Science Fiction Studies

In Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media, a group of largely Canada-based scholars (seven of thirteen contributors), many of whom are graduate students or postdoctoral researchers (seven of thirteen again), rehearse familiar theses about posthumanist theory. While the chapters of this book may not suggest anything new about theories of posthumanism, the investigations of various films (and media) show that its tenets continue to resonate with filmmakers, viewers, and academics. Literature and film professors Allison Mackey and Elif Sendur summarize their contribution in a way that reflects many of the arguments in the collection: "each film is … telling another story, one that encourages viewers to look beyond the human … to see the relational ontologies and multispecies connections that … sustain human life, a vision that challenges anthropocentric humanity's 'eco-phobic' and 'pathological inability to see connections'" (267; quoting Simon Estok, "Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness").

In this collection almost every chapter turns to Rosi Braidotti's numerous publications, most contributors bring Karan Barad's work to the discussion, and scholars engage with Donna Haraway's and Stacey Alaimo's research. Contributors employ these theorists to analyze a growing canon of contemporary art house sf while, unfortunately, neglecting popular cinema. Contributors dedicate three chapters to the films in the book's subtitle (the subtitle refers to a conference panel cancelled due to COVID-19), but it is a touch awkward to highlight those films with such specificity when most of the chapters turn attention elsewhere. The inclusion of "media" in the volume's title refers to video games assessed in two chapters. These two contributions make sense for a study of posthumanism yet feel out of place for a volume otherwise devoted to the study of sf cinema. Nevertheless, the collection is an engaging work of theory and film and media analysis with some riveting chapters and the occasional ill-conceived one.

In the introduction, editors Julia A. Empey and Russell J.A. Kilbourn briefly outline the stakes of feminist posthumanism and sf. The theory sets its sights on challenging Enlightenment thinking about Man as the purported universal subject so as to develop alternative ways of philosophizing about [End Page 493] humans and non-humans. Regarding the sf genre, Empey and Kilbourn remind readers that generations of women have produced literary sf, and this history influences contemporary sf cinema, even those films produced by men (which comprise most of the films and other media in the volume). Critical posthumanist theory and the film genre, then, are a natural pairing.

The editors state that the chapters are "grounded in formal analysis, whether in terms of film style or game mechanics, and in the active application of cutting-edge critical theories" (7). To some degree, this is accurate, although a few chapters are much more interested in story, plot, and character at the expense of form. The second half of the introduction is a very lengthy summary of the chapters, a nice resource for scholars who want to get a quick sense of the arguments and examples in the book. Empey and Kilbourn conclude by noting that "all our contributions confront … the fundamental status of 'woman' in a contemporary culture struggling to cast off the legacy of the sexist and misogynist bases of Western Enlightenment modernity and its colonial extensions in time and space" (8).

Sarah Stulz articulates this conclusion in her standout chapter on Her (Spike Jonze, 2013). Structured as thirteen conceptually linked theses, Stulz parses the AI's (Scarlett Johansson) performance of gender and sexuality. The film offers several revelations about the construction of gender binaries, the invisibility of women's labor, and the operation of fantasy in sexual encounters. Zorianna Zurba's chapter on Her follows. There, Zurba examines some of the same topics and scenes as Stulz with an eye toward love and the (im)possibility of human-AI relationships. The mistaking of the AI's polyamory for "polygamy" is a small...