Fantastika Journal

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81947263462)

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Podcast by: Tom Ue

Information Overload in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

Every day, Wade Watts, the central character of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, checks the Hatchery, “one of the more popular gunter message forums” (32). There, he “scan[s] the most recent message threads, taking n the latest gunter news and rumours”: “The usual gunter clan flame wars. Ongoing arguments about the ‘correct’ interpretation of some cryptic passage in Anorak’s Almanac. High-level avatars bragging about some new magic item or artifact they’d obtained” (32). My central arguments, in this presentation, are that Cline offers powerful warnings about information overload, the accounting for what truly matters, and the use and misuse of information. As Henry Jenkins writes, “the age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes of reception” (26). Jenkins takes, as his case study, the consumers and the producers of the reality television series Survivor (2000-present). With the advent of online forums, participants more readily “share their knowledge and opinions” (28). Jenkins follows Pierre Lévy in arguing for the might of collective intelligence: “Collective intelligence refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may be able to do collectively” (27). Jenkins’ terms, we suggest, can dexterously be applied to our reading of the gunter communities. The Hatchery and other forums sustain Wade. He visits, amongst a number of forums, Samantha’s blog “Arty’s Missives,” which “had become one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, now logging several million hits a day” (35). Wade reasonably assumes that Samantha’s blog is ripe with “misdirection and misinformation” (35). He is nevertheless hooked. By looking at Wade’s interactions with archives, we show how Cline offers particular insights into more meaningful engagements with data.

About the Authors:
Tom Ue is Co-Editor of Film International and Assistant Professor in Literature and Science at Dalhousie University. He is the co-author of The Worlds of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (Routledge, forthcoming). Ue has earned the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and a 2022 Dalhousie University President’s Research Excellence Award for Emerging Investigators. He is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.
James Munday read Mathematics and Physics at Dalhousie University, where he earned the University Medal in Physics and the Sir William Young Gold Medal in Mathematics. While his academic studies have concentrated on STEM, he is co-author of the forthcoming The Worlds of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (Routledge), and he has written and presented a number of essays on Cline’s and Tolkien’s oeuvres.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the script and recording

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84956184046). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Sonakshi Srivastava

Arboreal Em/bodiment:
Subjectivity, Silence, and Vegetal Future in Han Kang

Content Warning: rape, suicide
Keywords: cannibalism, consumption, body, arboreal, fantasy

When Yeong-hye, the protagonist of Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, makes a dietary choice independent of any prior discussion with her husband, and maternal family, everyone is taken by surprise. The choice of giving up meat and animal products (eggs and milk) induces much anxiety amongst her kin, who fail to rationalise her aberrant behaviour and see reason in her “dreams” – ultimately incarcerating her in a psychic hospital.
The disobedient act of giving up meat and ultimately food itself along with Yeong-hye’s refusal to “speak” about this choice trigger the action in the novel since the act of eating with the family provides a ready setting in which “individual personalities develop, kinship obligations emerge, and the customs of the group are reinforced” (Fiddes). We routinely use food to express relationships among ourselves and with our environment. The obtaining and consuming of food can be an eloquent statement of shared ideology.
Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat, and her refusal to inhabit her “fleshly body” is seen as an “interruption” in the regular routine of the ordinary world of her husband, and family.
Yeong-hye gradually begins to make an escape from the regular world and begins to believe that she is turning into a tree – her fantastical construction of an alternative reality forms the crux of this paper. I will attempt to delineate how such radical imaginings serve to pronounce underlying inequalities in inhabiting gendered bodies that also inform acts of consumption. What does Yeong-hye’s fantastic arboreal world tell us about our entangled living(s)? By referencing Sumana Roy’s and Kiran Desai’s works, I will attempt to answer these questions.

About the Author: Sonakshi Srivastava is a writing tutor at Ashoka University, and an MPhil scholar at Indraprastha University. Her research is at the intersection of food futures, speculative fictions, and the Anthropocene. She is a South Asia Speaks Translation Fellow from the class of 2021, and was also shortlisted for the Food Serendipity Lab.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

 Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors.

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78547989824). 

