Precarious Bodies in Precarious Times: Herstorical Transcorporeality in Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars

Abstract

This article draws on the intersection of the metahistorical, corporeal and material turn in contemporary cultural theory, with a focus on Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars (2020), incidentally written to commemorate a centenary of the Spanish flu in Britain, and suddenly appearing prophetic of the COVID-19 situation in 2020–2021, with unintentional, but poignant parallels. The methodological framework used for the article is transmodern metahistory, as well as new materialism, with its important concepts of transcorporeality (Alaimo) and intra-action (Barad). The article examines women’s (bodily) lives in 1918 Dublin as depicted in the novel, against the tempestuous political and military historical context furnishing the background for the material, temporal and discursive entanglements and shared vulnerabilities, which are the centre of the narrative. It also touches upon topical issues and processes characterizing the present-day world, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic, #MeToo and BLM movements, social injustice and intersectional feminism, as well as silenced traumatic historical phenomena, such as the cruelty and abuse of Irish and Canadian residential institutions, and the larger issue of livable lives—a crucial topic for women writers today.

Keywords:

• Transcorporeality
• metahistory
• pandemics
• intra-action
• livable lives

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My earlier publications appeared under the surname Tofantšuk.

2 For example, Philomena (2014), The Magdalene Sisters (2002), etc.

3 Fisher, Jane Elizabeth (2012), Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.