriminatory touch as the “more fundamental, even . . . paradigmatic, tactile function,” as Morrison puts it,¹⁰ reiterates, in neuroscientific terms, a care-centered approach to being that recognizes relationality as primary and constitutive. The neuroanatomy of affective touch provides an instructive lens for reading human animal relationality. “Specialized pathways for socially and affectively relevant touch” (Morrison, Löken, and Olausson 312) that begin at the skin via CT afferent fibers demonstrate how human animals, much like a wide range of mammals, from rats (306) to primates (307), are built for care (312). Much like a host of humanities-based approaches to human animals in morethan-human worlds, neuroscience invokes relational ontologies that treat human animals as interdependent, affective beings that are physically and socially made for and by affective encounters and entanglements. The concurrence between so-called hard and soft disciplines—itself a tactile metaphor—on this count presents a compelling case for approaching animal bodies as contingent and vulnerable, response-able and responsible. No small task, transforming the Western social imaginary fixated on self-propelling individuals as atomistic engines of industry and prosperity whose capacity to thrive is impeded only by personal failing. However, this is where fiction and film can step in, offering perspectives that help denaturalize the cultural scripts so often taken for granted, offering non-normative representations of touch, ⁹ I recognize evolutionary arguments run the risk of reproducing sociobiological reductionism in appealing to biological markers as evidence of sociocultural meaning (and vice versa). However, Morrison troubles such simplistic sociobiological narratives in her work, which stresses the complexity of embodied interactions. As she explains, though different biological systems of touch are distinguishable in lab settings, such distinction becomes moot as embodied beings inhabit and encounter the world, touching to identify, interpret, understand, relate, and feel all at once. Most significantly, her assertions about the evolutionary longevity and biological significance of affective touch shed light on the implicit biases of neurobiological research that focuses primarily on the “wide-ranging functions of touch [and] leaves out a very essential fact: touch can also be pleasant” (emphasis in original, Morrison, Löken, and Olausson 305). ¹⁰ Morrison’s comment is from her 2017 talk, “The Skin as a Social Organ: The Neuroscience of Affective Touch,” which was delivered at University of Leeds, Oct. 2, 2017.

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affect, and relationality that can help audiences imagine being and relating otherwise. Glimpses of speculative worlds can help readers and viewers reflect on existing cultural parameters of care. In the analysis that follows, I explore texts that imagine potential embodiments and contact zones of posthuman care that implicitly reevaluate the hallowed idea of “human touch” so often employed as a shorthand for good care. These texts offer tacit rebuttals to claims that care lacking human touch is no care at all. Nonetheless, they are not uncomplicated celebrations of nonhuman contact; they address the always lurking potential for destructive touch, for violence and abuse, reminding audiences that touch always has a politics as well as an ethics. Touching or being touched always carries risk and some bodies are more vulnerable than others. In what follows, I explore fictional speculations that help initiate a dialogue that puts neuroscience, posthumanism, and care studies in touch with new materialism and affect theory in order to consider how the biology, phenomenology, ethics, and politics of touch can (and do) inform and transform one another. The rest of this chapter explores literary and cinematic texts that trouble divisions between species and cast doubt on the efficacy and ethics of policing what increasingly appear as arbitrary ontological boundaries. In their provocative treatment of sensuous embodiment these texts trouble the assumption that bodies end (or begin) at the skin. I begin by exploring two novels of feral children living with animals before moving on to consider tactile bonds beyond the animal, analyzing a film that explores the limits of posthuman touch and care in its depiction of alien relations. All three texts depict haptic intimacies that contravene utilitarian ontological models that efface affect and interdependency and treat embodied subjects as available matter, while at the same time registering the risks of contact between porous, vulnerable bodies. How does one remain open to contact, human or otherwise, in social structures built on the denial of relationality and contingency? These texts consider particular bodies—feminized, sexualized, racialized, aged, animalized, disabled—that engage embodied porousness and “touchability” in all of its caring potential and mortal risk. My texts are eclectic: a novel by an Australian writer based on events in post-Soviet Russia; a hybrid text, part poem, part novel, part visual text by a British writer that recounts events in nineteenth-century Bengal, India; a Scottish-British film that takes place on the margins of Glasgow and in the remote regions of the Scottish Highlands. These texts share little in terms of narrative, style, or setting. However, in all cases, narrative and form facilitate the communication of non-normative embodiments produced with and for

70        posthuman relations. Much like Ishiguro’s robot narration in Klara and the Sun, which coaxes readers to share a strange, yet familiar perspective that subtly undermines human distinction, the unconventional, more-than-human protagonists that focalize Dog Boy, Humanimal, and Under the Skin generate uncanny reading and viewing experiences that similarly comfort and challenge their human audiences. Despite their divergent styles, all three highlight the complexity, diversity, and ambiguity, the risks and possibilities of posthuman touch as both the producer and product of vulnerability and care. As with most narratives I explore throughout this book, these are stories of care (and its absence) at the margins; they imagine the relationality that happens outside and alongside more conventional narratives of dyadic, human care. Though the scenarios they depict are extraordinary, these exaggerations amplify the mundane, everyday posthuman tactile encounters that form the fabric of embodied life.

Feral Families: Dog Boy and Humanimal In the summer of 1998, Ivan Mishukov was discovered living with a pack of wild dogs on the streets of Moscow.¹¹ Ivan is one of a handful of documented “feral children”¹² whose close contact with nonhuman animals allowed him to survive, despite little to no contact with human caregivers after his separation from his human kin at age 4. Ivan was “rescued” from his dog family after two years living with the pack. Quotations ascribed to Ivan suggest that he was unconvinced that his capture and removal from his canine family was salvation; quite the opposite, records suggest he viewed it more like a kidnapping.¹³

¹¹ Hornung’s novel is one of several fictional adaptations of Ivan’s story, which also include the young adult novel Dogs of Winter (Pyron), the play Ivan and the Dogs (Naylor), and the experimental film Lek and the Dogs (directed by Andrew Kotting). ¹² “Feral children” include any children raised apart from humans, but cases of feral children raised by nonhuman animals have a particular hold on the public imagination, resulting in multiple stories, novels, films, and visual art projects. Feral children are typically unable or unwilling to narrate the details of their experience, which contributes to the mystery and mystique of their stories and the proliferation of media representations. Feral children ostensibly raised by animals, including Marina Chapman, Oxana Malaya, Sujit Kumar, Rochom P’ngien, John Ssebunya, and Kamala and Amala (“the wolf children of Midnapore” who are the subject of Humanimal) are the subject of numerous scholarly and artistic representations, including, for example, Julia Fullerton-Batten’s sensationalizing 2015 photo series, “Feral Children, 2015.” ¹³ Both Bobbie Pyron, author of the young adult novel about Ivan’s experience Dogs of Winter, and psychotherapist Brenda Mallon (30) quote Ivan as proclaiming, “I was better off with the dogs. They loved and protected me” during an interview at the Reutov children’s shelter that housed him after his separation from his canine kin. While Pyron attributes the quotation to the Chicago Sun-Times (July 26, 1998), Mallon cites an unspecified 1998 issue of The Observer.

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In Savage Girls, Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, popular historian Michael Newton adopts this view, claiming that Ivan quickly developed a symbiotic relationship with the street dogs he lived with, in part because of an affinity between abandoned children and homeless dogs in post-Soviet Moscow, both of which “are abandoned with mournful regularity, and quickly turn feral” (16). As Newton explains, Ivan developed a relationship with a particular pack of dogs by begging for food and sharing it with them, leading them to trust and befriend him, and even adopt him as their pack leader (16). Despite numerous attempts by the police to “wrest him from the streets,” the pack evaded capture until they were finally lured into a restaurant kitchen with bait (16). According to Newton’s romanticized vision of events, “[t]he relationship [between Ivan and the dogs] worked perfectly, far better than anything Ivan had known among his fellow humans” (16) and Ivan’s return to human society was a fall from grace: though he effectively assimilated back into human society and “appears to be just like any other Moscow child . . . it’s said that at night he dreams of dogs” (17). Newton relies on a series of conventional oppositions, between humans and animals, civilization and wilderness, corruption and purity, to convey the pathos of Ivan’s narrative and create a sensational tale of woe. Though it’s unclear whether Ivan fled his mother and her boyfriend or was abandoned by them, the sparse details of his early childhood are unquestionably grim. He was abused and abandoned, a pattern of mistreatment leading to homelessness that was common during the post-Soviet years in Russia. As the Soviet state collapsed and housing was privatized, many families, including young children were left homeless (Encyclopedia of Homelessness vol. 1 484): “In Moscow, the number of children brought from the street to the special militia (police) reception centre for juvenile delinquents doubled between 1988 and 1998. This rapid growth in number is related to social processes resulting from the collapse of the Soviet social structure, including the breakdown of the Soviet welfare system and rising unemployment” (Horschelmann and van Blerk 77–78). Children bore the brunt of the spike in post-Perestroika poverty. As sociologist Svetlana Stephens explains, within the Soviet economy, “the social role of children was tightly defined by the boundaries of socialization and education” (78), a role that shifted significantly as a result of the transition to a market economy as large sections of the Russian population lost access to employment, housing, education, public health care, social benefits, and pensions (79). A wealth of research has demonstrated correlations between poverty, insecure employment, and adverse conditions for children and Stephens describes an increase in “explosive and erratic parent-child

72        interactions” (79). Indeed, the situation in 1990s Russia, and Moscow in particular, is interpreted as a confirmation of the causal relationship between the collapse of welfare states, unreliable or unavailable employment and child suffering. However, Stephens argues that such generic social-economicfamilial risk factors were inflected by particularly Russian social expectations regarding children, adults, and familial structures. As she reports, street children in Russia produce a specific kind of anxiety in their potential threat to social institutions, particularly family and school (77). She quotes at length from a 2000 report on St. Petersburg that pathologizes street children, claiming their “serious personality problems” are the result of an altered “system of values” that makes them “unable to conform to social norms” or effectively differentiate between “good and evil.” The report goes on to allege that such children have “only basic needs and primitive interests. . . . These children have no sympathy or compassion for other people. . . . Consequently their connections to family and society as a whole are very weak” (77). The report’s synopsis relies on a familiar set of binaries (adults/children, society/individual, healthy/unhealthy, good/evil, civilized/primitive) to explain the threat posed by street children, who are described as barely or not-quite human. Though the terms of this analysis are specific to post-Soviet Russian social norms, I would argue that this description of pathologically “uncivilized” children exemplifies the anxiety produced by posthuman liminality. Despite the idiosyncrasies of the context she analyzes—the post-Soviet disintegration of the welfare state and the resulting spike in unemployment, poverty, and homelessness—, Stephens argues “one can find significant similarities between the situation in Russia and the processes happening in the West in the course of globalization. There is a visible expansion of street-level economic activity and growth of the new urban poor, resulting from the transformation of welfare states and changes in global labor markets” (90). Indeed, as much as the St Petersburg report expresses a particularly Russian prioritization of the social good over individual desires (which are treated as selfish and capricious), at the same time, it reproduces humanistic models in its expression of fear and disdain for non-normative subjects, embodiments, and relations, which are figured as wild, inhuman, and dangerous—in other words, feral. In 2009 Australian author Eva Hornung published a novel, Dog Boy, based on Ivan’s remarkable experience as a feral street child. Hornung’s novel, which portrays the protagonist’s experience of human/nonhuman intimacy in all its fetid, aromatic, tactile specificity, is a portrait of sensuous nonhuman care largely uninhibited by the sociocultural structures and boundaries that typically preclude such relationships. However, this posthuman kinship is short

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lived. While the circumstances of post-Soviet poverty in Moscow in the late 1990s generate the novel’s unconventional interspecies kinship, they also abolish it, producing an ironic circularity in which the failures of the state necessitate the very transgressive kinship it later denounces and punishes. The novel toggles between the historical specificity that both creates and destroys “dog boy,” and the inhuman, ahistorical immediacy of its embodied feral protagonist aloof from human socio-political structures. In Dog Boy, Hornung reimagines Ivan as Romochka, a 4-year-old boy left to wander the streets after his mother and her boyfriend disappear from the family apartment. Without any access to human care, the novel’s protagonist survives by joining a nonhuman family, a pack of wild dogs living in the basement of a crumbling church on the city’s outskirts. Once this unconventional living arrangement is discovered by human authorities it is destroyed: the dogs are lured with poisoned meat so that Romochka can be captured and delivered to the Anton Makarenko Children’s Centre, where director Dr. Dmitry Pastushenko and his assistant Natalya Ivanovna test theories of child development. The novel ends on a grim note: forced to re-enter human society, Romochka kills his dog siblings, which Dmitry has offered to him as pets. Romochka’s murder of the puppies imitates the actions of his dog mother, who killed a litter birthed at a time of starvation, which Romochka took as a lesson that pups that cannot be nourished and sustained must be eliminated. The novel’s final lines are distant and chilling, the point of view suddenly shifting from the intimate, sympathetic third-person narrative voice that has communicated the majority of the novel’s action to a remote secondperson perspective tinged with salacious voyeurism: “If you were to look now through the window . . . you would see Romochka alone in that room still cradling the three puppies. The empty milk bottle stands beside him” (289). The reader becomes a Peeping Tom, peeking through the window to see a desperate, despairing boy who, tortured by the loss of his animal kin, marks his transition into human society via animal death, killing the puppies with quick bites to the head: He strokes the pups until they sleep. Then he stands and begins to weep, his shoulders tense and shaking. He turns. His face is raised towards you now, and he is sobbing in earnest, mouthing a scream. He stays like this, his body stiff, his fingers outstretched. He stops. His breathing stills and he stands limp at the window for a while, his eyes huge and dark in a white face. Then he turns swiftly and, bending down to the puppies, bites through each of their skulls in turn. (289–290)

74        The novel concludes with a brief, impassive explanation—“He has chosen to stay” (290)—that implies a cause-and-effect relationship between his location and the destruction of his dog siblings: to remain in human society requires the sacrifice of Romochka’s nonhuman kin. The choice to be human is explicitly associated with the death of the animal, both literally (the puppies in Romochka’s hands) and figuratively (Romochka’s dog life). Romochka’s two-year experience as a “dog boy,” that is, a posthuman being enacted in and by embodied animal relations, is revealed as an untenable transgression. While the novel’s melancholic depiction of the human as the annihilation of the animal is an indictment of anthropocentric taxonomies, it does not shy away from disconcerting features of posthuman care, paying close attention to the unsettling (for most human readers) conditions of animal survival and pleasure. Though its overarching narrative frame, which charts Romochka’s alienation from human society, his survival via feral kinship, and tragic reabsorption by human society, relies on archetypal conflicting binaries— wilderness v. civilization; animal v. human—the majority of the text ignores such categories in its communication of the greasy, grimy, and smelly praxis of embodied, interdependent animal being, frequently provoking powerful affective resonances in the embodied reader. From the novel’s opening, Romochka is depicted as an animal at risk of starvation and hypothermia whose vulnerable materiality is all consuming. His engagement with his surroundings is largely haptic: seeking heat, but finding only icy pipes, he “snatche[s] his hand back as if scalded” (4). Romochka’s priorities are fundamental—food and heat—and the novel charts his canny, life-saving adaptation to a new mode of being that privileges sensuous connection. As Hornung has explained in interview: I had this notion that Romochka could demonstrate . . . the enormous flexibility and mutability of human selfhood . . . Romochka ends up with—not a selfhood that is less than human, but one that is more, that encompasses a kind of doghood as well as a boyhood. And he is able to exploit boyhood or doghood according to where he feels he will have the best chance of survival. (Neary)

Hornung depicts a haptic posthuman care that jettisons language in favor of interspecies touch. During his first contact with his new dog family, Romochka tries to tell the puppies a story but finds that “[w]ords had lost their spell” (26). In place of words, he quickly discovers an embodied communication of movement, touch (licks, bites, nuzzles) and smell: “He found himself quickly

 :      

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fitting in with teeth serious and teeth playful, reading easily the bodies around him with eyes, fingers, nose and tongue” (26–27). When Romochka first encounters the street dogs as a starving, freezing child, he notes their material capacities: “Dogs, he said to himself, are warm. He had cuddled Mrs Schiller’s hairy dog Heine many times, and he had a sudden vivid memory of Heine’s warm belly skin and stinky breath” (10). He initially approaches a stray dog while wandering the city streets in part because such contact has always been forbidden. He recalls his mother’s prohibition as he moves toward the dog: “Never go near street dogs. They have diseases that can kill you” (emphasis in original, 10), his mother had told him. Inter-species contact, at least initially, is an act of defiance, but this thrill is muted by the lack of audience: “There was no one there to chase him and tell him off, which gave his transgressions a certain hollowness. He was so cold and hungry” (10). Accustomed to meagre, often abusive parenting—he recalls family contact as brutal and cruel; his mother and his “uncle” often beat him and locked him in a cupboard as punishment—Romochka finds the possibility of transgression without punishment alluring. However, the pleasure of flaunting rules quickly dissipates as he experiences the comforts and reassurances of animal contact, a taboo intimacy that facilitates not only survival, but animal flourishing. His first contact with the dog he later calls Momochka (Russian for “mother”) is via her tongue. He approaches her because she lacks the hostility he intuits in other street dogs and she greets him by “placing a sticky kiss on the corner of his mouth” (13). He interprets this contact as an invitation, and follows her through the streets to her den, sensations of cold and hunger compelling him forward. These sensations of animal need—the painful “sizzle” of his stomach (13), the biting cold—drive him across species boundaries: “And so it was, trotting with three dogs through ordinary lanes, past ordinary tenements, past ordinary lives, a lone boy crossed the border that is, usually, impossible—not even imaginable” (15). Romochka is rewarded for this border crossing with heat and sustenance. As he follows Momochka into the basement: the warmth of the nest, warmth of the squirming bodies, rose to heat his face. He dropped to his hands and knees, to his belly and wriggled towards her. She growled steady and low, and he stopped. Then he inched closer, again, eyes averted. She was growling softly when he reached her flank in the full heat of the puppies. He curled himself slowly into that warm bed and pulled off his freezing mittens. He could smell the puppies now, warm and spicy-milky, sucking, sucking. He could smell her too, stinky and comforting. (16)

76        Momochka begins to lick his face and he registers the nuances of the sensation: Her tongue was warm and wet, sweet and sour. He licked his lips and tasted her spit and the faint taste of milk. He wormed his cold hand towards her belly and grabbed a puppy. It writhed, grunting in displeasure as he pulled. It took two hands, but in the end he managed to yank it off the teat. The puppy squealed and snuggled, nudged deep and found another. Romochka wiggled himself close, buried his cold nose in the mother dog’s hair and sticky skin, and then the hot milk was his. It slid, rich and delicious, down his throat and into his aching belly. His anxiety floated away and wellbeing seeped through him. After a while his hands warmed up and he reached up for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank, feeling out her scabs and scars and playing his fingers along her smooth ribs. She sighed and laid down her head. (17)

I quote these passages at length to convey the wealth of sensuous, often sensual, details Hornung employs. The sensations and pleasures are multiple and diffuse, invoking an embodied animality via language—writhing, snuggling, wiggling, burying, worming—and tone—“[h]is anxiety floated away and wellbeing seeped through him.” The final sentence conveys a powerful image of interspecies comfort that simultaneously invokes fundamental human animal bonds (the mother-child connection produced through nursing) and archetypal human/ animal tactile intimacies (a human child stroking a dog’s belly). The scene transposes a familiar image of human maternity—a child absent-mindedly touching his mother’s body as he nurses—onto human/dog intimacy, producing an uncanny moment for the reader. At once familiar and strange, this image of a boy nursing a dog is sensuous and disorienting, suffused as it is with the calm, comfort, and sighing warmth of a familiar human connection. Romochka adjusts quickly to this emphatically tactile relational ontology. His world is haptic, as opposed to optic, based on contact, warmth, and connection. Since he can see very little in the dark of the basement, his haptic awareness quickly makes up for the absence of the visual: “He filled his invisible body and although nothing about him had changed, in this darkness he felt enlarged. Warm bodies clambered over him, burrowed around him. He grabbed hold of one and tucked it to his chest. The puppy whined and wriggled, but he held on harder and it stopped struggling. Its rapid heartbeat settled and he smelled its milk-and-leather breath” (17). As Romochka adjusts to dog life, he revels in a connected, interdependent agency based on responsibility and obligation to his nonhuman den-mates.

 :      

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At this point, it may seem that I’m holding up Hornung’s novel as a model of posthuman animal being that laudably reverses human hierarchies, exposing humans as dangerous brutes, and nonhuman animals as paradigms of collaboration and honest care. There is, to be sure, the potential to read Hornung’s novel as a dismantling of anthropocentrism that reorganizes human/animal hierarchies rather than destabilizes them. However, my interest in the novel stems from its resistance to the structures that produce and normalize human exceptionalism. This is particularly evident in its lampooning depiction of the epistemic frameworks employed by the misguided scientists, Dmitry and Natalya, whose instrumentalizing humanism leads them to treat abused, abandoned children as psychiatric specimens freely available for scientific scrutiny and rehabilitation. Dmitry’s unflagging commitment to epistemological frameworks supplied by the biological sciences makes him well aware of human animal continuities: he decorates his office with animal artefacts—inert representations with little connection to animal lives—and likes to comment on the scientific fact of human animality in public: “he had said more than once over dinner that the human was an animal at heart” (194). Nonetheless, Dmitry struggles to fully integrate an understanding of homo sapiens’ literal, material animal status. For Dmitry, the animality of the human is a scientific abstraction, rather than a phenomenological reality and when confronted with an overt manifestation of human animality, his being revolts. Witnessing “Puppy,” Romochka’s name for another “dog boy” that has joined his pack, when he is first rescued, he experiences a visceral denial, “an upwelling of revulsion at everything animal” (194). Dmitry relies on clear distinctions between representations and the material world, tolerating representations—biological taxonomies, tchotchkes, and psychological theories—of human animality, but recoils from material manifestations of human-animal continuities and affinities. Karen Barad’s work on representation and materiality can help parse Dmitry’s denial and discomfort. In her essay, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Barad describes her skepticism toward the “representationalist” habit of distinguishing between things and their representations, the assumption that there is an “ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent” (804). In contrast, “[a] performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power

78        granted to language to determine what is real” (802). Puppy, Romochka, and their canine family enact a performative ontology in their acutely embodied discursive practices, exhibiting a profound, even radical embodiment that disturbs Dmitry’s representationalist scientific knowledge. This disturbance is experienced as an embodied rejection, a spontaneous and unexpected revulsion at the performative iteration of the theories of human animality Dimitry has casually accepted as representational, if not material, reality. To what degree, one might ask, can the representational arts enact this kind of material performativity? To what extent is a realist novel able to invoke the haptic dimensions of relational materiality, a central concept for the vision of posthuman care that motivates this study? This is a pivotal challenge for my own endeavor, which posits cultural texts, especially literary and visual representation, as unique posthumanist provocations that theorize via figuration and speculation, which is perhaps a fancy way of saying literary and visual representations show rather than tell audiences what human, posthuman, caring, and kin can and might mean, what they are and might be, what they do and might do. To what extent, I ask, can a text like Hornung’s disrupt the straightforward correlation of representationalism, that is, the (assumed) correlation between pre-existing things and the representations, in this case language, used to conjure them in the mind of the reader? To what extent can a literary representation go beyond discursive bodies to invoke and engage a fleshy, tactile, feeling, smelling, touching, and tasting body? To gauge this invocation and engagement one might consider actual readers and their embodied interactions with the text and so I offer a few reflections on my own affective interaction with the text as an example. As an embodied reader I do not passively receive Hornung’s depiction of Romochka and his canine cohort; rather, the representation touches me, not just as an abstract cogitating subject, but as a material agent who senses and feels. Hornung’s language is itself a form of sensuous habitation that incites, invokes and appeals to the reader’s animality in its reliance on tactility for its expression. In other words, the text relies on the reader’s porous, vulnerable embodiment for its power. In my case, Hornung’s novel mobilized my embodied reactions, engaging me via sensuous prose that, at least initially, produced a visceral revulsion that anticipated Dmitry’s own recoiling. As a result, I cannot easily disentangle myself from this kind of reaction; my own species boundaries were exposed and prodded by the novel’s earliest scenes of dog-boy intimacy. Though I may engage with Romochka’s dog-ness, I find myself butting up against my own anthropocentrism as I read. For example, I find myself estranged from Romochka’s delighted consumption of

 :      

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rat viscera: “This was, he decided, his favourite food. He chewed through the slippery ribcage to its soft centre, keeping the head in his fist to make sure Black Sister didn’t crunch through it and eat his treasure. . . . He sucked the stripped skull clean” (51). With such scenes, the novel reminds me of my (human) materiality. Unlike Romochka, I am not seduced into dogness by immersion; I am well aware of my inability to achieve a canine Umwelt¹⁴ even as I witness, even identify with, Romochka’s transformation, the sloughing of his human epistemology, the many assumptions and biases that have previously structured his life. Despite Hornung’s skillful evocations of the touch, smell, and taste of canine being, I am unable to move beyond a remote, if affected witnessing of this curious dog boy, a wild child that prods me into reflecting on my own capacities (and incapacities) for posthumanist reorientation toward being, knowing and feeling otherwise. This is the difficult work of fictional speculations of inhuman being, including feral children: to communicate posthuman affinities and care that are largely outside the ken of human(ist) epistemologies. It is perhaps unsurprising that Hornung’s novel produces affective and interpretive tensions as it attempts to express posthuman being via a conventional humanist art form, the realist novel. However, other representational modes are perhaps more disposed to performing posthuman becoming. Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009) is a fascinating attempt to grapple with the conundrum of representation’s anthropocentricism. Like Dog Boy, Humanimal is a story of feral children, in this case, the so-called Wolf-Girls of Midnapore, two girls, subsequently named Kamala and Amala, who Reverend J. A. L. Singh discovered living with wolves in 1920. According to Lucien Malson’s research in Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature, Singh was preaching near the village of Godamuri when villagers told him of the “fantastic people” who lived in the nearby forests (68). As Malson’s account continues, one evening the villagers took Singh into the forest to see these strange creatures, leading him to a wolf ’s den, where he watched “three adults and two ‘monsters,’ emerge from their ‘lair’” (68). Eventually Singh was able to capture the monstrous wolf children by killing their wolf mother, after

¹⁴ Umwelt is early twentieth-century philosopher Jakob von Uexküll’s term for the “island of the senses . . . that wraps every man like a garment” (107). Different sensory capacities produce different “islands” and so different species have distinct and inimitable Umwelten. As Uexküll explains, “No animal will ever leave its Umwelt space, the center of which is the animal itself. Wherever it goes, it is always surrounded by its own Umwelt space, filled with its own sensory spheres, irrespective of how much the objects change” (109).

80        which he brought them to an orphanage he ran in Midnapore (68), where one child died a year later in 1921 and the other in 1929. Like Hornung, Kapil imagines the posthuman embodied animality of her feral subjects; however, Kapil does not employ a realist mode. Instead, she inserts herself into the narrative, self-reflexively exploring both the barriers to and risks of her narrative project. In Kapil’s experimentally multimodal text there is no linear narrative to guide the reader, no seamless diegetic fictional world to absorb them. Kamala and Amala’s stories are communicated in a selfconsciously textual way that foregrounds the contingency and speculation of Kapil’s narration. The bulk of the text is structured as parallel narratives focalized by the implied author or one of the wolf-girls. The author’s sections are numerically ordered while those focalized by the wolf-girl are alphabetical, producing a 1a2b3c pattern (with some exceptions) with the two narrative voices further distinguished by font: the wolf-girl’s is significantly larger, assuming visual prominence whenever it appears. Despite these distinctions, the sections intertwine and converge in ways that can leave the reader lost in time and space. The sections are fragmented and frequently disorienting, but the narration is incessantly tactile and viscerally affective. Humanimal offers a tentative response to the question: How might one portray and convey posthumanist kinship without the alienation of representationalism that Barad describes? It offers a multimodal exploration of the feral child motif, treating language as textural, embodied, and performative, experimenting with the materiality of the text without abandoning its referential potential. One reads, or more perhaps more accurately, experiences Humanimal as a textual phenomenon that employs visual images (photographs and maps) and prose poetry to perform and investigate a range of boundaries, barriers, envelopes, and membranes, metaphorical and literal, intact and dissolving. Its evocation of “humanimal” being exposes how a range of “isms”—humanism, colonialism, racism, anthropocentrism, representationalism—sever interrelations, enforce boundaries, and police their maintenance. Even Kapil’s own representational practice is implicated and investigated for its potential perpetuation of domination via division. Kapil opens her narrative with an account of her imperfect attempt to protect Kamala and Amala from the violence of representation: There are two spaces in which I took notes for feral childhood. . . . The first space was a blue sky fiction, imagining a future for a child who died. The second space was real in different ways: a double envelope, fluid digits, scary. I was frightened and so I stopped. There were two kiosks like hard bubbles

 :      

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selling tickets to the show. A feral child is freakish. With all my strength, I pushed the glass doors shut, ignoring the screams of the vendors inside, with a click. I clicked the spaces closed and then, because I had to, because the glass broke, I wrote this. (1)

Regardless of the tactics employed, the risks of exploitation, of becoming the freak show barker reaping profits from showcasing the bizarre specimens that are the historical figures Kamala and Amala, remain vivid and threatening in Kapil’s account. Nonetheless, Kapil persists in her fictionalizing task. She pairs her pure speculation, her “blue sky fiction,” with an attempt to engage the elusive “real,” an effort that challenges her capacity to maintain boundaries between narrative and author, characters and fleshy people, respectful veracity and exploitative sensationalism. In this “second space” of fluid narrativizing— not quite fiction, not quite fact, not quite prose, not quite poetry—she is both narrating author and feral child, curious voyeur and scrutinized body. Even prior to this paratextual explanation of the project’s aims and techniques, Kapil offers clues that this will be a curious, multimodal, sensuous text. The verso of the title page is a black-and-white photographic image, a nonrepresentational range of blacks and greys with blotches of white, presumably stains or other damage, laid on top of the soft tonal gradations. At first glance, the photograph functions as a “haptic image,” Laura Marks’s term for nonrepresentational images that engage viewers as images, rather than as representational ciphers (The Skin 163), as discussed in Chapter 1. On closer inspection, one can make out the texture of fur and the photo eventually resolves into an extreme close-up of a wolf ’s neck and shoulder. The reproduction bears marks that suggest the original photograph was stained and distressed, touched and handled; it is a worldly phenomenon that bears the marks of tactile encounters with material agents: liquids, fungi, bacteria, the sweat and oils of animal skin. These lingering traces further accentuate the image’s haptic quality, reminding the viewer that it is both a mimetic representation and a material object. These traces are not merely evidence of previous contact, but are material markers of ongoing touch and intermingling, alerting the viewer to the presence of molds, bacteria, and moisture. From this first image, which faces the title page, the reader-viewer becomes attuned to textures and shapes, immersed in in the sensuous qualities of the text—both the visual and material quality of the pages, as well as their representational meanings and effects. In effect, this initial image both depicts touch and tactility in its highly textural close-up image of fur and embodies touch in its manifestation of material encounters.

82        Throughout the text, Kapil grapples with the paradox of tactile textuality, offering representation that investigates its own production and interrogates the boundaries it inevitably employs and reproduces, especially those between signification and materiality. She does this not only by foregrounding the materiality of her medium, as in concrete poetry, but by attempting to write about and with the tactile. The first section, “Humanimal 1,” is only two pages long, but in many ways it encapsulates the text’s oscillating representational strategies and the reading practices they provoke. As before, photographic images are integral, but in this case the photograph is not reproduced, but represented, communicated to the reader via ekphrastic description: “Balled up, her shaven head and spine visible through her skin, the wolfgirl was a singular presence, almost butter-yellow against the granular fabric of the Kodak paper” (5). As with the stained close-up of fur, visuality and tactility converge in Kapil’s rendering: the texture of the paper is part of the quality of the image. As the paragraph continues, the narrator relates a series of historical details, describing the wolf girl’s death at Easter in “the hot dry month before monsoon,” the photographic evidence of her death, the church she lived in after her initial “rescue”: “Behind the graveyard was a church, intensely white in the pale pink day / Behind the church was the jungle” (5). However, as “Humanimal 1” continues, what initially appear as separate phenomena begin to converge: “at the edge of the jungle was a seam, a dense shedding of light green ribbons of bark. A place where things previously separate moved together in a wet pivot. I stood and walked towards it in a dream” (6). This evocative image of simultaneous unraveling and union, of a barrier transformed into a hinge, culminates in the lithe, almost onomatopoeic phrase “wet pivot,” which denotes slippery rotation via the approximate rhyme and rhythmic convolution of its final sounds—“et” “ot”—, at once conveying and embodying the text’s preoccupation with evasive, oscillating ontologies. The “pivot” remains a conceptual touchstone as the text continues; recursivity and oscillation structure Kapil’s exploration of Kamala and Amala’s story as a series of events narrated multiple times from multiple perspectives,¹⁵ starting with the moment of the wolf girls’ capture. In the implied author’s account, Reverend Joseph hunts and tracks the humanimal family before finally shooting the wolf mother and capturing the two girls: “he transgressed ¹⁵ In her analysis of the text, “They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal,” literary critic Sarah Dowling terms Kapil’s style “antidevelopmental prose poetry,” arguing Kapil’s “elliptical” writing “recounts the story of Kamala and Amala in compressed sentences that replicate the shock and awe of the civilizational violence to which the two wolf girls were subjected” (737).