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Podcast by: Ibtisam Ahmed

The Power of Love:
Queer Superhero Desire as Transgression in Marvel’s Hulkling & Wiccan

Key words (including content notes): LGBTQ+, utopia, queerphobia, references to body image, references to gendered expectations and stereotypes
In 2022, Marvel released a one-shot special comic focusing on the romantic lives of their most prominent queer couple. The eponymous pair of Hulkling & Wiccan have become staples of the comic book publisher’s catalogue, including being the central characters of their major Empyre story arc. From their inception, both Hulkling and Wiccan have been open about their identities, with their love for each other often leading to the resolution of conflicts. The 2022 one-shot takes a slightly different approach by considering the possibility that their love in and of itself becomes the site of conflict.
The now-happily married couple are transported into separate alternate realities where they have forgotten each other and are shown to be romantically involved with two new characters who represent their deepest romantic desires. For Hulkling, this means having “a steadfast companion” who, like him, has alien heritage and follows him across galaxies. For Wiccan, this means “a tragic, distracting love” who needs to be rescued amidst a mundane urban setting. In both cases, these desires are completely conventional in cisheteronormative hero stories (and commonly accepted in-universe) – companions in arms, romantic connection through struggle, love at first sight – but they are framed as unattainable due to the characters’ queer identity.
In addition to the narrative points raised through the text, the art of the comic – and the characters within – further highlight expressions of self that are inherently transgressive. Masculine characters dressing up in intentionally camp costuming, characters of colour showing visible body hair, collective dinners subverting gendered norms about “hosting”; all of these images work to undo cisheteronormativity. By discussing the characters’ desires and experiences, and exploring the resolution of the story, I consider how something as “ordinary” as love can be radical when expressed through bodies which are considered transgressive.

About the Author: Ibtisam Ahmed (he/him) completed an MPhil at the University of Nottingham and is currently the Head of Policy and Research at LGBT Foundation. As a queer, disabled migrant of colour, his focus is on uplifting and empowering voices that are traditionally silenced. He has written about queer superheroes before, including a chapter about Hulkling and Wiccan as queer immigrant utopian embodiments in the book The Politics of Culture (2020, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), which he co-edited. His other work has been published on Project Myopia, Imagining the Impossible, and Ancillary Review of Books.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

Transcripts have been provided by the aut

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84956184046). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Brianna Anderson (@bri_anderson13)

Consuming Capitalism:
Bloody Activism and the Eco-Vampire in Dark Fang

Content Warnings: Blood, gore, sexual assault, violence
In the face of escalating climate change, many recent comics take up environmental issues. Often, these texts provide feel-good narratives of activism and empowerment. Miles Gunter and Kelsey Shannon’s series Dark Fang (2017) offers a subversive counterpoint to this trend by portraying gruesome and violent forms of environmental advocacy. The series centers on Valla, a young fisherwoman-turned-vampire. After her unwanted transformation, Valla retreats to the ocean, where she resides peacefully until the BP oil spill destroys her underwater refuge. Fleeing the toxic waste, Valla returns to the surface and discovers that capitalism and industrialization have poisoned the Earth. Horrified, the vampire attempts to singlehandedly destroy the fossil fuel industry and halt the impending mass extinction by slaying oil executives in a spectacularly gory murder spree.
As a transgressive yet sympathetic monster, Valla reflects larger anxieties about climate change and the inadequacy of current responses to environmental issues. She plays the role of the ‘eco-vampire,’ an emerging horror archetype that Simon Bacon (2020) defines as ‘an environmental warrior’ who serves ‘as a double or doppelgänger of humankind, simultaneously representing a dark mirror image of humanity’s own vampiric characteristics as well as actively trying to destroy or neutralize the forces of consumerist/technological progress’ (p. 8). In the face of mounting anger and fears about the future of the planet, eco-vampires spurn conventional—and largely ineffective—forms of environmental activism like recycling campaigns, instead playing out violent and taboo fantasies of consumption, female resistance, and radical ecoterrorism. Furthermore, by drawing parallels between the abuse of nature and women, the comic promotes an ecofeminist perspective. Examining Dark Fang from ecocritical and ecofeminist lenses, I argue that the horror comic uses the female eco-vampire to offer scathing critiques of capitalism, consumerism, and the gendered power structures that contribute to devastating environmental issues.

