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Paper short abstract

Mutated corporealities within toxic water environment in Jack Conner’s The Atomic Sea, narrating a radiation-altered world, are studied via embodied radiation aesthetics for envisioning transformed bodies as liminal ‘assemblages’ (ecological, technological, and organic) within irradiated interstice.

Paper long abstract

The literary imaginaries of mutated corporealities within toxic water environment can be decoded via the concept of ‘interstice’ (Yergeau 2018), describing in-between spaces, where identities, embodiments, and environments meet one another. The presentation addresses Jack Conner’s The Atomic Sea (2014), depicting a radiation-altered world with interspecies entanglement, where the protagonists’ physical and psychological adaptation to the irradiated water environment exemplifies the posthuman subject’s ‘relational, embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity.’ (Braidotti 2018) The paper emphasizes that Conner’s irradiated environment creates forms, challenging the ‘collapse of distinctions between human and aquatic (benthic) life’ (Peters & Steinberg 2015) and making visible ‘the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory […] work of […] ‘crip technoscience’ (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019). This highlights how the mutated body becomes simultaneously a critique and a product of environmental crisis, where these transformed/mutated figures are not simply metaphors, but material realities, which dramatize bodies as liminal ‘assemblages’ (ecological, technological, and organic). Narrating mutated bodies’ refusal to return to any so-called normal state as the embodiment of ‘crip temporality’ (Chen et al. 2023), Conner’s novel outlines the productive disruption of fixed categorical boundaries, representing disabled, hybrid, and aquatic forms not as mere aberrations, but as dynamic sites of critical possibility. With the appeal to ‘embodied radiation aesthetics’ (Eswine 2018; Lütticken 2019), nuclear technoaesthetics (Masco 2004), ‘slow hope’ (Mauch 2018) and nuclear criticism (Salleh 2011; Mellin 2022), such envisioning the novel’s mutated/irradiated hybrid humans, genetically altered beings, contributes to debates about challenging human exceptionalism and destabilizing anthropocentric boundaries within toxic environments.