“I Am Not Returning Home”: A Transgender Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Abstract

Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation (2014) takes the form of a field journal written by a character known as "the biologist." It follows an expedition of four women into Area X, where monstrous creatures roam and all living things, including the biologist, undergo transitions as their DNA radically changes. This reading of the biologist's journal presents it as not only a transition narrative but as a fictional transgender autobiography, sharing many similarities with the features of trans autobiography identified by Jay Prosser (1998). I argue that the biologist's attempts to assert her identification of a topographical anomaly as the "tower" can be a metaphor for the struggle in trans autobiography for self-identification to be accepted as truth. Contextualizing Annihilation within current discourses in transecology, I make links to the rhetoric of blame on LGBTQIA+ people as the cause of environmental disasters. I conclude with a hopeful reading, which defies this blame, of the biologist's statement that "I am not returning home," as an ending of trans possibility. Trans people must constantly reassert and fight for our existence, so as a trans-identified scholar I hope to highlight transgender readings in unexpected places, showing that our experiences exist across all genres." . . . I have hoped that in reading this account, you might find me a credible, objective witness." (Jeff VanderMeer 2014a, 55) Annihilation(2014a) by Jeff VanderMeer is a weird fiction novel which follows an expedition of four women into Area X, a site quarantined by the agency known as the Southern Reach and investigated for many years due to unusual changes in its ecology. VanderMeer's writing is often seen as a response to climate change and Anthropocene concerns (Bruhn and Hart 1), and is categorized as both weird fiction and ecofiction (Marshall 663 cited in Clapp 2). Weird fiction typically blends sci-fi, fantasy, and horror with aspects of surrealism, magical realism and Lovecraftian influences (Vint 197 cited in Ersoy 252). It has been argued that Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space (1927) could be seen as the precursor to Annihilation (Ersoy 253). As Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (2011) describe in The Weird: A Compendium of Weird and Dark Stories, the weird: " . . . strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges that failure as sign and symbol of our limitations" (Location 250). Stories belonging to the genre of weird fiction do not have to concern themselves only with the extra-terrestrial and can just as easily be concerned with life on Earth and contemporary human and ecological issues (Ersoy 253).Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, takes the form of a field journal written by a character known as "the biologist." Names are never used on the expedition, and we know the rest of the team only as the psychologist (the expedition leader), the surveyor, the anthropologist, and the (absent) linguist. Within Area X two structures, a topographical anom...