1.1 New Materialism and Emergence

One of the greatest insights of the New Material turn has been to popularize the notion of nonhuman agency. For New Materialists, agency is an inherent aspect of materials themselves and is not the sole domain of the human, and there is a lot at stake in such a radical proposition. Indeed, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost explain in their introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, “what is at stake here is nothing less than a challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world, including its normative sense of the human and its beliefs about human agency, but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and interact with nature” (Coole and Frost Reference Coole, Frost, Coole and Frost2010, 4).

In their monumental collection entitled Material Ecocriticism that features applications of the New Materialism to ecocritical approaches and the Environmental Humanities, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann explain that

Now more than ever, these issues of “material ecocriticism” are imperative for understanding our climate crises, and much of the work in this emerging area is necessarily inter- and transdisciplinary. At the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century, we were reminded perhaps like never before of just how much a mistake it is to ignore the impacts of materiality and nonhuman material agencies on our daily lives. Climate change realities, which had begun to receive long-overdue mass media attention until 2020, suddenly became low on the list of priorities in the public imagination, with the staggering material realities of the COVID-19 pandemic trumping virtually everything else in our day-to-day lives. The agency of a microscopic material would bring the airline industry to its knees, cost the world trillions of dollars in losses, infect and kill millions of people, and produce untold numbers of unknown effects.Footnote ¹⁵ Elemental agencies are clearly in need of a lot of attention.

Summarizing from the growing body of work in new material studies, Moritz Ingwersen and Timo Müller explain that “the material world is anything but inert” and that there are “two intersecting lines of argumentation”:

In Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Steven Johnson defines “emergence” as “the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication” (Johnson Reference Johnson2004,18). Slimes offer a way into these discussions. Johnson explains that

It is transmorphic: “The slime mold oscillates between being a single creature and a swarm” (13). The morphing of slime from single creatures to a kind of collective intelligence bears a startling resemblance to what Melody Jue describes as at least one of the visions of blue feminist materialisms: “The posthuman subject that emerges from these watery feminist materialisms should change our self-conception, encouraging us to see our own distributed embodiment as a condition that is attached to the ecological welfare of a sphere larger than our own body” (Jue Reference Jue2020, 20).

One reason slime so consistently evokes a sense of horror may have something to do with how it conflicts with our sense of causes and effects, how it refutes the notion of leadership and hierarchy, and how it defies expectations about collective organization:Footnote ¹⁶ “Much of the world around us,” Johnson notes, “can be explained in terms of command systems and hierarchies – why should it be any different for the slime molds?” (Johnson Reference Johnson2004, 15). Yet, it is different, and what he describes as “the eerie, invisible hand of self-organization” (16)Footnote ¹⁷ is more than simply eerie; it is a threat to our sense of order. Johnson explains how Evelyn Fox Keller came to resist “the conventional belief […] that slime mold swarms formed at the command of ‘pace-maker’ cells that ordered the other cells to begin aggregating” (14). Keller, Johnson notes, built on the work of one of Alan Turing’s last published papers about “how a complex organism could assemble itself without any master planner calling the shots” (14). Grasping such an idea has never been easy.

1.2 Grasping for Slime

Perhaps it is slime’s elemental amorphousness and definitional intractability that make it an attractive ingredient in imagining horror. The very notion of slimic agency indeed is the stuff of horror films, with slime dripping from the mouths of aliens or covering or devouring or transforming people’s bodies in films such as The Blob (1958), The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986 remake), Alien (virtually the entire franchise), Poltergeist (1982), Demons (1985), Street Trash (1987), Troll 2 (1990), Frankenstein (1994), and so on. Because slime is also deeply entangled with gender, race, and class in the popular imagination, as I will show, it is important to analyze these issues in tandem with matters of slimic agency and slime’s elemental amorphousness.

There has been a surge of interest within the past decade or so in elemental theory,Footnote ¹⁸ yet slime seems to ooze out of reach in many discussions. This is odd, because slime is never far away from us – from our origins in primordial slime to the slime of copulation that initiates our conception, it is elemental in our existence. While it clearly does not fall firmly within any of the four Empedoclean elements (water, air, earth, and fire), slime is, nevertheless, a component of life – and of eco-horror. Slime is an element whose dimensions have occupied philosophers for millennia, and there is, now more than ever before, an urgency to address the profound environmental, political, and social dimensions of slimic agency.

There is a long literary history representing the dangers of agential slime. Early modern medicinal writings uniformly associate slime with disease and disorders. Thomas O’Dowde’s 1664 A Poor Man’s Medicine associates infections of the blood with slime; Thomas (AKA Tobias) Venner’s 1638 Via Recta links poorly prepared foods (fish in particular) with the production of unwholesome slime and disease; and countless other contemporaries of Shakespeare, building on the humoral theories of Galen, announce the dangerous and unhealthful properties of slime. So prevalent are these documents that Shakespeare himself has much to say on the topic of slime. Othello has Iago announce that “An honest man he is, and hates the slime / That sticks on filthy deeds” (5.2.155–156). In Richard III, slime is clearly associated with death when Clarence dreams about drowning and going down to “the slimy bottom of the deep” (1.4.32). As in our own time, however, slime in the early modern period is at best ambivalent, both symbolic of death and life, rot and fertility, good and bad.

In Great Expectations, the “old hulls of ships in course of being knocked to pieces” float amid the “ooze and slime and other dregs of tide” (Dickens Reference Dickens and McMaster1980, 369). Here slime is part of the dissolution of the human into the natural worlds and of the reclamation of the materials wrought by the human hand. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, slimic agency takes on a nationalist flavor. Slime here is associated with English nationalism, “the slime and mud of Paris” an implicit threat that contrasts with the “clean […], wholesome soil of an English country garden” (Brontë Reference Brontë and Dunn1971, 127). Slime is more explicitly agential in its relation with contagion and disease in Bleak House. It manifests as the “odious slime” of a frog in Gulliver’s Travels and is, at another point in the narrative, part of the origin of two “brutes” who “appeared together upon a mountain; whether produced by the heat of the sun upon corrupted mud and slime, or from the ooze and froth of the sea, was never known” (Swift Reference Swift and Landa1960, 97; 219). Moreover, as it is physically ambivalent, so too is it conceptually slippery. While it pollutes, infects, and endangers, at other times it cures.

The ambivalences of slime become more pronounced than ever as science advances and new models of understanding develop. One of the interesting hypotheses (subsequently borne out by scientific research) was about the meliorative and medicinal properties of snail and mollusk slime. While such ideas go all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, one source explains that

There are more ominous imagined effects of agential slime, however, and these find a truly spectacular expression in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Yet, it is more the slime of justice than of malice that we witness here. After all, nature becomes hostile in response to the Mariner’s crime, and this response of antagonism and vengeance is in large part mediated through slime. Much of this vengeance involves leaving the mariner rudderless, unable to control his movement through the elements – in part because those very elements have lost their referential stability. It is hard to nail down slime.Footnote ¹⁹

With the rise of the gothic novel, the connections between slime and horror become fixed. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, human agency dissolves into slime, and Dr. Jekyll “thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices” (Stevenson Reference Stevenson2003, 60). Part of the horror here is the agency of slime, its capacity to make sounds. The agency of nonhuman materials is often the source of horror, of course. It is agency that makes monsters monstrous.

One of the greatest horror classics of all time – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – surprisingly has no slime at all; even so, there is something about the story that inspires the slimic imagination, as is very clear in the 1994 Kenneth Branagh filmic version with Robert DeNiro. The “wretch” is borne of a tub of slime, re-membered from the dead, a man not of woman born, yet carried to term (as it were) in a kind of a womb (a huge tub), all the while floating in a ghastly slime (rather than in amniotic fluid) that explodes into a chaotic and very slippery mess at the moment of his “birth.” At least part of the horror in these narratives is in the unnaturalness and subsequent danger that slime represents. It is imagined to go against nature and is “associated with the threat and uncertainty of boundaries and borders, […] the boundary between life and death” (Brayton Reference Brayton, Munroe, Geisweidt and Bruckner2015, 87). Resolutely an environmental issue, slime in many ways is horror.

In Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” the horrific agency of slime touches several registers. For one thing, it stands centrally as a symbol of a clearly dangerous and demonized female sexuality. All of the slimic disgust and horror in the novella centers on Helen, the main character, and she eventually goes through a kind of backward evolution – what Machen calls “Protoplasmic reversion” (Machen Reference Machen and Worth2018, 144) – and dissolves into a puddle of slime. Machen plays on both the fear of slime and on the sexist contempt for women’s agency in his audience here. Another register Machen touches is our own ontological insecurities and fears that our place in the scheme of things is far from guaranteed.

