Posthuman feminism and local embodiment in Oryx and Crake and Moxyland.

Abstract

This research project explores the representations of posthuman female cyborgs in two notable works of fiction, which are Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake as well as Lauren Beukes’ novel Moxyland. Both speculative narratives depict a form of thoroughly normalized masculine entitlement over the realm of technology and global production. On one hand, Oryx and Crake exposes the masculine power of globalized corporations that thrive for excessive consumerism driven by the mad creativity of men in the absence of any form of government. The dystopian setting features an exaggerated future North America wrecked by excessively masculine technologies. On the other hand, Moxyland divulges a patriarchal form of subject surveillance initiated by the collaborative work of government and corporations and executed via a web of technological advances. The narrative’s speculative time corresponds to a South African post-apartheid setting that reuses many elements of a past dystopia, which is the apartheid era. Furthermore, this research contributes in the discourse on posthuman feminist agency, which emerges more in Moxyland than in Oryx and Crake. The comparison of both narratives shows that the presence of a form of posthuman feminism requires a local potentiality and a subjective embodiment in relation to figuring masculinist technologies. The female Crakers’ physical and mental entirety in Oryx and Crake reveals a strong patriarchal technological design that allows the female cyborgs to operate under mild performative tendencies without any sign of subjective striving. Their bodies depict a form of global personhood that is devoid of an agential embodiment. In contrast, the women cyborgs in Moxyland, namely Kendra and Lerato, use their bodies as source of knowledge production, agency and re-inscription under strict governmental surveillance. They tailor an anti-cosmopolitan corporeality and a local personhood that recuperate the importance of the Global South in the process of knowledge producti