The Vulnerable Posthuman in Popular Science Fiction Cinema

Abstract

Following feminist critical posthuman thinking (Braidotti, Vint, Ferrando), this chapter analyses two recent popular science fiction movies portraying female characters that embody the concept of the vulnerable posthuman: Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell (2017). In spite of the fact that in these two movies the posthuman (female) characters are depicted as vulnerable beings apparently doomed to privileging and perpetuating the normative idea of the body in terms of gender and race, they still manage to somehow disrupt established configurations of power by offering audiences an unfamiliar experience. Viewers see life through the posthuman perspective thanks to filmic strategies, such as identification or sympathy, enabling us to temporarily refuse normative human ethics and to understand the posthuman subject as it is, with its alien/transhuman body and non-normative actions and desires.