Backward evolution is a recurring theme in Machen and always involves slime. It happens also to Francis Leicester in a subsection of Machen’s “The Three Imposters” entitled “Novel of the White Powder.” Leicester becomes slime, “a dark and putrid mass seething with corruption and rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles” (Machen Reference Machen and Worth2018, 172). In another subsection (entitled “Novel of the Black Seal”) of “The Three Imposters,” a boy (who, incidentally, is the offspring of a woman and the god Pan) falls sick and, while “foaming at the mouth” on the floor, “horror broke” as “something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy wavering tentacle, across the room” (142). He seems to be another case of “protoplasmic reversion.” One thing is certain: slime and horror go together here.

As a genre, horror involves the agency of nature just beyond control and domestication. It is the unexpected and the uncontrolled. Horror is the boundary-crosser. It is the defiance of the elements, of order, and of safety. It is the uncanny convergence of meaning across changing elemental media, “the agony of water” as it moves slimeward. To know the powers of horror is to know the appeal of the repulsive and to understand the draw of those things Julia Kristeva describes that do “not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1982, 4). It is an appeal and repulsion not simply of elemental crossings and contradictions but of the very fact of such agonistic relationships, such possibilities of both degeneration and regeneration embodied in one substance – and the danger in it all both thrills and horrifies.

1.3 Slimic Agency: Ecogothic and Horror

Powers mentions colonies and hives, and we need to add slime molds. Slime is part of the stock-and-trade of horror and the ecogothic, and there are solid bases on which to ground our worries about intelligent and potentially threatening slime.Footnote ²⁰ Unless we are to play fast and free with the notion of intelligence, however, it is useful to examine some definitions of the term. According to University of Michigan computer scientist Peter Lindes, “Intelligence is the ability of an agent, whether human, animal, artificial, or something else, to act in its environment in real time, using its limited knowledge, memory, computational power, and perception and action capabilities, choosing actions at each moment that move it toward its current goals, and to adapt over time by improving this ability to act” (Lindes Reference Lindes2020, 2). This definition stands in contrast to “the prevailing scientific view,” which, Merlin Sheldrake explains, “is that it is a mistake to imagine that there is anything deliberate about most nonhuman interactions” (Sheldrake Reference Sheldrake2020, 41). Such a view leaves no viable categorical space for the actions of slime molds. As Steven Johnson observes, “For scientists trying to understand systems that use relatively simple components to build higher-level intelligence, the slime mold may someday be seen as the equivalent of the finches and tortoises that Darwin observed on the Galápagos Islands” (Johnson Reference Johnson2004, 11–12). For anyone who has ever been lost in an IKEA store and stuck following the arrows of what seems like a giant IKEA assembly instruction booklet, what Sheldrake explains about the intelligence of slime can only be humbling:

Sheldrake’s questions on the topic seem to me very important: “Are network-based life-forms like fungi or slime molds capable of a form of cognition? Can we think of their behavior as intelligent? If other organisms’ intelligence didn’t look like ours, then how might it appear? Would we even notice it?” (65). While the answers to these questions are indeed extensive and complicated, it seems – at least following the definition Lindes offers – that the ability to make choices, to act as an agent (to have agency), must be central to our understanding of what it means to have intelligence.

The slime in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is horrifying because it seems smart:

Tara Wanda Merrigan describes Annihilation as a “book about an intelligent, deadly fungus” (Merrigan Reference Merrigan2014). It is the intelligence and the willfulness of slime that seem beyond our control and therefore produce horror.Footnote ²¹

Even when not directly described, slime invokes horror. In Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, for instance, there is much that could evoke horror – not the least of which is having to share a lifeboat with a hungry, full-grown 450-pound Bengal tiger. Yet, this charismatic carnivore with its big sharp teeth is a kind of slap-stick horror compared to the toothless slime that almost appears on the island where Pi and Richard Parker (the tiger) land. There is something eerie about “the island’s complete desolation,” save for the “shining green algae” (Martel Reference Martel2001, 300; 301), the meerkats, and the dead fish in the pulsating pond. Eerie, however, is not horror. The horror comes wrapped in oyster slime:

The slime here is not so toothless after all. The horror here, however, is wrapped in slime that does not actually appear, since the “green oyster” is a metaphor and not truly an oyster. Even so, the first thing most people think of with oysters is either something sexual (that they are an aphrodisiac)Footnote ²² or something about slime – or both. The mention of oysters and all that they evoke, along with teeth, brings to mind – whether or not Martel intended it – the vagina dentata image (about which more later in the text). While Pi inadvertently stumbles on a dangerously carnivorous, slimy plant out on the wild and open sea, Coleridge’s ancient mariner inadvertently invites slimic horrors through his deeds on the wild seas – specifically through his shooting of the albatross.

1.4 The Slime of the Ancient Mariner

A year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, I wrote about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the importance of slime as an environmental signal in it.Footnote ²³ Then when the pandemic struck, James Parker of The Atlantic wrote a startling article entitled “The 1798 Poem That Was Made for 2020. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is taking on new meaning during the coronavirus pandemic.” In many ways, Parker’s title offers a valid statement, and yet the article makes no mention of the slime in the poem, focusing instead on the listlessness we face in confronting unknown terrors and desolation. The failure even to mention slime is all the more extraordinary because of how slime is so central to the horror of the poem; yet, sliminess per se is not the actual source of the horror: it is the agency of the slimy things in the poem that evokes fear and revulsion. It is the proximity to the narrating subject of “slimy things [that] did crawl with legs,/ Upon the slimy sea” (Coleridge Reference Coleridge and Fry1999, ll.12–6) that terrifies. This proximity is clearly not only physical but also ontological: the narrator explains that “a thousand thousand slimy things/ Lived on” (ll.238–9), adding “and so did I” (1.239). The threat here is that the slime and the narrator might be or become indistinguishable.Footnote ²⁴ It is a point that William Ian Miller makes in his monumental Anatomy of Disgust: “stickiness and sliminess horrify because they erase the distinction between subject and object” (Miller Reference Miller1997, 271, n.5). So, while, as Miller states, “many different cultures […] converge in agreement that slime and ooze, feces and menstrual blood, are on the polluting side of the equation” (62) and that the polluting aspect of slime is disgusting, it is the agential characteristic that is threatening. Other critics have noted the threat of erasure in the poem, to be sure. Tim Fulford discusses the “zombie” politics of the poem and how “in touching his nephew’s living corpse, the mariner violates another taboo – that which separates the living from the dead” (Fulford Reference Fulford and Newlyun2006, 51). Useful as it is, however, Fulford’s discussion makes no mention of slime, let alone of its pivotal importance to the poem’s questioning of human exceptionalism. This threat of erasure The Rime of the Ancient Mariner offers in its depictions of slime, moreover, is willful. What the poem imagines is a retributive natural world, a response of nature to the apparently senseless and unwarranted killing of the albatrossFootnote ²⁵ – and it is precisely this imagining of a hostile, antagonistic, and vengeful nature that situates the poem firmly within a long tradition of ecophobic environmental ethics. We witness a nature beyond our control, and it scares us.

1.5 Resisting Containment

VanderMeer’s slime seems to undulate (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 54). Echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” ricochet through Annihilation. Gilman’s narrator sees what others cannot, and the story “pushes its readers to see beyond what is visible, both metaphorically and literally, at one and the same time calling into question what it means to see the unseen and what it means not to see it” (Estok Reference Estok2023a, 75).Footnote ²⁶ Gilman’s narrator addresses the reader directly, asking us to “imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions” (Gilman Reference Gilman, Ford and Ford1995, 608) and moments later tells us (after pulling off some wallpaper) that “waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!” (611). This theme about perception runs through Annihilation, and VanderMeer’s narrator also addresses the reader very directly, at one point apologizing for “not [having] been entirely honest thus far” and hoping that “you might find me a credible, objective witness” (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 55). The narrator expresses regret over having “neglected to mention some details” and worries about “any reader’s initial opinion in judging my objectivity” (150) – and, in both Gilman’s and VanderMeer’s narratives, the reasons the reader might doubt the reliability of the narrators is that they claim to see things others do not. The unnamed narrator of Annihilation confesses that there are “things only I could see” (48), shocking things that no rational person would believe. She sees words made of fungi lining the walls of the tunnel they descend. The unnamed anthropologist responds in disbelief: “Words? Words?” (23). So too does the unnamed surveyor: “Words? Made of fungi? […] This is a joke, right?” (25, 26). Later, the narrator explains to the surveyor that “something I see that you don’t might be important” (42). She explains “that the walls were made of living tissue” (42). Both narrators see things that others do not and therefore worry about their reliability as narrators.Footnote ²⁷

One of the issues that VanderMeer tackles is the whole notion of containment – a notion that slime is good at evading, both physically and intellectually. Indeed, part of what VanderMeer is exposing is what David Ehrenfeld has called “the arrogance of humanism” and “our unquestioning humanistic faith in our own omnipotence [, … our] ability to confront and solve the many problems that humans face, [the] ability to rearrange both the world of Nature and the affairs of men and women so that human life will prosper” (Ehrenfeld Reference Ehrenfeld1981, xiii; 5). When each new expedition goes into “Area X” in Annihilation, they do so with all of the surety of the scientist. The fungal slime thing challenges that surety. It communicates in a way that “no recorded human language” does (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 25). The beast that lurks in the marshes, the narrator explains, can be catalogued: “We were confident that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and assign it a place in the taxonomy of living things. It would become known” (31). The fungal slime thing “would not,” however, become known in such a way (31). The irony that VanderMeer reveals is that seeing what others cannot see may ultimately reveal that there is much more that is unseen than seen and that the inadequacy of our perceptions is under-acknowledged. The question is simple: “What can you do when your five senses are not enough” (178). Our senses are unequal to the scale of things.

