The Ship Who Sang: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Similarity

Abstract

The fact that there is an affinity between the agendas of feminist theory and critical posthumanism is well-known, but warrants further exploration when used for the analysis of specific popular cultural representations. By outlining the similarities between the two critical movements, it is proposed that the conceptual use of the notion of similarity in cultural analysis, as introduced by Bhatti and Kimmich (2017), can be productively employed to reframe the critical assessment of gender as deeply involved in representations and imaginaries of the posthuman in literary and cultural analysis. By discussing a modern classic of popular science fiction in the critical literature of gender in posthumanism, Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang ([1961] 1969), a deep-set gendered imaginary is outlined which troubles the critical posthumanist aim of an inclusive ethics due to the cultural inability to represent the posthuman as non-gendered. It is argued that many popular cultural representations of posthumans are still entrenched in a conventional gender economy. Thus, a critical revisiting of these preconceptions and the problems that a non-gendered imaginary seems to pose to globalised popular culture is vital at a time in which the development of a general artificial intelligence, as well as other posthuman scientific innovations, are declared scientific and economic investments. Simultaneously, contemporary popular culture imagines posthumans which are not less haunted by the ghosts of gendered knowledge systems than popular culture from the 1960s.