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Queering the Species Body: Interspecies Intimacies and Contemporary Literature

LeMay, Megan Molenda

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Taxonomies of biological life are historical and political products. In particular, distinctions made between humans and other species have historically served as the fulcrum upon which social hierarchies balance. For example, in formulating species according to morphology, eighteenth and nineteenth-century science helped shape anti-abolitionist claims that black slaves were inherently distinct from whites. Likewise, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a focus on reproductive relations as the bedrock of species categorization precipitated the development of state-sanctioned eugenics in the United States. This dissertation examines how the scientific, cultural, and literary imagination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries employs theories of speciation both to augment and contest normative human identity with a special emphasis on race and sexuality. Spanning eight decades of scientific and literary activity from the 1930s to present day, I explore how late modernist and contemporary American authors intervene in what is known as the "species problem"— a set of enduring questions on how to define species and how they arise. Working at the juncture of queer theory, feminist science studies, and animal studies, I reveal authors excavating the indeterminacy of species life, and thus of race and sex, by representing intimacies between humans and other animals. I begin by tracing a genealogy of the species body beginning with what historians refer to as "the eclipse of Darwinism." Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species notably triggered an ideological crisis in the scientific and political landscape. I investigate the extent to which Darwin's most radical ideas about species porosity continue to be repackaged in order to uphold established social orders and regulatory controls. Each of my four body chapters shows authors contributing to the scientific conversations on race, sex, and species of their respective decades, for example, Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936) at the crest of sexology and Edward Albee's drama The Zoo Story (1958) on the heels of the Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953). I also turn to contemporary writing with Marian Engel's novella Bear (1976) written alongside feminist sex research of the 1970s and Sherman Alexie's short stories in The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt (2003) during the rise of species-specific genomics. In bringing readers into the contact zone of interspecies intimacies, these works disrupt the popular scientific frameworks from which racial and sexual embodiment are culturally understood. The recent explosion of interest in the nonhuman no longer permits the humanities to treat the human as an unproblematic category. Ultimately, this dissertation interrogates the extent to which late modernist and contemporary American literature anticipates and contributes to this turn. That the instability of racial and sexual identity in these works hinges on disrupting species distinctions indicates a theoretical invitation. In interrogating this opening, I bring to light that moments of interspecies intimacy in late modernist and contemporary literature have a coherence that is both historical and formal. As literary interventions, they speak for the capacity of bodies to interact meaningfully in a multispecies world.
Debra Moddelmog (Committee Chair)
Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member)
Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member)
225 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • LeMay, M. M. (2014). Queering the Species Body: Interspecies Intimacies and Contemporary Literature [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404733899

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • LeMay, Megan. Queering the Species Body: Interspecies Intimacies and Contemporary Literature. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404733899.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • LeMay, Megan. "Queering the Species Body: Interspecies Intimacies and Contemporary Literature." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404733899

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)