Scholars have sought to address scalar issues in a variety of ways: Timothy Morton with “hyperobjects;” Rob Nixon with “slow violence;” Dipesh Chakrabarty with “species history;” and Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer with the notion of the “Anthropocene.” Richard Powers explains through one of his characters that “we are not […] wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces” (Powers Reference Powers2018, 467). Nor are we wired to comprehend slimic agency when all we can see as the vehicle of intelligence and agency are big flashy brains, such as we proudly carry around. Perhaps, then, we are also wired (or, at the very least, inclined) to see and imagine slime – with its cellular uniformity and lack of a brain – as stupid and inactive. This could in part explain why slime’s agency is so threatening.

2.1 Shakespeare and the Early Moderns

Unsurprisingly, fears about slime are entangled with sexism and misogyny – each, to differing degrees, obsessed with power and control. Indeed, myxophobia is deeply enmeshed with the fear of women’s bodies and sexualityFootnote ²⁸ and with fantasies of violence. Shakespeare offers a great many descriptions of female genitalia, often implicitly and in phobic relation to the environment, or, more specifically, to the land – whence, the “loathsome pit” of Titus Andronicus (2.3.193),Footnote ²⁹ the “sulphurous pit” of King Lear (4.6.125), and the “cold valley-fountain” of Sonnet 153 (l. 4). The images are far from uniform, ranging from the “no thing” between a fair maid’s legs of Hamlet (3.2.121) – perhaps out of which derives that “indistinguished space of woman’s will” (King Lear, 4.6.271) – to the “the dark and vicious place” in which Gloucester begot Edmund in King Lear (5.3.173). In the early modern male imagination, the vagina is a place of fluids and slimes that cause corruption, decay, and poisoning. It is a place of dangerous slimic agency.

King Lear clearly exhibits fear and loathing of the vagina when, disgusted with women’s agency almost to the point of speechlessness, he rants about what he sees as the source and site of that agency, something that for him and men of his ilk is the most dangerous thing in women:

The disgust here is palpable. It grows not merely out of a staging of vagina dentata misogyny, a fear of loss of masculine control to the sexual volition of women, a fear that dates back to the ancient Greeks; rather, this disgust is a more profound existential worry that the materiality of the vagina engenders in him – a fear of envelopment, death, and dissolution, a fear that grows out of a kind of myxophobia. Lear is getting on in years, is anxious to put things in order and to secure his place, but everything is falling apart, and at the height of it all, he rants about the vagina, the site and source of so much that he fears. His vaginophobia is consonant with early modern men’s ideas about menstruation.

In her detailed and comprehensive Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England, Sara Read offers an expanded discussion of the various links between menstruation and notions of monstrosity in Shakespeare’s day. Read notes that the early modern midwife Jane Sharp draws a linguistic parallel between the words “menstruous” and “monstrous” (see Sharp Reference Sharp and Hobby1999, 215) and argues that this is but the tip of a much larger obsession with vilifying the liquid materialities of women’s bodies – materialities that center on and extend from the vagina. Lear is hardly peculiar in his time for conceptualizing the vagina as a place of stench, consumption, and leakage.

The image of Woman as a leaky vessel has long been a dominant sexist standpoint. Gail Kern Paster explains that “the weaker vessel [… is the] leaky vessel” (Paster Reference Paster1993, 24) in early modern thinking and that

While clearly one of the issues here has to do with the imagined threat of “uncontrolled” female agency (verbal and sexual), there is also something else going on. Drawing on a treatise published in 1601 by essayist Pierre Charron (one of the disciples of Montaigne), Sophie Chiari maintains that “with their vapours, humours, and fluids, men and women’s bodies were […] comparable to small, independent weather systems. Human passions were liquids saturating the body and in need of control, a little like torrential rains threatening to flood the land” (Chiari Reference Chiari2019, 15). This is an insight with profound implications, since if bodies are weather systems writ small, then weather systems are bodies writ large. What this means is that weather systems (and, by implication, climate) are gendered. Moreover, the fluids we are talking about from “the leaky vessel” here are not waters from clean mountain streams: in the early modern male imagination, the vagina is a place of fluids and slimes that cause corruption, decay, and poisoning,Footnote ³⁰ a place of rot that provokes fear and disgust among men, with nothing less than biblical authority promoting the idea.Footnote ³¹ It is perhaps, therefore, something of an understatement to claim that “there was a degree of animosity towards the vagina in the early modern period” (Alberti).Footnote ³²

Reviewing misogynist traditions expressed in Swift, Milton, and Sartre, Camille Paglia describes the “squalid womb-world” and “mucoid swamp” of “fishy female jellies” as the “road to Lear’s hell” (Paglia Reference Paglia1990, 94). Notwithstanding her horrendous mixing of metaphors, Paglia has an important point: there is a long tradition associating women with slime, disgust, and corporeal menace and threat. In literary and scientific discussions of slime, as Wedlich has argued, stigmatization of entire groups of people has been common, and “a long and inglorious tradition has seen women forced into this category – as the apparently slimier sex” (Wedlich Reference Wedlich2021, 9). Central to this stigmatization is a gendered disgust that historically resembles Lear’s. Wedlich is clearly aware, however, of the ambivalence of this slimic disgust. The exploration on the topic from Martha Nussbaum’s Washington Post article is compelling and well worth quoting at length here for how it encapsulates this ambivalence:

Nussbaum’s comments are important because of the frightening frequency with which people turn a blind eye to powerful men and their myxophobic misogyny. If it is tempting to be an apologist for Shakespeare and the misogyny he stages, or for supporting fans to laugh off the sexist antics, actions, and comments of Mr. Trump, so, too, has it proven irresistible to exonerate Sartre. He has, after all, contributed a lot to the theorizing of slime and has productively advocated an antisexist philosophy.

2.2 Sartre

Despite their breathtaking originality, Sartre’s comments on slime entirely ignore the gendering of slime, much of it his own. Sartre’s gender “silence” has not gone unnoticed, and he has been called down for not only missing the chance to comment upon gender but of himself articulating sexist positions in his comments on slime. Constance Mui, for instance, argues that there is “unmistakably sexist language in Sartre’s discussions of the slimy and the hole, which he associates with the breast and the vagina, organs that are distinctively female” (Mui Reference Mui1990, 31). Whether or not Sartre is, as Mui claims in an ad hominem attack,Footnote ³³ a “grumbling misogynist” (31), the language of Being and Nothingness is clearly damning. Hazel Barnes has put it well: “There can be no doubt that a full investigation of the linguistic codes in Sartre’s writing would reveal him to be a man comfortably ensconced in a world of male dominance” (Barnes Reference Barnes1990, 341); but Barnes, like Margery Collins and Christine Pierce (whose pioneering “Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysis” made the first claim about sexist language in Being and Nothingness), and like Mui also, suggests that the sexist contingencies of the language “are [weaknesses that are] at variance with the central philosophy” of the text itself (Barnes Reference Barnes1990, 341). Mui ironically defends Sartrean philosophy as essentially antisexist (ironic because she does so at least in part through an ad hominem attack): “One cannot infer from the sexist analogies of slime and holes the claim that woman occupies an inferior ontological status. To do so would be to overlook the delightful irony in his ontology: in spite of his ill feelings toward woman, woman nevertheless prevails as a full-fledged consciousness in that ontology” (Mui Reference Mui1990, 32).

