Conference presentation
Haemorrhagic Bodies: The Only Home We Have
Limina 13th Annual Conference - Home: Belonging and Displacement (University of Western Australia, 26/07/2018–27/07/2018)
26/07/2018
Abstract
What real-world threats transect the visceral borders of our embodied existence? What figurations of life does science fiction offer to help us navigate the uncertainties of our world? Postmodernity can be read as framing our habitation of space-time as one of precarity, a habitation of acute ontological instability in which not even the individual enclosures of our own bodies guarantee our safety. When Ebola erupted across West Africa in 2014, it marked the beginning of the largest and most complex epidemic since the virus was discovered in 1976. An uninvited guest onboard mobile homes, this indiscriminate invader reminds us that the enemy without-turned-enemy-within lies submerged in the dance of genetic mutation and change, a dance to which our bodies have transported us like lovers on a Saturday night. In such times what value, indeed what relevance, might considerations of apex invaders such as the titular entities of the iconic Alien series offer to us? This paper examines the relationship between the precarity of the visceral body in which we live, and speculations in science fiction that inform the articulation of the home we cannot escape.
Details
- Title
- Haemorrhagic Bodies: The Only Home We Have
- Authors/Creators
- Ellen J Greenham (PhD. FHEA) (Author)
- Conference
- Limina 13th Annual Conference - Home: Belonging and Displacement (University of Western Australia, 26/07/2018–27/07/2018)
- Identifiers
- 991005609157507891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Murdoch University
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Conference presentation
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