In this essay, I look at how biopolitical regimes have emerged over the past few decades to produce what I call a non-category of state-induced vulnerability for gender-diverse populations, premised on the proliferation of automated checkpoints like facial recognition and state legal discourses. Through an analysis of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, I argue that this constitutes an operational logic unable to respond ethically to the transgender body as corporeally embodied.

In this article, using the example of koalas in the 2019–20 bushfires, I argue that our embodied encounters with animals are conditioned by an ethical address that can be found in and outside of language, which demands a fostering of life which must be environmental as well as physical. I posit that animals do have a face in the sense that Levinas has given us, and that our ethical responses should move beyond a narrowly defined mourning into a broader acknowledgment (...) of the manifold ways that human economies are fuelling the sixth mass extinction of all kinds of animals, not just koalas. (shrink)

In this article, I propose the concept of flotsam –waste washed-up or discarded in water –as a means of making sense of the pollution of the Anthropocene. Using examples taken from science fiction, notably that of J.G. Ballard’s novel _The Drought_, I suggest that flotsam (and jetsam) embody a capitalist logic in the Anthropocene in which potentially any being, human or non-human, and any thing, can become waste in a capitalist economy built on calculations of use-value, in what Marx called (...) the “metabolic interaction” between nature and human. (shrink)