Porous Skins: Pandemic Posthumanism in Speculative Fiction

Katharina Donn

doi:10.16995/c21.3228

Abstract

What does it mean to be human in a world that is both viral and vulnerable? The current pandemic has made clear that we live porous lives in a porous world of bacteria, microbes, viruses, organic bodies, and non-organic matter. In this article I explore the ethical and embodied conflicts this exposes us to, proposing that the motif of human and posthuman skin in speculative fiction re-assesses the relation between exposure and agency. In near-future worlds of ecological, socio-economic and viral breakdown, the vulnerable and porous human epidermis becomes a key site for probing the ethics of an ecologically enmeshed concept of human selfhood. The posthuman subjects of the feminist speculative fiction by Larissa Lai and Rita Indiana are deeply immersed - for better and worse - in the toxic realities they inhabit; but importantly, they also explore ways to navigate this entanglement and develop both agency and health within such exposure, salvaging sustainable futures for humanity on a broken planet. Working within an ecocritical framework, this article therefore charts pathways through the often doom-laden dystopias of science fiction towards more creative ways of inhabiting porous and exposed skins, in order to sustain human and nonhuman life in pandemic environments.

Highlights

In this article, I will explore the ethical and embodied conflicts which our porous skins expose us to
Exposure, employed here in the ecocritical sense, describes the recognition of openness to other human and non-human matters and forces beyond our control. Being exposed in this sense is the core condition of all organic life, and, from an ethical perspective, entails vulnerability, mutual responsibility and a form of agency which Donna Haraway describes as “respons-able” (2016: 2): the ability to be addressed and the call to respond to such address by other matters and beings who might already have traversed, entered into symbiosis with, or otherwise become enmeshed with the self
My focus is firmly on this aspect of agency: We are all exposed, but this invites us to re-position ourselves, to respond, to navigate exposure in ways that foster life - not to submit to the apocalyptic gloom of the star wars, nor to passively accept extinction

Summary

Introduction

I will explore the ethical and embodied conflicts which our porous skins expose us to. The ‘noise’ that Haraway proposes seeks a way beyond this cul-de-sac; her insistence to think the posthuman together with porosity, to consider a ‘polluted’, transversed human selfhood as a mode of survival but of life, is more attuned to the ambivalence of skin itself and more promising of a sustainable vision.

Results

Conclusion