Yet, it is neither what he does in his personal life with women nor his antisexist postures in various parts of Being and Nothingness that is at issue here: what is at issue are his sexist comments about slime. The cherry-picking by scholars seeking to exonerate Sartre of sexism results in pure nonsense. It is sham scholarship to say “X pleases me but Y – even though it contradicts X – is irrelevant.” To call Sartre’s sexist comments “contingencies of language” is to miss the point entirely, rather like saying that rape and clitorectomies are contingencies of culture. Sadly, this kind of exoneration is what Sartre apologists argue for. Better to get on with it. Better to acknowledge that he clearly wants to support a feminist position but is equally clearly unable to do so. Slime “is like a leech sucking me” (Sartre Reference Sartre1966, 773), Sartre explains, adding that “it is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking” (776). Woman as leech? This is sexism enough, but he goes on. Having associated slime with “feminine sucking,” he then associates it with “the possessed […] dog” (776), “a poisonous possession” (776), a “snare” (776), “a sickly-sweet feminine revenge” (777), and a “sugary death” (777). Implicitly, these are all a part of the feminine sucking that slime is for him. The images Sartre uses in association with women – feminine sucking, possessed dog, revenge, and death – are deeply misogynistic. Perhaps it is possible to write off Lear’s vaginophobia, just as it is possible to dismiss Sartre’s or Trump’s sexism, as a contingency, but both actions are counter-productive and are clearly not in the interests of feminism – or the environment.

To fully understand the environmental implications of a slime-based sexism (or a myxophobic misogyny), understanding the long history of slime’s gendering (culminating in a giant such as Jean-Paul Sartre) is necessary. The apparent myxophobic misogyny of Sartre’s work is certainly enmeshed with patriarchal ideologies that find popular expression (in films, for instance) that potentially reaches millions.

2.3 Alien Mother

Perhaps no recent text reveals the conceptualization of gendered slime quite as well as the Alien franchise, which began with Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. The films feature a near-perfect parasitic extraterrestrial species capable of surviving virtually any trauma or environment and driven by fierce compulsions to reproduce and survive. Center stage are the female aliens that, near-perfect though the species may be, have slime constantly dripping from their mouths. It seems improbable that such a species would slaver like a common mutt, but slime – perhaps because of the disgust it evokesFootnote ³⁴ – is a central conceit of the horror genre. And clearly, it is not just slime and disgust that evoke horror here. Gender is involved. The alien is female, her opponent is female (Warrant officer Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver), and the ship’s computer is called “Mother.” There is a case to be made that the film empowers women, to be sure, but it is not a compelling or convincing case. In a brilliant discussion of the topic, Judith Newton explains that “the most obviously utopian element in Alien is its casting of a female character in the role of individualist hero, a role conventionally played by a male” (Newton Reference Newton and Kuhn1990, 82). Certainly, the hero of the film is a woman: Ripley, believe it or not. Newton demonstrates that

But there is a more immediate seemingly feminist element of this film: “What Alien offers on one level, and to a white, middle-class audience, is a utopian fantasy of women’s liberation, a fantasy of economic and social equality, friendship and collectivity between middle-class women and men” (84). So, then, where does this leave black women or Asian women or women from the Global South? Moreover, Newton is acutely aware that the film poses but does not deliver on its feminist potentials. Newton goes on to discuss various misogynistic images of the alien’s agency, egg-laying, “womb-like and vagina-like spaces” (85), “vaginal teeth” (85), the various victories Ash has over Ripley, and so on to show that the film really does not do much for women – and even less so when we consider the gender implications of slime. Slime, however, does not slither into Newton’s discussion. Other theorists have discussed women, gender, and sexism in the Alien franchise (see, for instance, Bell-Metereau Reference Bell-Metereau and Weedman1985; Rushing Reference Rushing1989; Kavanagh Reference Kavanagh and Kuhn1990; Vaughn Reference Vaughn1995; Davis Reference Davis2000; Doherty Reference Doherty and Grant2015), but slime does not ooze into these discussions either.

The slime dripping from the alien’s mouth is clearly not some evolutionary function Ridley Scott imagines, but an ideological one. There will be female-on-female fighting (known in sexist and speciesist vernacular as “catfights”). The sexualized violence here that takes its meaning through the female body that the narrative objectifies but does not empower. Any empowerment the film affords women (as hero) quickly dissipates when the main protagonist appears in skimpy underwear, and given that she is fighting a drooling “bitch” – the teaser trailer for Alien 3 states “the bitch is back” (see Alien 3, 1992) – the stakes are clearly mapped out on the female body. Ripley is the sexy dominatrix, objectified and therefore controlled, her body the site through which this control is managed, and it is a body threatened by a less pretty, less sexy mother figure – who happens to be slavering slime.

By the time Ripley has become genetically infected in the franchise with the genes of the “bitch,” the specter of monstrosity looms. The now not-so-exceptional human sits at the contested definitional axes of the natural body, a kiss away from monstrosity. We witness here how, as Judith Butler explains, “the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation” (Butler Reference Butler1993, 8). Writing monstrosity is the narrativization of ecophobia, the imagining of unpredictable agency in nature that must be subject to human power and discipline. Ecophobia is the disciplinary reaction, and it is all about power.

It is the something-other-than-humanness that is dangerous in the monster, and in order for this danger to have any potency, we need a conception of the other-than-human as hostile, malevolent. When Kelly Hurley explains that “slime is the revenge of matter, which seeks to swallow up the known and bounded world into its own amorphousness” (Hurley Reference Hurley1996, 38), we approach the slimy core of the matter, so to speak, or the core of slimy matter. Hurley continues: “In slime, matter displays itself in all its ineluctability. As an anomalous phenomenon, slime testifies to the inability of human classificatory systems to contain and master matter; as a tactile experience, sliminess is a reminder of the utter Thing-ness of matter. From here it is a short step to positing matter as somehow malevolent” (36). And positing matter as somehow malevolent is ecophobia writ large – and slime is central here.

The slimic is evil just because it is slimic, as the Jew to the anti-Semite is vile for no other reason that he or she is a Jew, as the African-American is inferior to the racist for no other reason that he or she is black, and as the natural is threatening for no other reason that it (often gendered “she”) is the natural. It is in the potential agency of each that the threat lies – and there are intimate links among these maladaptive phobic responses. Gendering slime and colocating the disgust it produces with women is dangerously sexist. When men see women as sites of pollution, what Mary Douglas calls “matter out of place” (Douglas Reference Douglas1984, 36), effectively they see women as matter that they can control and rearrange and that they can put right and clean up. Slime, a shape-shifter that defies categories, triggers ecophobic disgust precisely because of the threat it poses to human order, and while we should make no mistake about it that it is a male order,Footnote ³⁵ we also need to understand that there is much more to it than that.

2.4 Class and Race

Rationalizing racism often resembles the kinds of apologist remarks about Sartre and Shakespeare we have seen. Graham Harman famously rationalizes H.P. Lovecraft’s very well-documented racism, explaining that “in certain rare cases, reactionary views might improve the power of an imaginative writer [… and] that Lovecraft’s racism may be such a case” (Harman Reference Harman2012, 59). In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft describes Manhattan’s Lower East Side as follows:

Despite Harman’s rationalizations, this is in-your-face racism, and it is certainly slimic. Philip Roth’s representations of slime’s entanglements with race, class, and ethnicity are decidedly more sophisticated, nuanced, and understated.

A pivotal scene in Roth’s Nemesis (Reference Roth2010) involves a swath of slime that importantly, if subtly, demonstrates mutual involvements of gender, race, and class with the slimic imagination and elemental eco-horror. A group of young Italian hoodlums have arrived in the Jewish neighborhood looking for trouble. When the novel’s central protagonist Bucky Cantor asks them why they have come to the neighborhood, “‘We’re spreadin’ polio,’ one of the Italians replied.” Class and ethnicity are tightly stitched into the fabric of the narrative here. The Italians have come from the East Side, which was “the industrial slum,” an area “that had reported the most cases of polio so far” in the narrative (Roth Reference Roth2010, 13).