About the Author: Brianna Anderson is a Marion L. Brittain Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida. Her research interests include archival studies, children’s literature, comics studies, ecohorror, and youth-made artifacts. She has recently published in The Lion and the Unicorn.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 


Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors. 

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84956184046). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Sarah Michelson (@sarah_michelson)

Hell is a Teenage Girl:
Monstrous Bodies in Jennifer's Body and Ginger Snaps

Content warnings: eating disorders, sexual violence, menstruation, bullying
Early 21st century film is full of monstrous teenage girls, some figurative (for example, Regina George from Mean Girls), but others rather literal, such as Ginger Fitzgerald (Ginger Snaps) and Jennifer Check (Jennifer's Body). In his essay "Monster Culture: Seven Theses," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen famously writes that the monster is the harbinger of category crisis and that the monster polices the borders of the possible. Teenage girls, too, have an inherent sense of liminality, as children on the threshold of adulthood who are trying to make meaning out of their own physical and emotional instability. This is not helped by a culture that heavily polices teenage girls and makes them feel uncomfortable in their own skin— it isn't hard for a teenage girl to feel like a monster. This paper analyses the body horror of Ginger Fitzgerald and Jennifer Check through the lens of abjection and monster theory, considering Ginger as a werewolf and Jennifer as a kind of vampire. It considers these characters' context within other teenage girl media of the era, and within a greater lineage of monsters. What do Ginger and Jennifer's monstrous bodies, and their monstrous hungers, say about the teenage girl experience?

About the Author: Sarah Michelson recently completed her M.Phil in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies at Trinity College Dublin, where she wrote a dissertation on 1980s gendered body horror. In addition to horror scholarship, Sarah also writes short fiction.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 


Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors. 

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84956184046). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Rebecca Gault

‘I Hunger. It Consumes Me’:
Hunger and Desire as Feminine Affliction

Content Warning: discussion of cannibalism, disordered eating, food, flesh, murder, gore.
Eve took the apple from the tree and humanity was doomed to fall from Eden. Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds and so, the winter came to ravage her mother’s work. Hunger is a feminine affliction. There has been a surge in theory about the female body and the meanings inscribed upon it, from Atwood to Ellmann, and yet these theories remain rather squarely in the field of the real. When women’s bodies – and indeed their hungers – are placed into a fantastical setting to allow for exaggeration and extremes, what does this do to the politics behind it? In examining figures such as the female werewolf, the female cosmic force, and the female cannibal, this paper seeks to explore the ways in which fantastika allows for female hunger to transcend conventional boundaries and allow for excessive consumption in ways that become both freeing and horrific. The discussion of female werewolves will centre the hunger and desire for freedom through bestial natures and the idea of letting go of humanity to fulfil this freedom. This leads into a discussion of elevation of the human into the deific and the cosmic hunger exhibited by Marvel’s Phoenix Force and her subsequent consumption of entire stars as an emotional need going unfulfilled, ultimately leading into a final discussion of the most transgressive type of feeding of them all; that of the female cannibal who consumes human flesh as an act of rebellion and horror. By utilising Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine and sociological frameworks of women’s relationship with both food and hunger, this paper will seek to analyse and examine exactly what is transgressive about female hunger and how fantastika seeks to elevate this phenomenon in such a way that it becomes a significant commentary on femininity and its intersection with desire.

About the Author: Rebecca Gault is an early-career academic from Glasgow, Scotland. She has a MA in English Literature from the University of Glasgow and is a current MLitt student on the Fantasy Literature program at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include monstrosity, gender and sexuality studies, and modes of fantasy.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 


Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors. 

