The Art of Forgetting: On Memory, Imagination, and Emotion in the Age of Posthumanism

Becoming (More-than-) Human: Ecofeminism, Dualisms and the Erosion of the Colonial Human Subject & (untitled illustrations)

Electric Animal An Interview with Akira Mizuta Lippit & (untitled photographs)

Reviewed by: Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction Alyson R. Buckman Jane Donawerth. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997. xxvii + 213 pp. Jane Donawerth, who has previously written and edited works on women and science fiction, contributes a sense of continuity—both in history and in theme—to the study of women writing science fiction. In her introduction, Donawerth uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to establish both a maternal literary heritage and a model of study that controls the presentation of material in her book. Frankenstein, Donawerth argues, provides women writing science fiction with not only a female progenitor but also with the central constraints of the genre for these women: the male narrator, science as a male preserve and its objectification of women, and the construction of woman as alien. The rest of the book is organized according to these three central constraints. Chapter 1, “Utopian Science in Science Fiction by Women,” discusses how female writers create a utopian science that constructs women as subjects rather than objects. Women authors break with contemporary science in their creation of female scientist-heroes, technologies that utilize female experience, new origin stories and definitions of science, and changes in the relationship of humans to nature. In chapter 2, “Beautiful Alien Monster-Women—BAMs,” Donawerth describes the reconstruction of the female alien within science fiction. While the BAM has traditionally been depicted by male authors as marginal, dangerous, and sadomasochistic, women authors reclaim and revise the female alien, empowering her. The male narrator is so entrenched within science fiction that he has become a generic convention. In chapter 3, “Cross-Dressing as a Male Narrator,” Donawerth discusses four techniques women authors use when dealing with the established convention of the male narrator: cross-dressing as a male narrator, converting or punishing male narrators, constructing androgynous or transvestite narrators, and using multiple narrators. These techniques destabilize the authority of the [End Page 491] male as narrator and open the text to female voices and experience, allowing the movement of women from the margin to the center of the text. While Donawerth is concerned with twentieth-century American and English writers in the majority of her text, the epilogue presents a different field of inquiry: non-Western women writers of science fiction. “Epilogue: Virtual Women in Global Science Fiction” briefly presents the question of how the conventions of science fiction and the revisions of Western women writers have affected the science fiction writings of other cultures. Jane Donawerth is clearly well read in science fiction written by women and in the critical works of feminist psychology, science theory, literary theory, and gender and cultural studies. She skillfully interweaves the insights of these fields with analyses of texts by both well-known and lesser-known artists. It would be useful, however, for Donawerth to discuss the audience for women writing science fiction. How is the work of women writing science fiction received within the audience of a genre catering traditionally to men? Who reads these female-authored texts and what is the response to them? Although Donawerth’s focus is the way in which female authors have revised the conventions of science fiction, it would be enlightening to know how these revisions have been received. In addition, while Donawerth mentions the need to deal with race, sexuality, and class as well as gender in science fiction texts, her analytic lens remains firmly fixed upon gender. Gender does not explain all in analyzing these works. For instance, Octavia Butler’s work is clearly influenced by racial, economic, and sexual factors as well. Donawerth also resists the insights of postmodern theory in her text, largely on the basis of its potential pessimism, although her discussions of the challenges to the authority of the narrator and to the value of individualism as well as her analyses of the constructedness of definitions of history and science and the performativity of gender in these texts suggest links with postmodern theory. This is problematic; as Marleen Barr reveals in Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, the recognition of the postmodernist elements of what she terms “feminist fabulation” can lead to the recognition and empowerment of female authors...

