Contesting Subjectivity: A Posthuman Perspective in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the anthropocentric position in which human being assumed itself as the forerunner of the civilization and to rest, whether it is nature or any form of life, he believed, as a subject of domination. Feminist school of criticism according to Black feminist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw identifies patriarchy as one of these structures which dehumanizes females on the basis of Intersectionality. The intersectional positions, according to her, divide human beings from one another based on their identity of colour, gender, religion and so on. In this context, the paper studies Margaret Atwood’s representation of intersectional positions in the novel, The Year of the Flood(2009) where she categorically prompts on the issue of gender politics on one part and on the other she hints upon decoding the politics of subjective identity through the genetically modified Crakers who appears to be giving the reflection of what Donna Haraway calls as ‘cyborg’. The Crakers, in the novel, are genetically modified humanoids that indicate human beings as a reflection of engineered machines which gets swiped away by pandemic called “waterless Flood”. The paper demystifies idea of identity politics through the concept of ‘cyborg myth’. Cyborg myth according to Donna Haraway, terms human as evolutionary form in which, “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 150). In order to highlight the uncanny politics of identity she takes charge to redefine the social functioning of human beings through the scientific progress in which the construction and reconstruction of human identity is played out.