Infrastructural Closure, Rupture, and Insurgency in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay addresses the problem of how to formally differentiate between oppressive and emancipatory infrastructures. In doing so, it develops an analysis of speculative science-fiction novel The Book of Joan (2017) to explore how infrastructure is characterized in its vertical-fascist, insurgent, and horizontal-egalitarian modes. I will make and explore three central claims. Firstly, the material infrastructure of patriarchal white supremacy is intimately bound up with semiotic infrastructure in ways that are extremely difficult to untangle. Secondly, vertical-fascist infrastructure functions as a means of capturing, appropriating, and homogenizing human and nonhuman life, while insurgent infrastructures that give rise to horizontal formations are characterized by a reversal of this process insofar as they seek to maximize living diversity and bodily autonomy. Finally, and relatedly, the difference between vertical-fascist and horizontal-egalitarian synthetic infrastructures must be understood in relation to the nonhuman-natural infrastructures into which they intervene, and which they can either synthesize with or overwrite.