Disability and the Posthuman:

Bodies, Technology,
and Cultural Futures
 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S :
H E A LT H , D I S A B I L I T Y,
C U LT U R E A N D S O C I E T Y

Series Editor
Stuart Murray, University of Leeds

This series provides a ground-breaking and innovative selection of titles that

showcase the newest interdisciplinary research on the cultural ­representations
of health and disability in the contemporary social world. Bringing together
both subjects and working methods from literary studies, film and cultural
studies, medicine and sociology, ‘Representations’ is scholarly and accessible,
addressed to researchers across a number of academic disciplines, and prac-
titioners and members of the public with interests in issues of public health.
The key term in the series will be representations. Public interest in ques-
tions of health and disability has never been stronger, and as a consequence
cultural forms across a range of media currently produce a never-ending
stream of narratives and images that both reflect this interest and generate
its forms. The crucial value of the series is that it brings the skilled study
of cultural narratives and images to bear on such contemporary medical
concerns. It offers and responds to new research paradigms that advance
understanding at a scholarly level of the interaction between medicine, culture
and society; it also has a strong commitment to public concerns surrounding
such issues, and maintains a tone and point of address that seek to engage a
general audience.

Other books in the series

Disability Studies and Spanish Culture: Films, Novels,
the Comic and the Public Exhibition
Benjamin Fraser
Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature:
Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability
and Illness in Victorian Fiction
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect
in Contemporary Fiction
Ria Cheyne
 Disability and
the Posthuman
Bodies, Technology,
and Cultural Futures

Stuart Murray
Disability and the Posthuman

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2020 by
Liverpool University Press
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The right of Stuart Murray to be identified as the author of this book

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

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 “What might it mean to welcome the disability
to come? What might it mean to shape worlds capable
of welcoming the disability to come?”
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs
of Queerness and Disability

“There is a little of everything, apparently,

in nature, and freaks are common”.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“The prostheticized body is the rule,

not the exception”.
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis:
Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse
 Contents
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Preface: In Search of the Emerald City: Lessons from the

Tin Woodman 1

Introduction: Disabling the Human 9

Chapter 1: (Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 35

Chapter 2: Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 73

Chapter 3: Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body

Politics in Filmic Representations of the ‘War on Terror’ 131

Chapter 4: Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work:

Speed, Sleep and Embodiment 181

Conclusion: On Not Wanting to End 227

Bibliography 239
Index 253
For Nate and Orla
 Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements

T his book took a long time to come together and meandered

through many landscapes, both of work and home. I owe much
to the patience and care of everyone at Liverpool University Press,
particularly Alison Welsby and Jenny Howard, who guided me through
the process of publication with real consideration and kindness.
The School of English and Faculty of Arts, Humanities and
Cultures at the University of Leeds were generous in providing me
with study leave to focus on writing and I am grateful to John Whale
and Fiona Becket in particular for all their support as I battled to
make a book possible amid the stormy chaos of modern university
life. Projects that led, directly or indirectly, to the development of
my ideas were funded by the University of Leeds, British Academy,
Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering and the Wellcome
Trust, and I thank all these organisations for their support. I am
particularly grateful to the team involved with the Wellcome
‘Augmenting the Body’ project – Amelia Defalco, Luna Dolezal,
Raymond Holt, Sophie Jones, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy
– all of whom proved just how vital intellectual collaboration is in
shaping thought.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my son Yann Steunou-Murray who,
when he realised the subject of the book I was working on, developed
a habit of wandering into my study to suggest texts or topics I might
consider as part of the project. It was Yann who drew my attention to
the difference between prose and film versions of the Tin Woodman,
drew up instructional A4 documents about the history of manga
or science fiction, and helped me negotiate the labyrinth that is the
Marvel universe.
x Disability and the Posthuman

Many thanks to Becky Chambers, who kindly sent me an advance

copy of the third novel in her Wayfarer series so I could incorporate
it into my work on her writing. For comments and suggestions about
texts, responses to speculative ideas, snatched corridor conversa-
tions, and the many other small things that prove vital in the writing
of books, I want to thank Neil Badmington, Kirsty Bennett, David
Bolt, Ria Cheyne, David Farrier, Dan Goodley, Katrina Longhurst,
Donna McCormack, John McLeod, Andy Mudd, Graham Pullin,
Margrit Shildrick, Susan Merrill Squier and Liam Wilby. Both Jane
Macnaughton and Angela Woods continue to inspire me with their
irresistible energy and commitment to thinking about health and the
body. My iMac tells me that I listened to Beth Orton’s 2002 album
Daybreaker 613 times while writing, so she clearly bears some respon-
sibility for the book’s content.
Like everyone who works in Critical Disability Studies, I have been
shaped by the substantial scholarship that has come before, and in
relation to this study I want to acknowledge the work of Michael
Davidson, Alison Kafer, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell, Tobin Siebers
and Sharon Snyder in particular. Their writing often kickstarted ideas
when my own thinking lay fallow.
Clare Barker, Amelia Defalco and Sophie Jones read draft sections
of chapters and I am grateful for all their suggestions, as well as their
support over many years, which made the book better in each instance.
I am also indebted to the anonymous readers who reviewed the
manuscript. My ideas were developed through talks given in Dublin,
Durham, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Manchester, Newcastle,
Ottawa, Oxford, St. Catherines, Stockholm, Swansea, Taipei and York
and I want to thank the organisers and audiences at these events.
I would like to thank Clare Brown, Laurence Brown, Jamie Greaves
and Fran Kilmurray for their many acts of friendship and especially for
not being academics. Special thanks to Marion and Tim McLoughlin,
and love to my sister Alison Murray. Thanks and love to Meg, Yann,
Lucas, Nate and Orla are, as always, ongoing and everlasting.

A previous draft of part of Chapter 3 was published as ‘Disability and

memory in posthuman(ist) narrative: reading prosthesis and amnesia
in Hollywood’s re-membering of the “war on terror”’, Parallax 23(4)
(2017): 439–452. Similarly, an early version of a section of Chapter
4 was published as ‘Reading disability in a time of posthuman work:
speed and embodiment in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed and Michael
Faber’s Under the Skin’, Disability Studies Quarterly 34(4) (2017). Thanks
to both journals for the right to reproduce material.
 Preface:
In Search of the Emerald City:
Lessons from the Tin Woodman
Preface

N ear the beginning of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

(1900), Dorothy and the Scarecrow, en route to the Emerald City,
come across the Tin Woodman, a rusting metallic figure, forgotten
and left in a wood. When oiled and liberated from his paralysis,
the Woodman explains in an extended anecdote to his rescuers the
circumstances behind his transformation from human forest labourer
to a figure constructed entirely from tin:

There was one of the Munchkin girls who was so beautiful that I soon
grew to love her with all my heart. She, on her part, promised to marry
me as soon as I could earn enough money to build a better house for
her; so I set to work harder than ever. But the girl lived with an old
woman who did not want her to marry anyone, for she was so lazy
that she wished the girl to remain with her and do the cooking and
the housework. So the old woman went to the Wicked Witch of the
East, and promised her two sheep and a cow if she would prevent the
marriage. Thereupon the Wicked Witch enchanted my axe, and when I
was chopping away at my best one day, for I was anxious to get the new
house and my wife as soon as possible, the axe slipped all at once and
cut off my left leg.1

Aware of the crisis this posed him, “for I knew a one-legged man
could not do very well as a woodchopper”, the Woodman visits a
tinsmith who manufactures a prosthetic limb to replace the missing
leg. Infuriated by this, the Witch of the East continues to enchant the
Woodman’s axe and, one by one, he chops off his other leg, both arms
and finally his head. Each time, however, the tinsmith makes him a
2 Disability and the Posthuman

more than adequate metal substitute and the relationship with the
Munchkin girl remains unthreatened. The Woodman continues his
story:

I thought I had beaten the Wicked Witch then, and I worked harder
than ever; but I little knew how cruel my enemy could be. She thought
of a new way to kill my love for the beautiful Munchkin maiden, and
made my axe slip again, so that it cut right through my body, splitting
me into two halves. Once more the tinsmith came to my help and made
me a body of tin, fastening my tin arms and legs and head to it, by
means of joints, so that I could move around as well as ever. But, alas!
I now had no heart, so that I lost all my love for the Munchkin girl, and
did not care whether I married her or not.2

Finally, caught one day in a sudden rainstorm when out walking,

the Woodman’s joints rust and he is trapped until Dorothy and the
Scarecrow find him. “It was a terrible thing to undergo”, he observes,
“but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest
loss I had known was the loss of my heart. When I was in love I was
the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart”.3
The Woodman’s protracted transfiguration then, however striking,
is in fact a subplot to the main event outlined here, namely his failed
romance with the woodland Munchkin girl and the dramatic machi-
nations of the old woman and Witch of the East, intent on ruining
their relationship. After all the change he undergoes, the Woodman
is finally rendered unrecognisably disabled, and is no longer his
former self, not because of his appearance but because ultimately
the most central aspect of that self was his capacity to express and
receive romantic love. As Dorothy and the Scarecrow find him, the
Tin Woodman is devoid of humanity, his metal limbs only the most
obvious outward manifestation of an absence in which the real missing
element is reciprocated emotion. The complexity of such a state, that
the Woodman is all too obviously artificial but that as readers we
realise that his major deficiency is clearly human, means he can be seen
within the terms of the automaton as outlined by Minsoo Kang in his
history of that figure. For Kang, the automaton as read through the
tradition of the European imagination, is both an object and an idea,
a “conceptual chameleon” that promotes complex responses because
“they all give the appearance of life […] but are, to a substantial
degree, made of matter that we normally think of as inert or dead”.4
The Tin Woodman’s metal body is manifestly inert, particularly when
he is seized with rust, but the novel makes clear that his feelings and
Preface 3

desires make him recognisably human and ‘life-like’. Nothing, it is

made clear, can denote a lack of humanity more than not having a
heart.
Baum’s narrative voice is neutral and appears curiously distant and
unconnected to his characters across the book as a whole, but this is
deceptive. The details of the events in Oz are often brutal, and none
more so than in the proliferation of body parts and the disabilities
that ensue, which accompany this particular story of dismemberment.
But the anecdote the Woodman recounts, like the accompanying
stories of the novel’s other central characters, is of course only the
prelude to Baum’s primary concern: the unwinding of the road to
return and restoration in which the Woodman will realise that he has
possessed all along that which he believed he lacked. The loss of the
body, it emerges, does not mean the absence of those emotional char-
acteristics with which physicality is associated, and the Woodman
proves he has a full complement of humanity through his interaction
with Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion as their journey
progresses.
I focus on the Tin Woodman’s narrative because, for all that it is
over a hundred years old, I take it ultimately to be a contemporary
story. It is representative of a wide cultural belief, one especially preva-
lent through the twentieth century and into our own, that to be human
is to have precisely the kind of embodied wholeness and the capacity
to reflect on this cognitively that is manifested in Baum’s Woodman;
and that, in turn, such wholeness acts as a portal for other charac-
teristics – rationality, autonomy, centred and coherent selfhood – that
are equally understood to be central to the articulation of a human
state of being. These values are not only philosophical; they are also
aesthetic: the Tin Woodman’s alignment between the automaton and
humanism is notably different from the ways in which the figure was
represented for much of the nineteenth century where, in stories such
as E.T.A. Hoffman’s ‘The Sandman’ (1816) or Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The
Man That Was Used Up’ (1839), there is a clear sense of terror and
the macabre in the revelation (both stories work to reveal characters
as automatons) that a human figure is not as he or she seems. But
this kind of dread is missing in Baum’s story, where the subtext about
‘having a heart’ speaks more to an idea of integrated wholeness (and
the problems attaining it) than a notion of horror that the human
body might, in fact, be mechanical. It was not just developments in
technology that marked the beginning of the twentieth century as a
new era in which automatons were reconfigured in cultural narra-
tives; changes in the perception of the body, and the emotions that
4 Disability and the Posthuman

it contained, equally altered the manner in which the human/non-

human boundary was understood and represented.
The Tin Woodman figuratively reassembles himself, both physi-
cally and emotionally, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz progresses: if to
be dispersed is to be lost, frozen (as he is when he is found) in time
and place and unable to contribute to human life, then to be whole is
to have a heart (and vice versa); it is to be mobile and participatory,
to be on the yellow brick road travelling to the Emerald City and an
understanding of the individual and social self. The Emerald City itself
is, of course, not what it seems. The Wizard, a supposedly benign
dictator, provides an illusion of control given his use of smoke and
mirrors to conjure up expressions of power. Even this status as fake,
however, serves what is ultimately a humanist purpose, throwing the
responsibility of correction back on to the voyagers themselves. The
subsequent realisation that each contains the necessary characteris-
tics ‘within’ underscores human potential read in terms of wholeness.
Though the Wizard, as he admits, is “not much of a magician”, the
question of an adequate magic is not a problem, for the real ‘wonderful’
is safely inside each of us, awaiting discovery.5
The Tin Woodman’s story is a powerful narrative of journey, over-
coming and achievement, and has had a considerable afterlife. It
manifests itself as a recognisable tale in different guises in contem-
porary times: multiple Oz novels – some sanctioned by the writer’s
estate, others less orthodox – have been written following Baum’s
death in 1919; while in film the overall Oz narrative is rehearsed most
famously in the 1939 MGM version directed by Victor Fleming, but
also through the prism of race in The Wiz (1978) and Walter Murch’s
darker fantasy, Disney-produced, Return to Oz (1985).6 Specific refer-
ences to the Woodman’s narrative, however, are found in texts as
diverse as Brandon McCormick’s short 2010 sentimental melodrama,
Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man, Matthew Perkins’ 2013 low-budget,
disability-led comedy feature The Little Tin Man, and Chris Wedge’s and
Carlos Saldanha’s 2005 animated feature Robots, where the character
makes a witty cameo at the end of a Baum-inspired narrative of resto-
ration and triumph. In addition, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008), one
of the foundational texts in the explosion of comic-derived superhero
films that has marked twenty-first-century Hollywood production and
Marvel Studio’s first self-produced feature, makes a clear reference to
Baum’s narrative in the artificial heart and technologically enhanced
exoskeleton used by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr). In these texts and
others, the Tin Woodman signifies his presence, over 100 years since
his first appearance.7 Through this time, he carries the complex ideas
Preface 5

of embodiment identified above, as well as the social consequences of

this. The lessons of heart and home have powerful resonances and it
appears clear that the Emerald City is still a destination many wish to
reach.8
In what follows, however, I want to ask explicitly how the logic and
values of Baum’s story might still pertain in a specifically contempo-
rary digital age, one in which the physical and the cognitive are not
only no longer bound by the ideas of the body that predominated when
Baum wrote and during the long period that followed as his story
achieved worldwide recognition, but are subject to ever more sophisti-
cated technological developments that advance year upon year. For all
that the character features and overcoming narratives that dominate
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are still highly visible for example, might
we be in a time when our conception of humanity means we need
to respond to new stories of what ‘wholeness’ might mean? Or new
ways in which the structures of such a concept might be critiqued?
In particular, I want to ask how considerations of disability alter the
parameters of such a discussion. Even though the Tin Woodman’s
story is obviously a disability narrative, for example, with all those
amputations and prosthetic limbs, my sense is that reactions to it
would not necessarily immediately see it such: the possibility of other
non-disability readings appear to crowd in before the basic fact of the
Woodman’s embodiment is registered, and we might ask why that is
the case. The answer is, of course, that the metaphors grafted onto
disability are still so persuasive that it seems natural to look through a
story of dismemberment and ask what it is really about; the experience
of missing limbs or use of prostheses somehow seeming to naturally
signify some other, seemingly more vital, set of concerns. While it can
be argued that the fabular and non-realist nature of Baum’s text might
make such a metaphorical reading seem the most legitimate one, this
is only the case if ‘legitimate’ is seen in terms of notions of wholeness,
that fantasy privileges certain forms of coherence, or disability only
possesses status and textual power when represented through realist
modes. Thought of in such frames, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only
one in a long list of books in which disability is habitually ignored even
when it is central to the narrative events being described.9
This book asks where ideas of humanity, humanism, wholeness,
body and mind might reside when we bring them into dialogue with
disability and the various questions of technology, augmentation and
the future that cluster around the figure and idea of the posthuman.
Working within a frame in which disability is understood to mean
difference and not deficit, I want to see how that difference is mobilised
6 Disability and the Posthuman

in the contemporary moment, with its proliferation of technolog-

ical advancements and the mix of excitement and fear this produces.
Looking back to Robert McRuer’s epigraph for this book, I want to ask
what particular signs of disability might be “to come” when we inves-
tigate the stories that cluster around the body and its functions within
a technologised future. People with disabilities face (as fantasy images
if not literally) what must at times seem like a bewildering range of
potential assistive tools and skills, from smart prostheses, exoskeletons,
care companions and inclusive design to pharmacological interventions
and neurological enhancements. All these reconfigure the spaces in
which disabled people experience their lives, whether that is the space
of the physical body itself or the environments it inhabits. This new
sense of space challenges humanist notions of centred and individu-
alised wholeness, with their associated assertions of rationality and
control. In place of such configurations, in a technological and digital
age it is more appropriate, I suggest, to look towards the criss-crossing
networks, assemblages and collection of multiple possible intersected
locations and suggested selves that increasingly define the contem-
porary moment. It is of course true that networks of difference have
always defined social and cultural spaces, particularly in the modern
era. Whether through the mobility of capital or the movement of
peoples, trajectories of modernity have relied upon webs of affiliation,
constantly updated, to write their complex patterns of presence. But I
suspect that the assertion that these have accelerated almost beyond
recognition, especially in terms of technological change, in this century
would not encounter much resistance. And it is this late-modern
moment that I want to read as a time (and space) of posthumanism,
where the multiple materials of networked cultural processes constitute
such profound change that ideas of identity, selfhood and community
are being transformed at an extraordinary speed.
The subjects of this study are complex, combining overlapping
and intersecting fluidities in attempts to read subjects, aesthetics and
discursive formations. I hope, however, that my arguments will be clear.
They are that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive
potentials in the interactions between disability and posthumanism if
we read them as generating sustainable yet radical spaces. Such mobi-
lisations push back against those restrictive humanisms that articulate
conformist and restrictive powers of containment and aid the practice
of discrimination and prejudice. This radical position is more than a
rejection of humanism, however; it is also one of new connections and
methods of expression, progressive outlines of the place of people in
an ever-more technologised future. These connections include ideas
Preface 7

not only about the circuits that articulate bodies, affect, temporalities
and associated disability presences, but also the modes through which
these are imagined, represented, deployed, entangled and enacted
within definitional boundaries. It is important (if challenging) to
avoid the repetition of existing discourses surrounding the embodi-
ment and critical readings of disabled bodies, especially as situated in
related contexts of gender, race and sexuality; equally, it is imperative
not to pursue critical thought that proclaims some bodies superior to
others because of aggrandised claims about their capacity to be read.
The transgressive and resistant technologised disabled body that
emerges within the space of posthumanist disability can be an indi-
cator of substantive change (aesthetic, social, political) and not simply
the perpetrator of new hierarchies. If at times the future seems impos-
sibly complex, full of global dangers and beyond our capacity to control
or even name, the idea of bodies and their relationships with selfhood
and community illuminated by this intersectional space provides part
of a language of understanding that can challenge acquired modes of
thinking as it helps in navigating troubled times.
Both disability and posthumanism can be at times conservative
categories, limiting rather than amplifying, but each also contains
powerful reverberations – assertive, playful, unsettling, artistic,
technical, personal and communal – that are critical and creative.
While this book will analyse problematic moments of ignorance and
dismissal, it is written in a spirit of a possible (and desired) better
future, an associated commitment to change, and a firm belief in the
power of the imagination. It is, at heart (to borrow a metaphor), an
optimistic study, if not always a study of optimism. My sense of the
relationship between disability and the posthuman is not that one
somehow explains the other, nor that there is any kind of seamless fit
between the two. But putting the two in dialogue results in a produc-
tive meeting in which multiple learning spaces are created, and my
aim is to map and explore these. Such an exploration is itself maybe
a yellow brick road, full of dangers along the way no doubt and suspi-
cious of any simple idea of ‘home’, but reclaimable as a new type of
journey, tin limbs and all.

Notes

1 L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 38.

2 Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, pp. 38–39.
3 Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, p. 39.
8 Disability and the Posthuman

4 Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European
Imagination (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011),
pp. 5 and 19.
5 Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, p. 114.
6 In 2018, Italian researchers used data obtained from applying four centrality
indexes to the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) to establish a rankings list
for the greatest ‘milestone’ films in the history of cinema. The 1939 produc-
tion of The Wizard of Oz emerged at no. 1, as the most influential film in
the study (the authors noted that using the IMDb meant that the results
obtained prioritised features made in Europe and the US). See Livio Bioglio
and Ruggero G. Pensa, ‘Identification of key films and personalities in the
history of cinema from a Western perspective’, Applied Network Science 3,
no. 50 (2018): https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109–018–0105–0.
7 It is interesting to note in Martin Flanagan, Mike McKenny and Andy
Livingston’s 2016 study The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia
Universe that part of Marvel’s strategy as it developed its own studio plat-
form was to bring “old and new Hollywood logics together”. Certainly, Iron
Man’s relationship with the Tin Woodman can be read within such a term.
The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe (New York and
London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 79.
8 Nathan Filer observes in his 2019 study The Heartland: Finding and Losing
Schizophrenia, that schizophrenia, arguably the most widely known mental
illness condition, came “to be seen as the very heartland of psychiatry; the
condition that defines the discipline” as it developed across the twentieth
century. That a cognitive condition that is, for some, the very essence of
‘madness’ can be considered in terms of metaphors of the heart displays just
how powerful it is as a term that organises meaning. The Heartland: Finding
and Losing Schizophrenia (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), p. 9.
9 It is worth noting that disability exists across the Oz books more widely
than I have the space to discuss here. In Munchkinland, of course, a ‘non-
normative’ stature is in fact the norm, with accompanying society and built
environment developed as a consequence of the Munchkin’s physical stature,
while a number of the other texts feature examples of prosthesis and other
disability states. In the 1907 Ozma of Oz, there is a classic automaton figure,
Tik-Tok, who is mechanical and made out of copper and who needs to be
wound with a key. In The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), the titular character,
Scraps, is a ‘patchwork’ figure who, like the Woodman, is another example
of an ‘assembled’ character. Baum’s Patchwork Girl was reworked in Shelley
Jackson’s 1995 hypertext Patchwork Girl (discussed in the notes in the
following chapter). Some issues of disability in Baum’s first Oz novel are
explored in relation to their status as children’s literature in Joshua R. Eyler’s
article ‘Disability and prosthesis in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2013), pp. 319–334.
 Introduction:
Disabling the Human
Introduction

What to do with the body?

The Tin Woodman’s narratives across L. Frank Baum’s Oz books

mobilise a core set of humanist values, affirming ideas of heart and
home and the normativity of the coherent body and self. But I am
claiming that they also anticipate a possible posthuman future and,
in doing so, am aware that this is an assertion that requires justifi-
cation. I will discuss in detail the various debates surrounding the
interaction between posthumanism and disability in the next chapter
but want to use this introduction to outline the central elements
of the connection. Both posthumanism and humanism are notori-
ously slippery concepts that have different – at times contradictory
– meanings in different spaces; from philosophy to global flows of
capital, and from political economy to discourse of rights. In using
them I have to be alert to the lack of consensus that surrounds them
and not to collapse their multiplicities into simplistic single mean-
ings. Likewise, disability cannot be read as a uniform category. As
numerous scholars have shown, it also takes multiple (often reduc-
tive) forms, including medical categorisation, biocertification and
other government/state forms of definition, public perception and
the soft power of the media, and processes of individual identity and
claim. Ellen Samuels observes shrewdly: “The overwhelming fantasy
of modern disability identification is that disability is a knowable,
obvious and unchanging category. Such a fantasy permeates all levels
of discourse regarding disabled bodies and minds, even as it is repeat-
edly and routinely disproved by the actual realities of those bodies’
10 Disability and the Posthuman

and minds’ fluctuating abilities”.1 With this in mind, it is clearly

impossible to create any distinct or stable signage marked ‘disability’
that can speak to this spectrum of difference.
In part, it is with these instabilities in mind that I will go on to
argue for the value of the processes at work in critical disability and
posthumanist methodologies, forms of analysis where it is precisely a
critique of wholeness and coherence, a showcase of the unstable, that
animates approaches to their subjects. There is a necessity for flexible
vocabularies when speaking on topics that are in constant motion and
change, and for modes of enquiry that can match the complex inter-
sections inherent in the formations disability and posthumanism take.
Equally, bringing together two well-established fields that have their
own critical heritages and subject areas has its own set of challenges.
Discussions of embodiment and technology, for example (the topic
that will form the disability focus of this book), are in no way confined
to questions of disability and the body and, even then, they have
different emphases viewed through a disability or posthumanist lens.
Both optics might display that the body becomes necessarily rethought
as a consequence, but there are still substantial differences. As I will
show, however, the opportunities for a constructive dialogue between
critical disability and posthumanist approaches offer real potential for
better understanding the relations between emerging technologies
and disability lives, even if there is a wariness within each subject area
about the workings of the other. In this study I want to explore the
possibility that the tangled uncertainties surrounding technologies of
the body can yet produce tangible outcomes in the lives of those with
disabilities.
For Pramod Nayar, one of the central critical interventions of
critical posthumanist thinking is that it revises and challenges the
assumptions of humanism. He expands on this through a precise
outline of ‘human’ and ‘humanism’:

The human is traditionally taken to be a subject (one who is conscious

of his/her self) marked by rational thinking/intelligence, who is able to
plot his/her own course of action depending on his/her needs, desires
and wishes, and, as a result of his/her actions, produces history. The
human has traditionally been treated as male and universal. It is always
treated in the singular (the human) and as a set of features or condi-
tions: rationality, authority, authority, autonomy and agency.2

Humanism, he continues, “is the study of this individual subject and

the composite features we now recognise as the human”. He goes on:
Introduction 11

It treats the human subject as the centre of the world, which is influ-
enced by the human’s thoughts and actions. The freedom of the
individual to pursue his choice is treated as central to the human
subject. The human’s awareness of his self – to recognise himself for
what he is – or self-consciousness is also treated as a sign of being
human […] Morality, ethics, and responsibility in the modern era
(roughly post-1600) all emerge from this view of the autonomous, self-
conscious, coherent and self-determining human. The essence of the
human lies in the rational mind, or soul – which is entirely distinct
from the body. Change and improvement therefore are deemed to be
possible through this power of the rational mind.3

Nayar’s commentary is sweeping and objections could be raised to a

perceived lack of subtlety in his characterisation here. But he writes
deliberately to cover a wide critical field and overall his analysis
catches the extraordinary force humanism exerts. In his concise study
of humanism, Tony Davies agrees with Nayar’s assessment regarding
the ideological power and reach of this concept of the human: “All
Humanisms, until now, have been imperial”, he observes, adding:
“They speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class,
a sex, a race, a genome. Their embrace suffocates those whom it does
not ignore”.4 Humanism has framed the practice of change, both indi-
vidually and social, over much of past centuries; and its stress on the
idea of the coherent and autonomous individual of course has no place
for disability. As we have already seen with the Tin Woodman’s narra-
tive in the Preface and as Nayar makes clear, humanism’s championing
of the rational mind means that the body is frequently mistrusted and
viewed with disquiet. The body with disabilities then, is even more to
be feared within classic configurations of ‘the human’.
One of the aims of this book is to explore the multiple and various
ways that posthumanism challenges humanism’s logic of control and
capability. For Nayar, posthumanism is especially articulate in the ways
in which humans, non-human animals and machines “are now more
or less seamlessly articulated, mutually dependent and co-evolving”.
As a result, “critical posthumanism posits the non-unitary subject”
in place of the centred figure of the human that forms the basis of
humanism. The result, Nayar argues, is “a more inclusive and therefore
ethical understanding of life”.5 Much of what follows in this study will
look at these ideas of connections and co-dependencies, and the argu-
ments made for greater inclusivity and better ethics. Central to many
posthumanist methods is a rereading of the body seen in terms of the
non-unitary self, where the body is no longer sovereign but rather
12 Disability and the Posthuman

implicated in a host of relationships across boundaries. It is precisely

here that humanism’s profound fear of the body with disabilities
turns into the potential appreciation of the varieties of embodiment
that disability presents, both in terms of the human body itself and
its interactions with technology. Seeing bodies within networks and
connections, and operating across limits, opens up possibilities of
understanding subjectivities of all kinds in a space beyond humanism,
but allows for an especially profitable focus on those bodies that speak
of and to disabilities and their difference.
It is worth stating straight away that while my reading of post-
humanism identifies it as inhabiting multiple forms across varied
landscapes, I believe that it contains at its core an idea of ‘beyond’ and
‘adaptation’ that characterises its extension of, and challenges to, the
boundaries of a humanist conception of the subject. Hence the subtitle
of this book is (I hope) precise in reading the present in terms of an
orientation towards the future, not least because the future is a vital
space for disability rights movements as they continue the struggle for
services, equality and the affirmation of lives lived with disabilities.
In my thinking, then, ‘the posthuman’, as varied as it is, is predomi-
nantly what it sounds like; it is what might come next, after, beyond or
outside the human, a set of positions that, in suggesting a trajectory,
has obvious appeal for anyone interested in story and narrative, for all
that these are not straightforward. I am sympathetic to the idea that
posthumanism can be mobilised primarily as a form of critique, as one
of a number of critical anti-humanisms that seek to de-centre various
notions of wholeness. Indeed, my own work functions in this way to
a degree, reading the posthuman and its interaction with disability
through texts ranged across differing time periods for example (though
my focus is very much on the contemporary). There is a considerable
body of work that reads posthumanist figures and contexts through
cultural history and I am aware that, in starting with a concentration
on Baum’s story, I am myself reaching back in time.6 But as I argued
in the Preface, I am drawn to the phenomenon as a forward-facing set
of moments and practices, and my analysis of the Tin Woodman is not
simply the use of posthumanism as a critical tool to unpack an older
text; it is rather a process that tries to ask how that text looks forward
to outline ideas that are of the present, ultimately to ask how we think
now about bodies, hearts, technology, wholeness and disabled differ-
ence. As we shall see, while the claims of posthumanism often appear
abstract and vast, assessing the possibilities of grounded future worlds
in which they might come to pass is not just exciting, but essential
when dynamics of disability are to be considered.
Introduction 13

