Post-apocalyptic futures often imagine horrors of the human flesh, bodies disfigured and deformed by human war, radiation, bio-weapons, and pollution. Post-apocalyptic SF often envisions bodily deformity as a symbol of human degradation, of loss. Apocalyptic imaginings are enwrapped in the cultural configuration of ableism and the reading of diverse bodies and a range of ability differing from that taken as “normative” as symbols of ‘what has gone in the world’.
Camille Alexa’s “All Them Pretty Babies” imagines two futures living side by side: the normative city-dwellers who enforce medical control and the hegemony of the ‘normal’ body even as that body is proving unable to survive and reproduce, and the mutated, deformed hillside-dwellers who try to find ways for diverse body types to interact with each other, though constantly in danger of government censor in the form of eugenic-motivated extermination.
Esme, a woman who dwells among the polluted hillsides, lives as part of a community that has begun to create a normative-resistant social text. Trained by a woman who has become a nanny to the biologically Othered, New Mama, Esme defines beauty as difference from the mundane normalcy of the human body that is preferred by most of society. She sees beauty in extra eyes, legs, arms, and conjoined bodies. She is dismayed that she is so boring, with only two legs, two arms, and two eyes, and considers herself ugly for only having two legs, two arms, and two eyes. Her reconfiguration of ideals of beauty imagines a possibility of a resistant bodily text that counters government control and the medicalised body that stagnates humanity’s future.
Camille Alexa’s regulation-resistant bodies challenge notions of hegemonic normalcy that privilege limited ideals of beauty and ability.
About the presenterDerek Newman-Stille
Derek Newman-Stille (they/them) is a disabled, queer, nonbinary, fat femme activist, author, artist, academic, and editor. They teach at Trent University where they examine representations of disability in Canadian speculative fiction. They have published in academic fora such as Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Creative Teamwork: Developing Rapid, Site-Switching Ethnography, The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, The Canadian Fantastic in Focus, and Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings.