This article examines Neill Blomkamp's film District 9 (2009) in terms of discursive operations that are carried out on a range of bodies in the film: visceral, institutional and classificatory, as well as bodies of the built environment. The visceral body of the protagonist Wikus van de Merwe is shown to be the nexus of a signifying matrix in which, through processes of metaphor and metonymy, different bodies in the film are linked to each other and to current and historical referents. The operations of contamination and hybridisation, abjection and displacement, and severing and dismemberment, are discussed in terms of their significance in a South African postcolonial framework. It is shown how these operations, representative of the machinations of apartheid, are affected microcosmically on Wikus's body, and questions are raised regarding the resulting fantasy of punishment and redemption that plays out within the caricatured world of the film.
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