Feminist Posthumanism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

More than thirty years after the publication of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, the image of cyborg still strikes as an interesting way to imagine the self in a postmodern context. The cyborg figure has continued to inform feminist reading and articulation of the mind/body bifurcation in science fiction film and literature that epitomizes the body-as-machine metaphor. The embodied hybridity of Haraway’s cyborg particularly opens up a move beyond the dualistic epistemologies that produced antithetical subject positions that feminist articulations of science fiction take up in highlighting the paradoxical representations of embodiment and subjectivity in cyborg technology. Inasmuch as contemporary cyborg theory reaffirms the basic foundations of Cartesian dualism in late twentieth century cyborg films, Mamoru Oshii’s film Ghost in the Shell, as a reference to the philosophical concept “ghost in the machine” could be a useful site of interrogating the body and technology hybridity as a place where we project a normativization of the body. It is in this context that I would like to explore the female, posthuman body presented in the film as texts coded with cultural and gendered anxieties. I aim to look into how the film, through its depiction of the cyborg heroine, Major Motoko, implicates female bodies inscribed with cultural and social rhetoric. To this end, I will use Lauren Wilcox’s perspective of technology as both embodied and embodying. I shall focus on Wilcox’s use of the posthuman theories by Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles in understanding materialization/dematerialization of technology in the film.

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- Feminist Posthumanism

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

- by Wendy Lynne Lee
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- Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, Marxism, Postcolonial Studies
- by Daniel Illger
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- Game studies, Badiou, Feminist Posthumanism, Assemblage Theory

This interview between Francesca Ferrando (New York University) and Asijit Datta (University of Calcutta) is an extended and exhaustive effort to weigh the pressing concerns of posthuman life, death, and philosophy in times of the... more

- by Francesca Ferrando and +1
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- Death, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Transhumanism/Posthumanism

Jak myśleć o życiu i śmierci, o utracie i nadziei w postapokaliptycznym i posttraumatycznym świecie? Jak nie tracąc z oczu globalnych i planetarnych wyzwań „naszego dzisiaj”, móc myśleć także o materialnych, konkretnych, usytuowanych, wręcz intymnych szczegółach i związkach, w które wchodzi życie w swoich jednostkowych przejawach i formach? Jak tworzyć odpowiedzialne relacje ze światem, jak o nim opowiadać i myśleć? Jak myśleć o człowieku inaczej niż przez pryzmat autonomiczności, samowystarczalności, atomizacji czy jednostkowości? Jak pomyśleć człowieka jako „bycie ze świata”, uchwycić ruch antropo-de-centralizacji, immanentnej relacyjności, sieci współzależności? Na te pytania autorka próbuje odpowiadać współ-myśląc z tekstami współczesnych myślicielek posthumanizmu przede wszystkim Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Vinciane Despret, Natalie Jeremijenko, Erin Manning i Michaela Mardera.
Narracje naukowe, filozoficzne czy interwencje artystyczne opowiadają nam o świecie i mogą to czynić na różne sposoby. Eseje z tego zbioru są próbą wypracowania teorii, konceptualizacji, wizji, utopii czy opowieści o świecie, które rozpoznając specyfikę „naszego dzisiaj”, eksperymentują z myśleniem o „naszym jutrze” (czasem podważając sam linearny obraz czasu) i zmierzają ku praktykom zmiany codziennego etosu.

Rozprawa stanowi próbę ukazania w jaki sposób splątane konceptualizacje i praktyki ciała przenikają się w procesie samoorganizacji materii. Tak sformułowane rozważania zostały usytuowane w obrębie dwóch współczesnych nurtów filozoficznych: posthumanizmu i nowego materializmu. Przedstawicieli i przedstawicielki tych formacji myślowych łączy potrzeba przemyślenia sposobów stawania się materii, uchwytnych w dynamice przeistaczających się ciał. Tego rodzaju ukierunkowanie rozważań umożliwia rozumienie cielesności w kategoriach procesów, relacji, zależności, a także wspólnotowości. Nieodłącznym wątkiem tak sformułowanych filozoficznych dociekań są analizy poświęcone powiązaniom ludzkich i nie-ludzkich przejawów sprawczości. W takim ujęciu myślenie i ruch, zachodzące w układach powiązanych ciał, stanowią nierozerwalne przejawy aktywności materii. W związku z tym filozoficzne spekulacje zostały połączone z analizą praktyk ciała wywodzących się z tańca, performance, sztuk wizualnych itp., aby umożliwić lepsze zrozumienie ich wzajemnego przenikania się w procesie samoorganizacji materii, a tym samym w przekształceniach współdziałających ciał. Słowa kluczowe: konceptualizacje ciała, praktyki ciała, ciało, materia, cielesność, posthumanizm, nowy materializm

