Agential Orange: Immortal Performatives and Writing with Ashes

This essay is a case study of the author's late father and his processes of coming to know himself through a relationship with Agent Orange, a deadly and untraceable chemical. In performatively demonstrating the agential forces of nonhuman others at work, the essay troubles idiomatic written forms in order to navigate the personal and professional sites of Agent Orange's emergences in this man's life, which were confined neither to the hospital nor the home, the social nor the material, health nor sickness, and which blurred the lines between any such binaries. In the end, a way forward, even in death, is conceptualized through the paradigm of a social-material world.