MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

Zombies, Chemicals and Saints: Towards a Cosmopolitics of Permeation

Monster stories index anxieties about the dissolution of the possessive individual: a minded subject encased in a bodily fortress. Zombies gobble without will, and mutants emerge after permeation by toxic exposure. But what if the individual is the monster, not the zombies or mutants? In this talk, I describe my research with exposure to scientists and their study participants living in working-class colonias in Mexico City, infamous for their excess. The scientists work with nineteenth-century industrial models of exposure, presuming exposure to be temporally discrete—an event that occurs when and if individual boundaries are breached. They educate participants how to prevent exposure and to curb their excess to avoid obesity. The participants burlesque these boundary-making mandates, proclaiming themselves as zombies while expressing skepticism about exposure prevention, because they live constantly permeated by both chemicals and saints. By combining chemicals and saints, the participants offer a cosmopolitics of permeation that dislodges the implicit secularity of most social theory in alignment with critical theories of entanglement and intra-action. I theorize  this secularity as contiguous with the industrial logic that bequeaths the monstrousness of both environmental catastrophe and the individual.

Monstrosities
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