After Queer, After Humanism Liveblog 4

Mica Hilson, “Cuckoos of the World, Unite!”
Cuckoo figured in nature and science writing as a welfare cheat, grifter, and queer child.
Nature writing is always ideological.
Focus on the selfish gene. Selfish Dawkins-ism. It is heteronormative. Obsessed with lines: keeping subjects in line to keep the family in line.
Using systems theory to reframe the cuckoo's relationship with its host.
Heathcliff as cuckoo. The good that cuckoos can bring to an ecosystem.
The boy as a toxic gift. Affective bond between cuckoo and host. Wuthering Heights as relic of dying system. Inheritance of family lineage is more like a closed loop. The seeming instability was ultimately a gift to the social system.

Megan Fernandez, “Transgenic Poetics.”
Idea of seeing everything. “We halved them because we could” (Matthea Harvey)
Judith Roof, my fantastic new chair, The Poetics of DNA.
fascination with the molecule as an agent of mutation
gene as mythical agent of selfishness
terrorist discourse
transgenic changes our aesthetic categories: changing ideas about freedom, pleasure, comfort
to consider how the making of new creatures allows us to assign new affects
becoming creaturely as part of transgenics
vitalism: genomic diversity and uncertainty
Haraway: mixochrondra paradoxa that have loads of different types of DNA
also a way to integrate OOO (aha!)
centaurs, breeding, superstition, witches: the transgenic is everywhere!
Eleni Sikelanos, Body Clock: an account of her pregnancy
2009 modification of marmosets
Sikelanos: nonlinear engagement in science and political language
kinship between words
“corpsicle” (nice word)
“genotype stomping on phenotype”