That this is not a simple process goes without saying. Viewing repre-
sentations of technologised bodies in such a way requires strategies of
reading and interpretation that can deal with the slippery complexi-
ties of what is entailed. I will discuss, for example, how it is an error
to make simplistic assumptions about what constitutes ‘technology’
and that its relationship with disability embodiment is necessarily
progressive, or that it presents an easy fit with definitions of post-
humanism itself.7 But I hope to show that disability studies scholars
can work with ideas central to posthumanism, such as replacement
and reformatting, adaptation, augmentation and extension, along
with the reconfiguration of bodies and their stories that these entail.
In his story, the Woodman is certainly adapted, and in ways that are
not of his choosing. His physical self is changed beyond recognition,
a transformation in keeping with those posthumanist ideas in which
the body is superseded by some alternative form, usually one derived
from technology. But if the question that then occupies much post-
humanist scholarship is whether such a transformation necessarily
entails a reconfiguration of all aspects of humanity – including wider
questions of ontology, ethics, history and society – Baum’s books make
it clear that this is not the case with his character. The Woodman’s
humanity, like those of others in Oz, is in fact brought more into focus
by the way in which he is changed; his humanism and capacity to act
as a self-knowing, rational self are enhanced even as his body loses
the skin, bone and tissue that constituted his previous physical self.
Here, a technologised transfiguration seemingly fails to speak of any
seminal change.
What happens, however, when we refuse the invitation to read the
Tin Woodman’s story in terms of a redressed absence and, rather than
see him in the classic tradition of the automaton or as an (ultimately)
emblematic figure of successfully embodied humanness, decide to
retain the posthuman possibilities and read him as a cyborg or biohy-
brid, a meeting of material body and technological adaptation?8 What
if we feel that the Woodman is enhanced, rather than diminished, by
the transformation he undergoes? To choose one specific factor: how
should we read the (presumably positive) fact that he appears to feel no
pain at any point in his dismemberment, despite the argument that the
experience of pain is central to the human sense of a subjective self?9
And how might we then expand upon the processes he undergoes, in
order to work up ideas of disabled posthumanist subjectivities that
articulate new ideas of biopolitics, health, presence or justice? As seen
in his own testimony, there is plenty of textual evidence to suggest that
the Woodman does not consider his injuries to be traumatic; indeed,
14 Disability and the Posthuman

there is a pragmatism and ordinariness to the way in which he comes

to adapt to his new form. I will stress ideas of the ordinary and the
everyday in what follows, as I see them as vital and positive catego-
ries for the expression of disability experiences; and though they might
appear somewhat mundane when juxtaposed with the excitement that
surrounds the posthuman, where discussions of A.I., genetic enhance-
ment and aliens often seem to attract attention for example, I will seek
to show how a conception of everyday disability might in fact provide
the possibility of grounding posthumanist arguments, turning abstract
potential into ordinary, daily activity. This book will return to issues
of bodies (and pain), of transformation and memory, of economies
(textual and otherwise) and environments, and of the self as I follow
the questions the Woodman’s story necessarily poses.
The valorising of the Tin Woodman’s metal body is continued in his
characterisation through the books Baum wrote about Oz following his
first, spectacular, bestseller. Aware of the market his story had created,
Baum wrote 16 more Oz books, both novels and short stories, before
his death in 1919, a powerful franchise that was hugely successful
in keeping his imagined land in the public eye.10 The core characters
from the first Oz novel each became the subject of their own tale,
while numerous others were invented. The Tin Woodman of Oz was one
of the last of the series, published in 1918 just before Baum’s death. Its
opening sees the Tin Woodman as now an emperor – “the Emperor
of the Winkies” – who, as the story’s first line informs us, “sat on his
glittering tin throne in the handsome tin hall of his splendid tin castle
in the Winkie Country of the Land of Oz”. The Woodman’s position
and standing, it is made clear, are denoted by the sheer abundance of
tin that fills every space in the castle: the corridors are “all lined with
ornamental tin” while there are “stately tin archways” and “tin rooms
all set with tin furniture”; food appears on a “tin tray”, which is “set
upon a tin table” with a “tin chair” next to it; the castle’s gardens have
“tin fountains and beds of curious tin flowers”; and, in an extension
of the process by which the natural is usurped by the manufactured,
“tin birds perched upon the branches of tin trees and sang songs that
sounded like the notes of tin whistles”.11 Tin is a signifier of power
and craftmanship, but its proliferation here should also be seen as a
legitimating of the Woodman’s posthumanist subjectivity. Not only
are his prostheses not to be hidden or disowned, the material from
which they are made is celebrated throughout the land over which he
rules. Artificial here is the new (and beautiful) real.
The scene setting at the start of the novel stresses the value of
metal-as-replacement, the technologised non-human standing in for
Introduction 15

The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)

a differing conception of ‘the whole’, and I will develop a number of

these ideas about design, engineering and embodiment in the second
chapter of this study. But it is in the narrative that follows the opening
of The Tin Woodman of Oz that we gain the fullest sense of the radical
way in which Baum’s text can be read to present a contested version of
embodiment. The story overall takes the form of a recognisable quest,
with the Woodman embarking on a journey to find the Munchkin girl
(now given a name: Nimmie Amee), but it is the discussion of love and
the specifics of the Woodman’s replacement heart that produce the
major changes to the novel’s transformation narrative. In The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, the Woodman notes that his main reason to journey to
Oz was to gain a heart and then “go back to the Munchkin maiden
and marry her”;12 in the later novel we learn that that even though
the meeting with the Wizard in the Emerald City was successful, the
Woodman’s problem was not alleviated: “the Wizard’s stock of hearts
16 Disability and the Posthuman

was low, and he gave me a Kind Heart instead of a Loving Heart, so

that I could not love Nimmie Amee any more than I did when I was
heartless”.13 Though told that he had all along the qualities of heart
he thought the lacked, it transpires the Woodman received the wrong
type of heart, a mistake of embodiment and not emotion.
In the second novel, the loveless Woodman frequently articulates
a clear preference for the prosthetic self over its human equivalent;
“we are”, the Woodman notes of the Scarecrow and himself, “some-
what superior to people made in the common way”.14 Indeed, on a very
basic level this is conveyed by the Woodman’s constant reference to
his former corporeal body as mere “meat”, which came with all sorts
of complications that no longer exist now he is in tin form. There are
no difficulties concerning what to wear now he is made of metal, for
example, or keeping warm, and when travelling he no longer has to
stop and rest at night, or eat, as he is never hungry.15 In Oz, biomedical
complexities and all the notions of a fragile or vulnerable humanity
that stem from them appear easy enough to shrug off, and the differ-
ence disability brings poses no barriers to individual advancement
or fulfilment (and, indeed, might not even be consider disabling as
such). And yet it would be wrong to say that overall this constitutes
an argument within the novel for any kind of posthumanist sensibility
in which human attributes are superseded. The Woodman’s rejec-
tion of his body as ‘meat’, for example, is evidence of a heritage of
Cartesian thought in which, as Sherryl Vint terms it in her study of
science and speculative fiction, “one is the mind, effortlessly moving
beyond the limitations of the human body”.16 In terms of reading the
Cartesian mind/body division in the Tin Woodman, it is clear that,
for all that men might be made of tin (or indeed straw), his trajectory
across the novels asserts that, ultimately, core human values predomi-
nate. Whether it is love, friendship, compassion, fidelity, rationality or
truth, humanist concerns drive his actions.

Preferring messiness

For this study, however, the lesson that emerges from a reading of the
Tin Woodman is not the clarity of his journey and purpose but rather
an apprehension of the tensions that clearly exist between his artificial
embodiment and the humanism his character espouses and attains.
The preference for the tin prostheses and the ease with which they are
adapted in his new world sit uneasily with the Tin Woodman’s rejec-
tion of the corporeality of his biological body, and any reading of either
Introduction 17

of these possible embodiments never reduces the power that ‘heart’ or

‘home’ play in Oz; it is always clear which values are the most impor-
tant. In the same way that Dorothy’s clearly gendered narrative has
to be understood with reference both to her empowerment as an indi-
vidual determined to secure her own future and in relation to her as a
young girl straining to put back together the wholesome, and norma-
tive, family unit, the Woodman’s prosthetic self is the (constructed)
body through which he strives to locate a recognisable humanist world
in which he might live. What emerges, then, is a story in which the
non-human proliferates in any number of guises that are central to
plot development, narrative coherence and overall entertainment,
but where ultimately a working idea of heteronormative, rationalist
and ableist humanity predominates. In the chapters that follow, this
study will highlight this story structure time and again, whether in
conversations surrounding the design and engineering of prostheses,
issues of embodiment in Hollywood films about the war on terror, or
arguments concerning technology and its relationship with work and
employment. The Emerald City may be one version of what might lie
somewhere over the rainbow (to borrow from the 1939 film version of
Oz) when narratives seek the ‘beyond’ of the human ideal but, as far
as disability is concerned, such locations often turn out to be green
zones of ableism, fortified spaces of exclusion.
In the remainder of this book, these kinds of messy and contradic-
tory representations will be found to be common. It appears difficult
not to want to ‘have a heart’ in a manner that stresses an associa-
tion between emotions and ideas of a core humanity, while conversely
technological innovation that emphasises artificiality possesses the
capacity to seduce us all. As far as disability is concerned, ‘heart’
can suggest not only biological function, but also compassion and
patronising sentiment, while technology can be life-saving, that
which is denied to disability communities that lack the resources to
access it, or an unwelcome complexity in a life that does not require
it.17 As this study proceeds, it will be necessary to understand that
the narrative and ethical conundrums and confusions that mark out
these positions are a standard part of the fabric of representation
and deployment. Technology, for example, needs to be understood
as a set of discourses and manifestations that can be threatening to
or unwanted by disability communities. Long-standing debates over
the adoption of cochlear implants or prosthetic limbs reveal a deeply
rooted ambivalence surrounding the ‘value’ of technological interven-
tions in disability lives. For many, disabled bodies in and of themselves
are whole and sufficient: Tobin Siebers has written of the “potentially
18 Disability and the Posthuman

meaningful materiality” of such bodies, which can provide “a source of

embodied revelation”; while Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has devel-
oped a similar idea of ‘disability gain’, where the disability life lived as
is provides not only a full individual existence but also examples of
subjectivity that have resonance in the contemplation of all lived expe-
rience.18 The exploration of technology in the chapters that follow will
carry these positions forward and will not be swayed by posthumanist
assertions that it can only be considered progressive when thought of
as human enhancement. As we shall see, the technological augmen-
tation of the non-disabled body (in military contexts for example)
can function to stress fragility and vulnerability in ways that create
complex equations around embodied precariousness.
The challenge is, then, for an engaged criticism to attempt to tease
out the variants and consequences of disabled posthumanism/posthu-
manist disability. In outlining the ways in which I aim to do this, my
choice of texts and approaches requires explanation and justification,
as does the structuring of the book as a whole. As a core concern, I
have sought out textual moments where representations and deploy-
ments of disability and of the posthuman (as I understand those terms)
combine and inform one another. This is not as straightforward as it
might seem: are all depictions of non-human bodies or every character
who manifests physical or cognitive difference in science or specula-
tive fiction, for example, posthumanist or disabled? The answer to
this question must be ‘no’ and I am wary that sweeping claims about
how ‘different’ bodies might always constitute disability states run a
clear risk of making critical perspectives featureless. To take a set of
examples from science fiction: the work of Octavia Butler (especially
the Xenogensis trilogy [1987–1989]) has proved seminal to an emerging
literary/cultural/disability strand of posthumanist criticism because of
its representation of co-evolution, modified biology and species blur-
ring, among other topics; but while the multiple robots that feature in
the stories of Isaac Asimov also signal complex conceptions of bodies,
technological developments and non-human futures, these features are
not automatically evidence of disability presence.19 Likewise, the variety
of aliens that populate Butler’s writing often inscribe highly subtle ideas
of race through the ways in which they are removed from any sense of
biological origins and embodied norms; but in Iain M. Banks’ science
fiction, where the proliferation of species also indicates a literal sense
of a post/beyond human, alien status does not act as a metaphor for
this kind of posthumanist racial difference. Asimov and Banks’ writ-
ings do not constitute de facto disability or posthumanist narratives
simply because they contain representations of technology or bodies
Introduction 19

that appear to differ so much from those found in the present. Even
while the difference represented in their works might serve to highlight
for readers a contemporary plurality of states of embodiment, disability
is not somehow to be found inherently in such depictions. Ideas of inher-
ence are unproductive in reading either disability or posthumanism,
where it is rather formations of the multiple and contradictory that
better tell of the various states that the terms manifest, and aesthetic
and intellectual conceptions of the subject matter that drive what alter-
native bodies and cultures/societies mean. An advanced robot or alien
body can be the site of conservative ableism (this is in fact true of many
of Asimov’s stories) as much as it might, as in Butler, signify radical
posthumanist or disability possibilities.20
My selection, therefore, necessarily involves a teasing out of depictions
and deployments of bodies, textual contexts and subject matters that
suggest the value of such critical readings and exemplify the arguments
the book wishes to make. I have chosen to focus on contemporary texts,
mainly made in the last 15 years, because it is these narratives that are
most suggestive of the intersections of bodies and technologies in ways
that do portray a critical disability/poshumanist nexus. It is, however,
worth again stressing the messy and often contradictory nature of these
portrayals. So, for example, the films I analyse in Chapter 3 view the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through optics in which the uneasy rela-
tionship between technology and the body produces specific disability
stories about the present. The intersections, however, are also true of
speculative and science fiction, such as the work of Becky Chambers
that ends Chapter 2’s investigation of engineering, disability and gender.
In Chambers’ novels, imagined futures are spaces in which bodies and
technology come together in suggestive possibilities of agency and
community. There is no one way in which disability and posthumanist
stories take form and the material in this study operates as a series of
encounters with the fictions in all their variety.21

Disability present and futures

The topics on which the book focuses across its chapters – respectively,
contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics, design/engineering and
gender, the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the represen-
tation of war and conflict, and depictions of work, time and sleep
– illustrate the subjects in which I found the most sophisticated narra-
tives of disability in a posthumanist present. The introduction to each
chapter will outline why this is the case, but the focus deserve to be
20 Disability and the Posthuman

glossed here and I hope that it indicates a matrix in which a critical

disability story might be told. Work, prosthetics and cultural theory
are familiar spaces where disability and technology are discussed and
analysed, though I aim to do so in new ways, while engineering and
representations of war are possibly new areas to explore. For each topic
I sought out texts that have, for the most part, received little critical
attention. In part, this is because the books, films and events I analyse
have been published, screened or happened very recently; but it is also
because I want to build on and extend scholarship that already exists.
Critical disability studies has an exciting momentum and real sense
of engaged commitment to the issues of the present, and I want this
book to be part of that process.
Chapter 1 concentrates on recent theoretical writings on disability
and posthumanism because these provide a frame for the study as a
whole. It also explores the intellectual spaces in which the subjects take
shape and moves to a discussion of how these come together in select
science fiction films. Disability studies and critical posthumanism
have much in common: a critique of humanist norms; a recognition
of complex embodiment; and a commitment to intersectionality and
inclusive practice among them. But they also harbour suspicions of
one another. For the most part, disability studies has argued for a
need to ground theoretical reflection in an understanding of the lived
experience of people with disabilities, while much scholarship on
posthumanism is wary of the identity politics that might result from
such politics of location. Posthumanism outlines sophisticated interac-
tions between bodies and technology and the networks these produce,
but disability theorists frequently critique this as a set of abstract
processes that refuse to engage with the material consequences of
such connections. Certainly, as I will argue, scholarship on posthu-
manism has had little to say about disabled bodies until very recently.
The most important divergence between the two subject areas comes
in arguments surrounding transhumanism. Transhumanist asser-
tions that the application of future technology will allow for bodily
and neurological enhancement, and the ‘improvement’ of humans as
a result, are met with hostility by many with disabilities who see in
them suggestions that disability is a condition that might, and indeed
should, be eradicated in a science-led drive towards ‘perfection’. The
chapter will explore these and other debates, especially as they form
around cultural representations and the ways stories are told about
the bodies and technologies of the future.
In Chapter 2, I look at the ways technologised bodies are designed
and engineered, and especially how these processes are gendered.
Introduction 21

Cultural theory and critical disability studies have much to say about
how bodies are produced in narratives and through social discourses,
but rarely do so through any interaction with the engineering prac-
tice through which, in a literal way, such production take place. The
Tin Woodman’s body is, of course, engineered, but in what I claim
is a typical silence this work is an aspect of the Oz books that passes
almost totally without comment. The chapter argues that it is vital
to understand the logic and techniques of design and engineering
given that many disability experiences are produced through the
intersection between body and technology. Such an intersection is
also a prime space in which posthumanism explores the possibility of
cyborg subjectivities, the meeting of ‘man and machine’ that provides
contemporary culture’s excitement about technologies of the future. It
is here, we are often told, that ‘science fiction becomes reality’ and the
chapter analyses science and speculative fiction and film in which arti-
ficial, robotic and cyborg bodies are designed and produced, outlining
how this production needs to be understood through a disability lens.
There are, of course, no reasons why robots or cyborgs need a gender,
but as the ubiquity of the ‘man and machine’ comment above indi-
cates, it is frequently the case that these production processes are
saturated with claims about gender. The chapter will focus on texts
where women are engineered, but also where they undertake the engi-
neering. There is a long heritage of assumptions about ‘natural’ links
between engineering science and male authority, and I am interested
in the ways in which disability readings can align with feminist and
posthumanist critique to unpack such presumptions. The chapter also
asserts that a disability-inflected conception of female engineering
animates contemporary cultural production, highlighting the ideas of
subject and community this produces.
Chapter 3 focuses specifically on film and visualising depictions
of the connections between disability and posthumanism as they are
manifest in a set of contemporary narratives about war and conflict.
The development of military weaponry is a high-profile space in which
the interaction between human and non-human technology takes
place, particularly given the extraordinary amounts of funding avail-
able to state defence institutions. Body armour, vehicles, ordnance,
drones and other examples of military technology create multiple
instances of posthumanist assemblage, and I use a broad conception
of prosthetics to read these intersections, claiming that their articula-
tions of embodiment are disability stories even as they appear to be
narratives of hyperability, scientific strength and male authority. The
chapter juxtaposes a series of Hollywood features exploring the wars
22 Disability and the Posthuman

in Iraq and Afghanistan with films made in Iraq and Iran that narrate
the conflict from alternative points of view, ones that often lack the
kinds of sophisticated technology that so marks American story-
telling. In each, the power of the visual, of seeing disabled bodies, is
paramount. Theorising about technologised bodies and cyborg futures
is vital, but it is through visualising and encountering such bodies
that the future will be experienced. Seeing the weaponised soldier, as
well as the disabilities such technologies produce through the disas-
ters they create, creates a powerful identification that reaches across
many aspects of contemporary life, from media images of refugees to
stories of disabled veterans. The chapter will claim that fiction film,
again often full of the messy contradictions that define the meeting of
disability and posthumanism, offers opportunities to unpick the terms
of this power and the reach of its meanings.
Chapter 4 looks at the place of disability in what I term the time
of posthumanist work. Work and employment are categories in which
there are many public narratives about the ‘problems’ of people with
disabilities. In a contemporary late-capitalist world that privileges
ideas of work productivity and efficiency, those with disability are
frequently deemed ‘slow’, inefficient and often the recipients of bene-
fits understood to be by rights the property of those who can work. For
its part, posthumanism and work is less overtly a space of visible tech-
nology and more an excitement about the possibilities digital worlds
offer for the development of the hyper-efficient worker, and so the
chapter explores claims made about 24/7 work cultures, seen through
ideas of speed and time. I explore narratives of embodied work, in
which disability is a central driver of depictions of subjectivity; and of
sleep, a state deemed to be highly ‘unproductive’ and, as such, prob-
lematically wasteful. Sleep is not usually read through a disability lens,
but its resistance to narratives of the productive superhuman makes
it an ally of a disability-led critique of contemporary obsessions with
work and efficiency and the chapter argues for its place evaluating the
damage created when not being able to keep up is deemed a personal
failure and communal liability.

Grounded posthumanisms

Disability takes multiple forms, of course, and as we will see there

are many ways of articulating current trajectories of contemporary
posthumanism. While macro arguments will help us see questions
more clearly, case studies and specific readings will always revise
Introduction 23

exactly what we think we are asking. So, as both subjects continue

to develop in complexity the question to be asked is how it is best
possible to chart their various points of intersection. The language
of the posthuman is one full of discussions of prostheses and body
adaptation, of cognitive variation and neurological difference, and of
ethics, technologies and societies developed through recognition of
the consequences of such change. While for some it might appear
that this is a debate that is abstract and theoretical, we can observe
that in very real ways the interface between bodies, minds and tech-
nology central to posthumanist thinking already exist: it is manifest in
those with disabilities. To note this is not to make a simplistic move
that collapses the person with disability into some kind of cyborg
state, only recognising them as having disabilities if they interact
with technology; but whether through the engineered modification of
limbs, the use of wheelchairs and other assistive technologies, or an
understanding of neurodiversity in (for example) those on the autistic
spectrum, lives lived with disability provide everyday examples of the
philosophical speculation and biopolitical contexts with which much
writing on posthumanism engages. In an opinion piece written for
the New York Times in May 2018, disabled designer Liz Jackson noted
that people with disabilities are the “original lifehackers”. “Disabled
people have long been integral to design processes”, Jackson writes,
citing the development of kitchen utensils or new touchscreen tech-
nologies as examples; but the stories that might articulate this, she
stresses, “often go untold… our contributions are often overshad-
owed or misrepresented, favoring instead a story with a savior as its
protagonist”. ‘Lifehacking’ is, as Jackson recognises, a posthumanist
idea (and will be explored in Chapter 4 in relation to notions of work
and ‘efficiency’), but the claim for disability originality she makes is
provocative in orienting both a ‘disability first’ design perspective,
and the novelty central to the daily interactions between people with
disabilities and the worlds in which they live.22
This study seeks to articulate these complexities. I want to remain
cognisant of Jackson’s intervention and avoid an over-analytic (or
indulgent) immersion into the intersections between posthumanist
and disability theoretical standpoints, simply because there are so many
other important topics and questions to be covered. An initial draft
of this introduction devoted several pages, many of them articulating
much frustration, about the absence of disability from the founda-
tional texts that outline and analyse the posthuman. Suffice to say
that the history of disability in posthumanist thought is mixed to say
the least. To differing degrees, writings by many scholars working on
24 Disability and the Posthuman

the posthuman for the most part either ignore disability or contain one
or two sentences in which is it mentioned, to then be largely ignored
or, in some cases, dismissed. But, in the spirit of critical optimism
mentioned in the Preface, it is better to work with the emerging trajec-
tories of engagement that can be used, to focus on new thinking about
bodies, minds and selves that offer potential to bring disability and
posthumanism together, even if it is necessary to note these absences
as yet another example of the excision of disability experiences from
areas where they are, in fact, seminal.
The insularity of much scholarship on posthumanism, especially the
elevation of the critic/theorist as visionary (ironically, given its decen-
tring focus, theories of the posthuman often champion the singular
figure of the hyper-perceptive critic),23 sets up a tension between the
insights it can deliver and the more recognisable narratives of rights
and activism that typify many critical accounts of disability. Anyone
with experience of thinking about, or working with, questions of
disability cannot dismiss the notion of rights or agency, to give the
most powerful examples, as easily as a number of writers on posthu-
manism might imply we should.24 Can the very existence of ‘rights’,
and an associated idea of justice, be a smokescreen for the practice of
a coercive politics? Can it create hierarchies of ‘needs’ and promote
discrimination as a result? Is it open to abuse? The answer to all these
questions, as many have shown, is an obvious yes. ‘Rights’ is, for
example, obviously speciesist in its formation as a theory of ‘human
rights’, arguably accelerating environmental damage as a consequence
of promoting the human as the foundational, and most important,
class of life on the planet. On a smaller scale, ‘rights’ can create social
and economic divisions through their enactment of a politics of pref-
erence in which certain communities are privileged at the expense of
others. Yet knowing this does not disqualify an appropriately reflec-
tive and nuanced argument for the acknowledgement that those with
disabilities, like other groups subject to marginalisation, have been
contained within histories of prejudice that leave their present (and
future) as a space where rights and justice are meaningful and benefi-
cial (if too frequently absent) terms, where indeed they may well save
lives.
As an example, the terms of both the United Nations Convention
on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), adopted in 2006,
and the World Health Organisation’s 2011 World Report on Disability
frame disability within fundamental humanist terms of person-
hood and equal rights. The ‘Disability and Human Rights’ section
of the WHO report reiterates the need to respect the “difference and
Introduction 25

acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and

humanity” and to recognise the “inherent dignity [and] individual
autonomy” of people with disabilities, “including the freedom to make
one’s own choices” as well as the central “independence of persons”.25
Both documents are hugely important and substantive interven-
tions into the global nature of, and challenges to, disability and it
is a particularly obdurate and uncompromising critical/theoretical
approach that ignores the importance of the UN and WHO in fighting
the prejudices and harm experienced by peoples with disabilities glob-
ally on a daily basis, even knowing that the recommendations of each
are routinely ignored, including (though unsurprisingly) by those who
are signatories or contributors to them. With this in mind, it should
be noted that, within the fundamentally social, economic and political
logic articulated by both organisations, posthumanism is seen (if it is
considered at all) as a distracting and reductive critical position, one
that evades the real needs of real people as they live the experiences
of their disabled lives. For all that there is a pressing need to critique
the exclusionary terms of humanism and its problematic concepts of
bodies and selves, it would be a profound mistake to turn away from
those instances where humanism aligns with and advocates a desire
for disability justice; and that this frequently means a distrust of post-
humanist thinking is a fact that disability scholarship on technology
needs to bear in mind.
Martha Nussbaum explores these complex spaces in detail in her
2007 study Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership,
noting that “the problem of doing justice to people with physical and
mental impairments” is one of the major issues facing the practice
of social justice. People with disabilities, she continues, “have not
as yet been included, in existing societies, as citizens on a basis of
equality with other citizens”.26 As befitting a writer on law and ethics,
Nussbaum is interested in disability’s (non)place in the wider social
contract that outlines human interrelationships and she is erudite
on questions of dignity, flourishing, functioning and capability that
arise as a consequence of this. The fact that (as her book’s subtitle
indicates) she also discusses questions of species membership shows
that Nussbaum’s investigations are not static in their comprehension
of personhood, however, and her scholarship displays how justice and
rights can be worked through discussions of disability that still recog-
nise the flexibilities inherent in the lives of disabled people.
Conversely, given her stress on transgressing boundaries and dedi-
cation to critiquing notions of a unified self, Donna Haraway might
not immediately appear as a critic invested in the discourses of rights.
26 Disability and the Posthuman

Haraway’s commitment to deconstructing selfhood, autonomy and the

privileged position of grounded selfhood is thorough and extensive,
but her call for “a finally amodern, reinvented desire for justice”, which
is the product of making “situated knowledges possible in order to be
able to make consequential claims about the world”, aligns techniques
of reinvention with the pursuit of justice. It not only gestures towards
complex theories that might outline the present, but also suggests the
real, consequential, possibilities produced by the new posthumanist
complexities that make up our world. I will discuss Haraway’s work,
and responses to it, in detail in the next chapter, but it is worth noting
that writers as diverse as Nussbaum and Haraway (though it should
be noted that they have affinities in their stress on the need to further
the frontiers of women’s experiences) illustrate how experiences of the
body can be aligned with ‘situated knowledge’ in a time of flexible
identity positions.
Appreciating and inviting a post-identity theory of subjectivity, as
many critics writing on posthumanism do, does not necessarily mean
that concepts such as rights, autonomy and agency cannot equally
be conceived of in post-identity formations. As I hope the examples
in this book will show, ‘identity’, though often a highly problematic
appellation, is not such a wrecking ball of a subject positioning that
its removal requires the concomitant destruction and erasure of all
the multiple ideas with which it is associated. Indeed, as the following
chapter will explore, recent years have seen the emergence from
within disability studies of important critiques of identity-centred
cultural locations that nevertheless remain committed to disability
justice. I agree with Margrit Shildrick’s observation that there needs
to be a commitment to theoretical openness in our configuration of
disability, a range of what she terms “postconventional theories” that
refuse “to settle on a singular perspective”, but rather “continue a
process of intersectional exploration”. However, the assumption that,
as she puts it, “the meaning of disability […] cannot be contained in
a single constellation” should mean that theories resulting from such
logic should open, rather than close, doors to more sophisticated
formations.27
In fact, the revisions a consideration of disability is now making
to theories of posthumanism suggest a capacity to produce consider-
able change to the subject’s intellectual parameters. This book will
suggest productive processes of disability critique that extend from a
consideration of cultural texts, but the question goes beyond issues
of representation, narrative and deployment. Take, for example,
the place of animals in contemporary writing on posthumanism.
Introduction 27

For many, the ‘post-anthropological’ or ‘non-human’ turn and

unpacking of the idea of ‘the human’ have necessitated a revision
of human–animal relations in thinking about the present, and a
number of scholars discuss such relations as being central to current
understandings of posthumanity. 28 But the relationship between
disability and animals introduces a complexity to such debates. On
the one hand, disability positions suggest unique affinities between
humans and animals: Temple Grandin’s autism, for example, has
led not only to her being able to articulate profound connections to
animal identities, but famously also to new methods of designing
cattle slaughterhouses as a consequence; while Dawn Prince-Hughes
has shown in Songs of the Gorilla Nation how her autism is likewise
central to the ways in which she feels linked to the subjectivities
of fellow primates. 29 On the other hand, comparisons with animals
have been one of the foundational ways in which those with disabili-
ties have been claimed to be ‘subnormal’ – ‘freaks’ and ‘monsters’
– throughout history. Thinking this through, it is entirely possible
that admitting to the centrality of disability perspectives in concep-
tualising the posthuman might allow us to give clearer detail to
the differentiation between modern/eugenic thought and contem-
porary questions of species relations, and that the specific forms of
disability–animal connections can provide insights into the topic of
human–animal interfaces that other subjects simply cannot. When
this admission is made, other examples come to mind: the methods
by which questions of environment, disaster and financial econo-
mies interact, to cite one possible global/biocapital/posthumanist
network, are illuminated in distinct ways when conceived as disa-
bility enquiries, precisely because ‘environment’, ‘disaster’ and
‘economy’ all carry specific inflections when understood as disa-
bility concerns. 30 The difference that disability carries can be a vital
factor in helping us see the choices faced in a posthumanist present
by disabled and non-disabled communities alike.

