Term paper free writing 4

The posthuman could be a field of possibility, a socially and politically negotiated range of configurations operating within certain technological and material limitations. What the posthuman can become, in other words, is based on what people agree to, what people allow, and also what technology allows us to do. These changes will also take place within a mesh of ecological/material boundaries that will help co-determine what possible configurations of the posthuman are viable. Biotechnology and information technology (bioinformatics) offer individuals the possibility to radically transform themselves. However, the unintended consequences of globalized economic and technological development might be just as much a catalyst for posthuman becomings as the techno-transhumanist impulse. Environmental contaminants, ecological disintegration, lived human-techno relationships – part of imagining the posthuman is going beyond a “transhumanist” approach centered an autonomous individuals using technology to reconfigure themselves towards specific ends. Caught up in a webwork of technological and material flows, the nature of our becoming is only partially something we control. Cultural texts like SF have a role to play in co-determining the field of posthuman possibility. The posthuman is less a stable taxonomic designation and more something that refers to a mode of imagining, a mode of speculation; this is not an idle project, as the desires figured within imaginings of the posthuman have real consequences on lived realities.

What does the reproduction mean in posthuman terms? Perhaps before we examine its posthuman valences, it would be worth dwelling for a moment on its other possible meanings. In heterosexual reproduction, two organisms pass on their genetic material to their offspring. Sexual reproduction allows an organism to reproduce itself as a material system. Reproduction is imaginatively and emotionally-charged – to be deprived of reproduction is to be deprived of a possible future. Reproduction engenders a set of social relationships. Reproduction is culturally-negotiated by a set of sexual codes. Technology allows us greater options of choosing when and how we reproduce, but this ability doesn’t come without the possibility for accidents and malfunctions. Birth control, for instance, has returned as a politically controversial issue in the United States because of the sexual possibilities it affords women, because of the alternative social, familial, interpersonal, and sexual arrangements and relationships that it makes possible. As organisms, we reproduce the conditions of our own reproducibility. Reproduction requires material consumption, expenditure of energy; reproduction is an embodied activity. Reproduction creates a possible future, opens up a particular horizon.

The cyborg can be imagined as a challenge to heterosexual reproduction. It is prophylaxis. Technological barriers impede or change the functioning of the reproductive system. Fukuyama, for example, imagines a “postsexual” phase for posthumans brought about by possible radical life extension technologies. The idea of nature and natural sex enters here. A very particular kind of sex, heteronormative reproductive sex, is enshrined as the norm. Other lived sexual experiences and relations are defined as deviant or perverse. In other words, the cyborg is queer. Is the posthuman queer? As an open field, as an imagined entity still very much being defined, the posthuman could be queer. Like Haraway’s cyborg, the posthuman is part nightmare, part promise. The posthuman is utopic and dystopic, the posthuman is in some sense an imaginative construct that reveals to us, like a monster, what we are (not),  what we desire to become (or avoid becoming).