Chapter 20 - Toxic Nature

Summary

This chapter examines select fiction and memoirs dealing with biocultural precarity. Adapting the work of Samantha Frost, which resonates with Donna Haraway’s “natureculture,” it proposes that the late twentieth century has seen the emergence of texts that foreground somatic and genetic precarity, together constituting a toxic state of human nature itself. The former, visible in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, has an exogenous etiology that emanates from a cultural condition (invisible, residual industrial chemicals) and whose manifestation is in the very nature of Animal’s corporeality. Genetic precarity, seen in memoirs dealing with, say, Huntington’s disease (Mona Gable’s, Therese Crutcher-Marin’s, Sarah Foster’s), has its etiology in the genetic material passed on from generation to generation, again altering irrevocably the nature of the human. In both cases, however, the embedding of the human with her/his toxified nature within specific cultural practices – from family to biomedicine – means that the biological precarity and toxic nature are instantiations of biocultural precarity.