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89173630311). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Trae Toler

"What is Blood for if not for Shedding?":
Bodily Transfiguration as Racial Violence and Trauma in Benard Rose's Candyman (1992) and Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021)

Key Words: Candyman, Race, Racial Violence, Systemic Oppression, Monstrous Bodily Transgression
“What is innocent blood if not for shedding?” Candyman asks in Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman. This quote harkens back to his own past. Before he was Candyman, he was Daniele Robitaille the son of a slave turned into an artist. Robitaille’s hand was severed from his wrist and replaced with a rusty metal hook. He was then lathered with honey as bees stung and ate away at his chest cavity. Robitaille was turned into a monster at the hands of a violent white mob simply for loving a white woman. In other words, because he feels his innocent blood was shed, he now forces society to face the monster they created anytime one dares to summon him. To others, he is a monster, but upon closer analysis, Candyman is a victim. His hook and chest-hive of bees are grotesque bodily transgressions symbolic of racial oppression and racial caste in America.
In 2021, Nia DaCosta invited audiences once again to summon Candyman offering a direct sequel to Rose’s original film. In summoning the monster, DaCosta successfully challenges the audience’s understanding of Candyman and suggests that any victim of racial violence ultimately becomes a Candyman. The stories birthed from these acts of violence become cautionary tales to minority
children who must navigate a society that seeks to otherize and vilify them. In the film’s climax, William Burke, a man who lived his life solely in the Cabrini-Green Project Homes, states, “Candyman is a way to deal with the fact that these things happened to us, are still happening!” Ultimately, this podcast aims to address how the bodily transgressions displayed in both films, Candyman (1992) and Candyman (2021), blends the fantastical with the historical to offer a damning critique on generational racial trauma and violence in America.

About the Author: Trae Toler teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Brunswick Community College. Toler’s research is grounded in analyzing identity in horror cinema. Additionally, Toler’s film review of Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood (2019) was published in the May 2021, volume 5 edition of Fantastika Journal.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors. 

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89173630311). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Derek Thiess

A Technology of Torture Porn:
Christian Supremacy, Medieval History, and Revisionism

Content Warning: torture
In my first book, Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader (2015), I argued that historical approaches emphasizing “complexity” and “continuity” were apologetic strategies, producing revisionist histories that downplayed the historical violences enacted in the name of Christianity. Early peer reviewers met such claims with denial, and post-publication reviews wondered why I did not focus on race or gender or Nietzsche. Six years later, Matthew Gabriele and David M.
Perry published The Bright Ages, what they claim is a “New History of Medieval Europe,” working against a supposed “myth of the Dark Ages” and “weaving together strands of time, culture and place that affirm continuity just as they mark significant change (x). I’m not the first scholar to suggest this work advances Christian Supremacy, but historian Mary Rambaran-Olm’s review “Sounds about White” focuses primarily on the text’s treatment of race. Ironically, Gabriele and Perry also argue that their emphasis on continuity “brings people, traditionally marginalized in other tellings, into focus” (xi) and for this revisionist history asked publicly for the text to be nominated for a Hugo.
Taking my cue from the authors, I would put The Bright Ages into conversation with the fantastic, in this case reading it against the germinal work of the film genre known as “torture porn”: Eli Roth’s Hostel films. I suggest that in graphically portraying “medieval” forms of torture, these films highlight the embodied nature of the history in question, and they do so precisely by positing continuity. They urge us to see, instead of the beautiful religious mosaics, cathedrals, and murals of the Middle Ages, the cost: a human, embodied suffering at the hands of actively colonial religious institutions that continues to this day. In figuring this embodied violence, and even in our critical reactions to these films, they emphasize the apologetic nature of our appraisals of medieval, Christian historical violence.

About the Author: Derek Thiess is Associate Professor of English as the University of North Georgia. In addition to Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader (Lexington 2015), he is the author of Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction (Routledge 2017) and Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction (Liverpool 2019).

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors. 