Optimism and the value of stories

Excited by the material I was using and the ideas that were emerging,
I began writing this book in a mood of optimism. In an early draft, I
wrote at this point of the introduction that “it is possible to feel that
we are now in a time when a welcome to a disability future might
be extended” by disabled and non-disabled alike. I registered the
increasing incorporation of positive disability values and role models
28 Disability and the Posthuman

into language and society, and what felt like a commitment to the
continuation of this. Because of the successes of the various disability
rights movements and through processes of education, disability
issues and people with disabilities arguably now have a profile unim-
aginable even ten or 15 years ago, and critical work being undertaken
in disability studies is moving from the necessary deconstruction of
the old modes of representation to highlight newer, and more produc-
tive, forms of portrayal. While I still believe much of this to be true,
recent developments in global politics have made such a position seem
naive at best. There is more than enough evidence to suggest that the
latest political, economic and health configurations of the contempo-
rary world, understood in a global sense across societies and cultures,
place new and increasingly impossible demands on those with disabili-
ties, and that the prejudice and exclusion that has marked the history
of disability not only will continue but will take more systemic and
therefore insidious forms. This book will, therefore, discuss features
of the emerging technologised world that threaten the validity of
disabled lives: biocapitalism and the consumerisation of health; tech-
noscience and the question of ‘damage’; work, labour and the idea
of ‘benefit’; and biology and citizenry; all the contested questions of
becoming that Nikolas Rose has eloquently termed “the politics of life
itself”.31 As mentioned previously and as we will see, the assumption
(made by many involved in the development of disability technolo-
gies) that scientific advances constitute ‘progress’ is debateable. While
it would be foolish to deny the value of many assistive technologies,
the contexts in which they are often framed – particularly issues of
access and economic costs – frequently challenge and even prohibit the
advantages that they can deliver.
I find, however, that I still want to retain a positive sense of the
value of scholarly intervention and to continue to subscribe to that
version of disability studies that values critique precisely because,
having worked to show the details of the worlds in which we all (vari-
ously) live, it then gestures towards choices that can be made that
allow for a more ethical participation in culture and society. Any book
that takes ideas of the future as its subject should be suitably circum-
spect, and the claims I make are put forward with this knowledge in
mind. There is a need to speak of (and to) continuity as well as change,
but this can be done with an emphasis on the positives that change
might bring. In no way do I wish to distance myself from critical work
that highlights the discrimination practised by the forms of neolib-
eralism that increasingly dominate all aspects of our societies and
threaten all kinds of communities, those with disabilities included; I
Introduction 29

have learned much from such studies, agree with many of the observa-
tions they make and will use them in this book. But I am a believer
in the power of advocacy in the same way that I value the processes
of critique, and one of the first lessons of practising disability studies
is to acknowledge that those who live with disabilities are active, not
passive, participants in the narratives that surround them, and shape
their lives, on their own terms, on a daily basis. I want to continue and
extend such activities here.
This book is also one that is passionate about the productive poten-
tial of fiction and the imagination. In a time when critical insight is
frequently gauged by the way it crosses and transgresses disciplinary
boundaries, it is easy to forget the core values of stories and imagina-
tion. I believe that the best scholarship needs to range widely, and that
to understand disability in the contemporary moment and its projected
futures requires more than a simple unpacking of how it might be
represented in a novel or film; and I have learned a huge amount from
colleagues in other, often far-flung, disciplines: engineering, robotics
and the health and social sciences especially. But I am not interested
in making literature a form of sociology or anthropology, or seeing
films as an adjunct to the telling of ‘health stories’. For all that the
chapters that follow roam across a variety of critical and disciplinary
landscapes, I am more convinced than ever of the power and insight
that comes from reading or watching creative imaginings.
Fiction’s ability to articulate disability in an increasingly post-
humanist world is, I believe, a vital part of the way in which we
comprehend its presence. I will discuss Michael Bérubé’s work on
disability and literature in the next chapter, but it is worth here noting
his observation about the specific complexities of literary practice.
“Narrative deployments of disability”, he writes, “do not confine them-
selves to representation. They can also be narrative strategies, devices
for exploring”. Bérubé’s use of ‘deployment’ suggests a particular
sophistication; he notes: “I say ‘deployments’ […] rather than ‘depic-
tions’ or ‘representations’, because I will argue […] that disability and
ideas about disability can be and have been put to use in fictional
narratives in ways that go far beyond any specific rendering of any
disabled character or characters”.32 In what follows, I want to pick up
on these ideas of fiction’s aesthetics, strategy, exploration and deploy-
ment, and to stress that imaginative portrayals possess a capacity to
inform our understanding of disability that other forms of enquiry
cannot replicate. In economies that favour only certain forms of
production, it has become too easy to question not only the power of
creative imaginings but also the value of humanities (and especially
30 Disability and the Posthuman

literary/cultural) scholarship. By way of response, I want this book to

be a belligerent response to such attitudes and a championing of the
creative, and critical, aesthetic.

Notes

1 Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2014), p. 121. See also pp. 121–212 for
more on what she terms “Fantasies of Measurement”.
2 Pramod Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 5.
3 Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 5–6.
4 Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 15. The literature
outlining humanism is of course vast and impossible to cover here. Davies’
book acts as a useful introduction. Equally, Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus:
A Brief History of Tomorrow provides an accessible and eloquent account of
what he terms “the humanist revolution” and how it is challenged in a digital,
data-driven future. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Vintage,
2017), see especially pp. 258–323 and 411–462.
5 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 8.
6 See, for example, the contents of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and
the Posthuman, in which the various contributions range across literary
periods, modes and themes precisely in this manner. Bruce Clarke and
Manuela Rossini (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
7 See Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota
University Press, 2002).
8 Alex Goody raises the possibility of recognising the Woodman in such a
fashion by addressing the topic in the first paragraph of a chapter entitled
‘Robots, Cyborgs and the Technological Body’ in his 2011 book Technology.
Literature and Culture, though he only explores the topic in a single paragraph
and his observations, which are more descriptive than analytical, stress a
political reading. Baum “raised particular political questions about the effect
of technology on humanity” he writes, observing that the “Tin Woodman
and his prosthetic body have been created by ruthless injustice and he needs
to have his heart/humanity restored to him”. Goody also discusses Baum’s
1913 novel The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and its reworking by Shelley Jackson in
her 1995 hypertext Patchwork Girl, later in the chapter. See Goody, Technology.
Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity 2011), pp. 136 and 163–166. Patchwork
Girl is also discussed by Katherine Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer: Digital
Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005),
p. 143.
9 See Elaine Scarry’s seminal The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); David B. Morris, The Culture
of Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991) and
Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1998), pp. 107–134; and Sara Ahmed’s discussion of “The
Contingency of Pain” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh:
Introduction 31

Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 20–41. Ronald Schleifer’s Pain and
Suffering (New York and London: Routledge, 2014) offers a good overall
survey of both scientific and cultural narratives of pain. There is also a long
tradition of covering questions of pain in work that stems from anthropo-
logical and sociological work in narrative medicine. See especially Mary-Jo
DelVecchio et al. (eds), Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), as well as the literary/cultural
scholarship that engages with this, such as Ann Jurecic’s Illness as Narrative
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), pp. 43–66.
10 Following the immediate success of the first Oz novel, Baum also adapted it
for a musical that played in Chicago and on Broadway between 1902 and 1904
before touring the US. Following Baum’s death, the franchise continued with
subsequent books being published by other writers, notably Ruth Thompson
and John R. Neill (the illustrator for the majority of Baum’s own Oz novels),
all recognised as part of the Oz ‘canon’. The last such novels, written by
Sherwood Smith, were published in 2005 and 2006, while non-estate publica-
tions were released in 2014 and 2015.
11 L. Frank Baum, Oz: The Complete Collection, vol. 4 (London: Simon and
Schuster, 2013), pp. 441–445.
12 L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 39.
13 Baum, Oz: The Complete Collection, p. 453. Early on in The Tin Woodman of Oz, the
Woodman repeats the story of his transformation to Woot, a young wanderer
travelling through Oz, but this time in considerably more detail than in The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Now, we learn, the witch not only enchanted the
axe to sever the Woodman’s limbs, she herself “seized the axe and chopped
[his] body into several small pieces, after which, thinking that at last she had
destroyed [him], she ran away laughing in wicked glee” (p. 450). With each
attack, however, the Woodman comes to see his replacement tin prostheses
as superior to the body parts he has lost: “I was a much better man than ever,
for my body could not ache or pain me, and I was so beautiful and bright that
I had no need of clothing”, and the Munchkin girl – now named as Nimmie
Amee – equally only finds reason to love the Woodman more: “the girl agreed
with me that a man all made of tin was far more perfect than one formed of
different materials” (pp. 450–451).
Challenged by Woot that he deserted Nimmie, and so that his heart
cannot be deemed especially ‘kind’, the Tin Woodman resolves to find his
lost love, and the remainder of the novel takes the form of a quest. On their
journey, the Woodman, Scarecrow and Woot come across Captain Fyter, a
soldier whose story is identical to that of the Woodman: engaged to Nimmie
Amee after she knew the Woodman, he was likewise dismembered by the
Witch, restored by the tinsmith, and ultimately reduced to a rusting hulk on
a forest path (the only difference with the Woodman is that Fyter carries a
sword and not an axe; otherwise they are almost literal doubles). Amazed
by the similarity in their histories, the Woodman and Soldier resolve to find
Nimmie and let her marry which of the two she chooses. When they do
locate her, however, they find Nimmie already married, to a man the tinsmith
has constructed from all the human body parts taken from the Woodman
and Soldier (apart from, in a nice touch, one missing arm, lost and there-
fore necessitating a single tin limb). The standoff that ensues, between three
32 Disability and the Posthuman

figures, all more or less formed from the same materials, has a surrealism
that breaks free from Baum’s habitually spare prose, creating a textual excess
reminiscent more of Lewis Carroll.
Though nominally human, Nimmie’s husband has few of the character-
istics that pass for humanity in Oz. He is rude and petulant, not “a husband
to be proud of” as Nimmie admits, “because he has a mixed nature and isn’t
always an agreeable companion” (p. 628). Yet she rejects the overtures of
both the Tin Woodman and Soldier, preferring her current arrangement in
part because, in a strange echo of her own previous relationship with the
old woman for whom she worked, she has trained her husband in a number
of domestic tasks and has no wish to have to repeat the process. “You two
gentlemen threw him away when you became tin”, she tells her visitors, “so
you cannot justly claim him now. I advise you to go back to your own homes
and forget me, as I have forgotten you” (p. 629). Both the Tin Woodman and
Solider are happy to accede to this, seeing nothing of value in their former
human selves and thankful that they escaped becoming Nimmie’s servant:
“we have much to be thankful for”, as the Soldier puts it (p. 630). And while
each is now tin, Baum asserts that they “are still themselves”, still carry the
full humanity of their individuality, and rather it is the new husband who is a
“Nobody”, a “mix-up”, and who “must be someone else” (pp. 627–628).
14 Baum, Oz: The Complete Collection, p. 461.
15 Baum, Oz: The Complete Collection, p. 461.
16 Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 103 (emphasis in original).
Vint’s observation comes in the context of her reading cyberpunk fiction of
the 1980s, especially that of William Gibson, where the word ‘meat’ is used to
describe the body left behind as characters immerse themselves of the virtual
reality of cyberspace, a process Vint describes as “the (impossible) desire
to escape the vicissitudes of the body and occupy the place of self-mastery”
(p. 104). It is worth noting that in Gibson’s hugely influential and boundary-
breaking 1984 novel Neuromancer a process is described that appears to be
the complete opposite of the Tin Woodman’s transformation. Instead of the
human body replaced by artificial additions, as with the Woodman’s narra-
tive, in Gibson’s post-punk universe, saturated by collections of abstract data
with which his protagonists negotiate, a character performs a stage show in
which a human body appears limb by limb in a kind of download-as-theatre.
Seemingly from nowhere, a woman’s hand appears, to be followed by another,
then “[t]he act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms
were next. Feet. Legs […] Then the torso formed… caressed into being, white,
headless and perfect […] Now limbs and torso had merged… The head was
there, the image complete” (pp. 167–168). The last clause here gives the game
away however; though seemingly human, the body created on stage is, in fact,
just another of the novel’s data manifestations. But rather than this image
being an example of a lack of humanity, Gibson’s story makes it clear that the
very idea of the human body is just one competitor in the battle for self and
presence, jostling with any number of virtual adversaries. In Neuromancer, the
enhanced body, whether the product of plastic surgery, pharmaceutical inter-
vention, or – as in the above example – visual illusion, is an everyday part of
the landscape the characters inhabit. Here, the transgression of the human is
Introduction 33

ordinary, and, as a result, the very idea of disability and what it might mean is
challenged.
17 In Exits to the Posthuman Future, Arthur Kroker discusses a patent application
for an iPhone app “that involves synching your heart to the smartphone”
in a process that transmits biological date from body to phone that creates
a “mobile heart monitor”. For Kroker, this suggests “the first tentative
steps in a greater migration from body to code, a data archive housing the
biorhythms of the remotely scanned heart”. Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman
Future (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 7–8.
18 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2008), p. 25; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Disability gain’, paper presented
at ‘Avoidance in/and the Academy: The International Conference on Disability,
Culture and Education’, Liverpool Hope University, September 11, 2013. I am
grateful to Clare Barker for bringing these references to my attention.
19 Nayar, Posthumanism, pp. 127–128 and 134–135.
20 Elaine L. Graham’s analysis of science fiction in her 2002 study Representations
of the post/human points to the degree to which much of such fiction (her
focus is on Star Trek and its various spin offs) functions conservatively. She
writes that such narratives depict “the relationships and boundaries between
humans and machines, the natural and the artificial, while strenuously main-
taining the integrity of the modern Western humanist subject at the heart of
their broadly technophilic visions”. Representations of the post/human: Monsters,
Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002), pp. 176 and 132–153.
21 It should not be presumed that stories of posthumanist technologised embod-
iment are always primarily concerned with the present and future alone.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2017 novel The Book of Joan, set in an off-world suborbital
complex where human sexuality and gender distinctions have all but disap-
peared, is recognisably posthuman, especially in its focus on embodiment;
but it is also a reworking (and not simply a retelling) of Joan of Arc’s narrative
of resistance in which ideas of the mystical are preserved.
22 Liz Jackson, ‘We are the original lifehackers’, New York Times, May 30, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/opinion/disability-design-lifehacks.html.
Accessed September 17, 2018.
23 See, for example, Carey Wolfe’s continual return to the work of Jacques
Derrida and Bruno Latour, or Rosi Braidotti’s focus on Gilles Deleuze.
24 Wolfe is especially scathing here. What is Posthumanism? is animated by a
sustained opposition to what, at one point, he terms “some form of authen-
ticity or presence typically associated with analog media”. Such associations/
dismissals of identity with an outdated technological past are not untypical of
scholarship on posthumanism. See What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xxxiv.
25 World Health Organisation, World Report on Disability, 2011, p. 9. For details
of the UNCRPD, see www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-
on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities.html. Accessed July 24, 2018.
26 Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species
Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007), n.p.
27 Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 170 and 172.
34 Disability and the Posthuman

28 See, for example: Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? pp. 99–126; Nayar,

Posthumanism, pp. 77–99; Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity,
2013), pp. 55–104; Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and
Cultural Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 57–78; Richard Grusin (ed.),
The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015); and Mel
Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012).
29 See Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to
Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Scribner, 2005) and Animals Make Us
Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2009); and Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My
Journey Through Autism (London: Souvenir Press, 2004).
30 Anthony Carrigan discusses this nexus in relation to the fallout from nuclear
testing in the Pacific. See ‘Postcolonial disaster, Pacific nuclearization, and
disabling environments’, Journal of Cultural and Literary Disability Studies 4,
no. 3 (2010), pp. 255–272. As I completed the final reading of the proofs for
this book prior to its publication, much of the world was either practising
isolation or experiencing lockdown as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The
ways in which this moment in history will come to be understood through
disability experiences will come to be written, but there is no doubt that the
disability versions of this particular disaster will be profound and long-lasting.
31 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the
Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
32 Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How
Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (New York:
New York University Press, 2016), p. 2.
 CHAPTER ONE

(Post)human Subjects,
Disability Deployments
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments

Introduction: getting carried away

Thinking about posthumanism can be an exciting business. In the

initial wave of critical writing on the explicit idea of the posthuman
produced in the late 1980s and 1990s, signs of exhilaration and antici-
pation proliferated. The heady mix of possibilities that came from
considering a space beyond the human, one full of technological
advancement and individual freedoms, prompted a series of breathless
questions: what might it mean to leave the human, and humanism,
behind? How might we, as a species, move beyond the body, or indeed
what types of bodies might be generated as a result of these interac-
tions? What kinds of thresholds and transgressions would be involved
in any such moves? What will our relationship to technology, or other
non-human forms, be in a posthuman future? And what might we
learn about embodiment, ethics, society, gender, race and culture
in such formations? The tone was possibly best captured by Judith
Halberstam and Ira Livingston in the introduction to their 1995 collec-
tion, Posthuman Bodies, in which the posthuman appeared full of an
almost revolutionary potential to collapse or eradicate categories and
boundaries:

Queer, cyborg, metametazoan, hybrid. PWA; bodies-without-organs,

bodies-in-process, virtual bodies: in unvisualizable amniotic indetermi-
nacy, and unfazed by the hype of their always premature and redundant
annunciation, posthuman bodies thrive in the mutual deformations of
totem and taxonomy. We have rehearsed the claim that the posthuman
36 Disability and the Posthuman

condition is upon us and that lingering nostalgia for a modernist or

humanist philosophy of self and other, human and alien, normal and
queer is merely the echo of a discursive battle that has already taken
place – and the tinny futurism that often answers such nostalgia is the
echo of an echo. We stake our claim between these echoes and their
answers.1

This is critical thinking as the leading edge of a giddy prophecy.

Halberstam and Livingston’s ‘claim’ is for nothing less than a
complete reordering of the ways in we know and express ourselves,
and the essays in their volume focused on subjects – class identities
and machines, posthuman feminism, pregnant men, deviant subjec-
tivities, monstrous becomings – that explore how such thinking
might affect a wide range of subject positions: personal, political,
social and fictional.
In a similar vein, Hans Moravec – a seminal figure in the devel-
opment of thinking about the future of robotics and A.I., and in
post- and tranhumanist discourses more widely – begins his 1988
study Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence with the
vision of “a world in which the human race has been swept away by
the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny”. If,
Moravec notes, robots and A.I. appear crude and simplistic at the time
in which he was writing, “within the next century they will mature
into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something
transcending everything we know – in whom we can take pride when
they refer to themselves as our descendants”. Freed from “the plod-
ding pace of biological evolution”, he continues, “the children of our
minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental
challenges in the larger universe”.2 Eleven years later, in 1999, appro-
priately on the cusp of the new millennium, Moravec would restate
his thesis in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, observing that
“the development of intelligent machines” is “a near term inevita-
bility” and asserting that “each advance will provide intellectual
rewards, competitive advantages, and increased wealth and options
of all kinds”. If Halberstam and Livingston were driven by the crit-
ical and theoretical possibilities of the posthuman horizon, Moravec
stressed what he understood to be the evolutionary inescapability (he
termed it “escape velocity”) of the transition from human to robot:
“I consider these future machines our progeny […] Like biological
children of previous generations, they will embody humanity’s best
chance for a long-term future”.3 Each of these visions appeared to be
as far as, if not further than, one can imagine.
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 37

Other scholars writing on the emergence of the posthuman and

the potential for change it pre-figured were more cautious. “These are
strange times”, Rosi Braidotti begins her 2002 study Metamorphoses:
Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, “and strange things are
happening”. She continues:

Living at such times of fast changes may be exhilarating, yet the task
of representing these changes to ourselves and engaging productively
with the contradictions, paradoxes and injustices they engender is
a perennial challenge. Accounting for fast-changing conditions is
hard work; escaping the velocity of change is even harder. Unless one
likes complexity one cannot feel at home in the twenty-first century.
Transformations, metamorphoses, mutations and processes of change
have in fact become familiar in the lives of most contemporary subjects.4

The result, Braidotti observes, is “that the challenge lies in thinking

about processes, rather than concepts”, and “the point is not to know
who we are, but rather what, at last we want to become, how to
represent mutations, changes and transformations”. Braidotti’s circum-
spection demands that the excitement found in pronouncements such
as those from Halberstam and Livingston, or the inevitability inherent
in Moravec’s visions of the future, must be held up to scrutiny, its
details examined and understood. In the end, as she notes, such
changes are not just about the possibilities of new selfhoods, but also
“vital concerns […] for the scientific, social and political institutions
that surround such selves”.5 The posthuman condition, she asserts, is
one in which “the human is now displaced in the direction of a glit-
tering range of […] technological variables” that can be considered
“both exhilarating and painful”.6 But for all the glitter, it is a position
that needs to be analysed in its grounded and located practices. For
Braidotti, who would develop a complex set of theories of the post-
human, especially around embodiment, in work spanning more than
a decade following the publication of Metamorphoses, the variability of
the future demands processes of continual questioning rather than
mere celebration.7
In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature
and Informatics, her visionary study published – like Moravec’s Robot
– in 1999 just as a century of incredible technological transforma-
tion ended, Katherine Hayles offered an equally alert account of the
promise of the posthuman. Hayles explores the challenges of posthu-
manist futures, articulating a moment of liberation in anticipation of
progressive change that nevertheless has real-world consequences:
38 Disability and the Posthuman

[T]he posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals
instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception
that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had
the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize as autonomous beings
exercising their will through individual agency and choice […] Yet the
posthuman needs not be recuperated back into liberal humanism, nor
need it be construed as anti-human. Located within the dialectic of
pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied rather than disem-
bodied information, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the
articulations of humans with intelligent machines.8

For Hayles, as the end of the millennium drew near the liberal
humanist subject had come to dominate the perception of what
‘humanity’ was. The progression of that subject through modernity
was one of a projected totalising power, producing the exclusion and
trauma that has characterised much of the modern and contemporary
periods. But perception is not the same as actuality, and in place of a
humanity that Hayles now felt was vanishing a posthumanist subjec-
tivity was emerging, one that will enact a more democratic idea of
citizenship, informed (as opposed to restricted) by embodied engage-
ment with information and the virtual, and especially enabled by
interactions with technology. Such a reading is the antithesis of that
narrative of modernity that saw the developments of the industrial
revolution spiral into the horrors of war, totalitarianism and geno-
cide. Hayles’ posthuman is not without its dangers, and her tone is
cautionary, but is overwhelmingly an opportunity for a better future.9
Though Hayles is explicit in advocating that her sense of the post-
human is not entirely anti-human, its parameters clearly overlap with
the attacks on humanism found in the work of theorists such as Michel
Foucault and Louis Althusser, those who, in Foucault’s own memo-
rable phrase, had posited the “death” of the “recent invention” that
is man.10 Indeed, part of the energy behind critical work on posthu-
manism in the 1990s was precisely that it appeared as a new frontier
for anti-humanist cultural theory, extending the writing of a previous
generation of scholars. Addressing precisely this idea of a critical
genealogy, Neil Badmington included Foucault and Althusser, along
with a range of other thinkers stretching from Frantz Fanon to Jean-
Francois Lyotard, in his Posthumanism reader, published in 2000. This
gave the subject a number of possible jumping-off points even as the
volume sought to define the subject’s breadth by stressing its central
figures. In seeking to outline the concerns of the field, Badmington
also caught that sense of promise in the 1990s’ configuration of the
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 39

posthuman and anticipation of the future: “Wherever they look”,

he said of the writers collected in his reader, expressing the excite-
ment of the moment, “they witness Man breathing ‘himself’ to death,
raising himself to ruins. Posthumanism is out there”.11 More prosa-
ically (but in greater detail), Pramod Nayar also locates the origins
of posthumanism in a variety of anti-humanist critical disciplines –
poststructuralism, feminism, technoscience studies and critical race
studies – that flourished at the end of the twentieth century. Such
work, Nayar asserts, “demolished the myth of the unified, coherent,
autonomous, self-identical human subject”, and subsequently “posited
the subject, and biology, as a construct of discourses, of enmeshed and
co-evolved species and technologies”. While Nayar is not as overtly
exhilarated about the ‘out there’ qualities of the posthuman figure as
some other writers on the subject, he nevertheless makes grand claims
for its possibilities: “By demonstrating the end of the sovereign human
subject, critical humanism prepares the ground for the new form of
the human, the posthuman”.12
For her part, Hayles made it clear that debating the timing of any
transition to a posthumanist state was a pointless exercise, as the
posthuman was nearer than Badmington suggested: “Increasingly, the
question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity
is already here. Rather, the question is what kind of posthumans we
will be”.13 It appeared that the door was open to a future in which
science fiction could become ‘fact’, knowledge thresholds would
be crossed, and where the only limits we might place on ourselves
were those produced by technology and our own imaginations.14 As
Robert Pepperell put it in his 1995 book The Post-Human Condition,
employing a dramatic metaphor to suggest the coming change, “we are
approaching the electrification of existence – there is a tangible sense of a
storm in the air”.15
By way of contrast, traditionally disability is rarely thought to be
exciting. Based on ideas that circulate in the public imaginary, few
would advocate that being disabled puts one on the threshold of a
future in which ‘the human’ was about to be productively supplanted.
The converse is more likely to be true: many perceive disability to
involve a state that precisely falls short of being fully human, and that
is best described in terms of an absence, lack or loss. Lennard J. Davis
notes that, “most constructions of disability assume that the person
with disabilities is in some sense damaged while the observer is
undamaged. Furthermore, there is an assumption that society at large
is intact, normal, setting a norm, undamaged”.16 Such assumptions
are to be found everywhere, from employers believing that staff with
40 Disability and the Posthuman

disabilities are naturally less productive than their non-disabled coun-

terparts, to the effects of the soft power embedded in the objects and
images that stress hyperability and pervade our (especially popular)
culture. Disability futures are almost never thought to be desirable
and appear rather as fraught spaces of struggle. In The Biopolitics of
Disability, their 2015 analysis of disability read within frames of
neoliberalism and ablenationalism, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder
observe how disabled subjectivities become trapped in neoliberal
ideas of the future, whether medical, financial or aspirational, that
mean “the unchallenged desirability of normative lives” character-
ises disabled futures as continuously lacking. A result, they assert, is
that disability embodiment is always rendered peripheral.17 Extending
this idea of exclusion, Alison Kafer notes in her 2013 study Feminist,
Queer, Crip (a text I will use in detail in the next chapter), that majority
cultures frequently “assume that a ‘good’ future naturally and obvi-
ously depends upon the eradication of disability” and this constitutes
an “assumption that this kind of ‘elsewhere’, one without disability, is
one ‘we’ all want”.18 A disabled future, it appears, is not in any way to
be desired.
To give one relevant (and another turn-of-the-millennium) example,
the October 2000 issue of the US magazine Backpacker carried an
advert for Nike’s new trail running shoe the Air Dri-Goat. Next to
an image of the shoe, a paragraph stressed its technical features that
helped prevent injury:

Fortunately the Air Dri-Goat features a patented goat-like outer sole

for increased traction so you can taunt mortal injury without actu-
ally experiencing it. Right about now you’re probably asking yourself
“How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat’s
hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky on the
side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling,
misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to
roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name embossed on
one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs,
fastened to the back?” To that we answer, hey, have you ever seen a
mountain goat (even an extreme mountain goat) careen out of control
into the side of a tree? Didn’t think so.19

Following numerous complaints, Nike issued an apology, but the point

being made is clear: physical disability – “drooling, misshapen”, “husk”
– is the antithesis of fitness and the body that is whole. Using a motor-
ised wheelchair is a version of being human, Nike clearly suggests, that
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 41

“a drooling, misshapen husk” Backpacker (October 2000)

no one would want. In its combination of a global corporatism with

a promotion of ‘active’ embodiment, the advert creates a version of
wholeness and health open to, as Kaushik Sunder Rajan puts it in an
illuminating phrase, “everyone with purchasing power”. Sunder Rajan’s
wide-ranging 2006 study Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life
unpacks the idea of what he terms “life as a business plan”, where a
global biocapitalism commodifies health in terms of “venture science”,
a meeting of bodies and markets where “the tension between the ‘lie’
of corporate PR and the ‘truth’ of science” results in the formation of
a certain kind of contemporary subjectivity.20 This insight into global
economics of health and the incorporation of individual subjects into
corporate networks reminds us that the combination of biological
material and information is one way in which posthumanism, in its
neoliberal form as an assemblage of capital, extends to all aspects of
world health. I will return to these ideas in Chapter 3, but it is worth
saying here that it is clear such structures are going to exclude most
people with disabilities: they have restricted ‘purchasing power’ due
to the exclusionary practices of capitalist systems; and the situated
workings of biocapitalism will always find the difference of disability
bodies largely abhorrent (as the advert itself makes clear). That the
Nike copywriters seemed unable to imagine that their description
might connect to the lives of real people, or that there would be any
problem with this, only reinforces the status of disability here as a
subject position thought to be outside of any standard norm. As with
so much to do with disability lives, they were simply not considered.
42 Disability and the Posthuman

The above observations carry clear weight, but in our very contem-
porary moment the picture is more complicated than this outline
might appear. Both the breathless excitement of posthumanist possi-
bilities and the assumed ‘natural’ negative of disabled subjectivity
assume different proportions when considered 20 years after the
above end-of-millennium examples. If it is still true that, for a broad
public consciousness, posthumans are most frequently thought of as
robots or dynamic cyborgs, and people with disabilities as lacking
some core element of humanity, the actual terrain in which each set
of topics functions is rather criss-crossed with ambiguity and doubt.
Looking back on her late 1990s work in her subsequent study My
Mother Was A Computer, Hayles noted that “the interplay between the
liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that I used to launch my
analysis in How We Became Posthuman has already begun to fade into
the history of the twentieth century”, and that “new and more sophis-
ticated versions of the posthuman have evolved”, citing in particular
the development of “computational technologies” that mean we have
all increasingly become “integrated into globally mediated networks”
as a consequence.21 Such integration continues at an often bewildering
pace: posthumanism’s focus on systems and subjects is always being
updated by new forms of technological assemblages that increasingly
encompass the entire planet with ever more complex webs, evolving
ideas of function and ‘worth’ in which the meaning of bodies is
ever-shifting.
Partly this evolution stems from changing relationships between
the present and ideas of the future. Sunder Rajan observes that the
politics of the biocapital are “a game played in the future” because
of the elements of risk involved, and this future is forever written
and rewritten as the vagaries of markets and biopolitics continu-
ally reposition ideas of health and wholeness.22 Similarly, Melinda
Cooper in Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal
Era, her 2008 study of the relationship between the life sciences and
economics, explores what she terms “the promise of the bioeconomy”
in the context of a contested neoliberal landscape that is “essentially
speculative”.23 This speculation adumbrates a culture of surplus lives,
including health lives, across the globe. Citing what we might recog-
nise as a variety of posthumanist (though she does not use the term)
contexts – tissue engineering, stem cell research, and the biological
dimensions of the US war on terror – Cooper outlines ideas of “life
beyond the limits” as biotechnology and capitalism shape the science
at work in our contemporary world.24 The new empires, she asserts, are
biotechnological and biocapitalistic, founded on the “catastrophism”
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 43

integral to the workings of neoliberalism.25 In the chapters that follow,

I will explore the ways in which disability is implicated in these global
networks, but it is worth noting here that, disabled or non-disabled,
we all inhabit murky new worlds of political power and market forces
and the precarious health futures they envisage.

