ABSTRACT
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, narratives of infection remind academic and general readers that human separateness from the biosphere was always delusory. Infections and narratives thereof trouble the ‘I’/’not-I’ distinction on which various humanisms depend. For such ideologies, the breakdown of these bodily and social boundaries can evoke horror, while for posthumanism, these distinctions themselves can become objects of critique. This chapter examines these ideas as they are found in Charles Burns’ graphic novel, Black Hole (1995; 2005), which details the transformation of the lives of its teenage characters in mid-1970s Seattle, following infection by a mutagenic pathogen known as the Bug. Post-infection, the teens’ social claustrophobia is thrown into relief by what this study terms the “productive abject”: the initially revolting integration of that which subverts the self/other distinction, thereby critically reclassifying the teens’ lifeworlds. Burns’ art style literalizes the continuity between human and non-human bodies, deconstructing the anthropocentrism which enables ecological exploitation. This chapter also situates Burns’ characters amid the aesthetic and ontological registers of the weird and the eerie (Fisher 2016). Finally, this chapter analyzes the character of Eliza, whose playful blurring of boundaries recalls Haraway’s cyborg as a figure of utopian posthumanism.
