RT Journal Article
T1 The Commodified Body and Post/In Human Subjectivities in Frears’ s Dirty Pretty Things and Romanek’s Never Let Me Go
A1 Carrasco Carrasco, Rocío
AB Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis,and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, itrevolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vintor Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. StephenFrears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of thecommodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service ofpowerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted on their bodies by advanced capitalistsocieties, the main characters in these movies are considered as alien, marginal and/or non-humanbeings. Their body organs are but commodities to be literally traded and removed to be given to theprivileged ones in order to preserve the latter’s integrity and “humanity”. These commodified subjectsdo not construct a “liveable” sense of the self in the face of multiplicity, ambivalence, contradiction,inequalities and oppression, as materialist feminism advocate, but remain, however, on a marginal side.As this article sets up to contend, both movies denounce the commodification of the body or “life” tradingby positioning viewers on the side of the marginal, allowing us to become part of the post/in humanexperience. Hence, Dirty Pretty Things and Never Let Me Go offer instances of commodified beingswhose fears, pains, vulnerabilities, thoughts and feelings are available to mass audiences. In this sense,the immigrant/illegal/artificial/exploited body becomes a repository of the characters’ troubledsubjectivities, allowing spectators to situate themselves and reflect upon the intricacies of contemporaryideologies upon certain bodily practices. The body becomes, then, a valid tool for criticism that connectsto current understandings of power and subjectivity.
PB Purdue University Press
SN 1481-4374
YR 2019
FD 2019-03
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10272/16091
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10272/16091
LA eng
NO Carrasco, R. (2019). The Commodified Body and Post/In Human Subjectivities in Frears’ s Dirty Pretty Things and Romanek’s Never Let Me Go. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3366
NO The author wishes to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project "Bodies in Transit", ref. FFI2013-47789-C2-1-P, and Research Project "Bodies in Transit 2," ref. FF2017-84555-C2-1-P) and the European Regional Development Fund for the writing of this essay.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 31 may 2026