Volcanoes, guts and cosmic collisions: the queer sublime in Frankenstein and Melancholia

Abstract

This paper explores the possible relationship between queer bodies, ones strictly defined as nonprocreative, and Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism. We’ll ask a couple of big questions: How do nonprocreative bodies find themselves as mythic figures within narratives and to what ecological end could those figural positions be of some benefit?Hidden in the texts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia lurks George Bataille’s concept of the Jesuve. This queer sublime is the violent manifestation of material instability felt keenly by the abject, nonprocreative body. The sublime of the Jesuve revels in the subject’s explosive disfigurement as it anticipates the reuse of human matter and identity.Can we find existential comfort in considering the recycling of the human body, not as a spiritual rebirth, but as a vibrant material up-cycling? Can volcanoes, cosmic collisions and queer bodies become an integral part of human ecological ontologies?