Forms of a Posthuman Fantastic in Mia Gallagher’s Shift

Abstract

In posthuman philosophy the human subject is not regarded as an entity but a relational process. Yet the historical construct of “the individual” remains the (unconscious) reference point in human perception, feeding ego- and anthropocentrism. This article will argue that in their call to revise the static ideal of the individual entity posthuman philosophers find “allies” in fiction. More specifically, the fantastic is a genre which offers great possibilities to drastically reshuffle basic tenets of perception. Mia Gallagher’s Shift offers a spectrum of fantastic stories in which protagonists relate to human and nonhuman agents such as animals, minerals, air and water. But, in this posthuman theory and fiction, not only human beings are deconstructed into relational nodes; the categories that constitute them are no independent concepts either, but mere interactional factors. This article’s analysis of Gallagher’s short stories focuses on the ways in which self and other, nature and culture, life and death, feminine and masculine, interior and exterior worlds interact.