- by Bartosz Mroczkowski
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- Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Body in Performance, Donna Haraway

Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative brings together 15 scholars from five different countries to explore the different ways in which the posthuman has been addressed in contemporary culture and more specifically in key narratives, written in the second decade of the 21st century, by of these works engage in the premises and perils of transhumanism, while others explore the qualities of the (post)human in a variety of dystopian futures marked by the planetary influence of human action. From a critical posthumanist perspective that questions anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, and the centrality of the 'human' subject in the era of the Anthropocene, the scholars in this collection analyse the aesthetic choices these authors make to depict the posthuman and its aftereffects. Sonia Baelo-Allué is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza (Spain) where she currently teaches US Literature and British and American Culture. Mónica Calvo-Pascual is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza (Spain) where she teaches Contemporary US Literature and British Culture.

- by Sonia Baelo-Allué and +1
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- Cultural Studies, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Contemporary American Literature

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

- by Andrzej Marzec
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- Critical Theory, Biochemistry, Botany, Landscape Ecology

This chapter will demonstrate how post-humanist, post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic ethics are genealogically indebted to feminism on a theoretical level, and are inestricably embedded with gender awareness, on a practical level. To prove this point, we will bring different examples of speciesism and bio-centrism; following, we will further deepen this comprehension to an experiential level, through a game role and a thought experiment based on a revisitation of the notion of the “veil of ignorance”, as disposed by philosopher John Rawls (1971). At the end of this ethical reflection, readers may experience a posthuman epiphany that will possibly spark actual explorations of post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic ways of living. In fact, this chapter wishes not only to offer a clear academic source to unravel, in deep and rigorous ways, the affect and effects of feminism to the field of posthuman studies. More broadly, this is a call to all the people who consider themselves posthumanists, to take a step further and materialize the posthuman praxis of existence that we are envisioning, in the profound and substantial quest of self-discovery and evolution that is our posthuman era.

- by Francesca Ferrando
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- Ontology, Ethics, Feminist Theory, Bioethics
- by Rosi Braidotti
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- Feminist Posthumanism

Posthumanism is a theoretical frame, as well as an empirical one, which can apply to any field of enquiry, starting from our location as a species, to the individual gaze. Posthumanism addresses the question “who am I?” in conjunction with other related questions, such as: “what am I?” and “where and when are we?”. The existential aspects are not disjunct to political and spatiotemporal elements. On one side, such an approach has a festive element: the loneliness of the Western subject is lost in the recognition of the others as interconnected to the self. On the other side, the awareness of distributed agency in the evolving body of spacetime becomes infinitely resonant, as does each existential performance: there is no absolute “otherness”; we exist in a material net in which everything is actually connected and potentially intra-acting. Such an awareness generates theoretical as well as pragmatic considerations. In the 21st century the impact of anthropocentric habits on earth has become so massive that geologists are addressing the present era as the Anthropocene, in which human actions are seriously affecting the ecosystem. In the past, humans were not recognized as agents directly causing climate changes. It is now common knowledge that the earth is collapsing under the massive quantity of non-recycled garbage produced daily, the high emission of atmospheric greenhouse gases and the level of pollution introduced into the natural environment. The way the majority of current human societies are performing their material interacting in this world is based on anthropocentric premises, which are leading to a point of non-return in ecological and sustainable terms. Since everything is connected, this damaged balance is also directly affecting human well-being: an example can be seen in the alarming global rise on cancer rates. Humanism may not be of help in changing such a direction; posthumanism, on the other hand, can be the turning point, by bringing to the discussion crucial notions such as speciesism, entanglement and non-human agency, among others.

- by Francesca Ferrando
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- Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Feminism, Posthumanist Ethics

This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism-what we have also called elsewhere 'PhEmaterialism'. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting-edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory.

- by Jessica Ringrose and +1
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- Feminist Sociology, Gender Studies, Education, Feminist Theory

'Reading Mutant Narratives' explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of 'mutant narratives.' Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction
that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction.
The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied.
As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also
estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of 'embodied estrangement.'
Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, 'performative enactivism,' that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.

