Amoebic Narrative

This essay poses a series of stories, drawn from Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels and accounts of social amoebas/slime molds in feminist science studies and science fiction. The author aims to respond to Sylvia Wynter's call for a new science from a queer vantage. Given Wynter's understanding of the centrality of stories to human autopoeisis, the author considers how queer stories take new forms, beyond the norms of narrative closure as detailed in Peter Brooks's reading of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Returning to Freud, the author discerns how the life drive (which he identifies with “animalcules”) inspires queer narrative modes. The author argues that Gladman's queer experimental novels exemplify the life drive as a narrative form that aims for divergence and proliferation rather than closure. The article compares the epistemic challenges and opportunities that social amoebas have presented to the science of Man with Gladman's life-drive innovations; the author turns Freud's description of the animalcules as narcissistic in a queer direction, via Bersani, whose idea of small n narcissism resonates with social amoebas’ being. The article concludes that Gladman's series demonstrates—through form and language but also its imagined spaces and relations—how Wynter's new science manifests in queer stories.