SPECULATIVE ECOLOGIES AND NARRATIVES OF TRANSFORMATION: THE MATERIAL ECOCRITICAL SELF IN SCOTT WESTERFELD'S UGLIES

Abstract

This article explores the environmental and transformative narratives in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005), situating the novel within ecocritical and materialist frameworks. It argues that Uglies uses the tropes of young adult dystopian fiction to critique anthropocentric ideals of material aesthetics and the socio-environmental costs of their pursuit. Through a close reading of the novel’s treatment of materiality, technological developments, and environmental futures, the article shows how the novel foregrounds the entanglements between bodies, technologies, and ecologies, and resists the posthumanist separation of nature and culture. In particular, the text’s treatment of the natural landscape as both refuge and site of transformation complicates the simplistic binaries of civilization vs. wilderness, offering a speculative ecology that foregrounds hybridity, relationality, and environmental agency. The paper further considers the impact on the central character’s sense of self, especially in regard to the text’s appeal for readers in its negotiation of normative pressures around beauty and identity. In doing so, the study contends that Uglies functions as a site for critically imagining more ecologically attuned ways of being in the material world. Ultimately, the article contributes to the ongoing conversations in ecocriticism and YA studies by illuminating how speculative fiction can intervene in discourses about environmental materialisms, transformations of the self, and the possibility of posthuman subjectivity.