Consider the following passages from the Chen:
A toxin threatens, but it also beckons. It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death. A toxin requires an object against which its threat operates; this threatened object is an animate object — hence potentially also a kind of subject — whose “natural defenses” will be put to the test, in detection, in “fighting off,” and finally in submission and absorption. (265)
Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion[. . .] (266)
1. Considering Chen's definition of "toxin," what are the toxins in John Lyly's Gallathea? Maybe a more appropriate question would be who are the toxins?
What are the roles of the citizens, the Danes, and the gods in creating a society that fears toxins? How do the Danes enact toxicity? Can the Danes be considered a racialized, toxic other?
2. Are Gallathea and Phillida toxins? Remember that the sacrifice to the Agar must be "the fairest and chasest virgin in all the country," which appears to fall under the requirements of Chen's "new kind of purity" (266), since outward beauty and sexual absistence can be see as manifestations of purity and innocence.
View the following clip:
3. How does toxicity function according to temporality? Once intoxicated, is a subject or object always toxic? This is, at least, the running joke in Monsters, Inc., in which the character "George Sanderson" is constantly subjected to new detoxifying regiments. If Gallathea and Phillida are toxic, when did they become toxic? Does their impending gender/sex transformation at the end of the play detoxify them? Consider the following passage from Chen: "Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives" (281-82).
4. The Rafe/Robin/Dick subplot is often ignored among critics and scholars, for various reasons. Even though the subplot appears to be a low-brow, simple farce that makes fun of dimwitted servants, some of the brothers health is endangered as they work for different masters, which can be seen as an early modern echo (if we can echo back in time) of the Chinese workers who are exposed to lead paint. Chen says of the Western concern (or lack thereof) for these workers: "the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves" (269). Can these servant brothers be compared to the Chinese workers? Does the play encourage us to pity or sympathize with the servant brothers, or are the just visible enough for "blame," but not enough for "the ring of sympathetic concern"?
2. Are Gallathea and Phillida toxins? Remember that the sacrifice to the Agar must be "the fairest and chasest virgin in all the country," which appears to fall under the requirements of Chen's "new kind of purity" (266), since outward beauty and sexual absistence can be see as manifestations of purity and innocence.
View the following clip:
3. How does toxicity function according to temporality? Once intoxicated, is a subject or object always toxic? This is, at least, the running joke in Monsters, Inc., in which the character "George Sanderson" is constantly subjected to new detoxifying regiments. If Gallathea and Phillida are toxic, when did they become toxic? Does their impending gender/sex transformation at the end of the play detoxify them? Consider the following passage from Chen: "Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives" (281-82).
4. The Rafe/Robin/Dick subplot is often ignored among critics and scholars, for various reasons. Even though the subplot appears to be a low-brow, simple farce that makes fun of dimwitted servants, some of the brothers health is endangered as they work for different masters, which can be seen as an early modern echo (if we can echo back in time) of the Chinese workers who are exposed to lead paint. Chen says of the Western concern (or lack thereof) for these workers: "the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves" (269). Can these servant brothers be compared to the Chinese workers? Does the play encourage us to pity or sympathize with the servant brothers, or are the just visible enough for "blame," but not enough for "the ring of sympathetic concern"?
I haven't read "Gallathea," but I feel like I have a tenuous grasp from reading your posts and hearing you speak about it these past weeks, so perhaps I can attempt to answer question 1 and 2? You ask, "Considering Chen's definition of "toxin," what are the toxins in John Lyly's Gallathea? Maybe a more appropriate question would be who are the toxins?" You then ask if perhaps Gallathea and Phillida are toxins, but also compare them to Chen's purity. I am wondering if maybe we want to read into the gendered implications of their relationship to suggest that their homosocial (homosexual? Do they ever have sex as two women in the text?) relationship is the toxicity that poses a threat to society, and that by transforming them into a heterosexual normative couple they are redeemed as healthy bodies because they can participate in the heterosexual and (supposedly) therefore reproductive future? This might be a stretch...thoughts?
ReplyDeleteYour inclusion of Monsters, Inc. here is fantastic--it makes me think of even more nuances in the realm of toxicities. For instance, George Sanderson is continuously "outed" as toxic by other workers until (if I remember correctly, it's been a while) he violently resists his own toxification by gagging the person who tries calling out the code for toxicity towards the end of the film. We get a lot about toxicities in Chen, but not quite as much about the ways in which people can or do resist those classifications, or if that's really possible. What changes for George Sanderson, after all, is the refiguring of the toxicity (human objects/contact) until it is no longer toxic, not necessarily the refiguring of his own intoxicated body.
ReplyDeleteWow, I love this whole Monsters, Inc. discussion! Cassie, I think you're totally right that George Sanderson provides a good example for thinking through the question of resistance and the refiguring of toxicity. Also, I'm just a huge fan of the movie.
DeleteIt's all fun and games until somebody gets tubesockulosis.
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