Body Horror and the Death of Life
Beneath the world-destroying violence of male dominion, a morbid terror churns. Man’s is a Kingdom of Fear, and madness reigns, for what has men so spooked is something they cannot run from: their own bodies. The ruling fathers have historically reacted to this predicament by scorning biological material reality and chasing after the consolations of domination, delusional transcendence, and, when desperation sets in, revenge against the rejected real world. Man Against Being traces body horror as the through line that unifies manmade society’s hallmark oppressions and atrocities. Moving from the mind/body separation that is patriarchal doctrine’s starting point to the brutal subjugation of all creatures scapegoated as bad bodies so men can play at being pure minds, from ‘born in the wrong body’ to the transhumanists' dreamt-of ascent into bodiless virtuality. Drawing on a holistic ecofeminist analysis of male dominion’s cascading devastations, Aurora Linnea argues with poetic insight that, if men are determined to do away with bodies and biological life, the antidote to patriarchy’s apocalyptic charter must necessarily involve a return to the flesh and blood of matter, a reintegration of body and mind and living earth.