Saltwater Language: Making Sense of Ourselves Through the Science and Art of Marine Invertebrates

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022Saltwater Language: Making Sense of Ourselves Through the Science and Art of Marine Invertebrates is an “undisciplined” project entangling the biology of four marine invertebrates (sea stars, crabs, barnacles, and octopuses) with a wide array of genre-crossing literatures featuring those real and figurative marine invertebrates to explore the question: what does it mean to be human? Though the question is large, and certainly not static, the impetus to separate being human from being animal via the messy character traits of consciousness, reasoning, morality, and free will is examined.I argue that marine invertebrates, the spineless, faceless, queer, biblically “teeming things” that deny any easy categorization of what it means to be “animal,” challenge the stability of human Othering and by default, challenge the stability of the traits defining what it means to be human. Marine invertebrates shatter the spell of essentialist thinking, requiring a deeper, interior inquiry and binding relations with the natural world. Each chapter traces the real and fantastical representations of a particular marine invertebrate to elucidate the innumerable threads woven together, defining the unending process of becoming human