Screening posthumanism: humanness, embodiment and artificial people in 21st century science-fiction film and television.

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This project aims to investigate how, within contemporary science-fiction film and television,technologies come to be inscribed with ideas of 'humanness' (Wood, 2002). It will explore this inscriptionof the human onto the technological through varying modes of embodiment, from the intangible to thetangible. Posthumanism, although a contested term, can broadly be thought of as a rethinking of what itmeans to be human, specifically, the ways evolutionary, ecological and technological advancementsaffect Enlightenment definitions of humanism (Wolfe, 2010). Science-fiction regularly envisionsposthuman futures of human displacement through narratives of AI, cyborgs and holograms. Thesetechnologies have been discussed under two broad lines of argument. The first is that concepts of'humanness', such as gender and community, are inscribed onto technology to make it moreunderstandable and manageable. This renders technology 'safe' and keeps intact the conceptualcategories of humanness (Wood, 2002). The second is that technological subjects inscribed withhumanness open up and problematise the very definitions of what it means to be human in posthumanistfashion (Herbrechter, 2013). My intervention will show that these two conflicting approaches arenegotiated simultaneously within contemporary science-fiction film and television. I hypothesise thatdefinitions of what it means to be human are simultaneously upheld and challenged within a single text,and will elucidate this conflict through close textual analysis and the framework of posthumanism.