ABSTRACT
Gestural voices inhabit uncontainable bodies. Thomas More’s utopia strove towards an organic whole, symbolized in the healthy body of its citizenry; yet whereas related notions of the body politic seem anachronistic today, the underlying norms that bodies should be honed to health in the interests of a smoothly functioning economical or political system certainly are not. Chapter 2, “Uncontainable Bodies: Posthuman Biopolitics,” explores fictional configurations of the posthumanly monstrous as the flip side of neoliberal fantasies of biopolitical perfection. I develop a vision of human bodies which, instead of relying on the skin as a border to be proofed at all cost, immerse themselves in the interlinked cells of human and non-human organic matter. Envisioned as an alternative to a biopolitics that demands discipline and docility, such uncontainable bodies embed the human into the multiplicity of life, rescuing it from the need to immunize until life becomes mere survival. I trace the political agency emergent from such bodies through readings of the cyberpunk that is dominant in contemporary pop culture, such as Bladerunner or William Gibson’s Peripheral. It is in Larissa Lai’s feminist biopunk and postcolonial science fiction, however, that posthuman figures explore new forms of political agency. Inhabiting bodies which, nourished by multiplicity, seek connection instead of transcendence, these figures become politically salient when they establish subversive connections. Instead of paying credence to the premise of unitary one-ness and singularity, such multiple personhood becomes untameable to (bio)power in an ecological re-imagining of the posthuman politics.
