The Vitals: Crochet and creative writing as posthuman praxis

As the cascading social and environmental crises of the Anthropocene deepen, a fundamental re-imagining of what it means to be human is taking place. The transcendent Human subject, possessed of a mind separate from matter, is now under sustained critique. Posthumanist thought recasts the human self as emergent, multiple and entangled with a material world of agency and vitality. Posthumanist praxis seeks to engage with the world in ways that decentre the Human subject and elevate the importance of the more-than-human world. This thesis represents the results of doctoral research into posthuman storytelling, specifically through a combination of an embodied handicraft (in this case crochet) with the more cerebral act of creative writing. My thesis is presented in two parts: a novel and an exegesis. Part One, The Vitals, takes an established literary genre, the cancer memoir, and refashions it as a posthuman tale. Instead of a unified first-person narrator, this story has multiple more-than human narrators: the cancer-affected organs deep within a woman’s guts. It is a telling that inverts and troubles the usual subject-object relations between a woman and “her” body. Part Two, The Exegesis, reveals the powerful contribution of the humble practice of crochet in cocreating a posthuman story. A close reading of the text of the novel shows how creative writing methods were used to take a posthumanist sensibility, honed through crochet, to a wider audience through a work of publishable literary fiction.