Figurations of posthumanity in contemporary science/fiction - all too human(ist)? (original) (raw)

This thesis explores stories of robots, androids and replicants passing as human in contemporary science fiction, and what these stories tell us about the dynamics of determining sameness and difference. The notion of passing as human illustrates how the ‘human’ is produced and maintained as an exclusive category, and how this construction of humanness relies on qualitative indexing of normality, authenticity, and legitimacy. Also, passing as human indicates a challenge to the stability of the notion of the human as such, exposing how a binary system of categorisation allows for the co-construction of a universalised and normative (human) Self versus an improper Other. In other words, to pass as human raises questions about the boundaries of the very category of the human, as social identity, as subject formation and as existence. I posit that contemporary science fiction contributes to knowledge production about and discourses of the ‘human’ as an ontological identity category that is under stress. I am concerned with discourses about the boundaries of the human, such as human bodies and existences, and how these boundaries are established and negotiated in popular culture, specifically in the science fiction genre. How is human identity and ontology policed and regulated; how is it rendered legitimate or how does it fail to materialise? In light of revolutionary technological and scientific developments over the last few decades, the boundaries between biology/human/subject and technology/machine/object have become increasingly unstable. The theoretical framework of the posthuman addresses this instability as political and ethical questions concerning the status and accountability of the human and the non-human alike. This posthuman turn involves a closer focus on the notion of ontology as connected to politics, ethics and epistemology. Here ontology is not about knowledge of Being or existence as a kind of fixed entity, but as the material or physical conditions of, and the processes of, the world one lives in, is part of, and has access to, and the knowledge or experience that informs our ways of making sense of the world, ourselves and others in it. My interest in the posthuman turn stems from my background in feminist cultural studies. Long-standing feminist and postcolonial debates about power and privilege as a matter of body, politics and the conditions of possibility for agency illuminate the incongruities of a dualistic world-view where fixed markers of, for example, gender, race, sexuality, ability and class serve to privilege certain bodies and not others. The contestability of the ‘human’ as a neutral category is particularly evident in feminist critiques of science as disembodied ‘truths’ rather than situated and locatable forms of knowledge production. In line with key insights from the field of cultural studies, I apply this critique to literature, films and TV as both producers and products of knowledge. Drawing on the expanding field of science and literature studies (SLS), this thesis brings together feminist politics of location, knowledge production and science fiction. Donna Haraway (1988; 2011) suggests that knowledge production is a situated practice that shapes the ways in which we understand our reality. She refers to this as worldings: the stories, practices and knowledges that make a world or a reality. As a genre, science fiction is renowned for imagining alternative technologies, bodies and realities. By engaging in the potentialities of science, technology and medicine, science fiction opens up alternative worlds for exploring identities, embodiments and ontologies that confront conventional boundaries between sameness and difference. In a sense, technological and scientific development has contributed to a (re)actualisation of such speculative fictions: what was considered science fiction several decades ago might now be technologically feasible. I am interested in the ways in which stories about passing as human in science fiction resonate with ongoing discourses about the human in contemporary society. Particularly, I am interested in what is at stake in such stories, both as a mediation of human exceptionalism and as a conceptualisation of ongoing negotiations about the boundaries of what is considered ‘properly’ human in political and ethical discourses. Such discussions are at the heart of contemporary biopolitics and bioethics, and illustrate how political regulation of the human body (and the ways in which ethical considerations about human and non-human life can be articulated), are part of contemporary knowledge production and worlding practices. I refer to this as posthuman worldings. This thesis is a qualitative, interdisciplinary research project that consists of four articles, as well as an overview document. My work is grounded in visual and textual analysis of science fiction texts, mainly TV series and particularly the reimagined TV series Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009). I also rely on a genealogical analysis of the structures of sameness and difference that are made visible by contemporary biopolitics and bioethics. In an attempt to bridge the conventional gap between textual analysis and contextual inquiry, I combine close readings of selected scenes and characters in said science fiction texts with an analysis of current ethico-political discourse concerning what is considered or understood to be ‘human’ in late modern Western societies. Exploring the notion of passing as a perceptual and conceptual strategy for challenging established dualisms, I suggest that a noticeable increase in the number of stories of passing in science fiction indicates an ideological shift in terms of ways of thinking about sameness and difference as relational rather than distinct categories of differentiation.