Abstract
The Swedish sci-fi drama TV series Real Humans (original title in Swedish: Äkta människor) can be viewed as a playground for trying out imagined possible future human-robot relationships that can tell us something regarding ideas about possible futures for being human. In the paper, representations of ttranshumansexual relationships are explored, specifically how these representations reproduce and possibly challenge notions of being human. Three articulations of transhumansexual relationships are identified: authenticity, legal subjectivity, and failure of heterosexuality. The negotiations of being human take place in three different discourses – a heteronormative and humanonormative discourse on gender and sexuality, a biological discourse, and a citizenship discourse. Transhumansexuals and hubots in transhumansexual relationships are humanized – anthropomorphized – and made more intelligible as human(-like) beings. However, the quest to make transhumansexual relationships intelligible as something human tends to (hetero- and humano-)normalize the queer potential of transhumansexual relationships
Highlights
Real Humans is a Swedish sci-fi drama TV series broadcast from 2012 to 2014 by the Swedish public service television company (Sveriges Television)
The series takes place in what the co-creator of the show, Lars Lundström, has referred to as a Swedish “parallel present”: a contemporary Swedish society with the difference that hubots – a neologism based on the words human and robot capturing the human-likeness of the robots on the series – are an integral part of people’s everyday lives:
Aino-Kaisa Koistinen refers to Real Humans as ”one of the most intriguing sf series dealing with the boundaries of human and nonhuman beings that has been produced since the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica” (Koistinen 2015: 417-418)
Summary
Real Humans is a Swedish sci-fi drama TV series broadcast from 2012 to 2014 by the Swedish public service television company (Sveriges Television). Science fiction film has a long history of portraying relationships between humans and machines, where science fiction is one of the main arenas for dealing with interactions between humans, non-humans, and human-like non-humans – an ”important ethical laboratory to (re)imagine and play with human-machine relationships, modes of being human, or understandings of human nature” (Ornella 2015: 337). Lundström’s quote and his idea of Real Humans as depicting a parallel present of close relationships between humans and hubots works well with what Alexander Ornella refers to as an ethical laboratory – (re)imagining and playing with human-hubot relationships and notions of being human. Aino-Kaisa Koistinen refers to Real Humans as ”one of the most intriguing sf series dealing with the boundaries of human and nonhuman beings that has been produced since the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica” (Koistinen 2015: 417-418). Malin Ideland and Tora Holmberg bring forward the potential of Real Humans to function as a ”thought-figure” for imagining what society might look like with advanced robot technology (Ideland & Holmberg 2014)
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