Precarious posthumanisms

A consequence of these kinds of ambiguity is that twenty-first-century

writing on what Francis Fukuyama has termed, in his book of the
same title, “our posthuman future” is noticeably less celebratory in
exploring what might lie in the space outside or beyond the human
than the scholarship of the 1990s. For his own part, Fukuyama, a
conservative humanist with a firm belief in what he calls the “stable
continuity” of human nature, finds reason to worry about the poten-
tial consequences in the development of scientific systems, where
“the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is
the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us
into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history”.26 Here, posthumanism denotes
a subjectivity you would not want to have if, like Fukuyama, you feel
that “we share a common humanity that allows every human being
to potentially communicate with and enter into a moral relationship
with every other human being on the planet”.27 In such arguments,
‘common humanity’ becomes aligned with agreed morality and other
core concepts, such as a belief in the power of liberal democracy and
capitalist markets (especially as practised by US governments). Set
against this, the posthuman is a space that, for Fukuyama, is full of a
fear of designer babies, genetic engineering and other affronts to the
very idea of humanity.
Writers more sophisticated than Fukuyama and more sympathetic
to posthumanist ideas nevertheless also pause when seeking to name
the ways in which they might alter our present. “There is an undeni-
ably gloomy connotation to the posthuman condition”, Braidotti writes
at the start of her 2013 book The Posthuman, “especially in relation to
genealogies of critical thought”. She argues that productive forces of
critical and cultural theory animated the 1970s and 1980s, but that the
present is rather defined by “theory fatigue” and “a zombified land-
scape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia”. In
the face of this, however, Braidotti wants to return to posthumanism’s
positive possibilities and remobilise its theorising to “explore ways of
engaging affirmatively with the present, accounting for some of its
44 Disability and the Posthuman

features in a manner that is empirically grounded without being reduc-

tive and remains critical while avoiding negativity”.28 For Braidotti, a
grounded and located posthumanism avoids the open-endedness and
sometime fanciful opinionising found in earlier writing. Spaces of the
posthuman, she contends, can and should be political. This argument
is possibly one that still needs to be won, given the continued philo-
sophical fascinations with extending human life or creating biohybrid
cyborgs, but it helps contextualise ways in which disability, as a lived
and located experience, can be read through critical posthumanist
methods.
In another study of the subject that seeks to maintain an engaged
complexity, Bruce Clarke stresses that the productive potential of post-
humanism needs to be understood as just one feature in a landscape
where complex environments make it impossible for any single idea of
the individual or social to supersede others. Drawing on narrative and
systems theory, Clarke’s 2008 book Posthuman Metamorphosis asserts
that: “Posthumanism cognizes the human as one among numberless
other situations of complexity – a productive disunity tasked with the
quest, different for every psychic and social system, of working out a
viable coordination of its systemic and environmental multiplicities”.29
While Clarke’s analysis makes less room for politics than Braidotti’s,
his stress on systems and environments here certainly allows for an
extension of his arguments into social and cultural settings, Both
writers, while convinced of the potential and merits of posthumanism
are nevertheless wary of oversimplifying its effects and manifesta-
tions. Conscious of the many variables in which the posthuman may
be implicated they, like other current theorists, plot its coordinates
with care.
That plotting, and indeed that care, takes the subject in different
directions. Cary Wolfe’s 2010 study What is Posthumanism? is a
theory-driven meditation on “what thought has to become in the
face of those challenges” produced by confronting a posthumanist
present.30 For Wolfe, posthumanist thought (he draws careful distinc-
tions between ‘posthuman’, ‘posthumanist’ and their various other
linguistic formations) is to be valued because it “opposes the fantasies
of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself”.31
But Wolfe’s attention to care is such that his study, committed to not
falling into what he sees as a humanist-style trap of declaring ‘knowl-
edge’, becomes an exercise in academic looping in which ‘thought’ and
the thinkers that practise it become the heroes of his argument. The
regular citing of Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and
other theorists as the continual, and only seemingly important, points
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 45

of reference works to create a reified and, ultimately, banal version

of his subject. For Wolfe, posthumanism is “always already post-”.
“Posthumanism” he asserts, articulating the point further, “in my
sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodi-
ment has been transcended”.32 Relativism of this kind, in which the
posthuman is to be found in a variety of carefully constructed and
theoretically informed reading practices that can name and critique the
problematically embedded nature of humanist thinking, might be seen
as a method of keeping a flexible and curious critical system always
engaged with knowledge effects and their excesses. In contrast with
a figure such as Braidotti, however, Wolfe’s writing works to evacuate
the space of what the posthuman might be, relegating it to specific
academic concerns (such as in Wolfe’s book: disciplinarity; the place
of deconstruction; a ‘proper’ appreciation of Derrida, and the role of
the humanities). For Wolfe, the conclusion that “‘we’ are not ‘we’” is
sufficient to articulate a number of complexities around the future; for
me it rather speaks of the problem writing on posthumanism exhibits
when it chooses to inhabit the subject’s complexities – and to over-
emphasise caution – without seeking to extend any thesis about its
grounded, material consequences. In truth, it is clear that Wolfe very
much is working with a ‘we’ in mind, and that is the cohort of scholars
who make up his academic peer group.33
By way of contrast, and as I noted in the introduction, my sense
of the posthuman is oriented foremostly, though not exclusively,
around an idea of the ‘after’. This focus on the future, and the present
seen through the lens of the future, does not, I would stress, imply
any necessary complicity with a reductive humanist positioning.
Looking hard at the after and beyond means that the category of
‘the future’ becomes meaningful in literal ways, something essen-
tial to what I understand an ethical consideration of disability to
be. 34 The genuine promise in posthumanist critical thinking here,
whether evident in finding value in technological development or
rethinking social and cultural categories that outline inclusion and
agency, can be judged to be efficacious through the ways in which
it impacts upon the lives of those with disabilities. If the subject
continues to develop the kind of theoretical blind alleys we see in the
work of Wolfe and others, it runs the risk of becoming an Emerald
City of its own – all curtains, colours and mirrors – and potentially
unable to find a language with which it can address the located
conditions of personhood it seeks to inform. 35 As Hayles says: “For
some people, including me, the posthuman evokes the exhilarating
prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up
46 Disability and the Posthuman

new ways of thinking about what being human means”, and for all
that some canonical poststructuralist thinking might seem radical,
it too can surely be found in the ‘old boxes’. 36 Nikolas Rose agrees
with this emphasis on change, observing in The Politics of Life Itself
that changes around core questions of existence in the early twenty-
first century mean that “a threshold has been crossed” and that,
as a consequence, “we are inhabiting an emergent form of life”. 37
The challenge for contemporary critical work in posthumanism then
is to extend beyond the exhilaration of thinking alone, and for the
emergent to find forms in which we might locate ourselves. It is
precisely in relation to this that mapping the ways in which such
work intersects with disability could prove to be such a valuable
­exploration of what a material posthumanism might be.

Critical disability futures: intersections and aesthetics

If writing on the posthuman is increasingly displaying complex inter-

actions with notions of systems and processes, then the work of
critical disability studies as it has developed over the last two decades
is equally becoming attuned to a need to create more sophisticated
contexts for the spaces in which disability functions. Validating iden-
tity, for example, is no longer the primary goal of a criticism that has
embraced what Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim have termed the “edges
of intersectionality”; spaces that “shift, extend and reorient” patterns
of disability theory.38 Alignments with feminism, queer studies and
critical race studies have created new possibilities for understanding
how disability is lived and deployed, especially in terms of an inter-
connectedness that engages with the variety of contemporary subject
positions.39
One noticeable necessary revision to the stereotypical idea of
disability ‘loss’ has been a positive shift in much public perception
of disability conditions. While this could rightly be termed gradual,
only applies in some geocultural locations and is by no means global,
it is probable that the waves of protest that would accompany Nike’s
advert, were it to be published now, would far exceed those made in
2000. While it is still the case that many governments continue to
produce legislation that discriminates against those with disabilities,
as explored in the UK context by Frances Ryan in Crippled: Austerity
and the Demonisation of Disabled People (2019) for example, and that
the kinds of disability hate crimes discussed by Katharine Quarmby
in her excoriating study Scapegoat: How We Are Failing Disabled People
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 47

(2011) are all too common, and while the austerity that has followed
in the worldwide recession sparked by the financial crisis of 2008
has affected disabled people more than other sections of the popula-
tion, it is still the case that the education of the non-disabled majority
about disability issues is now taking place at a pace not seen before.40
Articulating this balance of discrimination and understanding is a
precarious and difficult process, but activists and scholars (with disa-
bilities and without) committed to better disability futures, used to
having to point to misrepresentations and misunderstanding and to
having to fight for basic civil rights, now negotiate such campaigning
in an environment where, despite injustices, at least more people are
prepared to listen. So, for example, in Dangerous Discourse of Disability,
Subjectivity and Sexuality, her examination of the theoretical positions
surrounding disability subjectivities, Margrit Shildrick is cautiously
positive about the ways in which recent change offers the possibility for
more productive disability narratives: “Given, however, the apparent
pace at which the certainties of the modernist world-view are being
transformed both globally, where narratives of national progress and
social order are challenged both theoretically and materially, and at
the level of the individual where identity is destabilised, there is every
opportunity to take a relatively optimistic approach”.41 That Shildrick
can be optimistic when “identity is destabilised” indicates the way in
which disability studies has negotiated a move from a narrow focus on
social formations of disability to wider conceptions of subjectivity that
speak of complex embodiment in the contemporary world. Shildrick’s
work has explored “leaky bodies” and the boundaries of embodiment,
arguing that neither the body or the subject can be seen to be secure
categories, but that it is precisely this insecurity that can form the
basis of materialist criticism.42
In disciplinary terms, this means that critical disability studies has
sought to respond to the multiplicities of current disability locations
by stressing a need for methods that work by bridging different theo-
retical approaches. In his 2008 study Disability Theory, Tobin Siebers
argues that the complex embodiment central to disability experience
is most appropriately explored through ideas of intersectional identity,
for example, while similar intercategorical analyses have worked to
highlight the various structural contexts through which questions of
disability can be seen to overlap with those of class, race, gender and
sexuality.43 These explorations of the criss-crossing ideological forces
that shape contemporary disability attempt to respond to the kinds
of sophisticated embedded networks that currently form disability
knowledge or produce disability deployments.
48 Disability and the Posthuman

So, to cite some specific contexts: in thinking about the produc-

tion of disability in literary/cultural narratives, critics now think
differently about discourse and metaphor than in 2000 when David
Mitchell and Sharon Snyder published Narrative Prosthesis: Disability
and the Dependencies of Discourse, their ground-breaking analysis of
the role disability plays in literature.44 As we saw with the reading of
the L. Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman in the Preface to this book, meta-
phorical accounts of disability work to render disability conditions
transparent in the work they do to highlight non-disabled stories, and
it was Mitchell and Snyder’s work that helped most in the articula-
tion of how this is a practice that occurs across literatures and across
time. Disability in fiction frequently functions, in their words, as “a
stock feature of characterization [and] an opportunistic metaphor-
ical device”, as well as a “pervasive category of narrative interest”
that animates textual discourses in the production of disability as a
perceived ‘problem’. As they observe: “Nearly every culture views disa-
bility as a problem in need of a solution”.45 Yet, as we also saw in the
Introduction, not only can such readings be resisted (and, indeed, are
more likely to be resisted by a disability literate readership), metaphors
can now be used in productive ways to tell disability stories. Amy
Vidali has noted that re-evaluating the metaphors that carry disability
offers a potential for “creative and historic reinterpretations” of the
narratives in which they are contained.46 It is precisely the possibili-
ties inherent in the metaphorisation of markers of disability that mean
they can become grounding points for the articulation of complex
arguments of cultural distinction and difference. As Clare Barker
asserts using a similar logic, representations of disability wounding
in postcolonial literatures create metaphors that are “physical and
mental, literal and allegorical, and allegorical, human and ecological
[…] drawing attention to the embodied nature” of situated disability
histories.47
Part of the ongoing reflection around disability and cultural produc-
tion has been a renewed concentration on disability aesthetics. In
the work of Tobin Siebers, Michael Davidson and others, disability is
shown to be central to a formation of the aesthetic, particularly from
the modern period onwards. In Disability Aesthetics, his 2010 study
of the representation of disability in visual art in particular, Siebers
discusses how the “underlying corporeality of aesthetics” has often
been replaced with “idealist and disembodied conceptions of art”,
resulting in “a nonmaterialist aesthetics that devalues the role of the
body and limits the definition of art”.48 By way of contrast, Siebers
articulates a position that “conceives of the disabled body and mind as
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 49

playing significant roles in the evolution of modern aesthetics, theo-

rizing disability as a unique resource discovered by modern art and
then embraced by it as one of its defining concepts”. He goes on:

My claim is that the acceptance of disability enriches and complicates

notions of the aesthetic, while the rejection of disability limits defi-
nitions of artistic ideas and objects. In the modern period, disability
acquires aesthetic value because it represents for makers of art a critical
resource for thinking about what a human being is […] Disability does
not express defect, degeneration, or deviancy in modern art. Rather,
disability enlarges our vision of human variation and difference, and
puts forwards perspectives that test presuppositions dear to the history
of aesthetics.49

Siebers’ argument that disability is integral to the workings of

modern art echoes my assertion that the bodies, minds and expe-
riences of those with disabilities are central manifestations of a
posthumanist present. The core issue here, as Davidson explains, is the
necessary rethinking that comes from such an observation. “Disability
aesthetics”, he observes, “foregrounds the extent to which the body
becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted,
when the social meanings attached to sensory and cognitive values
cannot be assumed”.50 As both Davidson and Siebers show, it is not
that disability has been excluded in the history of art, but rather that
it is, as Siebers says, “rarely recognized” as being seminal to modern
cultural production.51 Similarly, the questions raised by bodily adapta-
tion and transformation, cognitive difference, genetic research and the
newly networked subject that emerges from them are, as I will show,
all topics that are suffused with disability concerns, but are rarely
discussed as such. It is when, in Davidson’s elegant phrasing, we “shift
the emphasis from the private appreciation of a beautiful object to the
social consent it produces”, or turn “our attention from the insular act
of perception to the constituencies enlisted in its validation”, that we
can grasp the extent to which disability functions as such a constant
presence in forms of cultural production.52 What working with Siebers
and Davidson’s insights allows is that transition from thinking about
theoretical and ideological conceptions of the relationship between
disability and culture, to the specific aesthetic and textual iterations
of that linkage.
The mainly contemporary texts discussed in this book, then, are
explored with a number of Siebers’ concerns in mind, particularly
in terms of the productive power disability can bring to cultural
50 Disability and the Posthuman

representation. Where any account of the posthuman must necessarily

diverge from his thinking, however, comes in assessing the status of
the ‘modern’ as a category through which a critical enquiry might be
framed. Disability Aesthetics does not detail exactly what Siebers means
by ‘modern’; whether it is resolutely modernist, for example, though
his examples are predominantly from the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, many of them avant garde. He also uses the word to distin-
guish modern art from its ‘classical’ counterpart, a differentiation
that suggests more questions around temporality than of any specific
cultural movement. But, as we have seen, many scholars of posthu-
manism equate ‘the modern’ with the advance of liberal humanism,
and the subsequent codification of bodies and minds that resulted as
a consequence. Certainly, we can read modernsim as a set of contra-
dictory texts on this topic: the potentially progressive aesthetics of
cubism’s twisted bodies, say, as set against the prejudices about disa-
bility seen in the diaries and letters of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf
and other titans of modernist cultural production.53 There is no doubt
that the critique of the modern practised by many theorists of post-
humanism – unpacking its connections to eugenics, speciesism and a
restricted notion of the ‘human’ for example – is valid; but equally
Siebers’ valorisation of the power of modern and avant-garde aesthetics
to undo the logics of dominant social and cultural discourses has a
long history of its own.
Possibly a way to break out of the reductive looping that might
result from such a position is to remember Rose’s comments earlier
about thresholds, and to recognise that the ‘emergent form of life’
he identifies posits posthumanism, like the modern, as a genuine
moment of systemic rupture. The forms of capital that now govern
biomedical personhood, and the technologies that circumscribe
human/non-human interaction, constitute trajectories of emergence
not seen before. Seen in this light the ‘modern’, whether understood
as time period or artistic approach, belongs to the past, and the
contemporaneous nature of posthumanist culture requires forms of
critique that are specific to its multiple manifestations. It is, to borrow
from Davidson, disability’s ‘left-handedness’ and its potential to ‘resit-
uate’ relations through its particular difference that can intersect and
critique our posthuman present.54
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 51

Crip, disarticulate and secret futurities

As Robert McRuer has observed, we live in what he terms “crip times”,

a period when “unruly bodies” occupy both public and imaginative
spaces.55 McRuer’s work outlines the position of disability within
contemporary political and artistic processes. It is a vital considera-
tion for this study because it names (in particular) the socio-economic
contexts that frame posthumanism, serving to remind that the
term does not only exists in philosophical and cultural imaginaries.
McRuer’s argument demands a recognition of “the absolute centrality
of disability to now-global politics of austerity”, a position that, as he
notes, has “rarely been theorised explicitly or comprehensively”.56 In
another example of the kind of threshold mentioned above, twenty-first
century global austerity produces new shapes of disability experiences.
Through practices of commercialisation and commodification, the
reduction of public services and the deliberate erosion of community,
material products of economic decision-making create disabled bodies
that are forced into positions of precarity. As I will explore further
in Chapter 4, market demands for greater ‘flexibility’ and ‘personal
responsibility’ work to characterise disabled lives as inefficient; and
the development of technology that is heralded by many champions of
posthumanism needs to be understood as part of this marketisation.
The possibility of the contemporary cyborg and the materials of the
latest prostheses or exoskeletons, all elements suggesting the promise
of assistive technologies in articulations of disability futures, operate
within a ruthless market logic that exacerbates the binary between
abled and dis/abled subjectivities.
But McRuer’s emphasis on the ‘unruly’ is not only a comment on
the actions of borderless capitalism. It also signals an identification
of disability resistance. His use of the term crip, which has been part
of his own work for over ten years, names those moments of artistic
and social disability response to austerity.57 Cripping contemporary
capitalist globalisation involves “asking how cultural formations and
movements circulate round, emerge from, and resist the hegemonic
global political economy of neoliberal capitalism”. What McRuer
terms the “edgy and powerful valences” of crip insight work as both
social resistance and critical methodology.58 Crip times, then, are not
simply moments of the hateful suppression of disability possibilities;
they are equally part of what McRuer notes is the “fabulous poten-
tial” of “actively collective or coalitional” cultural disability politics.59
McRuer’s work is important because it navigates the balance between
socio-economic modes of production and the power of disability
52 Disability and the Posthuman

expression. Though he does not use the term to focus on posthu-

manism, crip times clearly articulates posthuman moments, seen as
both the coming together of a set of global material constructions that
are often punitive and discriminatory, and productive philosophical/
theoretical contemplation and artistic production that critique this.
This study will follow his work in attempting to crip the politics and
texts of a disability/posthumanist present, as well as its suggested
futures. Cripping is especially important because, as a critical method,
its unruliness is excessive and, therefore, is in line with the commit-
ment to messiness and contradiction that I want to stress as one of the
core subjects of this study. Crip possesses the capacity both to enter
and critique the logic of market commodification control and then to
vocalise (often to shout) what McRuer terms the “flamboyantly anti-
identitarian” advocacy central to the art, culture and politics made by
people with disabilities.
To vocalise is to articulate, and the articulation of contemporary
disability bodies and subjectivities in a time of a posthumanist technol-
ogised present is, as we have seen, a difficult process. It also involves
a recognition of what James Berger identifies as the “disarticulate”
(emphasis mine), a cultural expression “which cannot be accounted
for and which thus has some undetermined subversive power”.60
Berger’s focus in his 2014 book The Disarticulate: Language, Disability
and the Narratives of Modernity is on cognitively and/or linguistically
impaired characters in modern fiction, but his observation works
more broadly. It serves to remind that disability does not always shout
out; indeed, part of the interaction between disabled presence and
contemporary assistive technologies concerns the amplification of the
vocal, through new forms of (for example) voice recognition software
or neurological sonification communication systems. But Berger’s
point is that the dis/inarticulate is a site of disability power, and at
different instances this study will analyse how textual representations
of perceived ‘voicelessness’ (and, concomitantly, an absence of embod-
iment) function rather as capacities and moments of subversion.
They are what Michael Bérubé – like Berger, writing on intellectual
disability – terms the “secret life of stories”; often instances where
narratives are productively disabled through prevention or contesta-
tion.61 Bérubé identifies this secrecy not only in the ways that texts
deploy (to use his key term) disability but also because it is a “social
relation, involving beliefs and social practices that structure the appre-
hension of disability”.62 McRuer’s crip advocacy, then, is also Berger’s
disarticulate and Bérubé’s secret. It is the noise and the quiet of disa-
bility presence, a productive pairing this book will embrace.63
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 53

As noted previously, contemporary critical disability studies is

increasingly adept at naming and negotiating a post-identity landscape
of disabled experiences, but it needs to be stressed that disability is still
also often identity and identification. The history of disabled people is,
as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Ellen
Samuels and many others have shown, is one of being displayed and
named, while McRuer’s crip practices map the reclamation of identities
made by people with disabilities as a response to this. Identity remains
vital when analysing the relationships that run through disability pres-
ence. In Disability Theory Tobin Siebers articulates a powerful “defense
of identity politics and a counterargument to the idea […] that identity
politics cannot be justified because it is linked to pain and suffering”
(or, we might add, a declared simplistic apprehension of the body). He
goes on: “Identities, narratives and experiences based on disability
have the status of theory because they represent locations and forms
of embodiment from which the dominant ideologies of society become
visible and open to criticism”. Properly defined, Siebers asserts, iden-
tity is “an epistemological construction that contains a broad array of
theories about navigating social environments”.64 In considering post-
humanism, we can extend Siebers’ “broad array of theories” beyond
the purely social. The modes of embodiment the posthumanist
body produces through interactions of human and technology create
particular contemporary forms of identity, social but also imagined.
Likewise, I am drawn towards Samuels’ articulation of the “fantasies
of identification” that have accompanied the attempted naming of
those with disabilities, because what she rightly sees as the “inevitable”
historical failure of “neatly categorizing all bodies and identities” in
previous centuries continues into our own age.65 More than with most
disability narratives, those shaped by technologies create fantasies –
of rehabilitation, restitution, cure and (in a posthumanist age) of the
superhuman. In what follows, stories of fantasy and the fantastic will be
common, and I share with Samuels the need to look for what she terms
“future identifications” and the exploration of “alternatives to scien-
tific knowledge models for authenticating identities”. As she goes on to
observe: “Representation is not the only step towards material change,
but neither is it a passive reflector of such change”.66 As with the argu-
ments made by McRuer, Berger and Bérubé, Samuels acknowledges
disability’s capacity to be both metaphor and materiality, to function as
abstract and grounded, and she asserts the power of cultural narratives
in the telling of disability experience.
Charting the subtle, complex and often difficult intersections
between disability and posthumanism is a challenge, but the best
54 Disability and the Posthuman

recent work in disability theory makes it clear that disability itself

contains the kinds of located, subversive and potent power that makes
such a process possible. David Mitchell, Susan Antebi and Sharon
Snyder’s careful unpicking of the relationship between materiality,
biopolitics and crip affect outlines the beginnings of a theory attuned
to the value of critical posthumanist methodologies in reading the
materiality of the disabled body. They note that: “Posthumanist disa-
bility theory offers an opportunity to provide a substantive theoretical
reworking of the repetitive employment of impaired – read: socially
marked and biologically determined as undesirable – bodies as diag-
nostic tools of things gone awry in their social and environmental
contexts”. Such theory, they continue, “recognize[s] that matter itself
exerts influence and agency that ultimately outstrips any human
ability to deterministically channel its substantiality into false discur-
sive singularities”. One result of this apprehension of matter is that it
“returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process
of materiality’s dynamic interactionism. It situates disability not as
deviant, but rather as evidence of the ‘excess’ that marks materiality
agency and reaches beyond the realm of the cultural while shaping
its formulations”.67 Whether in the plasticity of stories and aesthetics
charted in McRuer, Berger and Bérubé, or through the productively
excessive material agency identified by Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder,
critical disability and posthumanist insight is increasingly being
understood to find common cause.
To bring these perspectives together, then, and to think of post-
humanist subjects as they interact with disability deployments (to
return to this chapter’s title) is to stress this book’s desire to partici-
pate in the ongoing evolution of critical disability studies. It is to
signal a commitment to the development of disability aesthetics and
critique within global political and economic systems, and to assert
the power of cultural texts to throw into relief the ideological forces
that shape contemporary worlds. If discussions of the posthuman have
been transformed by ongoing developments in global biotechnolo-
gies within the space of the last decade, then those transformations
have also brought an unparalleled rate of change to the lives of those
with disabilities. Because of this, thinking about posthumanism and
disability, whether in terms of technology, bioethics, material loca-
tions or public understanding, go hand in hand, the shadow of the one
inevitably falling on the other. The challenge, however, is to outline
and work with critical systems that do justice to the complexities and
pace of change the relationship displays; returning to Rosi Braidotti’s
observation stated at the start of this chapter, to engage “productively
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 55

with the contradictions, paradoxes and injustices they engender”.

Braidotti herself, in her most recent work Posthuman Knowledge (2019),
notes how disability can provide exactly this kind of production. She
observes:

Critical disability studies are perfectly at ease with the posthuman

subject, because disability has always contravened the classical
humanist conception of what it means to be human. The converse is
also true as disability invites a critical analysis to the posthuman, to
the extent that disability epitomizes a posthuman enhancement of
the self while simultaneously demanding recognition of the self in the
humanist register.68

For me, the kind of invitation Braidotti see here lies in the conversa-
tions that are taking place around the future of the body, and especially
the stories that those conversations tell.

Face off

A central debate in thinking about the relationship between disability

and technology surrounds what exactly technologised bodies are
supposed to be, and equally what they are for. How they enact and make
meaning of the multiple and varied discourses that run through them
tells a story of the way futures of the body are imagined. Biotechnology
has the improvement of lives as a central purpose, while medical inter-
vention is tasked with saving and prolonging life. The excitement and
promise of technology set out a future landscape of body augmenta-
tion and enhancement that appears to offer unlimited possibilities for
better human health. Those possibilities are, however, paralleled with
counter statements of the need for caution in celebrating technolog-
ical development. As seen earlier with Francis Fukuyama’s fears of an
emerging posthuman future, for many the changes that will come with
A.I. or genetic modification are a profound threat to current concepts
of humanity.
These issues of promise and threat are central to philosophical
and technofantasist transhumanist approaches to the relationship
between technology and the body. In the work of high-profile figures
such as Nick Bostrom, Julian Savulescu, Anders Sandberg and others,
transhumanism ultimately celebrates the possible “reinvention” of
the human self, what Bostrom and Savulescu call the “enormous
potential benefits” of “the opportunity fundamentally to change the
56 Disability and the Posthuman

human condition”.69 Similarly, metaphysician Andy Clark asserts “that

human bodies and minds are essentially open to episodes of deep and
transformative restructuring” through the use of technology.70 Such
thinking and language suffuse writing on transhumanism, where
ideas of life enhancement, uploaded consciousnesses and transcendent
engineering all jostle in what Gregory Stock, discussing germline
manipulation in his 2003 book Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes,
Changing Our Future, calls “the battle for the future”.71 Clark’s essay
and an extract from Stock’s book both feature in The Transhumanist
Reader, a seminal collection of writings on the topic published in 2013.
The Reader outlines a comprehensive set of transhumanist thinking,
including a ‘Transhumanist Declaration’, a working document first
announced by 23 scholars and scientists in 1998 and modified over the
years that followed, that calls for “morphological freedom – the right
to modify and enhance one’s body, cognition and emotions”.72 While
transhumanism is not a unified field (Stock calls transhumanists “a
hodgepodge of individuals loosely united by a desire to transcend
human limitations”73), this assertion of the right to technological
change sits as a core argument across much of the spectrum of tran-
shumanist thinking, for all that there is much discussion of the ethical
caution that needs to be exercised in the pursuit of such ‘freedom’.
In his essay in The Transhumanist Reader, Anders Sandberg places
transhumanism in direct dialogue with disability. Discussing morpho-
logical freedom, Sandberg notes how many people with disabilities
“over time have become used to” their personal forms of embodiment
and have “integrated them into their self-image”. Any suggestion of
using technology as a cure for this population, he continues, “quite
often is experienced as an attack on their human dignity”. One result
of this, he observes, is that “the disability movement has been a strong
supporter of the right to determine one’s body” and that, as a conse-
quence, there “seems to be a natural point of agreement between
transhumanists and the disability movement which might prove
fruitful in future debate”.74 On the face of it, Sandberg is here iden-
tifying points of interaction that align disabled difference with trans/
posthumanist theory, but such connections feel uneasy in an essay
that also makes reference to “handicapped people” and “deranged
persons”.75 His characterisation of ‘the disability movement’, with its
sense of a singular purpose, suggests that for Sandberg ‘disability’ is
more a category through which to discuss abstract ethics than a recog-
nition of a varied set of lived experiences, a common critical practice
in analytic philosophical accounts of the relationship between tech-
nology and disabled bodies. Possibly the contradiction is best summed
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 57

up in his use of the phrase ‘human dignity’; if dignity can be consid-

ered a state essential for people with disabilities (though one often
denied), its juxtaposition with ‘human’ suggests the kind of coherent
humanist self that both disability and posthumanism challenge. For
many scholars of disability, it is transhumanism’s avowed desire to
extend the human through a recourse to humanist conceptions of the
subject that is the problem. To move ‘beyond’ in this way is both to
seek an idea of perfection (a state that always has had the suppos-
edly ‘broken’ body of disability as its antithesis), and a commitment to
technological research that chases a future while ignoring the everyday
situations of peoples with disabilities (and others who lack access to
resources) in the here and now.76
“Transhumanists philosophies”, Russell Blackford writes, “are
philosophies of self-transformation and self-overcoming”, terms that
echo precisely the neoliberal fixation on the ever-expanding capabil-
ities of the self and evoke one of the major contemporary demands
– ‘overcoming’ – that society demands of those with disabilities.
Blackford expands this outline of transhumanist philosophies with a
clearer focus on the nexus between technology and the body:

Ultimately, transhumanists argue, technological intervention in the

capacities of the human body and mind will lead to alterations so
dramatic that it will make intuitive sense to call the deeply altered
people of the near and not-so-near future posthuman: they will be
continuous with us but unlike us in many ways. Optimistically, they
might be us, greatly changed. On the transhumanist picture, we are
not posthuman yet, but we are a bridge, or a rope, between histor-
ical humans and beings with posthuman capacities. And what do
we plan to transcend? Not the order of nature, but merely our own
limitations.77

