Takeshi Kovacs: The Commodification of the Male Body in Altered Carbon

Abstract

This chapter deals with how manhood is depicted as a constructed concept in the TV series Altered Carbon (Netflix 2018-2020), opening debates on gender politics and the implications of human enhancement on contemporary societies. The series proposes that the mind can survive the death of the organic body and people can transfer human consciousness from body to body. The body is reduced, then, to a mere recipient, a marker of status and privilege that powerful businesspeople (mostly men) can manipulate and process in order to avoid death and reach immortality. Gender, sex, race and age seem to be arbitrary when constructing hierarchies. A new and discriminatory class hierarchy operates in this society where the body becomes the main site of power, a commodity to be disposed by the wealthy at their will. Altered Carbon portrays images of a tough masculinity that is subjected to control, manipulation and violence, but also offers virtual reality characters and characters who cannot afford a body and take whatever available for them. In this dystopian scenario, it is quite interesting to analyze how masculinity still relies on normative-and masculinist-conceptions. It follows Takeshi Kovacs, an Asian soldier turned rebel that awakens after 250 years in order to resolve the mystery of the death of millionaire Laurens Bancroft, who has paid for his liberation. Paradoxically, Kovacs takes the form of a tough white male body that is constructed, transferable and expendable. He is depicted as a tough hypermasculine character with extreme fighting skills and no trace of vulnerability. As it will be argued in this chapter, this white angry and commodified version of masculinity becomes problematic in a society where gender, race and age have apparently lost their meaning. By focusing on the idea of the commodification of the body, Altered Carbon offers spectators a space for reflection and criticism as, in spite of the possibilitites opened up by a seemingly fluid notion of the body, it still relies on essentialist dualism placing normative masculinity at the center of hierarchies.