A woman spasms in the grass, dreaming of a “moat of vast sea creatures” as her body begins to relinquish its position as a human (VanderMeer 100). Her very genes turn queerly towards the sea, embracing a nonhuman future as she “descend[s] into the light” of contamination and change (VanderMeer 114).
On the pavement of a basketball court, a man shoots a woman through the shoulder. She writhes there until “her cheeks and chin tear with a wet sound and the bones crunch,” until the traumas of the past pressing themselves onto the present transform her into “an elk. [An] Elk Head Woman” (Jones 278).
In a boarding house in Ingolstadt, Victor Frankenstein stitches together an amalgam of dead flesh until, to his horror, “the dull yellow eye of the creature open[s],” and the disparate bodies of the dead become a single living thing (Shelley 46).
In these three very different works—Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series (also referred to as Area X), Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—the relationality between “animals, humans, and living and dead things” is violently redrawn, inviting fusions between the living and the dead, the human and the nonhuman (Chen 5). The hybrid beings in these texts seek an understanding between seemingly disparate pieces of themselves, between the language of the human and the language of the more-than-human, animal, and alien.
By reorienting their familiar environments and familiar bodies in seemingly contaminated and nonhuman directions, these texts engage in a necessary queering of both the animate and inanimate that transcends both space and time. Reading these three works together in this way might seem strange, as their publication history covers such a vast distance in time and space, but that is part of why I find it so productive. By reading Frankenstein, so often thought of as one of the first true works of SFF, against two contemporaries, we can see the ways in which the queering that I interrogate here is neither a new or fleeting preoccupation in SFF. I hope to do so with the assistance of a few key theorists: Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect; Elizabeth Freeman’s book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories; Donna J. Haraway, particularly Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World.
A queer reading of the transformations at the heart of these texts imagines queerness as “a powerful site [...] of failure” for Western modernity and its heteronormative modes of being (Freeman XVI). Queerness instead becomes the site at which both the narrative of human exceptionalism and the narrative of a pristine natural world fall away. Unlike the figure Chen calls the “neutral queer,” the queer beings of these texts cannot be fully absorbed or assimilated into the frameworks of capitalism and neo-liberalism (Chen 66). Nor is theirs merely a queering under the binaries of human/nonhuman or natural/unnatural but a queering of the world—what Jane Bennett describes as “the recognition of human participation in a shared vital materiality” (Bennett 14). In her treatment of the nonhuman, Bennett asks, “Why are we so keen to distinguish the human self from the field[?]” (Bennett 121). (The field, for Bennett, being all matter that exists outside the human body.) In these texts, the vibrancy of all matter supersedes the need for human exceptionalism, and the forms of queerness that manifest include the human and move beyond it.
Annihilation (2014), Authority (2014), Acceptance (2014), and Absolution (2024) comprise Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series (also called Area X)
Bodies, nature, and time itself are all coming out of joint throughout these novels, folding into what Timothy Morton would call hyperobjects—massive assemblages, massively distributed in space and time—while living in hauntings of the past and future. But there are hauntings other than queer hauntings; there are out-of-joint modes of time that might not be queer time, and not all hyperobjects queer things. Morton stresses, “the recognition of being caught in a hyperobject is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and familiar strangeness” (Morton 63). This can be a familiar queer experience but isn’t inherently queer. While Chen argues that it is possible to use queering not only regarding the ordering of sexuality/gender identities but also as a site of disruption and transgression, Freeman argues, “What makes queer theory queer as opposed to simply deconstructionist is also its insistence on risking a certain vulgar referentiality, its understanding of the sexual encounter” and its specific queer interventions into heteronormativity (Freeman 11).
For the rest of this essay, I will move through the different ways that the human and nonhuman meet in these texts and bringing out the queerness of each aspect. I start with an intervention into what Freeman calls chrononormativity, arguing that the idea of queer time becomes a key part of these fusions. I then return to the idea of the hyperobject, to consider the ways in which queerness haunts these texts. Finally, I locate this queerness in the deconstructions of time and matter in these texts, by turning once more to the bodies being queered and to the more erotic power of the monster itself.
