Problematic selves and unexpected others: Technology, subjectivity, science fiction

This project is an exploration of the related production of bodies and subjects through a reading of selected contemporary science fiction texts. The readings both examine the representation of subjects and bodies in these texts, and consider the implications of these representations in the context of current debates about appropriate uses of technology. My central argument is that such popular texts articulate current cultural preoccupations and assumptions, and that a critical reading of such texts provides insight into popularly accepted ideological constructions.;Chapter 1 reads Gwyneth Jones' Aleutian trilogy, examining the ideas of subject formation through discourse and body/subject materialization through practice found in these texts. Chapter 2 compares two representations of a world of posthuman bodies: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and Iain Banks Culture trilogy. Chapter 3 examines the repressed body of cyberpunk narratives through a reading of William Gibson's Necromancer, Pat Cadigan's Synners, and Raphael Carter's The Fortunate Fall. This reading focuses on the ways in which representations of the repressed body return to complicate our understanding of the novels and the relation of body to self. Chapter 4 more explicitly turns to the question of the mutual production of discourses and bodies, and discourses and subjects, through reading Neat Stephenson's The Diamond Age and Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence.;The conclusion develops an argument for a new concept of the posthuman subject, one that remains focused on a subjectivity embedded in material reality, and one that seeks to be responsible for the social consequences of the worlds it creates. I argue for a posthuman strategy of becoming monstrous by embracing our problematic selves without grounding these identities on the repudiation of unexpected others, a critical posthumanism that includes a ground for ethics.;This project explores the possibilities for changing maps of the social, for creating a new collectivity that includes the monsters. It is about looking for the chance to resist the ways in which the category of the 'natural' has been used in exclusive and repressive ways, and a chance to form new understandings of subjectivity which explore the liberatory potential of new technologies of the body and the self.