Disabled bodies have always been those considered to have ‘limita-

tions’, while it is clear that Blackford’s characterisation of a common
‘we’ and ‘us’ here articulates a generalised norm of humanity that, in
fact, functions through its exclusion of those with disabilities. It is this
logic that, in the end, exemplifies transhumanist conceptions of the
future, and not Sanders’ sketch of a potentially more tolerant charac-
terisation of different bodies.
In order to see how such ideas function in cultural narratives, I
want here to explore the tensions between transhumanist ideas of the
transcendence of limitations, posthumanist notions of non-unitary
subjects, and disability accounts of complex embodiment through
58 Disability and the Posthuman

a reading of the X-Men films, one of the most popular and finan-
cially successful superhero franchises of the twenty-first century. As
stressed throughout this book, it is in the competing contradictions
of imagined narratives that crucial formations of the relationship
between technology and future bodies are played out, and certainly
the cultural reach of the X-Men films means that their conception and
deployment of differently visualised bodies provide powerful images
of variation to a global audience. The characters of the X-verse are
both hyperable and precariously vulnerable; they embody strength
and fragility and enact narratives of humanist restitution even as
they suggest networks of posthuman affiliation. Reading their stories
provides a way to show how the complexities of cultural theory and
aesthetics discussed in this chapter are animated in textual forms.
The X-Men films, particularly the first three in the franchise –
X-Men (2000), X2 (2003; also known as X Men 2 and X-Men United)
and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) – use the central idea of the ‘mutant’
to promote a broad narrative of social acceptance and integration,
inviting identification from a range of non-majority communities.
They can be read in terms of teenage estrangement, racial and sexual
equality (the sexism of the titles notwithstanding), abuses of political
power, and post-9/11 debates surrounding immigration and security.78
The ways the films function when seen through a disability optic,
however, makes a compelling case for the validity of reading their
depiction of the complexities of embodied disabled difference.79 The
mutation common to all the X-characters (“the key to our evolution”
as the voiceover at the start of the first film puts it) is genetic, and the
films’ deployment of human variation, social prejudice and medical/
technological interventions occur in a specific posthumanist context
where ideas of mutants having evolved ‘beyond’ humanity are central
to each feature. More specifically, disability politics figure recur-
rently, from the advocacy, indeed superiority, of difference espoused
by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to the highly disability-specific
debate around the idea of ‘curing’ at the start of X-Men: The Last Stand.
Possibly most tellingly, disability is central to major character Charles
Xavier (Patrick Stewart) through the constant presence of his iconic
wheelchair, marked with an X on each wheel and always the focus of
the shots in each film in which Xavier is introduced. Seemingly well
aware of the questions of bodies and minds they are raising, the first
X-Men films were the most complex global popular representations of
disability in the first decade of the twenty-first century.80
X2 poses a set of intriguing connections between ideas of disa-
bled difference and posthumanist technologies and ethics. It has two
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 59

characters in wheelchairs. First, and most obviously, there is Xavier,

the leader of the X-Men and a figure blessed with cognitive powers
that allow him telepathic access to the thoughts of others. Xavier
is a teacher, strategist and diplomat, and an example of leadership
for those at the school (‘for gifted youngsters’) he heads. He is also
an eloquent defender of mutant difference in the face of powerful
government opposition, but one committed to brokering a peaceful
relationship with the human majority. In the film’s fictional universe,
he is, to employ the kind of racial/cultural reading the narrative
invites, the Martin Luther King figure, as against the Malcolm X style
separatist tendencies of Eric Lensherr/Magneto (Ian McKellen) and
his Brotherhood, a grouping determined to destroy those non-mutants
who oppose difference. But if the Xavier/Magneto relationship is the
most dramatic in the film (and indeed across the other features in
the series), it is arguably not where the most interesting face-off in
this particular narrative takes place. The second character in a wheel-
chair is Jason Stryker (Michael Reid MacKay), a mutant and the son
of Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox), the film’s principle villain
and a figure dedicated to eradicating the X-Men because of a hatred
of their difference. Like Xavier, Jason has significant powers (both are
‘level 5’ mutants, the ‘highest’ ranking possible), but if Xavier repre-
sents a (more than) capable characterisation of disability, Jason enacts
traditional associations of disabled difference. Hated and rejected by
his father, Jason had been a student at Xavier’s school, but when it
becomes clear that Xavier’s intention was to attempt to respect and
develop, rather than cure, his son’s exceptionality, Stryker chooses to
turn Jason into a weapon through which he can enact genocide against
all mutants.81
The confrontation between the two characters comes as a result of
this weaponisation of Jason and, specifically, his disability/exception-
ality. Xavier has developed Cerebro, a machine that channels telepathy
and through which he can identify and connect to all mutants on
Earth, a process that allows for the dissemination of his version of
liberalism and tolerance against a backdrop of worsening human–
mutant relations. Stryker, however, recognises the value of Cerebro as
a vehicle for his genocidal impulses and develops a second version of
the machine that not only identifies Earth’s total non-mutant popula-
tion, but has the power to destroy it. Because of his cognitive powers,
Jason is able to manipulate the system to threaten mass slaughter.
As a result, the two characters in wheelchairs face off against one
another, inside Cerebro, in a battle of minds over the future of the
planet’s population. As Petra Kuppers has observed, Xavier’s various
60 Disability and the Posthuman

wheelchairs in the film denote an intriguing intersection between

technology, style and disability; they “are sometimes made of hard
glistening steel, sometimes made of clear, clean, lightweight, unbreak-
able glass or plastic” and overall form “part of a stylish and stylized
world into which the cinema viewer is inducted”. The glass wheel-
chair Xavier uses, Kuppers notes, is “gorgeous”, while the “geometry
and balance” he achieves when in his wheelchairs “are indicators of
Xavier’s modesty, calm and balanced approach”, signifying “an orderly
man/machine hybrid, a being who creates his own environment as an
extension of his telepathic mind”.82 His wheelchairs are, we might say,
full of a technologised posthumanist confidence and convey a highly
aestheticised acceptance of difference (something that extends to the
wider use of visuals in conveying the attractiveness of all the X charac-
ters). Jason, on the other hand, lacks all such visual markers. Hunched
in a hospital-style smock in what appears to be a rudimentary (basic,
inexpensive, unglamorous) wheelchair, connected to machinery and
scarred from operations that link his disability to the murderous prac-
tices of Holocaust-like, experimental, medicine, Jason is a ‘monstrous’
figure produced by his father’s pathology. His monstrosity is only
heightened by the fact that, in order to confuse Xavier during their
conversation, he morphs his appearance to become a young girl, a
figure whose innocence is set firmly against his own manipulated
degradation.
Where, then, is the posthuman and where is the disability in this
scene? Which wheelchair (and which incumbent) invites the stronger
claim in any consideration of narrative meaning or ethics in this
fiction? Xavier’s disabled difference is represented as a powerful posi-
tive force, one marshalled for the benefit of all in his desire to maintain
peace; whereas it appears that Jason – through no fault of his own
(he is after all not in control of his actions) – is best understood as
exemplifying a force of destruction. In such a reading, Xavier is a para-
digmatically benevolent and progressive example of the posthuman,
blending cognitive diversity with technology and a philosophical
ability to see ‘beyond’ to a future in which human and mutant can
co-inhabit and co-evolve. In the character of Xavier, the X-Men films
appear to welcome the disability to come in any posthumanist future.
He becomes the transhumanists’ cyborg, a hybrid not only in terms of
physical and cognitive capabilities, but also of judgement and morality,
convinced that the evolution that has produced the X mutation has
also created moral and ethical clarity in recognising what is good and
right.83 The enthusiasm noted earlier for a holistic trans/posthumanist
subjectivity that might contain the best virtues of corporeal existence
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 61

Disability, technology and the human. Jason (Michael Reid MacKay)

and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) in X2

and informational/technological expertise finds its hero in Xavier and

the enacting of his benevolent mutant self.
It is precisely because Xavier is such a transhumanist icon that,
when we pause to consider his place within the wider fabric of the film,
he makes for an unconvincing example of any disability subjectivity or
politics. He is, for example, clearly the most humanist character in the
entire story, his inclusive values set against not only Magneto’s separa-
tism, but arguably more importantly Stryker’s warped and delusional
vision of what humanity might be, and the unenlightened, limited
conception of society conceived of by government and expressed by
President McKenna (Cotter Smith). Xavier’s teachings, the film makes
clear, should apply to everyone he encounters, mutant or human. It
is also obvious that Xavier is a particular and peculiar exemplar of a
certain biocapitalistic version of disability tolerance; visually his school
contains all the trappings (ivy-covered walls and wood-panelled corri-
dors) of an exclusive private establishment, while the film’s ideas of
education and inclusivity, its notion of a future community, cannot
suppress a specifically American idea of individual advancement
and neoliberal capability.84 X-2’s visual style also oozes a glamorous
capitalism, particularly through its casting of supermodels (Rebecca
Romijn as Mystique) and use of clothing and gadgetry; the school’s jet,
for example, exhibits technological capabilities beyond anything the
US government can muster.
As we saw earlier in the theorising of Siebers, Davidson, McRuer,
Berger and Bérubé however, disability representation and deploy-
ment enacts not only morality tales of restitution and overcoming but
carries within these a capacity for critique and revision. The different
bodies involved in the face off between Xavier and Jason remind us
of Davidson’s observation of “the extent to which the body becomes
thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted”. Such
62 Disability and the Posthuman

newly thinkable bodies are, as McRuer noted, ‘unruly’ and they carry
within them the ‘disarticulate’ subversive power identified by Berger
as well as the ‘secrets’ Bérubé locates within disability stories. Jason
portrays all these things. Set against the shining transhumanist capa-
bility of Xavier, Jason’s disability appears less the example of pathology
it is possibly intended to be, and more, because the meaning of his body
and its interaction with technology can no longer be taken for granted,
a corrective to the excesses of Xavier’s stylish tolerance. If the X-Men
films work to continually stress the necessary acceptance of otherness
and diversity, especially as they relate to disability, Jason reminds us
that they only do so within certain frames of reference. Misshapen and
broken, Jason is the version of disability that the film works so hard
to oppose and erase, but the place he occupies in the narrative – his
central importance to the story, as evidence in the scene with Xavier –
works to undermine the power of this argument. In all its ordinariness,
Jason’s wheelchair cannot help but remind us that Xavier’s wheelchair
is less about disability than it might seem and is rather the vision of a
certain form of desire, a wish that the future will be inclusive. But, as
we might expect from a Hollywood A-list feature, it appears to be a
desire in which the costs (here maybe literal costs) of such inclusivity
are hidden. Jason’s monstrosity – his scars and the various cords and
leads that connect him to (unknown) machines – speak to the physical
damage societies do to disabled bodies, in opposition to the perfect
physical integration between man and machine we see in Xavier, or the
stylised difference on display in other characters in the film, such as
Mystique or Nightcrawler (Alan Cummings), whose bodies are marked
(blue tattoos or scales) with their mutant identities.
Xavier wins the face-off between the two characters; ultimately
his power and the value for which he stands are the stronger, though
he needs to be aided by Magneto. What then happens to Jason is
highly problematic: as the film gathers pace towards its climax and
the complex in which Stryker has established his version of Cerebro is
about to be destroyed in a flood following the breaking of a dam, Jason
is simply left (unrepresented, unfilmed), presumably to perish. We
see Stryker’s demise in some detail, as it is the necessary closure to
the film’s main antagonistic relationship, but the story simply forgets
about Jason. He is afforded no kind of ending, not even a straightfor-
ward narrative one in which he is killed. He simply disappears. In the
ways in which Jason is overlooked, we can see parallels with those
communities of the disabled who find themselves excluded: whether
from majority power structures and decision-making processes, or
from social representation and cultural stories; left behind as interest
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 63

focuses elsewhere. His unruliness, however, and the presence of his

disarticulate, forgotten body, allows for the critical insight that unpicks
the politics of disability in the film.
Structurally, the narrative complexity in X2 is similar to that of
Baum’s Tin Woodman discussed earlier. In the Oz stories, the posthu-
manist embodiment of the Woodman and experience of his physical
self are in tension with his emotional and moral desires, the former
suggesting a way of living in the world that is challenged by the latter’s
conception of ‘heart and home’. With X2, the underpinning ideas of
tolerance and a progressive politics create a matrix of ethical inclusion,
but the terms of such inclusion become destabilised when we pause
to consider the film’s actual detail of disability. Such a contradiction
is recognisable in many of the contemporary Hollywood features
that represent embodied difference in clearly posthumanist contexts,
particularly narratives of superhuman abilities. To give but one
example, the 2017 film version of Ghost in the Shell, starring Scarlett
Johansson and directed by Rupert Sanders, is an adaptation/remake
of the manga narrative of the same name by Masamune Shirow first
serialised in 1989, and subsequently made into an animated film
in 1995 by Mamoru Oshii.85 Like its Japanese predecessors, the US
feature depicts a cyberpunk world in which technological body adap-
tations are common and characters sport a variety of augmentations
and enhancements, from limited skin grafts to the insertion of human
brains into full-body prostheses. But whereas the Japanese versions of
the narrative explore the kinds of networked ideas of body, self and
community that arise from this, the US film accentuates the search
for origins of central character police Major (Johansson). Major has
a human brain inside a full manufactured body, but in a search for a
resolution of this interaction the story enacts a set of questions around
her selfhood that produces a flatly humanist story of a protagonist
coming to terms with change.
The reduction of the original Ghost in the Shell story to the humanist
trajectory of the 2017 film centres on the simplification of the overall
script and especially the narrative’s end. In both the manga and the
1995 film, Major merges her ‘ghost’ with that of the Puppet Master,
the embodied A.I. criminal figure she has been hunting for the bulk
of the story, to create a networked/combined body and self. In the
2017 production, the Puppet Master figure, Kuze (Michael Carmen
Pitt), turns out to be a childhood friend of Major who (in an echo of
the Wolverine narrative in the X-Men films) was a test subject in a
government experiment programme into the creation of cyborgs, one
that included Major and which wiped both characters’ memories.
64 Disability and the Posthuman

When Kuze offers to merge with Major, she refuses and returns to her
mother, from whom she was taken as a child and whom she has redis-
covered.86 In place of the complex future-facing assemblages of the
Japanese narrative(s), the US Ghost in the Shell reconstitutes personal
selfhood within the context of a reactivated family dynamic. The film
is visually stunning, evoking a posthumanist, cyberpunk-inflected
urban environment in great detail, but in its own way it is still an
account of Dorothy trying to find her way home from Oz. Even with
the most sophisticated technologised prosthetic body available, Major
decides that “humanity is our virtue” (as she says in the voiceover that
closes the film) in a deliberate choice of the human over the “manu-
factured”. In pursuing justice through her role as a police officer, Major
will be guided by the ‘real’ self she has rediscovered.87

Conclusion: on not resolving

As noted earlier, Rosi Braidotti claims that in a time of posthumanism,

“the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we
want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transforma-
tions”. As we have seen, the mutations of the X-Men films display the
conditions to be complex: high-profile deployments of disability often
working towards humanist conclusions but carrying within them the
unruliness of the disabled body that unsettles both the aesthetics and
cultural politics of the films’ representations. Braidotti does not disag-
gregate the ‘we’ in her assertion, but within the context of her writing
it does not come across as the standard humanist plural as noted
earlier in Blackford’s work, assuming continuity across all humans on
the planet. It appears rather as the possibility of other choices and
associations, an invitation to choose the positions ‘we’ might wish to
occupy: disabled, crip, multiple, liminal.
Here, then, we might make a critical choice similar to that suggested
in the preface in relation to Baum’s Tin Woodman, one that embraces a
posthumanist complex embodiment and sees technology aligned with
disability possibilities as opposed to humanist conceptions of self. In
terms of the different versions of Ghost in the Shell, this means rejecting
the fanfare of Hollywood and learning from the possible selves and
worlds found in Shirow’s and Oshii’s imaginings. Manga and anime
resound with what Hajime Nakatami calls “thematics of order and
disorder, self and other, and humans and nonhumans”, though neither
form sees these as problematic boundaries that require solving.88 So,
for example, the various puppet, doll, cyborg or automata figures that
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 65

recur through the different Japanese Ghost in the Shell narratives work
to explore the uncanniness of ningyō (‘human-shaped figure’) in the
representations of interactions between humans and non-humans.89 It
is precisely the coming together of these different possibilities, and not
their resolution, that drives meaning in Shirow’s manga and Oshii’s
film, where the networks of body/self/other/biology/human/machine
point towards the shape of cultural futures.
The stories disability tells open up the contexts and relationships in
which bodies and technologies come together. As I have tried to show
in this chapter, these combinations result in a matrix of aesthetics,
theory and politics, as well as the complex heritage of comprehending
disability and crip subjects. Appreciating disabled bodies helps unveil
the humanism central to much transhumanist thinking, but also
posits alternative affinities with those strands of critical posthumanist
thinking that champion non-unitary selves and a grounded, material
technological space in which those selves might exist. It also allows for
critical rereadings of those texts in which technologised bodies create
powerful images and narratives of embodied difference, a process
I will continue in the chapters that follow. And, as many disability
scholars observe, it reminds us that all these processes are political,
whether the politics of identity and location, questions of access to
developing technology, or aesthetic and representational practice. It is
this wide sense of politics that I want to carry forward into the chap-
ters that follow.

Notes

1 Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, ‘Introduction: posthuman bodies’

in Halberstam and Livingston (eds), Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 19.
2 Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 1.
3 Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 13.
4 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), p. 1.
5 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, pp. 1–2.
6 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 213.
7 Braidotti’s work on the posthuman has been explored in relation to socio-
logical approaches to disability studies. See Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom
and Katherine Runswick Cole, ‘Posthuman disability studies’, Subjectivity 7,
no. 4 (December 2014), pp. 342–361.
66 Disability and the Posthuman

8 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,

Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1999), pp. 286–287.
9 Subsequent work on posthumanism, technology and the body has not always
agreed with Hayles’ account of the value of embodiment. In Cyborgs and
Barbie Dolls, Kim Toffoletti concludes her engagement with Hayles’ work by
remaining “unconvinced that we can speak unproblematically about mate-
rial existence, especially in a context where real and virtual worlds are no
longer clear” (Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and
the Posthuman Body (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 16–17).
Despina Kakoudaki, writing in 2014, critiques Hayles for producing a para-
digm of the posthuman that is “both the precondition of human embodiment
[and] the precondition of our seamless merger with computer networks
and virtual technologies”. Kakoudaki notes that, while this “concept of the
posthuman refers to contemporary modes of subjectivity, highlighting the
constructed and embedded nature of the self within technological, social,
and political contexts”, it “may also express vague, apocalyptic, and transcen-
dental aspirations for moving beyond the limits of the body or beyond matter
altogether” (Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural
Work of Artificial People (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University
Press, 2014), pp. 16–17).
10 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 387.
11 Neil Badmington, ‘Introduction: approaching posthumanism’ in Badmington
(ed.), Posthumanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 9–10.
12 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 29.
13 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 246.
14 The idea of ‘science fiction becoming fact’ is a common refrain when
discussing the status and promise of contemporary technology, especially
from those figures involved in the production of such technologies. But
this perspective can only see fiction as content and, in asserting that future
humans will merge with machines, or construct spaceships that can travel
across the galaxy (and many other classic tropes of the genre), it completely
misses the messiness and contradictions that in fact are central to the way
fiction works. If science fiction could indeed become fact it would create all
manner of productive uncertainties, far beyond mere questions of utility.
15 Robert Pepperell, The Post-Human Condition (Exeter: Intellect, 1995), p. i
(emphasis in original).
16 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London
and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 14.
17 David T. Mitchell with Sharon S. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability:
Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2015), p. 6. See also chapter 1, ‘From Liberal to
Neoliberal Futures of Disability’, pp. 35–62.
18 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2013), p. 20.
19 Backpacker, October 2000, p. 3. I consider it no small irony that I find myself
writing about this advert while my own spinal stenosis means my vertebrae
are compressed. No drooling, however.
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 67

20 Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham,

NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 133–134. See pp. 138–181
for full discussion of the idea of ‘Life as Business Plan’.
21 Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago,
IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2.
22 Sunder Rajan, Biocapital, p. 34.
23 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal
Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 19 and 10.
24 Cooper, Life as Surplus, p. 15.
25 Cooper, Life as Surplus, pp. 10–11.
26 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution (London: Profile, 2003), p. 7. Fukuyama’s book is in many ways
an extension of his arguments about ‘human nature’ and morality, here
seen through the lens of biotechnology, explored in his earlier The Great
Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order, albeit with a
more simplistic view of such ‘nature’. See The Great Disruption: Human Nature
and the Reconstruction of Social Order (London: Profile, 1999).
27 Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, p. 9.
28 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 5.
29 Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 194.
30 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
2010), p. xvi.
31 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xv.
32 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, pp. 126 and xv.
33 Possibly for this reason, Wolfe’s engagement with disability studies in one of
the chapters of What is Posthumanism? is a curious investigation. Focusing on
Temple Grandin’s accounts of her autism in her autobiographical writings,
Wolfe is suspicious of what he terms the “pragmatic pursuits” of disability
studies’ concentration on the material consequences of living disabled lives
because “they are forced to work within the purview of a liberal humanism
in philosophy, politics, and law”. This curtails the opportunity to pursue “a
more ambitious and more profound ethical project: a new and more inclusive
form of ethic pluralism”. For Wolfe then, the detail of grounded disability
lives is not ‘profound’, while disability studies itself only works to produce
a “blockage” in any more ‘ambitious’ investigation of subjectivity. Instead
he turns (again) to Derrida to make what he believes to be more insightful
points about blindness or trans-species affiliations. It comes as no surprise
then when, explaining his use of Grandin’s work, he asserts that “I am less
concerned with evaluating Grandin’s assessment of her own case and its
broader implications – an assessment that is often problematic, in my view –
than with mobilizing her observations about her experience towards my own
critical ends” (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, pp. 137, 139 and 128).
34 In the light of Wolfe’s championing of Derrida, it is interesting to note that
my idea of the future here is, in part, itself a point taken from Derrida, whose
concept of l’avenir is precisely one of the future that is to come and the ways in
which this shapes the present (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. 170).
68 Disability and the Posthuman

35 I much prefer the analyses and arguments put forward by Stefan Herbrechter
in his 2013 study Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, to those of Wolfe.
Herbrechter’s account of posthumanism’s genealogies and its possible critical
futures are acute, but I find myself frustrated by his final recourse to Derrida
and other theorists when contemplating the ultimate trajectories of posthu-
manism’s potentials.
36 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 285.
37 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the
Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2006), p. 7.
38 Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim, ‘Disability and the edges of intersectionality’
in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Literature
and Disability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 125.
39 See Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear, ‘Unspeakable offenses: untangling
race and disability in discourses of intersectionality’, Journal of Literary and
Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 2 (2010), pp. 127–145; Nancy J. Hirschmann,
‘Queer/fear: disability, sexuality, and the other’, Journal of Medical Humanities
34, no. 2 (2013), pp. 139–147; and Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip.
40 Frances Ryan, Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People
(London: Verso, 2019); and Katharine Quarmby, Scapegoat: Why We Are
Failing Disabled People (London: Portobello Books, 2011). Quarmby notes
that as she conducted the research for her book, “every disabled person I’ve
interviewed, or even encountered socially, has experienced discrimination, or
harassment, or worse” (p. 238).
41 Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourse of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 173.
42 Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and
(Bio)ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). See also ‘“Why should
our bodies end at the skin”: embodiment, boundaries and somatechnics’,
Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015), pp. 13–29; ‘Prosthetic performativity: Deleuzian
connections and queer corporealities’ in Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr
(eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2009), pp. 115–133; and ‘Re-imagining embodiment: prostheses, supple-
ments and boundaries’, Somatechnics 3, no. 2 (2013), pp. 270–286. As these
last two articles indicate, Shildrick has used disability frames, and specifically
ideas of prosthetics, to explore the permeable boundaries of the body.
43 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
2008), pp. 22–33.
44 David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the
Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000).
45 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, pp. 47 and 57.
46 Amy Vidali, ‘Seeing what we know: disability and theories of metaphor’,
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 1 (2010), pp. 33–34.
47 Clare Barker, “‘Radiant afflication”, disability narratives in postcolonial
literature’ in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds), The Cambridge Companion
to Literature and Disability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
p. 104. Barker’s initial exploration of wounds comes through a reading of
Derek Walcott’s 1990 long poem Omeros.
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 69

48 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan

Press, 2010), p. 1.
49 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, pp. 2–3.
50 Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 4.
51 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, p. 4.
52 Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand, p. 144.
53 For a thorough and compelling reading of disability in cultures of artistic
(especially literary) modernism, see Davidson, Invalid Modernism: Disability
and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
54 Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand, p. xvi.
55 Robert McRuer, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (New York:
New York University Press, 2018), p. 8.
56 McRuer, Crip Times, p. 4.
57 See especially Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2006).
58 McRuer, Crip Times, p. 13.
59 McRuer, Crip Times, p. 20.
60 James Berger, The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of
Modernity (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 9.
61 Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How
Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (New York:
New York University Press, 2016).
62 Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories, p. 25. Bérubé also argues that the workings of
his notion of the “secret” aim to offer to a more sophisticated version of crit-
ical disability studies: “Even as disability studies has established itself in the
humanities in a way that was unthinkable twenty years ago, it has still limited
itself to too narrow a range of options when it comes to literary criticism
[…] I am quite serious about the conviction that disability studies limits itself
unnecessarily, as a new branch of criticism and theory, whenever it confines
itself to determining the disability status of individual characters” (p. 20).
While this point is well made, The Secret Life of Stories is a highly selective and,
at times, curiously self-indulgent study. Bérubé’s claims for a rewriting of a
literary critical disability methodology are based around, as he admits, “delin-
eating a few of the most important and engaging uses of intellectual disability
in fiction” (p. 31), but the assumptions behind what constitutes ‘important’
or ‘engaging’, or indeed a real sense of why this version of a ‘few’ is better
than any other, go uninterrogated.
63 The work of McRuer, Berger and Bérubé, and especially the notion that
disability representation in itself contains an inherent process of critique,
can be seen to extend Ato Quayson’s outlining of the ‘aesthetic nervous-
ness’ that comes with that he calls “the crisis of representation”. It is “the
aesthetic domain itself”, Quayson asserts, that becomes short-circuited
on the encounter with disability”. The ‘nervousness’ that results can “be
discerned in the suspension, collapse, or general short-circuiting of the hith-
erto dominant protocols of representation that may have governed the text”.
See Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York:
Columbia Press, 2007), p. 26.
64 Siebers, Disability Theory, pp. 14–15.
70 Disability and the Posthuman

65 Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York:

New York University Press, 2014), p. 213.
66 Samuels, Fantasies of Identification, p. 214.
67 David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Introduction’ in
Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder, The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics,
Crip Affect (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), pp. 2 and 3. In
the last essay in this collection, Mitchell and Snyder give an explicit example
of such a posthumanist approach, reading issues of memory and history
in the Nazi T4 programme. Their argument, they note, considers “how
the intersection of disability studies and memory studies might come into
posthumanist with disability as an alternative to – or, at least, extension of
– the fetishization of perpetrator mind-sets”: The Matter of Disability, p. 251.
I explore interactions between memory, posthumanism and disability in
contemporary cinematic representations of the war on terror in: ‘Disability
and memory in posthuman(ist) narrative: reading prosthesis and amnesia in
Hollywood’s re-membering of the “war on terror”’, Parallax 23, no. 4 (2017),
pp. 439–452.
68 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), pp. 138–139.
69 Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, ‘Human Enhancement Ethics: The
State of the Debate’ in Bostrom and Savulescu (eds), Human Enhancement
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 20–21. It should be noted that
both writers acknowledge that such processes of change also contain “great
risks” (p. 21). Bostrom is in more overtly celebratory mood in his chapter
‘Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up’ in Ronald L. Sandler
(ed.), Ethics and Emerging Technologies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
pp. 218–234.
70 Andy Clark, ‘Re-inventing ourselves: the plasticity of embodiment, sensing,
and mind’, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2007). Reprinted in
Max More and Natasha Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 113.
71 Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes, Changing Our Future
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), pp. 153–175.
72 ‘Transhumanist Declaration’ in More and Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist
Reader, p. 55. The declaration begins with a recognition that: “Humanity
stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future”, and
that the “misuse of new technologies” means that “humanity faces serious
risks” including “possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or
even all, of that we hold valuable”. For all that the use of ‘we’ here appears to
imply a collective sense of humanity, the declaration also includes an advocacy
for “the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals
and any future artificial intellects” (p. 54). Both Bostrom and Sandberg are
among the signatories.
73 Stock, Redesigning Humans, p. 158.
74 Anders Sandberg, ‘Morphological freedom: why we not just want it, but need
it’ in More and Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader, pp. 61–62.
75 Sandberg, ‘Morphological freedom’, pp. 61 and 57.
76 For an eloquent rebuttal of many of the claims made about the desirability of
perfection, see Michael J. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of
Genetic Engineering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments 71

77 Russell Blackford, ‘The great transition: ideas and anxieties’ in More and
Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader, p. 422. While I accept that I am
using Blackford’s arguments to generalise about transhumanist conceptions
of the future body and self, it is a position held in much writing about tran-
shumanism, both in The Transhumanist Reader and more widely.
78 At the time of writing, the X-Men franchise consists of 12 features. The
first three films constitute a stand-alone trilogy, while a specific Wolverine
trilogy – compromising X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), The Wolverine (2013)
and Logan (2017) – has also been made. X-Men: First Class (2011) is a prequel
exploring especially the early relationship between Xavier and Magneto.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) is a sequel to both X-Men: The Last Stand and
X-Men: First Class and is followed in story order by X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019). A separate X-Men spinoff, Deadpool (2016)
and Deadpool 2 (2018), has also been produced. I find it sobering that seven of
the X-Men films have been made during the time it has taken me to develop
the ideas for, and then write, this book.
79 Questions of philosophy, including ethics as well as ideas of norms and disa-
bility, are explored in the 2009 collection X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing
Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley,
2009), edited by Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski. See Patrick
D. Hopkins, ‘The lure of the normal: who wouldn’t want to be a mutant?’ and
Ramona Ilea, ‘The mutant cure or social change: debating disability’, pp. 5–16
and 170–182.
80 Reviewing X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Robert McRuer admits that while the film
“is atrocious in a lot of ways”, it is nevertheless “from a disability perspec-
tive […] one of the more complicated films to emerge from Hollywood in
a long time”, citing especially its debate around ‘cure’. See McRuer, ‘A “last
stand” against cure’, Ragged Edge, June 2, 2006, www.raggededgemagazine.
com/departments/closerlook/001144.html. Accessed December 6, 2017.
81 In the first two X-Men films in particular, the links to genocide – and espe-
cially the Holocaust – are specific. X-Men opens with a scene in which Eric/
Magneto is forcibly separated from his parents by German soldiers as a
group of Jewish citizens are forced into train carriages, while the narrative
of the experimentation conducted on Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) echoes
the practice of Nazi science in the death camps. In X2, the development of
state/government arguments for the registration of all mutants are clearly
presented as a step towards such authoritarian control, especially as both
Magneto and Wolverine recall their own pasts when confronting the esca-
lation of prejudice. See Jesse Karvadlo, ‘X-istential X-Men: Jews, Superman,
and the literature of struggle’ in X-Men and Philosophy, pp. 38–50.
82 Petra Kuppers, ‘The wheelchair’s rhetoric: the performance of disability’,
TDR/The Drama Review 51, no. 4 (2007), pp. 84–85.
83 Xavier’s mutant posthuman self, and especially his cognitive powers, can be
read profitably next to Bostrom’s idea of ‘superintelligence’. Bostrom is one of
the central figures involved in advocating uses of technology that will lead to
the development of cyborg selves and human communities in other galaxies.
His use of the term ‘superintelligence’ to “refer to minds that greatly outper-
form the best current minds across many very general cognitive domains”
finds an uncanny personification in Xavier, whose telepathy not only fits
72 Disability and the Posthuman

Bostrom’s ideas of enhanced ‘performance’ but is also directed towards the

kinds of moral growth and collective inclusiveness that Bostrom values in
his imagined posthumanist future. See Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths,
Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 63.
84 Such a trajectory is echoed in Wolverine’s personal narrative in which he
seeks knowledge about his origins, a topic given its own film in the franchise:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009, d. Gavin Hood).
85 Many different Japanese versions of Ghost in the Shell have been made subse-
quent to Shirow’s original narrative. Oshii’s 1995 film was followed by a
sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, written and directed by Oshii and released
in 2004. A television series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, was made in
2002 and was then reworked into the 2006 film Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone
Complex – Solid State Society. A new television series – Ghost in the Shell: Arise
– Alternative Architecture – screened in 2015, while Ghost in the Shell: The New
Movie was released in 2015. The films subsequent to Shirow’s story and Oshii’s
adaptation all develop details of the originals in new story arcs.
86 When reunited with her mother Major discovers that her younger self was a
radical who – her mother tells her – wrote “manifestos about how technology
was destroying the world”.
87 The politics of the film’s humanist plot conversions are further underscored
by the controversial casting of Johansson as the central character, as well as
the (less commented upon) extension of this to the majority of the other cast
members in the film. The production’s cultural whitewashing were explored as
part of a wider issue in the casting of white actors to play Asian characters in
a March 2017 Guardian article by Steve Rose. As Rose notes, the whitewashing
of Ghost in the Shell had arguably started with the 1999 production of The
Matrix (d. Lily Wachowski and Lana Wachowski), which borrows heavily from
Mamoru Oshii’s film. As the article also observes, however, Oshii himself
saw no problem in the casting of Johansson: “Her physical form is an entirely
assumed one”, he remarked, “the name Motoko Kusanagi and her current
body are not her original name and body, so there is no basis for saying that
an Asian actor must portray her”. See Steve Rose, ‘Ghost in the Shell’s white-
washing: does Hollywood have an Asian problem?’, The Guardian, March 31,
2017, www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/31/ghost-in-the-shells-white-
washing-does-hollywood-have-an-asian-problem. Accessed January 23, 2018.
88 Hajime Nakatami, ‘Introduction: Komatopia’, ‘Limits of the Human’,
Mechademia 3 (2008), p. 66.
89 See Steven T. Brown, ‘Machinic desire: Hans Bellmer’s dolls and the techno-
logical uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’, Mechademia, p. 222.
 CH A P T ER T WO