Animacy, Chen’s practice of queering the world, hopes to “trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural body/cyborg” (Chen 2). But while many of these systems of difference seem to crumble in tandem with one another, I would like to contend that, for our purposes, time is the first system of difference that is necessarily cast aside. The linear structure of existence, which demands birth, childhood, “[heterosexual] marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childbearing, and death” are sequential, inevitable, and unchangeable, is what Freeman calls chrononormativity (Freeman 4). The monster troubles that organization of past, present, and future into a single productive timeline. To queer time, however, requires more than queering the bodies involved in these (re)productive and linear destinies, but a queering of the ecologies around them: breaking down the idea that the queerness in these bodies is somehow the exception, the abnormal in an otherwise normal or heterosexual world, where time continues to flow on strict schedules. To queer the body, we must also accept queering the nature around the body, situating queer time as something affecting the animacy of things, and not only the animal.
We might think of that queer time as a kind of haunting, in which history intrudes on the present. Expanding on the idea of hauntology—a term originally coined by Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993)—Freeman defines queer hauntology as an “ethics of responsibility towards the other across time, toward the dead or toward that which was impossible in a given historical moment[…], the present is thereby always split, but split by prior violence and future possibility rather than simply by the nature of signification” (Freeman 9). Hauntology allows different moments in history to reach out, to haunt, to impose themselves onto the present: the past, forever lingering, and the many lost futures that violence has cut away, their unrealized potentials pressing back through time. Within the pages of these three texts, hauntology is constantly arriving into the world, through objects, bodies, and nature itself, forcing those bodies in the present to come to terms with the violent histories of the bodies that came before and after them.
The cover of Stephen Graham Jones's novel The Only Good Indians (2020) evokes the specter of Elk Head Woman
In The Only Good Indians, moments of hauntology leap out at the reader, slowly but surely queering the natural world by eroding the linear sense of time that the characters rely on. It happens in sharp moments of otherness and racist encounters, like when Ricky is being interviewed by the logging foreman in Minneapolis. A moment of hauntology throws Ricky backwards through time or, from another perspective, throws the past forward into the present: “When [the foreman] reached across the table to shake Ricky’s hand and look him in the eye while he did it, the modern world had fallen away for a long blink, and the two of them were standing in a canvas tent” (Jones 2).
Hauntology also appears in moments of recognition as well as alienation. Ricky describes moments with Gabe where the past presses onto them, until “it’d feel like he was holding a tomahawk in his hand. It’d feel like his face was painted in harsh crumbly blacks and whites, maybe a single finger-wide line of red on the right side” (Jones 7). As The Only Good Indians describes it, “The years can just fall away, man” (Jones 7). As Elk Head Woman brings vengeance and retribution out of the past, even the natural world begins to respond to such a haunting, turning a seemingly pristine and undisturbed nature into a space beyond chronological time.
At the end of The Only Good Indians, it is not Gabe or Ricky who faces Elk Head Woman, but Gabe’s daughter Denorah. In that chase, even time seems to bleed, giving way to “another world [with] skeletons all around her” (Jones 299). The violence of the past that created Elk Head Woman surges forwards in a hauntology that pierces the natural world. Life and death no longer exist along productive timelines, but surge forth into monstrous new expressions, ultimately allowing a clearer understanding between Denorah and Elk Head Woman.
This shift into a natural world with a ruptured sense of time can also be seen in VanderMeer’s Area X, where time coming out of joint produces whole new formations in nature. When The Biologist passes from the Southern Reach into Area X, she encounters the illusion of a pristinely preserved natural landscape full of flora and fauna, lacking only the presence of human beings, where clocks seem at first glance to tick along just the same as beyond the border. There is only a distant lighthouse and a bottomless dark pit, which the Biologist cannot help but think of as “the tower, which was not supposed to be there, plung[ing] into the Earth” (VanderMeer 1). However, as Timothy Morton warns in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of The World, “the abyss is not an empty container, but rather a surging crowd of beings” (Morton 80). That initial impression of Area X as something pristine and devoid of human elements falls away the further into Area X the narrative travels, revealing a queerer nature, and a queerer human presence. Eventually, Area X gathers enough queer time to reach a world where even reproduction is uncoupled from both linear time and heterosexuality, the Biologist becoming the parent of her strange duplicate, Ghost Bird.