- by Kaisa Kortekallio
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- Feminist Theory, Dystopian Literature, Narrative, Embodied Cognition

Feminist theorists have long been concerned with, in Peta Hinton and Pat Treusch’s (2015) words, “revealing and negotiating inequalities conceived along the break-line of a binary logic that has characterized and sedimented Western traditions of thought” (p. 1). Feminist posthuman thinkers continue this work exploring how historical exceptionalism given to human “man” has helped foster vastly unequal hierarchies and social stratifications that privilege some human and nonhuman bodies, knowledges, and modes of being over others. As Jasmine Ulmer (2017) writes, posthumanism has urged “renewed attention to materiality, vitalism, ecologies, flora, fauna, climate, elements, things, and interconnections [and] has created openings across academic fields regarding who and what has the capacity to know” (p. 1). The word “renewed” is key, since as Ulmer and many others point out, posthumanism does not inaugurate such attention, but rather follows a rich and varied legacy of indigenous knowledges that have long positioned the human as part of, rather than sovereign over, a vibrant ecology of active matter and systems. This entry introduces feminist posthumanism, paying specific attention to key thinkers, including philosopher Rosi Braidotti, and further explores emerging methodologies for engaging in research that accounts for the posthumanist turn in feminist thought and action.

- by Jessica Ringrose
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- Feminist Theory, Research Methodology, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism
- by Marietta Radomska
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- Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Zoontology, Agential Realism

NOTE: This is the self-archive version of the chapter “Humans Have Always Been Posthuman: A Spiritual Genealogy of the Posthuman”
In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M.R. (eds.) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, Springer, October 2016, pp. 243-256. ISBN: 978-81-322-3637-5 (Print). For the final version of this article, please purchase the chapter: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_15
ABSTRACT: This article wishes to unveil the relevance of spirituality in the genealogy of Cultural, Critical and Philosophical Posthumanism. In its genealogical endeavor, it expands the lens of the posthuman outside of Western academia, to Eastern traditions of thought such as Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoga and Tantrism. This article first provides an introduction to the topic of Posthumanism and spirituality. Secondly, it highlights ancient spiritual traditions which are in tune with the posthuman approach; lastly, it elaborates on the development of the spiritual politics of the posthuman, by emphasizing the relevance of Posthumanism as a contemporary philosophy of life. This article argues that spirituality, in its all-encompassing signification, is in tune with the core meaning of the posthuman post-dualistic perspective. And still, this article also wishes to emphasize that no specific tradition can be regarded as fully representative of the posthuman, as most of these traditional systems of thought, once systematized, have adapted to anthropocentric and humanistic paradigms. This is why, although Posthumanism is deeply indebted to the spiritual realm, its offerings are unique, original and very much needed. In the age of the Anthropocene, Posthumanism is required to develop daily ethics of living based on an integral investment of its post-anthropocentric premises. The notion of spirituality dramatically broadens our understanding of the posthuman, allowing us to investigate not only technical technologies (robotics, cybernetics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, among others), but also, technologies of existence. In this sense, humans have always been posthuman.

- by Francesca Ferrando
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- Religion, Buddhism, Comparative Religion, Sociology of Religion

This paper draws on political economic and psychoanalytic theories of the maternal to explore why comparatively advantaged heterosexual men across the US and China began investing in life-sized, heteronormatively configured, and highly realistic silicone female sex dolls in the 1990s and new millennium, respectively, in keeping with similar investments in Canada, Russia, France, Germany and, Japan. The growing popularity speaks not only to the realism afforded by technological advances in material sciences, but to geopolitical economic traumas related to: the 1973 oil crisis, de-industrialization, and the evisceration of male-centric unions in the US and Europe; the simultaneous and widespread entry of women and persons of color into a more precarious workforce both within and outside deindustrializing contexts; and the contemporaneous and meteoric neoindustrialization of the Chinese economy, which saw the rise of extreme wealth disparity, social inequality, and gender ratio imbalances. The traumas were not unrelated to those attending the 1990s Soviet " transition " to capitalism and Japan's 1990s financial crisis. By the first decade of the new millennium, certain men across these arenas were finding comfort in the arms of large breasted, youthful looking, white or Asian silicone sex dolls for reasons I argue cannot be understood outside the political economic and psychical force of the maternal and sexual difference.

- by Heidi J. Nast
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- Sex and Gender, Posthumanism, Reproduction, Sexuality

NOTE: this is chapter 27 of the book "Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television," eds. Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck, Curtis Carbonell (Palgrave, 2015). For the final version of this article, please purchase the book. ABSTRACT: Cinematic and TV productions have recently begun to include aliens, computers and non-human others into the saga of the “human”. The symbolic significance of such a shift is radical: the notion of the human has evolved, from a closed category, into the extended and open label of the posthuman. Through Affect Theory and New Materialism, this article analyzes movies and shows which portray emotional relations between humans and robots, AI and biotechnological chimeras. And still, such productions are not free from sexist, racist and homophobic biases, a mirror of the human-centric guidelines of their productions. Through a media archeological approach and a creative literary style, this article emphasizes the recognition of the difference as a crucial contribution offered by media imagination to contemporary society, in order to envision desirable futures for humans and non-humans alike. At the same time, it urges to rethink the media in the light of the posthumanist critique, thus deconstructing the discriminatory practices of representation still embedded in such productions.