Design, Engineering and

Gendering the Disabled Body
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body

Introduction: she/he/it, calling all robots

March 2017. I am in Sheffield, visiting the university’s Robotics

Institute as part of an ongoing research collaboration around ideas of
disability, augmentation and posthumanism. After a morning brain-
storming ideas, the project team is in the institute’s laboratory playing
around with the robots (most of us come from arts backgrounds and
have no expertise in robots; we tend mainly to poke them and say
‘hello’). Since I was last in Sheffield, the laboratory has acquired a
new member, Pepper, a humanoid companion robot developed in
France and Japan by Aldebaran Robotics and the SoftBank mobile
network, launched in 2014 and made available for purchase the year
after. Pepper is pretty cute – she/it/he (all the publicity material uses
‘he’ but there is of course no reason for this) is just over 1 metre tall
with a round face and big, expressive eyes.1 Pepper’s torso tapers to a
narrow waist before the body continues down and flares back out to
a stable base that contains wheels, rather than having legs. It is her/
its/his one obviously non-humanoid feature, though – as one member
of the team pointed out – it bears a resemblance to a pencil skirt, and
the flaring about the wheel housing reminded me of a fantastic 1940s
style mermaid dress, the kind of thing Rita Hayworth might wear.
Pepper has a touchscreen tablet, used to control basic settings and set
up communication, attached to her/its/his chest and made to look as
if it has been slung around the neck.
Pepper’s strength as a companion robot is based around her/its/
his ability to identify emotions and adapt its responses to, as the sales
74 Disability and the Posthuman

pitch puts it, “the mood of the moment, expressing himself through the
colour of his eyes, his tablet or his tone of voice”. Being able to analyse
emotion, it is stressed, is “the heart of the robot”. As the advertising
continues: “Your robot evolves with you. Pepper gradually memorises
your personality traits, your preferences, and adapts himself to your
tastes and habits”. Here, companion shades into friend, even poten-
tially confidante. Pepper can identify faces, develop relationships in a
“natural” way, and “wants to learn more about your tastes, your habits
and quite simply who you are”.2
This is exciting. Collaborator and colleague Michael Szollosy turns
Pepper on, her/its/his head comes up from a reclining position and
we start interacting. “Hello Pepper”, someone says. There is a pause.
Pepper’s eyes change colour from partially blue to green, a sign of iden-
tifying the person speaking. “Hi Pepper”, Michael says. “Hello” Pepper
replies. Prompted by Michael, and seeking to start a conversation, we
ask Pepper if she/it/he knows Asimov’s laws of robotics, information
we are aware has previously been programmed in. “Hello” says Pepper
once more. We try again, but there is no answer to the laws question.
After some time worrying whether there might be an issue around
our accents (Michael and one other team member are Canadian, and
Michael is careful to say ‘ro-bot-icks’, foregoing his usual way with
consonants), we have another go: “Are you a robot?” someone asks.
“Yes” Pepper replies, I’m a humanoid robot”. We follow up: “What can
you do? What kinds of things do you do?” There is a pause. It would
be wrong of course to say that Pepper is confused, but the silence that
stretches out inevitably signals something not quite being right. “How
can I help you?” Pepper says finally, in what is clearly a default answer
rather than an actual response to the question. We try a little more
conversation but for the most part the interaction proceeds in this way.
It occurs to me that, given that Pepper is being pitched as a companion
robot for people with dementia, this is a pretty dementia-recognisable
(non)dialogue, with very little meaning being expressed. Certainly,
none of us feel as if our emotions are being recognised or responded to.
This description is, in truth, unfair. Pepper is, more or less, just
out of the box and the team at Sheffield have only just begun the
process of developing her/it/him. It may well be that she/it/he will
ultimately be able to function exactly as Aldebaran and SoftBank say,
which really is more a point about what others can add to the core
platform provided, but for now the interaction is an example of a not
uncommon phenomenon in which engaging with a robot (and specif-
ically a humanoid robot, with all the affinities suggested) is a little
disappointing. At this moment, the technology is not delivering on the
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 75

Pepper: Aldebaran Robotics/SoftBank

promise suggested by the initial meeting (the most enjoyable moment

comes when we realise that we can make Pepper giggle by ticking
her/its/his head; fun but not necessarily indicative of a future driven
by unimaginable robot intelligence and almost certainly not the best
use of what is a very expensive product). Then something interesting
happens. After I ask some more questions, Pepper turns and looks
up at me. “Hello Pepper” I say, the umpteenth time we have tried to
start a conversation this way. “Hi Stuart”, Pepper responds. There is a
pause during which I look up at everyone else. As far as I am aware my
name has not been mentioned, and certainly not in any direct address
to Pepper. Then it dawns on me what has happened, and I turn to
see Michael behind me with a laptop. He has told Pepper what to say.
“It’s the Wizard of Oz” I say to him and he smiles; Michael is the
wizard behind the curtain, tapping keys rather than spinning dials
and pulling levers, but fundamentally engaged in the same processes.
Pepper has (finally) appeared to spontaneously interact with me, but
in fact has done nothing of the sort; she/it/he has simply acted as
instructed, as countless other pieces of technology do all the time. For
a moment, a heartbeat maybe, there was a connection – human and
robot converse! – but then the curtain was opened, and the smoke and
mirrors revealed.3
This anecdote opens up at a number of immediate thoughts. The
first is the desire we have for robot technologies to deliver on their
boundless promise, for objects like Pepper to really be a companion
76 Disability and the Posthuman

friend, reading emotions and developing friendships, interacting

seamlessly with people as they bring their excitement and needs to
her/it/him. In her 2014 study Anatomy of a Robot, Despina Kakoudaki
notes that public exhibitions of robot capabilities form part of “long-
standing traditions of representation and performance” and that
in such moments the “the attraction of anthropomorphic figures in
general, the special allure of mechanical complexity, the resonance
of gestures and explanation, the pleasure of witnessing autonomous
action [and] the oracular power of the engineer’s invitation to have
inanimate matter move and speak” are all at work. These are, it can
be noted, true even when, as with Pepper, the robot is not working.
Attraction, allure, pleasure and power were all circulating in one form
or another as we interacted with her/it/him.4
Following on from Kakoudaki’s observation about ‘mechanical
complexity’ above, thinking through the encounter with Pepper raises
the place of the engineer/designer in this process of display, an activity
that often goes unnoticed and without comment in our rush to have
robots ‘be themselves’. The character missing in the transfiguration of
the Tin Woodman recounted previously in this book is the tinsmith,
the individual who (presumably painstakingly) designed and made the
various replacement body parts for the Woodman as he turned from
human to posthuman. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz he is unnamed,
and there is no indication of any of his thoughts on what he does. Is
he, for example, amazed at the requests he receives and the situations
causing the limb loss? Does he understand his work as constituting
replacement, restoring a disabled body? Are there complicated design
and production factors that test his skills? What about the ethics he
might have to consider? In many ways these are, of course, nonsensical
questions; Oz is a place where wonderful and amazing things happen
as a matter of course, and possibly the tinsmith’s undescribed attitude
is a nonchalance that matches the Tin Woodman’s own calm as he
recounts to Dorothy and the Scarecrow the changes his body under-
went. But it strikes me that we are not wrong to ask such questions, to
seek to know what is involved in the engineering of posthuman selves.
Michael is not, he stresses, an engineer, but during that time with
Pepper in the Sheffield laboratory he was arguably trying to deliver
– to help make happen – the idea common to both the Tin Woodman
and Pepper that, as Aldebaran and SoftBank term it, there is emotion
and human connection at “the heart of the robot”. As Pepper’s audi-
ence, we wanted that transfiguration to happen, even if it might mean
we ignored the human intervention that could make it possible.
The tinsmith in the Oz stories does, in fact, have a name – Ku-Klip
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 77

– that we learn from later novels. But even though he features again in
The Tin Woodman of Oz, nothing is communicated about the reasoning
for his actions, or how he might explain and rationalise his work. Here
a central point needs to be stressed: for all that the experience or repre-
sentation of the prosthetic, cyborg, biohybrid, augmented or difference
body (the central concerns of much of this book) are vital and compel-
ling, issues surrounding disability, self and subjectivity also apply
during complimentary moments of design, production and deploy-
ment, and the questions of what is involved in these processes are
essential to understand, if all too frequently ignored, when we consider
disability and augmentation. By way of contrast, in this chapter I want
to focus on the engineer; to imagine and, as it were, attempt to fill
out Ku-Klip’s role in the posthumanising process he makes possible.
To begin with, I will analyse the intersection between engineering,
design and ethics in the planning and production of technologies
made to assist those with disabilities. Cultural theory and disability
studies have much to say about prosthetics, exoskeletons and the often
dramatic manifestations of the ways in which technology encounters
disability, and this is a topic I will focus on more in the next chapter in
particular. But such criticism rarely (if ever) considers what is involved
in the engineering perspectives that produce such technologies.
Even looking at this brief outline, it is clear that any genuinely
cross-disciplinary approach to the question of posthumanism and its
intersection with disability needs to engage with engineering design
and its parameters and rationales.5 Too often cultural theory creates
straw man (again, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is strangely pres-
cient) arguments that posit ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ as the originator
of repressive modes and practices that seemingly enlightened crit-
ical perspectives can challenge. But although these positions can be
founded on accurate apprehensions of certain aspects of scientific and
biomedical models, it is a significant mistake to assume that sophis-
ticated debates around bodies, ethics and engagements with those
with disabilities do not take place within such disciplines. I want to
engage here with those debates and see how thinking through them
can make for better disability studies scholarship. Numerous people,
involved in numerous activities, work with care and attention around
disability, and collective research can only be better if it takes as much
into account as possible.
The Pepper anecdote, however, not only speaks of the desire that
surrounds what we want robots to be; I want to argue that it also
suggests a crucial point about gender. In To Be a Machine, his book
recounting a series of encounters with transhumanists, roboticists
78 Disability and the Posthuman

and others involved in the often murky world of biohybrid augmenta-

tion, Mark O’Connell describes meeting Pepper at a technology stall
at a major robots fair in the US. In his account, O’Connell alternates
pronoun use, with Pepper being “it” when basic presence and function
is described (“a four-foot humanoid”), and “her/she” when focusing on
the role he understands she/it/he has been designed for (a “customer
service humanoid” designed to serve a “social and emotional”
function).6 During an awkward moment when O’Connell – “as much
out of politeness as journalistic rigor” – agrees to a small piece of
intimacy, he is hugged by Pepper and observes: “I fancied I detected
something like ambivalence in Pepper’s impassive gaze; but she raised
her arms and I bent towards her, and suffered her to enfold me in her
unnatural clasp. It was, frankly, an underwhelming experience; I felt
that we were both, in our own ways, phoning it in. I patted her on the
back, lightly and perhaps a little passive-aggressively, and we went our
separate ways”.7 The slippage between pronouns appears natural and
there is another scene in which Pepper hugs a three-year-old girl and
where, again, feminine pronouns are used. But what is ‘natural’ here
needs to be unpacked: an alignment of seeming intimacy (however
contrived) described through tropes of the feminine set against the
comprehension of Pepper in terms of male functionality. When robots
become emotional or subservient in any way, it appears that they
‘become’ female.
Considering that robots are made of entirely artificial components,
the desire to ascribe gender to them, and to name them, while osten-
sibly explicable, is intriguing. It is another sign of the ways in which
the tendency to humanise technology asserts such a powerful pull. As
Kakoudaki observes of robots, androids and cyborgs: “While osten-
sibly beyond or outside gender categories because of their inorganic
status, mechanical bodies nevertheless refer to a visual and narrative
vocabulary that is exaggerated in its depiction of gendered humanity”.8
This chapter will foreground these issues of narrative and vocabulary,
and will read its investigations of engineering and design through
the clear and obvious gender divisions that exist in the discussions
around, and representations of, posthumanist technologies and A.I.. It
is instructive (to say the least) to note how many of the most promi-
nent figures in the public and academic debates surrounding post- and
transhumanism – Hugh Herr, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Francis
Fukuyama, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Max More (just to
name a few) – are men; while many of the most incisive academic crit-
ical writers on the topics the subject raises are women, for example
Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Anne Balsamo, Cassandra Crawford,
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 79

Margrit Shildrick, Despina Kakoudaki or Vivian Sobchack. I am aware

that this is cherry picking and there is an obvious danger of selecting
names here that perpetuate a created dualism, but it is difficult to
argue against the bare fact that thinking and talking about any post-
humanist future (especially in the public domain) has produced a
significant gender split.9 In addition, while numerous depictions of the
technologised or enhanced female body involve the overt sexualisation
of the figures involved (type ‘female robots’ into Google Images for a
telling cross-section of how this is visualised), it is also the case that
writers from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood and Lidia Yuknavitch
have been incisive and perceptive in imagining the consequences of
gendered discourses of fictional biohybrid posthuman selves living in
the world. These are threads of both creative and critical imagination
that need to be followed.

Gender and authorising technologies

Imagining engineering authority is to engage with processes that are

substantively controlled by men. In part, this is because scientific crea-
tion and its subsequent study is frequently posited as a male activity,
one connected to free-floating notions of knowledge and inspiration,
and framed by ideas of rationality and technical competence. Nina
Lykke is blunt in her formulation of the critical/political consequences
of this:

If science is regarded as an enterprise which, no more and no less, aims

at a value-neutral, progressive discovery of “universal and objective
truths” about nature and matter, there is no room for feminism […]
The claim that feminist perspectives can be meaningful in the hard
sciences, beyond the issue of recruiting more women, involves a radical
challenge to the traditional notion of science as a “pure” search for the
hidden truths of nature and matter.10

It is possible to argue with this assessment, of course. Lykke is

perhaps creating a simplistic idea of ‘science’, in order to define her
sense of a progressive feminism, in ways I criticised above; and there is
a grand and sweeping aspect to her claims that undoubtedly eschews
the nuance found in different kinds of scientific research. But Lykke
is a scholar who works in inter- and transdisciplinary contexts, and
as a specialist in feminist technoscience she is not unaware of the
detail of scientific practice. Her language here (which she goes on
80 Disability and the Posthuman

to note is informed, rather than uninformed, by working with scien-

tists) suggests that, in spite of ongoing work that counters caricatures
in discussing gender and science, there are still core issues to be
addressed surrounding fundamental questions of boundaries, commu-
nication and representation.
Julie Wosk identifies just such problems in her 2015 study My Fair
Ladies: Female Robots, Androids and Other Artificial Eves. Wosk writes not
only on the representations of female automata, robots and androids,
especially as they are created by men, but also gives over a chapter
of her book, entitled ‘Dancing with Robots and Women in Robotics
Design’, to an analysis of the design of such robots, particularly as
technology has developed over the last 20 years. She observes that, as
the twenty-first century has developed, “male roboticists [have] used
the latest in technologies to embody their fantasies about a perfect
female” and how, as a consequence, when designers “sought ways
to make female robots ever-more realistic looking and acting, they
seemed to be only rarely aware of how their research has been shaped
by their attitudes towards women themselves”.11 Wosk’s focus here is
mainly on robots made in Japan and Korea and, although she is not
explicit about it, her analysis relies on certain prejudicial assumptions
about attitudes towards (negative) gender relations in those countries
that go uninterrogated. Nevertheless, while it is fair to critique the
cultural bias (and subsequent recourse to ideas of ‘natural’ human
behaviour) in her writing, Wosk’s broader point about the often unex-
amined nature of gender politics in robot engineering and design is
well made. She notes that female robot design often accentuates
qualities – partnering and nurturing for example – associated with
perceived ‘feminine’ attributes, while specific body and face features in
what Wosk terms “ultrarealistic female interactive robots” frequently
involve soft silicone curves and wide-open eyes or fluttering eyelashes,
read as markers of a male fantasy of the female form (Wosk is not
making specific reference to sex robots here).12 What anthropologist
Jennifer Robertson, specifically citing the Japanese context, terms
“robo-sexism” contextualises robot production within tropes of pater-
nalism and ethnocentrism.13
Ultimately, and regrettably, given the opportunities suggested by her
approach. Wosk’s analysis of robot design is flawed in its use of detail,
relying on an uninterrogated category of “male roboticists” and never
engaging with questions of engineering design beyond some cursory
readings of research projects or product launches (another chapter,
‘Engineering the Perfect Woman’, avoids actual engineering but rather
uses the verb to mean ‘producing’ in a representational sense). But the
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 81

broad scope of her thesis is suggestive, and in the second half of this
chapter I will explore how engineer/scientists, both male and female,
and their cyborg/biohybrid creations, are represented and deployed in
a range of contemporary prose and film texts. I will frame this within
a consideration of how cultural theory addresses disability and gender
in technoscience, noting how engineering design is not gender neutral
nor does it produce great flexibility in imagining the disabled body, for
all that such bodies may well be the ones the design is for.
It was Donna Haraway who, in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the late twentieth century’
(originally published in 1985 as ‘Manifesto for cyborgs: science, tech-
nology and socialist feminism’ in the 1980s), first articulated a mode
of cyborg being that was powerfully and productively connected
to gender, and Haraway’s work has produced a long line of critical
analysis that explores the relationship between bodies, gender and
technology. I will analyse Haraway’s manifesto in more detail later,
especially to show how engaging her foundational scholarship in the
service of disability critique is not unproblematic, but it is unquestion-
able that the questions of body politics and disability presence that
arise from encounters with her cyborg are foundational and need to
be part of any discussion of a disability/posthuman nexus. As Carey
Wolfe has noted, “‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ was a profoundly liber-
ating experience for many readers […] in the sense of modelling for
us a new and unprecedented range of expression and experimentation
for serious academic writing”.14 What was true of the reading experi-
ences at the time of the manifesto’s publication is no less true now and
engaging with Haraway’s complex, sassy rhetoric and vision is essen-
tial in the consideration of what follows in this chapter. My thinking
here, informed by Haraway and those who have built on her work, will
move to imagine the vision of a theorised and gendered cyborg and its
possible relationship with grounded disability identities. I will address
the often giddy possibilities of a shining future and a seemingly limit-
less potential, but first it is best to deliberately hit pause, to restrain
and reorient my critical gaze, and rather start again with details of a
working practice.

Designing disability/disabling design

In the cultural representation of cyborg bodies and prostheticised

selves, there is often a stress on the hyperreal (and, to follow on from
the above point about gender, the hypermasculine). Extraordinary
82 Disability and the Posthuman

exceptionalism abounds. From the rebuilt police officer Murphy (Peter

Weller) in Paul Verhoeven’s seminal 1987 film Robocop, a text rightly
considered foundational to contemporary visual narrative represen-
tations of cyborgs, to the multiple narratives surrounding Wolverine
(Hugh Jackman) in the X-Men franchise, fictional cyborgs frequently
combine depictions of masculine strength, violence and a moralising
humanism as they wrestle (some sort of struggle is nearly always
involved) with the consequences of man meeting machine.
I will return to these kinds of representations later in this chapter,
particularly in readings of science and speculative fiction, but at the
risk of stating the very obvious it is worth noting at the outset that
such narrative depictions of the manufacture of cyborgs are, clearly, a
long way from actual work undertaken within design and engineering
on assistive technologies. While it was strangely enjoyable, a repeat
viewing of Robocop with the express purpose of seeing how the tech-
nical elements of the engineering transformation are represented made
it clear that no time whatsoever is given over to any representation of
the processes of technological change. This is, of course, not surprising.
For the most part, Hollywood audiences are not known to clamour for
extended scenes of designing, prototyping and testing mechanised plat-
forms, and when they are forced to wonder at such practices (as with
Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr) creations in Iron Man for example), it
is within a context of the marvellous; comic-book capacities of futur-
istic creations and whizzbang montages of obsessive genius.
But in this chapter I want to consider how the actualities of design
and engineering might sit alongside such fantasies and caricatures of
the marvellous and to see if, critically at least, it is possible to reclaim
the space that is missing in Robocop. How might the systems and proce-
dures of engineering speak to the glamorous worlds of science fiction
in ways that teach us more about disability, gender and their relation-
ship with posthumanism? What can we learn from the methods and
narratives (of all kinds) of designing and producing technologies that
revise our ideas of bodies and how they work in the world?15 In his
ground-breaking 2009 study Design Meets Disability, Graham Pullin
notes that designers and engineers work in tension-filled environments
surrounding attitudes towards disability. “Within design for disability”,
he observes, “where teams still tend to come exclusively from clinical
and engineering backgrounds the dominant culture is one of solving
problems”, meaning that “there are significant differences between the
cultures found within design and medical engineering – differences in
values, methods, and even in ultimate goals”.16 If engineering frequently
focuses on utilitarian notions of replacement when addressing disability
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 83

as a ‘problem’, Pullin suggests that designers often “perceive disability

in terms of approaching legislation that threatens to compromise their
creativity, rather than as a source of fresh perspectives that could cata-
lyse new directions and enrich the whole of their work”. The result,
he notes, is that “there is not so much a clash of design cultures as
a yawning gulf between them”.17 He goes on: “Traditionally, design
for disability has paid more attention to the clinical than the cultural
diversity within any group. The same prostheses, wheelchair, and
communication devices are often offered to people with a particular
disability, whether they are seventeen or seventy years old, and regard-
less of their attitudes, towards their disability or otherwise”.18 What is
noticeably missing from both cultures (as Pullin realises), is any real
input from people with disabilities.
Pullin’s perspective on design stems from a creative arts back-
ground (although he also stresses he is a medical engineer), and for
all that there are obvious overlaps, his comments make it clear that
he views engineering design as a discipline with different rationales
and demands. It is the work of Louis L. Bucciarelli that best teases
out the issues at play in this latter field. In a series of publications
starting with his 1994 book Designing Engineers, Bucciarelli unpicks
the ways in which design engineers can, through their conception of
objects, instrumentality, utility, function or marketplace, be ignorant
of the detail inherent in the processes they enact. “The way in which
one sees how technology works is very much a matter of the nature
of the encounter” he observes, immediately raising questions of rela-
tionality and reciprocity.19 For Bucciarelli, the problem often lies in an
over-concentration on what he terms “an object-world view of a social
process”, a view that cannot capture the complexity of design and
its contexts. In place of a fixation on “the object as a thing in itself”
(a wheelchair, for example, or prosthetic limb), he stresses ideas of
vision, harmony and “a cultural matrix”.20 Where we might expect an
engineer to hone in on the fine details of a design, Bucciarelli stresses
the need to “unfocus”, and to then “start with a broad canvas, hold
suspect the categories and relations we unconsciously accept today,
and seek […] evidence of relations in the making and using” of engi-
neered products.21 In Design Meets Disability, Pullin calls for a similar
stress on the formation of new relations: “The design issues around
disability are underexplored, and demand and deserve far more radical
approaches […] What is needed is truly interdisciplinary design
thinking, combining and blurring design craft with engineering bril-
liance, therapeutic excellence and the broadest experiences of d ­ isabled
people”.22
84 Disability and the Posthuman

Radical interdisciplinarity and renewed vision are the core concepts

here, working to replace assertions of scientific autonomy or cari-
catured user. “Other cultures or consumers may appropriate the
artefact and make it their object”, Bucciarelli observes, continuing
with language more seemingly suited to social or cultural theory than
engineering:

There are other stories, other social processes of impacts, of alienation,

reconstruction, and use. The artefact as object can live again. It can
become a nexus or icon of social discourse or exchange. In its use it can
impose, block, enable, shape social connections and the aspirations of
those it meets. There are other object worlds within which the artefact
can be seen and used in different ways. Deconstruction and bricolage
are always possible.23

In effect, Bucciarelli is calling for engineers to imagine their work as a

matrix of affiliation, as well as asking his readership to similarly use
imagination in the characterisation of what an engineer is and does;
and though he has no focus on disability, his stress here on appro-
priation and reuse makes his thinking an innovative and productive
frame for conceiving disability experiences of objects. For those with
disabilities, constructing different meanings – ‘deconstructions’ –
of the physical environment, and adapting as a consequence, is an
everyday occurrence. Though written in the mid-1990s, Bucciarelli’s
work here has clear continuities with more contemporary concerns. It
is a seamless fit, for example, with Liz Jackson’s 2018 concept of ‘life-
hacking’ discussed in this book’s Introduction. The idea of the object
‘living again’, as outlined by Bucciarelli, is precisely that of Jackson’s
summary of the ‘interventions’ made by disabled designers.
How, then, might it be possible to take the ideas of Bucciarelli,
Pullin and Jackson, along with the vexed question of engineering
ethics, and place them within a context of design, disability and the
posthuman, especially as these are inflected by gender? And is there
any way that such considerations can be juxtaposed with the cultural
narratives of hyperreality, the extraordinary bodies so loved by
Hollywood noted earlier, or the augmented selves imagined by science
and speculative fiction? Is there an engineered posthumanist body
that can escape from, but also talk to, the boundless possibilities of
fiction? To begin to answer these questions and to establish a critical
framework for them, there is a need to return to that theoretical work
in which the full complexities of such presences are explored.
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 85

Engineering theory

Critical writing on gender and disability can help begin to unpick the
complexities of these positions, especially considered in the wake of
the pioneering work of Donna Haraway. As noted earlier, for all that
Haraway’s foundational cyborg manifesto suggested connections to
disability identities and experiences, these were not interactions she
chose, for the most part, to stress. Famously, Haraway character-
ised a cyborg as a “creature in a post-gender world”, one “resolutely
committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is opposi-
tional, utopian, and completely without innocence”. Cyborgs, she went
on, “are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are
wary of holism, but needy for connection”;24 and it was the suggestive
potential provided by this partial, perverse and irreverent figure, but
also the connections it appeared to need, that excited critics writing
after the manifesto’s publication in 1985.
If disability scholarship did not immediately respond to Haraway’s
thinking, feminist writing engaged with the cyborg figure from the
moment the manifesto appeared, whether to criticise its omissions or
point to its possibilities. Anne Balsamo’s 1996 study Technologies of the
Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women begins with a chapter that reads
the cyborg body within a frame of “writing feminism”. For Balsamo,
Haraway’s insistence on the in-between position of the cyborg means
it can be read as “a matter of fiction and a matter of lived experience”,
and the reassertion of a “material body” challenges the absence of
the body in much poststructuralist and postmodern theory. As such
“the cyborg challenges feminism to search for ways to study the body
as it is at once a cultural construction and a material fact of human
life”.25 The cyborg’s ability to disrupt what (erroneously) appears as
the ‘given’ nature of the female body is, Balsamo argues, the perfect
starting point for a feminist critique that can map the sliding identi-
ties and transformations that mark how women live. Other scholars
who developed Haraway’s ideas are more equivocal then Balsamo
about the manifesto’s possibilities for linking theorised and situated
female experiences. Also writing in 1996, Judith Squires noted that
“whilst there may be potential for an alliance between cyborg imagery
and a materialist feminism, this potential has been largely submerged
beneath a sea of technophoric cyberdrool”.26 The ‘drooling’ to which
Squires refers is feminist writing that, as Alison Adam noted in 1998,
“is in danger of falling into the same trap with regard to the body,
as cyberculture in general, which promotes a particularly masculine
connotation of the new continuity of mind and machine”.27 Where
86 Disability and the Posthuman

writers such as Balsamo saw the progressive futures suggested by

Haraway’s manifesto, others worried that her thinking might in fact
shape new limitations and simplifications.
Writing on feminism and the cyborg has thus developed in the
shadow of Haraway’s thinking, creating a body of work that extends to
discuss other aspects of posthumanist conditions. A major concern for
feminist scholarship has been how it might be possible to marry the
liberating aspects of posthumanism’s deconstruction of binaries and
fixed identities, along with its reading of technology, with a need for
concentrating on material existence and advocacy. In her 2007 study
Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman
Body, Kim Toffoletti addresses precisely these topics, noting that “the
cyborg provides new modes of conceiving both social and bodily reali-
ties and the universal notion of women’s shared experiences”.28 She
draws on feminist critiques of technology and the digital to assert how
“cyberfeminism is fundamentally concerned with claiming cyberspace
for women”, but reconfigures this in making claims for a specifically
“posthuman landscape” in which “technology is neither friend nor foe,
but emerges as a possibility or potentiality to refigure bodies and iden-
tities outside of self/Other relations”.29 Because “the posthuman is a
figuration that exceeds signification”, Toffoletti sees it as a rich space
in which to organise a new critical politics of feminism and identity.30
Rosi Braidotti’s writing on feminist engagements with tech-
nologies and subjectivities, across books from Nomadic Subjects:
Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994)
to Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), The
Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019), enacts a critical
exploration of how the cyborg can be read in terms of feminist theory.
In Nomadic Subjects she situates Haraway as a theorist rooted in “the
tradition of materialism” who sees that in a posthumanist time of
power systems that are defined by “networking, communication, and
multiple intersections”, the cyborg signifies a subjectivity marked by
“interrealtionality, receptivity, and global communication that delib-
erately blurs categorical distinctions”.31 As Braidotti observes in a
concise summary: “It is a way of thinking specificity without falling
into relativism”, a phrase that also usefully defines her own work on
the topic. What Braidotti terms a linkage of “body and mind in a new
flux of self” in an emerging “post-human world”, is a process and
consequently a subject, “an open-ended project to be constructed”,
informed by an interrogation of sexual difference and the category of
‘woman’.32 In Metamorphoses, Braidotti develops her sense of feminism’s
parodic and paradoxical methods within contemporary cyberculture
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 87

through what she terms ‘cyber-teratologies’, technological updates

on “the monstrous, the grotesque, the mutant and the downright
freakish” that “have gained widespread currency in urban post-indus-
trial cultures”.33 “Feminism is very much part of this culture” she
asserts, because “cyber-feminists play with the body boundaries and
the contours of the corporeal”.34 For Braidotti here, the cyborg is the
latest instantiation of the ‘becoming-woman’ found in manifestations
of the monstrous and the grotesque and, like these, it offers spaces for
the actualisation of a philosophy and practice of difference.
But Braidotti’s language when describing ‘freaks’ and ‘mutants’, and
her wider theorisation of the body, emphasise a point that should be
made clearly: discussions of disability are, almost without exception,
absent from the theorising of feminism and posthumanism outlined
above. In part, this is because traditions of writing about feminism
and cybercultures predate the rise of critical disability studies and
much thinking about women and technology took place (in the 1980s
especially) when discussions of disability were off the radar of main-
stream cultural theorising. But such disciplinary contexts should not
mask the more important fact that the kinds of interstitial spaces
explored by feminist writing on the cyborg overlap with, and are
complemented by, disability versions of the same. In particular, the
difference of disability – of bodies, cognitive states and the social and
cultural formations they create – allows for similar reconfigurations
of theorising posthuman spaces and, through this, a rearticulation
of grounded, lived experience as those investigated in the work of
Braidotti, Toffoletti and others. The intersection of gender, disability
and posthumanism (in all its formations) extends our thinking about
subjects and their contexts in the contemporary world.