The environmental justice movement addresses this issue and calls “attention to the ways disparate distribution of wealth and power often leads to […] the unequal distribution of environmental degradation and/or toxicity” (Adamson, Evans, and Stein Reference Adamson, Evans and Stein2002, 5). Environmental justice scholars have made clear and irrefutable “connections between race, class, and environmental ills, amassing strong evidence that communities of color and communities of the poor suffer far more from such problems than do whiter wealthier communities” (2). Clearly, however, it is also gendered violence that is implied in the Nemesis spitting scene. It is a gendered scene not only because it is men being violent but because of the kind of violence they are enacting – namely, forcing themselves on their mostly passive victims. Cantor walks up to them and stands his ground, but the scene reaches a kind of climax despite this resistance. The hoodlums spit and then casually leave. What remains are the slimy remnants of the climax: “It turned out that there was sputum spread over the wide area of pavement where the Italian guys had congregated, some twenty feet of a wet, slimy, disgusting mess that certainly appeared an ideal breeding ground for the disease” (Roth Reference Roth2010, 16). The isomorphic tags of rape here are unmistakable, and the monstrous birth that will result from this metaphorical crime is the materialization of the disease, though the narrative does not pronounce a verdict.Footnote ³⁶ On the contrary, the narrative diffuses the source of engenderment, with characters arguing about the situation:

Later, race and ethnicity remain central, as the source of the engenderment remains a mystery:

References to “the day the Italians tried to invade the playground” (62) continue throughout the novel, slime taking center stage. The subtlety and ambivalence of slime are evident here, and it is clear that race, class, and gender are involved with this strange element that Brayton describes as “a material condition that is neither chemical nor biological in nature, but fundamentally liminal and marginal – between solid and liquid, inert and alive” (Brayton Reference Brayton, Munroe, Geisweidt and Bruckner2015, 81). It is worth mentioning, too, that racism and sexism are clearly implied in Jack Arnold’s 1954 horror classic Creature from the Black Lagoon. Part of the threat of corruption from the slimy monster in this film is that it is foreign, a monster from the shallows of a lagoon in the depths of the Amazon jungle. “Gill-man,” as the creature is called, is not from Seattle. He is a monster from abroad, a monster because he bears human form but clearly is not human, a monster because he breathes both in and out of water, a monster—worst of all and most threateningly—because he has his horny little eyes set on a helpless white woman, which, of course, plays into a long tradition of sexism and xenophobia. Conceptually, slime is indeed deeply entangled with fears about threats to human integrity, and in America, “human” has often meant white, male, and middle-class. It has also meant heterosexual.

3.1 Queer Little Nightmares

Slime is queer. It is an element that calls into question virtually all of the boundaries that we live by. It is an element that troubles the living with the dead,Footnote ³⁷ the fully constituted subject from the abject and the nonhuman, the acceptable from the taboo, and the edible from the disgusting. In an edited collection entitled Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry,Footnote ³⁸ the Japanese-Canadian writer Hiromi Goto shockingly exposes these slimic unsettlings in her short story “And the Moon Spun Round Like a Top.” Bernadette Nakashima, the central protagonist, is approaching menopause and has “big blood clots” during her menstrual period which, after going online, she discovers “was normal […] during ‘the change’” (Goto Reference Goto, Zomparelli and Ly2022, 121). One of these clots was “the size of a hamster” and “almost looked like one, with four stubby, limb-like protrusions [and a] rounded bulge that was almost a head …” (121). It had a “jelly-like consistency” (121). Then she finds that it is alive: it “recoiled from her touch” and then “humped and squirmed, humped and squirmed like a plump red grub on the sticky surface of her gusset” (121). Then another one came out, “a hot, round bulge [that] billowed through her vagina […] slid out, slick and easy” (124). As she is trying to make sense of it all, “the giant clot of blood squealed” and “continued shrieking – a piercing pitch” followed finally by “a quiet mewing” (125).Footnote ³⁹ Moments later when she is holding the thing, it starts sucking her blood: “A sharp pain punched through her forefinger, the fleshy part below the first joint. Bernadette gasped. Sucking. She could feel the suction, the painful throb of her broken flesh. The wet sounds of swallowing” (125). She wonders, “What manner of life was this?” (125). What manner indeed! Barbara Creed has noted in her discussions of Julia Kristeva’s work that “the ultimate in abjection is the corpse” and in order to avoid becoming a corpse, “the body protects itself from bodily wastes, such as shit, blood, urine and pus by ejecting these things from the body just as it expels food that, for whatever reason, the subject finds loathesome” (Creed Reference Creed1993, 9). She explains that “slime, bile, pus, vomit, urine, [and] blood [are all …] abject forms of excrement” (40). The slimy thing that has come out of Bernadette’s vagina, as it turns out, is neither bodily waste nor an abject form of excrement. It is a living thing, and she suckles it with her blood.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is apparently also intelligent. It stops making noise when Timo, the caretaker of the building, comes up to see if everything is all right. He is satisfied that it is, but clearly it is not. This slimic monstrosity “had no face. No eyes. And yet it had a mouth for eating. Teeth for biting” (Goto Reference Goto, Zomparelli and Ly2022, 126). Clearly a very aggressive version of the vagina dentata trope, these slimy blood clots multiply, and Bernadette “could not say how many skinless creatures she had passed during the long night” (128). She collected them all in “jars, soup pots, bowls, … basins, a cat carrier, some old Tupperware containers and, of all things, a discarded baby’s bathtub” (128), and then when the officious caretaker returns (this time because he thinks that the noises he hears are pets), we get horror, pure horror: “Thud. Thud. Clatter. Things falling from a height. Bang, bang, bang. Like someone kicking the kitchen cupboards with a workboot” (130). The slime clots ate him.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, Bernadette had given so much of herself to make these creatures – “the entire day spent bleeding creatures into the tub” (130) – that she herself was starved, and “the sounds of crunching bones, slurping and sucking, made [her] stomach rumble. Juices filled her mouth” (130). Before long, “the hunger in her belly roared,” and as “the creatures surged around her, […] she grabbed them, the little ones falling into the back of her mouth like raw oysters. Plip, plop, plip” (135).Footnote ⁴² She drew before her “a writhing, shimmering mound” and “gulped and gulped like a starving sea turtle eating an entire ocean of jellyfish” (135). Clearly, there is a lot going on in this story with slime.

The first and most obvious slimic issue in this narrative is the subversion of hetero-reproductive norms. Bernadette is producing life without a man: “she hadn’t had sex for over nine years” (122). According to Bernadette’s friend, Glenda, “who referred to herself as queer” (119), Bernadette herself is also queer: “even though she might not be gay,” Glenda says, “jeez was she ever queer” (119). Bernadette’s “walk around Lost Lagoon at Stanley Park” (115) in Vancouver only adds to this unspoken fact. Lost Lagoon is a famous gay cruising area in Vancouver (admittedly more for men than for women, but still it is a queer zone). It is clear that she does not need or want men, and the life she makes without a man is one that she suckles with her own blood (perhaps raising the issue of how this story re-articulates questions about the lesbian vampire genre).Footnote ⁴³

The centrality of menstrual blood in this story forces a focus on a slimic material coded in patriarchal texts as a defilement, as excrement, as stuff not to be regarded. Goto actively resists such a demonizing of menstrual blood. Not only is it central to this story; it is also ultimately ingested, becoming sustenance rather than poisonous impurity, life-affirming rather than mortal in effect, hardly the threat it is for men. Julia Kristeva shows how “menstrual blood […] threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference” (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1982, 71); however, life, this story suggests, is simply not what patriarchies portray it as. Eagerly anticipating her next period, Bernadette muses on everything: “Oh, remarkable life … Every cell in her body sang” (Goto Reference Goto, Zomparelli and Ly2022, 136). Goto expresses the “potentials of queer becoming shaped by […] aqueous entanglements,” to borrow a phrase out-of-context from Jeremy Chow (Chow Reference Chow2023, 4). Bernadette subverts slime’s registers and everything that Kristeva says about menstrual blood as a sign of abjection. Kristeva writes that

But in Goto, menstrual blood and slime are not the threat of life by death.

3.2 Life

Our relationship with the waters of our planet is well known, and, as Astrida Neimanis so cogently explains, “our own embodiment […] is never really autonomous”:

Neimanis notes that “as bodies of porosity, we are constantly interpermeating our surroundings” (76).Footnote ⁴⁴ She describes how

For instance, during sex, she explains, citing Alphonso Lingis, “our muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstantiate into ooze, slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions, into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganisms of the night air” (Lingis Reference Lingis2000, 38, as cited by Neimanis Reference Neimanis2017, 138). Neimanis is also clear that “phallogocentrism, the masculinist logic of sharp-edged self-sufficiency […] supports a forgetting of the bodies that have gestated our own” (3) – which, effectively, is both a misogynistic revulsion toward the corporeality of women and a variety of myxophobia.

Slime is complex, entangled with life as much as with death. Life begins in slime. Lorenz Oken notes “that all organic beings originate from […] the unfusorial mass, or the protoplasm [Urschleim] from whence all larger organisms fashion themselves or are evolved. Their production is therefore nothing else than a regular agglomeration of […] mucus vesicles or points [Schleimpunkte], which first form themselves by their union or combination into particular species” (Oken Reference Oken1847/2015, xi–xii). People who eat eggs see this slime in the yolk and the whites, and horror is perhaps the result when there is a bloody little embryo in the mix.

