Corporeality, Genetic Technology, and Climate Change in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

Abstract

In her novel The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood vividly illustrates the unmistakable impact of climate change on people’s lives these days. Genetic manipulation has become one of the technologies that people have grown dependent on to solve environmental problems in this age of climate change, where severe droughts, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and the like are being reported more frequently than ever. But genetic engineering has profound consequences for human corporealities, as both COVID-19 and The Year of the Flood show. In the novel, Atwood presents a world where humanity finds it hardly possible to survive without genetic fiddling. We find ourselves in a similar situation in real life, especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic where genetic alteration technology is essential: studies have shown that vaccination using genetic engineering is the best way to halt the spread of the virus, but no one can give a definite answer to its long-term effects on bodies. Atwood illustrates through the Paradice Project episode in the novel that such a genetic experiment can make the ecological future more uncertain and unstable in the age of climate crisis. Though a few monopolistic multinational GMO companies touted genetic engineering technologies as a benevolent solution, it has become evident that they are only doing so for their own profit, as exemplified by the Vitamin pill episode in the novel. . In the real world and in The Year of the Flood, climate change and multinational capitalism exert a bad influence on biodiversity. With human and nonhuman animal bodies being mistreated more than ever as materials for the gene industry, Atwood shows how badly women are exploited in an age of genetic engineering. As we depend too much on genetic technologies, we tend to overlook the small but influential agencies within human and nonhuman assemblages, which result in dismissing the entanglement between human and nonhuman beings.

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Keywords

gene technologies, genetic alteration, human corporealities, climate change, trans-corporeality, Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, pandemic, capitalism