 :      

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a wild space of gold, smashed grasses and transparent mountains, to reach the caves. The cave was littered at its entrance with bones. The porters gave him their coarse, white woolen shawls and he threw them over their forms. Two girls. ‘I saw them first.’ Flailing then rigid then soft” (31). The account of violent capture, of destruction and violation—“smashed grasses”—is abrupt, even staccato, and unlike the book’s many descriptions of contact and convergence, of melting, of tentacles extending and testing, of bodies grasping and licking. Singh and the girls experience the jungle in starkly contrasting ways: for the Reverend it is an alien space of danger; for the girls, it is a living, moving presence: “All the branches stir in their silver. Like a liquid metal—the jungle. For her, the girl—tentacular” (9). The Reverend’s single articulation— “I saw them first”—articulates the ocularcentric paradigm that Kapil’s text has struggled against. For Kapil, seeing and claiming are one and the same and the violence of the gaze is literalized in the Reverend’s declaration of ocularcentric mastery. The chilling scene evokes imperial discovery and colonial violence in its depiction of seeing become seizing become owning. In this case, the colonial subject, Reverend Singh, has become a stand in for the imperial project, seizing and “civilizing” the wild nature he “discovers.” The scene of capture re-enacts the decimation and extraction of colonial expansion—the smashed grasses, the dead wolf, the captured children—that is echoed throughout the text in passing references to West Bengal’s colonized ecosystems. In contrast to the Reverend’s exclamation of possessive vision—“I saw them first”—, Kapil’s text denies its reader clear images of the world it inhabits. It thwarts an imperialist gaze, instead offering readers an opportunity to engage in a literary form of humanimal contact, depicting its central figures via embodied encounters that defy visual referents. Impressions, moments, affects, the tangible and tactile are substituted for narrative legibility. The text appeals to the tongue, the mouth, the gut, the fingers and hands, as much as the eye. Unlike Sing’s ocular possession of the girls, the wolves engage in haptic assimilation. Kapil describes how, as babies, the first girl was placed under a tree and massaged with coconut oil when a passing wolf decided to investigate and collect her: “the mouth of the wolf was the sharp pink O that covered her and kept her still as they—the girl and her new, animal mother—crossed into the green” (18). Their tactile relation transforms the human girl into a wolf girl, or, according to Kapil’s evocative compound term, a “wolfgirl,” the elimination of the space between the two words conveying the material closeness of the two bodies—mother wolf and baby girl—and the posthuman creature that results. The girl was human when embedded in a human family, becoming wolf when embedded in wolf relations.

84        The text’s “pivoting” narration repeatedly describes scenes of capture and attempted assimilation. At one point the narrator provides a relatively perfunctory account of the event: “A woman left her daughters beneath the tree then tiptoed back to town. A wolf woke up deep in the tree. A girl was a speck on the ground, so the wolf picked her up in her hairy beak and flew off into the trees. When the girl was found in a milky cave, they shot her mother the wolf and tore her out of her hair” (32). This is followed, a few lines later, by another ekphrastic passage: There is a formal photograph that survives in anthologies of this period: the wolfgirl seated, center front of a row of orphans, at Joseph’s feet. The eyes of the good children do not waver. When the photographer shouts from under his black cape—1, 2 3—our girl is the only one who looks up at a raven passing overhead, shaking her head like a dog on a rope, to howl ‘Owowwoow.’ Joseph kicks her hard, his face completely blank for the camera, but it is too late. It is 1924. The photograph will be blurry. Two faces blossom from one thin neck. (32)

Despite her literal capture, the wolfgirl’s responsiveness interferes with her photographic capture and ontological reassignment. Her attunement to her environment, to the bodies and matter around her, thwarts her clear representation, her howling reaction to a bird overhead interfering with the clarity of the photograph. The wolfgirl’s material attunement impedes her adaptation to a singular identity as a (non-wolf ) girl; she maintains a responsiveness to other beings that appears incompatible with legitimate human-ness. As Kapil makes clear, in the colonial world of Humanimal, being a member of the species homo sapiens is no guarantee of human-ness; the human is an embodied performance, not just a being, but a way of being, what Sylvia Wynter identifies as a racialized praxis, that depends on an elimination of animality.¹⁶ Therefore, the girls’ bodies must be modified and re-educated; they must be trained in human gait and posture.¹⁷ The girls’ captors shave

¹⁶ Wynter’s theory of the human as praxis understands the category in distinctly racialized terms. For Wynter, “the human” is historically indistinguishable from “Man,” a gendered, racialized form of being overrepresented as generic (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” 288). As a result, Black, feminized, disabled, Indigenous homo sapiens are excluded, much like animals, producing affinities between Blackness and animality that Zakiyyah Iman Jackson investigates at length in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. These categorical connections and distinctions are the subject of Chapter 4. ¹⁷ Humanimal’s epigraph, from Ida Rolf ’s Rolfing and Physical Reality, frames the text as an exploration of how bodies are disciplined toward the human:

 :      

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their arms, legs, and skulls. Their arms are wrapped to enforce extension, and bones are broken and reset to afford human postures: “this is corrective therapy,” Kapil writes, “the fascia hardening over a lifetime then split in order to re-set it, educate the nerves” (14). This destructive re-organization of animal bodies is echoed in the patterns of colonial exploitation that decimate and regulate the natural world. The narrator describes a razed landscape, groves of sal trees cut down for export: “the British erased sections of the forest, then re-planted it like a Norfolk copse, brutally. Linearity is brutal. Yet, now, the jungle is more luminous and spacious than it would have been naturally. . . . I have a private view of a corrupt, humanimal landscape, a severed fold” (34). “Linearity is brutal”—the sentence pivots to face multiple directions at once, referring not only to the artificially neat rows of replanted trees, but to Kapil’s overarching narrative project, which risks re-molding the messiness of entangled humanimal being to suit the linear causal demands of narrative literature. Kapil’s text self-reflexively engages with this process, enacting, critiquing, and evading the organization of messy lived materiality into representational order via a multivocal, multimedia format that accommodates the critique and destabilization of its own form, genre, and narrative. The language of “the severed fold” recalls Manning’s description of sensation as a process of continual overlapping that defies linearity and the clear differentiation of inside and outside, self and not-self: “Self is a modality,” Manning writes, “a singularity—on the way toward new foldings. These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, alreadycontained, but co-constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression. The self is not contained. It is a fold of immanent expressibility” (“What If ” 34–35). Manning uses the image of the fold to express a modal perspective of being as praxis. In Kapil’s imagery, the active, relational, enfoldedness of matter is arrested by colonialism, which extracts indigenous flora, replacing the dense, entangled mess of a Bengal jungle with tidy plots of imported monoculture. Yet, even as she describes the brutality of this erasure, That girl has had aberrated physiological patterns all her life—a very slender, flattened, ribsdown pattern. When I was working on her, I was pulling her back from her unique pattern. I was changing a unique but very poorly operating girl to a normal pattern of a woman who could no longer look in the mirror and know that she was unique. I was afraid to say to her, “You are beginning to look like other people.” This was what I wanted to say, but I realized that that was the wrong thing to say. (qtd. in Kapil vii) According to the Dr Ida Rolf Institute, Rolfing is “a form of bodywork that reorganizes the connective tissues, called fascia, that permeate the entire body” (https://www.rolf.org/rolfing.php). Rolfing sessions initiate a re-education of the body toward muscular efficiency and energy conservation and “economical and refined patterns of movement” (https://www.rolf.org/rolfing.php), in effect, training bodies to become more normatively human, that is, efficient, economical, and refined.

86        Kapil refuses the tidiness of pre-/post-colonial evaluative binaries. Evading the temptations of oppositions, Kapil’s speaker conveys the violence of the severed fold at the same time as they describe its “luminous” effects. Linear plots are quickly re-entangled; all severed folds are enfolded anew. Narratives of feral children provide opportunities to reflect on the possibilities (and limits) of posthuman care. Histories and legends of feral children have long fascinated their normative, human-raised counterparts, suggesting as they do the plasticity of bodies, manners, and habits.¹⁸ Feral children are beings produced via relations, in this case, nonhuman relations, that challenge normative conceptions of the human. In her study Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics, Naomi Morgenstern draws attention to the posthumanist potential of the titular figure as represented in contemporary literature. For Morgenstern: The posthumanist wild child . . . figures or personifies the philosophical wildness of a human being (and a being-in-relation) to come—but not of the future in a teleological, modernizing sense. This new kind of wild child is, to a more or less explicit extent, a child of the border between a liberalhumanist “world” that might be coming to an end (a world that usually imagines itself doing so in apocalyptic terms—as the end of the world) and a posthumanist, democratic future that not only might, in a certain way, come back to us from what we had always figured as an evolutionary or historical past, but also might not even arrive as a “world” in the sense in which we have often relied on that concept. (emphasis in original, 23)

Hornung and Kapil’s texts similarly imagine the “philosophical wildness” of human beings outside the perimeter of “a liberal-humanist ‘world,’” but this wildness is the wildness of the outskirts, the hinterlands. Romochka and his kin live amongst society’s literal and figurative trash, (the dogs’ den is located near a dump) and survive by scavenging from “civilized” Moscow’s detritus. Though post-perestroika Moscow may not be an obvious example of the kind of liberal-humanist world that Morgenstern references, it maintains the infrastructure of civilization—public transport, a police force, social services—that ¹⁸ Evidence of this fascination includes the numerous films, novels, stories, histories, and scholarly studies devoted to the topic. Examples include Francois Truffault’s 1970 film The Wild Child; Jill Dawson’s 2003 novel Wild Boy; and T. C. Boyle’s 2010 story “Wild Child” (all based on the nineteenthcentury figure, Victor, the “Wild Boy of Aveyron”); as well as Porochista Khakpour’s 2014 novel The Last Illusion; Michael Newton’s popular history, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002); and Adriana S. Benzaquén’s scholarly investigation, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (2006).

 :      

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are missing in the kind of proto-apocalyptic posthuman scenario that facilitates the wild child Morgenstern describes. In back alleys, garbage dumps, and derelict buildings wild posthuman animals are born or created, live and thrive. In Dog Boy, Dmitry’s efforts to extricate the boy from the “dog boy” involve severing formative posthuman kinship and violently reinstating species boundaries. In the end, Romochka must excise and euthanize dog-ness in order to perform human-ness. The violence required to successfully achieve and maintain human status in the novel’s final scene literalizes speciesism’s structural violence, the patterns of exclusion and division underlying the creation of the (liberal humanist) human that have been explored at length by animal studies scholars and philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida, Paola Cavalieri, Cora Diamond, Erica Fudge, and Cary Wolfe. Hornung’s novel begins to pick at these species boundaries but demonstrates their resilience in the final scene of forceful re-inscription. Despite the unsustainability of Romochka and Momochka’s kinship, the novel’s representation of this doomed relationship offers a visceral sense of the possibilities (and risks) of posthuman care. Kapil’s text goes further in unraveling species boundaries, depicting a praxis of posthuman care as relational entanglement via a shifting, “pivoting” mode of expression, which highlights the multiplicity and nonfixity of humanimal being. The text conveys the material modality of subjects formed by and for haptic relations, a processual, unfinished mode of being that makes remodeling a perpetual possibility (or threat, as the case may be).

Alien Touch Both Dog Boy and Humanimal depict extraordinary posthuman care, introducing readers to “humanimal” ways of being that are unlikely to be familiar to their readers. Literature is often praised for its ability to re-orientate reader’s feelings and beliefs by immersing us in unfamiliar, non-normative scenarios and relations. In their discussions of science fiction literature, both Sarah Dillon and Sherryl Vint stress its special ability to voice otherwise mute subject positions (Dillon 135), which stimulates the reader’s “sympathetic imagination” and “moral engagement.”¹⁹ According to this perspective, literature can ¹⁹ Vint traces these ideas to J. M. Coetzee, who, she argues has “suggested that literature, by enabling us to imagine the world from another’s perspective, enables us also to grasp something of the other’s experience and to extend our moral engagement” (“The Animals in that Country” 179). Both Vint and Dillon are interested in literature, particularly science fiction’s capacity to “look back at the human” (179), whether from the position of an animal (Vint) or alien (Dillon).

88        produce the human as an unfamiliar object perceived by a near limitless range of nonhuman narrators and focalizers, including, for example, animals (Vint) and aliens (Dillon). This narrative possibility contributes to the oft-made claim that literature opens readers up to being otherwise, to regarding ourselves through the eyes of another.²⁰ Dillon’s claims for literary moral engagement frame her analysis of Michael Faber’s novel Under the Skin (2000), which, she argues, employs defamiliarizing techniques to make readers aware of how language produces the human/nonhuman distinctions that structure human ontology. By employing a “transspeciated” focalizer, Isserlay, an alien creature who holds humans, or “vodsels,” in contempt and her fellow aliens, or, as she terms them “human beings,” in much higher regard, Faber’s language enacts a series of reversals that reorient the reader to a nonhuman perspective that exposes the violence of anthropocentrism. Indeed, many critical examinations of Under the Skin scrutinize the novel’s use of language, which defamiliarizes humans, or vodsels, in ways that justify and normalize their rough treatment as consumable objects. In one oft-quoted passage (Dillon; Murray), Isserlay reflects on the distinctions between vodsels (homo sapiens) and people (Isserlay’s alien species) that legitimate the treatment of vodsels as alimentary objects: The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions. In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn. And when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why. If you were looking clearly, that is. (Faber 174)

The passage employs an ironic reversal, a process of literal dehumanization, that makes humans inscrutably alien, a difference that Isserlay uses to justify ²⁰ The ethical potential of literature’s capacity for engaging a reader’s sympathetic imagination is much debated and my aim is not to argue for or against this possibility. Instead, I want to stress fictional representation’s ability to imagine nonhuman capacities in ways that can highlight overlooked relational modes of being.

 :      

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their exploitation. In their analyses of the novel, Dillon, Tod Chambers, and Murray pay close attention to this kind of linguistic play, which highlights language’s structuring force via its reorganization. Faber’s novel charts Isserlay’s reluctant recognition of the sophistry of such linguistic negation as she becomes increasingly aware of vodsels’ affective capacity, their status as living, feeling beings. Much like Dog Boy, Faber’s novel rehearses a process akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal,” a shift from a molar to a molecular ontology that is processual and relational (Dillon). For Dillon, the transition to “becoming-animal” in Faber’s novel stimulates moral engagement via Isserlay’s (and, by extension, the reader’s) “strange affinity” (148) with unfamiliar creatures. While Faber’s novel experiments with language and perspective to kindle a sense of relational being, Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation, Under the Skin (2013), takes a very different tack, one that often jettisons language and accentuates the implied tactility of a medium—cinema—that takes bodies as its primary representational material. The film treats touch and skin as vital narratological, formal, and affective elements, exploring human/nonhuman intimacies, risks, and connections through skin, touch, and affect. The film’s plot concerns a nonhuman creature, credited as “The Woman,” masquerading as a beautiful young woman (played by Scarlett Johansson), driving the streets of Glasgow in search of bodies for harvest, typically licentious young men who eagerly follow her into a dark lair only to be swallowed up in an inky pool. In Glazer’s film touch is invited, but endlessly deferred. Men reach out to touch the protagonist’s skin, but are instead swallowed by the viscous pool, where they linger in a kind of prenatal suspension where touch is inaccessible, but for a brief moment of contact between two helpless victims. Though human touch in the pool is tantalizingly suspended, there is a sense of overwhelming contact; the victim’s entire being is enveloped in an unearthly medium, a dark amniotic-like fluid that doesn’t nurture, but rather decorticates, and eventually flays the hapless captives. As a result, the film treats male desire as an opportunity for gruesome objectification, ironically inverting and literalizing the traditional operation of objectifying desire. Desiring male bodies are reduced to undifferentiated biological matter, converted into an unidentifiable red slurry, their empty skins left to drift through the darkness like ghosts. In many ways, the film is about a lack of care, posthuman or otherwise, in its depiction of the hunting, killing, and processing of human men. However, in its attention to both the extremity and mundanity of embodied relations, the film highlights the perversity of humanist frameworks that delimit ethical significance, confining expressions of concern and care to particular expressions of being. It exposes anthropocentrism by flaunting its parameters,

90        treating human bodies—male, white, able, young, heterosexual—as disposable, as nothing but matter to be harvested and processed (for what purpose, it’s difficult to say, though the novel offers additional detail on this front). Under the Skin evokes Vivian Sobchack’s compelling characterization of film as a phenomenological experience that “makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience” (3 Address of the Eye). As Sobchack explains, “[a] film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that make itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood. . . . Cinema thus transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of being alive and consciously embodied in the world that count for each of us as direct experience” (3–4 Address of the Eye). In other words, despite the centrality of vision and visuality in cinema studies, film and its reception are constituted by and for embodiment beyond the ocular. Cinema represents the relation of matter to itself and other matter, which viewers apprehend and comprehend through their own sensuous experience as relational, embodied beings. Unlike other art forms, including literature, film “transposes without completely transforming” the matter it represents. Glazer’s film engages with the phenomenological potential of its title, exploring the paradox of skin as both boundary and territory, as the contact zone of all contact zones, at once an absolute boundary between subject and the world, and a porous multiplicity constituted by a host of nonhuman entities.²¹ It engages the sensuousness Sobchack elaborates, frequently eschewing language and dialogue in favor of “haptic cinema,” those cinematic images that prioritize surface engagement over representational meaning: “Haptic cinema appeals to the body as a whole,” writes Marks, since the “haptic image forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative,” thereby producing “sensual engagement” (emphasis in original, The Skin 163). Marks’s book on haptic cinema is titled The Skin of the Film, a metaphorical phrase she uses to convey the way film signifies through materiality, “through a contact between perceiver and ²¹ The extent and significance of the microbiome—the vast array of microbes that inhabit the human body—speaks to the human body as biologically heterogeneous. As Protima Amon and Ian Sanderson explain, “[t]he human microbiome is composed of communities of bacteria (and viruses and fungi) that have a greater complexity than the human genome itself” and perform such an important array of functions they should be understood as an “essential organ of the body without which we would not function correctly” (258). In her work on “somatic multiplicity,” Shildrick goes a step further, arguing that “the relatively recent emergence of bioscientific work on the human microbiome and on microchimerism, together with a concomitant upsurge of interest in the concept of immunity across political, philosophical and cultural spectrums, opens up a radical contestation of the dimensions and significance of human being” (“(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality” 11). These bioscientific discoveries buttress new materialist, posthumanist critiques of bodies (human and otherwise) as stable, discrete, individual entities.

 :      

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object represented . . . [and] suggests the way vision itself can be tactile as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes.” It is this experience of implied contact she terms “haptic visuality” (124). Under the Skin employs this kind of “haptic visuality” to express uncanny embodiment and communicate strangely familiar visceral affects.²² The film’s opening sequence is an almost entirely non-mimetic sequence of throbbing and quivering color patterns radiating from a central point. Initially, the audio is a series of atonal noises, but gradually we hear a human voice verbalizing phonemes (rather than words): the film’s subtitles describe these sounds as “HISSING, GRUNTING, CHANTING, SOUNDING OUT CONSONANTS.” Gradually these sounds transform into recognizable words: “Feel. Fiels. Fill. Filled. Filts. Foil. Failed. Fell. Felds,” and so on. Long before we see her human embodiment, we hear the Woman’s human voice experimenting with the English language, particularly, the “f ” sound and its terminology. That “feel” is the first intelligible English word is significant, announcing the film’s preoccupation with affect while at the same time undermining that announcement, treating the language of emotion as part of the nonhuman, nonsensical generation of English sounds in which pronunciation trumps meaning. As the opening sequence continues, the nonrepresentational imagery begins to evoke the shape of an eyeball, continuing to shift and quiver until it comes to resemble an actual animal eye, a white pupil surrounded by a vivid aquamarine iris. In this gradual resolution towards representation—of an eye, no less—the opening sequence sets up a tension between the ocular and the haptic, between the image as seen (and seeing), and the image as felt, as haptically registered, in, through, and by the embodied viewer. In this opening sequence, the audience registers the construction of an alien being through haptic images, non-representational noises and sounds, which eventually resolve toward an image of an eye, highlighting the ocularcentrism that underlies audience/film relations, particularly when it comes to filmic representations of female bodies. This opening collection of ²² The film challenges normative assumptions around vision and the ocular availability of human bodies, exposing the danger of the look, the cruelty of the stare, the violence of the gaze. As in Peeping Tom (1960), such looks kill, though in this case, the murder is more gynic than phallic as victims are consumed, rather than penetrated. Glazer’s film trades ocularcentrism for a haptic relationality that initiates the possibility, if not the realization, of posthuman ethical encounters. In this sense, the film can be read as refuting film history’s preoccupation with visual pleasure, the tyranny and “frenzy” of the ocular, in its invocation of haptic inflection. Nonetheless, though it employs haptic cinema and, in many ways, undermines scopophilic conventions, it remains yoked to visual pleasures. For example, when “The Woman” first examines her own reflection in a full-length mirror, the chiaroscuro effects of a space heater’s glowing filaments combine with the camera’s slow, caressing movements to accentuate the erotic spectacle of Johansson’s naked body in accordance with the visual conventions of narrative cinema.

92        haptic images and nonsensical sounds alerts viewers to the film’s sustained exploration (and exploitation) of the sensual vulnerability and existential precarity of animal embodiment. As the film progresses, the connections between animal feeling, contact, affect, and responsibility become increasingly acute, but in this initial sequence, the film’s preoccupation with the sensuous plurality of feeling is on full display. When we first see the Woman, beyond this image of what might be her eye in extreme close-up—she is a naked silhouette in a glowing white space, contemplating a dead woman who lies at her feet. As the scene continues, she undresses the body, pausing only to carefully remove an ant from the corpse. The care the protagonist takes in contacting and examining the delicate body of the ant is in direct opposition to her careless interaction with the human body.²³ While the corpse is uninteresting to the woman, the ant is arresting and she pauses her task of dressing in the corpse’s clothes to touch the ant, encouraging it onto her finger so she can examine it more closely, seeming to marvel at the ant’s progress across her hand. The film cuts to an extreme close-up of the ant’s formidable silhouette, its pitch-black antennae and pincers imposing against the stark white background (see Fig. 12). This ant-scale filmmaking produces a disorienting attention to the minutiae of being that renders the human gargantuan, fleshy and slow. The shot is a brief, but telling, disruption of an anthropocentric perspective, a bias that will be tested, even flaunted throughout the film. This disorientation of anthropocentric scale is part of a larger trend in the film, which converts the novel’s defamiliarizing language into defamiliarizing embodiments. The film treats a range of bodies (adult, child, male, female, able, disabled, insect, and so on) as visual and haptic material entities, at once opaque, vital, and affective. In its exploration of encounters between human and nonhuman bodies, the film depicts posthuman touch and care that defy simplistic empathy-altruism hypotheses that treat empathy and identification as producers of altruistic, ethical relations.²⁴ Does the viewer identify, and therefore empathize with the nonhuman woman, or the male prey she stalks,

²³ The actor in this scene, Lynsey Taylor Mackay, is credited as “The Dead Woman,” though what looks like a tear leaves the body’s open eye at one point. ²⁴ “The empathy–altruism hypothesis states that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation” (emphasis in original, Batson, Lisher, and Stocks 1). The efficacy of this causal relationship as well as its capacity to produce ethical action in real world settings remains contested. According to Suzanne Keen, Batson’s own research suggests “empathy-induced altruism can lead to actions showing partiality rather than care for the common good and can result in injustice and immorality” (145). As Keen’s study elaborates, there is even less conclusive evidence that the empathy triggered by fictional representations corresponds to ethical action (4).

 :      

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Fig. 12 Ant-scale imagery in Under the Skin

or even the ant she picks from the dead body? Theories of identification and empathy seem beside the point in Glazer’s film; sensation and affect are paramount. The film’s expression of touch and contact suggests haptic contact as a conduit for a curiosity and wonder that prohibits violence—to a point. Though characters human and otherwise remain unknown and often unknowing, the film nonetheless evokes the possibility of ethical relations, deploying touch as a producer of mysterious, inviolable intimacy. Posthuman care is achieved (albeit rarely) through (brief ) tactile relations that alert both parties to the indeterminate affectivity of embodiment. For a film preoccupied with skin, embodiment, and touch, actual tactile contact is limited, making even brief episodes of touch notable. The opening image of the ant making its way across the protagonist’s fingertip attentively rendered in extreme close-up conveys the Woman’s fascination with the encounter, an interest lacking in her perfunctory dealings with the dead woman or any of the men she leads to their deaths. Though the Woman lures men to her lair with an implied promise of sexual contact, such contact remains forever deferred as the victims are swallowed by the killing pool. However, after many nights of hunting, the Woman allows, indeed, initiates contact, encouraging one of her potential prey to caress her cheek. This quiet moment of tentative touch is later reciprocated by rough, but life-saving contact as the Woman drags the man out of the dilapidated house before his body can be rendered, shoving him, naked and cowering, into her van so she can deposit him on the outskirts of town. Though her handling is coarse, it is a rare moment of protective touch since she is attempting to save the man from the oily pool that will repurpose his viscera. The unusual contact between the Woman and this potential victim is, critics have argued, due to their shared

94        abnormality: she is a nonhuman woman; he has a prominent facial deformity that has made him wary of human contact. Both Ara Osterweil and Dijana Jelača read the encounter as an experience of shared alienation that alerts the protagonist to the exclusions and limits of the category “human.” The man’s disability has meant a life of exclusion and rejection that has made him alert to the dangers of human interaction; his quiet cautiousness around the Woman, his tense acceptance of her offer of a caress suggests a learned distrust. Jelača describes the meeting as “an encounter with her own alterity, an arrival at posthuman subjectivity and the emergence of posthuman ethics,” arguing that “The two figures forge an unspoken bond born out of their shared alien displacement” (388). Jelača describes a process of identification that breeds empathy in the Woman who recognizes her own alterity via the man’s. This reading depends on the sympathetic imagination arousing an uncanny, that is, “familiarly unfamiliar,” experience that produces a posthuman ethics still bearing traces of humanist exclusions. However, as the film continues, it tests empathy’s ethical capacities and fortitude and exposes the risks of sympathetic contact. Unlike Isserlay in Faber’s novel, Glazer’s protagonist remains unnamed and unknown throughout the film, maintaining a perpetual strangeness and opacity that is key to the film’s effects. The tension between the audience’s sensuous intimacy with the Woman’s projected body and our alienation from her interiority inspires an animal, embodied affiliation between her and us. We know her only as we know her embodied interactions with the world: her hand drawn over a furred surface; her eyes scanning a watery horizon; her body jostled by an unexpected blow; her finger punctured by a rose’s thorn. Johansson’s acting style is flat, affectless, her facial expressions providing little indication of the character’s emotional state. Her dialogue is brief and perfunctory, associated only with her task of securing victims. Rather than watch her converse and emote, we watch her affect and be affected, a receptive, susceptible body moving through the world. After her contact with the disfigured man, the Woman abandons her predatory role and flees to the Scottish Highlands where she is eventually given shelter by a stranger she meets on a bus. They speak rarely, but watch television, go for a walk, visit a desolate, ruined castle, attempt to have sex. The Woman opens herself to contact, to response-ability and corresponding responsibility, but this openness also introduces her to vulnerability and risk, as she fatally discovers when she encounters a sexual predator turned murderer in a Scottish forest. For the Woman, awakening to relationality and

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care is concomitant with awakening to precarity and risk. All care involves an element of risk since opening oneself to another can always produce harms, but posthuman care accentuates and complicates risk, based as it is on relations across a range of organisms and matter. Any expectations and parameters associated with care dissolve toward obscurity as unfamiliar creatures interact, highlighting the risks of relations between “leaky” bodies. However, such risk is rarely evenly distributed. Like Dog Boy and Humanimal, Under the Skin demonstrates that though the precarity and vulnerability of such leakiness may be universal, structural inequalities provide protective carapaces for certain bodies while stripping away the protections of others. Under the Skin’s final scene of sexual violence and murder is a blunt reminder of the unequal distribution of risk that comes with making contact. Touch may be crucial for posthuman care, but it remains inequitably hazardous. As tempting as it is to make affirmative claims about animal contact and a future of care negotiated via posthuman touch, one must address the omnipresence of gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence that is always lingering, haunting the prospect of contact for any politically precarious body. Though touch may seem like the solution to remote, atomized ontologies that disavow relationality and overlook human responsibility to and for the responsive matter that produces being, simply advocating touch overlooks the profoundly unequal consequences of contact. Glazer’s film is a bleak reminder of the politics of touch and the implications of relationality, showing audiences how the desire for connection is inevitably enmeshed in complex, intersecting matrixes of power. The film treats touch in its multiplicity: as haptic, affective, intimate, sexual, predatory, and violent, as both material and immaterial. It evokes the incredible power of touch, both proximate and remote, in its depiction of an alien being, literally “under the skin” of a beautiful woman, who becomes increasingly unwilling to treat living beings as insensate, utilitarian matter as she gradually makes fleeting, then more sustained contact with the world: first via the touching hands of strangers trying to help her after she trips on the pavement; later via the stranger who shelters her when she is bedraggled and alone at a remote bus stop in the Scottish Highlands. To touch and be touched, the film suggests, is to enter the world of ethical relations, but such relations are always in and of the world, a world structured by inequality and injustice. The film disabuses the viewer of any post-racial fantasy of universal humanism, the idea that “we” are all the same “under the skin.” While walking alone in the forest, the Woman is attacked by a man who tears her clothes so

96       

Fig. 13 The black alien hovers over its white skin in Under the Skin

violently that her human skin is also torn loose, exposing her underlying strangeness. As she peels away her human “Scarlett Johansson” exterior, a dark form emerges, densely black, like burnished stone. The final images of a flayed Scarlet Johansson, the black alien form gazing down at the blinking white face torn loose by her attacker (see Fig. 13), is an ironic inversion of Frantz Fanon’s famous analysis of blackness, skin, and identity, the “epidermalization” of identity produced by racism he describes in Black Skin, White Mask (112).²⁵ The Woman’s whiteness, youth, and beauty produce a sexualized visibility that previously facilitated her serial seduction and disposal of the white men she hailed on the street. However, her whiteness is not enough to protect her from white male predation. The film confronts the fallacy of normative liberal humanist “tolerance” discourses that insist on the superficiality of “skin-deep” difference by maintaining, rather than dissolving the Woman’s difference through the removal of her external trappings: her difference is not merely “skin deep”; it goes all the way down, so to speak. Her attacker’s response to this alien difference is swift and decisive: he douses her with gasoline and sets her alight. ²⁵ “Epidermalization” is Kelly Olivers’s term for the racist process Fanon describes, a “reversed mirror stage” that “reduces the ego to skin, not even a fragmented body. Rather than create or maintain the illusion of agency and wholeness that supports the ego, the subject is deflated to a flattened sense of self as nothing but skin” (Witnessing 33).

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Glazer’s film is a reminder that touch is always political, always in touch, so to speak, with power. Gender, race, sexuality, ability, age, species, and so on are always operational in relations of touch. As important as it is to understand and interpret the biological conditions, operations, and systems of touch in their many forms, it is equally important to couple this understanding to an awareness of how human interaction is determined by specific sociohistorical political contexts. What it means to touch and be touched, affectively, discriminatorily, and so on, will depend on a host of factors. Touch is not simply discriminative in the sense of identifying the matter at hand; it is often discriminatory, demanding, and derisory. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon poses the question, “why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover the other” (206).²⁶ In this moment, Fanon—perhaps rhetorically— offers touch as a possible solution to the objectification of the gaze; however, as the negative phrasing of his question suggests, the possibility of redemptive touch remains forever on the horizon, just out of reach (Caspari 5). “Why not simply try to touch the other?” To put it bluntly, because the other might strike or flay, rather than caress the hand that reaches out. As much as touch can be a communion, it can be a violation.

Posthuman Touch Touch challenges boundaries and barriers, the bracketing off of “me” from “the world.” Returning to Manning’s opening provocation, by shifting the conceptualization of skin from enclosure or envelope to porous, relational membrane, one can begin to imagine the body as an inter- and intra-active space where influences and agencies are folded²⁷ and enmeshed. Philosophers and cultural theorists have proposed a range of compound and hyphenated terminologies to express the relationality of haptic materiality: “intercorporeality” (Ahmed and Stacey [from Merleau-Ponty] 5), “spacetimemattering” (Barad, “On Touching 217), “bodyworlding” (Manning, “What If” 34), and ²⁶ I am indebted to Maya Caspari’s doctoral dissertation for reminding me of this evocative question, which Fanon poses at the end of Black Skin, White Masks. Caspari employs Fanon’s question as the launching point for her own intervention into the role of touch in alternative forms of literary resistance. See “Reading Frictions: The Politics of Touch in Teju Cole, Katja Petrowskaja, Han Kang and Claudia Rankine” for details. ²⁷ The term “folding,” which appears in the work of Ahmed and Stacey (Thinking through the Skin), Braidotti (“Writing as a Nomadic Subject”), Barad (“On Touching”), and Manning (“What If”), suggests provocative images that confound distinctions between inside and outside and open the possibility of multiple, contingent states of being: anything folded can be unfolded, re-folded, enfolded.

