Em Mcavan
Biographic Data
| ID | 118615 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Em Mcavan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Em |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcavan |
| SIGNATURE | MCAVAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-4524-3032 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Membrane: A poetics of the border
In this paper, I use the figure of the membrane as a mediating presence between inside and outside that helps to regulate the self against environmental toxicity. Drawing on the biological theory of Lynn Sargulis and Dorian Sagan, Didier Anzieu's theory of the Skin Ego and Ted Chiang's short story ‘The Story of Your Life’, I trace the appearance of the membrane as a form of material ecocriticism across texts, genres and bodies
Off the Clock
The Digital Tech Broligarchy’s Interest in Left-Wing Science Fiction: A Critical Reading of the Culture of Techno-Libertarianism
A slew of recent articles has asked what the connection might be between right-wing libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires and left-wing science fiction, especially the fiction of Iain M. Banks, the declared reading preference of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman. Bank’s Culture novels create a Rococo utopia that justifies social dislocation and political authoritarianism in the present, licensing and legitimating it under th…
Theses on the Future History of Trans People: On Trans Messianism
Subaltern discomfort: A Phenomenology of the Air-Conditioner in the Age of Climate (In)justice
In this paper, I use the figure of the air-conditioner to get at the bifurcated issues of access to comfort in the Anthropocene. I think through the phenomenological relations to the air-conditioner, using as my archive Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning novel The White Tiger. I put forth the theory of what I call subaltern discomfort, arguing that who gets to be comfortable, and why, I argue, is a matter of increasing importance as the climate warms…
The other vow: Affirmative Denial in Kafka, Shakespeare and Kol Nidrei
In this paper, I discuss what I call ‘the other vow’, a vow that undoes all others. Interweaving an aphorism from Kafka, Juliet’s speech from Romeo & Juliet, and the Jewish liturgical passage Kol Nidrei, I argue that we might find ways to inhabit language differently in the other vow – not the God of the name, or the God of the father, but rather a relation to the other to be otherwise. Instead, we might practice an affirmative denial and collect…
Flotsam: A Theory of Waste in the Anthropocene
In this article, I propose the concept of flotsam -waste washed-up or discarded in water -as a means of making sense of the pollution of the Anthropocene. Using examples taken from science fiction, notably that of J.G. Ballard's novel The Drought , I suggest that flotsam (and jetsam) embody a capitalist logic in the Anthropocene in which potentially any being, human or non-human, and any thing, can become waste in a capitalist economy built on ca…
The catastrophe of the face: Ethics, Deconstruction, Plasticity
In this paper, I discuss what I call the ‘catastrophe of the face’. I use the plays of Samuel Beckett, as well as deconstructive theories from Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Catherine Malabou, as a lens through which to see contemporary issues about the face. Arguing that the face is marked by plasticity, I trace a double-movement of the face, of disappearance-in-appearance in facial recognition software and appearance-in-disappearance in …
I Just Care so Much About the Koalas: On Grief, Value and Ethical Response to Non-Human Others in the Anthropocene
In this article, using the example of koalas in the 2019–20 bushfires, I argue that our embodied encounters with animals are conditioned by an ethical address that can be found in and outside of language, which demands a fostering of life which must be environmental as well as physical. What we mourn and what we do not mourn is itself a hierarchically imbalanced proposition.3 Falconer has noted the disappearance of the once-ubiquitous bogong moth…
On the reprieve: Deconstructive ethics and Primo Levi's 'Moments of Reprieve
In this article, I discuss Primo Levi’s Holocaust survivor testimonies in Moments of Reprieve, arguing that these stories illuminate a concept I term ‘the reprieve’. Using the reprieve as an undecidable word I argue that the reprieve is a moment of humanisation in the camps in which our inherent responsibility for one another becomes clear. Though it does not offer freedom or salvation, it does allow for a moment of loosening in the midst of repr…
Frankenstein Redux: Posthuman Monsters in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein is a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic text Frankenstein that profoundly challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day, by drawing on posthuman ideas about the constitution of the self. In this novel, Winterson portrays various forms of ‘monsters’ such as AI, lifelike sex dolls and transgender embodiment. Drawing on both Frankenstein as a text and the infamous…
The Postmodern Sacred
I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through t…
Paranoia inSpook Country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror
After September 11, American writer William Gibson turned from the science fiction with which he had made his name to the realistic. Gibson’s recent novel Spook Country turns towards GPS technology and its potential to track terrorists and containers to any point of the globe, using it as an entry into a post‐9/11 milieu in which private companies are not so easily distinguished from the government. Spook Country presents a version of what Fredri…
I Just Care so Much About the Koalas: On Grief, Value and Ethical Response to Non-Human Others in the Anthropocene
In this article, using the example of koalas in the 2019–20 bushfires, I argue that our embodied encounters with animals are conditioned by an ethical address that can be found in and outside of language, which demands a fostering of life which must be environmental as well as physical. What we mourn and what we do not mourn is itself a hierarchically imbalanced proposition.3 Falconer has noted the disappearance of the once-ubiquitous bogong moth…
