Paradise Rot (Verso Books, 2018) by Jenny Hval is a surreal and unsettling novel that explores themes of identity, sexuality, and transformation. The story follows Jo, a Norwegian exchange student living in a strange, decaying house with her mysterious roommate, Carral, where the boundaries between the body and the environment begin to blur.
Published in Haunting Utopias (volume 8, issue 1 of Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities), this paper embarks on a close reading of Paradise Rot, revealing the utopic potential of reimagining the body, not as a self-contained being, but as an intricate network extending beyond the skin. It challenges dominant Western ideas that isolate humans and place them hierarchically above non-humans like plants and animals.
Hval provocatively links the queerness of her characters to mushrooms. Both homosexuality and fungi have traditionally been demonised as alien, contaminating, and freakish. This paper further aligns these traits with queered figures from classic Gothic horror, such as the lesbian vampire and Susan Stryker’s transgender Frankenstein. These monstrous entities destabilise the distinctions between the "natural" and the supernatural, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead. → Read
Images & Paradise Rot Design: Chloe Scheffe