the need for feminist posthumanities
We are posthuman already. In fact, maybe we have always been. We live in a reality, where "many urban, highly educated and privileged people seem for instance increasingly taken by two significant cultural genres. The first is dystopian television series about the fall of white men, often featuring flawed (or even sociopathic) male characters who go to extremes to keep up the appearance of being functional. The white male figures in White Lotus, The Last of Us, Succession, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Dexter and House of Cards come to mind (with Ted Lasso as the glaring exception). The second cultural genre is the apocalyptic horror of Silo or Black Mirror, and dark science fiction films such as Blade Runner 2049, Alien Resurrection, Resident Evil and Annihilation. Replicants, hybrids, monsters, mutants, clones, robots and alien invaders constitute trans-species alliances or transversal assemblages that confront and challenge the received standards of normality, naturalness and propriety. These films seem to portend new forms of posthumanity emerging in none-too-distant futures. Both genres suggest that the contemporary social imaginary is clearly techno-terratological.
Dystopian climate futures that bring modern life back to natural history and ponder the evolutionary or reproductive consequences of human actions and humanistic politics are seen in television mini-series like Fortitude or in the feminist literatures of Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, A Handmaid’s Tale) or Ursula Le Guin (The Word for World is Forest). Utopian experimentations with lived relationality, sensory enhanced forms of sociality and sense of belonging are also attempted in series like Sense8, testing the grounds for posthuman connectivity. Clearly, from the overlapping domains of science and popular imagination we have already moved way beyond the limitations of the humanist imagination, for better and for worse. Despite the somewhat bipolar reports – either utopian or dystopian, technophobic or technophilic – we dream, live and enliven already the posthuman condition. Now more than ever we need the storytelling practices to be accountable for its politics."
What does that mean for our scholars? Humans are entangled with technology and science and the non-human. We need a new set of tools that goes 'beyond the humanist imagination' in order to study society. Scholars need to rethink. "In a classical anti-humanist argument, Foucault claims that we need to dethrone the concept of Man because it gets in the way of thinking with the high degree of accuracy and complexity required by our historical context." Humanities can no longer be practiced without reifying the stereotypes of the human. By offering a new starting point and altering views to reality, feminist posthumanities might be the answer we are looking for.
"There is no self-contained individual human being to be held in position of mastery, no divide between nature and culture, no ‘advanced’ civilisation that masters the wild Others, and no universal humanism practised across the diversity of our species: there are only sociable natures and relations that matter."
excerpts taken from: Åsberg, Cecilia, and Rosi Braidotti. "Feminist Posthumanities: Redefining and Expanding Humanities’ Foundations." (2024)
they also call FP "an academic trickster figure of post-disciplinarity" and I love that so much
