Speculative Flesh Ecologies: The Indistinction of Flesh in 21st century Speculative Fiction

Imagine a world where humans eat humans, plants eat people, pigs eat garbage, and meat is machine-grown; these are some of the fleshy interactions imagined by speculative fiction writers. These fleshy interactions ask us what it means to consider ourselves—humans, animals, plants, things, and cultured beings—as flesh and what kinds of ontological and ethical possibilities emerge when we reconsider what it means to both be and eat flesh. These ontological and ethical possibilities of flesh, I suggest, operate within speculative flesh ecologies; a space for humans to explore and rethink the distinctions drawn between themselves and other nonhumans. The speculative flesh ecologies presented in twenty-first century speculative fiction engage with contemporary issues such as animal agriculture, deforestation, waste pollution, and “techno-fixes,” in order to explore new ways of living with one another in times of heightened ecological uncertainty. Might the solution to the ongoing threats to our species ecologies come from embracing the position of indistinction between humans and nonhumans? Building on Matthew Calarco’s indistinction approach, I bring together other theoretical perspectives—Michael Marder’s grafts, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra—in order to push indistinction into new directions. When used as a framework to explore speculative fiction, this theoretical archive creates a cohesive argument for the expansive ontological and ethical possibilities of speculative flesh ecologies. I argue that the speculative flesh ecologies I explore in twenty-first century speculative fiction encourage us to adopt an indistinct approach to multi-species communities.
Chapter One, ‘“We Wouldn’t Ever Eat Anybody, Would We?”: Human/Animal Flesh and Indistinction in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008),’ interrogates the distinction between humans and animals, by using Calarco’s indistinction approach to explore narratives of human flesh consumption and what I term the “ideology of distinction.” Chapter Two, ‘“I Gave Them Fruit”: Plant Flesh and Grafts in Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018),’ develops the ontological and ethical indistinctions explored through human and animal flesh in chapter one. Using Michael Marder’s work on plants—specifically Grafts—alongside Calarco’s indistinction approach, this chapter pushes indistinction into botanical territories to unearth how we can begin to see that “we are also like plants." Chapter Three, ‘“The Pigs Ate Everything”: Thing Flesh and Vital Materialism in Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs (2019) and Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011),’ explores the concept of “thing flesh,” expanding chapter two’s focus on multi-species communication and grappling with moments of seemingly pernicious indistinction. This chapter uses Jane Bennett’s vital materialist approach to make sense of the most disparate ontological interactions portrayed in these texts, exploring the affective and transformative power of thing flesh and the indistinct possibilities that arise from opening ourselves up to the power of thing flesh. Finally, Chapter Four, ‘“Actual Real Proper Meat”: Cultured Flesh and Simulacra in Mat Blackwell’s Beef (2016) and Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks’ (2017),’ explores the idea of cultured flesh as real meat. This chapter develops chapter three’s exploration of animals-as-thing flesh, by complicating the ontological distinctions between fleshy beings and their material traces, between actual animals and cultured flesh. I collate Baudrillard’s work on the real, animals, flesh, and science fiction, and read it alongside Calarco’s indistinction approach, in order to explore the realness of cultured flesh’s "real" meat.