『유독한 신체』에 드러난 수전 안토네타의 신체의 정치학

Abstract

As an environmental memoir, Body Toxic records the author Susanne Antonetta’s struggle to survive historically sedimented environmental violence while suffering from many diseases such as multiple pregnancy, miscarriage, radiation-induced tumor, double uterus, etc. caused by her exposure to nuclear waste and pesticides. Reading the traces of environmental violence inscribed on her own memory and body, the memoir is a corporeal text where not only the traditional binary oppositions of human and nature, subject and object, and memory and body are deconsturcted, but also is problematized the bifurcated and commonsensical patterns of thought between ‘objective’ scientific knowledge and social discourses. Antonetta’s textual politics departs from the traditional memoir narrative as well as from the conventional novelistic narrative that are invested in the narrator/protagonist’s moral and subjective journey. Instead, it tries to construct, on the axis of trans-corporeality, an allegorical map on the ‘insignificant’ characters, stories, matters whose presence cannot be denied by the current capitalistic regime’s discursive dominance. Through the allegorical narrative strategy, this material memoir carves out the space of the new common for those whose places are constantly ruinated by the dominant social ideology.