98        “transcorporeality” (Shildrick, “Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?” 14). What these perspectives share is a sense of bodies as assemblages, depicting the self as “a modality . . . on the way toward new foldings” (Manning 35). Scholarship on skin and touch often stresses the relative obscurity of touch within Western onto-epistemologies biased by an “opticism” and “ocularcentrism” that has privileged “ocular observation as the path to certainty and knowledge” (Paterson, The Senses of Touch 5–6) and, correspondingly, underestimated the primacy of contact and contingency for being. Touch is not located in one body or another, but in the encounter, the relation. It is an embodied modality. As Claudia Castañeda explains in her foray into robot skins and the potential future of touch: Touch does not have to involve direct physical contact, . . . but it does require some form of embodiment, or “skin”. This skin cannot be a border in the abstract sense, nor is it automatically a site of communication or mutuality. Instead, the skin becomes a site of possibility in which the nature of the encounter is established through the process of “touching”, one body in relation to another. The quality of the encounter, its “feeling”, is not established by the toucher or the touched alone, and so cannot be judged in these terms. One body’s pleasure cannot exist in the face of another’s experience of violation, and pleasure in the encounter is in no way guaranteed. (first emphasis added, Castañeda 234)

As Castañeda makes clear, touch and skin are not uniquely human, or even animal. She analyzes the design of two robots and their “robot skin” to formulate her theory, which highlights the flexibility of the concepts of “skin” and “touch” as sites of possibility located in a particular materiality. Touch demands two bodies; however, the nature of those bodies is open, as these textual depictions of human/dog/wolf/alien/ant touch and care attest.²⁸

²⁸ It is worth noting the particular creatures that are the focus of the fictions discussed. The narrative attention paid to monkeys, dogs, wolves, and aliens perpetuates the tendency to highlight charismatic megafauna, those large, sociable mammals that are especially sympathetic to human audiences. The profoundly unfamiliar non-mammalian lived embodiment of insects, cephalopods, arachnids, reptiles, and others are less likely to be the subjects of posthuman affinities and narratives. That said, the popularity of texts such as Tova Bailey’s memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010), which recounts the author’s bond with a snail during the onset of her chronic illness, or the documentary My Octopus Teacher (2020), which depicts the year filmmaker Craig Foster spent establishing a connection with a common octopus through daily dives off the coast of South Africa, suggests an expansion of what constitutes a companion animal in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, the recurrence of certain

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Dog Boy, Humanimal, and Under the Skin demonstrate that the relationality and open-endedness of touch creates affirmative, often unexpected possibilities for becoming, but it also produces risk. Touch is the embodied capacity for nurturing associations, but so too is it the conduit for violence, aggression, domination. As Puig de la Bellacasa reminds readers, the “touch receptors, located all over our bodies, are also pain receptors; they register what happens through our surface and send signals of pain and pleasure” (107). The fact that human animals are made, survive, know, and feel via touch can seduce one into idealizing touch as affirming relational materiality, enacting care in its anatomical reversals and convergences. But this perspective overlooks the historical violence that attends contact zones big and small, how the imperial violence of discovery and conquest is so often enacted in everyday tactile interactions: touch as shove, slap, blow. Certainly touch is integral to care, but the assumption that human touch is superior, or predictably caring, is shortsighted. Touch operates in myriad ways, including ways that can nurture, circumvent, or even oppose the diverse networks of care explored throughout this book. The vulnerability of tactile materiality makes care essential, but not inevitable. This is why an ethics of care, posthuman or otherwise, requires a politics of care. As much as skin is a permeable, relational organ that produces and necessitates care, it is always, at the same time, a vulnerable, politically inscribed surface forced to bear the weight of sociohistorical meaning. There is no generic touch, but rather situated, contextualized contact inflected by the sociohistories that make some bodies more vulnerable than others. “What if the skin were not a container?” “Why not simply try to touch the other?” What if? Why not? Manning’s conjecture, Fanon’s query: these rhetorical, negative questions provide a syntax for the ambivalence and contingency of touch apposite to posthuman care, invoking touch as a perpetual, affirmative possibility without resolution. These questions, like the speculative fictions I’ve explored, grasp at an affirmative relationality that is impossible or unsustainable, perpetually just out of reach. They conjure fantasies of caring touch that inhabit, rather than deny, the risks of contact. They imagine bodies behaving, however briefly, as if the skin were not a container, but a connector in their narratives of multiple, diverse reachings and graspings

forms of charismatic animal life in accounts of posthuman care speaks to the continuation of species hierarchies and the tendency for some forms of life to be treated as more ethically significant than others. This is an issue to which I return in the chapters that follow.

100        and the surprising, sustaining, messy, and sometimes dangerous becomings that result. All three of these fictions of posthuman touch and care take place on the periphery of human society, in the wild, abandoned, inhuman hinterlands of civilized spaces: in ruins and dumps, jungles and razed forests, in dilapidated houses and desolate highlands. They depict feral, alien bodies seeking refuge in refuse. In the chapter that follows, I delve further into fictions of posthuman care on the margins, investigating care between marginally human, disposable bodies, biotechnological creatures dismissed and discarded by the societies that produced them.

3 Care and Disposable Bodies In 2006, Sony discontinued its popular product, Aibo.¹ Aibo was a small robot dog, about the size of a toy poodle, which had developed a strong following with users since its debut in 1999. Sony offered restructuring support until 2013, at which time Aibo owners were confronted with the problem of nonfunctioning, non-repairable robotic companions. Many owners were distraught at the loss of their companions and found themselves unable to simply trash or recycle them. But what to do with these broken robot dogs? A solution was presented when Kofukuji Temple began offering funeral services for “deceased” Aibos, allowing their owners to say farewell before the broken machines were dismantled or discarded (McCurry). While many Western journalists treated the funerals as amusing if not bizarre tributes to broken machines, Kofukuji Temple priest Bungen Oi was forthright about the reasoning behind the funeral rites: “All things have a bit of soul,” he explained. The notion of nonhuman, not to mention object souls is incongruous for many Western audiences who, steeped in Judeo-Christian humanist sensibilities, are accustomed to hierarchies of moral and emotional significance that make the nonliving un-grievable.² Reporting on Aibo funerals, National Geographic correspondent James Burch reflected on the strangeness of the practice: “A traveler happening upon a funeral for robot dogs might be taken aback. Is this a performance art statement about modern life? Is it a hoax? A practical joke?”³ Burch’s portrait of a disoriented traveler perplexed by the strange rites of a foreign culture draws from a long tradition of colonial travel ¹ Sony has since resurrected Aibo, introducing a new generation of the robots in 2018. Sales were immediately brisk, with Sony reporting 11,111 Aibos sold within the first five months on the market. The original Aibo model sold a total of 150,000 units according to the Japan Times (https://www. japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/05/07/business/tech/sales-sonys-new-aibo-robot-dog-off-solid-start/#. XiGWDuvgo9Y). ² The “grievability” of matter is a strong marker of the ontological status of the deceased. As Judith Butler explains: “if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life” (34), and, by extension, the nonliving is unworthy of grief. However, this sharp distinction between living and nonliving matter is not universal, as I explore in greater detail in the book’s conclusion on posthumous care. ³ The Netflix series Masters of None treats the problem of robot disposal as a joke in the episode “Old People,” which depicts the character Arnold experiencing shame at (mis)recognizing a machine, in this case a Paro robot, as affective matter, as matter that matters. The program takes advantage of the apparent irony of an enormous man (the actor who plays Arnold, Eric Wareheim, is 6 feet 6 inches tall

Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Amelia DeFalco, Oxford University Press. © Amelia DeFalco 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.003.0004

102        and exploration literature. The three frameworks he offers for interpreting foreign cultural practice—art, hoax, joke—speak to a Eurocentric refusal or inability to assimilate the literal meanings of unfamiliar practices, preferring to read them as figurative inventions.⁴ Instead of recognizing the robot funeral as a funeral, the traveler must transform it into a meta-event, a performance or joke about mourning as opposed to a performance of mourning itself. This interpretation highlights the “problem” that ethically significant nonhuman and inorganic bodies present for Anglo-European episto-ontologies and their associated anthropocentric valuation systems. Caring deeply for and about the nonhuman is a charged endeavor. This chapter examines depictions of care between, by, and for bodies that fall outside of Anglo-European expectations of care, bodies conceived, in both senses of the term—conceptualized and created—as fungible matter destined for disposal once their utility is exhausted. It considers depictions of inhuman bodies that share a precarious liminality as temporarily valuable, yet ultimately disposable matter, as trash, refuse, waste. Scavenging is the chapter’s topic and its method. I offer a magpie approach, collecting fragments from feminist new materialism, critical race theory, queer theory, animal studies, thing studies, and affect and waste theories. In this and Chapter 4 as well, I examine kinship in the hinterland and ruins, the dump, abandoned buildings, highly secured laboratories—care on the so-called periphery, a marginalized designation the and much is made of the character’s size throughout the show) delicately caring for a cute fuzzy robot. Paro, whose ascribed use as eldercare tool has expired with the death of Arnold’s grandfather, could be disposed of like the grandfather’s defunct VCR, but Arnold is unable to treat it this way. He eventually donates the robot to his building’s superintendent, a lonely older man; in other words, the narrative problem of his attachment is solved when he finds a more appropriate user, one that better matches the robot’s target market. ⁴ Like the Japanese Aibo funerals that perplex Western correspondents, displays of care for ostensibly disposable matter can be disorienting for those accustomed to Anglo-European humanist episto-ontologies. Unfamiliar, non-Western affinities are often dismissed, mocked, or criticized, as Indigenous scholar Venessa Watts makes plain. Watts describes how colonial anthropology discredits the sincerity of non-European belief systems, transforming Indigenous cosmologies into metaphorical and symbolic stories (25). Watts’s work stresses that the Haudenosaunee stories she cites are not symbolic, metaphorical, or mythical approximations of human/nonhuman relations, but are rather historical accounts of literal human-land connection experienced by the Haudenosaunee as palpably real: “Our truth, not only Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee people but in a majority of Indigenous societies, conceives that we (humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an extension of soil. The land is understood to be female: First Woman designates the beginning of the animal world, the plant world and human beings” (27). The colonial abstraction of non-Western cosmologies and care, refigured as myths and symbols—like robot funerals read as jokes or hoaxes—speaks to the challenge Western audiences, including academics, face in attempting to sincerely engage with the material reality of more-than-human entanglement. Barad uses the language of physics to tether her accounts of material entanglement to literal reality; Haraway relies on the term natureculture; Stacy Alaimo writes of transcorporeality; Jane Bennett promotes vibrant matter. I am inspired by all of these accounts, which resist representationalism, the abstraction and dualism of Cartesian humanism.

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novels I analyze dispute by treating such environments and the creatures that inhabit them as significant matter of narrative concern. This chapter and the next also reflect on the risks involved in advocating for care beyond the species, asking how one can care for and about the morethan-human—whether nonhuman animals, bodies of water, trees, rocks, or even machines—without belittling the ongoing battle for recognition by marginalized humans, including people of color, women, disabled and queer people, arguing that posthumanist advocacy requires self-reflexive vigilance. Struggles to widen the heretofore exclusionary scope of liberal humanist categories of ethical significance and the manifold critiques of Eurocentric humanism happening across a range of disciplines can augment and support one another in a “celebratory uptake of the nonhuman”, positioning “morbidity, monstrosity, and animality [as] objects of queer regeneration” (Haritaworn 212). Queer, Indigenous, Black, feminist scholars⁵ have demonstrated the compatibility of intersectional and critical posthumanist perspectives, arguing that efforts to draw historically excluded populations into the guarded territory of the “legitimate,” rights-bearing human merely perpetuates, rather than challenges the violence of human exceptionalism. For the human to exist it must remain exclusive and central, leaving inhuman others on the periphery, excluded and insignificant. And undeserving of care. This chapter’s inquiry into care and waste continues Chapter 2’s exploration of improper affinities and deviant concerns, examining care for, by and between “trash,” that is, care amongst inhuman bodies—shorthand for creatures deemed less-than-human (regardless of their morphology or genetics) and, therefore, dismissible and disposable by the societies and cultures that have produced them.⁶ I begin by engaging with waste studies and its critics, asking who and what counts as trash and why. While waste studies offers helpful insights into the constructedness of trash, its nearly exclusive focus on ⁵ See, for example, Jinthana Haritaworn, “Decolonizing the Non/Human”; Jackson, Becoming Human; Uri McMillan, “Objecthood, Avatars, and the Limits of the Human”; José Muñoz, “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness”; Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working beyond the Human/Not Human”; Jasbir Puar, “ ‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” ⁶ I use the “inhuman,” much like Muñoz, to describe ways of being beyond human ken that nonetheless demand “exhilarating and exhausting” intellectual consideration (“Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms” 209). This confounding, generative incommensurability is crucial to reimagining care beyond the human. As Muñoz explains, “[t]he radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant anti-inhumanity” (209). It is this kind of denaturalizing, unsettling work that is at the heart of Curious Kin. I choose “inhuman” for this chapter’s discussion of disposable bodies over other options, such as nonhuman, ahuman, or “infrahuman” (Glick) since its negative, even monstrous associations reflect the demonizing and marginalizing effects of humanist boundaries and the high stakes of their destabilization.

104        things, on inorganic, nonliving matter means that the question of disposable lives and bodies remains largely beyond its purview. Perhaps as a result of this omission, the colonial implications of Western valuation structures rarely feature in waste studies scholarship, despite its deft scrutiny of waste and trash as capitalist formations. My analysis brings new materialism, Indigenous, and queer theory to bear on the notion and “stuff ” of waste and looks to speculative literature that explores curious kinships between ostensibly disposable bodies, treating disposable bodies as matter of care and concern. Waste is, by its very definition, matter that does not require care (except when it threatens the health or survival of legitimate humans); it is “unwanted matter or material of any type, especially what is left after useful substances or parts have been removed” (Cambridge Dictionary). And so, caring for discarded matter is a form of resistance in the most basic sense, a refusal to abide by sociocultural norms of appropriate or legitimate affective attention and ethical concern. The literature I consult, both critical and fictional, explores the ethical and political significance of disposable matter and what might happen if one treats waste as worthy of care. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake (2003); Year of the Flood (2009); MaddAddam (2013)) are novels that imagine manufactured disposable bodies—clones and bioengineered chimeras—as focal points of narrative concern, producing an affective attention in conflict with their enforced ethical insignificance. The biotechnological bodies in these novels follow in the tradition of cyborgs and other “boundary creatures” that have, as Haraway famously postulated, “had a destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 2). An array of more recent investigations into liminal lives, animate things, and queer objects now complements and enriches the critical capacity of the in-between matter Haraway described in 1991. The work of Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, Jami Weinstein, Kim TallBear, Uri McMillan, Susan Stryker, and others explores the agency and animacy of things on the one hand (Bennett; Chen; Weinstein; TallBear), and the inhuman thingness of the animal, human and otherwise, on the other (Weheliye; Jackson; McMillan). In what follows, I analyze imagined inhuman creatures—not entirely human, animal, or technological—rendered disposable when their usefulness to “real” humans expires. Like cyborgs before them, these inhuman creatures challenge ontological systems predicated on an either/or logic of being, a challenge accentuated as their function expires and their bodies become waste. The novels offer charged speculations that seek to unsettle their audiences and, to varying

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degrees, contest the disposability they depict. In these fictions, Ishiguro and Atwood explore the deviance of caring for and about trashed and wasted inhuman bodies, highlighting the political significance of posthuman care as a disturbance of the humanist valuations that perpetuate anthropocentric exploitation. The novels analyzed in this chapter and the next explore curious kinships between beings that don’t matter to the social, cultural, and political systems that produced them, while they matter very much to the narrative landscapes they inhabit. As a result, these narratives perform a reversal of enforced insignificance in the close, caring attention they pay to disposable bodies. The novels attend to bodies produced as resources by and for the dominant (anthropocentric humanist) culture, treating them as affective, ethical agents embedded in rich relational networks. This vitality and agency is irrelevant, if inconvenient, for the extractivist sociopolitical structures that depend upon these bodies as ethically insignificant, but highly valuable resources. As a result, there is a central ironic tension operating in each novel’s careful, and in some cases, caring depictions of agential bodies categorized as inhuman disposable matter ripe for biocapitalist extraction by the societies that produce and manage them, a tension between sociopolitical and narrative attention, in which the narrator’s affective consideration is the inverse of the diegetic world’s uncaring disregard. In my analysis, attending to the curious, queer animacies of and kinship between disposable bodies is part of a larger self-reflexive project, providing an opportunity to reflect on the assumptions that produce such relations as “curious” in the first place.

What (and Who) Is Waste? Since Mary Douglas’s 1966 work Purity and Danger, which famously defined dirt as “matter out of place,” waste studies scholars from a range of disciplines (anthropology, literary and cultural studies, sociology, art history) have explored the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of trash (G. Hawkins; S. Morrison; Scanlan; Thompson; Viney; Wang). Waste studies scholarship tends to focus on objects and things, analyzing the social constructedness⁷ of waste, understood as the ethically insignificant, nonliving matter that human animals discard in their day-to-day lives: “it is when

⁷ Joshua Ozias Reno’s “Toward a New Theory of Waste: From ‘Matter out of Place’ to Signs of Life” is an outlier, asking “what it might mean for conceptions of waste, and critical theory more broadly, if we were to start from a different approach, bio-semiotics, . . . [that] challenges two central premises of

106        something means nothing to you that it becomes ‘filth,’ ‘shit,’ ‘rubbish,’ ‘garbage,’ and so on . . . whilst the uses of the word garbage have changed over time, all its instances nonetheless retain a general conceptual unity in referring to things, people, or activities that are separated, removed and devalued” (Scanlan 10). Many have pointed out that waste is a necessary byproduct of consumer capitalism (Rogers; Strasser; Schmidt; Wang), which depends on perpetual consumption and, therefore, on the disposal and replacement of outdated, exhausted, faded, malfunctioning things, making “today’s rubbish . . . the afterlife of commodities, their corpses” (Wang 343). Indeed, William Viney, building on the work of Heather Rogers and Susan Strasser, connects the genesis of waste with capitalism, arguing, “waste is all that can be bought, used and discarded. As capitalism has developed, so waste has come into being” (21). From this perspective, the contemporary matter and meaning of waste is unique: “garbage as we know it is a relatively new invention predicated on the monumental technological and social changes wrought by industrialization” (Rogers 31). Rogers’s focus on American trash production explains her first-person plural pronouns: “our,” that is, Western garbage, she argues, “is an outcome of a fully realized capitalist system” (50). Rogers’s appeal to a uniform readership reproduces an imagined homogeneity common to anthropological and cultural studies of waste, which tend to take for granted the clarity and uniformity of cultural distinctions between valuable and disposable—what Lucy Bell identifies as “the global North bias of waste theory” (Bell 114)⁸—and often overlook the heterogeneity of the things and bodies that occupy liminal spaces as both valuable and disposable, matter that is not quite living, not quite dead, at once human and less-than. Viney’s temporal theory of waste helps frame this liminality and simultaneity in its stress on provisional functionality as a determiner of matter’s status, explaining that objects become disposable once their “use-time” expires (4). His emphasis on use reaffirms waste’s capitalist origins: productive functionality determines worth. According to humanist logic, humans are not subject to this kind of use-time valuation, though colonial history offers much evidence to the contrary, as I discuss in Chapter 4. And while Western capitalist culture disavows the disposability of human animals, it produces distinct use-times for many nonhuman life forms. These times can be very the social constructivist paradigm, arguing, first, that it is meaningful to speak of ‘waste’ as a set of objects in the world that pre-exist symbolic categorization, and, second, that as a consequence waste is not only a mirror of human culture but also a sign of and for other-than-human beings” (4). ⁸ The polarities in waste theory are also symptomatic of the field’s Eurocentrism, as Lucy Bell explains in her critique, which addresses the field’s failure to address how the distribution, economics, and management of trash are the product of colonial logic. For further details, see Bell, “Place, People and Processes in Waste Theory: A Global South Critique.”

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brief; indeed, “Some farmed animals are killed mere hours after their births” (Coulter 206). The distressing details of animal disposal—newborn male chicks macerated in high-speed grinders, for example—are often mobilized by animals rights groups to stoke moral outrage and expose the immorality of applying use-time valuations to living things. As a result, the designation “life” is highly significant for distinguishing between ethically significant and disposable bodies, despite the fact that life remains a contested category with context- and discipline-specific definitions and parameters. W. J. T. Mitchell delves into the deceptive simplicity of the term within the life sciences, exposing how standard definitions of life are in fact nebulous and porous, letting in all kinds of unexpected, (ostensibly) nonliving matter, leading him to conclude “there is . . . no ‘real definition’ of life, no set of unambiguous empirical criteria to differentiate living from nonliving substance” (52).⁹ The distinction between living and nonliving matter is further muddied by the work of new materialists like Jane Bennett and Mel Chen, who investigate the vitality and agency of ostensibly inert matter and trace the ways race and sexuality are mapped onto the “fragile division between animate and inanimate” (Chen 2). Bennett’s work draws attention to the vitality of things, by which she means their capacity “not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Vibrant Matter viii). The agency of things, the indeterminacy of “life,” and the graduated and shifting value of human and nonhuman animals all trouble any pat, reliable distinction between ethically significant and disposable matter. Interrogating the assumed distinctions between matter that matters, and matter that doesn’t, involves inspecting both how such divisions are produced, maintained, and policed, as well as who produces and polices them. The second part of this process is sometimes overlooked by scholars relying on universalisms about how we interpret and relate to trash in commodity culture.¹⁰ Dissociation from trash is a luxury afforded by economic, racial, and gendered privileges that remain unavailable to many. Attitudes of ⁹ The latitude of “life” is further expanded by cybernetics and new materialism. As Daniel Dinello explains, Norbert Weiner, famous for developing cybernetics, equated life with feedback, with the ability to adapt to environments, an interpretation that “promulgated an understanding of life as being, essentially, the processing of information” (61). Jane Bennett’s theory of nonhuman vitality similarly conceives of life as responsive interaction: life is “not only a negative recalcitrance but a positive, active virtuality: a quivering protoblob of creative elan . . . a life draws attention not to a lifeworld of human designs or their accidental, accumulated effects, but to an interstitial field of nonpersonal, ahuman forces, flows, tendencies, and trajectories” (Vibrant Matter 61). ¹⁰ Here I am thinking of Douglas’s Purity and Danger; Gay Hawkins’s The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish; Heather Rogers’s Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage; John Scanlan’s On Garbage; Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash; Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory; William Viney’s Waste: A Philosophy of Things; and Min’an Wang’s “On Rubbish.”

108        reverence and disgust equally depend on a Manichean valuable/disposable categorization of matter, overlooking the complex, ongoing entanglement of (more-than-) human lives and so-called trash in order to maintain humanist dualisms: human versus nonhuman, active versus passive, valuable versus disposable (Bell 110). As a result, waste theory risks perpetuating the hierarchical ontologies responsible for producing matter as waste in the first place, even as it analyzes and interrogates those very categories.¹¹ Traditional approaches to waste theory tend to analyze either disposable objects or the concept of human disposability as a consequence of neo-liberal globalization.¹² However, some theorists have begun to interrogate and bridge the divide between things and humans in their studies of waste. Queer,¹³ feminist materialist, Black, and Indigenous perspectives on agential matter and more-than-human animacies eschew the Eurocentric humanist binarism that produces waste and its theories,¹⁴ challenging the naturalization of its hierarchies by highlighting alternative (non-Anglo-European) perspectives on more-than-human relations (TallBear; Todd; Watt) and the coterminous, interdependent invention of the humanist human and the racialized nonhuman or less-than-human other (Weheliye; Wynter; Jackson; Glick). Sociologist Myra Hird, director of Canada’s “Waste Flow” research program, who has been working in waste studies for more than a decade, has described her growing awareness of the entanglement of waste and colonialism, explaining that her increased attunement to Indigenous cosmologies has challenged her to reflect on the Eurocentrism that undergirds much of waste theory: “I have much to learn from a cosmology uniquely oriented to time and space, ¹¹ As Bell notes, waste theory often involves the “neglect of waste itself as a complex set of material agencies, and of the physical processes involved in the attempted disposal and retrieval of waste objects, which in turn shape these social constructs” (112). ¹² For example, Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives read human disposability as the product of ancient philosophy (entrenched in Anglo-European law) and neoliberal globalization respectively, but largely ignore the role of colonialism in producing racialized wasted lives. On the other hand, one finds waste scholarship, like Hawkins’s The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, John Scanlan’s On Garbage, and Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, that pays little attention to wasted lives. Lucy Bell and Susan Morrison are exceptions to this trend and my own reading of waste is indebted to Bell’s effort to decenter and decolonize waste theory. ¹³ Christopher Schmidt stresses the queer dimensions of waste, arguing “Capitalism’s need to name waste as other, against which value, profit, and product are then defined, is homologous to the social logics that have produced and subjugated queer identities” (qtd. in Morrison 11). ¹⁴ As Bell points out: it is only recently that scholars like Hawkins, Harrison, Gille and Davies have begun to turn to the material liveliness of waste—a turn that, as we shall see, cannot be separated from the emergence of new materialist theories by the likes of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo. In spite of these marked shifts, though, these studies are still largely rooted in the global North, thus reflecting and contributing to what Grossberg denounces as the “frustratingly euro-centric and euro-modern inheritances and tendencies” of cultural studies. (101)

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from in/human animal generation and transformation, and from a public for which, perhaps, waste is not a metaphor for colonialism but is colonialism” (Hird 215). In many ways, colonial humanism¹⁵ implicitly frames discussions of waste since its foundational hierarchies facilitate capitalism’s culture of disposability. As Susan Morrison explains, “[w]asted humans are, in fact, key to sustainability, ‘our’ sustainability—that is, we rich First World people” (101). The dependence of Anglo-European privilege on waste, on using and discarding matter, including “wasted humans,” bears repeating: Western life depends on the disposability of entire populations, human and more-than for its continuation (Bell; Hird). Heeding discarded matter, human or otherwise, can be a form of radical attention, a defiance of the binary colonial cultural logic that produces significant versus insignificant bodies. Caring about and for waste, valuing the useless and value-less not only defies the rules of colonial humanism but also undermines the binary logic that produces such rules. As Agamben has said in interview, “In our culture, the notion of life is never defined, but it is ceaselessly divided up: there is life as it is characterised politically (bios), the natural life common to all animals (zoé), vegetative life, social life, etc. Perhaps we could reach a form of life that resists such divisions?” (Skinner interview with Agamben, “Thought is the courage of hopelessness: an interview with philosopher Giorgio Agamben.”). Imagining a resistant form of life is a difficult task but addressing and rethinking the material presence of wasted matter can begin the process. To apprehend trash is transgressive;¹⁶ to care about trash is deviant. Postmodern art has often embraced the potential of detritus, drawing attention to its radical “sublimity” (Yaeger 327). “Trash,” Patricia Yaeger argues, “becomes attractive in rebellion against Enlightenment dialectics,” providing a means of confronting and resisting commodification (Yaeger 336). Reading and viewing contemporary literature and art, she argues, “we ¹⁵ My use of humanism here follows the lead of Braidotti and others who interpret: [h]umanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. Faith in the unique, self regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason forms an integral part of this high–humanistic creed, which was essentially predicated on 18th and 19th renditions of classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance ideals. (The Posthuman 13) As such, humanism is not only compatible with colonialism, but facilitates it, providing the epistemological framework to justify the oppression and exploitation of those who fall outside of the narrow remit of the legitimately human. I use the phrase “colonial humanism” to highlight the racialized anthropocentric extractivism latent in Eurocentric humanism, built as it is on a limited, normative conception of the human as “Man” (Wynter “Coloniality of Being”). ¹⁶ As Julian Stallabrass explains, “trash as such tends to be left unregarded, edited out of vision (and generally of photographs), ignored except as a practical problem, and deplored from an ‘aesthetic’ point of view, which repudiates it so as not to see it” (406).

110        find ourselves in the midst of a queer ecology where the distinction between organism and environment disappears” (Yaeger 324). This queer blurring of matter goes beyond Agamben’s call to reimagine life in a way that elides distinctions between political and animal life, subjects and objects, attending instead to the animacy and relational vitality of matter, regardless of its (apparent) liveliness.

Extractivism and Colonial Humanism The naturalization of human/inhuman, living/nonliving distinctions is a naturalization of ethical relations and obligations that legitimizes violence against inhuman, nonliving matter; indeed, in many cases this framework negates mutilation and destruction as violence, transforming devastation into harvest, resource extraction, processing, rendering, and so on. The transformation of ecologies into discrete, fungible resources is often referred to as “extractivism,” “a mode of accumulation that started to be established on a massive scale 500 years ago . . . [via] the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, Africa and Asia” (Acosta 63). Though frequently associated with mining, extractivism also describes farming, forestry and fishing practices. Ecuadorian Economist Alberto Acosta’s essay on the topic, which has become a touchstone for antiextractivism activism and scholarship, stresses the inequality and environmental degradation endemic to extractivist models from the late sixteenth century to the present. He counters claims for so-called sustainable or progressive “neoextractivism” made by (largely South American) nationalist governments, arguing that these adjustments do little to address the underlying inequality endemic to the process: As in the past, the lion’s share of the benefits of this economic orientation goes to the rich countries, the importers of Nature, which profit still further by processing and selling it in the form of finished products. Meanwhile, the countries that export primary commodities only receive a tiny percentage of the revenue from mining or oil, but they are the ones who have to bear the burden of the environmental and social costs. (73)

Although Acosta assumes and maintains a distinction between “Nature” (capitalization in original) and the human beings who extract its resources, he argues for a “decommercialisation of Nature” (81) that would overturn “anthropocentric visions” that naturalize the human right to extract.

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Indigenous scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson goes a step further in her own critique of extractivism, criticizing not only its production and maintenance of gross inequality between humans, but its manifestation of colonial epistemologies that regard more-than-human bodies as fungible matter unquestionably available for (white) human use. As Simpson explains: Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extracting is taking. Actually, extracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous—extraction of indigenous knowledge, indigenous women, indigenous peoples.¹⁷

The societies depicted in the speculative novels I analyze depend on the kind of colonial biocapitalism Simpson describes, on anthropocentric assumptions about the fungibility of matter, biological or otherwise. Both novels focus on bodies afforded limited, temporary, or negligent ethical significance within the anthropocentric Anglo-European humanist societies they inhabit. They imagine inhuman creatures (neither fully human nor nonhuman) that occupy a precarious position between subject and object categories, at once valuable and disposable. In narrating the lives of inhuman bodies, these novels highlight the difficulty such ambiguous matter poses to humanist valuation hierarchies. Discarding inhuman creatures provokes discomfort in the novels’ “legitimate” humans (and, presumably, their readers), but so too does affording inhuman bodies the privileges and attention, in short, the care, typically reserved for “real” humans. Like the discomfited National Geographic journalist observing Aibo funerals, these novels narrate stories of curious care between and for inhuman matter with a limited use-time, matter that is poised for disposal. Indigenous and Black activists and scholars have fought to halt and reverse

¹⁷ Simpson’s comments are from her interview with Naomi Klein, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/ 2013/03/06/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.

112        extractivist plunder, in part by exposing the contradictions and fallacies that underpin the naturalization of such exploitation.¹⁸ Never Let Me Go and Oryx and Crake use speculative modes to trigger and engage a similar skepticism via other means, highlighting the violence of extractivism by exaggerating its naturalization to extremes. In these novels, biotechnology facilitates an extractivist approach to living bodies, producing quasi-human bodies as harvestable resources, “spare part” repositories.¹⁹ Like queer, feminist, Black, and Indigenous scholars of agential matter and more-than-human animacies who repudiate colonial humanism, which sanctions extractivism and generates waste (both conceptually and materially), these novels challenge the naturalization of humanist hierarchical distinctions between significant humans and disposable bodies. In their depictions of extractivist limit cases these novels convey both the violence endemic to biocapitalism and the posthuman care that persists nonetheless. These novels imagine the “spare part” body in situ, prior to the extractions that will separate them into valuable and disposable matter. In depicting future waste as living, breathing entities, these texts challenge characters and readers alike to reckon with the violence of colonial extractivism that determines and delimits life.

Never Let Me Go Images of trash and discards abound in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. In the novel’s final scene, the narrator, Kathy H., gazes at a trashstrewn field, imagining, however briefly, the return of a dead loved one, Tommy, who has been used and discarded, much like the plastic detritus that clings to the boundary fence at her feet. Kathy, like Tommy and most of the novel’s characters, is a disposable body, a human clone bred as an organ ¹⁸ Exposing and transforming this pattern of exploitation is central to Stacy Alaimo’s vision of “trans-corporeal feminism,” which stresses the enmeshment of human and more-than-human worlds. As Alaimo explains, registering the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment” . . . makes it difficult to pose nature as a mere background for the exploits of the human, since ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin. Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the “environment,” which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a “resource” for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings, with their own needs, claims, and actions. By emphasizing the movement across bodies, transcorporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between human corporeality and the more-than-human. (“Trans-corporeal Feminisms” 238) ¹⁹ For an illuminating discussion of the history and politics of “the concept of the ‘spare part’ body, or the body useable for donation and transplantation,” see Megan Glick’s Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood (170).

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donor for “real” (non-cloned) humans. For most of her life she has lived amongst other clones, often in freezing, dilapidated houses amidst the cast offs of legitimate humans, their discarded books and magazines, cassette tapes, toys, and trinkets.²⁰ Kathy and her fellow clones cherish these discards, which cannily anticipate the clones’ own destinies as temporarily valuable, ultimately disposable matter. Ishiguro depicts this pattern of exploitation as utterly normal, even banal, setting the dystopia not in some distant future, but in a UK past—“late 1990s,” according to its epigraph—that is likely familiar to many of the novel’s readers. Variously termed “alternate realism” (Rollins 350), a “counterfactual twentieth-century England” (Black 785), “a careful hybrid of realism and science fiction” (Rich 632), Never Let Me Go offers a revised version of the recent past, “some kind of alternative England” (Walkowitz 224), in which human cloning has become not only feasible, but ubiquitous, resulting in the production of human bodies as biocapitalist commodities, fungible resources available for extraction.²¹ The novel concerns three clones in particular, narrator Kathy and her childhood friends, Tommy and Ruth, who, unlike most clones, spend their early lives at a remote boarding school called Hailsham. The early sections of the novel depict the routines of school life at Hailsham; Kathy describes their childhood exploits: friendships and fallings out, the thrill and pain of burgeoning romantic love. At this point, the reader is unlikely to regard these children as unusual in any significant way, though the narration contains peculiarities: the children seem to lack parents; interaction with the world outside the school is prohibited; the narration is marked by an unsettling tone, occasionally hinting at some unknown, but dangerous knowledge. As the students age out of Hailsham they are moved to “the cottages,” moldering, unheated housing where they reside until beginning the medical extractions or caring responsibilities (for clones who have undergone harvesting) for which they have been created. As a result, the novel depicts a limit case for the vicious logic of colonial extractivism—human bodies as extractable resources—that at the same time captures the banality of normalized systems

²⁰ Anne Whitehead makes a similar argument in her discussion of this final, mournful scene, comparing the field to the “novel itself,” which has “like the wire, caught and held all of the things that [Kathy] has lost in the course of her life” (80). ²¹ Kelly Rich regards the “narrator [as] an infrastructural element—what we might understand as sentient infrastructure” (633) and Rebecca L. Walkowitz compares the clones to animals treated as resources in Western society, arguing that the novel is “a critique of anthropocentrism, the idea that is it is ethical or acceptable to sacrifice non-human animals to the needs and desires of human life” (224). See also, Mark Rollins, “Caring Is a Gift: Gift Exchange and Commodification in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.”

