Embodiment and Disembodiment in Contemporary Science Fiction: Postmodern body transcendence from a socialist feminist perspective.

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to understand the recent cycle of science fiction films that, through their depiction of posthuman characters, implicate female bodies inscribed with cultural and social rhetoric. This thesis shall analyse the female, posthuman bodies presented in Her (2013), Lucy (2014) and Ex Machina (2015) as texts coded with cultural and gendered anxieties. Looking at aspects of posthuman (gendered) sexuality, this thesis will demonstrate the extent to which these science fiction fantasies are indicative of a masculine response to technology in postmodern society. A response that, whilst provoked by post-God anxieties, makes misguided claims for a form of transcendence in which the mind is considered separable from the body.