How does science influence attachments to borders? How can literature help us interrogate the ways scientific rhetoric, such as rhetoric of modern genetics, influences conceptualizations of belonging and exclusion? As the anthropologist Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), argues, science is never separated from power: “Like other forms of Western knowledge […] genomic practices and data sets cannot be disentangled from histories and politics of resource extractions or from racism, colonialism, and oppressive religious and national doctrines.” (Native American DNA, 2013: 202-203) In the 2015 novel Codex 1962, the author Sjón interrogates how the rhetoric of DNA affectively influences notions of collectivity in Iceland. Codex 1962 blurs the borders between fact and fiction in its discussion of Icelandic genetic laboratories who rely on willing Icelandic participants in order to conduct their research. By drawing attention to how social belonging and nationalism are intertwined through pleasure, the novel asks the reader to rethink and resist that affective merge. The novel repeatedly calls attention to how the pleasure of belonging to the national collective is interconnected with the pleasure of identifying with the rhetoric of superior DNA, a notion that relies on white supremacy, heteronormativity, and strict national borders.
Situating affect as a potential for change, I turn to feminist scholars Rosemary Hennessy and Jasbir Puar who have taken affect as an object of analysis of social structures, borders, and hierarchies. Through literature, the reader can trace how the “structures of feeling,” to borrow Raymond Williams’ phrase, that make and condition her reality, come to appear as internal and individual. Analyzing the technique of DNA rhetoric as an assemblage of affects, bodily forces and discourses, my reading of the novel strategically reconsiders how to build collectivities beyond the borders of those binaries. Furthermore, by attending to affect, I unpack how literature opens a way to interrogate pleasure as a site where national texts can be disentangled, and other futures can be imagined. Attending to the affective power of scientific rhetoric specifically, feminists can move toward more ethical ways of building alliances and conceptualizing change.

Sólveig Ásta Sigurðardóttir is a Ph.D. student in English at Rice University in Houston. Her research focuses on 19th century American literature, Scandinavian immigration to the United States and settler colonialism. She holds a degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Iceland and is a Fulbright recipient.

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