Queer Desires and Sugary Kisses: The Sweetness of Interspecies Encounters in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the prismatic possibilities for interspecies pleasures, bodily fluidity, and intimacies that disrupt speciesist, heterosexist, and repronormative paradigms in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Through the lens of sweetness as an aesthetic, affective, material, and sensory quality, I interrogate modes of human-animal kinship that are predicated on sensorial pleasure, while remaining attuned to the knotty biopolitical entanglements of tenderness, mastery, and commodification underpinning the sweetened human-animal encounter in late capitalism.This paves the way for a literary animality that is as attuned to queertemporalities, cross-species erotics, and speculative futures of multispeciesbecoming, as it is to deep-temporal issues of climate change and extinction.