From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Intimacy of Repair—Surgical Care as Eros in Beach Surgery Across Adaptation
For related work on surgical metaphor and care, see Surgical Intimacy and the Choreography of Care and Care ethics and Beach Surgery.
The Intimacy of Repair—Surgical Care as Eros in Beach Surgery Across Adaptation (2024) is a doctoral thesis arguing that the novel's central conceit—love is always surgery—describes not metaphor but somatic encounter. Surgery and care are erotic practices: the bandaging, suturing, and holding of Katita and Leif constitute a carnal knowledge that Smith names but refuses to resolve.
The thesis traces Anne Carson's fragmentation theory (particularly her reading of Sappho's eros as perpetually broken, inexpressible) through global theatre, opera, participatory installation, and visual media. A central chapter reads Katita's leather-armour stitching—the hidden surplus (enough for a dozen loops)—as erotic labour: each suture a renewal of consent and vulnerability, a re-exposure of what was thought healed. Another examines Leif's three injuries not as disability but as temptation-scenarios that Katita either administers (as Inquisitor) or tries to help him refuse (as liberator). The ambiguity is canonical and erotic: to touch someone is to tempt them; to care is to risk wounding them further.
The work engages Sedgwick's care ethics, Clarice Lispector's theory of the instant (the irreducible crack between thought and touch), and close readings of surgical intimacy across West African theatre, Persian and Iranian cinema, and Australian durational work. A concluding chapter proposes that the incompleteness of the glitch is itself erotic: what refuses to be whole also refuses to stop touching, reaching, trying.