114        of exploitation. All forceful subjugating apparatuses remain invisible throughout the novel and the everyday experiences of human bodies engineered as utilitarian matter are delivered in an unremarkable style that belies the viciousness of the practices the narrator describes.²² Kathy H. is a self-conscious narrator. She directs her account to a fellow clone, a carer like her who will soon turn to donation. Consequently, she writes to an interlocutor accustomed to the systems and routines she describes, one who requires no explanation or justification for their shared position as biological resources: “I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical almost every week” (13). In other words, Kathy writes from one disposable body to another, (re)orienting the novel’s human readers toward an inhuman perspective. Critics frequently comment on the novel’s interrogation of “the human” (Black; Carroll; Eatough; Whitehead) in its focus on bodies and lives “denuded of citizenship and culture” (Black 789). Kathy reflects on a life reared as a bioengineered resource designed and developed explicitly as material, as a collection of organs and tissues waiting to sustain other, more legitimate forms of life. As a result, Kathy and her fellow clones are at once precious and disposable commodities; they contain value, but they themselves, as relational, vibrant beings, are insignificant, and once their goods have been harvested, they become useless, disposable. Though the novel concerns the use of clones for life extension, the reader is never afforded access to the “real” human lives these clones extend. Our narrative access is restricted to Kathy and her friends and lovers, all of them clones created for extraction. In fact, the clones are health care resources twice over: first their affective and reproductive labors are exhausted as caregivers for fellow clones during the organ harvesting process; second, their own organic matter is harvested until they die. This former, less tangible extraction is what Christa Wichterich calls “care extractivism,”²³ which “marks the intensification and expansion of the ongoing ²² Many critics have remarked on the novel’s “mundane,” “banal” (Gill 852–853), or “flat” (Rich 632) narrative style, often reading it as a reflection of its narrator’s “radically delimited” (Rich 632), “inhuman” status (Black 786). ²³ “Extractivism is a reckless and careless exploitation and depletion of resources assuming that they are growing naturally and are endlessly available. The concept of care extractivism with its focus on reproductive and affective work is an analogy to the concept of resource extractivism, however countervailing its productivistic and industrialistic focus of value creation. Secondly, from a perspective of neoliberal policies, strategies of care extractivism—like resource extractivism—are well suited to cope with crises situations of social and biological reproduction such as a lack of caregivers and teachers or an increase in infertility while not burdening the state with additional costs and social responsibilities. Through care extractivism care workers are constructed as cheap workers and as entrepreneurs of the self in care markets along social hierarchies of gender, class, race and North-South as colonial and postcolonial division” (Wichterich 5–6).

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economisation and commodification of labour and resources in arenas that were not commercialised until recently” (5). Wichterich describes how “the agency and labour” of care extractivism is frequently “disguised by the ideology of gift economy” (19) and Never Let Me Go similarly employs a range of deceptively gentle euphemisms to describe its confiscation of biological material, obscuring the violence of the biocapital transaction in which Kathy and her fellows are conscripted. In refiguring the violence of appropriating vital organs via the discourse of charity and gift giving, the novel enacts a familiar colonial tactic, recasting plunder as benevolence. The novel tells a story of profit extraction; in this case, it is the bioengineered bodies of the subjugated themselves that are the natural resources in demand. By transposing an extractivist paradigm onto human clones, Never Let Me Go confronts readers with the ethical repercussions of a universally applied colonial biocapitalist logic that regards cloned human bodies as extractible biomatter. The clones are biotechnological commodities valued insofar as their organs are available and viable, a utilitarian status the novel’s terminology confirms: the clones do not die, but rather “complete” once they can no longer give parts of themselves to the real humans they are created to maintain. In its exploration of the affects and agency of Kathy and her fellow clones, Never Let Me Go attends to the waste products of the biocapitalist society it imagines, the ostensibly useless matter that accrues from treating life forms as utilitarian matter, resources ripe for harvest. Like any commodity, the clones themselves—that is, their creaturely non-donate-able being, their useless affects, tissues, and consciousness—are “deferred trash.”²⁴ One of the novel’s characters, Ruth, proclaims as much in a rare moment of clear-sighted bitterness: “[we are] modelled from trash,” Ruth contends, “[j]unkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from. . . . If you want to look for possibles [yet another of the novel’s euphemisms—this one refers to a clone’s human original], if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from” (139). What Ruth doesn’t say, but implies, is that just as they come from rubbish bins, so are they destined to return there. Though readers are never told precisely what happens to the harvested clones once they “complete,” one assumes they are disposed of, most likely incinerated with the rest of the hospital’s medical waste.

²⁴ As Stallabrass argues, “the commodity and trash are as closely linked as production and consumption. It may even be that we can think of commodities as deferred trash” (407).

116        Ruth’s comments illuminate the granulation of the humanist hierarchies posthumanism seeks to undermine and dismantle. It is not a simple binary that organizes the novel’s world, with humans on one side and disposable bodies on the other, but rather a shifting territory of graduated value. “Trash” humans—“junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps”—may not count for much compared to their “respectable” human counterparts; nonetheless, their human status exempts them from enforced donation. Similarly, the value and disposability of the clones shifts as their biomatter is gradually exhausted. The association between clones and trash is further underlined in the novel’s final image, which I used to introduce my discussion of the novel. Standing by the windswept field, Kathy observes the debris that has collected along a barbed wire fence that separates her location from the “ploughed earth” beyond it: “all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a seashore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before coming up against these trees and these two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags” (287). Kathy is stuck with the other trash, outside the organic environs, separate from the “ploughed earth” of “natural” reproduction (all clones are sterile); she is a tool whose use value, though great, is set to expire as she prepares to begin donating. In contrast to these recurring images of lost, discarded, and trashed matter, the novel highlights particular objects as cherished, even invaluable, its treatment of cloned disposability counterbalanced by an ongoing preoccupation with originality as a marker of value. Long before readers know that the novel’s protagonists are themselves copies of human originals, we are alerted to the high status afforded originality and artistry in the novel’s world.²⁵ As Kathy explains, at Hailsham she and her cohort are urged to create original art on a regular basis. This art is then put on display for a mysterious woman known only as “Madame” who collects the best pieces. Tommy suffers considerably throughout his childhood as he struggles to produce the kind of original art so prized by his teachers and Madame. Long after departing Hailsham, even when there are no teachers to collect and assess his art, Tommy persists in attempting to prove his creative ability. When he finally shows his drawings to Kathy, she is struck by his skillful creation of minutely detailed machine ²⁵ Shameem Black also analyzes the novel’s treatment of art and artistry within a posthumanist framework, elucidating parallels between the extractive processes of art making and clone donation: “In its portrait of the systematic exploitation of the clones and its implicit exploration of vulnerable actors in our modern economic order, the novel indicts humanist conceptions of art as a form of extraction that resembles forced organ donation” (785).

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animals. Looking at his creations, Kathy reflects, “In fact, it took a moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird” (187). Tommy’s imaginary mechanical creatures are uncanny self-portraits²⁶ that capture his own mechanicity as a biotechnological creature valued according to the utility of his inner parts.²⁷ At first, Tommy’s intricate drawings amaze Kathy, who is stunned by their skillful detail. However, the second time Kathy sees the drawing she finds they no longer feel “fresh” (241). Instead, “they looked laboured, almost like they’d been copied” (241)—an assessment with grave implications within the novel’s biotechnologically segregated world of original humans and copied clones, valued citizens and biomechanical bodies. Tommy’s stubborn insistence on creating original art, which the teachers at Hailsham believed could provide evidence of clones’ individuality and originality, in short, their human-ness, results in drawings that bear telltale traces of his boundary status as living technology. For Kathy, Tommy’s machine animals are at once awe-inspiring and unsettling depictions of a toofamiliar biotechnological materiality. In effect, Tommy’s attempts to demonstrate his humanity via artistic representation results in a rendering of his own technological animality, his artistic aspirations at once challenging and confirming his biotechnological inhuman status. Near the novel’s conclusion, Tommy and Kathy discover that their enforced creativity was in fact an attempt to prove their humanity; their drawings and paintings, explains their former teacher Miss Emily, “revealed what you were like on the inside. . . . they revealed your soul” (175). The Hailsham student artwork was used to support Miss Emily’s clone welfare activism, raising awareness of clones’ humanness.²⁸ Within the English humanist late ²⁶ Black calls Tommy’s drawings “inhuman art, which marries the animal with the automatic, [and] provides an alternative to the destructive visions of soul-based humanity that the novel critiques” (802). She argues that “Tommy, like Ishiguro, is literally making cloned art. . . . The novel encourages us to embrace such simulacra as the greatest form of realism: we are asked to change our allegiance from the humanist art fostered by Hailsham to the inhuman art of Ishiguro and Tommy” (Black 802). ²⁷ A great deal of the scholarship on Never Let Me Go addresses the novel as troubling the category “human,” with all of the racial, gendered, and sexualized meanings that category continues to signify. See, for example, Black; Carroll; Gill; Wen Guo; Kakoudaki; Ridinger-Dotterman. As Rachel Carroll explains, the novel reproduces “contemporary debate and speculation about the prospect of reproductive cloning,” which highlights “the way in which such beings, as ‘copies’ of human originals, challenge notions of the human, especially in relation to issues of individuality, authenticity and origin” (63). ²⁸ Miss Emily’s arguments echo those of animal rights activists who defend their claims by demonstrating the similarities between animal and humans. However, as critics point out, the demand for animal rights based on their perceived proximity to the human perpetuates anthropocentric attitudes toward life. These efforts rely on the naturalization of human exceptionalism, that is, the

118        twentieth-century world Ishiguro depicts, original “high” art represents the zenith of human achievement, while mere copying and imitation occupy the nadir of animals and machines. The novel imagines a society in which (bio) technological reproduction has strengthened rather than smashed the value and aura of the original. Never Let Me Go (like the MaddAddam trilogy, discussed below) invokes a valuative hierarchy of reproductions and originals that evokes cultural theories of originality and individuality, particularly Benjamin’s concept of the aura. These texts draw canny connections between the humanist celebration of individuality and originality and the disposability of (bio)technologically (re)produced posthuman bodies. The “aura” has not “withered,” as Benjamin would have it (221), but has thrived to the point that copies themselves are urged to participate in the self-defeating fetishization of individuality, originality, and aura worship. In the novel, “a plurality of copies” (Benjamin 221) carefully segregated from their “real” human counterparts has confirmed both the value of the authentic original (the “real” human) and the interchangeability of (bio)technologically produced reproductions, reinscribing the veneration of “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” (218). In effect, Ishiguro’s novel maps a bioethical critique onto Benjamin’s cultural materialist analysis, imagining the repercussion of biotechnological reproduction operating within liberal humanist paradigms that pit valuable, auratic originals against utilitarian, disposable copies. The novel highlights the esteemed role of creation and the banality of imitation, illustrating the precarity of biotechnological creatures within an individuality-obsessed²⁹ anthropocentric culture. And yet, despite the normalization of their status as exploitable resource, valuable insofar as their parts are viable, a kind of posthuman care emerges amongst Kathy and her fellows.³⁰ The clones are made aware of their role from

assumption that humans (and those who closely resemble them) deserve certain rights and freedoms denied other, lesser creatures. This humanist approach treats the problem of subjugation as the result of a failure or refusal to appreciate a creature’s proximity to the human. According to this logic, the solution to mistreatment is the extension of rights, welcoming creatures into the sacred territory of human personhood. However, as many disability, critical race, gender, and animal studies scholars have made clear, the cultural logic of humanism will always manufacture outliers, bodies that fail to meet the criteria for legitimate personhood and are victimized as a result. Ishiguro’s astute linking of originality and artistry with humanity demonstrates how art is recruited in human exceptionalism, exposing the overlap between aesthetic and ontological hierarchies. ²⁹ Many scholars have noted the novel’s preoccupation with individuality and originality. As Walkowitz explains, the novel’s “humans think that individuality is the highest value, and they convince themselves that they are ‘not like’ the clones—‘not like,’ because as a group they possess a quality that they believe the clones do not have (individuality) and ‘not like,’ because they believe they are incomparable (only a clone is ‘like’ someone else)” (225). See also, Whitehead; Black; Gill. ³⁰ Black calls this “empathy for a posthumanist age,” arguing that the novel “calls for what seems like a contradiction in terms: an empathetic inhuman aesthetics that embraces the mechanical, commodified, and replicated elements of personhood” (Black 786).

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an early age: as a Hailsham teacher explains, “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults . . . you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do . . . you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided . . . you need to remember that” (81). Their affective lives are simply an inconvenient by-product of the non-renewable resources they provide. Nonetheless, the novel’s clones exercise their animal relationality, not simply through sexual relations, which are permitted since all clones have been bioengineered for sterility, but as affective, embodied, enmeshed matter. Emotional attachments are not explicitly prohibited, but warnings are issued regarding the problematic attachments that can arise from sex: feelings are dangerous in bodies designed as resources. Relating with and as vibrant matter, the characters become less resigned to their fate and long, however quietly, for an exemption, or at least a delay of their harvest. A rumor circulates among the clones that love between clones can win them “a deferral,” extra time before beginning to donate. Kathy and Tommy imagine that the artwork collected from Hailsham was somehow connected to this possibility, that it provided a glimpse of students’ inner lives that would help the state adjudicate the veracity of their love claims later in life. They locate the Hailsham teacher, Miss Emily, who arranged the collection of the artwork and attempt to apply for the imagined extension, only to learn that their emotions are immaterial to their status as resource material; their artwork was in fact an effort to demonstrate their souls, that is, their ethical significance as (near) humans. The narrative explores the consequences of hierarchical ontologies in which bodies must prove their anthropocentric vitality to warrant ethical recognition.³¹ The paternalistic violence of this model is painfully clear; characters gradually disappear from the narrative as they fulfill their extractive destinies. The final image of Kathy amidst and as discarded matter—“plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags,” isolated and adrift—is the outcome of the coupling of individualist humanism with the colonial logics of resource extraction. The tenuous kinship amongst the clones is inhibited by their socialization as utilitarian matter. Produced as commodities, their vibrancy (beyond their extractable biological material) is redundant and inconvenient, with an important exception. The clones’ affective labor can be similarly extracted during periods of caring, nursing their post-donation fellows back ³¹ Walkowitz proposes: “At many points in the text, we are asked to notice that an unquestioned hierarchy, in which humans are distinguished from animals, makes the donation system possible. Tommy’s drawings are telling about how that distinction is preserved. They suggest that strategies of abstraction allow us to see some bodies as mechanisms and others as individuals” (224).

120        to health so they can donate again, the cycle repeating until their use value expires. In this way care itself is shaped by the extractavist imperative of the society’s colonial humanism: even a clone’s affective impulses are fashioned for utility and efficiency. I have taught Ishiguro’s novel to undergraduates for a number of years and they frequently express frustration at the protagonists’ passivity, their refusal to even entertain the idea of resistance or rebellion. Why don’t they just run away, is a common refrain. I appreciate their frustration. One of the novel’s many strengths is its chilling matter-of-factness; Kathy’s narration is often melancholic, but there is no evidence of the rage many readers see as her right. In the novel, the production of clones as commodified biomatter has been so successful the clones themselves are convinced of the utter inevitably of the colonial humanist logic that generates and justifies their disposability. The novel’s world appears hermetically sealed: there is no mention of any territory outside of England; there are no interactions between clones and humans, beyond the human guardians tasked with their maintenance. The novel’s totalitarianism is complete: there is no “outside” to escape to. As Ruth tells Kathy, “I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?” (227). Nevertheless, Kathy narrates, and her tale implies the existence of an interlocutor who cares enough to read her story. As such, I read the novel itself as a gesture of posthuman care, as an assertion of vibrancy and agency that reaches out to a similarly vibrant reader. The novel concerns both the inevitability and fragility of posthuman relationality, depicting beings grasping at care, treasuring its scraps wherever they’re found. It depicts disposable bodies in care, in love, treasuring one another, making contact, however brief or tenuous. Never Let Me Go challenges the humanist notion that originality and individuality are exceptionally human, and, concurrently, that these traits should be precursors for ethical relations and responsibility. Moreover, the novel demonstrates how the overvaluation of individuality and originality is in fact an obstacle to ethical relations since it depends on a dangerous anthropocentric syllogism—human = unique = precious—that implies its opposite is also true—inhuman = generic = disposable. The alignment of ethical of significance with originality and “auratic” distinction means that those bodies that appear, to “real” human observers, as unoriginal, indistinct and replicable—often manifested, as I discuss below and in Chapter 4, in the herd, the heap, the mass, the dump—are undeserving of ethical consideration and care. Ishiguro’s novel exposes and counters such assumptions, offering glimpses of posthuman care amidst a dystopic world designed for its elimination.

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The MaddAddam Trilogy Like Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s speculative MaddAddam trilogy explores biotechnologically facilitated extractivism. The MaddAddam novels imagine the catastrophic outcome of biotechnological research and development determined by neoliberal market economies, a biocapitalist system in which the matter and codes of life have become the primary commodities for exchange.³² The narrative dramatizes the results of this convergence of capitalism and biotechnology, the myriad social, cultural, affective, and ecological implications of rampant biocapitalism that treats vital, affective agents as fungible, ultimately disposable matter.³³ Comprised of the novels Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), the trilogy depicts the causes and effects of a devastating pandemic, which, in conjunction with environmental collapse caused by climate change, has nearly eliminated the human population. The novels narrate stories of disaster through various perspectives: Jimmy, best friend of the pandemic’s mastermind, Crake, in Oryx and Crake; survivors Toby and Ren in The Year of the Flood; Toby and Zeb in the trilogy’s final installment, MaddAddam. The novels depict a motley crew of human survivors, including members of an environmental religious cult, God’s Gardeners (Ren, Toby, Adam), an environmentalist guerrilla group, MaddAddam (Zeb, Crozier, Shakleton, Oates, and others), and a few homicidal criminals whose empathic capacities have been destroyed by their time in a gladiator-like “Painball” prison. In addition to these human survivors, there are a plethora of nonhuman creatures still inhabiting the earth, including bioengineered life forms, such as liobams, pigoons, rakunks, and the humanoid “Crakers,” a species designed by Crake to exist in harmony with their environment. Crake’s posthuman fantasy—the replacement of humanity with a superior, engineered life form—is the logical, if homicidal culmination of the biotech obsession that organizes the MaddAddam universe. The trilogy depicts a world determined (and ultimately destroyed) by the instrumentalization (Narkunas) and commodification of the

³² For a more detailed discussion of the trilogy as a depiction of the catastrophic consequences of the unbridled biocapitalist commodification of life, see DeFalco, “MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things.” ³³ Nikolas Rose, Sunder Rajan, and others term this “biocapitalism.” As Stefan Helmreich explains: “in the age of biotechnology, when the substances and promises of biological materials, particularly stem cells and genomes, are increasingly inserted into projects of product making and profit-seeking, we are witnessing the rise of a novel kind of capital: biocapital” (463–464). For more on biocapitalism and bioeconomics, see Cooper, Life as Surplus; Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself”; Thacker, The Global Genome.

122        micro (genetic material) and macro (organs and tissues) matter of life. In other words, bodies are resources to be harvested and discarded. In the MaddAddam trilogy, the fantasy of human independence and invulnerability central to neoliberalism and biocapitalism is depicted at its devastating endgame in which unbridled extractivism has resulted in the near annihilation of the planet’s ecosystems. Atwood’s novels suggest that humans ignore interdependence to their peril, evoking a posthumanist perspective in their dramatization of a catastrophic anthropocentrism that regards bodies as matter, as marketable, utilitarian objects.³⁴ Rosi Braidotti regards this form of biocapitalism as ironically post-anthropocentric: “In substance, advanced capitalism both invests and profits from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives. This context produces a paradoxical and rather opportunistic form of post-anthropocentrism on the part of market forces which happily trade on Life itself ” (The Posthuman 59). The prioritization of market forces that marginalize human lives certainly undermines, rather than engages posthumanist critique. However, the commodification of life is inevitably profitable only for some human populations; advanced capitalism, or biocapitalism, remains an anthropocentric prioritization of the needs, gains, and wants of a privileged few. The series’ major annihilating event is an engineered virus that triggers a global pandemic. Referred to as the “Waterless Flood” by survivors, the pandemic violently displaces humans from their dominant and domineering position, launching an apocalyptically posthuman world. The trilogy serves as a satirical cautionary tale about the repercussions of the transhumanist fantasy of human perfectibility that disassociates the human animal from its social, ethical, and ecological coordinates. The novels depict the catastrophic consequences of biocapitalist anthropocentrism that regards the entire world as utilitarian matter to be used in the service of human perfectibility. In the ³⁴ Oryx and Crake treats biotechnological biocapitalism as a reiteration (in a different scale and register) of the extractivist commodification of life. The novel details the early life of its ambiguously racialized title character, Oryx (a nickname; her real name is never divulged), bought and sold multiple times since she was a child (114–117). As Oryx’s life story makes clear, devastation wrought by climate change in her unspecified South Asian home (“[a] village in Indonesia, or else Myanmar? Not those, said Oryx, though she couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t India though. Vietnam? Jimmy guessed. Cambodia? Oryx looked down at her hands, examining her nails. It didn’t matter” [emphasis added 115]) has produced a glut of disposable bodies, affective matter ripe for extraction. As the novel’s narrator explains, the extractive exploitation of natural resources in the Global North results in drought, famine, and ecological collapse in the Global South. Or, in Atwood’s somewhat simplified narrativization, the West gobbles up resources, transforming ecologies into waste, and the East is forced to bear the brunt of the negative repercussions of this process, forced to treat themselves and their kin as resources when there is nothing else left to harvest (Oryx and Crake 118). Oryx’s story of her childhood slavery both highlights and perpetuates racialized patterns of disposability and provides a template for the colonial biocapitalist relations that propel the novel’s world toward apocalypse.

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MaddAddam universe, the disavowal of human animals as socially and ecologically embedded and embodied subjects produces chaos, genocide, and ecological devastation. As in Ishiguro’s novel, the corporatized biotech economy that structures Atwood’s dystopic future privileges the internal matter (and genomic data) that constitute the human organism, but largely ignores the relations, that is, the affective material networks and systems that produce animal being. In MaddAddam’s satirically apocalyptic vision of the future, biotechnology, global capitalism, and corporate culture have all but eliminated opportunities for care. And yet, in the world after the Waterless Flood, the planet’s remaining human survivors adjust to a new subsistence economy based on scavenging and eventually collaborate, even procreate with the Crakers. Atwood’s trilogy concludes with this glimmer of possible renewal, suggesting that despite the devastation wrought by rampant extractivism, new and emerging creatures might be reintegrated into ecological, affective, and ethical networks and systems that can sustain and be sustained by them. The trilogy concludes with a vision of what Haraway terms “significant otherness”: “vulnerable, on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures” (Companion Species 7). Pigoons, Crakers, humans, and the hybrid species that will populate the future share an interdependent vulnerability that does not facilitate a simplistic unification, but demands an acknowledgment of affective agencies, however “non-harmonious,” for future survival. Pigoons are one of the trilogy’s most notable bioengineered species, created, much like the clones in Never Let Me Go, to provide replacement organs for humans. However, in this case, human DNA has been introduced into pigs engineered to grow copious organs for harvesting, effectively transforming the pigs, or “pigoons,” into technology, living incubators that house multiple chimeric organs awaiting extraction for xenotransplantation.³⁵ These organgrowing entities are nicknamed pigoons—a portmanteau of pig and balloon— since they appear inflated to make room for the surplus organs that make the creatures such valuable commodities. Early in the first novel, protagonist Jimmy recalls his childhood encounters with these strange creatures. As Jimmy explains, his father worked on the pigoon project and so had access to the “special buildings, heavily secured,” that housed the creatures, which

³⁵ “The first thing that must be understood about xeno research is that it takes for granted the utilization of nonhuman bodies, as both experimental models and as a compilation of surrogate parts” (Glick 173).

124        needed to be protected from theft and sabotage like any other corporate commodity (Oryx and Crake 26–27). However, the pigoons’ high value lasts only as long as they carry their precious cargo and once all of their organs have been extracted, their exhausted bodies are waste, empty containers to be discarded. No one is quite sure how post-extraction pigoon remains are disposed of, but the rumor is that they end up on the plates in the corporate cafeteria, a prospect Jimmy finds particularly alarming, since he balks at “eating an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of [his] own” (29). Pigoons in the lab are ingenious living containers housing profitable biomatter, which makes them both incredibly valuable and entirely expendable,³⁶ both commodities and (deferred) trash. When Jimmy meets the living pigoons in the lab he finds them “slightly frightening, with their running noses and tiny, white-lashed pink eyes. They glanced up at him as if they saw him, really saw him, and might have plans for him later” (26). The unsettling convergence of technology, of “finely honed genetic material” (27) and the living, breathing animal who fixes Jimmy in its enigmatic stare, clings to Jimmy, who finds himself haunted by memories of the pigoon long after the encounter. He remains transfixed by the gaze of these biotechnological creatures, which he believes truly see him—unlike his parents who tend to treat him as invisible. He is fascinated by their uncanny animal/ human/technological status, meticulously constructed, yet destined for disposal. When they meet in the lab, both Jimmy and the pigoons are vulnerable bodies whose survival, contentment, and pleasure depend on the whims of unreliable adults. As a result, there is a moment of reluctant recognition in the scene of the Jimmy/pigoon gaze, a trespassing of the imagined boundaries demarcating humans from animals from technology (26). The encounter highlights the dogged importance of individual contact for ethical significance. Jimmy’s encounter with particular pigoons produces a moment of ethical engagement that undermines their disposability (for Jimmy). Jimmy’s encounter with the face of the biotechnological animal haunts him in part because it suggests that particular inhuman bodies might be more (socially, ethically) than biotechnological objects. In this sense, Jimmy’s unsettling communion with individual pigoons reasserts the cult of the individual, treating identification and empathy with particular embodied subjects as the route to an ethic of posthuman care that inhibits disposability. ³⁶ In Atwood’s trilogy, the pigoons eventually escape the confines of the lab, ceasing to be fleshy incubators for human organs to be harvested and used. Outside of the lab, pigoons are no longer bioscientific objects, their meaning determined by their medical usefulness, but rather inscrutable vibrant, affective things.

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Fig. 14 Jason Courtney’s illustration of the Jimmy’s pigoon encounter in Oryx and Crake (courtesy of Jason Courtney)

The dread of Jimmy’s transgressive human/pigoon gaze is powerfully captured in Jason Courtney’s eerie illustration of the scene (see Fig. 14), which emphasizes the significance of the face-to-face encounter, rendering the other penned pigoons as landscape material, as fleshy, indistinguishable humps. Indeed, Courtney’s illustration emphasizes the singularity of the face; despite Atwood’s use of the third-person plural to narrate the encounter (“They glanced up at him as if they saw him, really saw him”), Courtney depicts a one-to-one gaze between Jimmy and a single pigoon. The scene’s revelatory face-to-face encounter with pigoons (or a pigoon in Courtney’s painting) evokes Levinas’s philosophical assessment of the face as the arresting imperative that reminds the (human) perceiver, “thou shalt not kill” (86–87). In this sense, the encounter is “successful” since it strengthens the taboo of consuming pigoons for Jimmy. But what of those disposable bodies, distant or herded, whose faces cannot be seen, or whose interactive surfaces may not register to humans as faces at all? An ethics based on face-to-face encounters lacks the means to register the ethical significance of bodies that remain indistinguishable or de-individuated. What of the pigoons as landscape, the fleshy humps in Courtney’s illustration? Moreover, what of those boundary creatures without

126        faces? Does facelessness and indistinction disqualify one from ethical consideration? Both Atwood’s writing and Courtney’s illustration invoke the face as a conduit for establishing ethical significance and, by association, facelessness as a conduit to disposability.

Posthuman Care beyond Recognition Animal studies scholar Erica Fudge has investigated the association between the face and ethical value, showing that faces, human and otherwise, have historically individualized particular bodies as matter for concern (180–181). By this logic the utilitarian bodies of indistinguishable clones segregated from their human “possibles,” pigoons huddled or herded who do not make eye contact, these segregated, “faceless” bodies remain outside ethical concern. This formulation reiterates the importance of individualization as the foundation of concern and care, an association between individuality and ethical significance that recalls the fetish of the aura discussed above. This privileging of unique individuals marginalizes biotechnological replicas and other inhuman bodies unable (or unwilling) to “face” the privileged humans who determine their fates. Much like Benjamin’s original work of art, Levinas’s face emits an “aura,” an ineffable “something” that calls out to its witness, alerting him³⁷ to its bearer’s value and significance, for Benjamin economic and cultural, for Levinas, ethical and divine. An ethics based on close contact leaves ontological hierarchies intact; in Ishiguro and Atwood’s fictional speculations, biotechnological creatures without opportunities to engage in direct, appealing encounters with original, privileged humanist subjects are destined for disposal. Fudge and her antecedents, most prominently Levinas, are working with a specific, symbolic interpretation of “face,” one that is uniquely mammalian, if not human. As Derrida’s animal philosophy demonstrates, such an interpretation stems from Levinas’s commitment to human sovereignty, which results in “a profound anthropocentrism and humanism” (The Animal that Therefore I Am 113). While Derrida’s critique destabilizes such anthropocentrism, it maintains the sovereignty of the living, if not necessarily the

³⁷ Levinas maintains a conventional humanist approach to ethics, which treats “Man” as the exemplum of the human. He employs male pronouns when discussing the generic human throughout his oeuvre.

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sovereignty of the human.³⁸ By leaving the hierarchical structures that produce anthropocentrism intact (altering rather than eradicating them), traces of humanism remain, traces that normalize the arrogance of anthropocentric valuations and disregard inhuman agencies. Avoiding this anthropocentrism, argues Krzysztof Ziarek, requires a new way of attending to and attaining being and living, human and nonhuman beings, forms of life and non-living things. The possibility of such a different key of relations hinges, however, on the ability to bring into question the very central position of the anthropos, underscored by the term the Anthropocene. And not only the central position of the human but also of life and of living beings, on which the notion of the anthropos depends. One could say that it is perhaps for the sake of living beings, that is, for the sake of their survival, that, paradoxically, the centrality of living has to be called into question. (29)

However, like many Anglo-European scholars, Ziarek overlooks existing models for the “different key of relations” he describes. One need not rely on hypothetical modes of being and relating that eschew anthropocentrism and strict living/nonliving binaries: Indigenous cosmologies that interpret the world as a web of relations, for example, do not depend on the kinds of living/nonliving distinctions that Ziarek and others treat as the dogged specter of humanism that haunts posthumanism (see, for example, Colebrook and Weinstein). Indigenous, curious, queer, posthuman forms of kinship and care inhibit and prohibit the extractive colonialism Simpson describes and Ishiguro and Atwood imagine, a dynamic I explore further in the book’s Conclusion. For now, like Ziarek, I ask, to what degree are Anglo-European ethics, including posthuman ethics, “inescapably bound with life, limited to beings that can be said to be alive, and thus exclusive of beings that cannot claim the status of the living?” (24). And, returning to Levinas, to what degree does the notion of the face in fact reproduce anthropocentric hierarchies and, therefore, facilitate, or at least offer no barriers to, the extractive colonialism that Ishiguro and Atwood depict? Though Jimmy may feel an uneasy twinge of connection with the pigoons who meet his gaze, such encounters remain isolated from the larger extractivist project, which is unaffected by fleeting,

³⁸ As Ziarek notes, “[w]hat underlies the sovereignty of the human amongst living beings is rather a more deeply entrenched and thus also more extensive ‘sovereignty’ afforded to the living over other, non-living beings” (24).