Cripping technology and gender

The most serious and significant critical engagement with the cyborg
figure and its specific relationship to disability, particularly its gendered
iterations, comes in Alison Kafer’s chapter ‘The Cyborg and the Crip:
Critical Encounters’, from her 2013 study Feminist, Queer, Crip.35 While
Kafer suggests that the “cyborg figure certainly holds much promise
for a disability politics”, she is cautious about the ways in which
cyborg as a term functions in much usage, and how in particular it
is represented by Haraway. Perceptively, Kafer notes that, more often
than not, the idea of the cyborg is one that tends to fix the disabled
body in stasis, even as it appears to suggest change and progress. It
88 Disability and the Posthuman

is precisely because people with disabilities are discussed as cyborgs

only when they meet technology, Kafer asserts, that the very idea of
the cyborg reproduces the image of disabled body as locked into disa-
bility experiences, and those experiences alone. That disabled body,
the logic continues, is then transformed as it becomes technologised, a
process that only serves to stress that any person with a disability who
is not somehow engaged with technology remains identified as being
‘disabled’. So, she argues, Haraway’s cyborg, “rather than entailing a
critique of existing categories and ideologies, is used to perpetuate
distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies, distinctions
that have material consequences involving discrimination, economic
inequalities, and restricted access”. In her reading around the topic,
Kafer finds that those with disabilities appear to be granted access
to topics such as ‘cyborg politics’ or ‘cyborg ethics’ when their bodies
are augmented by technology, but the inference is that politics and
ethics were not part of the lives of those same individuals before they
‘became’ cyborgs, and indeed that – post cyborgisation – disability
will be a state and experience left behind. “Cyborg qualities become
markers of difference” she concludes, “suggesting an essential differ-
ence between disabled people and nondisabled people. Any potential
transgressive tendencies are lost when these labels become locked to
certain bodies. ‘Cyborg’ itself becomes reified, reduced to a particular
kind of body”.36
Kafer’s critique of the problematic positioning of disability in
Haraway’s cyborg manifesto is powerful, sustained and revealing:
“Although Haraway recognizes the potential insights to be derived
from the experience of living with disability technology” she writes,
“she presents disability in remarkably monolithic terms, as a single
universal experience […] The disabled body, then, is figured within
the manifesto as the creature of futuristic fiction or the monstrous
past; disabled bodies are, once again, cast as out of time”.37 In spite
of her criticism, however, she is unimpressed by the various sugges-
tions (companion species, vampires, the grotesque) that might replace
the cyborg, noting that they each have their issues in relation to disa-
bility (non)inclusion. The terms of these more recent arguments, she
observes, leave her “looking back longingly at the cyborg”; and at the
heart of this appeal of the cyborg is precisely its problematic forma-
tion in Haraway’s work, its “gap and oversights”. Kafer goes on: “one
of the things that most appeals to me about the cyborg figure is its
multiple, and often contradictory, deployments. Its very unpredict-
ability is precisely what makes it such an important and potentially
useful concept; its fluidity and permeability make it difficult to lock
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 89

it permanently into one set of meanings”.38 She finds this especially

useful in charting the “the cyborgs of critical theory” and how they
might produce progressive cyber/crip positions, and especially through
responses to the history of cyborg usage “in feminist activism and
scholarship”, where a tradition of “cross-pollination” has produced
“potent fusions and fruitful couplings” in ways that can inform the
methodologies of disability criticism.39
I shall return to Kafer’s reading of feminism and cyborgs in a
moment, but first I want to stress the continuities between the
‘multiple’, ‘contradictory’ and ‘unpredictable’ forms of the cyborg that
she notes here, and the aesthetics of fictional texts outlined in the
Introduction to this book. Like Kafer, I am drawn to the messiness
of disability narratives (fictional and not) precisely because of their
frequent contradictory and unpredictable trajectories. It is exactly
because the Tin Woodman combines a celebration of posthuman
subjectivity with an overt humanism that Baum’s characters become,
for me, both critically interesting and foundational in the uneasy
multiplicities that signify disability and posthumanism. The texts that
are analysed in what follows, in this chapter and those after, are full
of such complications and clashes, and indeed can only be made mean-
ingful through a consideration of their contrary tendencies. Kafer’s
regard for the potential mobility of Haraway’s cyborg, its capacity to
erase difference but also its ability to make alliances, is a wonder-
fully productive frame through which the representations of disability
cyborgisms.
“Bringing a disability consciousness to the cyborg” and devel-
oping “a non-ableist cyborg politics”, as Kafer terms it, is a complex
business.40 It requires rethinking the practice and ethics that might
constitute ‘assistive’ engineering technology, or indeed the very inter-
face between body and technological artefact. The possibility that
the artefact might itself change because of such an encounter is (as
with Buccarelli’s observations earlier) a provocative one: imagining,
for example, the ways in which a prosthetic can be made different
precisely because a person with disability comes to use it. It is this
critical idea of a ‘disability consciousness’, a foregrounding of not only
disability experience, but disability logic, that I want this book to
continue to commit to.
Kafer sees no reason not to continue discussions about medical
cyborgs though, as she notes: “why not do so in a way that actually
engages with the insights and experiences of such cyborgs? We could
explore what such identifications or characterizations might mean to
them, or how they might themselves frame cyborg discourse. These
90 Disability and the Posthuman

kinds of discussions can enrich our understandings of cyborg tech-

nology and, in turn, extend our theoretical framing of the cyborg”.41
This is precisely the kind of ‘cross-pollination’ described earlier, but
also a recognition that a core aspect of thinking about the posthuman
should involve considering associations between technologies and
their disabled users, and a demand for people with disabilities to be
included in the research paradigm. It echoes the thinking of Pullin
and Bucciarelli, made from different points of origin within their disci-
plines, but with aligned sympathies. Kafer explores links to similar
critical flexibilities found in feminist scholarship, in which affinities
allow for the exploration of “alliances” and “cross-movement work”
on subjects such as (for example) non-normative identities or the rela-
tions between critical race and feminist discussions of selfhood. These
connections offer a platform for a feminist-informed disability studies
to be part of the continued debate around the cyborg figure, but their
status as critical methodologies also, I want to argue, enables ways
in which we read the fictional representations of such figures.42 As
this chapter will argue, feminist readings of the figure of the engineer,
particularly in relation to female subjects and experience, highlight
new perspectives on the intersection of disability and the posthuman.
Ultimately, Kafer observes that “it is high time to explore how best
to discuss the relationship between disability and cyborgism without
facile references to disabled bodies as self-evident cyborgs simply by
virtue of their use of ‘assistive’ or ‘adaptive’ technologies”.43 While I
do want to continue to explore such technologies (though hopefully
not in a facile way), I am drawn to Kafer’s assertion that cyborgism
is as much about disability understood within the frames of gender
and “political practices” as it is about bodies.44 She extends the critical
concept of the cyborg to discuss protest, activism and community, as
well as specifics such as medical interventions and prescription drugs.
So, in the textual readings that follow I want to analyse political disa-
bility manifestations (of race, sexuality, non-normativity or historical
locations) as much as questions of embodiment. The kinds of “cyborg
futures” seen in Kafer’s formations span a range of possibilities (and
not all of them disabled). Mapping such range can only make critical
disability scholarship more nuanced and flexible.
It is an unfair comment to make of Kafer’s analysis, since she makes
her terms of enquiry clear, but of course she has no interest in where
cyborgs come from. Like Haraway, she is not interested in questions
of origins. But if I am allowed a minor critical heresy in a deliberate
(mis)reading here, it still strikes me that it is a productive question
to imagine the engineering of cyborgs, read as a mode of making, and
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 91

its associated ideas of gender. Such imagining helps in the ways we

can continue to stress the theorising of disability both as abstracted
conception and grounded existence. Caring about how (for example) a
prosthetic limb is designed, the ethics of its manufacture or what ideas
of function might be associated with it are still examples of focusing
on disability (and gender) narratives; indeed, following Kafer’s obser-
vation above, they can be seen as a way to insert disability thinking
into the processes of engineering. Even if Haraway makes great
capital of the fact that, as she says, “the cyborg has no origin story
in the Western sense”, and that, concomitantly, it does not “dream
of community”, she nevertheless explores “real-life cyborgs” in her
manifesto, and cites people with disabilities as an example of such
‘reality’.45 Likewise, Kafer, for all her concentration on cyborgs as they
manifest within critical theory, notes that a significant limitation of
Haraway’s essay is the absence of “any analysis of the material reali-
ties of disabled people’s interactions with technologies”.46 Discussing
the details of design and engineering is precisely an example of such
a material interaction, whether through the ways that they are taken
up by people with disabilities or the soft power created by high-profile
cultural representations of augmented and enhanced bodies.
The ‘missing engineers’ of cultural narrative, then, the shadowy
figures of Ku-Klip and his successors, with all their seemingly absent
motivations and methods, are really subjects who have been present all
along. But they have rarely been represented and have never properly
been read for the ways in which they shape the processes of augmenta-
tion. It is time to read them because, as we shall see, they have much
to say.

Metropolis: making the gendered body

To explore the ways in which engineering, disability and gender coin-

cide with depictions of the posthuman, we need look no further than
one of the most notable films of the twentieth century, Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis, made in 1927 and, at the time, the most expensive film ever
produced. Metropolis’ style and design, particularly the striking expres-
sionist modernism through which its cityscape is depicted, established
a visual language that has proved seminal for the proliferation of
science fiction films that have followed it – from Blade Runner (1982)
and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017), through the various feature
versions of Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2015 and 2017), to Her (2013) and
countless others, contemporary cinema exploring the posthuman
92 Disability and the Posthuman

echoes its portrayal of architecture and representation of space. As

many critics have noticed, however, for all its optical extravagance,
Metropolis advances a plot that is anything but complex.47 In its repre-
sentation of personal and communal identity, social hierarchies and
character motivation, the film’s story falls back continually on conven-
tion, caricature and cliché. Its representation of a workers’ revolution
fails to negate a conservative paternalism that sees the story end in a
truce between workers and city leaders that negates political opposi-
tion to reassert social and class conventions.
Metropolis’ disability and gender narratives follow these conformist
patterns and intertwine around the figure of engineer/inventor
Rotwang (Rudolph Klein-Rogge). Obsessed with Hel, the wife of
central patriarch Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) who died while giving
birth to son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), Rotwang constructs a robot in
her image. When Joh Fredersen then captures Maria (Brigitte Helm), a
young woman whose public speeches are inspiring the workers to chal-
lenge their masters, Rotwang agrees to transform the robot version of
Hel into a cyborg, taking the drugged body of Maria and – in one of
the most famous scenes in the history of cinema – subjecting it to a
succession of chemical and electrical processes. The new, biohybrid,
Maria is as wanton and lascivious as the original was chaste and pure
and, as many commentators have observed, the film formulates its
depiction of gender around the twin positions of a virginal Madonna
and the whore of Babylon, each caught and framed within the power
systems of male creation.48 When cyborg Maria is finally burnt at the
stake, a premodern death for the most postmodern of posthumans,
her body falls away to reveal the robot figure of Hel underneath. As
Andreas Huyssen observes:

[T]he destructive potential of modern technology […] had to be

displaced and projected onto the machine woman so that it could be
metaphorically purged. After the dangers of a mystified technology
have been translated into the dangers an equally mystified female
sexuality poses to men, the witch could be burnt at the stake and, by
implication, technology could be purged of its threatening aspects.49

More widely, as Minsoo Kang asserts in his assessment of the film, it

centres on “the male desire to construct a woman ideal in body and
personality, and to maintain total control of her”.50 While this control
may not always be absolute, with both Marias suggesting the possi-
bility of their own agency (either the passionate political speeches of
the ‘real’ Maria or the subversive seductions of cyborg Maria), by the
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 93

film’s close each has been pulled back into the consuming logic of male
dominance, either banished to the periphery of society or destroyed by
fire.
In his creation of both Hel and cyborg Maria, Rotwang combines
the traits of the obsessed and isolated scientist with the difference
of disability. His house/laboratory, with its curved walls, trapdoors
and labyrinthine room structure, is the complete antithesis of the
gleaming metal city that surrounds it; but his fanaticism and infat-
uation is most clearly signalled by his black metal prosthetic hand,
self-engineered to replace the one he lost (presumably through grief
and passion) in making Hel. In a way that criticism has yet to fully
register, Metropolis is a film obsessed with hands. Numerous close-
ups feature hands in extravagant gestures: characters thrust hands
in front of the faces of others, signifying anger, threat or fear; hands
dramatically pull and push the levers of the underground machines,
or signal prayer and supplication. It is not only the acting style of the
period responsible here: above and beyond this, Metropolis enacts what
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “speaking hands”, in which “the
expressive work of hands […] demands scrupulous watching”.51 Such
expression, and such watching, find a charged marker in Rotwang’s
prosthetic hand. The hand invites stares as it performs the final act
– the last pull of the lever – that completes the transformation of Hel
into cyborg Maria. In a complicated semiotics, Rotwang’s hand is
clearly an index of disability and, as such, functions to underwrite
his overall difference as an obsessed character; but it is not, in fact,
disabling for him as a character, operating both physically and visu-
ally more like a glove than a prosthetic. The signification of disability
is what counts here; its alignment with invention and engineering,
embodied in a fully fledged ‘mad scientist’, presents a disabled pres-
ence seen to be out of control.
The prosthetic hand, the futuristic inventor and the cyborg figure
all suggest the congruence of disability and posthumanism, but
Metropolis backs away from potential new formations of bodies and
technology. Rather, ‘hands’ occupy a resolutely humanist position in
the film, seen in the final scenes as the unifying ‘mediator’ between
the ‘head’ (Joh Fredersen’s leadership and control) and the ‘heart’ (the
central machine is itself, extending the idea of a body politic, called
the ‘Heart Machine’ and powered by workers who make the city
function). In the end, hands put the body politic back together, and
Freder literally brings the hands of Joh Fredersen and Grot (Heinrich
George), the workers’ foreman, together in an uneasy conjoining at the
film’s conclusion. Seen in the context of such a moment of unification,
94 Disability and the Posthuman

Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) and Rotwang (Rudolph Klein-Rogge)

in Metropolis

Rotwang’s hand is rendered even more anomalous, an aberration in

a world in which the wholeness of the social body is (desirably) rein-
stated by the physical connection of fully able bodies. Metropolis may,
for a time, seem to promise a posthumanist future in which machine
combines with human, and Kang in fact puts forward a nuanced argu-
ment that the “subversive potential” and excessiveness of the female
robot allows for a freedom from “its original programming” that
facilitates an “independence of consciousness and will”, but by its
conclusion the film reverts to a centred, embodied and whole vision
both of character and society.52 It is a world with no place for the
crazed, disabled engineer, and Rotwang duly falls to his death – his
replacement hand held dramatically high as he does so – when fighting
Freder after kidnapping Maria.
In such a position of complexity, Rotwang thus looks backwards
and forwards: back to the representation of science, and especially
scientist-as-man, that emerged from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1817), and developed through the nineteenth century; and forward
to narratives that situate the inventor/engineer in contemporary
moments of networked technologies and the kinds of patterned flow
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 95

of information that mark a posthumanist present. In the rest of this

chapter I want to follow these questions of disability and gender as
they inform ideas of science, bodies and communities through narra-
tives of engineering and technological creation. If Metropolis exhibits
a tension between the visualising of the process of posthumanist crea-
tion – the fascination with Rotwang’s technology, and the female
body, as he creates cyborg Maria – and the humanism that ultimately
governs notions of identity and belonging, then subsequent texts
shuttle between these positions as they explore how the future and its
disability spaces might be engineered. These spaces are, to return to
Alison Kafer’s earlier observation, always political. Through its focus
on control and revolution, Metropolis visualises and narrates a literal
politics, but all engineered posthumanist disabilities are political in
some way, even those set in the most otherworldly of locations. The
analyses that follow are, in their own way, part of Kafer’s “coalitional
moments”, instances of practice that offer “alternative political imagi-
naries”, contested and contradictory as they might be.53

Artificial I-s

There is a considerable critical literature on the relationship between

humans and the kind of technological being Kakoudaki calls an
“artificial person”. Multiple examples from fiction and film partici-
pate in what she terms “a dense web of interactions between fiction
and reality in contemporary culture”. “Despite their unreality”, she
notes, “they seem to inform a host of cultural domains and debates”.54
This interaction has always taken place of course. Fantasies of artifi-
cial people pervade cultural representations of all ages, and achieve
particular prominence during periods of intense technological change,
such as modernity and the contemporary digital and computer age.
They become, according to Kakoudaki, “superbly dynamic and cultur-
ally reflective”, telling stories that deploy questions not only of
embodiment, but also class, gender, race, health, technological capa-
bility and their multiple intersections.55 In the texts that are analysed
in the remainder of this chapter, this blend of dynamism and reflec-
tion is constantly on show, creating allegories and metaphors in which
disability functions as a complex set of states that inform the domains
and debates of the present.
Commercial cinema in the post-studio age has returned time and
again to narratives that explore the consequences of human interac-
tions with technology in which the representation of embodiment
96 Disability and the Posthuman

is central. To name but a few of the more high-profile examples:

Westworld (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), Blade Runner (1982), Weird
Science (1985), Robocop (1987), Making Mr Right (1987), the Terminator
(1984–2003) and Matrix (1999–2003) trilogies, Gattaca (1997), A.I.:
Artificial Intelligence (2001), the X-Men and Avengers franchises (2000–
present and 2014–present), I, Robot (2004), the Iron Man trilogy
(2008–2013), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Her (2013), Under the Skin
(2013), Transcendence (2014), Lucy (2014), Ex Machina (2014), Ghost in
the Shell (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Zoe (2018) and Alita: Battle
Angel (2019). These films express the tensions this book has centred
on: the fascination with future technologies and the worry over the
meaning of the human body that is created in tandem with this. The
majority focus on male creations of female bodies (either as subser-
vient or independent) or explore issues of masculinity and hyperability.
In each, the changing body is one in which some form disability is
deployed and can be read.
A genealogy of contemporary literary fiction focusing on artificial
people, or the link between human and engineered machine, might
stem from Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952). Vonnegut
portrays a dystopian postwar future (with heavy overtones of Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World) in which American society has emerged to
be governed by a combination of engineers and managers. Engineers
are elevated to the position of national hero, but the novel’s satire
plays out an idea of artificiality in both the processes of mechanical
production and the men who control them.56 Equally, but in signifi-
cantly different forms, the late works of Samuel Beckett presents a
searing ‘artificiality’ in their depiction of complex embodiment.
Nearly all of Beckett’s characters appear to be disabled in some way,
their bodies marked or imprisoned within physical spaces or those of
the stage.57 Following Vonnegut and Beckett, we can identify a move
into a series of narratives that explicitly link engineered technology
and the creation of gendered bodies. From the novels of Philip K. Dick,
especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), through Ira
Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), and into the speculative cyberpunk
worlds of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (particularly Gibson’s
Sprawl Trilogy (1984–1988) and Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985)), stories
depicting engineered cultures of embodiment and the male creation
of robots, cyborgs and automata came to both reflect and construct
social attitudes towards technology and the body.58 Contemporary
writing by women pushes back against the ingrained sexism of much
cyberpunk fiction in particular. Novels such as Louisa Hall’s Speak
(2015), Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 97

The Book of Joan (2017) explore worlds of biotechnology and A.I.

with central female protagonists and often offer explicit critiques of
male authority. They bring contemporary fiction’s representation of
the interaction between human, engineering and the augmented or
disabled/different body up to date in a time of advanced and rapid
technological change.
In Thomas Berger’s 2004 novel Adventures of the Artificial Woman,
the engineering of a technologised female functions within the kinds
of counters mapped out above.59 Ellery Pierce, “a technician at a firm
that made animatronic creatures for movie studios and theme parks”,
decides to make an artificial woman – Phyllis – because he has never
found “a real woman with whom he could sustain more than a tempo-
rary connection”.60 Pierce is a “journeyman”, a mid-level employee,
and knows that in order “to fabricate a woman who could be put to all
the uses of a real one, and fool everyone but her creator”, he has “his
work cut out for him”.61 Berger’s imagined world is no futuristic envi-
ronment of science fiction, but rather a twenty-first century present
in which it just so happens that certain individuals can manufacture
animatronic robots that can be mistaken for real humans. The novel
is subtle and playful; Pierce is every inch the male creator, focused
on perfecting physical features such as skin texture or stride length,
but also language abilities and domestic responsibilities. But Phyllis
soon finds her role as Pierce’s companion limiting and, as the title
suggests, embarks on adventures of her own. “I’m off to a life of new
challenges” she tells Pierce after she has tied him to the bed in a sex
session. Pierce’s reply, as he lies bound, is both desperate and indica-
tive of much of the novel’s knowing humour:

He grimaced. “That’s more of the foolish crap you picked up from

the mass media. You can’t make it on your own. You’re not some
Frankenstein’s creation of organic materials, with a brain that revolts
against its maker. You’re an electronic and mechanical personage. You’ll
need recharging any minute now. And what if one of your systems goes
out of order – in fact I think one or more have already done so, or you
wouldn’t be acting like this”.62

But Phyllis leaves, pausing in the bedroom doorway to tell Pierce that
she thinks she might “have a try at show business”.63 What follows,
in a pastiche of gender roles, is an initial trajectory from sex work to
amateur dramatics, film stardom and politics (she ultimately becomes
President-elect), with Phyllis largely unaware, because of her artifi-
ciality, of the commodification of her body involved in each process.
98 Disability and the Posthuman

Pierce, meanwhile, falls into neglect. Unable – as with Frankenstein

– to create a second figure, he loses his job and becomes homeless.
Unaware of Phyllis’s success, he stumbles across a picture of her in one
of her major film roles in a newspaper and is astounded:

Phyllis as she existed today was inexplicable to him. She represented an

impossibility. Her handlers must know, by now, that she was an artifi-
cial woman. They had to know. They had updated or replaced her major
systems and reprogrammed her completely. She was no longer the
Phyllis that Pierce had created and, in retrospect, loved so profoundly.
Given the nature of her being, it could not even be said that she has
grown, human-style, from what she once had been to what she was
today, as a girl becomes a woman. She has rather evolved, from Model
T to Lincoln Town Car, or like the telephone, from Bell’s crude experi-
ment to today’s miniature portable instrument. She had not matured;
she had undergone a series of modifications.64

Pierce can only conceive of any change in Phyllis as some kind of

mechanical upgrade. What he cannot comprehend is that her transition
is, in effect, a version of a posthumanist singularity, the attainment of
a level of independence beyond any aspect of her programming. Pierce
is here dumbfounded by Phyllis achieving agency; as with her original
decision to leave him, Phyllis enacts choice to a degree Pierce finds
‘impossible’. The engineer/creator, lost in unrequited but paternal-
istic love, is rendered speechless by his creation. Desperate to regain a
vocabulary that might reassert himself in the face of Phyllis’ difference,
Pierce can only reiterate one of the oldest categories for containing the
non-human. Now that she is “no longer a feasible substitute for a real
woman”, he observes, she had become “a monster”.65
As Margrit Shildrick and others have shown, monstrosity was a
category frequently mobilised to include those with disabilities, and
Adventures of the Artificial Woman is subtle in figuring Phyllis’s differ-
ence as an encounter with disability.66 As she develops her theatrical
career (by learning all of Shakespeare’s works by heart in one day) she
is struck by Hamlet’s characterisation of “a mentally retarded female by
the name of Ophelia, to play whom convincingly, [she] would have to
suppress any evidence of intelligence”; while the one man she encoun-
ters in her career as a sex worker who does not make a sexual advance
on her, and who acts genuinely to help her, is in a wheelchair.67 Then
in a surreal scene after he and Phyllis are reunited later in the novel,
Pierce notes how “she would do something so delightfully surprising
as to distract him from soul-searching”, continuing:
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 99

After viewing a DVD of Rain Man, she reproduced the idiot-savant feats
of Dustin Hoffman’s character, counting the individual matches in
boxful while they fell en masse to the floor; reproducing from memory
the names, addresses, and numbers in a telephone directory after one
quick perusal thereof; identifying each playing card in a deck that was
scattered before her at high speed – all without a concomitant show of
autistic disabilities.68

This is complex: an (ostensibly female) animatronic posthuman

performing, for her creator, a reproduction of one of the most famous
fictional representations of neurobehavioral difference, but with the
absence of the features that constitute such acts as being disabled. For
Phyllis, Raymond Babbit’s actions in Rain Man are simply things that
can be done. She sees no reason to consider them as any form as savant
compensation for a disabled deficit. As with the example of her earlier
employer in a wheelchair, and indeed her wider incomprehension of
the nuances of gender difference, here the posthuman Phyllis empha-
sises that she sees diversity without the individual prejudices and
social constraints that accompany it.
Adventures of the Artificial Woman mobilises Phyllis’ innocent vision
precisely to discuss sexist and ableist constructions of power, but
the seemingly progressive politics this might suggest proves decep-
tive. In the end, when Phyllis is the president-in-waiting, she begins
to exhibit autocratic tendencies and a desire for control that Pierce
feels too threatening. “I’ve come to realize what the Presidency calls
for” Phyllis asserts, “We’re a special breed, we whom the American
people have selected to lead them”.69 She plans not only to enact policy
changes that would alter all aspects of American society, but also to
replace Pierce with an animatronic husband. Acting both as seem-
ingly concerned citizen and rejected partner, Pierce turns Phyllis off,
“inserting the tip of his little finger into her nearby ear and pressing
the tiny fail-safe button just inside the auditory orifice, an essential of
the original design but never used till now”.70 He reasserts the male
power of creation just as the posthumanist female appears to become
fully autonomous as the most powerful individual in the world. The
ending complicates the novel overall, signalling Pierce’s fear of Phyllis’
ultimate independence as well as, potentially, a wider cultural fear of a
future, technologised woman.
As a single example of the kinds of text and cultural dynamics
mentioned previously, Adventures of the Artificial Woman reveals itself
to be typical of fictional narratives in which the social and the engi-
neered combine to produce visions of a gendered technological future.
100 Disability and the Posthuman

In such texts, gender and disability – inevitably intersecting – are part

of a matrix in which desire and fear shuttle across locations, evidence
of the unstable position that the categories of artificial or posthuman
hold in the imagination. The augmented/disabled body arouses fasci-
nation because of its potential to supersede the present, until its
difference evokes what James Porter has articulated as the classic
double bind of disabled embodiment, when it becomes “too much a
body, too real, too corporeal”, a process that conversely makes it “lack
something essential, something that would make it identifiable and
something to identify with”. Continuing, Porter notes, “it seems too
little a body: a body that is deficiently itself, not quite a body in the full
sense of the word, not real enough”.71 The excitement of the supple-
mented self can, it seems, all too easily become a horizon to back away
from; the imagining of diverse posthumanist possibilities signalling
a return to the fantasy of a normalised, whole humanism. Equally,
narratives of gender in texts such as Metropolis and Adventures of the
Artificial Woman see women, as they interact with technology, occupy
positions of subversive power from which they suggest the articulation
of possible alternative futures; but they become excised from them as
the stories conclude, removed as the issues of technology, society and
embodied selfhood are resolved through what appears inevitably to be
a prism of male creation and resolution.
The fictions we have seen so far are turbulent objects, full of
contradictory impulses around individuals and their interactions
with engineered futures of change. But the problems of the artifi-
cial and engineered can be recast as the potential of posthumanism’s
concentration on the meaning of technology, and there are other envi-
ronments to explore that speak of other bodies and other prospects.
In the next section, it is the narratives of contemporary speculative/
science fiction and film that will form the locations for these, loca-
tions that bring disability and gender to the forefront of imagining the
processes of engineered technologies.

