| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores posthuman re-imaginings of the body in works of feminist speculative fiction. Its main focus is on the representation of the body in Monica Byrne’s novel The Actual Star (2021). The novel’s future society reimagines biological sex, gender and sexuality, as well as different forms of bodily hybridity (with technology, and interspecies hybridity). The thesis rests on a close-reading of the future plotline in Byrne’s novel in light of a theoretical framework based on works by important feminist posthumanists such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando. It also contrasts and compares Byrne’s novel with other works of speculative fiction, particularly Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy. This thesis argues that feminist speculative narratives disrupt discriminatory practices based on identity categories like biological sex, gender and sexuality by renegotiating the notion of difference in post-dualistic ways. Feminist speculative narratives’ experimentation with different forms of hybridity is strongly indebted to Haraway’s cyborg figuration and its post-dualistic ambitions, and they frequently confuse the border between biology and technology in ways that destabilize binary dualisms like natural/artificial, body/mind, physical/virtual and Self/Other. Yet, exploration of the role of technology often brings with it a confusion of posthuman and transhuman values and interests in these narratives, illustrating the fact that posthumanism implies both a continuity and a discontinuity with humanism. Through their world-building, feminist speculative narratives not only create the future, they also renegotiate what it means to be posthuman. The posthuman that emerges in these narratives is not one, but many, it bases its subject formation on relationality and interconnectedness, and its body is a site of hybrid possibilities and pleasure. | eng |