Digital Selves and Embodied Realities: Cyborg Identity and Posthuman Subjectivity and Intertextuality in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This

Abstract: The paper draws on the ideas from Haraway (1985) and Hayles (1999) to investigate how a digital techno sphere transforms our selfhoods and relays qualities of circulation and visibility as it pertains to Patricia Lockwood's No one is talking about this. The narrator exists online in what Hayles calls a posthuman identity defined through life in the techno sphere, although Lockwood's narrator as Haraway's cyborg has no name or corporeal singularity ascribed to her. Lockwood’s self is built almost entirely in “the portal” generics; her vocabulary drifts closer to the internet than that of any single assured narrator, and her habits of thought, her jokes, or even her sense of emotion exist to be circulated and exchanged rather than to be contemplated. Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality provides a guiding precursor to understand this problem because Lockwood's narrator treats her interior sense of humour as simply an amalgamation of screenshots and memes. The second half of Lockwood's novel depicts the birth of her sister's baby who's hard to see and suffers from Proteus syndrome. These characters are confronted with caregiving, and illness, and loss. In the face of this exposure of vulnerability, Lockwood's narrator starts to find her ironic distance and vocabulary unsuited to suffering, love and the kind of labour with a body that refuses to work for her name. What is poignant about Care work is that while the first half of the book is light-hearted in tone. Since most of the critical readings on Lockwood's novel have tended toward Comics studies, literary experimentation or Cultural Studies of the internet itself, few formal readings engage with Lockwood's use of a textual mythos of the cyborg, or borrowing from Hayles' formal texts.

Keywords: Cyborg, Identity, Intertextuality, Portal, Posthuman, Suffering.