- by Francesca Ferrando
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- Future Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Media Studies

In this chapter, we explore some of the key insights arising from feminist post-humanist and new materialist approaches, along with critical discussions of popular notions of post-feminism in the context of digital leisure and fourth wave feminism. Over several decades, rich and complex theoretical debates have emerged across social science and humanities disciplines about the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin notions of human subjectivity, human/non-human and digital relations, embodiment and the significance of affect in the circulation of power (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Coole & Frost, 2010; Grosz, 1994; Haraway, 2013). A number of these post-structural and post-humanist approaches grouped under the rubric " new materialism " have begun to shape emergent fields of study that offer novel connections with feminist leisure scholarship; science and technology studies, animal studies, physical cultural studies, food studies, health and eco-humanities, digital sociology, material cultures, participatory design and arts as research practice, along with now more established queer, black, brown, Mad and crip feminisms-among others. Building upon Lisbeth Berbary's detailed account of post* ideas in chapter three, we have written this collaborative chapter through our particular interest in different ways of thinking through questions about power, women's subjectivity or agency and the everyday politics of leisure. Over the last two decades, there have been significant transformations in forms of feminist activism and broader debates in feminist scholarship that extend post-structural critique in new directions. With the rise of web 2.0 and the proliferation of digital media practices, the 1990s " girl power " popular cultural forms of post-feminism are being reinvented in the context of intensified political, economic, and cultural pressures that link women's local lives and global issues in new ways (Baer, 2016; Harris & Dobson, 2015; McRobbie, 2015). Feminist leisure studies have begun to engage with these cultural shifts in what has been termed, not unproblematically, as fourth wave feminism (Parry & Fullagar, 2013). Knappe and Lang (2014) suggest that fourth-wave feminists use "the web to re-link older and newer organizations, foster stronger networks, and encourage outreach to a new generation. Fourth-wave feminism has been defined by its focus on technology" (p. 364). Building on this analysis, we also offer some reflection on the utility and limitations of wave metaphors as we consider future avenues for feminist work.

- by Simone Fullagar
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- Sociology of Sport, New Media, Feminist Theory, Digital Media

The Special Section explores and problematizes the many intertwined human-vegetal relations and multi-species intimacies brought forward through the complex processes of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, globalization, and extractive... more

- by Marianna Szczygielska and +1
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- Botany, Indigenous Studies, Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Studies

The subject of this paper it to discuss the motive of transhumanism, its ethical, psychological and sociological aspects in two English novels, Charles Stross' Accelerando and Peter Watts' Blindsight.
The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the subject of transhumanism in a humanistic manner, however transhumanism is strictly technological subject it thrives mainly due to humanist thought. Even if this philosophy may lead to the end of humanity it is still goal the most close to the human nature. The first chapter is focused on explaining the concepts of transhumanism, transhuman, posthuman, and the Technological Singularity. Psychoanalytical and sociological aspects are discussed in the following two chapters, offering examples of how they were viewed by the authors. Both novels predict changes in the way emotions, motivations within respective societies will change. The main drivers of change are economy prosperity, nanotechnology, the emergence of virtual reality and the possibility of digitizing the personality.

- by Karolina Cisowska
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- Psychoanalysis, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Posthumanist Ethics

What can a body do? To answer Baruch Spinoza's question, we engage with posthumanist feminist concepts of nomadic subjectivity and relations with non-humans. Through an exploration of two 'patches', the Chinchorro Mummies of the Atacama Desert in South America and the burials at Wor Barrow in the Neolithic of southern England, we suggest that these approaches open up a new way of encountering past bodies. What capabilities do bodies, past and present, have? This question is one in which bodies' capacities are revealed as immanent, historically contextual and emergent.

- by Oliver Harris
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- Posthumanism, Neolithic Archaeology, Baruch Spinoza, Archaeological Theory

“Posthuman” has become an umbrella term to refer to a variety of different movements and schools of thought, including philosophical, cultural, and critical posthumanism; transhumanism (in its variations of extropianism, liberal and democratic transhumanism, among others); the feminist approach of new materialisms; and the heterogeneous landscape of antihumanism, metahumanism, metahumanities, and posthumanities. The struggle over the meaning of “posthuman” can be seen as a way of coping with an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-epistemological as well as scientific and bio-technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

- by Georg Theiner
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- Cyborg Theory, Posthumanism, Embodied Cognition, Embodied Mind and Cognition

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna J. Haraway addresses deeply situated feminist explorations and varied epistemologies and ecologies. It contains figurative criticism of the current environmental crises that forms the emergency of the Anthropocene. Haraway traverses alternative ways of knowing how the subject’s experiences of past, present, future, gender, culture, race all dissolve into each other and need continuous interrogations to arrive at the evolving notions of subjecthood and environment. The book investigates the material semiotics, political histories of different surfaces, mythologies, species, and stories and forces us to establish contact with other existents in search of harmonious ways of survival. In our age when global politics and global capital are operating by destruction and distortion of natural resources, the book emerges as an inevitable counter by-product of staying with the trouble.

