Corporeal Cartography: The Body as a Map of Place-Based Relationships

The drama Heroes and Saints and film Fresh Kill respond to local and global environmental justice issues and generate a corporeal cartography that maps the relationships between place and the body through embodied memory, desire, movement and machine. These bodily maps make environmental injustice visible and intervene to form an alternant future. The texts thus contribute to a canon of activist-oriented literature and participate in a conversation about the agential capacity of literature to expose injustice and activate an intervention. Heroes and Saints and Fresh Kill pose an interest in cartography and the body, and I draw on the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to frame the body as a map of place-based relationships. Deleuzian theory posits the map as that which can form rhizomatic connections on a singular plane, and the body functions like a map. Queerness, gender and race shape embodied experience in my primary texts, and this positionality informs the bodily map. Corporeal cartography, then, builds connections and interruptions to generate becomings that can change the future