This paper examines how contemporary British fiction deploys posthuman and transhuman figures to interrogate the political mechanisms through which human value is allocated, withdrawn, and technologically managed. Focusing on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun together with Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, this paper argues that these novels stage worlds in which biotechnology and artificial intelligence intensify rather than abolish entrenched hierarchies of recognition.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of grievability and feminist posthumanist theory, including the work of Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando, the paper traces how these novels construct differential regimes of value across biological, synthetic, and hybrid bodies and interrogates the ethical stakes of post-anthropocentric imaginaries within late-capitalist modernity. Ishiguro’s clones and Artificial Friends inhabit systems of care that simultaneously protect and render them sacrificial, regulating which lives can be publicly mourned and which are designed to be quietly replaceable. Winterson’s posthuman figures, meanwhile, dramatize how technologically enhanced bodies are inscribed with heteronormative scripts of intimacy and violent sexual normativity, particularly in the exploitation of sex-bots.

The paper contends that these texts resist both techno-optimist and apocalyptic narratives by foregrounding disposability as a structuring logic of contemporary life. Through close readings of scenes of biomedical surveillance, organ-donation scheduling, and the pedagogical regulation of sexuality, this paper suggests that British posthuman fiction does not simply imagine what comes after the human, but diagnoses how late-modern societies are already reorganizing humanity along new axes of usefulness, vulnerability, and replaceability.

Authors:
Francesco Bottone, University of Bologna, Italy

About the Presenter(s)
Francesco Bottone is an independent researcher with an MA from the University of Bologna. His work focuses on posthumanism, postcolonial studies, gender studies, Victorian Gothic, and British literature. He is preparing doctoral applications.

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