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.
Highlights
In the introduction to their edited volume on feminist posthumanities, Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti (2018) state that the basic aim of critical posthumanism is to find an answer to a moral philosophical question: ‘how to live well with multiple others on this planet’ (4)
Åsberg and Braidotti contend that ‘presently, our collective imagination manifested in popular cultures complements a humanistic critique’, and that in particular, contemporary popular television series and other mass-received dystopian genres would indicate that ‘clearly, from the overlapping domains of science and popular imagination we have already moved way beyond the limitations of the humanist imagination, for better or for worse’ (5)
Rephrased in a Derridean vein, it can be stated that while posthumanist perspectives in both theory and popular culture are following the ghost of the other, by which I mean the imaginary of an as-yet not fully shaped futurity of living ‘well with multiple others on this planet’, such perspectives are haunted by the ghost of the same, by which I mean the insidious power of pervasive ordering and knowledge systems so deeply ingrained in popular cultures that they re-appear in a spectral manner as they struggle to overcome them
Summary
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. It is argued that many popular cultural representations of posthumans are still entrenched in a conventional gender economy. 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. Contemporary popular culture imagines posthumans which are not less haunted by the ghosts of gendered knowledge systems than popular culture from the 1960s
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