BOBC |
Resource type: Book Chapter DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_34 BibTeX citation key: Servitje2020 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Surgeon X", Illness, Kenney. Sarah, Medicine, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Sciences, Watkiss. John Creators: Ahuja, Allewaert, Andrews, Canavan, Evans, Farooq, Fretwell, Gaskill, Jagoda, Lamb, Rhee, Rusert, Servitje, Taylor, Vadde, Wald, Walsh Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (New York [etc.]) Collection: The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science |
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Abstract |
By some estimates, antibiotic resistance (ABR) is expected to kill more than 10 million people by 2050. In response to this growing threat, there has been an increased appearance of science-fictional language and imagery describing the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” In 2016, Sarah Kenney and John Watkiss created Surgeon X, a comic series that narrates a dystopian future transformed by ABR. However, rather than merely capitalizing on the apocalyptic discourse of a dangerous future, Surgeon X outlines the real, present social entanglements of the antibiotic apocalypse’s “science fictional” qualities in a juxtaposition of image and text. It graphically estranges our own antibiotic moment. In doing so, it reveals also how the interdisciplinary study of literature and science can expand our limited and delayed understanding of ABR. The comic presents the raw matter of the post-antibiotic world in a way that demands readers to rethink present assumptions about biomedicine in politically, ethically, and socially just ways.
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