- by Asijit Datta
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- Posthumanism, Animal Studies, Hybridity, Ecology

From Genesis to Joyce, women have been represented as being closer to nature than culture, and hence quintessentially Other, and Carol Emshwiller and Ursula Le Guin, writers of fantasy, science fiction, and social criticism, transform this purported proximity into a heuristic homology. Embracing and dramatizing an imputed feminine animality, Emshwiller, a short story writer and novelist who has taught creative writing at New York University, and Le Guin, who, in addition to being a prolific fiction writer, essayist and writer of screenplays, has also taught creative writing, use a variety of thought experiments to reassess and realign notions of gender and humanity. Often similar in focusing their narratives through the perspective of those once silent or entirely beyond the parameters of language, Emshwiller and Le Guin try to circumvent what they perceive as the inherent limitations of normative discourses. In Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog, the protagonist is a woman who begins life as an animal, and who learns that becoming human is a relative endeavor. In the stories in Emshwiller’s The Start of the End of it All, the longing for love that determines self-definition is cathected onto the changing shapes of women’s bodies and personas, and the shifting roles of animals who share, or are even transposed onto, their lives. In Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Le Guin paces the reader through a series of stories about animals and aliens whose characters and languages have been belied or misinterpreted by men. Both writers characterize non-verbal art forms as closer to nature and animals, and as therefore less subject to universal or male-dominated readings and appropriations. As a result, their writings start with the premise of a feminine wildness embedded within Western culture, but end with an ambiguous glimpse of what it would mean to transcend all hierarchic oppositions between female and male and between nature and culture.

- by Richard Hardack
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- American Literature, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory

Archaeological Theory in Dialogue presents an innovative conversation between five scholars from different backgrounds on a range of central issues facing archaeology today. Interspersing detailed investigations of critical theoretical issues with dialogues between the authors, the book interrogates the importance of four themes at the heart of much contemporary theoretical debate: relations, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms. The authors, who work in Europe and North America, explore how these themes are shaping the ways that archaeologists conduct fieldwork, conceptualize the past, and engage with the political and ethical challenges that our discipline faces in the twenty-first century. The unique style of Archaeological Theory in Dialogue , switching between detailed arguments and dialogical exchange, makes it essential reading for both scholars and students of archaeological theory and those with an interest in the politics and ethics of the past.

- by Craig N Cipolla and +2
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- Archaeology, Anthropology, Ontology, Posthumanism

This paper is an investigation into the posthuman influence on postmodern art and the potential for art production in a posthuman context. It emphasises one particular period in art history. The period spanning from the late twentieth century to the early twenty first century is an era bent on the domination of the media and the promiscuity of technologies. It is an era that provokes the onset of posthumanism, where the distinctions that once held humanity in place have become dated; because it is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relationship between human beings and machines. In this way, it is no longer necessary to write science-fiction since we are currently living it. Our time is a posthuman era where the body has become vestigial and obsolete; expendable under the confines of the global village, which has imploded under the weight of its own progress. Posthuman art comments on this paradigm shift, where man submits to the vestiges of hyperreality and a dependence on the media.

- by Shane K de Lange
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- Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Postmodernism, Posthumanist Ethics

Taking Turns is an open forumfor brief and rapid assessments of changes emerging in the
field, and its discontents. In this series, we invite both Nordic and non-Nordic scholars to
present their take on contemporary challenges for feminist scholarship and gender research.
In this issue, we are handing the baton over to Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English at the
University of Texas, Arlington, USA. Dr Alaimo’s research interests include nineteenthand
twentieth-century multicultural American literatures; critical theory; feminist theory;
cultural studies, green cultural studies; science studies; environmentalism and feminism;
environmental health, environmental justice, environmental ethics; emerging theories of
materiality in environmental feminism, corporeal feminism, and science studies; science,
literature, and art of sea creatures. Her first book, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting
Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000), explores the work of North American women
writers, theorists, and activists from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth
century, arguing that “nature” has been a crucial site for a wide range of feminist cultural
interventions. Material Feminisms, edited with Susan J. Hekman (Indiana UP, 2008),
charts emerging models of materiality in feminist theory, bringing together environmental
feminism, corporeal feminism, feminist science studies, and disability studies. Her most
recent book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and theMaterial Self (Indiana UP,
2010), argues that focusing on “trans-corporeality”—the movement across human bodies
and non-human nature—profoundly alters our sense of human subjectivity, environmental
ethics, and the individual’s relation to scientific knowledge. Her next book, Sea Creatures
and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics, will explore