128        personal moments of connection. The majority of pigoons remain faceless herds, biotechnological containers for “spare parts” awaiting harvest and disposal. The above readings of ethical encounters depend on yoking a symbolic interpretation of “face” to a particular denotative meaning. However, other denotative meanings of the English word “face” have more lateral potential.³⁹ Initial entries in the OED confirm the face as an animalian trait, defining it as “The front part of a person’s head from the forehead to the chin, or the corresponding part in an animal.” However, later definitions complicate this distinction, describing “face” as: “The surface of a thing, especially one that is presented to the view or has a particular function.” This explicit association between faces, relationality and functionality presents intriguing possibilities for thinking inhuman relational bodies. This second definition of “face” makes no mention of any particular features typically associated with animal faces (eyes, nose, mouth). Instead, it is a surface’s parameters and functionality that determine face-ness. The flexibility of this definition, which suggests a face is merely a space, a surface available for encounters, conjures the face as a kind of present absence. In these terms the face is primarily a relational area of undetermined characteristics. From this perspective, semantically, a face is not much. Symbolically, the opposite is true. I adopt a strategically literal posthuman reading (or perhaps deliberate misreading) of face as a functional and/or perceptible surface since this flexible definition provides an opportunity to rethink anthropocentric distinctions between disposable bodies and valuable individuals. The face in this secondary sense is no longer Levinas’s unique marker of auratic individuality. Instead, it is a manifestation of relationality that highlights bodies as

³⁹ In his discussion of human/animal relations, Derrida remarks on the animal’s lack of a face in Levinas’s philosophy, drawing on conventional anthropocentric interpretations of the ethically demanding “naked” face as uniquely human: The animal has no face, he does not have the naked face that looks at me to the extent of my forgetting the color of its eyes. The word nudity, which is used so frequently, which is so indispensable for Levinas in describing the face, skin, and vulnerability of the other or of my relation to the other, of my responsibility for the other when I say ‘‘here I am,’’ never concerns nudity in its sexual difference and never appears within the field of my relation to the animal. The animal has neither face nor even skin in the sense Levinas has taught us to give to those words. There is, to my knowledge, no attention ever seriously given to the animal gaze, no more than to the difference among animals, as though I could no more be looked at by a cat, dog, monkey, or horse, than by a snake or some blind protozoon. (The Animal that Therefore I Am 107)

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interactive, encounterable matter,⁴⁰ expanding Levinas’s vision of relational ethics, his treatment of responsibility as concomitant with response-ability to more-than-human worlds. The correspondence between response-ability and responsibility has become a touchstone for many feminist philosophers who, like Kelly Oliver, argue that ethical responsibility stems from a fundamental interrelational connectivity. As Oliver explains, “Because our dependence on the energy in our environment brings with it ethical obligations, insofar as we are by virtue of our environment and by virtue of relationships with other people, we have ethical requirements rooted in the very possibility of subjectivity itself. We are obligated to respond to our environment and other people in ways that open up rather than close off the possibility of response” (Witnessing 15).⁴¹ As I’ve discussed throughout Curious Kin, Haraway, Barad, and others go a step further to position entanglement as the precursor not only to ethical relations but to being itself, making “phenomena,” rather than things, “the primary ontological units” (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity” 818). As a result, “Responsibility is not an obligation that the subject chooses but rather an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness” (emphasis in original, Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction” 183). My point is that such frameworks provide a useful lens for reading inhuman (semantic) “faces” not as crucial markers of a singularity that legitimize ethical significance, but as markers of the relationality that produce being. Combining the ethical significance of the face with a posthumanist reconceptualization of faces as a markers of relationality, rather than individuality, advances a critical posthumanist skepticism toward the humanist cult of sacred individuals. Biotechnology mobilizes this skepticism in its perforation and erasure of humanist boundaries, making subjects and objects increasingly difficult to distinguish. But even as biotech appears to dissolve ontological boundaries, ⁴⁰ “No animal at all, Levinas implies, would admit in the same way to the incapacity to answer what is in sum the question of responding: for to have a face is to be able to respond or answer, by means of the ‘Here I am,’ before the other and for the other, for one’s self for the other. And in responding that he can’t respond, Levinas says, ‘Here I am’; he responds, but by admitting that he can’t respond to the question of knowing what a face is, namely, of knowing what responding is, and he can thus no longer answer for his whole discourse on the face. For declaring that he doesn’t know where the right to be called ‘face’ begins means confessing that one doesn’t know at bottom what a face is, what the word means, what governs its usage, and that means confessing that one didn’t say what responding means. Doesn’t that amount, as a result, to calling into question the whole legitimacy of the discourse and ethics of the ‘face’ of the other, the legitimacy and even the sense of every proposition concerning the alterity of the other, the other as my neighbor or my brother, etc.?” (Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am 109). ⁴¹ It is worth noting that Oliver’s remarks conclude: “This obligation is an obligation to life itself.” In other words, her argument depends on the sovereignty of life. Nonetheless, Oliver’s work, like that of many other feminist philosophers provides a rich theoretical foundation for more capacious models of relational responsibility.

130        it erects and fortifies others. Biotech as an industry relies on biocapitalist extractivism, treating life forms as stores of valuable matter and data, transforming entangled matter into marketable commodities, deferred trash. However, fiction can reverse this perspective by drawing attention to the vitality and agency of disposable inhuman bodies, treating imagined biotechnological tools (clones, pigoons) as responsive, agential matter. In Atwood, the biotechnological pigoons escape the lab and become unpredictably agential beings, employing a deadly posthuman kinship to track and hunt their human prey as a cooperative pack. Outside of the lab, pigoons are no longer bioscientific objects, their meaning determined by their medical usefulness, but rather inscrutable living, feeling inhuman creatures. In Ishiguro’s novel, a clone conveys the disavowed affective and agential capacities of inhuman bodies constructed as biocapitalist tools. In both texts, ostensibly disposable bodies assert their vital relationality, the vibrant capacities that confound their easy consignment to the waste bin. In her elaboration of the destructive history of the Eurocentric humanist paradigm, Braidotti argues that “the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism” has produced humanist citizens on the one hand, and “disposable bodies” on the other (The Posthuman 15). Never Let Me Go and the MaddAddam trilogy depict the failures of this “binary logic.” These narratives of inhuman bodies treated as disposable matter expose the inadequacy of humanism to account for the incredible range and significance of machine/animal/human assemblages and interdependencies. If “humanism works divisions” (Latimer 90), representations of disposable inhuman bodies expose the violence and volatility of those divisions. By paying attention to bodies deemed unworthy of attention and care, to unindividuated, disposable bodies, one can begin to imagine ethical value that moves beyond the cult of “auratic” (human) individuality to consider the possibility of what Jane Bennett, following Latour, terms “the ‘horizontalizing’ of the ontological plane” (“Systems and Things” 230). Fictional narratives of disposable biotechnological bodies can further posthumanist critiques of the cult of the individual human subject by challenging readers to grapple with the frequently disturbing consequences of humanist logic. Inhuman bodies that undermine anthropocentric disposability are “bodies that matter in the age of biotechnological reproduction,” a mattering that flaunts humanist divisions. The critique of divisions between humanist subjects and disposable bodies is a political project. “Why advocate the vitality of matter,” asks Jane Bennett? “Because my hunch is that the image of dead or

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thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earthdestroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (Vibrant Matter 4). Narratives and images of ostensibly disposable bodies treated as matter of concern encourage their readers to care about the fates of (fictional) inhuman creatures treated as inconvenient, useless matter, as trash. Never Let Me Go and MaddAddam are dystopic depictions of the violence of humanist extractivism. However, the source of the dystopia is not the extractivism itself, but the normalization and naturalization of exploitative models of relations. By drawing readers’ attention to the horror of the normative, such narratives pave the way for alternatives. For Simpson, “The alternative to extractivism is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility.” In the next chapter I consider such alternatives, which expose and resist the brutality of normative colonial relations, erecting inhuman intimacies as sustaining bulwarks against the violence of anthropocentric extractivism. Like Aibo funerals, which disorient Anglo-European assumptions about animacy, grievability, and the anthropocentric delimitation of care, narratives of disposable inhuman bodies highlight the exclusivity of the human and the colonial ideology endemic to humanism. In what follows, I continue to explore the colonial violence that creates and maintains “the human,” and position posthuman care as a form of “deep reciprocity” that disrupts the racialized human episteme.

4 Decolonizing Posthuman Care In 2013, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi developed the slogan “Black Lives Matter” to highlight and refute the disposability of Black lives in American society. This disposibility was foregrounded in the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student who was shot by a fellow citizen who claimed to feel threatened by the boy’s presence in a Florida gated community. When the courts acquited Martin’s killer in 2013, Black Lives Matter (BLM) became a rallying cry, expressing widespread outrage at explicitly and implicitly state-sanctioned violence against Black subjects. As Garza explains, “the #BlackLivesMatter movement is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to [American] society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (1). BLM is an assertion of Black significance and a repudiation of systemic racism. “The brilliance of the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter,’” explains Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “is its ability to articulate the dehumanizing aspects of anti-Black racism in the United States” (182). In asserting Black significance, BLM exposes the pervasive de-legitimization and disposability of Black life in America, and the exclusion of Black lives from state-sanctioned liberal humanist care. The backlash against BLM’s assertion of Black value has confirmed the precarity of Black ethical significance, the degree to which the assertion of Black “mattering” (the meaning and worth of Black lives) remains a controversial and inflammatory proposition. The slogan has been co-opted by reactionary counter-protesters affronted by the Black focus of the original, most prominently in the slogans “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” (the latter a reference to the “thin blue line” euphemism that interprets the police as the protective barrier between peaceful society and lawless chaos). The provocative power, even notoriety, of the Black Lives Matter slogan speaks to the persistence of colonial humanism, to the unsustainable tension between American discourses of citizenship as a guarantor of unalienable rights and white America’s consistent treatment of Black lives as ethically insignificant, as resources to be extracted, as disposable matter. Moreover, BLM exposes the persistence (beyond the abolition of slavery) of Black disposability, which Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Amelia DeFalco, Oxford University Press. © Amelia DeFalco 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.003.0005

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continues to license the violent exploitation and eradication of Black lives across the United States and the Western world.¹ The slogan “Black Lives Matter” is an implied response to what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson identifies as the “persistent question” of “the quality of black(ened) people’s humanity” (Becoming Human 1); it is at once a rejoinder to and refusal of this foundational historical question about the exclusionary limits of humanity, an exposure and repudiation of Black disposability. This chapter interrogates the racialization of disposability and the speculative response to such disposability offered by Black (critical and fictional) literature of posthuman care. While BLM is in many ways a demand for ontopolitical recognition, an assertion of the humanity of “black(ened) people” in contradiction to their violent disposability, Black literature, both critical and fictional, offers alternative approaches that assert the significance of Black existence by resisting and dismantling the humanist parameters of being.² Rather than engaging a politics of recognition, critical race scholars like Joshua Bennett and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson have highlighted the productive affinities between Black and nonhuman beings in Black literature and visual culture, producing criticism that “move[s] beyond a critique of bestialization” to “critique and depose prevailing conceptions of ‘the human’ found in Western science and philosophy” (Jackson, Becoming Human 1). AngloEuropean ontologies have historically positioned blackness and human-ness in an inverse relationship, a structural relationship that produces what Sylvia Wynter terms the “coloniality of being,” in which “the present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, . . . overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” 260). Resisting the coloniality of being has often involved efforts to refuse and ¹ In 2020, BLM was the rallying cry for the widespread protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The George Floyd protests spread across the United States and beyond, increasing the visibility of the BLM movement across the globe. Though BLM is an American initiative, the BLM Black Global Network Foundation group is active throughout the US, the UK, and Canada, and in 2020 Black Lives Matter protests took place across Western Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Italy, Denmark) and Australia (https://www.politico.eu/article/us-style-civilrights-protests-come-to-europe-george-floyd-black-lives-matter/). In Australia BLM has been embraced by many Indigenous activist groups who see parallels between the over-policing and carceral violence suffered by Black Americans and Indigenous Australians (https://www. ft.com/content/b482d830-700c-4632-b8c4-d8f6fbc031e5; https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/ 6826632/heres-why-black-lives-matter-resonates-in-australia/; https://theconversation.com/why-theblack-lives-matter-protests-must-continue-an-urgent-appeal-by-marcia-langton-143914; https:// www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/213/6/now-we-say-black-lives-matter-fact-matter-we-just-blackmatter-them1). ² Kodwo Eshun, Zakiyyah Jackson, and Kristen Lillvis have explored how Black writers imagine and theorize ways of being that turn away from Anglo-European humanist perspectives that conflate the human with whiteness and rationality (in contradistinction to blackness and corporeality) and toward a processual, liminal, relational understanding of being.

134        reverse the dehumanization of blackness and insist on Black people’s right to be included in the liberal humanist category “human.”³ However, as Wynter’s analysis demonstrates, the very invention of the human, or, more accurately, “Man,” as a species and an ontology is based on exclusionist properties; in other words, the human as a generic category depends on ostracism for its existence, meaning, and significance. As a result, many critical race theorists have fixed their critical sights on the notion of the human itself, interrogating its historical development and persistence, its sociopolitical meanings and implications in an effort to hasten its deposition.⁴ Such work challenges Anglo-European conceptions of being and mattering and offers alternative visions built around transversal posthuman relations.⁵ Anglo-European science and philosophy have consistently positioned Black life as subordinate to white life, a marginalization that both affirms the generic human-ness of whiteness and affiliates blackness with nonhuman, insignificant matter. As Jackson explains: Whether machine, plant, animal, or object, the nonhuman’s figuration and mattering is shaped by the gendered racialization of the field of metaphysics ³ This shift away from a politics of recognition raises a difficult, pressing question for those committed to feminist, anti-racist, posthuman scholarship: namely, how can one advocate for a radical disruption of the human via the horizontalizing of the ontological plane without trivializing or undermining the ongoing work of scholars and activists struggling to affirm the moral significance of minoritized populations? If all matter is agential, if, in some sense all matter matters, what of the incredible efforts made by people of color, people with disabilities, queer people to be recognized as fully human and, therefore, ethically significant? Does posthumanist critique threaten political activism, like Black Lives Matter, organized around claims for legitimacy and recognition? As Haritaworn warns, “[i]t is thus essential to interrogate the nonhuman alongside the dehumanization of ‘Man’s human Others’ and to understand what disposes them to becoming animal’s other (or object’s other). There is a certain temptation to scapegoat critical race theorists as anthropocentric, correlationist dupes of the species binary with an irrational investment in humanity and a lack of acknowledgment that objectification and animalization remain necessary objects of investigation. How do we steer clear of yet another loop of ‘vulgar constructionism’? To quote an anonymous grad student, the turn to animal studies at times reflects a desire for an ‘Other that doesn’t talk back’ ” (Haritaworn 212). It is imperative that scholars remain vigilant when exploring Black posthumanism and resist temptations to invoke a prelapsarian past or exoticized present of happy entanglement and harmonious care. As Ward’s novel suggests, posthuman care can offer nourishment via destruction, nurturance via violence and death. Uncomplicated celebrations of such care risks ignoring the colonial legacies that have ruptured and devastated Black being so irrevocably that violence has become lodged in all relations. ⁴ For example, Megan Glick positions her work as an alternative to the critical race theory “plea that we must strive to work toward a ‘common humanity,’ or the possibility of a radically antiracist humanism.” Instead, Glick highlights “the ‘human’ itself as a central problem in rights frameworks and in relation to expectations of liberal Western personhood” (7). Working in a similar vein, Jackson’s Becoming Human examines “unruly conceptions of being and materiality that creatively disrupt the human–animal distinction and its persistent raciality” (1). ⁵ See, for example, Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism”; Puar, “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess”; Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Weheliye, “After Man”; Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.”

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even as teleological finality is indefinitely deferred by the processual nature of actualization or the agency of matter. Thus, terrestrial movement toward the nonhuman is simultaneously movement toward blackness, whether blackness is embraced or not, as blackness constitutes the very matter at hand. (“Outer Worlds” 217)

The blackness of the inhuman produces a figurative affiliation between Black and nonhuman bodies, which is used, in turn, to degrade and delegitimize Black existence. Homo sapiens species status has never been a guarantor of “legitimate” human status⁶ and the very notion of the human cannot be disentangled from racial exclusion and violence. As Alexander Weheliye explains: The volatile rapport between race and the human is defined above all by two constellations: first, there exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of the Homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans; second, as a result, humanity has held a very different status for the traditions of the racially oppressed. (Habeas Viscus 8)

Black studies scholarship that moves beyond posthumanist efforts to decenter the human, to advocate instead for the dismantling of the human, not only as a marker of moral significance but as a coherent ontological category, attempts to depose the enduring racialized taxonomy Weheliye describes. To be clear, this proposition is not a naïve call for a post-racial politics that denies the ubiquity of racial oppression, but rather it is an effort to upend the illusion of what Sylvia Wynter terms “generic ‘normal humanness’” (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” 266) by exposing the human as in fact a bastion of anthropocentric racialization. If the human ceased to be the zenith of ontoepistemological chains of being and the inhuman was no longer a cudgel for oppressing minoritized bodies, what alternative modes of being and relating might emerge? This chapter considers criticism and fiction that scrutinize and ⁶ My comments build on a strong “human-skeptical” tradition within critical race theory, which traces the colonial construction of the human as an ontological category and argues for its disruption. See, for example, Anne Cheng, Ornamentalism; Glick, Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood; Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man; Jackson, Becoming Human; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.”

136        denaturalize racialized humanist ontological frameworks in their explorations of life on the periphery of the human, amidst the outcasts, discards, and detritus of normative, politically sanctioned “humanness.”⁷ This chapter continues the discussion of marginalized bodies rendered disposable via their exclusion from the human begun in Chapter 3 by considering the degree to which the novels discussed—Never Let Me Go and the MaddAddam trilogy—to some degree re-inscribe the ontological boundaries they appear to challenge in their reproduction of the center/periphery frameworks that sustain the generic human even in the very act of critique and subversion. This is not to say these texts are lacking, but to draw attention to the limits of their posthumanist critique. Speculative literature like Never Let Me Go and the MaddAddam trilogy exposes the destructive tension between legitimate citizens and disposable bodies and, by implication, the harm of colonial humanist models that exclude and delegitimize a wide range of bodies and lives. They reveal destructive hierarchies but offer few challenges to dominant Eurocentric maps of the ontological plane. Of course, fiction is not instructional; its task is descriptive and imaginative rather than prescriptive. Nonetheless, speculative narratives concerning unconventional life forms, including AI, robots, clones, and cyborg hybrids, frequently re-negotiate ontological maps in order to accommodate or exclude the (in)human life forms they imagine. However, rarely do these re-negotiations involve the abolishment or radical reorientation of ontological hierarchies. As the examples in the previous chapter demonstrate, one frequently finds depictions of the melancholia of the disposable, exiled inhuman boundary creature, but that melancholia implies the possibility of affective resolution via inclusion. Redrawing ontological boundaries to bestow legitimacy on these forlorn creatures would, theoretically, alleviate the suffering they endure as bioengineered creatures, deferred trash. These boundary creatures are designed to induce shudders of familiarity and uncanny strangeness—akin to Madame’s “shudder” on encountering clone children during her visits to Hailsham (35)—that trigger larger questions around legitimacy and belonging. The normative world of valued, legitimately affective, legitimately alive humans deserving care is clearly defined, and it is the exclusion of the clones, rather

⁷ Audre Lorde writes of a “mythical norm,” which “[i]n America . . . is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure,” that haunts the edges of Black consciousness. “It is,” Lorde explains, “with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different,” a difference that is subsequently transformed into “deviance” (116). Colonial humanism depends on this yoking of deviance to deviation from a mythical but nonetheless intransient and authoritative norm.

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than the exclusionism of the human itself that is presented as an impediment to equality. The emotional resonance of the novels largely stems from allying the reader with the remote, peripheral positions of disposable inhuman creatures; belonging remains a desirable, if remote possibility, one pictured just beyond the horizons of the marginalized. In this chapter, I examine Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), which depicts as an alternative approach to the scandal of disposable lives that refuses to adopt, or sometimes even acknowledge, the center/periphery, human/inhuman distinctions that disturb and threaten Ishiguro and Atwood’s protagonists. This novel includes no robots, aliens, or feral children. Its narrator is neither a machine nor a clone. Salvage the Bones is a work of realist fiction, devoid of the fantastical creatures that populate Klara and the Sun, Robot and Frank, Oryx and Crake, and the other speculative fictions explored in the previous chapters. Nonetheless, Ward’s novel concerns care beyond the human in its focus on Black experience delivered via a young, Black female narrator whose race and gender exclude her from “generic normal humanness” in a world structured by anti-blackness. Salvage the Bones treats a range of discarded bodies, human and otherwise, as vital, relational, affective, ethically significant, caring matter. In Ward’s novel, the generic, politically sanctioned human is so remote he verges on invisible; white bodies hover at the narrative’s margins, barely acknowledged, vaguely threatening, but largely irrelevant. Instead, Ward attends to the narrator’s life in “the Pit,” which is her family’s name for the literal dumping ground they inhabit. The Pit is brutally and beautifully horizontalizing; it is a landscape of discards, at once disintegrating and fecund, cherished and disposable. My analysis reads Ward’s novel as a depiction of radically posthuman, even posthumous⁸ care. This is not to suggest that Ward evokes a utopian imaginary of happy entanglement and harmony. Quite the contrary, in Ward’s novel nourishment is attained via destruction, nurturing via violence and death. Salvage the Bones imagines posthuman affiliations salvaged in spite of colonial humanism’s relentless exploitation of Black life. This chapter traces the novel’s depiction of “black(ened)” beings as relational, interdependent, “biocultural” matter embedded in constitutive webs of care. In ignoring humanist taxonomies that gauge bodies according to their adherence to colonial models of the human, the novel repudiates colonial extractivism, the racialized

⁸ I use posthumous to draw attention to the biocentrism of care and to refer to the possibilities of care beyond or after “life.” I discuss the notion of posthumous care in greater detail in the Conclusion.

138        system of exploitation that both produces and relies on the disposability of racialized—“blackened”—nonhuman bodies and environments. I begin this discussion of Black posthuman care by elaborating the fraught relationship between critical race studies and posthumanism, scrutinizing the potential for collaboration and coordination that has, as yet, been largely overlooked in critical posthumanism. I consider the potential for a decolonial posthumanism, a version of posthuman care self-reflexively attuned to its colonial genealogies. In what follows, I consider Black critical and fictional re-interpretations of ostensibly disposable, discarded bodies that draw attention to the entangled ecologies of Black being. These literary explorations of Black posthuman care are at once refutations of the coloniality of being and indictments of posthumanist scholarship that fails to account for the racial dimensions of the generic human it claims to decenter. I begin by investigating the potential for a decolonized posthumanism before turning to Ward’s novel, which, I argue, theorizes Black posthuman care as savage salvage, a ferociously vital attention and attachment to the more-than-human remains that exist in the wake of white extraction.

Decolonizing Posthumanism Despite the significant overlaps between the aims and vocabularies of critical race theory and critical posthumanism,⁹ the latter has often neglected the insights offered by the former.¹⁰ Indeed, what Neel Ahuja describes as the “colonial genealogies of the posthumanist turn” (xiv) are evident in posthumanism’s failure to grapple with the formative and fundamental racialization of the generic human so central to its critique, an oversight that risks reproducing the historical patterns of exclusion that continue to render Black lives inhuman and disposable. Twenty-first-century critical appreciation for posthuman ontologies and posthumanist theory has often failed to account for humanism’s persistent delegitimization of racialized not to mention disabled and queer lives. This exclusion has resulted in a persistent tension that scholars ⁹ Like Juanita Sundberg, in this section’s heading I use decolonial to describe the process of “exposing the ontological violence authorized by Eurocentric epistemologies both in scholarship and everyday life,” and, moreover, working to confront and dismantle those epistemologies and their effects (34). ¹⁰ A handful of scholars have begun to draw attention to this oversight. See, for example, Jackson, “Outer Worlds” (216). Indigenous scholars have offered similar criticisms, arguing that many of posthumanism’s central tenets are endemic to longstanding Indigenous cosmologies (Todd, Watts). I discuss these overlaps and potential appropriations further in the Conclusion.

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of the more-than-human (which includes, but is not limited to, posthumanism) would do well to acknowledge and honor. As Uri McMillan argues, “the black subject—made, historically, to be both object and person—is prosthetic and human, flesh and machine. In short, theories of ‘object life’ are at their most fecund, productive, and expansive when considered with, rather than instead of, black cultural studies” (223). What follows is an attempt to enact the kind of collaborative reading process McMillan invokes. I look to Black studies, critical race theory, and fictions that explore the potentially affirming affiliations between Black and nonhuman bodies. In particular, I analyze Ward’s novel, which counters Black disposability with a vision of posthuman care that ignores liberal humanist relational conventions and hierarchies. The novel is less a dismantling of colonial humanist hierarchies than a complete dismissal of them, a pointed refusal to acknowledge and admit the ideological structures that produce and maintain Black disposability. This active ignoring does not eliminate debilitating colonial structures or their violent effects, but it facilitates speculative modes that imagine Black more-than-human relational matrixes of care that enable persistence and survival, if not necessarily comfort and contentment. In the previous chapter, I discussed the productive tension between the moral outrageousness of the premise of Ishiguro’s novel—bioengineered humans rendered as disposable matter, as literally extractible resources for so-called real humans—and the understated banality of the narrator’s tone. However, given the fact that existing human populations are already rendered disposable every day, the premise of the novel is not particularly outrageous. Of course, speculative fiction is not the only way to show readers the violence of colonial humanist taxonomies and the policing of their narrow categories; such violent exclusion is ubiquitous across contemporary politics in the Global North, as BLM makes clear. Interrogating these ubiquitous cultures of disposability requires scholars attend to race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and enduring patterns of colonial exploitation. Posthuman and new materialist ambitions for “‘horizontalizing’ the ontological plane” (Bennett, “Systems and Things” 230) require engagement with the entrenched harms and extractive violence of existing verticalities, even as such perspectives imagine the progressive potential of inhuman agencies.¹¹ In short, the whiteness of the human—the apotheosis of agential matter that matters—is too frequently overlooked in

¹¹ Glick makes a similar point in her contextualization of her book’s central concept, “infrahumanism,” which she describes as “humanism’s shadow Other” (10). As Glick explains, critical neglect of the human as a hermeneutic category has stunted the potential of posthumanist analysis: “the desirability

140        posthumanism and its affiliates, which “rely on problematic iconographies of the human” (Glick 8). Noting, critiquing, and revising “problematic iconographies” and their legacies can help cultivate a decolonial posthumanism alert to the colonialism of humanism and the enduring racialization of the human. In solidarity with this decolonizing project, I employ posthuman care to describe the webs of affiliation and concern that bind a range of excluded inhuman creatures, lives, and objects, entangled mattering that repudiates colonial cultures of extractive valuation and disposability. Salvage the Bones powerfully demonstrates this dual action of critique and revision, at once rehearsing the exclusionist violence of the coloniality of being and imagining a mode of interdependent, relational being emancipated from colonial hierarchies and extractive valuations. Imagining, in short, a decolonized posthuman care. In Ward’s novel, the meaning of disposability becomes increasingly unstable as ontological territories become intelligible via relations, rather than limits. The previous chapter explored literature that compelled readers to register continuities between “real” and therefore “legitimate” human bodies and their engineered, inauthentic, “illegitimate” counterparts. Depictions of extracted, abandoned, and disposed of nonhuman bodies implicitly critique the structures that evaluate and valuate beings based on their compliance with an exclusionary model of the human, resulting in distinctions between real humans on the one hand and disposable bodies (machines, clones, bioengineered hybrids, AI substitutions) on the other. However, all of these comparisons implicitly reproduce the value of the human in their examinations of bodies that fall short of this supreme category, taken as given. Narratives of care relations between humans and nonhumans tend to question processes of exclusion that relegate certain bodies to the ethically peripheral realm of illegitimacy, but they don’t necessarily scrutinize the naturalized supremacy of the human at the center. Attending to the injustices heaped on the inhuman can obscure how the very notion of a “normally, generically human” based on a “Western bourgeois liberal monohumanist phenotypically—racially white— aesthetic corporeal standard” (McKittrick and Wynter “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 55, 60) poses an insurmountable obstacle to

of this shift—from vertical to horizontal conceptualizations of matterable life—fails to recognize the human itself as a term that is already deeply imbricated within, and productive of, states of non/ personhood. That is to say, rather than arguing for the ethical expansion of the parameters of the human (in which historically marginalized groups’ fundamental humanity is recognized and codified in law), it is imperative to look to the terms of humanity itself as the very site of ongoing conditions of inequality” (Glick 8).

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non-exploitative relations. Ostensibly peripheral, disposable bodies remain just that if the critical gaze fails to reorient itself in ways that dismantle the coloniality of human exceptionalism that continues to color posthumanism both figuratively and literally. Caring for and about discards is a refusal and reorientation of colonial territorializations. As Toni Morrison reminded interviewers again and again, she wrote from and for “the center” as she conceived and experienced it: from and for Black experience.¹² She rejected the idea that Black life was marginal and pointed out the colonial assumptions that produced such orientations. Salvage the Bones similarly imagines Black subjects oriented around and towards blackness and the nonhuman, as opposed to whiteness and the colonial human. Ward’s novel refuses to (re)produce spatial metaphors of centers and margins; the ostensible boundary is the world. What lies outside the Pit and its environs remains largely indistinct and irrelevant. The novel offers a vision of horizontalism in which diverse matter relates, feels, affects, and is affected. Though the narrative indicates that the Pit’s bodies are largely discards, the vibrancy and care within and between them belies their disposability. The novel’s vision of posthuman vitality and care offers a significant challenge to periphery/ center, inhuman/human binaries that persist even within critical speculations of the posthuman. What happens when one refuses to heed center/periphery orientations and ontological boundaries? When inhuman creatures claim territory and embrace illegitimate, “deviant” affections and affinities? What if curious, queer, posthuman kinship were normalized as simply kinship requiring no modifier? Ward’s novel engages such questions in its depictions of black(ened) agents enmeshed in and embraced by particular, situated forms of transversal kinship

¹² “I’m writing for black people,” Morrison told a Guardian interviewer in 2015, “in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologise or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people]—which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it” (Hoby). Earlier in her career, she specified her audience even more precisely: “I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving loving way. They are writing to repossess, rename, reown” (qtd. in Pal 2439). As Pal explains: [c]ommunities of women in Morrison’s novels act as support systems facilitating the survival of Black women in a hostile environment. These communities though replete with differences and complexities represent a specific culture and a specific value system. What is refreshing about them is that they are presented from the subject position of Morrison as an African-American woman. Their terms of assertion are determined by a discourse in which they occupy the centre and not the margin. (2443)

142        and care that affirm being without appealing to colonial humanist norms.¹³ Ward’s characters do not speak back to or resist the coloniality of being, but appear to ignore its intolerable demands and censorial guidelines altogether, affirming the categorical and material porousness and plurality of human animals. By inhabiting the territory of waste and staking a claim with exiled, discarded, and denuded agential matter (organisms, objects, landscapes), Ward’s characters enact relational ways of being based on responsiveness and responsibility that rebuke the socio-political systems that have manufactured their disposability.

Salvage the Bones In an interview published in The Paris Review, Ward has described Salvage the Bones as a novel inspired by her experiences of terror and anger during and after Hurricane Katrina. While the hurricane itself was frightening, its trauma was compounded by public and governmental failures to respond to the Black suffering the disaster engendered. In the interview, Ward recounts how her family was forced to take refuge in trucks during Katrina (a Category Five hurricane) after being refused shelter by a white family when her grandmother’s house was flooded. As Ward explains, the violence of the hurricane continued long after the storm abated and she decided to write a novel that embodied that relentless brutality: I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us. (Hoover)

Salvage the Bones is a novel of ruthless survival and the forms of caring kinship that emerge and persist amidst ongoing devastation. Ward has commented on

¹³ My use of “transversal” is inspired by Braidotti’s discussion of “ ‘humanimal’ transversal bonding” in her essay “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” As Braidotti explains, “[e]scaping the gravitational pull of logocentric systems of thought, critical/creative nomadic thought pursues the actualization of transversal relations, inhabited by a vitalist and materialist multi-directional affectivity that works in terms of transpositions, that is to say generative crosspollina-tion and hybrid inter-connections” (The Posthuman 16). “This transversal alliance,” she explains, “today involves nonhuman agents, technologically-mediated elements, earth-others (land, waters, plants, animals) and nonhuman inorganic agents (plastic, wires, information highways, algorithms, etc.). A posthuman ethical praxis involves the formation of a new alliance, a new people” (21).

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the closeness of “salvage” and “savage” as a phonetic reminder of the two as conjoined responses to destruction and deprivation (Hoover). The novel’s narrator, Esch Batiste, is a poor, Black 15-year-old living in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage¹⁴ on the coast of Mississippi who discovers she’s pregnant in the weeks prior to Katrina’s arrival. Esch narrates her life “in the Pit,” the denuded plot of land where she lives with her father, three brothers, and a variety of nonhuman animals, including her brother Skeetah’s beloved pitbull, China. The Batiste family has lived in the Pit for three generations; Esch and her brothers were born in the Pit—all but the youngest, whose difficult delivery necessitated an emergency trip to the hospital where Junior was saved but their mother died. The novel is at once stark and embellished in its attentive depiction of vulnerable bodies (human and otherwise) surviving amidst the devastation wrought by extractive capitalism and natural disaster. The novel portrays the formative entanglements of a range of bodies in extremis before the climactic arrival of Hurricane Katrina both amplifies and strains the Pit’s posthuman ecology.¹⁵ The novel’s title speaks to its re-valuation of remains: salvage is how Esch and her siblings survive.¹⁶ Like all of Ward’s publications, which include three novels and a memoir, Salvage the Bones addresses the precarity of Black lives lived post-extraction. It depicts Black agents who, having been relieved of all their resources, are discarded by the state, left to molder with the other detritus produced by extractive capitalism. Black lives, Black bodies are at the center of all Ward’s texts; white lives, white bodies, white laws are distant yet palpably malevolent forces the characters seek to avoid and evade. Salvage the Bones’s only white bodies are disconcerting and often threatening: they include two victims of a possibly deadly car crash, one lifeless on the ground, the other bloody and delirious, as well as a farmer who lives at the edge of the Pit whose roundworm medicine Skeetah steals in an attempt to save China and her puppies. Encounters with whiteness are always risky; when Esch, Skeetah, and their friend, Big Henry, come across the car accident Skeetah urges them to flee the site since even injured or lifeless white bodies pose a threat to Black existence.

¹⁴ Bois Sauvage is a fictionalized version of Ward’s own hometown of DeLisle, a poor Black town on the coast of Mississippi that was hard hit by Katrina (Henderson). ¹⁵ Annie Bares interprets Ward’s depiction of Katrina as a representation of slow violence (as explored by Saidiya Hartman and others) (22). The novel, Bares argues, “characterizes Katrina as one in a string of ongoing environmental and human crises and as a product of racialized histories of debilitated and debilitating environments” (25). ¹⁶ The violence of extractivism is also evoked in the title of her previous book, The Men We Reaped, a memoir that recounts the violent deaths of five young Black men in the United States, including her brother, who died in a car accident at the age of 19 in 2000.

