Body Drift: Searching for Queer Fish in Amruta Patil's Kari
Abstract:
According to Arthur Kroker, ‘body drift’, the phrase with which this paper first
began to take root, refers to the fact that we can no longer be said to ‘inhabit a body
in any meaningful sense of the term but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies –
imaginary, sexualized, disciplined, gendered, labouring, technologically
augmented bodies.’ Moreover, as contingent are the bodies caught in perennial
processes of becoming, so contingent have always been the codes of their
becoming – codes that shape sexuality, gender, relations of power, class are
perpetually caught in the relentless drift of ‘contestation among different
interpretations and practises’ that are themselves resisted, reshaped, transgressed,
remixed and re-spliced. Kroker’s book, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway, from
which this paper borrows part of its title, is an exploration and explication of the
contingencies, complexities and hybridities of the drifting body in the arguably
posthuman present. In this paper, I borrow Kroker’s deeply evocative term, body
drift, and its powerful implications of multiplicitous, complex and hybrid
ontologies, to critically analyse the metaphor of drift and its companion metaphors
of floating, swimming and traversing bodies of water in Amruta Patil’s graphic
novel, Kari, with the intention of exploring the themes of queerness and hybrid
identity as they occur in the narrative.
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