Care and Disposable Bodies

Abstract

Abstract Waste is matter that does not seem to require care, except when it threatens the health or survival of “legitimate” humans. As a result, caring for discarded matter can be a form of resistance in the most basic sense, a refusal to abide by sociocultural norms of affective attention and ethical concern. Chapter 3 explores the ethical and political significance of disposable matter and what can happen when one treats waste as worthy of care. In dialogue with waste and discard studies, queer animacies, Indigenous and critical race studies, the chapter analyzes two novels—Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake—that imagine biotechnological bodies engineered for extraction and disposal. These texts explore the consequences of caring for and about discarded bodies, highlighting the political significance of posthuman care as a disturbance of the humanist valuations that perpetuate colonial hierarchies of matter.