“Pain in someone else’s body”: Plural Subjectivity in Stargate SG-1
K. M. Ferebee
Publication: Volume 3 Issue 4
Abstract
Lennard Davis, in his work on visualizing the disabled body, argues that at root the body is inherently and always already fragmented. The unified “whole body” is, therefore, hallucinatory in nature—an imaginary figure through which the body’s multiplicity is repressed. There is much in this view that is consonant with posthumanism, which so often seeks to destabilize the “whole” and singular one in favor of the multiple, the fragmentary, and the hybrid. Yet despite these considerations of the body as fragmentary, little attention has been paid to the value of considering the body not only as fragmentary, but also as potential fragment. What might we learn by rejecting anthropocentric assumptions about the body-mind’s inherent completeness, and exploring the radically plural ontologies offered by visions of shared, joint, or group body-minds? This paper turns to science fiction as a source of such visions, considering depictions of symbiotic and hive minds through the non-traditional models of ontology and agency. While science fiction has traditionally represented plural being as a troubling and fearful injury to wholeness, this paper aims to highlight the symbiotic Tok’ra of television series Stargate SG-1 as a model of excess being that not only challenges the naturalization of the “complete” body, but also asks us to interrogate presumed boundaries between self and other.
Keywords: Plural Subjectivity, Phantomatic Ontology, Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Stargate SG-1, Disability Studies, Environmental Humanities
K.M. Ferebee (kmferebee@gmail.com) is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at The American University of Afghanistan, located in Kabul, Afghanistan. She holds a PhD in English from The Ohio State University, where her research focused on posthumanism and, specifically, on narratives of contamination in literatures of the Anthropocene. Her current work involves the rhetoric of systemic environmental collapse, from Chernobyl to COVID-19. She divides her time between Kabul and London.