Even in its associations with life, slime can ambivalently embody horror – and not only in unwanted embryos. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for instance, Annie Dillard is in pure awe at the baffling fecundity of the natural world. Early in Chapter 10, she recalls a nightmare she had wherein she had witnessed two giant Luna moths mating,

And then she awoke screaming. The horror of things out of place—such as fish in the bed!—is only a part of the nightmare, the larger part being unwelcome slime in it. Moreover, when such a thing as slime generates life and agency, it adds to the horror, since we harbor a deep cognitive resistance to the notion of agency within something as cellularly heterogenous as slime.

Undoubtedly, another reason for the horror is the very lack of diversity slime seems to represent. On some visceral level, and I expect that we will eventually find biological evidence for this, it seems that we are repulsed by too much uniformity and are threatened by ideas about the loss of diversity. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the marching armies of enemy countries seem so frightening. It has to do with loss of individuality and identity, and Allison Mackey seems correct in maintaining that “the fear and mistrusts of the fungal stems at least in part from the terror of losing one’s own individuality by merging into a collective entity” (Mackey Reference Mackey2023, 253). So, too, with slime and its mono-cellularity. It is not simply that the appearance of slimy creatures such as jellyfish often “confus[e] the categories of solidity and liquidity,” as Stacy Alaimo has pointed out (Alaimo Reference Alaimo, Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis2013, 145) but that such creatures, like slime itself, inspires an “ontological confusion and panic” (152). Alaimo goes on to argue that “gelata, ever so gently, question the humanist desire for solid demarcations” (154) and “float at the far reaches of our ability to construct sturdy interspecies connections, thus posing both conceptual and ethical challenges” (140). And of all the connections slime troubles, that between life and death is perhaps most disturbing.

3.3 Death and the Undead

Slime and death are inseparable. The association of slime with the trope of disintegration is very present in VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and as “the path of slime grew thicker” (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 58), the narrator’s fear of disintegration increased. Her husband, who had always been “outgoing and impetuous and […] passionate” came back from the previous expedition to the slimy tunnel with “none of that in him” (57). Life, as it were, has been sucked from him.

Annihilation is a part of a growing body of what has come to be known as fungal fiction, and, predictably, it is a genre in which slime is central. Fungal fiction is a subgenre of ecohorror that embodies our worst fears. According to Evelyn Koch, “fungal fiction represents our human fears of global infections, decay, and ultimately extinction” (Koch Reference Koch2023, 280). While fungi are essential to life, “it is,” Koch explains, “the darker side of fungi that unsettles us: their ability to feast on death to form new life” (279). Yet, slime settles on both life and death. It is the “agony of water,” but it is not water.

Slime is a shape-shifter, an amorphous thing that differs from water in how it characterizes the bodies and things it touches. It invests them with ethically charged identities. Water just makes things wet; slime makes them disgusting or horrifying or dangerous. Water dries; slime infects. Water takes the speediest route; slime is in no rush. Slime twists and turns the concept of spatial integrity and invests it with a multiplicity of potentials for inhabitation and reinhabitation. Slime is radical in this sense. It collapses capitalist ideals about the management of space and in turn the management of time too. A critique of these ideals takes clear form in the insatiable, unsustainable, and mindless hunger of the slimy zombies that populate the television adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead.

The apocalypse begins in a French science laboratory, on one of the walls of which hangs a slogan reading “Les Morts Sont Nés Ici” (“The dead are born here”). The series suggests that it is unimportant both what the exact purpose of the viral research was or how the virus got out (it seems to have been unintentional); what is important is that the zombie apocalypse is the result of human fiddlings with genes and viruses. The critique of medical and military institutions, however, is the very tip of the iceberg here, and this is not just some ridiculous comic book fantasy. The science behind it all is perhaps even plausible, argues clinical microbiologist Anisha Misra (see Misra Reference Misra2023). Whether or not this is so, the fictional virus is airborne, and no one is immune. Everyone carries it. When they die, the virus slows decomposition and reactivates the brain stem allowing only the basic survival instincts to work – and, incidentally, these are ones that tend not to show humanity in its best light. The zombies engage in mindless cannibalism of the living, who then “turn” and do the same. Civilization totally breaks down. As civilization collapses, the remnants of our world struggle both against the zombie enemy (called “the walkers” in the series) and against each other. The horror of the zombie enemy would be very different without the slime. These creatures are dead and rotting, their slime infectious, like the saliva of The Komodo Dragon.Footnote ⁴⁵ The slimy borders of these walkers challenge and dissolve the boundary between the living and the dead – a challenge neatly congealed in the oxymoronic title of the series. Spaces mortal to the human frame are inhabitable to these zombies. They challenge the understandings of space and protocols about corporeality. The walking dead demand a total recalibration of physical responses to human bodies, a need for astonishing and widespread violence against the integrity of the living dead that inhabit the deliquescent human frame.

Even without the deliquescence, the trope of the zombie alone is a strong figure of resistance. Laura Wright explains why zombies serve as an excellent vehicle of social critique: “zombies have consistently lacked the ability to reason; they are driven by a thoughtless and amoral consumption and have served as ideal metaphors for an increasingly consumer-based culture that is often driven by unethical production models” (Wright Reference Wright2015, 69). These unethical production models take full form in The Walking Dead among the still-living groups that use weapons, extortion, totalitarianism, and so on to battle each other for control of resources and power. The battle is as much against what animates the live human frame as the dead, a battle as much against the human survival instincts that pit us against each other as against the threat of degeneration that the waves of slimic zombies represent. The threat of death and degeneration that slime poses is perhaps a part of the ecophobic vision of the return of Nature (about which I wrote in The Ecophobia Hypothesis, 66).

3.4 Ecophobia and Slime

Ecophobia is central to promoting the sense of human particularity – corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual – that has enabled incredible accomplishments for our species. Our porous corporeality is fundamental here, and as locus, gauge, and conduit for both our self-assurance and our fears, the body is the site through which ecophobia takes meaning and expression. Resisting ecophobic impulses means moving away from the sense of particularity and exceptionalism we maintain, away “from the entrenched notion of humanity’s privileged status as if it exists outside of earth systems” (Oppermann Reference Oppermann, Cohen and Duckert2017, 143–44). One of the ways to achieve this movement away from the sense of self-entitlement and exceptionalism is, as Stacy Alaimo has put it, by “thinking across bodies.” So doing “may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” (Alaimo Reference Alaimo2010, 2). It is precisely such agency and the intimacy of the threats it offers that often evokes the maladaptive response of ecophobia, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in our complicated responses to rot and slime – significant at least in part because these responses are a disturbing playground of ecophobia.

We have good reason to fear dirty and rotting things: they have not promoted our well-being in our evolutionary history. No one would call it ecophobic to avoid mortality and shun bacterial and viral threats. Bacteria in film and literature rarely offers an accurate understanding of bacteria and is more often than not phobic in its representations. In the 2004 romantic comedy Along Came Polly, for instance, Reuben Feffer (played by Ben Stiller) explains to Polly Prince (played by Jennifer Aniston) that “when you think you’re innocently eating a little bar snack, you’re actually ingesting potentially deadly bacteria from about 39 soil-handed strangers. I mean, people wonder why they get E. coli poisoning or salmonella or hepatitis, when all they gotta do is look at the snack bowl at their local watering hole… .It’s an absolute hot zone in there.” Feffer’s fears border on the phobic.

Post-pandemic compulsive use of hand sanitizers in public venues (and I confess to have sanitized as much as, and perhaps more than, anyone else) is a recent example of our further trek down the road of obsessive fear of dirt and bacteria. The reality, however (and this is not to take the idiotic position of the antivaxxers), is that the human body is comprised of more nonhuman than human DNA, and obsessive hand sanitizing is more harmful in the long run than it is beneficial in that we are killing microorganisms that are beneficial to our own survival. For instance, we need intestinal flora in order to digest our food, regulate our immune system, and reduce inflammation. These gut flora (the bacteria) produce antimicrobial substances that outnumber the total count of cells in the human body by 1,000 percent–ten to one, in other words. The biological questions about what we are doing to future generations with our compulsive sanitizing need our attention. No less does our sense of being besieged, outnumbered, and under attack by our microscopic companions need attention; imagining war rather than cohabitation with the microbes will not help us in the long run, and the fact remains that “we are more microbe than human” (McFall-Ngai Reference McFall-Ngai, Gan, Tsing, Swanson and Bubandt2017, M52). There will be consequences for tearing into microbial ecosystems.

We are facing a serious loss – one that has nothing to do with personal liberties or social freedoms. Before COVID-19, with the growth of the Anthropocene, we had already begun to face “the loss,” Margaret McFall-Ngai explains, “of the complex microbial worlds both within and beyond organismal bodies – worlds that make nearly all life possible” (M51). These microbial worlds are absolutely essential for us, yet we are tearing into them willy-nilly with our sanitizing regimes. Again, to be clear, this is not to argue on any level against the need for good hygiene during pandemics, but we need to know that there will be consequences down the road for this.

