Among Walruses, parasites and non-binary humans

trails for the Chthulucene in Jess Arndt’s “Large Animals” and “Together”

Abstract

Trans literature, in the context of American literature, is traditionally linked to the autobiographical genre. However, there is currently an uprising of trans-author voices that are also manifesting themselves in the narrative genre, more specifically, in the short story. The short stories “Large Animals”, and “Together”, by Jess Arndt, present similar elements about the discomfort of what it means to be socially read as a trans subject and a trans body departing from animal otherness, which manifests itself in the inconvenient presence of an intestinal parasite in the protagonist couple of “Together” and in a walrus paying night visits to the bed of the protagonist of “Large Animals”. We will seek to bring together the elements of trans identity and animal otherness that appear in Arndt’s narratives with Donna Haraway’s proposals (2016a; 2016b) for the interspecies alliance and the union between past, present and future, which she calls the Chthulocene, as a form to overcome Anthropo/ Capitalocene and the specters of modernity.