Tracy Sorensen
Can subaltern organs speak?
Symposium presentation 2pm Thurs Dec 8
The ecological crises confronting the world today are supported by a way of viewing the material substance of the world as both infinitely exploitable and lacking in agency and value of its own. This way of seeing the world is, in turn, supported by the Cartesian mind/body split which places the mind closer to heaven (which matters the most) and the body closer to the earth (which matters least). In my creative practice research, I am interested in finding ways to represent the world differently: in which agency and subjectivity are distributed across the material world rather than focused on the individual, unified, transcendent, human subject. My current novel-in-progress is a cancer memoir narrated by a woman’s abdominal organs: the liver, spleen, intestines, and so on. These organs occupy the unseen and normally ignored “crevices” of the body. In this 20 minute slide presentation featuring images of crocheted abdominal organs, I will argue that “my” organs can be viewed as subaltern figures. Like colonial subalterns (Spivak, 2015) their agency is dismissed or unaccounted for, and yet they are central, essential players in our world/s. I will show how my novel radically decenters the transcendent human subject (“me”) in favour of a conception of “myself” as a dynamic fleet or ecosystem in which agency is distributed and lively across interconnected human and more-than-human entities.
Ref: Spivak, G. C. (2015). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory (pp. 66-111). Routledge.
Tracy Sorensen is a novelist, sessional academic and current PhD candidate at Charles Sturt University. Her research interests include communications and the more-than-human world. Her research methodology blends crochet with writing. She was the 2020 Charles Perkins Centre Writer in Residence. Her novel The Vitals, a cancer memoir from the point of view of the affected abdominal organs, will be published by Picador/Pan Macmillan in 2023.