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81947263462). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Stephanie Weber

‘Before you go storming out of here like you usually do, I suggest you check your Tattoo’:
Interactive Tattoos, Biomedical Body Modification and Questions of Autonomy in the Science Fiction Series The Invisible Man

content warnings: interactive tattoos, body modification, experimental medicine, loss of agency, illness
While tattoos allow to "write oneself" and "be read by others" (DeMello 2000, 1), their narrative quality also makes them suitable as story elements in fiction, where tattoos magically come to life. Interactive, living tattoos are however not only a creation of Science Fiction. Researchers from Switzerland, as well as MIT and Harvard Medical School have experimented with tattooing a special biosensitive ink that reacts with colour changes to biomarker variations in the interstitial fluid in order to monitor metabolism or to detect early stages of cancer. The body is not only used as a canvas for identity formation and individual expressions, but the aesthetics, permanence and communicative nature of tattoos encode information about bodily functions. The boundaries of art and disease, of controlling internal processes and of being controlled by an external force, is blurred. In the Science Fictions series The Invisible Man, tattoos are used to monitor internal processes and to exercise control over the protagonist Darien Fawkes. After an experimental surgery, he is able to become invisible by using a Quicksilver gland implant in his head, yet he cannot control the amount of Quicksilver he secretes and the side effects caused. He works for a secret agency, which constantly monitors his Quicksilver level with a colour changing snake tattoo on his arm. They use this knowledge to manipulate him and to force him to stay with them as their best asset, instead of using his superpowers for his own goals. I want to look at the history of the socio-cultural practice of tattooing and compare tattoo narratives and tattoo aesthetics with advances in experimental medicine and their use in The Invisible Man to show how interactive tattoos enhance and transgress corporeal boundaries and how they can be used to enhance or limit their wearers’ autonomy and agency.

About the Author: Stephanie Weber obtained her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at University of Vienna, Austria in 2019. Her dissertation deals with the uncanny quality of Freak-characters and uncanny narrative strategies in postmodern literature. She is currently an independent scholar with a main research interest in tattoos, body studies, narratology.

Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors. 

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
Join the discussion on discord (https://discord.gg/zsMTBcnTcC) or on our Round Table Discussions on 12 November 2022 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89886254918). See www.fantastikajournal.com for details

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Podcast by: Hannah Menendez

Rebel Cyborgs:
Technological Posthumanism and Personhood in The Murderbot Diaries

Oliver Krüger defines technological posthumanism as the theory that “robots and artificial intelligence are the future carriers of evolution and progress” (16)--in other words, human beings will eventually be rendered irrelevant and technologically outdated, and thus vulnerable to their own creations. In science fiction, this theory is commonly depicted as a dystopic anxiety (think Terminator or The Matrix), in which writers and directors imagine that the eventual outcome of unhindered technological progress will be artificial intelligence eliminating and/or enslaving humanity. In this essay, I will explore how Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries instead explores posthuman anxieties by imagining what capitalism will look like after unchecked technological progress enacts on the bodies of cyborgs (robot-human constructs) the same script that corporate capitalism has always enacted on those considered subhuman. The series protagonist, Murderbot, is a cyborg–a blend of human body and artificial intelligence–who is fully sentient, but considered subhuman and therefore unable to be oppressed. Despite cyborgs and artificial intelligence surpassing the human mind in processing capacity, Murderbot’s personhood is denied because it in essence a creation designed for corporate explointation. I argue that this series presents not only a more transparent critique of capitalism, but also a critique of the technological posthumanist project: that technological progression will neither save nor annihilate the human; instead, it will continue to propagate the systems we already have unless those systems are first destroyed. The cyborgs succeed in freeing themselves from this system through claiming bodily agency and declaring their own personhood in solidarity with each other, a radically hopeful posture compared to previous posthuman dystopic fictions.

About the Author: Hannah Menendez (she/her) is an Assistant Professor and Research & Instruction Librarian at Sam Houston State University. She graduated from Florida State University with an M.A. in English and an M.S.in Information. She researches critical information literacy and speculative fiction from a postcolonialist perspective.

 
 Disclaimer: The information and ideas in these podcasts are the property of the speakers. Fantastika Journal operates under the Creative Commons Licence CCBY-NC. This allows for the reproduction or transcription of podcasts for non-commercial uses, only with the appropriate citation information. All rights belong to the author.

The views expressed in these podcasts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fantastika Journal and its editorial board. 

Transcripts have been provided by the author and there may be small changes between the written script and audio recording. We apologize for any errors.