Summarizing the work of Carl Woese, McFall-Ngai describes how, by the early 1990s, it had become clear that “the earth’s biological diversity is far more microbial than ever imagined” (M54) and that “microbes don’t just ‘rule’ the world: they make every life form possible, and they have been doing so since the beginning of evolutionary time” (M59). McFall-Ngai summarizes important arguments about how “bacteria matter not only in themselves but also in relation to other living beings, who depend on them for processes as basic as bodily development” (M59). She spells it out so that even the most nonscientific of readers can clearly understand:

Citing the work of Yang Wang and Lloyd H. Kaspar, McFall-Ngai contends that “there is growing evidence that the presence or absence of certain microbial strains is linked to depression, anxiety, and autism” (M64). So why in the world is there no media attention to the possible harm that our antiseptic, antibiotic, compulsive sanitizing might be doing to our future?  At least part of the answer is quite simply that we do indeed suffer from that branch of ecophobia that Michael Pollan called “germophobia.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, his words could not have been timelier.

After SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, a widespread microbiophobia took hold, and hand sanitizers started growing like mold on old bread. Today, as Pollan notes in a discussion about fermentation, “the microbial world is regarded foremost as a mortal threat” (Pollan Reference Pollan2013, 296). The legacy of Louis Pasteur, he explains, “is a century-long war on bacteria, a war in which most of us have volunteered or been enlisted. We deploy our antibiotics and hand sanitizers and deodorants and boiling water and ‘pasteurization’ and federal regulations to hold off the rot and molds and bacteria and so, we hope, hold off disease and death” (296).Footnote ⁴⁶ Pollan calls it “germophobia” (297), but it is also known as “microbiophobia,” “Mysophobia,” “verminophobia,” “bacillophobia,” and “bacteriophobia” – all of them clearly falling under the rubric of ecophobia, which, as I have suggested elsewhere, plays out in many spheres, including the personal hygiene and cosmetics industries (Estok Reference Estok2009, 208).

What makes Pollan’s work so relevant here is that it sidles up to the thin membranes of our most intimate worries, and it pokes at them – and, when they burst, what is “at stake […] is our whole relationship to nature” (Pollan Reference Pollan2013, 297). Pollan is relentless – with a nun, no less – in his exploration of what he calls “the erotics of disgust” (360). Sister Noëlla – a post-Pasteurian cheese maker and microbiologist at a Benedictine abbey in Connecticut – reassures Pollan, “Oh, I really like that term” (360). Pollan uses the term because of the ambivalence of our responses to the “various aromas” of our rotting, fermented foods and how they “are often likened to those of the human body in its various parts” (360) – stinky feet, ass sweat, genital musk, and farts (also known as “cutting the cheese”). Pollan goes on to observe that

Those smells contain compelling information about sexual matters, about which foods are edible and which deadly, about how to track food and water, about possible dangers, about fire, and so on; also, that compelling mass of information shows that the body owes everything to what is outside of it and, as Australian feminist philosopher Moira Gatens notes, “is in constant interchange with its environment. The human body is radically open to its surroundings” (Gatens Reference Gatens1996, 110). The porosity of the body, Nancy Tuana explains, “is a hinge through which we are of and in the world” (Tuana Reference Tuana, Alaimo and Hekman2008, 199). Alaimo calls this porosity “trans-corporeality” and states that “perhaps the most palpable trans-corporeal substance is food, since eating transforms plants and animals into human flesh” (Alaimo Reference Alaimo2010, 12). Failing to see this reveals ecophobia and its intersections. One of these intersections, as Pollan engagingly clarifies, has to do with a kind of contempt, fear, and repression of bodily needs and expressions. He quotes French sociologist Pierre Boisard as claiming that food “reminds us of the body, of sensual pleasure, or sexual fulfillment, and of all that is forbidden in it” (Pollan Reference Pollan2013, 363). Startlingly, Pollan then goes on to suggest that the American “government’s crackdown on raw-milk cheese is rooted in sexual repression” (363). That crackdown, which is at core microbiophobic and ecophobic, then, as Pollan suggests, intersects with what Greta Gaard has called “erotophobia.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Without question, because various parts of our bodies carry the same bacteria as many foods, the products of those bacteria smell similar: “so it may well be that the allusiveness of a funky cheese to the human body is actually more literal than metaphoric, a matter not so much this stands for that as this is that, too, in food form” (Pollan 2013, 362–63). We are the matter that surrounds us, and our desire to transcend that and to deny materiality and transcorporeality is, as I have said, ecophobic; yet, evolutionary biology favors the fearful, and avoiding rot has clear survival advantages. Avoiding something that will kill you cannot reasonably be called ecophobia, and the sense of disgust has unquestionably had evolutionary roots and functions that have offered survival advantages.

Disgust is a complicated matter, part ideological no doubt but also with genetic roots. It is, as many researchers have shown, an evolutionary response centered on the sense of taste that protects the body from danger or death, and it is not raw or absolute ecophobia. Carroll Izard, for instance, has argued that “in evolution, disgust probably helped motivate organisms to maintain an environment sufficiently sanitary for their health and to prevent them from eating spoiled food and drinking polluted water” (Izard Reference Izard1977, 337). And, to be clear, an aversion to imagined threats to our survival is not ecophobia, and an aversion to slime (because of its association with disease, rot, and other things that can kill us) is clearly not always ecophobia. Equally clearly, however, slime is not always putrefaction and death. Indeed, slime is the very basis of life itself. We begin as slime, from semen and vaginal secretions, and, millennia before our individual genesis,Footnote ⁴⁹ as primordial slime – hence, perhaps our ambivalent fascination with it. We begin in slime, but slime and rot can have (and have had) mortal consequences.

The body is indeed vulnerable to any of a number of kinds of mortal corruption. It is the body, the sacred house of the human subject, that rot most threatens, and slime is rot’s messenger. Slime, to use Kelly Hurley’s words, “constitutes a threat to the integrity of the human subject” (Hurley Reference Hurley1996, 35). In the introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s landmark work On Disgust, Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith note that the disgusting are “things that are decaying and putrefying, that are contaminated and contaminating, and are thus associated with impurity and threat” (Korsmeyer and Smith Reference Korsmeyer, Smith., Kolnai, Smith and Korsmeyer2004, 1–2). Slime is within that category. Robert Wilson explains that slime is central to disgust and that “what is now slime was once something else that has degenerated. Slime is disgusting because it is uncertain, a phase in the dissolution of existence” (Wilson Reference Wilson2002, 64). Uncertainty and diversions are threatening: they are the lifeblood of ecophobia.

4.1 The Agony of Water

When water goes awry and thrashes in an agony of metamorphosis away from its three natural states, it is the stuff of horror – and nowhere is the agony of water more resplendent than in slime. Utterly unpredictable, slime is not subject to control in the way that water is.Footnote ⁵⁰ While “we can never fully direct water’s relational reach [, and while it] has a remarkable capacity to resist containments of all kinds” (Chen et al. Reference Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis, Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis2013, 12), we can and do try our very best to control water – and with spectacular results. Water’s sometimes random and unpredictable nature fosters both fear and wonder, but slime is more extreme in its evocative range, producing horror on the one hand and puerile wonder on the other. The impulse to control water’s apparent randomness and unpredictability has resulted in beautiful and amazingly choreographed displays – such as in the Bellagio Fountains of Las Vegas or the Latona Fountain in the Gardens of Versailles; but there is little taming of slime that inspires aesthetic awe, except, perhaps, in lava lamps. The impulse to control water has resulted in the Hoover Dam and the Three Gorges Dam; harnessing slime does not produce such wonders.Footnote ⁵¹

In Elemental Philosophy, David Macauley explores how the four elements of ancient philosophy can serve as an organizing set of principles for discussions about contemporary environmental issues, an exploration that both yields many productive insights and perhaps raises questions about whether an interstitial border crosser and intruder such as slime might itself qualify as another element. Macauley speaks of how our “corporeal ties to elemental waters […] are more than mythic or metaphorical” (Macauley Reference Macauley2010, 45) and notes that these ties are “evident in the fact that our eyes must be bathed frequently in salt water, and our body – like the sea – requires a prescribed range of saline in order to sustain life” (45). He goes on to note that there is much about water that remains “random and unpredictable” (48), and it is at this juncture that some comment about slime is appropriate – not only because of our corporeal ties with slime but because of how slime takes “random and unpredictable” to a whole new level.

