Sick

The ‘pancreas under capitalism’ and the ‘proletarian lung’ testify to the penetrating physiological effects of class (and racial) oppression, demonstrating that the biological and social cannot be considered separate spheres. […] It may be useful to consider the proletarian lung within the networks of nature/culture, which are ‘simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society’.
Stacey Alaimo. Bodily Natures
(with quotation from Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern)

The body social, body environmental, body psychic, body politic: riven with a kind of pestilence, of disease. 

Answering with the homeopathics of theatre and performance: underlying pain secreted at the surface:

I ate my new country from the inside out. I did it soon after I got here.
Before it could make a feast of me.
The first dream was caused by the cheeseburger: I know it.
That was how I everything started to make sense. Very simple.
There was this greasy loving taste,
a taste halfway between fat and sugar: little bits of gristle
and the surprise of ketchup,
the squeek of the onion.
Half an hour later I was in bed asleep and an hour after that:
the nightmare.
A mouth, riding through the air,
me on top, Dr Strangelove,
straddling the top lip of the flaming orifice.
(LIPS:) ‘Hooo haaaw!’
It was fantastic, my love!
All of this from one poisonous cheeseburger!
(75. Eating this country, Said, Calgary, 1998)

Opening out to difference, to deviance. Stacy Alaimo’s notion of the trans-corporeal, the inter-relationality of all entities, with some cautions:

Chemically sensitive people and other trans-corporeal subjects would caution, however, that not all deviations, in this world of toxicants and xenobiotic chemicals, should be embraced. To “remain ever open to deviation” would be revised, in this case, to take the anto-epistemological condition of chemically reactive people seriously by making the world more accessible for them. (139)
Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures.

What does a posthuman environmental ethics look like, Alaimo wonders. What to do when so much human generated toxicity is producing sufficient deviance to perpetually pollute all bodies (politic, psychic, ‘environmental’, etc)?

—We deforested what’s known now as Easter Island, focusing instead building large stone faces, and before long had nothing to eat and we all died there. Could we rename this planet Easter Earth? I guess that would be a Christian conspiracy. In the same way that calling it Easter Island is a Christian conspiracy? What’s your opinion on this, mother?

—Should we be calling you mother? Would you appreciate something else? Not to be trite but is it just cisgendered bullshit to call you mother, when you don’t really need that? Sorry for our limitations, mother. Whatever the case it doesn’t feel appropriate to call you ‘Father’. Although when I call you mother the whole world starts to suffocate me. I can’t breathe, mother.
(39. Matricide Part I)