(ProQuest: ... denotes text stops here in original.) Many scholars in the West have rightly turned away from the modernist world view of Descartes, with its isolated rational individual in full possession of both itself and one rational world. Many have also rightly turned away from the related modernist political view of bourgeois liberalism, with its isolated individual as the rational bearer of natural and even God-given rights. Yet, with the rather extreme pendulum swing by many toward postmodernism, with its counter claim that our rational world and the rational subject are more or less freely constituted by language, one is left with the impression that something of value has been lost: a patterned world with which the human person or subject is in contact.1 With respect to both the rational world and the human subject, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, as it does with respect to so many issues, comes between more extreme positions, in this case between modernism and postmodernism. He moves beyond both modernism's pre-established rationality and the bourgeoisie's isolated rational subject, but does so by re-interpreting and redefining each, not by attempting to eliminate them. Moreover, his grounding of both rationality and the sense of self in the body's lived-through encounter with a really existing world escapes the foundationalism of modernism, since this encounter continues to unfold, and it escapes the arbitrariness of postmodernism, since this encounter is stable enough to make at least some non-arbitrary generalizations about both the world and the human experience of it. Given this last point, that human experiences, and thus more generally human nature, are stable enough to make at least some provisional generalizations about them, it seems plausible to maintain an at least modified (non-essentialist) theory of alienation, and that this theory may still be used to guide a politics - even in our so-called postmodern age. This, then, will be the focus of the present essay: it will present MerleauPonty's theory of rationality and of the human subject as coming between modernism and postmodernism; it will present a nonessentialist theory of alienation; and it will attempt to make the case that this nonessentialist theory of alienation can still be used to guide politics. Modernism Before taking up Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, let us first turn to a brief characterization of how both the modernist and postmodernist treat the human subject, and, given their respective theories of the subject or of human nature, how each then addresses politics. The concept of rationality will be addressed further below. As is well know, Descartes defines the modern subject as the indubitable and complete reflective awareness of oneself by oneself, as a complete awareness of oneself as a conscious, thinking entity, i.e., as a thinking substance, with a precise rational identity. This rational self, which is separate from the world, others, and even embodied emotions, can nonetheless rationally manipulate and control the world, others, and itself. With this sort of view of the subject more or less incorporated into Natural Law Theory, employed variously by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and even by Marx, as well as by many to follow, we find a precise human essence, given in nature or even by God, from which we may be alienated, that more or less absolutely dictates what its proper social and political environments should be. Postmodernism A variety of views regarding the postmodern subject is admirably revealed and summarized by Pauline Marie Rosenau in Post-Modernism and the Social Science.2 She states that postmodernists frequently propose a de-emphasizing of the personal subject and, generally, that they call for less emphasis on the subject [considered] ... as the 'preconstituted centre of the experience of culture and history'3 (PMSS 42). Of Nietzsche, as one of the most significant precursors of the postmodern rejection of the modern subject, Rosenau states the following: Nietzsche questioned the . …

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanization of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk.

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanisation of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or as requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk.

Solaris (1961), widely regarded as the seminal work of Stanisław Lem — a leading figure in science fiction and futurist thought — stands as a canonical text that traverses the disciplinary boundaries of science, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. The “ocean of Solaris” presented in the novel constitutes a radical Other: an entity fundamentally untranslatable within the framework of human language. Simultaneously, it functions as a mirror that exposes the depths of the human unconscious, while also serving as an ontological Other that destabilizes anthropocentric assumptions. Through an interpretive lens informed by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and posthumanist theory, Solaris may be understood as a posthuman text that interrogates the limits of human epistemology, subjectivity, and ethics. Lem foregrounds the solitude of the human subject, the narcissism inherent in systems of perception, and the pervasive anxiety elicited by the unknowable Other—thereby articulating a speculative ethics and ontology beyond the human. Set within a fictional spatio-temporal framework of futuristic and cosmic proportions, Solaris persistently returns to the question of the human. At its core, it is a philosophical narrative that poses a critical inquiry into the essence of human existence, articulated through the encounter with alterity. Rather than offering a resolution, the novel confronts the reader with the intrinsic contradictions and epistemological limits that underlie all attempts at understanding. While the human subject endeavors to grasp the Other, it is instead compelled to confront the ruptures, ignorance, and constraints within the self. Ultimately, the novel’s philosophical gravity resides not in the deciphering of the alien Other, but in the encounter with its very incomprehensibility—an experience that renders visible the structural instabilities of human cognition and the existential disquiet they engender.