In spite of yielding to our hand, water still has the upper hand: there is more of it than of us (and even the corporeality of “us” is more water than anything), and when unpredictable things such as earthquakes happen, water takes complete control of us. The March 2011 Sendai tsunami is a recent example, but history is dotted with others. Nothing is waterproof. Water carved out the Grand Canyon. It kills countless numbers of people, plants, and animals in storms each year. It freezes and expands and destroys buildings and bridges. It weighs heavily and unpredictably. We have ample reason to fear it as much as to be in awe of it. Yet, it does not epitomize fear in the way that slime does.

Water is a funny element – the only one, as is well-known, that occurs naturally on this planet in the three states of matter (liquid, solid, and gas). In addition to going to these states, water can also go “bad.” In VanderMeer’s Annihilation, it teeters (if water can be said to teeter) between the good and the bad (or at least between what we consider as such). At one point, the pool in the narrator’s childhood backyard began to rot, becoming “more and more brackish with algae,” but, “by some miracle […] within months […] the pool had become a functioning ecosystem” (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 44), replete with local birds, turtles, frogs, and fish. The only thing that the narrator had done to nurture this development was to dump in some fish, most of which died from shock. Nature, having already slimed it up in the pool, did the rest.

Slime is the transgression of all transgressions, of water – the very basis of life. Yet, the transgression of water to slime is a transgression to something that is itself ironically also the very basis of life. As a transgression par excellence, slime slips outside of the cultural categories that define the known, the safe, and the normal and falls squarely (as squarely as slime can fall) into the category of what Noël Carroll defines as horror: “what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories” (Carroll Reference Carroll1990, 35). Thus, in VanderMeer, the diversions water takes are the stuff of horror.

VanderMeer’s is not a dry world, and it is not fear in a handful of dust that he offers; rather, we have eeriness “in the black water with the sun shining at midnight” (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 50). It is an image that looks a lot like the odd stillness and horror of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

In both VanderMeer and Coleridge, water goes awry. In Coleridge, the eerie placidness of the water quickly gives way to sliminess and slimy things crawling; in VanderMeer, as the three remaining women of the expedition in chapter two go down the stairs of the mysterious tunnel/inverted tower, horror is never far away. Not surprisingly, the journey is marked with slime – first with “the trails of snails or slugs” (VanderMeer Reference VanderMeer2014, 48) and then more definitively with a “slightly viscous [residue], like slime […] about half an inch deep over the steps [… and] eight or nine feet wide” (53). If slime signals degeneration, then perhaps it also signals an equally threatening and thwarting of expectations through a kind of re-purposing of material, sometimes with monstrous results.

4.2 Monstrously Divisive Waters

Korean director Bong Joon-ho invokes slime in his 2006 film The Host in ways that radically challenge binaristic thinking – in particular, notions about borders and boundaries. Bong is “the first Asian filmmaker to win the Oscar award for Best Director” (Maheshwari Reference Maheshwari2023)Footnote ⁵² and is Korea’s most prolific and successful director. His films have met with tremendous approval among Western audiences while generically refusing the conventions of Western theater. Nam Lee has argued that

This is significant because Bong divides and unites in his films: he establishes filmic conventions that are not Hollywood style (and not Gangnam style) but that mirror its appeal and bring in huge audiences. In many ways indeed, The Host is about divisions that unite. These uniting divisions – cultural, ideological, geographical, economic, generational, and gendered – often intersect across the slimic.

Forcing the audience to confront dividing lines, The Host shows the borderlessness of environmental issues in a country riven with divisions. While the Han Gang (Han River) being a poisoned public waterway unites people in a shared threat of vulnerability at the same time that it divides the city into the affluent south (Gangnam) and the less affluent north (Gangbuk),Footnote ⁵³ it is critical also to remember here that vulnerabilities to unsafe water are not shared equally. Water – as Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis note in their edited collection Thinking with Water – is “a matter of concern shared across our differences” (Chen et al. Reference Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis, Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis2013, 7), but those shared differences are not equally shared. When water goes awry, it is the communities of the poor that bear the disproportionate burden of suffering.

An important part of this film has to do with notions about dilution (perhaps even reflecting Korean anxieties about cultural dilution threatened by the International Monetary Fund’s bailout conditions during East Asian financial crisis, called “the IMF-crisis” in Korea). The dumping scene, then, in addition to raising environmental awareness, is culturally nuanced and committed to resistance: there is clearly something different going on in this film than in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and rather than exploiting imperialist and colonialist stereotypes, Bong is clearly “writing back” to them. Shortly after the old white man urges the dumping of formaldehyde into the public waterways, we see that the poisons have not diluted and that some people fishing are noticing mutations. Soon a monster appears from the river. Water is central in this narrative and becomes both the great equalizer and the great divider. It has the effect in this film of bringing into visibility a world unseen and yet present before our eyes, both disorienting us and, to borrow a description from Melody Jue’s description of immersion in water, “shaking up the conditions of interpretation” (Jue Reference Jue2020, 163). Not confined to the river, however, water is pouring down constantly in the film. The characters are soaked, the monster often slipping on unsure footing, the sense of saturation complete. The watery excess magnifies the horror by invoking slime.

Bong’s The Host seems to be set during jangma (Korea’s rainy season), and so the rain is perhaps perfectly plausible; even so, the effect is to create a sense of saturation and sliminess. It is useful to understand saturation in the sense that Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz use it in their introduction to their edited collection entitled Saturation: an Elemental Politics: “while saturation begins with water and watery metaphors,” they explain, “it is useful beyond water as a heuristic for thinking through co-present agencies, elements, and phenomena that traverse ideological systems and physical substances alike” (Jue and Ruiz Reference Jue, Ruiz, Jue and Ruiz2021, 11). In The Host, the excess of water leads to a sense of saturation that is complete, and this sense of saturation and excess carries with it a sense of slimic rot, a diversion of water from its proper course and state.

Diversions in The Host are both physical and metaphorical – bad liquids being diverted to the wrong place, and ecological systems being de-railed, the latter the consequence of the former. The outcome in The Host is a monster that seems irremediably and irrationally evil, bent on the destruction of people and property, heedless of ethics and decency – it does, after all, grab children as they run away. The slimic imbalance that polluted water causes in the film are deadly.

4.3 The Blue Humanities

Susanne Wedlich makes the important point that anthropogenic climate change increasingly threatens the balances of our aquatic ecosystems: “Climate change and other catastrophes threaten [these balances], but could also work in slime’s favor, ushering in a new era of gooey dominance” (Wedlich Reference Wedlich2021, 7). This would not be a good thing. Indeed, central to all meteorological phenomena are the balances of the Earth’s oceans, and climate change is shifting the balances and creating positive feedback loops (also known as vicious cycles) between the seas and the skies. When marine systems – what Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis refer to as the “necessary balance of waters” (Chen et al. Reference Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis, Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis2013, 3) – are disrupted, aquatic and biological effects run deep. One of the problems is that the effects of disrupted balances produce things that evoke fear and hostility toward the environment – an ecophobic response that gels around slime and requires serious immediate attention. The seas are becoming slime, a “nondescript goo” of the jellyfish.Footnote ⁵⁵ The upsliming of the oceans is a global phenomenon, and is not restricted to one place or to jellfish-ization. The “sea snot” in the Sea of Marmara of Turkey is another disturbing example. “Sea snot,” Serpil Oppermann explains in her 2023 Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene, is “a mucilage outbreak in the sea” (Oppermann Reference Oppermann2023, 20).Footnote ⁵⁶ Triggered by human activities, these outbreaks, Oppermann points out, are devastating for the local marine ecologies. There are, as Mentz states, “multiple forms of planetary water” (Mentz Reference Mentz2024, xii), and while research is moving productively into oceans and seas, it is also gradually moving into fresh waters, bogs, and swamps. As it does so, new areas of slime research will open up, studies of creatures from black lagoons and of biological slimes in brown swamps will surface, and there will develop a virtue in muddy thinking.Footnote ⁵⁷

It is an open question whether or not UBC marine biologist Daniel Pauly is accurate to suggest “a new name of this new era, the age of slime” instead of the term Anthropocene (Pauly Reference Pauly2010, 61). With the removal of the high end of food chains in global seas, jellyfish are proliferating, and oceans are becoming slime. Thus, Pauly proposes “that [our era] be called ‘Myxocene’” (61), the Age of Slime. The horror for Pauly is in the destruction of biotic complexity, the abortion of intricate biotic purposes and aims, and the normalization of bodies of slime (namely jellyfish) floating aimlessly through the annihilated seas. These and other changes that we have wrought “impel research,” Stacy Alaimo has argued, “on how gelata affect and are affected by marine environments” (Alaimo Reference Alaimo, Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis2013, 139). And, to be sure, the research in the Environmental Humanities is increasingly blue.