Fungal Symbiopoetics: Seeing Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty through Anthropo-Ecologies, Multispecies Assemblage, and Compost Kinship
Fungal Symbiopoetics: Seeing Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty through Anthropo-Ecologies, Multispecies Assemblage, and Compost Kinship

Summary/Abstract: Taking the fungal paradigm in the environmental humanities as my starting point, I argue that Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty articulates a distinctive mode of “symbiopoetics,” an onto-tale that reveals the convergence of body horror, fungal ecology, and weird narrative form. Through fungal symbiopoetics, Whiteley scrutinizes vexed questions about fungal agency, multispecies identity, survival, and the fluidity of non/human, fe/male bodies. At the kernel of this interrogation are Nathan, a young storyteller in a post-apocalyptic community of men, and the Beauties, who grow from the graves of the dead women and become agentic fungal beings. The Beauties exemplify a symbiotic kinship that exposes the porous boundaries between genders, bodies, and environments. To this end, the study suggests that fungal-human symbiosis in The Beauty epitomizes what I term as “anthropo-ecologies,” ecological formations that deconstruct anthropocentric subjectivity and reproductive futurity by envisioning compost, queer modes of kinship. By way of conclusion, I reflect on how fungal symbiopoetics in contemporary fiction recenters the more-than-human world and acknowledges our multispecies entanglement.

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