In science fiction ideas about human subjectivity and identity have traditionally been established in a comparison between self (human) and Other (non-human) characters. So, the alien, monster or robot of science fiction may provide an example of Otherness, against which a representation of ‘proper’ human subjectivity is established, interrogated and, on occasion, problematised. Images of Otherness in science fiction can be understood as a metaphor for forms of Otherness within society or between societies and in this way the genre can engage with the fears and anxiety surrounding a given society's Others. Preceding chapters have concentrated on the representation of gender and sexuality, but received notions of human subjectivity and identity are also bound up with issues surrounding race and ethnicity. Based upon classificatory models largely constructed in the nineteenth century, qualities and traits have often been assigned to particular races with the assumption that the race in question is homogenous and that individuals belonging to various racial groupings are the vessels of essential racial characteristics. So racial markers, as with the markers of sexuality, are frequently referred to as ‘evidence’ of an essentialised being that is separate and divided from other modes of being. However, divisions between self/Other have not always been based upon models of a clear cut opposition. For instance, as Robert J. C. Young points out: Racial difference in the nineteenth century was constructed not only according to a fundamental binary division between black and white but also through evolutionary social anthropology's historicised version of the Chain of Being. Thus racialism operated both according to the same-Other model and through the ‘computation of normalities’ and ‘degrees of deviance’ from the white norm.

Posthumanism originates from the negation of anthropocentrism, and states that humanity represents only a temporary phase or state in the evolutionary process of the world and can be able to interconnect with other non-human entities to form new substrates that carry life information. Biotechnology is one of the key means of realizing posthumanism, and provides a robust material and technological foundation to dissolve the human subjectivity and particularity. This paper primarily investigates the crises generated by humanity itself under the complicity of posthumanism and advancing biotechnology, and further attempts to employ Nietzsche’s Übermensch philosophy and its contemporary developmental theories to critically analyse the philosophical and ethical issues that human subjectivity faces. The aim is to offer potential pathways to reconstruct human existential subjectivity for addressing the dilemmas of our era.

The paper delves into an analysis of how humanity is portrayed within the expansive realm of science fiction. Recognizing the genre's unparalleled ability for world-building, the study examines science fiction as a cultural artifact that mirrors societal values, fears, and aspirations. It investigates how the genre adapts by analytically modeling shifts in human viewpoints in alignment with scientific theories and technological progress. Within the landscape of science fiction literature, the human subject takes on a complex role, serving as a vessel for cultural, ethical, and ontological exploration. Through narrative and speculative frameworks, the genre probes the transformative forces affecting human experience and physiology, while consistently emphasizing the enduring essence of humanity. The paper meticulously explores the role of the human subject in science fiction, outlining how the genre provides a nuanced investigation set against a backdrop of scientific and socio-cultural evolution. It contends that although science fiction stretches the limits of human experience, it invariably maintains a fundamental core of humanity, aligning itself with the broader objectives of anthropological study. Contemporary science fiction thus serves not only as a lens for scrutinizing the anxieties and hopes about humanity's future but also as a platform for speculative inquiry into the very nature of human existence.