144        The characters that inhabit the Pit, too young or disabled for steady employment, survive by scavenging, hunting, and foraging. Esch’s father, injured in a car accident and traumatized by his wife’s bloody death in childbirth, is an alcoholic itinerant worker whose meagre disability benefits cannot support four children. Income, and therefore food, is scarce and unreliable. Nonetheless, Esch and her family persist, living in the tumult of what Christina Sharpe calls “the wake,” her term for the ongoing rupture that was and is transatlantic slavery. As Sharpe explains, Black subjects in the United States (and elsewhere) survive amidst “the unfinished project of emancipation,” constantly buffeted by “the precarities of the afterlives of slavery” (5). Sharpe’s moving account of contemporary “blackness and being,” which blends personal history with critical reflection, asks “what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/ survival” (14)? The Batiste family embodies this precarious “un/survival,” living in the untenable space of “non/being” (Sharpe 14).¹⁷ The Pit is a place marked by both absence (extraction has produced its concavity) and lively presence, a demonstration of the persistence of Black life and care in the face of exclusion and negation.¹⁸ Life in the Pit, in the wake, is fractured, tenuous, and unreliable—savage. The perpetual rupturing force of the wake disrupts relations: the strain and pressure of extractive violence reaps Black bodies, extracting their labor (physical, cognitive, affective) and discarding what remains. Caring relations are perpetually interrupted, dislocated, eroded, and erased by the strain of the colonial extractivist impulse that structures American sociopolitical life. Ward’s novel challenges extractivist logic by focusing readers’ attention on what remains post-extraction, “salvaging the bones” of colonial decimation. The novel is a tacit response to Sharpe’s central query: “What happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we to attempt to speak, for instance, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who know, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who care?” (7). Ward’s depiction of Black ¹⁷ The Pit manifests “the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance” (Sharpe 14). ¹⁸ Ward’s novel evokes Sharpe’s delineation of Black care as a form of resistance: “Living as I have argued we do in the wake of slavery, in spaces where we were never meant to survive, or have been punished for surviving and for daring to claim or make spaces of something like freedom, we yet reimagine and transform spaces for and practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention)” (Sharpe 130–131).

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posthuman care in the Pit imagines the possibilities of Sharpe’s scenario. The disaster of antiblackness is undeniable, palpable in the ruined ground on which Esch’s family stands. Gutted and dumped on, the Pit bears the scars of extraction; yet, amidst this disaster is posthuman care and love, not in spite or because of disaster, but with and alongside it. From its opening pages, the novel draws attention to detritus, to reclamation and gleaning, to life lived among and as remains. In the opening scene China gives birth in the “gap in the woods [Esch’s mother’s] father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit” (1).¹⁹ The scene pays close attention to the intensity of China’s labor and the gory details of the birth: in her struggle to expel the puppies “she seems to be turning herself inside out” (4), and later Esch watches as she devours the “glistening mess” of the afterbirth (17). The bloody delivery reminds Esch of her own mother’s fatal labor, and she recalls how her mother “squatted, screamed” trying to give birth to Junior, how she was “dragged . . . from the bed to [Daddy’s] truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again” (2).²⁰ The novel’s Gothic imagery—bloody bodies, dark woods, hidden traumas—express the violence, the perpetual threat of life in the Pit, in the wake. The property’s nickname reflects the landscape’s history of extraction. As Esch explains, her maternal grandfather, Papa Joseph: let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry lake, making it into a pond. (14)

¹⁹ Scholars have provided diverse, compelling readings of the Pit in Ward’s novel (Bares 25; Clark 344; Coby). Holly Cade Brown goes so far as to describe it as the novel’s “central character,” stressing “Ward’s stylistic tendency to include aspects of the natural world normally excluded from the literary picture” (8). ²⁰ Attention to the violence and danger of maternity recurs throughout the novel. Birth and death are intimately connected, not only in the scene of China giving birth and the recollections of Esch’s mother’s death, but also in the narrative of Esch’s grandmother Mother Lizbeth, who delivered eight babies, of which only one (Esch’s mother) survived. The risks of childbirth are a reminder of the scandal of Black maternal mortality in the US: “[a]ccording to the CDC, black mothers in the U.S. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers, one of the widest of all racial disparities in women’s health” (Martin and Montagne), further evidence of the disposability of Black (female) lives within a colonial system that fails to provide life-saving care to bodies deemed “not-quite-human” (Weheliye, Habeas Viscus 3), “maimable” (Puar), and disposable.

146        Dredged for its valuable organic resources, the Pit is now strewn with the detritus of generations. A space that once held nourishing matter—soil for growing animal feed—is now a muddy waterhole and a dump (15). Esch attentively describes the range of “detritus in [the] yard: refrigerators rusted so that they look like devilled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines, a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and looks like a handheld cake mixer” (89). In addition, the property includes “the patchy remains of [her maternal grandmother’s] rotting house. . . . The backseats of junk cars, the old RV Daddy bought for cheap from some man at a gas station in Germaine that only ran until he got it into the driveway” (10). Ward depicts a post-extraction world of discards, a space where sustaining relations are strained or severed, but life and care persist as relations shift and reorient according to what remains: stray dogs, junk cars, a muddy swimming hole, a collapsing house. Esch’s ancestors cleared and sacrificed land in order to survive and the resulting Pit is strewn with debris, but Esch doesn’t interpret this dumping as a sign of loss or disrespect. Living in the Pit is living with life, with the matter, living and not, that persists post-extraction, in the wake. The novel describes living and loving—living-loving is a more appropriate formation since the two are enmeshed to the point of co-constitution—as and with discarded matter, producing an episto-ontology of salvage that repudiates extractivist socio-economics. Bodies without economic value adhere to one another, establishing close affinities that queer humanist filial norms. In its reorientation of matter and mattering, the novel bears an affinity with Black Lives Matter activism, which calls out the central scandal of its very existence—the outrageousness of Black ethical significance as a radical proposition—but without recourse to a politics of recognition. It highlights the matter and mattering of Black lives, Black bodies—understood not merely as Black human bodies, but as any and all “black(ened)” matter, human and otherwise, from the Pit’s detritus and dirt to dogs bred for destruction—via caring, careful narrative attention that dwells on (and with) a multitude of posthuman bodies, from “the insects crawling on the ground to the birds swirling in the air” (Brown 8). In other words, Salvage the Bones imagines a reorientation of matter and “mattering” around blackness, including “blackened,” that is, disposable nonhuman and human matter. In Salvage the Bones, matter and mattering, which colonial humanism divide along racial lines, become indistinguishable and inseparable. However, this radical posthuman ethicality cannot, finally, survive the pressures of anti-blackness that force Black subjects to limit and choose affiliations. When Katrina hits the Pit, the family are offered no state protections or support and the disaster strips them

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bare, literally tearing clinging bodies from one another, forcing Esch and her brothers to hierarchize their care, choosing who survives and who is swept away. In the end, Skeetah chooses Esch over his beloved China and is tortured by the sight of the dog carried away by the storm waters.

Pit Love In his essay “Pit Bull Promises,” Harlan Weaver reflects on the racialization, what Jackson might term the “blackening,” of pit bull bodies that goes hand in hand with their perceived danger (345). He investigates how narratives of racialized pit bull love and loathing can invoke queer kinships—“improper affiliations” (356)—that threaten heteronormative (white) human intimacies (344, 356, 358). In Ward’s novel, the homophonic resonance of the two pits— the Batiste family’s residence and Skeetah’s beloved dog—highlights the correspondence between deviant, blackened bodies, both territorial and animal. Though these various “pits” denote and connote depression and negativity, these meanings are overwritten by affirmative associations as “pits” become sites of nourishment, protection, and care. Ward carefully attends to the material contours of the intense connection between Skeetah and China,²¹ depicting a queer, often tactile kinship that defies humanist boundaries and conventions. As China reaches the end of her pregnancy, Skeetah begins sleeping in the shed with her as they both await the birth. Esch watches over the pair, attuned to the needs of the caregiver: “Every night, I waited until he cut the light off, until I knew he was asleep, and I walked out of the back door to the shed, stood where I am standing now, to check on him. Every time, I found him asleep, his chest to her back. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh” (2–3). The image of Esch attending to Skeetah attending to China attending to her unborn pups evokes Kittay’s vision of “doulia,” which she defines as a “nested set of reciprocal relations and obligations” produced by “connection-based equality” (Love’s Labours 68): bodies caring for bodies caring for bodies caring for bodies, and so on. The intimacy between Skeetah and China is frequently communicated via images of bodily contact—touching, stroking, licking—and figurations of ²¹ Much has been written about the interspecies intimacy between Skeetah and China (see, for example, Bare, Brown, Bennett, Lloyd), which Bennett describes as “the sort of antinormative, distinctly wild kinship relations that have emerged in the wake of the loss of the potential for a nuclear family, the alternative possibilities that have opened up given the absence of the mother who preceded China” (emphasis in original 152).

148        shared embodiment like Esch’s simile that naturalize their material, affective connection. Like the “fingernail curled around the flesh,” Skeetah and China’s interdependence is not chosen, but rather emerges out of their relational materiality, as though their very morphology is interdependent: they are different parts of same body. However, even as antiblackness has produced the conditions for such queer kinships, so too does it interrupt and inhibit them. De-networked bodies are no longer secured and supported by complex material and affective meshes, but connected to the world via limited, strained bonds. As a result, care is scarce, exhausting, and precarious. Skeetah and China’s relationship emerges from their isolation to produce a curious kinship founded upon the Pit’s residual and recalcitrant care; both boy and dog are isolated and at risk, struggling to survive in worlds that interpret them as dangerous and seek their elimination.²² Their shared experience of negation produces a doubly “deviant” intimacy: it is an intimacy between deviant bodies, and an intimacy that is itself deviant in its defiance of species boundaries. Skeetah pays attention to China “like a man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his” (3), and later the two behave like the “proud parents” of China’s puppies (17). Throughout the novel, Esch compares their relationship to that of lovers (98), parents (17), fathers and daughters (98). She expresses skepticism toward their relationship yet covets their tactile tenderness. The intimacy she experiences with Manny, the teenage father of her unborn child, is far from tender, its hostile dimensions echoing the tense mating of China and Rico (the sire of China’s pups). After bearing Rico’s puppies, China fights Rico (at Skeetah’s urging) and though she sustains significant injuries, she is victorious, ripping out Rico’s neck in the fight’s bloody finale. The novel creates an implied parallel between China and Esch, who are both impregnated against their will; though both dog and girl ostensibly consent to sex, both experience the coupling as subordination, as material bonding devoid of care. Within the world Ward depicts, heterosexual sex is disconnected from care and entails gendered domination, putting feminized creatures in a bind since sexual pleasure can only come at the cost of their agency and authority. Curious and queer affiliations, on the other hand, offer the possibility of sustaining, affirming care. Ward depicts Skeetah and China’s connection as nourishing, ²² Harlan Weaver discusses the parallels between Black male bodies and pit bulls, drawing on actor Michael B. Jordan’s claim that “Black males . . . are America’s pit bull. We’re labelled vicious, inhumane, and left to die in the street,” to demonstrate “the many ways that debates about pit bulls touch on, join, and participate in perceptions of race and practices of racialization” (345). Organic or inorganic, human or animal, living or inert, the Pit’s matter is disposable.

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protective and enabling, a bond that manifests Skeetah’s assertion that “between man and dog is a relationship . . . Equal” (29). Equally negated, equally disposable, equally isolated and vulnerable, they cleave to one another, experiencing a nourishing care rarely afforded black(ened) bodies. However “equal,” their relationship nonetheless takes place in a colonial humanist world structured by patterns of exclusion and exploitation that imprint on every relation. As much as the novel imagines the Pit as a place of reclamation, salvage, and posthuman care, its inhabitants are heavily encumbered, tasked with surviving in a violent capitalist economy built on exploitation and scarcity. The novel’s opening scene (of China birthing) is itself a depiction of extractivism: China is made to reproduce because her puppies promise to fetch a good price. As much as Skeetah regards the relation between man and dog as one of equals, the pair exists in a culture and economy that molds that relation into one of owner and object. Skeetah’s posthuman care includes transactional elements that reflect colonial extractivism and at the same time subvert its exploitative structure via devotion to, and entanglement in, trans-species affiliation. His care refuses to maintain a clear boundary between humanist citizens suitable for affective entanglement and disposable, commodified nonhuman bodies. Nonetheless, Skeetah cannot shrug off the economic burdens that come with survival and so he both conforms and rebels, perceiving China as both a valuable commodity—a reproductive resource to be “mined”—and cherished curious kin. Unable to opt out of the socio-economic system that produces his impoverishment, Skeetah refuses the either/or fallacy of disposable versus valuable matter, engaging in a posthuman care alert and responsive to discarded bodies. Care in the wake is disaster care; it is care practiced amidst constant threat and debilitation, care practiced in the knowledge of one’s precarity, disposability, “maimability” (Puar), bareness, negation, non-status. Violence, endemic to the disaster of the wake, is inevitably part of the care that emerges in this volatile, hostile space of colonial extractivism. Creatures unattuned to this volatility become its victims. The dogfight is the epitome of the entwining of violence and care within the wake. Entering the cluster of dogs and humans surrounding the fighting ring is entering a space of aggressive posthuman intimacy, an intimacy that eliminates anything and anyone who infringes on the primary man/dog relation. The queer kinship between the men and their dogs relies on their alienation from more complex relational ecologies: canine and human alike are isolated individuals, nourished and strengthened via intense dyadic bonding. For these fighting dogs, all canid networks have been eliminated, replaced by transspecies dependence and affiliation. The

150        intensity of Skeetah and China’s affiliation outpaces all their competitors and Esch’s description of the pair entering the fray stresses this distinctive bond: “China is white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way that Skeetah does” (162). The intensity and exclusion of their devotion is the key to their violent domination: “no dogs sniff China. No dogs lope over to her and playfully snap, mouth her face or shoulder. She and Skeet stand apart” (163). Within the social economy of the dogfight, success is synonymous with the violent elimination of other dogs. The dogfight is an event premised on disposability: attendance signals participants’ willingness to sacrifice their nonhuman brethren. For the men and dogs in attendance, their bodies are the only resources available to them. And so, like any other resource, they are extracted for profit. The dogfight produces a perverse economy in which the one who profits from a body’s commodified disposability and traffics in its harm and destruction is also that body’s closest kin. It is queer kinship molded according to the vicious logic of extractivism in which sustaining, protective, devotional care becomes valuable for its ability to annihilate. Even though China is still recovering from birthing puppies and an accidental medication overdose, Skeetah chooses to fight her against Kilo, the father of her puppies. While others, including Skeetah’s brother Randall, insist that China’s strength is sure to be compromised by her maternity, Skeetah argues the opposite is true: “How you going to fight her. . . . She’s a mother!” Randall “scream-whispers,” but Skeetah is undeterred: “We all fight, said Skeetah. Everybody. Now leave me the fuck alone so I can talk to my dog” (emphasis in original 169). Earlier in the novel, Skeetah’s friend Manny draws similar conclusions from China’s maternity, arguing that fighting and motherhood are incompatible: “Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don’t think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female” (96). But Skeetah disagrees, responding, “You serious? That’s when they come into they strength. They got something to protect. . . . That’s power” (96). Skeetah associates maternity with ferocity,²³ a perspective that proves prescient when, at the climax of the dogfight, China tears out Kilo’s ²³ Throughout the novel, maternity and reproduction appear as both diminishing (even devastating) and regenerating, as the source of new power (power gained via the sacrifice of autonomy). Joshua Bennett regards this duality as integral to the novel’s progressive potential, arguing that “Ward demands that the reader relinquish the impulse to flatten motherhood into solely a space of nurturing or care and embrace a much more troubled, and troubling, view, one that fully engages with the violence of the natural world, as well as the gratuitous, ostensibly unnatural violence imposed by the regulatory forces of a white-supremacist social order” (16).

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throat. As Skeetah argues, “To give life . . . is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love” (96). Skeetah regards love as a rare, but voracious material affiliation, an embodied commitment that trumps, even eliminates all others. He draws connections between nurturing care and deadly strength, imagining China’s ability to wound, even kill, as directly proportionate, in the inverse, to her devotional love for him. Both Randall and Manny assume care saps one’s strength, supposing power is quantifiable and finite, reading affects and energies according to a capitalist model of scarcity in which resources are profitably exhausted. However, Skeetah’s intimacy with China hints at an alternative vision in which affects intensify, thrive, and multiply in response to engagement. Care is an affective relation, a distribution and re-distribution of energies in which routes continually emerge, develop, devolve. In contradiction to the supply and demand model of non-renewable resources that has shaped their lives in the Pit, Skeetah (and Esch) imagine and enact a world of relational emergence. Their relational being has been dislocated and disrupted by the denuding forces of antiblackness and capitalist extraction that have resulted in an excavated home, a dead mother, a debilitated father, a strained community. In response, Skeetah develops a fervent posthuman bond that replaces and eventually eclipses his ruptured human care networks, producing a radiant devotion that is conscripted into violent profit extraction when China’s devotion to Skeetah is mobilized for profitable domination in the dogfight arena.²⁴ Skeetah and China’s posthuman affiliation is a vision of affective emergence and relational ontology contorted by the demands of extractivist capitalism, which negates the agency of black(ened) bodies in its treatment of the inhuman and nonhuman as fungible, but ultimately disposable matter. Their devotional care for one another both refuses and admits this disposability. Cherishing one another is a refusal of their own disposability, but this devoted kinship is premised on the violent elimination of other bodies. This is the ²⁴ The novel includes alternative models of human-dog relations. Skeetah’s friend Marquise also brings his dog to the fight. However, Lala is a beloved pet, not a trained fighter, and she seeks out canid companionship, naïvely entering the fighting space in search of play. When she canters toward one of the fighting dogs and is attacked, Marquise is outraged and heartbroken: “Lala limps to him, yelping. He kneels over her and she melts into him, true to her butter color” (164). Together they reassure and comfort one another: Marquise “put his hand over her lips, slob runs through . . . she sits with her back to his legs, facing the woods, and bows her head” (165). Eventually she sits with her bottom in Marquise’s little brother’s lap, her head on Junior’s thigh, licking his leg (165). Like Marquise, Lala has rings in her ears and sleeps in his bed (161). Lala and Marquise’s queer kinship is rare in the world Esch describes, based as it is on care and affection without recourse to financial profitability. This refusal to mold their bond according to colonial extractivist logic, their commitment to unprofitable, non-violent, comforting intimacy leaves them vulnerable to humans and dogs partnered in pursuit of lucrative domination.

152        effect of their (enforced) participation in capitalist profit structures: other bodies must be eliminated to enable their own survival. Though no relations are immune from colonial capitalist extractivism and enforced disposability, the novel offers a sense of affirmative alternatives, however tenuous and fleeting, imagining how curious kin can cultivate agency and care in spite of the powerful forces that devastate blacken(ed) bodies.

Aftermaths, Afterlives After China’s bloody victory, Esch and Skeetah return to the Pit to prepare in earnest for the hurricane that has been gaining force as it approaches the coast. They glean and scavenge, using the remains scattered across the Pit to fortify their home. Skeetah remains preoccupied with China’s welfare, preparing gear and food to ensure her survival and comfort during the storm (198). Meanwhile, Esch forages for eggs laid among the detritus, discovering them “in the elbows of the dump truck’s engine, between the bottom of an old stinking refrigerator and the earth, wedged into the coils of a mattress chewed bare by animals” (199). The Pit calls out warnings as the storm arrives: “the clinking of metal against metal outside, some broken machine tilting like a sinking headstone against another” (216). The only official communication about the storm comes in the form of an automated phone call alerting the Batistes of a mandatory evacuation order. Esch notes that the voice on the phone, which offers no protection or assistance, only disembodied threats, “sounds like a computer, like he has an iron throat” (217). The message is both a command and a denial of responsibility: “if you choose to stay in your home and have not evacuated by this time, we are not responsible. You have been warned” (217). Throughout the novel, the state has remained distant, visible only in the effects of its neglect, in the dilapidated infrastructure in Bois Sauvage, the health care that fails to save Esch’s mother, the absent services that leave the Batistes scavenging for survival. This rare moment of state intrusion is telling in its style and content: the offloading of responsibility for vulnerable lives onto a computer-generated message of warning crystallizes the state’s contribution to, even endorsement of, Black precarity. The message alerts its listener to the possibility and implied permissibility of their future fatality. The Pit provides more useful guidance and support in the form of salvaged debris to cover the windows, foraged eggs for sustenance, and an announcement of the storm’s arrival via clanging debris.

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The family’s affinity with the Pit is vividly conveyed in the climactic arrival of Hurricane Katrina. When their house floods the family scrambles onto the roof, using the branches of a nearby tree as a bridge to a dilapidated, but taller house on the property where they wait out the storm in the attic: “We huddled together . . . and tried to rub heat from each other, but couldn’t. We were a pile of wet, cold branches, human debris in the middle of all of the rest of it” (237). The junk and waste moldering across the property proves their salvation; without their grandparents’ abandoned two-story house, the Batistes would have been swept away by the storm. As much as Esch’s description of the family as “human debris” is an exposure and indictment of human disposability, it is also an indictment of the human exceptionalism that values matter according to its utility (for humans). In other words, Ward’s critique of the disposability of Black human debris is also a re-valuation of matter, one that redistributes significance in ways incongruous to capitalist logic. The novel’s conclusion intensifies this embrace of detritus as meaningful, going so far as to question the very notions of waste and disposability. The Pit hosts the novel’s central tensions between manufactured scarcity and abundance, between enforced isolation and connection. Life in the Pit involves a jostling, a struggle for survival that often inhibits care and drives relations toward domination. Love in the Pit is often hardscrabble and desperate since diffuse webs of interdependence have been dissolved via extraction, leaving its residents to develop sustaining relations with the denuded matter that remains. Ward provides readers with a narrative of posthuman care that emerges from, between and within the vestiges of racialized anthropocentrism and colonial extractivism. Esch, Skeetah, and China are enmeshed in the Pit’s salvaged webs of refuse care—webs made of and for “refuse” in both its noun and verb form: both material waste and active refusal. Care of and between “waste” is a refusal of capitalist episto-ontological modes that read bodies, human and otherwise, as fungible matter. Denied the privilege of discarding and disavowing waste, Esch’s family lives in and with and as waste, grappling with the tensions produced by their conflicting affective responses to life in the Pit, at once proud of their survival and traumatized by their disposability. The novel’s posthuman bodies, all of whom have been treated as disposable by the socio-political and economic systems that surround them, nonetheless survive via curious kinships. As much as the Pit is depicted as a place of waste, it is at the same time a thriving ecosystem of networked relations, discarded matter figured as vital bodies.

154        Hurricane Katrina wreaks havoc on these networks, but this havoc is merely an extension of the ongoing rupture of living in the wake. Esch describes Katrina as: the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. (255)

Katrina is the violently destabilizing force that smashes relational networks, resulting in a new kind of entanglement, a perverse, often gruesome collision of matter. Ward’s novel concerns characters committed to care in the chaos and wreckage of the wake, the Pit, humans and animals surviving in the perpetual disaster of negation. Katrina is an amplification of this ongoing disaster that makes the violence of the extractive state even more visible. After Katrina has passed, Esch travels into the nearby town of St. Catherine to view the wreckage and finds it much worse than she expected. After detailing the immensity of the destruction, she homes in on small remains scattered at her feet, hoping to discover a “treasure that I can take back for Skeet, something that will help me tell him the story of what we found, but there is nothing here but broken bottles, smashed signs, splintered wood, so much garbage” (254). Eventually Esch settles on broken bits of colored glass and a pink brick stone, which she slips in her pocket: “I will tell him this. This was a liquor bottle, I will say. And this, this was a window. This, a building” (254). Esch’s salvage is a continuation of her commitment to caring for remains, human and otherwise, connecting bits of discard with a larger, vibrant ecology of relational being while at the same time bearing witness to the destruction and violence that has rendered them detritus. This is not to suggest that Ward offers salvage as a heroic solution to the ongoing extractive depletion of Black life. Instead, caring for the more-than-human wreckage of colonial extraction is a resolutely melancholic act that both perceives the ongoing violence that produced it and affirms sustaining affinities amongst that which remains. In short, Esch’s salvaging is an assertion of survival and presence amidst ongoing disaster and negation. In the novel’s concluding paragraphs, Esch imagines a future determined by posthuman, even posthumous survival in the wake. The final pages describe Esch’s (re)discovery of the care networks that continue to shape and

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sustain her. Family friends provide her with food and the opportunity to bathe after the storm—“It was heaven” (256)—before she sets out to locate Skeetah, whom she discovers camped out at the Batiste property, waiting for China to return. She brings her brother food and asks him to come to Big Henry’s house, but he is adamant that China is “somewhere out there, and she’s coming back” (257), and he will wait for her return sitting “on an overturned bucket in the circle of mud and dirt that he has made” (256). Despite the storm’s violence and the unlikelihood of China’s survival, he insists that her return is imminent: “Ain’t no if,” he tells his friend Big Henry (267) and Esch watches as: Skeetah rubs his head from the neck to the crown like his skin is a T-shirt he could pull off and over his skull. Like he could pull who he is off and become something else. Like he could shed his human shape, in the dark, be hatched a great gleaming pit, black to China’s white, and run off into what is left of the woods, follow the line of the creek, and find China sniffing at the bottom of the bole of an oak tree filled with quivering squirrels, or sniffing at the earth, at the rabbits between the waters. (257–258)

As her description of her brother shifts from observation to speculation, Esch’s language becomes affirmative, even celebratory, figuring her brother’s rebirth as a “great gleaming pit,” the resonance of “pit” moving in multiple directions to gesture simultaneously to the dog breed, the family hollow, and the fantastic posthuman ecology that binds them. This mode of conjecture continues and intensifies as the novel concludes with a series of paragraphs outlining Esch’s utopic speculations of posthuman intimacies and becomings. I quote these paragraphs at length to demonstrate their moving account of joyous reunion, defiant survival, and posthuman solidarity: We will sit with him here, in the strange, insect-silent dark. We will sit until we are sleepy, and then we will remain until our legs hurt, until Junior falls asleep in Randall’s arms, his weak neck lolling off Randall’s elbow. Randall will watch Junior and Big Henry will watch me and I will watch Skeetah, and Skeetah will watch none of us. He will watch the dark, the ruined houses, the muddy appliances, the tops of the trees that surround us whose leaves are dying from lack of roots. He will feed the fire so it will blaze bright as a lighthouse. He will listen for the beat of her tail, the padding of her feet in mud. He will look for the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the

156        color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving. China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit, and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great silence. She will know that I am a mother. (258)

Esch constructs a fantasy of posthumous posthumanity, a template for a future built on possibility and presence, rather than impossibility and negation. Esch imagines a queer posthuman family in which Black and nonhuman bodies and spaces are (re)generatively (re)entangled, in which bodies and affects converge and (re)constitute one another: China will be “the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood”; their materiality will emerge out of their relation, identifiable via the continuities of their flesh. She will be “dull but alive, alive, alive,” the pounding repetition of the word a celebration and a challenge, an assertion of presence in the face of (near) annihilation. Esch does not imagine a life freed from the limits of the Pit; she does not imagine her family relocated into (white) human spaces and communities that would legitimize her human-ness; instead, she imagines a future in which Black posthuman flourishing could be possible on its own terms. In such a world, China will return and call Esch sister, their shared experience of maternity, in all its violent glory, producing a queer, hallowed kinship. Esch imagines China as an ancient deity, a posthuman entity whose barks of kinship affirm the danger and power of the maternal responsibility Esch now shoulders. The novel’s ending expresses a commitment to curious kin and the relations that create and sustain them, a commitment to flora, fauna, and (more-thanhuman) family. These final paragraphs express posthuman care as a mode of being both inhibited and prohibited by the colonial order that structures Black American life. Though the novel’s concluding fantasy of Black posthuman care might never be fully realized, in imagining posthuman flourishing in the wake the novel invokes a futurism that eschews both naïve hope and jaded pessimism. Imagining impossible possibilities—China’s deified life after life— is to imagine ways of surviving colonial humanism and extractivism, and further, to imagine existence beyond survival. Ward imagines a new kind of posthuman flourishing that not only decenters the human, but explodes it

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altogether, offering a vision of being as queer, posthuman relationality. Before Katrina arrives and the family is preparing the house for the storm, Daddy initially refuses to allow China and her puppies inside the family home, but Skeetah is adamant that they be allowed to shelter with the family, otherwise, he will weather the storm alongside China in the shed. “Everything deserve to live,” he tells his father, “And her and the puppies going to live’” (213). Despite Skeetah’s efforts, the puppies are lost when the family flees the flooded house, and China is swept away by the torrential floodwaters. The painful irony of Skeetah’s assertion shapes the novel’s conclusion: “Everything deserve to live,” he proclaims, but very few manage to survive when all support and care are stripped away. The novel’s final paragraphs imagine a posthuman future in which everything not only deserves to live, but is allowed to live, imagining posthuman forms of life and care that overthrow normative, colonial humanist definitions of value and vitality.

Care beyond the Human In her 2011 New York Times review of Salvage the Bones, Parul Sehgal expresses her admiration for the novel, but questions its style, criticizing Ward’s tendency to “get carried away. She never uses one metaphor when she can use three, and too many sentences grow waterlogged and buckle.” What Sehgal identifies as excessive assists the novel’s interrogation of utility as the primary measure of value and Ward’s refusal to cull her language and figuration function as a stylistic embodiment of the politics of salvage. I read Ward’s bountiful style as an experimentation with the richness of language in both senses of the term: as an intensely sensual mode of expression and an expression of wealth, opulence, and accumulation. In other words, I read Ward’s opulent, “carried away” writing as a stylistic refusal of the racialized capitalist extractivism and scarcity the novel depicts. As much as the novel narrates privation and the consequences of colonial disposability, Ward’s style conveys the pleasures of plenty and multiplicity. Ward affords her narrator a wealth of language, a glut of images and figurations, even as she narrates the denuding of sustaining ecologies. In the context of poverty manufactured by colonial extraction, excessive language is a reclamation of abundance in the face of enforced diminution. Salvage the Bones is a novel preoccupied with bodies as both salvage and salvagers. In its depictions of touch and materiality, racialized and gendered more-than-human embodiments and relations, not to mention extractivism

158        and racialized violence, it assembles key issues explored throughout Curious Kin. Perhaps most importantly, it draws attention to difficult questions regarding the eradication of anthropocentric hierarchies of being. What might be gained (and lost) by moving toward a horizontal ontological plane in which all matter matters, in which hierarchical taxonomies dissolve? If all matter matters, what of the incredible efforts of people of color, disabled people, and others to be recognized as human, ethically significant, equal? To a certain extent, new materialist and vitalist arguments depend on human vibrancy as a taken for granted fact so unanimously agreed upon it requires little comment. But of course human agencies are perpetually denied and negated by white supremacist political frameworks, as the polemical responses to Black Lives Matter make so abundantly clear. Racialized, disabled, queer bodies have been and continue to be placed outside the parameters of “the human,” and are therefore denied the privileges, prerogatives, and care that that category endows. Posthuman efforts to decenter the human can inadvertently smuggle in colonial humanist genealogies by failing to adequately decolonize the human itself and address the fundamental coloniality of being.²⁵ Confronting the significant, ongoing harms of humanist exclusion is a necessary part of destabilizing and displacing its central generic figure. As Wynter proclaims: “the greatest task facing humanity is to dismantle the overrepresentation of Man as a model of what it is to be human” (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” 260). In short, posthumanism and decolonial critique are concomitant projects and the former ignores the latter to its peril. Exposing the neoliberal myth of autonomy that denies the entanglement and vulnerability of human animals in more-than-human worlds without addressing the nuanced, asymmetrical consequences of such myths (not to mention, how these myths are indebted to racist formulations of the human) not only ignores the ongoing inconsistency of the category “human,” but risks repeating its harms.²⁶ Scholars invested in posthumanist critique must do more to incorporate the insights ²⁵ Jackson warns readers about the Eurocentric humanism lurking within supposedly posthuman theoretical perspectives, arguing that: appeals to move “beyond the human” may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race. . . . [F]ar too often, gestures toward the “post” or the “beyond” effectively ignore praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of “the human” or illegible from within the terms of its logic. (“Outer Worlds” 215–216) ²⁶ There is growing attention to this critical oversight. For more on the whiteness of posthumanism, see Ahuja, Glick, Jackson, Weheliye, Wilby. For an account of the compatibility of intersectional feminist theory and posthumanism, see Puar’s “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg.”

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and concerns of Black studies and critical race theory into our analytical framework. This is not to posit a return to identity politics as a means of charting the interactions of discrete, predetermined subjects, but to acknowledge the persistence of a racialized (not to mention gendered, sexualized, ableist) notion of the human within posthuman configurations. In this chapter and the previous one I have analyzed fictions that unsettle biocentric, racialized definitions of the human (and life itself ) in their depictions of posthuman care. These fictions suggest how and why care for, by and between discarded bodies undermines the episto-ontologies that manufacture such disposability in the first place. As my various discussions of robots, feral children, aliens, clones, hybrid creatures, and “black(ened)” bodies have demonstrated, what “counts” as care is largely determined by who “counts” as human. “Real” care is delivered by “real” humans, and vice versa. By extension, deeming bodies deserving of care confirms their ethical significance. The delimiting of concern and care is tied to the delimiting of the human and interrogating, resisting, and disrupting those limits—of care, of the human—is the project of posthuman care. However, as we have seen, evading humanist conventions and taxonomies is a difficult process, so deeply ingrained and naturalized are its central tenets. It is not only the human, but life itself that is overdetermined by humanist assumptions and in the conclusion I consider care beyond the biological, exploring possibilities for posthumous posthuman care.

