After Medusa

Eva Hayward

Corals are among the largest living organisms, containing the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, and serving as global sources of carbon and nitrogen fixation (conversion). Changes in water temperature, seawater salinity, and overexposure of toxicity have resulted in coral bleaching, the expelling of photosynthetic zooxanthellae (plant-based parts of coral), which result in the starving of the animal. On January 5, 2017, the United Nations Environment Program reported the probable extinction of corals within 50 years. Focused on coral bleaching, this paper turns to Ranjana Khanna’s provocation that Freud’s psychoanalytic figure of Medusa (the mythic gorgon whose blood bound with seaweed to create corals—members of the phylum Cnidaria are still named after her—and gave the “Red Sea” its name) describes not only the threat of sexual difference, but also racial difference (Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, 2003). In describing colonization, Khanna argues that the threat of castration is marked equally by the position of women (what Freud referred to as “a dark continent”) and Africa (the colonial context of Freud’s psychoanalysis). Freud’s conflation of “primitivism” with women reveals not just the racial unconscious of psychoanalysis, but also how the colonial scene served as both “the threat of castration by the terrifying Medusa that is Africa” and its disavowal through racial violence. This paper asks: How might we conceptualize coral bleaching as an effect of colonial racism? What is the position of racial/sexual difference in ecological catastrophe? Can psychoanalysis augment and complicate environmental discourse?

Eva Hayward is an anti-disciplinary scholar coming out of the History of Consciousness tradition of the University of California at Santa Cruz (Ph.D. 2008). Her training is in the history of science, film and art history, and psychoanalytic semiotics, attentive to the persistence of sexuality and aesthetics in the structuring of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She was an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona where she joined the Transgender Studies Initiative (2014). She has also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Cincinnati. A Fulbright Scholar (Austria, 2019), she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and Uppsala University.  

Body/Litmus

Megan Hayes

A person deeply attuned to their marine ecology can gauge salinity by submerging their finger into ocean water and tasting it. That same taste, however, will not disclose the water’s pH. A logarithmic scale indicating the acidity or alkalinity of a substance, pH is most often rendered visible—which is to say available to the senses—using the respective red and blue hues of litmus paper. Despite the fact that the ocean has over the past two hundred years of industrialisation become twenty-five percent more acidic, dropping from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1, it is a shift to which our senses, ostensibly, are not attuned. Expressing as ecological corrosion, ocean acidification can only be sensed in its movements through marine bodies and technologies submerged in their medium. It is extremely difficult to contain or abstract acidification in both the lab and the field which makes the mapping, and the epistemological grasping, of planetary pH a slippery business. Drawing from Critical Indigenous Studies, Pacific Islander Studies, and Postcolonial and Feminist STS, this paper will explore how ocean acidification—an archive of two centuries worth of carbonic detritus from a planet carved out as a modernist grid for colonial empire and global capital—evades the colonial impulses of capture and abstraction embedded in scientific practice. At the same time, it will consider how the ocean allows its chemistry to be sensed and made sense of through multispecies relation at the edge of land and sea, such as by those with long term and intergenerational knowledge of the organisms on a particular shoreline. In this reading, the ocean rears as an agent pushing against the limits of what counts as thinkable or knowable in dominant fields of the sensible.

Megan Hayes is a researcher, visual artist, and settler-Australian from Ngunnawal Country, currently based in Oregon. Her research interests lie at the interstices of the environmental humanities, marine science, and cultural anthropology, and are informed by undergraduate studies in Photography and Situated Media at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a Research Master’s in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral research explores ocean acidification as chemical process, planetary boundary, and cultural object as it seeps between bodies in both the lab and the field of the Coral Sea region.