“Moist, Living”: The Hydro-Logics of Red Tory

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I offer a hydro-logical account of Red Tory (2019) and its critique of individualism’s contemporary capitalist forms. Drawing on the queer posthumanism of Astrida Neimanis, and the idea that we are all “bodies of water,” I examine the novel as a world comprising sexual, chemical, and political flows and the channels that organize them: pipes, reservoirs, Grindr, gay sex, metaphors, and, finally, MMT, the mysterious new drug referred to as the novel’s radical, communist “infrastructure.” MMT structures the psycho-sexual-political conversion of the novel’s protagonist, Tom, requiring him to conceive of embodiment not as a solitary, extractive activity but as sensuously inter-dependent, thus reconceiving the body as a dependence on infrastructure, in Judith Butler’s formulation. This sense of collectivity disavows the individualist metaphysics of neoliberal capitalism. However, this disavowal is not a smooth process. I argue that Tom’s political awakening involves a more specific concern about the heterogeneity of flows, and that his learning to embrace the failure of flows to dissolve into one another is central to the novel’s politics. Immiscibility makes far too visible our inter-dependence – and, in organizing the antagonistic interaction of flows, serves as Red Tory’s most insurgent infrastructure.