Conclusion Care beyond Life—Imagining Posthumous Relations

Throughout Curious Kin I have focused on imagined posthuman relations that nonetheless maintain a strong investment in biological vitality and well-being. The preceding chapters are largely concerned with care between more-thanhuman creatures, exploring a range of relational animacies in ways that often overlook virtual, lithic, and other nonliving or non-lively “existents,” Elizabeth Povinelli’s term for “life, thing, organism, and being,” in short for existing matter of any kind (5). I conclude Curious Kin by testing the limits of posthuman care’s conceptual capacity, scrutinizing its implied biocentric parameters and the ethical and political implications of theorizing care beyond life. To what degree does the limitation of posthuman care to life, the biological, or at least the animate, implicitly reproduce Anglo-European liberal ontologies? While previous chapters have explored care relations between human and nonhuman beings (both artificial and biological), the assumed primacy of animacy and agency has been only intermittently addressed. In this concluding chapter, I consider nonhuman, nonliving, inanimate care in light of Indigenous knowledges and critical life scholarship that contest the AngloEuropean scientific and philosophical contours of life and being, exposing “Western ontologies [as] covert biontologies” (Povinelli 5). These alternative perspectives on existents inform a posthumous¹ model of posthuman care inhibited by neither the conventions of normative filial affiliations nor biocentric limitations to ethical consideration. Just as the “post” in “posthuman” is not only a temporal designation indicating lateness,² I am using “posthumous” ¹ While Povinelli uses the term “geontology” to emphasize both “the biontological enclosure of existence (to characterize all existents as endowed with the qualities associated with life)” and “the difficulty of finding a critical language to account for the moment in which a form of power long selfevident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism is becoming visible globally” (5), I use posthumous to encompass embodied and virtual forms of being or “existents,” lively, inert, simulated. ² As discussed in the Introduction, Cary Wolfe argues, “posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (xv). Similarly, Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingstone proclaim that “the ‘post’ of ‘posthuman’ Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Amelia DeFalco, Oxford University Press. © Amelia DeFalco 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886125.003.0006

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here not only to denote existents after life, but to suggest ways of thinking about being beyond life, modes of existence unbeholden to Western biontologies. As discussed in the preceding chapters, though their objectives and methodologies may differ, critical posthumanist philosophies generally concur in affirming the human animal as one animal among many and interpret the human as a complex biopolitical, technocultural assemblage inextricably embedded in dense networks of intersecting structures and systems. However, while “the human” as a conceptual and material entity has been productively investigated and disrupted in posthumanist theory (see, for example, Braidotti; Jackson; Wynter; Weheliye; Wolfe), “life” has been less consistently interrogated as a similarly unstable marker of ethical and political significance. Despite the fact that the signifiers “life” and “living” have complicated, even contradictory meanings, they are often treated as self-evident, as ethically meaningful descriptors. Indeed, critical estimations of biotechnology and biocapitalism often hinge on the risks of treating biological matter as technology (and vice versa).³ The assumed intrinsic value of life remains undisturbed in such analyses. For many reasons, only some of them obvious, this is an intuitive evaluation. Povinelli interprets this intuitive preference for life over nonlife as part of the “carbon imaginary,” which, she argues, “lodges the superiority of Life into Being” (Povinelli 16–17). The biocentric dimensions of Western ontology effectively diminish the status (ethical, legal, ontological) of the nonliving and inert. This diminishment occurs despite the fact that “life” remains a fuzzy concept that evades definitive boundaries: as philosopher of science Carole Cleland and astrobiologist Christopher Chyba explain, “there remains no broadly accepted definition of ‘life’” (388).⁴ Nonetheless, “life” remains a powerful ethical designation: in Anglo-European contexts the preservation interests us not really insofar as it posits some subsequent developmental state, but as it collapses into sub-, inter-, infra-, trans-, pre-, anti-” (viii). My use of “posthumous” similarly signals transience and transition. ³ I have undertaken such analysis myself (DeFalco, “MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things”). This is not to say that there is no harm implicit in biotechnological frameworks or that interrogating slippages between living and nonliving is not worthwhile, but that critiques that take for granted the ethical primacy of life might do well to reflect on the meaning(s) of their privileged central term. ⁴ In the time of Covid-inspired discussions about whether or not a virus is legitimately alive, the indistinction of “life” as both a biological designation and a colloquial descriptor is especially apparent (for more on the debate over the living status of viruses see Carol Cleland’s The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life). Many definitions of life, such as biochemist Bruce Weber’s claim that “[l]iving entities can be viewed as bounded, informed autocatalytic cycles feeding off matter/energy gradients, exhibiting agency, capable of growth, reproduction, and evolution” (221), can also potentially accommodate artificial life.

162        of life carries ethical urgency absent from the preservation of nonliving existents. Since only something alive can be killed, the destruction of nonliving matter carries fewer sanctions than the destruction of life, just as the destruction of nonhuman life carries far fewer sanctions than the destruction of human life. Put bluntly, anthropocentric hierarchies place the human at the apex, nonliving existents at the nadir, and leaves nonhuman life jostling for recognition in the space between. Jami Weinstein warns posthumanist scholars to be alert to these entrenched categorical pathways, what she terms, “the remnants of humanism buried in the concept life itself” (emphasis in original 237). The concept of posthumous life can help us think beyond the biontological: “Whereas the posthuman is imbricated only in the event of the ‘death of Man’ (or human) and remains a human question, the concept of posthumous goes a level deeper by indicating that the remnants of humanism present in our conventional notions of life, too, must be transcended—signaling the ‘death of life’ and the problem of the posthumous” (Colebrook and Weinstein 6). What Colebrook and Weinstein neglect to mention is that this “deeper” form of posthumanism in many ways echoes longstanding Indigenous approaches to being and relating which are untroubled by the narrow definitions of life inherited from Anglo-European biontologies.⁵ In what follows, I consider depictions of nonliving existents, diffuse animacy, spirit, and ethical significance that underscore a world made up not of things, but of relations (Carriou 338). I engage with the concept of posthumous care—care beyond “life” (narrowly conceived)—via Indigenous cosmologies and Ojibwe-American author Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Stone” (published in the September 9, 2019, issue of The New Yorker), which depicts a sustaining human-mineral relation. A plethora of Indigenous communities with distinct histories, cultures, languages, and governments exist in what is now known as Canada and the United States: in the US alone, there are more than 700 nationally recognized and unrecognized Indigenous nations (Harris and Wasilewski 490). Across these diverse nations, La Donna Harris (founder of Americans for Indian Opportunity [AIO]) and Jacqueline Wasilewski have ⁵ Indigenous cosmologies and the prospect of nonliving being that TallBear and other Indigenous scholars describe are frequently invoked by scholars of “the new animism,” which treats “the idea of relationality” as the “key to understanding non-naturalistic worldviews . . . [and] defines human persons primarily through their relations with other entities rather than through their individual, cognitive or emotional identity” (Laack 122). My thanks to Liam Wilby for alerting me to this area of scholarship. As Wilby explains, “[t]he description of animism as the spiritual animation of dead matter in Western studies of animist cultures fails to acknowledge the animist contention of the aliveness and personhood of all objects and entities. Spirits do not animate dead matter, rather, all matter and spirits are understood as ontologically equivalent persons” (Wilby 32). For more on the new animism, see Garuba; Laack; Viveiros de Castro; Wilby.

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identified a series of “common core cultural values shared by most Indigenous peoples” (491), what they term “the Four R’s: Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity and Redistribution” (492). Across these common core cultural values obligation is primary, an obligation based on: the profound sense that we human beings are related, not only to each other, but to all things, animals, plants, rocks—in fact, to the very stuff the stars are made of. This relationship is a kinship relationship. Everyone/everything is related to us as if they were our blood relatives. We, thus, live in a family that includes all creation, and everyone/everything in this extended family is valued and has a contribution to make. . . . Our relatives include everything in our ecological niche, animals and plants, as well as humans, even the stones, since everything that exists is alive. (emphasis added 492–493)

Harris and Wasilewski highlight a dispersed, diffuse vision of vitality and ethical significance that contributes to “an ethos of care, not coercion” (493), offering a vision of more-than-human being that is rarely acknowledged in posthumanist philosophy exploring decentered humans, relational ontologies, and nonliving vitalism. Indigenous cosmologies model an expansive, entangled vision of being and care, a relational ontology that has been in practice for millennia and stands in direct opposition to Western biontologies. Western (posthumanist) philosophy is just starting to catch up.

Mineral Love Louise Erdrich has been publishing fiction and poetry related to Indigenous experience in the United States since the early 1980s. In addition to publishing over a dozen novels, she frequently contributes non-fiction and short stories to The New Yorker, including “The Stone” from 2019. The story concerns a girl who discovers a stone near the shore of Lake Superior, a stone that gradually becomes a determining force in the narrative unspooling of her life. Or, more precisely, the stone discovers the girl and initiates a relation: “She sat down beside a birch clump, and after a few moments her neck prickled. She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her. Looking around, she saw the stone.”⁶ The unnamed protagonist finds the stone “oddly attractive,” running ⁶ All citations from Erdrich’s story are taken from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/ 09/the-stone.

164        her hand over its smooth surface before taking it back to the cottage where her family is staying. Erdrich’s language evokes both the stone’s unexpected loveliness and its curiously enticing power of attraction: it draws the girl to it and remains bound to her throughout her life. As the story progresses, the stone becomes an ambivalent companion for the protagonist, their mutual support and protection of one another producing an impenetrable dyad that eventually eliminates all human contenders for the protagonist’s affections. From their first encounter, the stone provides the protagonist with solace and comfort: she puts it in a drawer and is “happy just knowing that it [is] there”; it offers her “peace and relief ” in times of stress. As the story continues, the stone becomes the protagonist’s primary source of comfort, providing consolation and security, a sense of well-being; in short, it provides care. The relationship between the two bodies is primarily tactile, occasionally even erotic: whenever something happened to upset her, the girl would go to the stone. She would sit on the bed with the stone in her lap, stroking it, until her agitation subsided. As she got older, in the most difficult of times, to calm herself, she would take the stone into the bathroom with her and set it on the edge of the tub while she soaked. One night, as she lay in the hot water, she became acutely aware of the stone. The smooth, empty scoops in its face seemed profoundly interested in her. A gentle, thrilling ripple spread through her body. After a while, she took the stone into the water with her and held it on her chest, then slid it down her body until it rested, heavily, between her legs. There was the weight and the pressure of the stone and the heat of the water. She put her hand on the stone and pushed against it. Then she put the stone back on the edge of the tub and closed her eyes.

The posthuman intimacy between the protagonist and the stone continues throughout her young adulthood as she attends college, where she excels at musical performance. She becomes a pianist, the stone always at her side, until one day the two “quarrel” and the woman smashes the stone against the bathroom tiles, breaking it in two, “destroying its strange symmetry. The spell was broken. It was like falling out of love.” The end of the protagonist’s posthuman relationship makes room for a human love affair: she “[leaves] her stone behind” and gets married. Her career as a pianist flourishes and she tours Europe. But the stone is not done with her and as she shifts her attention to human relations, the story’s narrator veers away from its human focus to narrate the story of its basalt character. Erdrich communicates the stone’s inhuman biography as best she can, attempting to convey the depth of mineral

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time, the static liveliness of stone life with human language that can only approximate the experience of an inhuman existent.⁷ The words “life” and “alive” fail to encapsulate the inhuman dimensions of the stone’s being; as the story’s narrator explains, “A stone is, in its own way, a living thing, not a biological being but one with a history far beyond our capacity to understand or even imagine.” The narrator goes on to describe the stone’s composition and formation but admits these details “sa[y] nothing” of its being and experience. The stone’s ontology, its unique and ineffable mode of being, remains profoundly remote to the reader, no matter what (inevitably anthropocentric) details the narrator can muster. This nonbiological life so alien to human comprehension nonetheless exudes a relational force, an agency, an “ineffable gravity” (Erdrich) that compels the protagonist to respond, to come closer, to reach out and make contact. Not for long does the stone remain abandoned in the protagonist’s drawer amidst other discarded objects—“old belts, unmatched socks, pilled sweaters, and stretched-out bras.” As the stone pulls the woman closer, her husband registers her withdrawal and after years of growing estrangement, he leaves the marriage. In his absence the woman revives her affection for the stone, repairs its injury with glue, and once again experiences the comfort and well-being she had enjoyed as a child in close contact with the stone. With the stone at her side, she lives a “comforting life,” eating nourishing meals and reading books in the glow of “golden light” (Erdrich). Just as the stone consoles her, so too does she care for it, oiling it when it looks dry and carrying it to the window “when [it] looked bored” (Erdrich). Eventually she dies as she has lived, with the stone by her side: As the blood seeped into her brain, she dreamed that she had entered a new episode of time, in which she and the stone would become the same through the endless repetition and decay of all things in the universe. Molecules that had existed in her body would be joined with the stone’s molecules, over and over in age after age. Flesh would become stone and stone become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird.

⁷ Erdrich’s story echoes medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s scholarly efforts to imagine “a kind of life” stone might possess, a “life” unhampered by “the impoverished criteria we have decided that any creature must demonstrate in order to possess a licit life” (34). Though working from a different epistemological tradition, Cohen proposes a similarly vital role for stone existents, arguing that “stone invites us to a more capacious way of inhabiting our world, one in which the question of possessing a familiar worldedness fades beside the realization of the capaciousness and vibrancy of that simple and profoundly inhuman word, alive” (34). Erdrich’s story and the Indigenous cosmologies it evokes offer an alternative vision of life and liveliness, one able to accommodate mineral being.

166        The story ends with this image of ecological deep time and consoling material convergence. The protagonist’s final vision is not metaphorical, but a literal projection of future entanglement that promises to perpetuate the posthuman connection that has sustained her throughout her human life. Erdrich’s vision of posthumous posthuman entanglement intimates at the possibility of life and care beyond biocentric life. The story encourages readers to reflect on what qualifies as life, offering a narrative of post-anthropocentric, posthumous existence that challenges Western biontologies. Erdrich’s story returns me to Curious Kin’s opening discussion of human/ nonliving relations in Klara and the Sun and Lewis et al.’s contention that Indigenous cosmologies are uniquely positioned to accommodate such relations. In interview with The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Erdrich highlights the role Ojibwe cosmology plays in the story’s exploration of more-than-human kinship and nonbiological life, explaining, “[i]n the Ojibwe language, nouns are animate or inanimate; the word for stone, asin, is animate. One might think that stones have no actual power—after all, we throw them, build with them, pile them, crush them, slice them. But who is to say that the stones aren’t using us to assert themselves? To transform themselves?” (Treisman). Both the story and Erdrich’s remarks recall Leroy Little Bear’s radio dial analogy quoted in the Introduction: “the human brain is a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations [ . . . ] the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.” Perhaps more than any of the texts analyzed in Curious Kin, Erdrich’s story nudges the dial toward more-than-human stations, initiating awareness, if not necessarily comprehension of posthumous posthuman vitality and care. Erdrich’s story is not about anthropomorphic projection or metaphorical nonhumans. In conveying a sense of the stone’s agency and being the story gestures toward nonhuman modes of existence without claiming comprehension or accuracy. The story, like its protagonist, registers nonhuman frequencies but does not mythologize or figurate them. It expresses affective and material posthuman affinities as experiential realities. Too frequently, argues Vanessa Watts, Indigenous cosmologies become “examples of a symbolic interconnectedness— an abstraction of a moral code” for non-Indigenous scholars (25). Watts insists that this translation overlooks the literalness of interconnection in Indigenous cosmologies, such as Anishinaabe⁸ and Haudenosaunee, which insist on the

⁸ Anishinaabe refers to a collection of First Nations inhabiting what is now Canada and the United States, which includes the Ojibwe nation. As a result, writing about Erdrich refers to her as both Anishinaabe and Ojibwe. Following her lead, I’ve used the latter when referencing her tribal affiliation.

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“truth” that “we (humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an extension of soil” (27). As Watts explains, within many Indigenous cosmologies: all elements of nature possess agency, and this agency is not limited to innate action or causal relationships. Thus, habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement. Non-human beings are active members of society. Not only are they active, they also directly influence how humans organize themselves into that society. (23)

Watts’s comments emphasize the Eurocentrism of the “we” so frequently mobilized by ethics of care and posthumanist scholars alike. Hayles’s claim that “we have always been posthuman,” queried in the Introduction, would, one imagines, be a perplexingly tautological statement for Indigenous readers accustomed to cosmologies unburdened by humanism’s anthropocentrism. There is a “silence about location” in universal declarations like Hayles’s; by acknowledging our (frequently white, Anglo-European, colonial) locations the scholarly “we” can begin to address our performance of “Eurocentric theory as universal, the only body of knowledge that matters” (Sundberg 36) and attend to those Indigenous and Black predecessors whose philosophies anticipate, and in many ways outpace Anglo-European theories of posthumanism, relationality and care ethics. As discussed in Chapter 4, posthumanist philosophers have paid scant attention to Black and Indigenous antecedents in their elaboration of non-anthropocentric episto-ontologies. Indigenous studies scholars Haritaworn, Sundberg, TallBear, Todd, and Watts have all noted the absence of Indigenous philosophy in posthumanist philosophy, which generally adheres to a Eurocentric philosophical genealogy and ignores philosophical traditions unbeholden to humanist anthropocentricism. Perhaps as a result of this Eurocentric oversight, traces of humanism endure within posthumanist theory, evident in its relative inattention to the formative role of race in the construction of the human (Jackson; Puar; TallBear)⁹ and the persistent mobilization of categorical boundaries, however hazy, that

⁹ For example, Jackson argues: [i]t has largely gone unnoticed by posthumanists that their queries into ontology often find their homologous (even anticipatory) appearance in decolonial philosophies that confront slavery and colonialism’s inextricability from the Enlightenment humanism they are trying to displace. Perhaps this foresight on the part of decolonial theory is rather unsurprising considering that exigencies of race have crucially anticipated and shaped discourses governing the nonhuman (animal, technology, object, and plant). (“Animal” 681)

168        maintain the normative pre-eminence of biocentric life.¹⁰ Scholars of vital materialism and critical life, like Jami Weinstein and Clare Colebrook, as well as Jane Bennett, refuse this naturalization of the supremacy of living matter, proposing alternatives based on theorizations of inhuman agency. However, for many Indigenous scholars the “horizontalizing of the ontological plane” Bennett and others propose (“Systems and Things” 230) is neither new nor radical.¹¹ As TallBear explains, Indigenous cosmologies “avoid the hierarchical nature-culture and animal-human split that has enabled domineering human management, naming, controlling, and ‘saving’ of nature” (“An Indigenous Reflection” 235). Writing of the ontological turn, which, like the posthuman turn, “highlights how organisms’ livelihoods are co-constituted with cultural, political, and economic forces” (234), TallBear points out that the innovation of these methodologies depends on the ignorance or denial of Indigenous cosmologies. As she explains: Indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives. In addition, for many indigenous peoples, their nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical Western frameworks as living. “Objects” and “forces” such as stones, thunder, or stars are known within our ontologies to be sentient and knowing persons. (234)

Posthuman care depends on acknowledging and honoring these overlaps and posthumanism’s indebtedness to decolonial philosophy. ¹⁰ For example, Weinstein and Colebrook argue that the perpetuation of life as a cherished concept within critical posthumanist discourse is a reminder of the persistence of humanism. Weinstein argues that when “the concept life is maintained as an unchallenged premise and a non-negotiable given— above all, life itself is valued and must be preserved and protected” (Weinstein 236), the radical potential of posthumanism is muted, at best. Both Weinstein and Colebrook have argued in favor of posthumous, as opposed to posthuman, theory. As Weinstein explains, “We could say that life as we know it is a habit—one that strictly frames the limits of who gets interpreted as Human, and one that must be nervously reiterated in order to reinforce those limits. As such, it may be more apt to talk in terms of the posthumous than posthuman, inhuman, or nonhuman, thus deframing the manifold investments in life, breaking the habit, and refuting humanism more exhaustively. Posthumous life pushes the envelope by exposing the legacies of humanism still haunting us in the specter of life—even in our posthuman theories and analyses” (237). See also, Colebrook and Weinstein’s Posthumous Life. ¹¹ Posthumanist geographer Juanita Sundberg details Bennett’s disavowed indebtedness to Indigenous cosmologies, which, she argues, Bennett simultaneously invokes and dismisses as “ ‘premodern’ magic” (36). As Sundberg sees it, in order to protect her theorization of inanimate agencies and “the power of things” from the “stain of ‘premodern’ magic,” Bennett invokes what she terms “a rich archive in Euro-American political theory,” thereby “enact[ing] colonial gestures of superiority that cast others outside the sphere of intellect and knowledge production. . . . Ultimately, Bennett’s [writing] is underpinned by and enacts an anxious Eurocentric and humanist framing of the human as modern, rational, autonomous, and nature transcendent; carefully kept outside the category of the human are those classified as superstitious animists” (Sundberg 36–37). However, by opening the doors to “premodern” philosophies and cosmologies the capacities of posthumanist theory increase.

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These longstanding and ongoing episto-ontologies premised on more-thanhuman relationality, more-than-biological life, and ecological entanglement challenge the novelty of posthumanism and “new” materialisms, if not their conceptual validity. Increased awareness of and engagement with these significant philosophical antecedents are key to developing a decolonial posthumanist analysis alert to the risks of reproducing humanist anthropocentrism in its blinkered attention to Anglo-European scholarly genealogies. Curious Kin is not immune to these risks and blind spots. The vision of posthuman care I offer is frequently inspired by canonical AngloEuropean scholarship (Barad; Braidotti; Haraway). At the same time, I have tried to diversify and decolonize my inquiry by invoking and engaging a heterogeneous archive of posthuman care texts, both scholarly and fictional, that interrogate posthumanism and care philosophy’s Eurocentric genealogies. Throughout, I have attempted to engage Indigenous scholar Dwayne Donald’s notion of “ethical relationality,” which demands researchers account for specificity and difference while seeking opportunities for communication. As Donald explains: Ethical relationality is an ecological understanding of human relationality that does not deny difference, but rather seeks to more deeply understand how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other. This form of relationality is ethical because it does not overlook or invisibilize the particular historical, cultural, and social contexts from which a particular person understands and experiences living in the world. It puts these considerations at the forefront of engagements across frontiers of difference. (qtd. in Todd 18)

Sundberg offers a similar ethical methodology in her description of the principle of “walking with” (40–41) as “a form of solidarity built on reciprocity and mutuality, walking and listening, talking and doing. Walking with entails engagement with Indigenous communities and individuals as intellectual and political subjects, colleagues in the practices of producing worlds. How one engages will take a variety of forms and will be different for everyone” (41). Donald and Sundberg’s models of ethical inquiry are important for both the methodology and content of Curious Kin. Just as the texts I analyze depict unconventional experiences of solidarity in their narratives of human/nonhuman reciprocity and mutuality, my interdisciplinary approach is also an attempt to “walk with,” rather than absorb or adopt, a range of non-Anglo-European methodologies and knowledges. My aim has been to

170        highlight the heterogeneity of posthuman possibilities and account for the diverse interrogation and deposition of the human as an exclusionist category of ethical significance occurring across a wide range of media, communities, and discourses. Those of “us” invested in enacting posthuman critique must remain vigilant about identifying our epistemological affinities and blind spots and reversing the silence of location in order to avoid reproducing a colonial posthumanism that retains the biases and exclusions of the very frameworks it seeks to dismantle. As I have reiterated throughout Curious Kin, investigating the boundaries of care, interrogating who and what are deemed more (or less) deserving and capable of care is, inevitably, an inquiry into the parameters and significance of the human. Paying attention to lives and bodies deemed undeserving or incapable of care is an important step toward exposing and resisting the “colonial imposition” of the human (Jackson, “Animal” 681). Concluding with this exploration of posthumous posthuman care highlights the unfinished business of exploring, analyzing and nurturing the multitudes of curious kin that produce and sustain human animal being.

(Open) Endings Posthuman care is not a panacea, and posthuman entanglement is not an unmitigated good. Entanglement is a description of worldly existence, rather than a prescription for ethical relations. It can produce both harms and care, especially in the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human behavior has dramatically transformed (and continues to transform) the matter and operation of the planet’s ecologies. In this time of climate change, when slow, more-than-human violence is picking up pace and the kind of cataclysmic weather represented in Salvage the Bones becomes pervasive rather than extraordinary, the pressure on already marginalized lives increases as climate change disproportionately effects the world’s poorest populations. What matters now is how we, as individuals and as a species, respond to “the wonders and terrors of symbiotic entanglement in the Anthropocene” (Swanson et al. M2). The failure to fully absorb and act on the profound implications of entanglement has made more-than-human worlds at once increasingly at risk and increasingly threatening: seas rise, forests burn, droughts increase (I write this in the midst of a summer drought in England, a largely unprecedented experience for this damp island), violent weather becomes commonplace. From this place of volatility, posthuman (and posthumous) care fiction can

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show more-than-human relations that foster moments and spaces of respite amidst the ruins of a damaged planet. Throughout Curious Kin I have explored posthuman care as it can and might operate in more-than-human worlds. The might of this formulation has been crucial to my method, which looks to fictional speculations that provide the kind of context and specificity crucial for imagining an affirmative, accountable, intersectional ethics and politics of posthuman care. Posthuman care is my chosen shorthand for relational models that account for the intraactive, more-than-human forces that facilitate being, including, but not limited to human, or even living being. Human entanglement, so frequently disavowed, asserts itself in times of pronounced vulnerability, that is, vulnerability accentuated by illness and impairment, not to mention the vulnerabilities created and exploited by biopolitical structures dependent on the right to debilitate racialized and gendered bodies (Puar xviii). In moments or periods of pronounced, often visibilized vulnerability (e.g. infancy, medical crisis, trauma, advanced age) the integrity of care is obvious. But more frequently, the necessity and ubiquity of care is disguised or minimized by the white, ablebodied, gender- and heteronormative privilege that can facilitate what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence”: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Slow violence obscures culpability and exploits vulnerability at a sedate pace, making harms difficult to register. Posthuman care pays attention to quiet, slow, or hidden vulnerabilities. It includes the banal, the everyday, the slow interactions, affects, and labor that support, sustain, and repair more-thanhuman worlds. But much like slow violence, ordinary, everyday, more-than-human care is difficult to recognize or narrate. How does one identify and enact a posthuman ethic of care? What might a society that acknowledges and values embodied vulnerability in more-than-human worlds look like? The literature, film, and television I have analyzed imagine ways of being and relating otherwise in their narrative specificity, their dramatization of situated relations and contextualized more-than-human dynamics, which communicate the problems and possibilities of posthuman care. This is not to say that posthuman care is a futuristic phenomenon; it is always already happening to and with and around us, most often in quiet, mundane ways that neoliberal socio-political structures fail to value (or even recognize). In their depiction of unconventional, large-scale, emphatically posthuman affinities, such as those between humans, robots, aliens, biotechnological creatures, nonhuman animals and stones, the

172        texts I’ve analyzed can become catalysts for the theorization of care in all its posthuman complexity. The texts in Curious Kin depict posthuman ethical engagement in action, troubling humanist hierarchies and exposing the relational ontologies and diverse agencies at work in more-than-human worlds. They offer exciting, conflicting, and often conflicted, scenarios of care that help audiences imagine posthuman forms and modes of relating and being, and, perhaps most importantly, alert us to the consequences of such scenarios. What comes next? As feminist philosophers have long insisted, there can be no one size fits all theory of care ethics. Care is situational, context, and site-specific, its ethicality and success dependent on the particularities of the agents involved. Fictions of posthuman care, Indigenous cosmologies, and posthumanist philosophies demonstrate that agents of care need not be human, animal, or even alive, in a conventional sense. But regardless of the agents involved, care remains demanding and complex, requiring vigilance and reflexivity. Posthuman care is what Puig de la Bellacasa terms “a ‘generic’ doing of ontological significance” (Matters of Care 3), one that is “unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness” (6). Fiction provides the means for theorizing posthuman care as at once a generic and situated being and doing. How does one care in and for more-than-human worlds? The fictions in Curious Kin suggest that imagining posthuman care is concomitant with a critical re-imagining of life, a reimagining that moves beyond anthropocentric humanist definitions to register the relational significance of not only posthuman, but posthumous being. “Curious kin” describes both a mode of relational being and a critical method. The preceding chapters explore and analyze fictions of posthuman care that speculate on the possibilities and risks of unconventional more-thanhuman relations. They are also an attempt to nurture frequently overlooked discursive kinships. Curious Kin makes the case for the generative power of curiosity, offering a spirit of inquiry that brings posthumanism, care philosophy, feminist new materialism, critical race and Indigenous studies, and other scholarly discourses into kinship. By reading fictions and scholarship of posthuman care carefully and critically we can begin to glimpse the possibilities for more-than-human bonds and new discursive relationships, as well as the imaginative and theoretical work that remains to be done.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ”, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Acosta, Alberto 110 activism/activists 18–19, 24, 31–2, 32n.10, 50n.22, 110–12, 117–18, 134n.3, 146–7 Adams, Tim “Artificial Intelligence” 31n.8 affective legitimacy 27–60 affinities 7–8, 17–18, 21–2, 40–3, 49, 52–4, 70–1, 77, 79–80, 84n.16, 88–9, 98n.28, 102n.4, 103–4, 133–4, 141–2, 146–7, 153–4, 166–7, 169–72 afterlives 105–6, 144, 152–7 aftermaths 152–7 Agamben, Giorgio 16–17, 109–10 Homo Sacer 108n.12 Age Watch 34–5 agency/agencies 10–11, 10n.6, 18–19, 24–5, 40–1, 61–2, 76, 96n.25, 97–8, 104–7, 108n.11, 114–15, 120, 122–3, 126–30, 134–5, 139–40, 148–9, 151–2, 157–8, 160–1, 161n.4, 164–8, 172 agential matter 108–9, 111–12, 128–30, 134n.3, 139–42 agents 1–2, 5–6, 12–14, 78–9, 106–7, 121–2, 141–3, 172 Ahmed, Sara 8, 16–17, 62–4, 66, 97–8 Ahuja, Neel 138–9, 158n.26 Alaimo, Stacy 20n.17, 62–4, 102n.4, 108n.14, 111n.17 alien beings 91–2, 95, 100 care 23 creatures 61–2, 87–8 displacement 93–4 encounters 23 entities 5–6 humans 88–9

relations 23 space 82–3 species 87–8 touch 87–97 alienation 65–6, 74, 80, 93–4, 159 aliens 87–8, 87n.19, 95–6, 96f, 98n.28, 137–8, 158–9, 171–2 All Lives Matter 132–3 altruism 92–3 America 27n.1, 136n.7, 148n.22 South America 69–70 see also United States American discourses 132–3 doctors 36–7 initiative 133n.1 life 144–5, 156–7 past 44 politics 51–2 projections 34–5 society 132–3 trash 105–6 Americans for Indian Opportunity 162–3 Americas 110 Amon, Protima 90n.21 Anderson, Ben 16–17 Andersson, Ulrika 16–17 Anglo-European anthropocentric hierarchies 5–6 assumptions 131 biontologies 162–3 conceptions of being 133–4 contexts 162–3 episto-ontologies 25–6, 101–2 ethics 127–8 expectations of care 102–3 genealogies 169

190  Anglo-European (cont.) humanist perspectives 133n.2 humanist societies 111–12 law 108n.12 methodologies 169–70 ontologies 133–4, 160–1 posthumanism 167 privilege 108–9 readers 24–5 scholars/scholarship 127–8, 169 science and philosophy 134, 160–1 animacy 24–5, 104–5, 109–10, 131, 160–3 animality 18–19, 76–80, 84–6, 103, 116–17 animals 2n.1, 5–6, 9, 12–14, 25, 27n.2, 30–1, 33–4, 37–9, 66–71, 84n.16, 86–8, 98n.28, 106–7, 109–10, 112n.19, 113n.21, 116–18, 119n.31, 124, 128n.39, 134nn.3,5, 152, 154, 163, 166, 172, see also dogs, human animals, monkeys/primates, non-human animals. robot dogs, wolves anthropocentric approaches 10, 12–14, 24–5 assumptions 5–8, 22, 111–12 bias 3n.2 conventions of care 22–3 culture 117–18 delimination of care 131 disposability 130–1 distinctions 128–30 egotism 1–2 epistemologies 33–4 exploitation 104–5 extractivism 109n.15, 130–1 hierarchies 5–6, 127–8, 157–8, 161–2 human definitions 172 interpretations 128n.39 ideology 40–1 models 14–17, 24–5 ontologies 2–3 perspective 50, 92 posthumous existence 166 prioritization 122 racialization 135–6 responses 66 scale 92–3 syllogism 120 taxonomies 17–18, 74 tendencies 17–18

valuations 101–2, 126–7 visions 58–9, 110 vitality 119–20 anthropocentrism 2–3, 18–19, 25, 32–3, 50, 77–80, 87–90, 113n.21, 122–3, 126–8, 153, 167, 169 anthropology 3n.2, 16–17, 102n.4, 105–6 Arista, Noelani “Making Kin with the Machines” 25 Aronson, Louise 37n.17 art 7–8, 18–19, 78, 101–2, 109–10, 116–18, 126 forms 79–80, 90–1 history 105–6 projects 70n.12 artificial friend (AF) 1–6 artificial intelligence (AI) 5–6, 22–3, 25, 31–2, 31n.8, 35–6, 41–2, 47n.20, 136–7, 140–1 Asia 53n.27, 57n.29, 110 Asimov, Isaac 32–3 Atanasoski, Neda 47n.20, 57–8 Attridge, Derek 16–17 Atwood, Margaret 24, 125–30, 137–8 MaddAddam 104–5, 117–18, 121–3, 130–1, 136–7 Oryx and Crake 20n.16, 23–4, 104–5, 111–12, 121–4, 122n.34, 125f, 137–8 The Year of the Flood 104–5, 121–2 autonomy 5–6, 10–19, 54–5, 58n.30, 62–4, 150n.23, 158–9, 160n.2, 168n.10 babybots 38–42 Bad Object Choices How Do I Look? 62–4 Bailey, Tova The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating 98n.28 Barad, Karen 10, 20n.17, 21–2, 62–4, 80, 102n.4, 108n.14, 169 “On Touching” 21–2, 97–8 “Posthumanist Performativity” 10–11, 17–18, 77–8, 128–30 Bares, Annie 143n.15, 145n.19 Batson, C. D. 92n.24 Bauman, Zygmunt Wasted Lives 108n.12 Bell, Lucy 105–9, 108n.11