The Postmodern Sacred
I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through t…
Paranoia inSpook Country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror
After September 11, American writer William Gibson turned from the science fiction with which he had made his name to the realistic. Gibson’s recent novel Spook Country turns towards GPS technology and its potential to track terrorists and containers to any point of the globe, using it as an entry into a post‐9/11 milieu in which private companies are not so easily distinguished from the government. Spook Country presents a version of what Fredri…
The Postmodern Sacred
I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through t…
Paranoia inSpook Country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror
After September 11, American writer William Gibson turned from the science fiction with which he had made his name to the realistic. Gibson’s recent novel Spook Country turns towards GPS technology and its potential to track terrorists and containers to any point of the globe, using it as an entry into a post‐9/11 milieu in which private companies are not so easily distinguished from the government. Spook Country presents a version of what Fredri…
Frankenstein Redux: Posthuman Monsters in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein is a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic text Frankenstein that profoundly challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day, by drawing on posthuman ideas about the constitution of the self. In this novel, Winterson portrays various forms of ‘monsters’ such as AI, lifelike sex dolls and transgender embodiment. Drawing on both Frankenstein as a text and the infamous…
On the reprieve: Deconstructive ethics and Primo Levi's 'Moments of Reprieve
In this article, I discuss Primo Levi’s Holocaust survivor testimonies in Moments of Reprieve, arguing that these stories illuminate a concept I term ‘the reprieve’. Using the reprieve as an undecidable word I argue that the reprieve is a moment of humanisation in the camps in which our inherent responsibility for one another becomes clear. Though it does not offer freedom or salvation, it does allow for a moment of loosening in the midst of repr…
The catastrophe of the face: Ethics, Deconstruction, Plasticity
In this paper, I discuss what I call the ‘catastrophe of the face’. I use the plays of Samuel Beckett, as well as deconstructive theories from Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Catherine Malabou, as a lens through which to see contemporary issues about the face. Arguing that the face is marked by plasticity, I trace a double-movement of the face, of disappearance-in-appearance in facial recognition software and appearance-in-disappearance in …
I Just Care so Much About the Koalas: On Grief, Value and Ethical Response to Non-Human Others in the Anthropocene
In this article, using the example of koalas in the 2019–20 bushfires, I argue that our embodied encounters with animals are conditioned by an ethical address that can be found in and outside of language, which demands a fostering of life which must be environmental as well as physical. What we mourn and what we do not mourn is itself a hierarchically imbalanced proposition.3 Falconer has noted the disappearance of the once-ubiquitous bogong moth…
Subaltern discomfort: A Phenomenology of the Air-Conditioner in the Age of Climate (In)justice
In this paper, I use the figure of the air-conditioner to get at the bifurcated issues of access to comfort in the Anthropocene. I think through the phenomenological relations to the air-conditioner, using as my archive Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning novel The White Tiger. I put forth the theory of what I call subaltern discomfort, arguing that who gets to be comfortable, and why, I argue, is a matter of increasing importance as the climate warms…
The other vow: Affirmative Denial in Kafka, Shakespeare and Kol Nidrei
In this paper, I discuss what I call ‘the other vow’, a vow that undoes all others. Interweaving an aphorism from Kafka, Juliet’s speech from Romeo & Juliet, and the Jewish liturgical passage Kol Nidrei, I argue that we might find ways to inhabit language differently in the other vow – not the God of the name, or the God of the father, but rather a relation to the other to be otherwise. Instead, we might practice an affirmative denial and collect…
Flotsam: A Theory of Waste in the Anthropocene
In this article, I propose the concept of flotsam -waste washed-up or discarded in water -as a means of making sense of the pollution of the Anthropocene. Using examples taken from science fiction, notably that of J.G. Ballard's novel The Drought , I suggest that flotsam (and jetsam) embody a capitalist logic in the Anthropocene in which potentially any being, human or non-human, and any thing, can become waste in a capitalist economy built on ca…
Membrane: A poetics of the border
In this paper, I use the figure of the membrane as a mediating presence between inside and outside that helps to regulate the self against environmental toxicity. Drawing on the biological theory of Lynn Sargulis and Dorian Sagan, Didier Anzieu's theory of the Skin Ego and Ted Chiang's short story ‘The Story of Your Life’, I trace the appearance of the membrane as a form of material ecocriticism across texts, genres and bodies
Off the Clock
The Digital Tech Broligarchy’s Interest in Left-Wing Science Fiction: A Critical Reading of the Culture of Techno-Libertarianism
A slew of recent articles has asked what the connection might be between right-wing libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires and left-wing science fiction, especially the fiction of Iain M. Banks, the declared reading preference of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman. Bank’s Culture novels create a Rococo utopia that justifies social dislocation and political authoritarianism in the present, licensing and legitimating it under th…
Theses on the Future History of Trans People: On Trans Messianism
Philosophy (7 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Art (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Environmental ethics (3 works) · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis (3 works)