- by Stacy Alaimo
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- Feminist Theory, New Materialism, Material Feminisms, Feminist Posthumanism

Posthümanizm sayısı Önsöz'ü / The Preface to Pasajlar's Issue (No 7) on Posthumanism

- by Cagdas Dedeoglu
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- Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Anthropocentrism, Transhumanism/Posthumanism

Through this research I attempt to answer questions about what it means to be human and how the human-robot relationship will alter how we look at humanity and human nature. This research is an attempt to explore and define the future of the human-robot relationship. The study analyzes what the nature of the human-robot relationship is. Although the concept is a difficult one to encapsulate as a whole let alone in a brief essay, it is important for the human to think about what it will become and the nature of its being. There is a line that divides the human being and the robot that is becoming increasingly blurred. When a robot looks and acts like a human, it is suddenly difficult to distinguish between the two. This also raises the issue, whether humans with prosthetic organs or limbs may be called robots. The issue is whether they ought to be called man, machine, or posthuman. With the intention of finding out who we are, research must be done to determine in which direction the so-called " posthuman " is going and what it means for humanity. In this study, the central focus is personhood and humanity. Technology is a broad topic, and although it is important, the main focus is not on technology as a whole. This essay focuses on the robot or humanoid specifically rather than other possible technologies. The purpose of this research is to attempt to find out what it is to be a human and to discover the nature of the man-and-machine relationship. This essay attempts analyze the human condition and human nature. The questions I mean to address are the following: (1) what will the human become in the future and (2) what do robots tell us about ourselves as human beings? The main question contemplates who we are as human beings. Along with print sources, I use films like Her (2013), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Ex Machina (2015) in attempt to reconcile the issues surrounding the human-robot relationship. These science fiction films can tell us a lot about who we are or who we think we are, and the assist in bringing important questions to the forefront. Is technology more than just a mediator? Are we and should we be becoming more technologically dependent? And what does that mean for us as a group of beings? Is society adapting or slowly assimilating? I also make use of thought experiments to bring into the conversation important issues that can be explained or worked out in a more comprehensive way via those experiments. Again, in order to narrow the wider scope of issues, the study will center on the human-robot relationship, rather than the more general human-technology relationship. Importantly, I argue that what is dangerous and not the human relationship with machines, but the loss of relationship and connection with one another. The sort of danger that usually comes to mind is the potential existential threat of robot revolution. But this implies that the nature of the man-machine relationship is equivalent to the historical relationship of humans and their war-waging ancestors (not to mention present war-wagers). Humans tend to forget who they are in relation to one another as they worry about the nature of man and machine. The nature of the human-human relationship may not be applicable to the man-machine relationship, and as time moves on into this new era of technology, the human-human connection must not be thrown to the wayside either. Further, the research does not include certain issues that arise from human enhancement, such as the ethics of the use of 2 robotics in general. This is unimportant to the central theme of this study, as the concentration is on not ethical implications posed by robots and technology, but rather, on what robots tell us about the human condition and the direction in which (post)humanity is headed. This is an attempt to expand the knowledge of what we think it means to be human. Here, I refine the definitions of robot and human, raise questions about the human condition, and challenge traditional negative views of the man-machine relationship to reshape how all humans— philosophers, scientists, and others alike—think about those relations and the posthuman future.

- by McKenzie Raver
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- Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Humanities, Cyborg Theory

The current era can be defined as posthuman. Why? Because the traditional notion of the human has been radically challenged not only by emerging bio-technologies, but also by our new understanding of the significance, and impact, of our species on planet Earth. In the era of the Anthropocene, the human is perceived as a geological force that can no longer be addressed in separation from its planetary and cosmic location. Aware of the importance of these realizations, scholars in the fields of Theology and Science are realizing the urgency of the posthuman debate. This is a unique opportunity for generative exchanges, that are forging not only public opinion, but also laws and regulations, as in the case of genetic “enhancements”i in humans. We as scholars produce what is valued as scientific knowledge, which constitutes the basis for laws, civic norms and social evolutions. The issues at stake are very high. This is why it is of key relevance to level the playing field, so that the discussion can be open, generative and informative; this is something we need to address right now. In fact, what is happening, is that out of excitement, or concern, for the possibilities involved by these bio-technological and ecological developments, some scholars have promptly entered the posthuman field, without a thorough investigation of the posthuman debate itself, thus basing their arguments on unwarranted premises and assumptions, generating confusion and even dismay. The discussion is happening, and it needs our voices. We bear great responsibility and we can make a difference; but before jumping into the posthuman, let's inform ourselves rigorously, openly and in nonsectarian ways. This is urgent, exciting, and necessary. The time is now, to connect and envision the posthuman turn.