As in the climax of Area X, VanderMeer’s nature reveals itself not as something pristine and atemporal and untouched. Instead, it recalls Morton’s argument that “there is no ‘pristine,’ no nature, only history” (Morton 58). The landscape reveals itself to be teeming with strange and mutated life, human and nonhuman alike, all enmeshed. Morton describes hyperobjects—entities/objects to which we remain too close to recognize as distinct—as “so massively distributed in time that they seem to taper off like a long street stretched into the distance. Time bends them and fattens them, the same way that an electromagnetic wave front shortens at its leading edge. Because we can't see to the end of them […] [h]yperobjects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them.” (Morton 55). For Morton, such hyperobjects include the biosphere of the Earth, or the specter of climate change, or music, or an oil spill, or a supernova. For VanderMeer, the strange and wild ecology of Area X is just such a hyperobject. Beginning as only “[a] splinter […] large as worlds” in the thumb of a queer lighthouse keeper named Saul, it grows to envelop a coastline, becoming a single object too large and too strange to be seen by the characters inside (VanderMeer 583).
With her body and mind infiltrated by contact with Area X and the rest of the expedition dead, The Biologist chooses to remain within Area X, to chase the passage of her vanished husband up the coast, deeper into the hyperobject. What returns to the world in her stead is a new identity, in a new body, who can call herself only the Ghost Bird.
Like Denorah facing Elk Head Woman in her father’s place, resolution in Area X is not possible for the characters who began the journey, but only to the people who were made and haunted by them. Denorah is not her father, and the Ghost Bird is not the Biologist, just as Frankenstein’s Monster can never be the many bodies he is stitched from.
As the borders of the hyperobject swell and expand to encompass more and more of the world, Ghost Bird’s re-entry into Area X reveals the extent of this queering of time. Finding her double’s former diaries reveals that as The Ghost Bird spent weeks in the world, many years passed within Area X. Re-entering Area X and its strange, moving, queerly queered time, she becomes a thing out of the distant past, a warped and fragmented memory, returning to her past self’s future, a doubling of body and nature. VanderMeer queers time by treating time within the hyperobject of Area X and time outside the hyperobject as two bodies out of sync. The Biologist and the Ghost bird become two alternative pasts and presents and futures, alternative presents, each haunting the other’s history, and alternative bodies, each representing divergent pasts and futures that can no longer be fulfilled.
This edition of the 1818 text of Frankenstein recalls the Monster's disparate, dissected origins
But as I stated above, not all hauntings are necessarily queer, so here we must turn towards the body of the monster itself, and the desire that the monster inhabits. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein throws the relationship between the monstrous and the body, and the body’s power to queer eroticism and relationality, into sharp relief. In the body of the Monster itself, we find a powerful queer hauntology, as the corpse pieces from which he is made comprise “a body that contains the history of bodies and of bodiliness and thus figures a gender and a sexuality that themselves write a history of genders and sexualities” (Freeman 103). the Monster’s body is, in this way, a cobbled-together history of desire and encounters, a body created out of the stitched together pieces of other bodies, whose erotic desires now all sit in a muddle of the canvas that is the flesh of this new creature. Alongside this erotic haunting, the Monster is a fusion of times and substances, an example of “agency [as] an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity” in which dead and inanimate matter force history into the present as the bodies of corpses are fused to create life (Bennett 31). His is both a queer creation story and a story signified by queer longing.
When Victor Frankenstein speaks of his goals, he does so expressly in terms of procreation, particularly nonhuman procreation. He proclaims: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve there” (Shelley 43). Indeed, the Monster considers themself to be not “even of the same nature as man,” but of a wholly differently gendered and sexed species (Shelley 111). Only by watching the cottagers does the monster recognize the idea of “the difference of sexes; and the birth of children” (Shelley 112). For the Monster, there is no cisfemale intervention in his creation, no heteronormative parenthood to be found. Victor is inceptor and progenitor; his is a queer creationism that eschews the demands of heterosexual reproduction.
