Thesis
Already monstrous : a dietary response to existential crisis
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2020
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.145
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Abstract
The material and epistemic crises associated with the Anthropocene demand new ways of understanding the human and our relation to the environment. In the face of the harm that human behaviour is wreaking on the biosphere it is urgent and necessary to deconstruct the human subject and our ways of being in the world. Any vacillation in the face of multiple potential extinctions, our own included, will, as Donna Haraway points out, ‘be written into earth’s rocky strata’ (2016, p. 102). Through my fictocritical response to these crises and to the material-semiotic complexities associated with the Anthropocene, I perform a radical evisceration of the category of the ‘human’, from which I will not emerge untransformed, nor unscathed. This performance entails autoethnographic documentation of my dietary transformation from omnivore to vegan, the subsequent shifts in the composition of my gut flora and the dramatic consequences which ensue. Getting to know my ‘gut buddies’ (Lorimer 2016, p. 59), who are active participants in the holobiont community of which I am a member, furnishes me with a greater understanding of the complexities and implications of my material entanglements with the world in which we all live and enables an unexpected opportunity for more-than-human becomings. By forging new and unpredictable alliances with peculiar, perhaps capricious partners by means of as yet uncharted practices, we cannot yet know what volatile assemblages will coalesce, what or who will be made or unmade.
Details
- Title
- Already monstrous : a dietary response to existential crisis
- Creators
- Nicholas Taylor
- Contributors
- Erika Kerruish (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityRob Garbutt (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University
- Number of pages
- 242
- Identifiers
- 991012942000202368
- Copyright
- © N Taylor 2020
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts; Humanities; School of Arts and Social Sciences
- Resource Type
- Thesis