The essays on this page are a selection of work I completed during my time in the Master’s in English Studies program at Arizona State University. They showcase my burgeoning scholarly identity and provide a foundation for my future research, showing how I approached my coursework for the master’s program thematically. Each essay considers a topic either directly addressing or parallel to my research interests. In approaching the topics of disability, the environmental humanities, science fiction, magical realism, and feminism, my work here analyzes how our Western Humanist legacies affect contemporary social and physical environments, and provides thoughts on how we may proceed into the Anthropocene future.
Becoming-Ocean: Posthumanism, the Blue Humanities, and Disability
This essay was written for Dr. Jason Bryant’s English 504: Posthumanism course and considers how Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist conception of the monistic, relational zoe provides a unique way to interpret our connection to Earth’s oceans. In taking a syncretic approach that combines the blue humanities, disability studies, and posthumanism, I contemplate how the ocean may work as a defamiliarizing agent to take our thinking beyond the anthropocentric Humanist hierarchy and towards an understanding of the assemblages that make up, and give legitimacy to, all forms of life. This essay establishes my work as a disability studies/environmental humanities scholar and provides a snapshot of my current research interests.
“Oily Bodies”: Petrocultures and Disability
In this essay, written for Dr. Joni Adamson’s course English 598: Environmental Humanities, I examine the intersection between petrocultures and disability. To do this, I analyze ExxonMobil’s 2014 commercial “Energy Lives Here: Anthem” and Brenda Longfellow and Glenn Richards’ 2013 interactive documentary Offshore, arguing that both films exemplify the tendency for petroculture rhetoric to concretize oil by associating it with bodies. In doing so, petrocultures reinforce potentially harmful capitalist values of progress and energy. I presented a version of this paper at the 2022 University of Toronto Graduate English Association Conference, Exhaust(ion). As the first graduate paper I completed, this essay shows the origin of my interests in the intersection between disability studies and the environmental humanities.
Humanizing the Future: Riddles and Metaphorism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Novel The Ministry for the Future
This essay was written for Dr. Jason Bryant’s course English 504: Posthumanism and takes a literary analysis approach to the questions of our Anthropocene future. I analyze Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future from the lens of Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) theory of alien phenomenology, which considers the perception of nonhuman objects. By linking the Anglo-Saxon riddles in Robinson’s novel with Bogost’s concept of metaphorism, I argue that thing-oriented literature provides an opportunity to reinterpret our anthropocentric relations to the world. This essay shows my approach to more theoretically-driven research and how I use a focus on materiality to link philosophy with literary and physical solutions to our Anthropocene situation.
Power and Place: Magical Realism as Feminist Resistance in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange
In this essay, written for Dr. Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s course English 560: Magical Realism, I take a detour from my environmental humanities work to analyze Ana Castillo’s novel So Far from God and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange as works of feminist resistance. I argue that both authors use a magical realist vision of “hyper domesticity” to subvert traditional roles of women and the domestic sphere and complicate colonial cultural hegemonies. While not directly connected to my research interests, this essay does consider sense of place, globalization, and colonial legacies, showing how the systems of the Anthropocene touch all facets of contemporary life. The paper’s conclusion also suggests how this essay may provide a foundation for future research into the connection between feminism, disability, and literary representations of the domestic sphere.
Kathleen Swain 