 Benhabib, Seyla 16 Situating the Self 14–16 “The Generalized and the Concrete Other” 14–16 Benjamin, Walter 117–18, 126 Benner, Patricia 11–14 Bennett, Jane 62–4, 102n.4, 104–7, 108n.14, 130–1, 147n.21 “Systems and Things” 130, 139–40, 167–8 Vibrant Matter 106–7, 130–1 Bennett, Joshua 133–4, 135n.6, 150n.23 Benzaquén, Adriana S. Encounters with Wild Children 86n.18 biocapitalism 111–12, 121–2, 161 bioengineering 1–2, 22–3, 104–5, 114–15, 118–19, 121–4, 136–7, 139–41 biology 2–3, 9–10, 12–14, 17n.13, 18–21, 51–2, 56, 68–9, 68n.9, 77, 89, 90n.21, 97, 104–5, 109n.15, 111–12, 114–15, 119–20, 121n.33, 159–61, 164–5 biotechnology 23–4, 100, 104–5, 111–12, 114–18, 121–4, 122n.34, 126–31, 161, 171–2 Black activists 112–13 agents 143 Black life/lives consciousness 136n.7 disposability 132–3, 138–9 embodiment 137–8, 143–7, 148n.22, 156 exclusion 144 existence 135, 143 experience 137–8, 141 hubot 31n.7 literature 133–4 nannies 33–4, 33n.11, 50 perspectives 108–9 posthuman care 24, 84n.16, 138, 144–5, 156–7 posthumanism 134n.3, 156 precarity 152 predecessors 167 scholars 103, 111–12 studies 135–6, 138–9, 158–9 suffering 142 writers 133n.2, 141n.12 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 132–4, 139–40, 146–7, 157–8 Black, Shameem 113–15, 116nn.25–27, 118n.30

191

Bloom, Lisa With Other Eyes 62–4 Blue Lives Matter 132–3 Borenstein, Jason 30–1, 35–6 “Robot Caregivers: Ethical Issues” 36–7 Bostrom, Nick 31–2 Boyle, T. C. 86n.18 Braidotti, Rosi 16–17, 20n.17, 161, 169 “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities” 142n.13 The Posthuman 18–20, 109n.15, 122, 130, 142n.13 “Writing as a Nomadic Subject” 97n.27 Broekens, Joost 30–1, 35–6 Bubeck, Diemut 17–18 Burch, James 101–2 Butler, Judith 8, 10, 62n.2 Canada 5–6, 27–30, 34–5, 109–10, 133n.1, 162–3, 166n.8 Čapek, Karl R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots 33n.12 capitalism 33n.11, 108–9, 111–13, 122–3, 143, 161, see also biocapitalism capitalist context 52–4 culture 106–7 economy 149 episto-ontological modes 153 extractivism 154, 157 formations 103–4 logic 153 model of scarcity 150–1 origins 106–7 outsourcing 33–4 productivity 35n.15 profit structures 151–2 systems 33–4, 105–6 Card, Claudia 17–18 care beyond biocentric life 166 human comprehension 5–6 life 24–5, 137n.8, 160–72 recognition 126–31 the biological 159 the human 103n.6, 137–8, 157–9 the species 103

192  caregivers 1, 5–8, 31n.7, 33n.11, 34–7, 40–1, 43–4, 70–1, 114–15, 147–8 caregiving 12–14, 22, 35–7, 46–7, 54, 56, 58–9 care robots 7n.5, 23, 27–62 care work 33–7, 52–4, 58 Carroll, Rachel 114–15, 117n.27 Casalini, Brunella 12–14 Caspari, Maya 97n.26 Castañeda, Claudia 64n.5, 98 Cavalieri, Paola 86–7 Cave, Stephen 47n.20 Chambers, Amy 50n.22 Chambers, Tod 88–9 Charise, Andrea 35n.15 Cheng, Anne 47n.20, 135n.6 Chen, Mel 8, 104–7 childbirth 71–2, 80–1, 113–14, 116–17, 122n.34, 123–4, 144–5 children 1, 10–11, 33n.11, 39–44, 47, 52–4, 71–81, 84, 86–7, 92–3, 111, 113–14, 122n.34, 136–7, 144, 148–9, 165, see also feral children Chyba, Christopher 161–2 cinema/films/television 21–3, 27–30, 43–50, 62–4, 68–9, 70n.12, 89–97, 171–2 After Yang 34n.13 Big Hero 6 34n.13 Black Mirror 34n.13 Channel 4 50–1, 59 Ex Machina 34n.13 Hollywood 59 Lek and the Dogs 70n.11 Masters of None 101n.3 My Octopus Teacher 98n.28 Netflix 101n.3 Real Humans (Äkta människor) 23, 37–8, 50–4, 50n.22, 52f, 55f, 56–8, 58n.30 Robot and Frank 23, 37–8, 43, 44f, 45f, 48f, 48n.21, 50–1, 137–8 Sveriges Television 50–1, 59 The Wild Child 86n.18 Under the Skin 23, 69–70, 89–93, 93f, 95, 96f, 99 Westworld 34n.13 Zoe 34n.13 Cleland, Carole 16–17, 52–4, 161–2 Coeckelbergh, Mark 57–8

Coetzee, J. M. 87n.19 Cohen, Jeffrey J. 165n.7 Colebrook, Clare 127–8, 161–2, 167–8 colonial anthropology 102n.4 biocapitalism 111–12, 114–15 decimation 144–5 disposability 157 epistemologies 111 expansion 82–3 exploitation 84–6, 139–40 extraction 154, 157 extractivism 112–13, 137–8, 149–53, 151n.24 genealogies 138–9, 157–8 hierarchies 23–4, 157–8 history 106–7 humanism 108–21, 132–3, 136–9, 141–2, 146–7, 149, 156–8 ideology 131 legacies 134n.3 logic 106n.8, 109–10, 114–15, 119–20, 151n.24 order 156–7 posthumanism 169–70 relations 130–1 travel 101–2 violence 82–3, 131 world 84–6 colonialism 80, 84–6, 108–9, 108n.12, 111, 127–8, 139–40, 167n.9 coloniality of being 133–4, 138–42, 157–8 companions 1, 4n.3, 35–6, 38–9, 44, 47–8, 101, 164 animals 30–1, 98n.28 neologism 10n.6 philosophies 19–20 species 16, 30–1, 41–3 companionship 21–3, 27–31, 35–6, 37n.17, 52–4 computers/computing 3n.2, 38–9, 41–2, 56, 152 contact 18n.14, 20–3, 31–2, 36–7, 58–9, 61–100, 120, 124, 126, 147–8, 164–5 Courtney, Jason 125–6, 125f Covid 1–2, 161n.4 Cranny-Francis, Anne 57–9

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193

critical posthumanism 17–19, 21–5, 87–8, 103, 138–9, 141, 161 critical race theory 20–1, 23–4, 103–4, 117n.28, 133–4, 135n.6, 138–9, 158–9, 172 Cullors, Patrisse 132–3 curiosity 6–7, 25–6, 47, 92–3, 172 cybernetics 47, 50, 56, 107n.9

dogs 36n.16, 38–9, 61–2, 70–1, 73–6, 78–9, 84, 86–7, 98, 98n.28, 146–51, 147n.21, 151n.24, 155 Dolezal, Luna 18n.15, 56 Donald, Dwane 169–70 Douglas, Mary Purity and Danger 105–6, 107n.10 Dowling, Sarah 82n.15

Dakers, Stewart 27n.2, 42–3, 59n.31 Davis, Todd F. 16–17 Dawson, Jill 86n.18 decolonization 108n.13, 157–8, 169 decolonized posthuman care 132–59 decolonized posthumanism 138–47, 169 DeFalco, Amelia Imagining Care 11–12, 12n.10 dehumanization 30, 46–7, 88–9, 132–4 DeKoven, Marianne 16–17, 22n.18 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 88–9 A Thousand Plateaus 17n.13 dementia 30–1, 35–6, 58–9 dependence/dependency 11–18, 20–1, 26, 34–5, 37n.17, 42–3, 54–8, 66, 108–9, 128–30, 149–50 Derrida, Jacques 10, 16–17, 86–7, 126–7, 128n.39, 129n.40 Diamond, Cora 86–7 Dick, Philip K. “Fiction Writes Back” 32–3 Dihal, Kanta 47n.20 Dillon, Sarah 87–9 Dinello, Daniel 32n.9, 107n.9 disabilities 5–6, 30, 32n.10, 52–4, 58–9, 93–4, 117n.28, 134n.3, 144 disposability 1–2, 24, 26, 33–4, 38–9, 50–1, 53n.27, 62–4, 95–6, 101n.3, 108–9, 108n.11, 116–18, 120, 123–4, 126–8, 133–4, 137–9, 141–2, 145n.20, 149–50, 153, 157, 159 disposable bodies 37–8, 40–1, 51–4, 56–8, 90–1, 100–31, 122n.34, 136–8, 140–1, 149, 153 creatures 23–4, 103–5, 111–12, 136–7 matter 23–4, 102–3, 102n.4, 104–7, 111–13, 121–2, 130, 132–3, 139–40, 146–7, 148n.22, 149, 151–2 doctors 1–2, 36–7 dog boy 72–4, 77–80, 86–7

ecological co-constitution 42–3 collapse 122n.34 connective tissue 14–16 coordinates 18–19, 122–3 deep time 166 devastaation 122–3 embeddedness 18–19, 122–3 entanglement 169 implications 121–2 meshes 67–8 networks 20–1, 122–3 niche 163 understanding 169 ecologies 5–6, 60, 110, 122n.34, 138, 149–50, 157, 170–1 ecology 14–16, 109–10, 143, 154–5 economic activity 71–2 burdens 33–4, 149 care 32–3 control 122 denigration 33–4 developments 34–5 discourses 51–2 forces 167–8 networks 60 order 96n.25 orientation 110 posthumanism 18–19 privileges 107–8 significance 62–4 structures 58 systems 149, 153 theory 12n.8 value 146–7 economy/economies 52–4, 56–8, 114–15, 121–3, 149–50 education 1–2, 71–2, 84–6 ego/egotism 1–2, 14–16, 96n.25

194  Ehrenreich, Barbara 33n.11 Elizabeth, Hannah 50n.22 embedded accountability 19–20 agents 12–14, 104–5 assemblage 161 beings 21, 137–8 entities 61–2 humans 17–19, 83 persons 12–14 posthumanism 50–1 relationships 56 robots 43–50 subjects 122–3 embeddedness 14–16, 26 embodied accountability 19–20 affects 31–2 agents 12–14 animality 76, 80 animal relations 74 beings 16–17, 21, 68n.9, 74, 90–1 communication 74–5 encounters 82–3 entanglements 61–2 entities 61–2 humans 17–18 interactions 76, 78, 94 language 80 life 23–4, 69–70 maternal love 65–6 modality 98 ontologies 64–5 performance 84–6 posthumanism 50–1 reactions 78 rejection 77–8 relations 56, 89–90 robots 43–50 subjectivity 50 subjects 69, 122–4 vulnerability 18–19, 171–2 embodiment 4n.3, 23, 37–8, 47–9, 53n.27, 58n.30, 60, 62–4, 66, 71–2, 78–9, 81, 91–4, 98, 144, 147–8, 157–8, 160n.2 entanglement 7–8, 10–20, 18n.14, 25–6, 61–2, 67–9, 86–7, 102n.4, 107–9, 128–30, 134n.3, 137–8, 143, 149, 154, 158–9, 166, 169–71

environmental humanities 3n.2, 16 Erdrich, Louise 164–7, “The Stone” 24–5, 98n.28, 162–4 Eshun, Kodwo 133n.2 ethics of care 10–18, 21, 34–5, 37n.17, 39, 44–6, 99, 129n.41, 144n.18, 167, 172 Eurocentrism 8, 20–1, 101–3, 106n.8, 108–9, 130, 136–7, 138n.9, 158n.25, 167–9 European Commission 34–5 European Union 34–5 extractivism 104–5, 109n.15, 110–23, 127–31, 137–8, 143n.16, 144–7, 149–53, 151n.24, 156–8 Faber, Michael 88–9, 94 Under the Skin 87–8 Fanon, Frantz 99–100 Black Skin, White Mask 95–7 Feder, Ellen 12–14 feminist criticism 62–4 materialism 102–3, 172 materialists 61–2, 108–9 philosophers 12–14, 16, 128–30 philosophy 10–11, 17–18, 167n.9 researchers 64n.5 scholars 103, 111–12 feral children 23, 41–2, 61–2, 70–1, 79–83, 86, 137–8, 159 feral families 70–87 Fineman, Martha 16–17 flora and fauna 12–17, 84–6, 98n.28, 156–7 Floyd, George 133n.1 Foster, Craig 98n.28 Fudge, Erica 86–7, 126–7 fungi/mushrooms 14–17, 17n.13, 81, 90n.21 Garber, Marjorie 16–17 Garza, Alicia 132–3 Gates, Bill 31n.8 gender 8–9, 16–18, 46–7, 52–60, 62–4, 95, 97, 107–8, 114n.23, 117n.27, 134–5, 137–8, 146–9, 157–9, 171 Gilligan, Carol 10, 12–16, 12n.10 Glazer, Jonathan 89–95, 97 Glick, Megan 103n.6, 108–9, 112n.19, 123n.35, 134n.4, 139–40

 Global North 33–6, 33n.11, 52–4, 105–6, 108n.14, 122, 139–40 Global South 33n.11, 122n.34 Gordon, Suzanne 12–14 Gregg, Mellisa 62–4 Groenhout, Ruth 17–18 Grusin, Richard 16–17 Guatarri, Felix 88–9 A Thousand Plateaus 17n.13 Halberstam, Jack 7–8, 20–1, 160n.2 Halley, Jean 16–17 Hall, Louisa 39–40, 42 Speak 23, 37–9, 42–3, 47–8 Hamington, Maurice 11n.7, 12–14 Hanssen, Beatrice 16–17 haptic assimilation 83 awareness 76 care 23, 74–5 communication 48–9 contact 92–3 convergence 47–8 dimensions 23, 78 engagement 74 entities 92 experience 48n.21 image 48–9, 81, 90–2 intimacy 47–9, 69 materiality 97–8 ontology 61–2 phenomena 61–2 quality 81 relations 86–7 tension 91–2 traces 50 visuality 48–9, 90–2 see also tactile, tactility, touch Haraway, Donna 16–17, 20n.17, 40n.19, 41–2, 102n.4, 169 Primate Visions 62–4 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 37–8, 104–5 Staying with the Trouble 4–5, 9–10, 18n.14, 35–6 The Companion Species Manifesto 10, 35–6, 122–3 When Species Meet 2–3, 61–2 Hardt, Michael 52–4

195

Haritaworn, Jinthana 103, 134n.3, 167 Harley, Alexis “Writing the Lives of Fungi at the End of the World” 14–16 Harlow, Harry 65–8 Harris, La Donna 162–3 Harvey, David 16–17 Hawkins, Gay 105–6 The Ethics of Waste 107n.10, 108n.12 Hayles, N. Katherine 16–19, 20n.17, 26, 56, 167 “Computing the Human” 39–40, 42–3 health 16–17, 30–1, 44–6, 54–5, 66, 103–4, 119–20, 145n.20 benefits 35–6 care 5–6, 34n.14, 58, 71–2, 114–15, 152 care workers 36–7 needs 1 Heerink, Marcel 30–1, 35–6 Heffernan, Teresa “The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary” 32–3 Heise, Ursula 19–20 Held, Virginia 11n.7, 12–14, 17–18 Hellstrand, Ingvil “Real Humans?” 52n.24 Helmreich, Stefan 121n.33 Hird, Myra 108–9 Hobbes, Thomas 44–6 De Cive 14–16 Hoby, Hermione 141n.12 Hochschild, Arlie R. 33n.11 Holler, Linda 64–5 Hong Kong 27–30 hooks, bell Black Looks 62–4 Hornung, Eva 70n.11, 74–80 Dog Boy 23, 69–89, 95, 99 Howard, Don 57n.29 hubots (humanoid robots) 30n.3, 38n.18, 50–8, 57n.29, 58 human animals 6–7, 10, 16–21, 58–60, 65–9, 76–7, 99, 104–9, 122–3, 141–2, 158–9, 161, 169–70 human care 23, 32–8, 43, 58–60, 69–70, 73, 150–1 human exceptionalism 1–2, 4n.3, 7–8, 18–19, 25–6, 32–4, 37–8, 58–9, 77, 103, 117n.28, 140–1, 153

196  humanimal 80, 82–8, 142n.13 humanism 24, 77, 80, 109–21, 126–8, 131, 134n.4, 156–7, 160n.2, 161–2, 167–8 humanist anthropocentrism 167, 169 approaches 12–14 art 79–80, 116n.25, 117n.26 assumptions 12–14, 159 belief 1–2 binarism 108–9 boundaries 52–4, 103n.6, 128–30, 147–8 care 21–2, 132–3 categories 103 citizens 130, 149 conventions 159 creed 109n.15 culture 104–5 definitions 3–4, 24–5 distinctions 37–8, 44–6, 111–12 dualisms 107–8 epistemologies 43–4 episto-ontologies 25, 102n.4 essentialism 17–18 exclusions 93–4, 157–8 extractivism 130–1 frameworks 12–14, 89–90, 135–6 genealogies 157–8 hierarchies 33–4, 37–8, 47, 50–1, 111–12, 116, 138–9, 172 human 9–10, 86–7, 108–9, 133–4 ideology 40–1 impulses 119–20 individualism 133n.2 individuality 117–18 inequalities 57–8 logic 106–7, 120, 130 models 9–10, 35–6, 60, 71–2, 136–7 norms 141–2, 146–7 ontologies 18–19, 37–8, 135–6 paradigms 54–5, 117–18, 130 parameters 133–4 perspectives 19–20, 44–6, 50, 133n.2 policing 37–8 sensibilities 101–2 societies 55–6, 111–12 subjects 16–17, 56, 126, 130–1 taxonomies 17–18, 137–40 tolerance 95–6 valuations 23–4, 104–5, 111–12

warning 42–3 world 149 imagery 48n.21, 84–6, 91–2, 93f, 145 imagination 21–2, 33–4, 57–9, 70n.12, 87–8, 93–4 imagining posthuman care 21–6, 172 posthuman forms of life 156–7 posthumous flourishing 156–7 posthumous relations 160–72 Indigenous activists 111–12, 133n.1 Anishinaabe 102n.4, 166–7 Australians 133n.1 Blackfoot 25 communities 25–6, 102n.4, 108–9, 127–8, 138n.10, 162–3, 165n.7, 166–70, 172 critique 25 experience 163–4 First Nations 166n.8 flora 84–6 Haudenosaunee 102n.4, 166–7 knowledge 111–12, 160–1 Ojibwe 24–5, 162–3, 166, 166n.8 peoples 111, 162–3, 168 perspectives 25, 108–9 philosophies 25, 167 populations 40–1 societies 102n.4 women 111 infrahumanism 103n.6, 139n.11 inhuman 24, 72–3, 120, 135–41 aesthetics 118n.30 agencies 126–7, 139–40 agency 167–8 art 117n.26 being 79–80 blackness 135 bodies 102–5, 111–12, 124, 126, 128–31 creatures 104–5, 111–12, 128–31, 136–7, 139–42 experience 164–5 hinterlands 99–100 matter 110–12 others 103 perpective 114–15 status 101n.2, 116–17 woman 92–3

 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 25 intimacy 3–4, 6–8, 24–6, 30–2, 34n.13, 35–9, 37n.17, 47–9, 58n.30, 64–6, 72–6, 78–9, 88–9, 92–3, 95, 113n.20, 131, 147–51, 155, 164–6 Ishiguro, Kazuo 3–4, 12–14, 24, 57n.28 117n.26, 120, 122–3, 126–30, 139–40 Klara and the Sun 1–3, 5–6, 69–70, 137–8, 166 Never Let Me Go 2n.1, 5–6, 23–4, 104–5, 111–24, 117n.27, 119n.31, 130–1, 136–7 Jackson, Zakiyyah 20n.17, 104–5, 108–9, 134, 147, 158n.26, 161, 167–8 “Animal” 134n.5, 169–70 Becoming Human 84n.16, 103n.5, 132–4 “Outer Worlds” 134–5, 138n.10, 158n.25 Japan 27–30, 34–5, 57n.29 Aibo funerals 101–2, 102n.4, 111–12, 131 Kofukuji Temple 101 National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology 59 Jelača, Dijana 93–4 Jennings, Bruce “Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care” 14–16, 34–5 Johansson‐Pajala, Rose Marie 31n.5, 34n.14 Johansson, Scarlett 89, 91n.22, 94–6 Johnson, Carolyn 31–2 Kakoudaki, Despina 53n.27, 117n.27 Kapil, Bhanu 80–3, 86–7 Humanimal: A Project for Future Children 23, 69–70, 79–80, 84–97, 99 Kaplan, E. Ann Looking for the Other 62–4 Keen, Suzanne 92n.24 Khakpour, Porochista 86n.18 Kite, Suzanne “Making Kin with the Machines” 25 Kittay, Eva 10, 12–14, 16–18, 37n.17 “Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care” 14–16, 34–5 Love’s Labor 147–8 Klein, Naomi 111 Kohlberg, Lawrence 12n.10

197

Koistinen, Aino-Kaisa “Real Humans?” 52n.24 Kuzniar, Alice 22n.18, 35–6 Kyodo, Jiji 34–5 Laack, Isabel 162n.5 Latour, Bruno 10, 16–17, 63n.3, 130 Leckie, Ann Ancillary Justice 34n.13 Levinas, Emmanuel 125–30, 128n.39 Lewis, Jason Edward 25, 166 “Making Kin with the Machines” 25 Leys, Ruth 16–17 Lillvis, Kristen 133n.2 Lishner, David 92n.24 Little Bear, Leroy 25–6, 166 Löken, Line 67–9 Lorde, Audre 136n.7 machines 1, 5–7, 17–18, 25–32, 35–44, 47–50, 52–9, 101, 101n.3, 103, 116–18, 134–5, 137–41, 146–7, 152 Mackay, Lynsey Taylor 92n.23 Mallon, Brenda 70n.13 Malson, Lucien Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature 79–80 Manning, Erin 10, 41–2, 62–4, 64n.5, 99–100 “What If It Didn’t All Begin and End with Containment?” 61–2, 84–6, 97–8 Ma, Rachael 43 Marks, Laura 48–9, 62–4, 81 The Skin of the Film 90–1 Marsden, James 43 Martin, Nina 145n.20 Martin, Trayvon 132–3 Massumi, Brian 62–4 Mattsson, Titti 16–17 McCoy, Peter 14–16 McCurry, Justin 101 McKittrick, Katherine “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 134n.5, 140–1 McMillan, Uri 103n.5, 104–5, 138–9 mechanical being 41–2 bodies 37–8, 52–4, 116–17 creatures 27–30, 116–17 dynamism 53n.25

198  mechanical (cont.) humans 38–43 laborer 46–7 life 57–8 personhood 118n.30 tasks 58 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 97–8 Millet, Lydia 66n.7 Love in Infant Monkeys 65–6 Mishukov, Ivan 70–1 Mitchell, W. J. T. 106–7 What Do Pictures Want? 58n.30 monkeys/primates 37–8, 40n.19, 61–2, 65–8, 98 more-than-human affective bonds 21 animacies 108–9, 111–12 being 163 bodies 111 care 22–3, 171–2 companionship 3–4 complexities 21 creatures 22–3 dynamics 21, 171–2 embodiments 157–8 entanglement 7–8, 16, 102n.4 entities 34n.13 forces 171 intimacy 24–5 kinship 166 lives 67–8 ontologies 58n.30 phenomena 5–6, 18–19 protagonists 69–70 relationality 25–6 relationships 2–3, 5–6, 32–3, 108–9, 170–1 remains 138 representation 22n.18 violence 170–1 worlds 16–17, 20–3, 26, 68–9, 112n.18, 128–30, 158–9, 170–2 Morgenstern, Naomi 86–7 Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics 86 Morrison, India 67–9 “Keep Calm and Cuddle On” 67–8 Morrison, Susan 105–6, 108–9

Morrison, Toni 141 Morton, Timothy 16–17 Mulvey, Laura Visual and Other Pleasures 62–4 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 62–4 Muñoz, José E. 8, 103nn.5–6 Murray, Stuart 30n.3, 87–9 Musk, Elon 31n.8 Nayar, Pramod 16–17, 20n.17 Neary, Lynn 74 Newitz, Annalee Autonomous 34n.13 new materialism 16, 20–1, 62–4, 68–9, 90n.21, 102–4, 106–7, 108n.14, 139–40, 157–9, 169, 172 newspapers/journals 27–30, 59n.31 Chicago Sun-Times 70n.13 Daily Mail 31–2 International Journal of Social Robotics 34n.14 National Geographic 101–2, 111–12 Guardian 141n.12 Japan Times 101n.1 New Yorker 162–4, 166 New York Times 37n.17, 157 Observer 70n.13 Paris Review 142 Sunday Times 14–16 Wall Street Journal 36–7 Newton, Michael 86n.18 Savage Girls, Wild Boys 70–1, 86n.18 Noddings, Nel 12–14 non-human animals 6–7, 22–3, 30–1, 70–1, 77, 103, 106–7, 113n.21, 119n.31, 143, 171–2 Olausson, Håkan 67–9, 68n.9 Oliver, Kelly 16–17, 96n.25, 128–30 Orning, Sara “Real Humans?” 52n.24 Osterweil, Ara 93–4 Pagler, Lisette 53n.27 Parks, Jennifer 59n.31 Paterson, Mark The Senses of Touch 31n.6, 97–8

 Pearson, Yvonne 30–1, 35–6 “Robot Caregivers: Ethical Issues” 36–7 Pechawis, Archer “Making Kin with the Machines” 25 Pollock, Griselda Vision and Difference 62–4 Povinelli, Elizabeth 160–1 Pratt, Mary Louise Imperial Eyes 62–4 Puar, Jasbir 8, 103n.5, 145n.20, 149–50, 158n.26, 167–8, 171 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 20n.17, 99, Matters of Care 3n.2, 10, 63n.3, 172 “Touching Technologies” 64 Pyron, Bobbie Dogs of Winter 70n.11 queer affiliations 148–9 animacies 23–4, 104–5 bodies 157–8 ecology 109–10 episto-ontologies 8 families 58, 156 identities 108n.13 inhumanity 8, 103n.6 kinship 8, 127–8, 141–2, 147–50, 156 lives 138–9 norms 146–7 objects 104–5 people 103, 134n.3 perspectives 108–9 regeneration 103 relationality 156–7 relations 6–8 scholars 8, 111–12 subjectivities 18–19 theory 8, 20–1, 102–4 racial biases 57n.29 dimensions 47n.20, 138 disparities 145n.20 dynamics 53n.27 exclusion 135 imaginaries 57–8 oppression 135–6 otherness 53n.27

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privileges 107–8 representation 53n.27 racialized anthropocentrism 153 beings 8, 52–4, 56, 69, 157–8, 171 characters 55–6 disposability 24, 133–4 dynamics 46–7 economies 52–4 exploitation 137–8 external forms 53n.27 extractivism 109n.15, 157 frameworks 135–6 human 131, 138–40, 158–9 humanoid forms 57–8 labor 58 lives 138–9 metaphysics 134–5 others 51–2, 108–9 pit bull bodies 147 pit bull love 147 praxis 84–6 taxonomy 135–6 violence 95, 157–8 racism 47, 80, 95–6, 132–3 Rajan, K. Sunder 121n.33 real care 23, 32–4, 37–8, 50–6, 159 real humans 44–6, 50–8, 104–5, 111–12, 114–15, 139–40, 159 Reno, Joshua O. “Toward a New Theory of Waste” 105n.7 representation 8, 20–3, 32–3, 48–9, 53n.27, 55–8, 66–9, 77–82, 84–7, 88n.20, 89–92, 92n.24, 116–17, 130, 143n.15 Rich, Kelly 1–2, 113–14 Riek, Laurel D. 57n.29 robot care 6–7, 23, 27–38, 50–1, 57–9 robot dogs Aibo 101 Aibo funerals 101–2, 102n.4, 111–12, 131 robotics 27–30, 34n.14, 47n.20, 59 robots C-3PO 32–3 Johnny Five 32–3 JustoCat 30–1 MiRo 27–31, 29f Nao 27–30, 28f

200  robots (cont.) Paro 27–32, 28f, 34–7, 58, 101n.3 Pepper 27–30, 29f, 30n.3 R2-D2 32–3 Robocop 31–2 Rosey the Robot 32–3 Terminator 31–2 Rogers, Heather 105–6 Rolf, Ida 84n.17 Rollins, Mark 113–14 Rooney, Ben 36–7 Rosendal, Henk 30–1, 35–6 Rose, Nikolas 121n.33 Ruddick, Sara 17–18 Russia/Soviet 69–70, 75 Moscow 70–3, 86–7 Salge, Christoph 31–2 Sanderson, Ian 90n.21 Sarsgaard, Peter 43 Scanlan, John 105–6 On Garbage 107n.10, 108n.12 Schmidt, Christopher 105–6, 108n.13 science 62–6, 77–8, 106–7, 122, 133–4, 160–2 science and technology studies 3n.2, 10 science fiction 19–20, 32–3, 32n.9, 87–8, 113–14 scientists 38–9, 61–2, 67–8, 77 Sehgal, Parul 157 Seigworth, Gregory 62–4 sexuality/sexualized 8, 52–4, 59–60, 97, 106–7, 146–7 bodies 8, 56, 69 contact 93–4 difference 128n.39 dynamics 46–7 human 158–9 humanoid forms 57–8 meanings 117n.27 pleasure 148–9 predator 94–5 relations 118–19 violence 95 visibility 95–6 work 50–1 Sharkey, Amanda 7n.5, 35–7, 58–9 Sharkey, Noel 7n.5, 35–7, 58–9 Sharpe, Christina 144–5

Sheffield Robotics 27–30, 28f, 59 Sheldrake, Merlin “Why the Hidden World of Fungi Is Essential to Life on Earth” 14–16 Entangled Life 14–16 Shildrick, Margrit 61n.1, 90n.21 “Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?” 10, 97–8 Shohat, Ella Talking Visions 62–4 Silicon Valley 31n.8, 59 Simpson, Leanne B. 111–12, 111n.17, 127–8, 130–1 Singh, J. A. L. 79–80, 82–3 skepticism 6–7, 17–18, 35–6, 47, 50, 58–9, 77–8, 111–12, 128–30, 135n.6, 148–9 skin 9–10, 23, 47–9, 56, 61–5, 67–9, 76, 81–2, 89, 93–100, 112n.18, 128n.39, 155 Skinner, Jordan 109–10 Sobchack, Vivian 48n.21 Address of the Eye 90–1 Sony 101 Sparrow, Linda 7n.5, 8, 35–6, 58–9 Sparrow, Robert 7n.5, 8, 35–6, 58–9 Stacey, Jackie 64, 66, 97–8 Star Gazing 62–4 Stallabrass, Julian 109n.16, 115n.24 Stephens, Svetlana 71–2 Stern, Daniel 10, 41–2 Stewart, Susan 22–3 Stocks, Eric 92n.24 Strasser, Susan 105–6 Strong, Jeremy 44 Stryker, Susan 104–5 Suchman, Lucy 38n.18, 57–8 “Subject Objects” 10, 40n.19 Sundberg, Juanita 138n.9, 167, 168n.11, 169–70 tactile awareness 64–5 body 77–8 bonds 69 contact 23, 61–2, 93–4 dimensions 65–6 encounters 23, 66–7, 69, 81 experience 67–8 functions 67–8

 interactions 99 intimacies 76 kinship 147–8 materiality 99 meanings 31–2 metaphor 68–9 ontology 76 relations 76, 83, 92–3 specificity 72–3 tenderness 148–9 textuality 82 see also haptic, touch tactility 56, 61–6, 78–9, 81–2, 89 TallBear, Kim 104–5 Thompson, Michael 105–6 Rubbish Theory 108n.12 Tometi, Opal 132–3 touch 21–3, 27–32, 48n.21, 58–9, 61–100, 157–8, see also haptic, tactile, tactility transhumanism 18–19, 27–30, 50, 56, 122–3 Tronto, Joan Moral Boundaries 41–2 Truffault, François 86n.18 Tsing, Anna L. 14–17 The Mushroom at the End of the World 16 Turkle, Sherry 7n.5, 35–7, 42–3, 58–9 United Kingdom 5–6, 34–5, 50–1, 133n.1 England 113–14, 120, 170–1 United States 27–30, 33–5, 46–7, 51–2, 132–3, 133n.1, 143n.16, 144, 145n.20, 162–4, 166n.8 Food and Drug Administration 27n.1 see also America Vallor, Shannon 30–1 van Wynsberghe, Aimee 30–1 vibrant matter 102n.4, 118–19 Viney, William 105–7 Vint, Sherryl 87–8 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 16–17, 162n.5 von Uexküll, Jakob 79n.14 Vora, Kalinda 47n.20, 57–8 Walkowitz, Rebecca 16–17, 113–14, 118n.29, 119n.31 Wang, Min’an 105–6, 107n.10

201

Ward, Jesmyn 134n.3, 138–42, 144–5, 147–9, 150n.23, 151–4, 156–7 Salvage the Bones 23–4, 137–47, 157–8, 170–1 Wasilewski, Jacqueline 162–3 waste/rubbish 23–4, 102–12, 114–16, 123–4, 128–30, 141–2, 153 Wasunna, Angela “Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care” 14–16, 34–5 Watts, Venessa 102n.4, 138n.10, 166–7 Weaver, Harlan 148n.22 “Pit Bull Promises” 147 Weheliye, Alexander 104–5, 108–9, 135–6, 158n.26, 161 Habeas Viscus 135, 145n.20 Weil, Kari 16–17 Weinstein, Jami 104–5, 127–8, 161–2, 167–8 Wells, Martha All Systems Red 34n.13 West, Loraine 34–5 Whitehead, Alfred North 10 Whitehead, Anne 113n.20, 114–15 Whiteley, Aliya The Secret Life of Fungi 14–16 Wichterich, Christa 114–15 Wiener, Norbert 107n.9 Wilby, Liam 158n.26, 162n.5 Williams, Linda Hard Core 62–4 Viewing Positions 62–4 wolf children 70n.12, 79–80 Wolfe, Cary 16–19, 86–7, 161 wolf-girls 79–80, 82–6 wolves 79–84, 98 Womack, Kenneth 16–17 Woman 89, 91–6, 91n.22 Woon, Long Litt 14–16 Wynter, Sylvia “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 133–4, 140–1 “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” 84–6, 108–9, 133–6, 157–8 Yaeger, Patricia 109–10 Yang, Julianne 52n.24, 53n.27 Yu, Ruby 27n.1 Ziarek, Krzysztof 126–8