Dreams of a Therapeutic Planet: (Dis)entangling Narratives of Post-Human Care in Anglo-American Speculative Literature

Abstract

“Dreams of a Therapeutic Planet” draws on psychoanalytic theory, intersectional gender and sexuality studies, radical Black theorizing, and ecocriticism to investigate how readers are made aware of and feel trans-species, matrixial trans-subjectivity through speculative literature and what creative and ethical practices of care ensue from these aesthetic experiences. I argue that select Romantic-era and contemporary Anglo-American eco-speculative writers analogously construct defamiliarizing, post-Human narratives and models of quotidian practices of care to foreground the planetary-scale significance of the erotic ecologies of diverse human psychosocial lifecycles. I show how the texts in this study move toward the theoretical, aesthetic, and narrative convergence of ecology and psychosexuality as a viable other-worldly site of psychoanalytic care. That is, “Dreams of a Therapeutic Planet” explores how Anglo-American speculative writers focus on scenes of post-Human caregiving between non/human characters to argue that these wildly caring, creaturely m/other figures (dis)entangle the un/conscious thinking and feeling of both adult characters and undeveloped/immature presubjects (i.e., literal and figurative children & newborns) as well as the actual readers who identify with such protagonists. My project proposes that particular articulations of Anglo-American eco-literary speculation explore and enact the revitalization of the wild and matrixial qualities of mind that have been long repressed, denied, and/or foreclosed by the anti-Black, biophobic, and phallocentric logics, narratives, and aesthetics of “monohumanist Man2,” to invoke Sylvia Wynter’s formulation. As cultural responses to the Romantic Anthropocene, to use a conceptualization inspired by Kate Rigby’s work, I argue that my archive of texts together construct an aesthetic of wonder-full wildness for their post-Human, transformational quest narratives that trace the development of presubjects into matrixial trans-subjects. Matrixial trans-subjects are non/human entities capable of approaching the unknown in the self and other in a mode of “positive” epistemophilic wonder. Thinking with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and bell hooks, respectively, gives me insight into how these matrixial figures also engage with m/other natures via the related ethical praxis of “revolutionary mothering” within “homeplaces” of interdependency that I identify in these texts as scenes of “developmental entanglements of care.” I therefore show how these authors speculate about the developmental mechanisms and aesthetic forms behind the cultivation of this post-Human subjectivity that “is always-already full of other beings and ways of being,” to call on L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy’s words. Overall, I show how these Romantic eco-speculative writers imagine the post-Human mind as potentially creatively equipped with and enriched by the intersubjective, interspecies, and trans-species psychological capacities for care/curiosity/concern, dialogic communication, and mutual transformation—psychic modes of approaching the self and other that exist in both conscious/cognitive and unconscious dimensions. My argument shows how this matrixial aesthetic of developmental entanglements of care manifests in representations of intersubjective sites, processes, and practices that might be said to effect the green and blue “dreams of a therapeutic planet.