ABSTRACT
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner questions the human/nonhuman binary in an early scene when businessman and inventor Eldon Tyrell asks "blade runner" Deckard, who is assigned to kill runaway replicants, to test Rachel, Tyrell's latest creation. Interrogating the "human" and "nonhuman" generates a large number of projects, but authors examine cultural, historical, social, and political borders, and these borders have everything to do with identity, power, and hierarchies. Consider the following projects: explore human/nonhuman boundaries, focus on colonial relationships, examine child/human/adult relationships and analyze animal/human boundaries. While it might feel strange to consider a child as less than human, reflect on how texts portray the "child" as a kind of human/nonhuman figure. The borders between human and animal are as much social as they are natural, a point that poses rather interesting problems for the classical representation of the human as animal rationale.