- by Francesca Ferrando
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- Critical Theory, Future Studies, History of Ideas, Theology

The closing chapter of the Routledge anthology Evolution of the Image: Political Action and Digital Self edited by Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska addresses the evolution of the image, from the hardimage to the softimage, and from the postimage (in its dystopian and utopian aspects) to the Martian image or xeno-vision as the logical telos of machine vision.

- by Ingrid Hoelzl
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- Posthumanism, Critical Digital Studies, Feminist Posthumanism, Robotic Vision

Transhumanism is a philosophical theme where advocates think that current and future science as well as medical technologies will reverse the effects of aging and even death, creating a new subset of humans, entitled "TRANSHUMANISTS. Then, after a further period of GNR Technologies that include robotics and superior Artificial Intelligence an even newer subset of PostHumans will arise and take over the earth and beyond.

- by James Sullivan
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- Transhumanism/Posthumanism, Feminist Posthumanism

Horzum reads Griffith’s novel from material-feminist and material-ecocritical perspectives, highlighting how Ammonite is conducive to a contemporary posthumanist worldview. The author argues that the novel demonstrates the intertwined nature of human and viral bodies through its critique of androcentrism, often equated with anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment ‘Man.’ Horzum’s analysis illustrates how Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, Margaret Price’s bodymind, and Başak Ağın’s mattertext are always already enmeshed within one another, with examples from the text and with supports from the recent theoretical intersections of environmental humanities and posthumanities. Reading Marghe, the protagonist of the novel, as a posthuman subject who undergoes symbiotic experiences with the nonhuman and the planet, Horzum contends that the entangled bodies of the woman, the Jeep virus, and the planet GP unfold as an assemblage presenting an emergent relationality within the narrative. Noting these actors’ involvement in multiple becomings, the author pinpoints the flat ontology on which each actor dwells within an ongoing, dynamic process of narrating and becoming with each of its components. This process, according to Horzum, is one that creates and navigates the entire narrativity and horizontal relationality in Ammonite. This chapter concludes with the author’s indication of a never-ending dynamism where every non/living entity is a vibrant, lively agent.

- by Şafak Horzum
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- Dystopian Literature, Posthumanism, Utopian Studies, Science Fiction

Cuadrado Payeras, Lidia María. "Prefazione: Parola." In Abbecedario del postumanismo, edited by Elisa Baioni, Lidia María Cuadrado Payeras and Manuela Macelloni, editors. Abbecedario del postumanismo. Mimesis, 2021, pp, 13-20. BUY A... more

El alma de las muñecas. Sobre la construcción de un cuerpo simbólico a través de una dialéctica del simulacro en la novela Érase una vez el amor y tuve que matarlo de Efraím Medina. Primera versión recibida: marzo 15 de 2006; versión... more

İçerik ve prodüksiyon şirketi olan Netflix’te, 2019’da ilk sezonu; 2021’de 2. sezonu yayınlanan ve 2022’de 3. sezonunun gösterime gireceği söylenen Love, Death & Robots dizisi bilim kurgu, fantezi, korku ve komedi gibi çeşitli türlerin kısa öykülerden oluşan bir kombinasyonudur. Toplamda 26 bölümden (1. Sezon 18, 2. Sezon 8) oluşan dizinin yapımcılığını Tim Miller, Joshua Donen, David Fincher ve Jennifer Miller üstlense de her bölüm, çeşitli ülkelerden farklı ekipler tarafından canlandırılmaktadır. Bu sayede dizi, Deleuze’cü tabirle “yersiz yurtsuzlaşmış” bir karaktere sahip olmaktadır. Dizinin giriş kapısını Deleuzyen bir anahtarla açtığımıza göre, içerde bizi bekleyen motiflerin heyecanına kapılmamak elde değil.
Bu analizde dizide yer alan Antropos figürlerinin baskın hallerini eleştirel bir bakış açısı sunarak çözümlemekteyiz. Braidotti’nin Deleuze ve Guattari’ye atıfla üçe ayırdığı oluşları, dizinin adının taşıdığı sözcüklere dağıttığımızda, Love hayvan oluşa, Death yeryüzü oluşa ve Robots ise makine oluşa uygun düşmekte ve bu yazıda da, dizinin ilgili bölümleri bu eksende okunmaktadır.