In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), Grace Dillon writes that such texts envision Native futures by rethinking the colonial past. This chapter addresses the intersection of ecofeminism, Indigenous studies, and science fiction by focusing on Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), The Future Home of the Living God (2017) and Oreet Ashery (Israeli) and Larissa Sansour (Palestinian), The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (2009), two works that model resistance to colonialism. As Tania LaFontaine explains, science fiction serves as a good vehicle for environmental themes (Science Fiction Theory and Ecocriticism 2016); Erdrich’s text presents a near future deeply destroyed by climate change. Yet by embracing the conventions of science fiction, she creates a space for self-determination as the Ojibwe use the disaster to reclaim their land. Also using science fiction as a path toward decolonization, Sansour and Ashery’s tale revolves around their alter-egos, Vovel and Nonel, who accidentally are infected with a virus that gives them super-powers. Reluctant super-heroes, they nevertheless decide to liberate Palestine. Upon reflection, they admit that despite the “dark shadow” of Occupation, they feel more optimistic, much like the Ojibwe in Erdrich’s novel who are celebratory over reclaiming lost land. According to Salma Monani and Joni Adamson (Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies 2017), such texts are particularly valuable to confront Western notions of progress, which paint Indigenous people as relics of the past. Moreover, Indigenous futurisms feature “returning to ourselves” as a process of recovering ancestral ways. As Cedar, the adopted Ojibwe daughter in Erdrich’s novel, declares to her unborn child: “Our people. My people. Your people,” a statement that she makes after returning to her tribe. Both texts acknowledge that an Apocalypse has already taken place, but by way of Indigenous futurisms the authors propose an optimistic future arising from decolonial struggle.

The ethics of global clinical trials: In developing countries, participation in clinical trials is sometimes the only way to access medical treatment. What should be done to avoid exploitation of disadvantaged populations?

This article examinesReset(逆时营救, 2017), a Chinese science fiction film that diverges from the genre’s typical patriotic themes.Resetoffers a compelling case study for exploring technoscience’s impact – as a tool of corporate biopower and neocolonialism – on human corporeality, subjectivity, and female agency. The film’s protagonist, Xia Tian, transforms from a career-focused scientist to time-traveling cyborgs, ultimately reverting to a traditional maternal role. Analyzing this trajectory through Foucault’s biopower, Haraway’s cyborg feminism, and contemporary theories on reproductive futurism and sacrificial motherhood, the study unveils Reset’s function as an allegorical lens. It magnifies the effects of global corporate biopower on human subjectivity, particularly female agency amid apocalyptic upheavals. Xia Tian’s journey illustrates the complexities professional women face in balancing career and family, reflecting broader societal issues and mirroring Chinese cultural imperatives that simultaneously valorize motherhood and women’s workforce participation.Resetperforms a double movement: introducing alternative forms of womanhood via cyborg iterations while framing these as incompatible with the envisaged societal future. This paradox highlights the film’s ambiguous stance, critiquing neocolonial capitalism’s manipulation of human bodies while exhibiting a conservative approach to gender roles.

Sarah Lefanu claims that feminist science fiction is ‘informed by the feminist, socialist and radical politics that developed during the 1960s and 1970s’ (Lefanu, 1988, p. 3). There were women writing science fiction much earlier, but the body of work labelled feminist science fiction burgeoned hand-in-hand with second-wave feminism. Lefanu states that The stock conventions of science fiction … can be used metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of “woman”’ (ibid., p. 5), and Wolmark concurs, noting that ‘significant convergence between feminism and science fiction since the 1970s … has resulted in the production of texts in which gender and identity are central, as is the depiction of new and different sets of social and sexual relations’ (Wolmark, 1993, p. 1).

This study explores the radical potential of feminist science fiction to question dominant cultural definitions of difference and identity, self and other. It examines the way in which the generic conventions of science fiction are subverted so that notions of both genre and gender identity are redefined. The book also considers the ways in which both feminism and postmodernism have enabled women science fiction writers to challenge the common sense nature of social and cultural practices and institutions. postmodernism's sustained critique of the grand narratives of western culture is paralleled by feminist analysis of the patriarchal nature of the dominant discourses of that culture. While these are not the same projects, they are nevertheless connected, both by their mutual recognition of the partiality of dominant cultural practices and by their potential to develop an interventionist cultural politics.