In this way, the Monster finds a kinship with Area X’s Ghost Bird, who similarly comes into being with no clear creator save the Biologist. Though she carries no sexual history of her own, her body carries the history of gender and sexual encounter that she has inherited from her double, her “haunted twin” (VanderMeer 487). Similarly, Elk Head Woman contains her own doubling of origin, coming into being in the hybrid human/animal form both through natural creation and as a violent response to the men who brought her into being through violence. But while these bodies share contained queer origins, I think we can go further in this reading, by exploring the queerness suggested by the actions and desires of these monsters.
For these monstrous beings, even residual moments of seemingly heterosexual desire are inevitably queered. “You must create a female for me,” the Monster demands of his progenitor, “for whom I can live in the interchanges of sympathy for my being […] my companion will be of the same nature as myself (Shelley 137-139). On its surface, this might be read as Frankenstein relinquishing its queer potential: surrendering to an inevitable heterosexual destiny. After years in Area X, the Biologist has become something like a colossal whale with “many, many glowing eyes […] all across its body, a living constellation ripped from the night sky,” forever returning to an island where, transformed into an owl, her long-abandoned husband remains waiting for her companionship (VanderMeer 493). Caught in a moment of queer time, Elk Head Woman abandons her quest for vengeance in lieu of “The only thing [she’s] ever really wanted to do this whole time” (Jones 303): to try and protect the family she’d lost. Denorah reaches across the species divide, preventing her adopted second father from becoming “Just another hunter” (304), preventing that cycle of violence from looping once more, allowing an understanding to blossom.
The conclusion towards which hauntings and queering and transformations lead the bodies in these stories is not one of violence or vengeance or heteronormative coupling and normative reproduction, but a queer animality, a “genre of queer animacy [serving as] a modulation of life force” that might allow for states of togetherness where animacy has replaced previous hierarchies that “work to blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-animal-vegetable-mineral” (Chen 98). This deprioritizing of species and human/nonhuman divide, in favor of a lively animacy which does not distinguish between species in seeking queer companionship, is cut tragically and violently short in the pages of Frankenstein, but is finally reached by the end of The Only Good Indians, and centered all throughout Area X.
These narratives attest to Chen’s argument that “animacy itself can be queer,” as the distinctions and exceptionalism between differing modes of life and across time itself begin to slide away (Chen 98). Within these texts, Elk Head Woman and the Biologist’s fusions of human and nonhuman, the Monster’s fusions of living and dead, and fusions of past/present/future in all three texts all remain sites of this queer animacy that allows differing types of matter to mingle while troubling those binaries of living/dead, and natural/unnatural.
Queerness, with its breaking down of natural time and its creation of monstrous, hybrid bodies can be a path towards empathy and solidarity, companionship and compassion. Even the violent failure of this potentiality shows this way forward in these texts, for though the Monster is denied compassion and finds resolution in violence and tragedy, his first instinct is to try to understand human beings, those creatures not like himself, and then to find a being whose matter might understand his. Even in Area X, in which the nonhuman natural world is experienced as strange and hostile, resolution is found in understanding and empathy as Saul—a man who had refused to accept this queer hyperobject—finds himself at its center, rushing down into the tower and “elongat[ing] down the final stair, jump[ing] into the light” (VanderMeer 573). In the centre of that brightness queering everything, the materia of human and alien ecology might read and understand each other at last. This, I believe, is the promise inherent in queering the world: a chance to reach for a subjectivity and relationality that allows what was once untouchable, monstrous, and other to become an avenue for expression, for acceptance, and for understanding.
Works Cited
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, 2012.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Jones, Stephen Graham. The Only Good Indians: A Novel. Gallery/Saga Press, 2021.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Masterpiece Library Edition). Peter Pauper Press, 2023.
VanderMeer, Jeff. Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy. HarperCollins, 2015.