We Are All Monsters: Radical Relationality During Planetary Crisis

Earth’s climate is ever changing; yet for the first time in our planet’s history, Homo sapiens are the primary agents of this change. With this realization in mind, some geologists hope to rename our current terrestrial epoch the Anthropocene. Critical theorists have responded with alternate names – such as the Capitalocene or the Plantationocene – that point directly to the kinds of human activity that have led our planet to its current predicament. This paper begins with the premise that we are currently living through what environmental philosopher and multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway has named the Chthulucene: the age of monsters. If rationalocentric thinking of Enlightened Man helped bring about the Anthropocene, then what kind of worlds can emerge by turning away from Man and towards a radical reimagining of ourselves as monsters? What can chthonic stories teach us about how to live and die well together during a time of mass extinction? Drawing primarily from the emerging interdisciplinary field of art, science, and technology studies (ASTS), this paper offers a creatively narrated analysis of three chthonic narratives: Cold War satirical film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Octavia E. Butler’s post-nuclear-apocalyptic novel Dawn, and my own psychotic episodes involving nuclear apocalypse. These narratives, along with the Chthulucene itself, challenge the Western cultural distinction between the real and the imagined in order to make room for radical forms of relationality that can change how we Earthly beings identify, respond to, and care for each other as we collectively move through our planetary crisis and into other possible worlds.