- by Duygu Küçüköz Aydemir
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- Discourse Analysis, Anthropology, Humanities, Film Studies

PhEmaterialism PhEmaterialism is a term that refers to emerging research methodologies in education exploring intersections of feminist community building, theorizing, learning, and activism in education (Ringrose, Warfield & Zarabadi, 2018). The mash-up "PhEmaterialism" broken down combines theoretical approaches drawing on posthumanism ("ph") and new materialisms ("materialism") with a specific focus on activating the feminist ("phem") implications of how these theories are generating new forms of educational research and equity, bespoken by the capitalized "E." The 'feminal' (rather than seminal) foremothers of this approach are the feminist philosophers Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett and physicist-philosopher Karen Barad whose pivotal conceptual contributions we explore in this entry. PhEmaterialist research works primarily to: • address ethical urgencies and questions of equity in the age of the Anthropocene • decenter the human from a privileged and extractivist position in the world • attend the agencies of all matter and materialities • attune to more-than-human affects, sensations, and non-linguistic modes of communication, transmission, and pedagogy • explore complex relationalities between humans and non-/other-than-humans • experiment with entanglements of feminist art, activism, community-building, pedagogy, research, and theorizing • enliven the possibilities of what academic research can do as it intra-acts with a range of stakeholders (policy makers, pressure groups, politicians, NGOs etc.) inside and outside of the formal academy Mobilizing both posthuman and new materialism frameworks (approaches that are sometimes taken separately), PhEmaterialism works to imagine new research practices in education specifically. This approach enables us to attend to how posthuman entanglements often intensify larger social stratifications and power asymmetries along intersectional lines. In other words, the human-generated effects of the Anthropocene do not affect human and non-humans uniformly, but often exacerbate ecological and social impacts on particular bodies (human and beyond) and in particular places and spaces (such as sites reeling from settler-colonialism, post-/industrialism, and late-capitalist profitizing) as well as deepen social inequities and violences around constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, among other social stratifications, and their multiple intersections. For example, Rosi Braidotti's (2013) posthuman feminism decenters the human as a sole, or primary, source of agency, assailing humanist intellectual legacies that position the human as the "measure of all things" (p.13). Humanist modes of thought have championed the human as exceptional, sovereign, and self-contained and positioned in extractivist, and often exploitative, relationships of mastery to the 'natural' world and other humans and non-humans.

- by Jessica Ringrose
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- Posthumanism, Educational Research, Critical Posthumanism, Feminism

Resumen: El objetivo de este trabajo es poner en diálogo la metáfora cyborg
propuesta por Donna Haraway en uno de sus Manifiestos, con la idea de Andy
Clark de que somos cyborgs por naturaleza (derivada de/relacionada con su
tesis de la mente extendida), y luego evaluar sus ventajas o desventajas para
una postura poshumanista. Se tomará como marco debates que son propios
de la antropología filosófica pero que, a su vez, involucran un intercambio con
otras disciplinas o subdisciplinas como son la filosofía de la mente y la biología.
Se sostendrá que tanto la propuesta de Clark como la de Haraway coinciden
en poner en entredicho los dualismos modernos, especialmente aquellos entre
naturaleza/cultura y natural/artificial. De este modo, se pueden inscribir en el
poshumanismo que ha ido ganando importancia tanto en el ámbito académico
de las ciencias sociales y humanas como en ciertos movimientos culturales
contemporáneos.
Palabras clave: Poshumanismo / Enfoque cyborg / Mente extendida

- by Nahir Fernández
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- Philosophical Anthropology, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Extended Mind

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

- by Marietta Radomska
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- Geography, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Posthumanism

Book Review of The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti

- by Joseph Nechvatal
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- Posthumanism, Poststructuralism, Critical Posthumanism, Postmodernism

According to Internet legend, a cursed JPEG file circulates online, featuring an image of a dog with a much too human grin. If you happen to see this image, the dog will haunt your dreams, asking you to “spread the word” by showing its picture to someone else, thereby passing on the curse. The story of Smile.dog, which is the demon dog's name, is a so-called creepypasta – that is, a digital urban legend. Its curse is therefore a playful one, meant to be circulated as a hoax, but it is also a productive, yet challenging, place to ruminate upon ethics in an era of digital media. Through the lens of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology – a haunted ontology – this article explores what digital monsters and curses might teach us about ethics as a question of responding to that which haunts and hoaxes.

- by Line Henriksen
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- Ethics, Monster Theory, Hauntology, Digital Storytelling