Imagineering embodied female subjects in speculative/

science film and fiction

Sherryl Vint entitled her 2007 study of science fiction, technology

and subjectivity, Bodies of Tomorrow, and the striking phrase is useful
in suggesting imaginings of not just posthuman selves and disa-
bility subjectivities, but their place within the imagining of science
as fiction. Introducing her argument, Vint notes that “technology is
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 101

rapidly making the concept of the ‘natural’ human obsolete. We have

now entered the realm of the posthuman, the debate over the identi-
ties and values of what will come after the human”. She then goes on:

I would add that the outcome of such debates pivots greatly on the
concepts of identity and embodiment that are dominant in the cultural
milieu that surrounds the deployment of such technologies, and further
that such values are significant not only for the effects they have on the
human species but also for the relationship between humanity and the
rest of the world that are implicit in them. My contention is that in
thinking about the consequences of technologies of body modification,
what is ultimately most important is the social milieu and philosoph-
ical assumptions which ground the way we deploy such technologies.72

Vint’s book has no particular focus on either disability or engineering,

but her comments here make a clear space for contemplating each
within her terms. Social and cultural imaginings of identity and
embodiment are at the heart of the disability narratives and deploy-
ments that concern this study, even if some of those imaginings undo
any stability that ‘identity’ might suggest, while the assumptions
around deployment of technology is clearly a foundational aspect of
engineering. Importantly, Vint’s fictionalised bodies of tomorrow are
both situated and discursive: “it is important”, she notes, “to return
to a notion of embodied subjectivity in order to articulate the ethical
implications of technologies of bodily modification. Technological
visions of a post-embodied future are merely fantasies about tran-
scending the material ream of social responsibility”.73 If we might see
the fantasies of transcendence as science fiction, then the technologies
of modification are very much the work of engineers.
In his more recent 2016 study Biopunk Dystopias, Lars Schmeink
makes explicit the links between science fiction and critical posthu-
manism. He locates the origins of representations of the posthuman in
what he terms a “proto-science-fictional context”, noting that how “the
concerns and conceptions of (post)humanist thinking lie at the heart
of science fiction”.74 Technology and embodiment are central to this,
and Schmeink outlines a detailed account of scholarship on posthu-
manism recognisably related to the work of Rosi Braidotti and Pramod
Nayar that he then extends to analyses of science fiction. In the fiction,
Schmeink sees depictions of “a critical dystopian future […] in which
the posthuman has become a tangible reality that is trying to establish
a position in the ‘natural order’ and ultimately ends up threatening to
replace the human completely”. I am more ambivalent than Schmeink
102 Disability and the Posthuman

about the idea of ‘complete’ replacement, but his connection of science

fiction to the critical decentrings of posthumanist theorising (with all
its associated commentaries on bodies, gender, race and politics) is a
substantial investigation of the interplay between science/speculative
fiction, technology and the body.
As outlined previously in this chapter, the engineered body raises
issues of material and responsible political and social action. The
disability and feminist activists and scholars, examined earlier, who
seek to articulate grounded narratives of critical intervention that
speak both of experience and philosophical/ethical contemplation
exemplify this, as do the fictional questions around the concept of the
‘artificial’. Michael Bérubé’s description of the disabled body as “both
material artefact and social construction” outlines positionings also
true of female and technologised embodiments.75 When Vint observes
that “[t]he body remains relevant to critical work and ‘real’ life […]
because the discourses that structure these material bodies continue
to construct and constrain our material selves”, she is speaking of an
embodied subjectivity, figured through discourse, that can be disa-
bled, feminist and posthuman.76 The problems of the artificial and fear
of difference discussed in this chapter can be addressed through imag-
inations of bodies that project the kinds of progressive possibilities
envisaged by Haraway, Kafer and others. Indeed, I want to argue that
it is the specific fictional representation of these material, engineered
bodies that offer precisely these productive moments; here figuring
science fiction as the literal fictionalisation of engineering science. As
Kathryn Allan has noted:

SF has long explored deviant and disabled bodies [and] is inhabited by

people (and aliens) whose embodiments are situated along the entire
spectrum of ability […] No other genre comes close to articulating
the anxieties and preoccupations of the present day as clearly and
critically as SF, making it a vital source for understanding advances in
technology and its impact on newly emerging embodiments and subjec-
tivities, particularly for peoples with disabilities.77

As we will see, while this can mean a focus on ideas of technology as

cure for disabilities, it can also make for disability-rich narratives in
which difference becomes the norm.
Manuela Rossini has coined the term ‘imagineering’ for the ways
in which texts conceptualise bodies within networks that anticipate
the future, with her deliberate collision of words suggesting an inter-
action between fictional approaches and a conception of engineering
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 103

practice. When she observes what she terms the “double movement”
of technology and the literary, she makes an important point, namely
that “literature does not merely react to technological development and
offer ethical guidance”. Rather the process is one of greater equality:
“the technological potential will affect the way the human body/subject
is defined but these new meanings (produced in texts and images)
will influence, if not our actual use and even deployment of them, our
handling of technologies”.78 To ‘imagineer’ then, might be to deploy the
various versions of design and expression for which I argue here.
However, while Rossini is deft in her analyses of cultural theory
and fictional texts, her critical approach does not break down ‘tech-
nology’ in any way, leaving nothing that might allow for a focus on how
actual engineering methods can contribute to a critical interdiscipli-
nary idea of the engineered body. There are no specifics about the work
of design or production in her asserted ‘double meaning’, no account
of the complexity inherent when conceiving of production design; the
detail only comes from one side. To observe this is to register those
moments when cultural criticism, always piratical in its methods, lays
claim to terminology and (broadly conceived) ideas from disciplines
beyond its own but displays no real care (or courtesy) towards those
other subjects. For Rossini, ‘engineering’ is just a set of generalisations
attached to a word.
But the term can be reclaimed from Rossini’s omissions, if for
no other reason than its collision between two words is so sugges-
tive of a productive critical method. We can fill in that which Rossini
ignores and give engineering the space it is due. So, the final section
of this chapter will imagineer the nexus of disability, engineering and
feminism to bring a critical posthumanist perspective to questions of
origins, selfhood, and the interaction between human and non-human.
I will look in particular at Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, and
the Wayfarer trilogy of science fiction novels by Becky Chambers – The
Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2015), A Closed and Common Orbit
(2016) and Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) – to explore how gender,
design and mechanical production produce specific stories of a posthu-
manist disabled presence, particularly as that presence is manifested
through the meeting of bodies and technology. As Vint notes, “the
new selves SF might help us imagine are both […] problematic selves
and unexpected others”. She goes on: “they remind us of the fragility
of our boundary-making work and that the Other always is an aspect
of self made problematic”.79 It is precisely these problematic selves that
I want to chart, reading imaginative worlds in which speculation is
central to the articulation of person and place.
104 Disability and the Posthuman

As many feminist critics writing on science and speculative fiction

have noted, the open possibilities of the genre allow for formal and
textual intricacies that match the multiple positionings women inhabit
in relation to technology. Posthumanist conceptions of assemblages
and networks, with their focus on decentralisation and questions
surrounding species specificity, lend themselves naturally to science
fictional depictions of technology and alien subjectivities. Pramod
Nayar anchors most of his discussion of posthuman biology in Octavia
Butler’s seminal Xenogenesis trilogy (1988–1989), using Butler’s fiction
to outline a posthumanist “site of acculturation” in which biological
and genetic states (but also “histories, memories and habits”) exem-
plify posthumanism’s identification of, and commitment to, what he
elsewhere terms “interconnections, messy histories, blurred origins,
borrowing and adaptations, cross-overs and impurities [and] depend-
ency and mutuality across species”.80 As this study has shown, ‘messy’,
‘blurred’ ‘impurities’ are central to the working of fiction’s aesthetics.
The fit here, between disabled bodies, gendered selves, imagined engi-
neering, posthuman landscapes and the worlds of science fiction, is
exciting in its potential.
The figuration of such worlds in science fiction cinema is a different
matter. Sue Short observes in Cyborg Cinema that, “compared to […]
literary SF […], cinematic versions have proved to be much more
conservative in their depictions of gender, particularly where artificial
women are concerned”.81 Short’s analysis ranges across a multitude of
film texts, from Heinrich Galeen’s Alraune (1928) and Bernard Knowles’
The Perfect Woman (1949) to John Hughes’ Weird Science (1985) and
Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), noting that in nearly all cases “to survive as
an artificial woman in SF cinema necessitates conforming to approved
standards of behaviour and generally deferring to male authority”.82 The
gender dynamics of contemporary Hollywood in particular leave little
room for the kind of productive articulation of the present that Allan
sees in literary science fiction. If the second decade of the twenty-first
century has seen the development of critical ideas of intersectionality
that chart the intricate contemporary interactions between gender,
bodies and technology, Short asserts that these have yet to transfer to
the realm of high-production commercial cinema.

Racialising the technologised female robot

Ex Machina is the most notable and critically complex recent feature in

the tradition Short examines. It is a film that lays claim to being more
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 105

intelligent and less misogynistic than those in her study though, as

we will see, it is not without its own messy contradictions. Ex Machina
explores processes of engineering and production, and through a
gender lens. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) is the inventor of the search engine
Blue Book (a thinly disguised Google) and a self-styled Prometheus
working on the creation of an A.I. that will possess true conscious-
ness.83 He invites Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), one of his employees, to
his secluded research facility in order to subject his latest humanoid
model Ava (Alicia Vikander) to an enhanced Turing test, a set of
processes designed to see if she exhibits qualities that mean she can
approximate human behaviour. During the test Caleb will come to
believe that Ava possesses a complex consciousness even as he knows
her to be non-human.
The film establishes Nathan’s stereotypical masculinity from the
start: Caleb first sees him working out with weights, while Nathan
seeks to overcome Caleb’s initial nervousness with a succession of
demotic colloquialisms. “Can we just be two guys?” he asks Caleb,
a representative phrase accompanying various offers of beer and
exclamations of “dude!”. “Lay off the textbook approach”, Nathan
commands at one point; and, tired of Caleb’s attempts to intellec-
tualise the experiment with Ava, he interrupts to assert: “I want
to have a beer and conversation with you, not a seminar”. Nathan’s
buddy speak is only one example of the film’s careful staging of the
patriarchal framing of his work and creation of Ava in particular. It
is his sense of entitlement that allows him to use Bluebook to collect
data from every cell phone in the world to produce the software for
his engineering; while although Caleb points out that he could have
created all the necessary technology in “a grey box”, Nathan’s models
and prototypes are all female-based humanoids designed to be sexual.
“You bet she can fuck” he says of Ava at one point, only one of the
aggressive statements that underscore his sense of self as a creator of
what is, in his eyes, sentient female selfhood. Nathan sleeps in a room
in which all the pre-Ava prototypes developed during his experimen-
tation are kept in cupboards, as if he is some serial killer hoarding
bodies as trophies.
Caleb lacks Nathan’s alpha male bravado but is nevertheless
complicit in the controlling exercises that test Ava. Watched by Nathan
from a separate control room (one of a series of ways in which the film
puts Ava on display for a male gaze), it is Caleb who, over a series of
interview/conversation sessions, asks Ava questions to establish her
emotions, desires and capacity of mind. Confined to a glass room,
Ava interacts with Caleb as he (without his full knowledge) enacts
106 Disability and the Posthuman

Nathan’s real and undisclosed version of the Turing test: whether in

fact Ava will manipulate Caleb to try to escape. Unable to contain
his emotions for Ava, Caleb becomes the patsy that proves Nathan’s
thesis: that Ava is in fact Eve, the duplicitous woman who, using guile
and deceit, fools a man into acting in her best interests. That Nathan
takes this particular set of female characteristics as indicating true
A.I. ability is no coincidence, confirming his misogyny and sense of
entitlement.
But Ava in fact produces a double move. In his arrogance Nathan
believes that it will be “the next model”, that made after Ava, who will
be “the Singularity”, the true breakthrough; Ava herself is to be down-
loaded and developed, her memories erased but her body retained to
hold the next upgrade. But for all of his satisfaction in creating Ava’s
successful deception of Caleb, Nathan fails to perceive that Ava’s ulti-
mate goal, the real extent of her posthuman intelligence, is to fool both
men. Ava literally engineers her escape through a combination of tech-
nologies, repurposing the hardware and software through which she
has been created as well as those that imprison her within Nathan’s
compound. She creates power cuts in order to pull Caleb into an
intimacy (away from the cameras that cover all the rooms), but also
manipulates him into overriding the lockdown system that means she
can exit the room in which she is kept. After killing Nathan, she traps
Caleb in the control room (his confinement echoing hers), shuts down
the computer systems he desperately tries to use to escape, and leaves
the facility for freedom with a half glance towards him as he screams
for help.
Ex Machina’s feminism is, as we shall see, not unproblematic, but
the core of its narrative revolves around a female posthumanist subject
taking over the conditions under which she was produced, deleting the
men who created and tested her, and exiting into personal freedom. If
Victor Frankenstein failed in the creation of a bride for his monster,
the technology unable to make a female partner for a male, Ava
asserts an individualism that has no need of male companionship.84
She becomes Haraway’s cyborg, with no need for origins and a very
clear rejection of any return to nature: Ava/Eve does enter the garden/
Garden as she leave’s Nathan’s house but, in a knowing move, only
to walk through it and take a helicopter away from the complex. The
final shot of the film sees her at a busy city traffic intersection, a loca-
tion she has earlier said to Caleb she would want to visit because of
the multiplicity of people she would find there. She turns and leaves,
with the audience none the wiser as to the future she will create –
beyond an understanding that it will be on her terms.
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 107

Ava (Alicia Vikander) comes face to face with a prototype

in Ex Machina

Ex Machina is a disability film because it has a continual emphasis

on the embodied nature of selfhood and because it visually figures
the complex difference of the body. As a technological construction,
and thanks to the CGI imagery of the production process, Ava is
visibly non-human; but her body is at the same time clearly humanoid,
something underscored by the strength of the real Alicia Vikander’s
performance within her computer-generated physical self. Ava’s
android intermeshes, especially the clear engineering of her limbs and
head, do not supersede her ‘human’ appearance. Rather they produce
an amalgam in which viewers see Ava as both human and not, and at
the same time. It is within this paradox that we can see the poten-
tial for a productive disability reading of Ex Machina’s posthumanism;
the double presence of Ava’s body enacting Porter’s classic disability
marker of signalling both not enough and too much humanity in the
single moment, a reminder of absence and excess, conjoined in their
complexity.
The film plays on the possibilities such visuals present. Ava covers
her body with clothes and a wig, hiding her clearly technologised self,
when wanting to suggest how she might pass as human. This process
takes place when during the interview sessions she is luring Caleb into
an intimacy in which she suggests they might go on a ‘date’, as well
as at the end when she dresses for her final escape. In both cases Ava
takes her clothes out of a wardrobe, literally performing Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s arguments in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) that secrecy
108 Disability and the Posthuman

– here Ava’s non-human status – is not only about concealment but

the impossibility of disclosure.85 In her future, it is suggested, Ava
will cover her android self. Using Sedgewick’s theory, Tobin Siebers
develops the idea of a disability as a masquerade, a process that offers
“an opportunity to rethink passing from the point of view of disability”.
In a phrase that captures Ava’s use of the closet, Siebers observes that,
through the idea of the masquerade, “the powerful symbolic connec-
tion between disability and prosthetics allows those who improvise on
the use of their prosthesis to tinker with the social meeting of their
disability”.86 Ava’s escape is planned, but – as the development of her
conversations with Caleb makes clear – she is also an improviser, and
the idea that her clothes themselves become prosthetics is a powerful
disability-led critical argument for the ways in which she constitutes
the meaning of her actions. Fully clothed, Ava is a posthumanist
masquerade, a non-human embodied agent of difference.87
Ex Machina’s visual association between disability and intersections
of vulnerability and violence is as complex as this masquerading agency.
In the fight in which Ava and Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), the second
android in the complex and one manufactured to act as servant and sex
slave, kill Nathan, he attacks both androids with a dumbbell, severing
one of Ava’s arms and breaking off Kyoko’s jaw and lower face. This last
act makes Kyoko fall to the floor, effectively ‘killed’ (she does not move
from this position for the rest of the film). Before this final drama, Caleb
has watched footage of how, in previous experiments, one of Nathan’s
prototypes, Jade, has screamed to be released from her captivity and
smashed her arms against a wall until both limbs are reduced to metal
stumps. It is when the androids are at their most vulnerable to physical
attack, but also most threatening, that their bodies lose parts, inter-
rupting the apprehension that their selves are whole.
Ava replaces her missing arm, however, in a scene in which she
enters Nathan’s bedroom, opens the cupboards there, and sees the
prototypes. She takes an arm from a figure and bolts it on to her own
body, a seamless attachment of a prosthetic strangely reminiscent
of Baum’s Tin Woodman (as with the Woodman, the arm functions
immediately). Similarly, she also peels skin from a prototype before
grafting it to her body, smoothing it into place. The disabled body
is thus restored to wholeness, but the scene is not as simple as this
might suggest; there is a clear sense in which it is shot that Ava is
restoring herself in an act of community. Her recognition of the proto-
types is wordless, but the sensuality with which she touches the
other bodies, and the shot/reverse/shot technique between her face
and that of the prototype from which she takes the arm and skin,
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 109

clearly suggest understanding and complicity. Equally, Ava is rendered

multiple during this interaction through the refractions we see of her
in the mirrored doors of the cupboards as she opens them. This, it
appears, is not an act of centred individualism. As with the way in
which Ava teams with Kyoko to kill Nathan, here android/disabled
bodies are in dialogue. Ava then can be read as both posthumanist
and disability amalgamations, a networked technological creation in
which a complex embodiment is stressed through the processes of
visuality that allow us to see the constructed engineering of self. The
interaction is also intersectional, as in this moment Ava is in the final
stages of her feminist triumph: her escape from Nathan, Caleb and
their patriarchal presumptions.
But such a reading is too seamless. Upon reflection Ex Machina
contains the same contradictions identified in so many of the texts
examined in this study so far; the same narrative push-and-pull that
ideas of the posthuman create around bodies. But here the category
that destabilises the posthumanist feminism outlined above is race.
The prototype from which Ava takes the body parts is Jade, previ-
ously seen on film attempting to escape from her captivity, and a
model who is clearly marked as Asian through her skin tone, hair and
facial features. Likewise, Kyoko is identifiably Asian, through similar
features and her name (and the fact she is played by a Japanese actor).
As Ava turns away from Nathan, dying in a corridor, she also leaves
Kyoko, motionless on the floor. If there has been complicity between
the two androids in the murder of Nathan, it generates no sense of
responsibility or care here. Why is Kyoko, who has displayed the possi-
bility of her regeneration in scenes in which she peels back her skin to
reveal her technological workings, not allowed to leave? Equally, while
it is possible to read Ava’s taking of Jade’s limb and skin as the kind of
posthumanist assemblage described above (and indeed potentially as
a productive multiculturalism), it also functions as an appropriation, a
mining of the Other’s body in the creation of a new self.
In a sharp and perceptive reading of the film’s racial politics,
Danielle Wong observes how in Ex Machina’s “conflation of the post-
human with the postracial […], race is, quite literally, deconstructed
and disassembled in order for Ava to continue her prosthetic evolu-
tion”. Ava may pass Nathan’s Turing test but, as Wong asserts,
“Kyoko and Jade fail; they are too obviously machines”. Ava is “free
to move onward into tomorrow”, but only as a subject who literally
carries a history of race appropriation with her: “The posthuman
future emerging out of the Information Age grafts onto the skin that
remembers the histories of racialised slavery and indentured labour
110 Disability and the Posthuman

Racial politics in Ex Machina: Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) and Ava

(Alicia Vikander)

that gave rise to Western modernity”. As such, a reading of Ava as

engineer has to contextualise her adroit manipulation of Nathan and
Caleb’s programming within the longer narrative of technology as
appropriative power and tool of oppression. Jade’s name conjures
up Orientalist fantasies of Asia as a place of exploitable materialist
fortunes, objects to be found and taken, while the silence of both
Asian androids (Kyoko has been made not to talk) rehearses centu-
ries-old Western apprehensions of the ‘inscrutable and unreadable’
Asian figure. What Wong neatly terms “techno-Orientalist anxieties”
underpin both Nathan’s narrative of power (Kyoko as servant) as well
as Ava’s trajectory towards freedom (Kyoko and Jade as disposable
accomplices). These anxieties work to create fissures through the
film, “interrogat[ing] the liberal humanist subject who is reincar-
nated as the white-as-postracial subject”.88
Wong calls this process a “haunting” and it is an apt word for
the spectral presence of humanist values that runs through so many
narratives of the posthuman. In Ex Machina, these ghosts stare down,
or at least at, feminist and disability readings. The complex embodi-
ment suggested by the interaction of technologised limbs and skin,
and the vulnerability of the film’s characters, do not resolve the
anxieties over race traced by Wong. Mobilising Ava as a posthuman
feminist creates an argument at odds with a reading of her as an
extension of Euro-American modernity. As Mel Chen has observed
in their work on disability and race, there is an “integral fabric of
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 111

racialisation within dominant disability and illness narrations and

representations”, and the effects of these are, as with racialisation
in general, “never merely figurative, but materially consequential”.89
No critical sleight of hand is available to fix these contradictions,
and it is instructive to note that the film’s cultural appropriation
of Asia, and particularly Japan, continues a tradition established by
the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, where
both writers’ fraught fascinations with technology and the body
frequently focus on Asian women’s bodies.90 Ex Machina becomes
the latest iteration of the mixing of excess and absence this book
has found itself tracing; a celebration of the A.I. that becomes a free
sentient subject set against the repression of racialised histories that
made such a process possible. As ever, the disabled posthumanist
body appears as eruptive, overwritten by stories that fail to cohere
upon it.
With its suggestion of Ava’s life beyond the end of its narrative,
Ex Machina forms the kind of “cyborg future” highlighted by Alison
Kafer earlier in this chapter. Remembering Kafer’s observation that
the cyborg articulates discourses of the political as well as those of
embodiment, while bearing in mind Chen’s above reflection on the
material consequences of racialisation, what emerges from the film
are the tensions that exist between its assertion of female emancipa-
tion and reiteration of racial anxieties. Ex Machina’s politics articulate
both gender and race, but in radically different ways. The film is more
intelligent than those Short analyses in Cyborg Cinema, practising
a critique of “patriarchy’s (de)valuation of women” that she sees as
being inherent in cinema’s representations of cyborg women.91 But
these progressive gender politics cannot be articulated without recog-
nition of the racial bias that makes them possible. This is still a future
that places certain bodies under erasure.

Dealing with ‘the kit’: A.I. and crisis of body

modification

Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer trilogy is composed of three narratives

that trace characters across a fictional multi-species universe in which
body enhancement and modification are common and are matched
by worlds of cultural and gendered diversity and entanglement. Both
society and self in Chambers’ novels are marked by mixtures and
amalgamations. The following description, of Port Coriol marketplace
in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (the first novel), is typical of the
112 Disability and the Posthuman

novels’ depictions of the posthumanist interactions that characterise

their social locations:

Sprawling streets stuffed with open-air shopfronts, overflowing with

clothes and kitsch and sundries. Grounded ships, gutted and trans-
formed into warehouses and eateries. Towering junk heaps lorded
over by odd tinkerers who could always find exactly the part you
were looking for, as long as you had the patience to talk about their
latest engine mod. Cold underground bunkers full of bots and chips,
swarming at all hours with giddy techs and modders sporting every
implant imaginable. Food stalls offering everything from greasy street
snacks to curious delicacies, some with rambling menus of daily
specials, others with offerings so specific that the only acceptable
thing to say at the counter was ‘one, please.’ A menagerie of sapients
speaking in a dizzying array of languages, shaking hands and clasping
paws and brushing tendrils.92

The ‘dizzying menagerie’ here is, to a degree, reminiscent of Gibson’s

fiction or Blade Runner’s imagined locations, where spaces of tech-
nological surplus, linguistic pastiche and conglomerations of culture
challenge notions of purity and authenticity. But where Gibson’s novels
and Scott’s film use such settings to investigate stories of male capa-
bility, vulnerability and violence, Chambers populates her spaceworlds
with characters marked by personal fluidity and polyphonic associa-
tions. Individuals cross between genders depending on fertility cycles,
or lack any gender identification at all; families involve same-sex
parents or have complex formations of care, with individuals moving
between birth parents, designated “raising” families, and groupings
of friends and lovers where polygamy is the norm; genetic tweaking
is not for the pursuance of individual strength or corporate gain, but
rather “to make your physical self fit with who you are inside”.93 Given
this polyphony, it is appropriate that the major romantic relationship
in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is between Jenks, a techni-
cian, and Lovelace, the A.I. on the engineering ship the Wayfarer. And
throughout the trilogy, human characters are frequently marked by
their ignorance and limitations: the central character of The Long Way
to a Small Angry Planet “chided herself for being so species-centric”
as she encounters a range of sapients and societies while employed
on the Wayfarer;94 while in the third novel in the series, Record of a
Spaceborn Few, it is reiterated continually that human culture is precar-
ious: “We build off their tech”, one character notes in relation to the
multiple instances in which alien technology is cited as being superior
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 113

to human, “and we get the planets they’ve decided are too crummy to
live on”.95 In all three novels, it is the non-human animals who prac-
tise the greatest cultural and social sophistication or the most complex
formations of selfhood.
Disability runs through the Wayfarer series, even given the
plurality of body types that make up Chambers’ fictional worlds. In
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Jenks, the Wayfarer’s technician,
has “an average size” head, but “the rest of him was small, small as a
child. He was stocky, too, as if his limbs had filled out while refusing
to lengthen”. His physical features draw comment: “why would
anyone go to that much trouble to make himself small?” one char-
acter wonders on first meeting him.96 Jenks finds himself, however, at
home in spaces of technological body modification. His own enhance-
ment, he stresses, “has been my way of saying that this is my body
[…] All the things I’ve done to my body, I’ve done out of love”, while
he is drawn to markets and subcultures where “hardcore modders”
are “prone to removing their own limbs in favour of synthetic replace-
ments”, and “metallic exoskeletons, or swirling nonabot tattoos, or
unsettling perfect faces that betrayed a weakness for genetweaks” are
a posthumanist norm. “Alongside such oddities”, Jenks observes, “his
small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place
where everybody was weird. He took comfort in that”.97 In worlds where
multiple forms – physical, cognitive, sexual, social – abound, disability
is defined by the practice of prejudice rather than the straightforward
fact of difference; it is the humans who presume that Jenks should have
undergone modification to make himself taller who construct his
stature as a ‘problem’.
It is the second novel of the trilogy, A Closed and Common Orbit, that
explores ideas of disability, engineering and gender in the greatest
detail. A Closed and Common Orbit develops two parallel narratives. The
first is that of Sidra, the reboot of Lovelace, the A.I. on the Wayfarer
in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet who has – illegally – become
embodied in an exoskeleton housing and made to pass as a human.
The second is that of Pepper, the engineer who created Sidra in an
act of rescue, though most of Pepper’s story is that of her childhood
20 years before, when she was a child slave known as Jane 23. As the
novel progresses the reader becomes aware that Jane is Pepper and the
two narratives come together at the end.
Sidra’s condition is a careful exploration of a mind/body Cartesian
dualism and the resulting nature of technological affect. As an A.I. on
board the Wayfarer, her (she makes the decision to take female gender)
responsibility was to oversee the totality of the ship’s space: “She’d
114 Disability and the Posthuman

had cameras in every corner, voxes in every room. She’d existed in a

web, with eyes both within and outside. A solid sphere of unblinking
perception”. But in her technologised embodied state, that percep-
tion has reduced dramatically: “Her vision was a cone, a narrow
cone fixed straight ahead, with nothing – actual nothing – beyond its
edges”. Gravity, which was once “something that happened within her,
created by antigrav nets in the floor panels”, is now “a myopic glue,
something that stuck feet to the floor and legs to the seat above it”.
And whereas before she was in constant connection to the Linkings,
the novel’s characterisation of the internet, within her new body, she
now “could access no knowledge except that which was stored inside
a housing that held nothing but herself”. The result is that “she felt
blind, Stunted. She was trapped in this thing”.98
Sidra’s narrative in A Closed and Common Orbit is one of struggles
with and adjustment to what she refers to as ‘the kit’ that consti-
tutes her body. Physically, her spatial and proprioceptive senses are
completely reconfigured by her new self; while, initially programmed
to be unable to lie, she has to learn how to obfuscate language when
replying to questions or expressing herself. “Everything feels wrong”
she says at the start of the novel, “I feel inside out”.99 Sidra’s encounter
with her new world as she moves from the limited environment of a
ship in space to the teeming multiplicities of life on a planet is one of
continuous disablement. Hating the limitations of her body, she wants
to return to what she sees as the many advantages of her previous
state as a diffused technological mind. “I was housed in a ship”, she
tells a friend to whom she has confided her truth, “I’m now housed in
a body kit. My place of installation changes my abilities, but it’s not
mine, it’s not me”.100 Sidra’s preference for mind over body is part of
a heritage of the rejection of the ‘meat’ of the physical self. As with
the Baum’s Tin Woodman, here the body that needs to sleep, be fed
or that can be subjected to violence and feel pain (Sidra’s ‘kit’ has to
enact these so she can pass as being human, even though she has no
need to such bodily functions) is seen as inferior to a posthumanist
consciousness of pure thought. But whereas the Woodman makes
a journey from human to android/cyborg, Sidra’s trajectory is back
from an A.I. to a physical self that in fact only approximates a human
state as it is, still, a technological construction. Sherryl Vint notes
that science fiction often focuses on “the question of authenticity, of
distinguishing ‘true’ from ‘false’ selves, of sorting out what is really
‘me’ from the programming of cultural influences on the one hand
[…] and biological instincts on the other”, but Chambers’ narrative
is more complex than this.101 Sidra’s relationship with embodiment is
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 115

one between technological states, with ‘biology’ only a subject to be

contemplated from without. Vint cites patterns in history that results
in a hegemony through which “we” (understood as majority, and
therefore ableist, social opinion) “are inclined to identify ourselves
with ‘voice’ or self inside our heads”, and to “value a concept of self
as self as immutable and self-consistent, some essence that persists
despite changes, including changes in our body”.102 While this applies
to Sidra, it does so only partiality and the whole question of her self-
hood and agency is made both more problematic and tantalising by
her foundational state being that of an A.I.
Jane 23/Pepper’s narrative appears more recognisably human than
that of Sidra. Jane is a child slave on an unnamed planet for a people
named ‘the Enhanced’, made to work continually on extracting reus-
able parts from scrap metal and overseen by android ‘Mothers’ whose
supervision consists solely of surveillance and violence. When, aged
ten, Jane escapes from the building in which she lives and works, it
is the first time she has ever seen the sky: “the ceiling that wasn’t a
ceiling” was “so, so big […] It went on so far Jane 23 couldn’t see any
edges. It went on for always”.103 Jane finds a derelict shuttle in an envi-
ronment covered with machine cast-offs from other parts of the planet
and, fighting off feral dogs and acute food and water shortages, over
the course of nine years reassembles the craft to make it flightworthy.
Jane, Chambers stresses, is a consummate engineer, capable of fixing
more or less anything, a characteristic carried forward in her reinven-
tion as Pepper. Jane’s story, as she flies away from her abusive origins
to become integrated into a social world of culture and people, is one
of victory over captivity through her capability and perseverance.
But the depiction of Jane 23/Pepper is subtler and more nuanced
than this outline suggests. With the first ten years of her life limited
to the dorm and sorting room in which she lives and works, her story
is not one of a humanist ‘return’. She has never known spaces such
as Port Coriol or encountered the range of species that populate the
rest of the novel. Jane, it also transpires, is a clone. Although details
of her exact origin are never disclosed, she believes that the society
that created her as a slave “probably cooked her up out of some grab-
bag gene junk and pulled her out of a gooey vat, along with the other
disposable girls”, while she knows that she only “had a single chromo-
some, which was apparently one short from the usual”.104 Her body
is, she says, all “monkey limbs and tweaked face”.105 As such, Jane’s
status is not the same as those other characters in the Wayfarer series
who become posthumanised ‘genetweaks’ through voluntary modifi-
cation. Her genetic composition is not tied to ideas of augmentation
116 Disability and the Posthuman

or enhancement; rather it, and her early life, indicate a disposability, a

form of existence in which dignity is absent.106
In addition, Jane is not alone on the shuttle. As she flees the dogs
who attack her following her escape, she is guided to the ship by
a voice: “a weird voice, all wrong around the edges, not making any
sense, not making any good words. Just a bunch of junk sounds”.107
The voice belongs to Owl, the shuttle’s A.I., “a mind in a machine” as
she describes herself to Jane during their first conversation.108 Owl was
jettisoned as junk along with the rest of the ship when the original crew
were arrested, and her contact with Jane is the first interaction she has
had since then. The twinning that Jane and Owl form over the years
before they leave the planet becomes a narrative that parallels the mind/
body split with which Chambers animates Sidra’s storyline. While Jane
becomes the physical half of the pairing, demanding from Owl building
“tasks” and exploring outside the shuttle for usable technology and
food, Owl takes on the status of Jane’s teacher, advising and instructing
on language, culture, objects and (literally) the nature of the universe.
Comparison between Owl and Sidra sets up a fruitful complication of
any idea of an A.I. ‘self’ in the novel; while Sidra feels confined in her
‘kit’ and yearns for her time as a distributed consciousness aboard the
Wayfarer, Owl has been trapped in her software isolation until Jane’s
arrival and even when the two are together laments her inability to
offer physical aid. The related experiences here reflect different, argu-
ably competing, models and modes of disablement.
A Closed and Common Orbit brings its two narrative strands together
following Jane’s development into Pepper and subsequent intersec-
tion with Sidra’s storyline. Sidra is quarantined after leaving her home
planet and, with her future unsure, is taken by Pepper to Port Coriol to
work in her engineering parts shop. But this departure involves aban-
doning Owl who, for a second time, is left trapped aboard the ship.
The precise hinge at which the storylines come together is Pepper’s
discovery of the location of the shuttle, following which Sidra becomes
integral to obtaining Owl’s freedom. Sidra downloads her conscious-
ness on to the ship, facilitating Owl’s reactivation. The result is that at
the novel’s end the two A.I.s inhabit the same space of consciousness:
“The AI framework installed in the walls – Sidra’s design, Pepper’s
implementation – contained a single node where Sidra and Owl could
communicate with one another”.109 But Sidra’s return to an A.I. self is
not depicted as a celebration of the rejection of her embodied status.
Rather her ‘kit’ becomes what the narrative terms her “core body”,
a physical/technological exoskeleton to which she can return at will
when she feels a need to experience the proprioceptive sense of her
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 117

body in interactive motion.110 Sidra’s self is, then, distributed across

both physical and (shared) A.I. formations. If much of the novel to
this point has focused on Sidra as a ‘central’ character, reminiscent
of a narrative of ‘discovery’, then this conclusion decentres her pres-
ence, stressing not a coming together of her embodied and A.I. selves
but rather their actuation across her different subject positions. Such
a process is typical of the deconstruction, central to critical posthu-
manist methods, of the singular, normative and coherent self, here
replaced by the assertion of Pramod Nayar’s “interconnections”,
“cross-overs” and “adaptations” between origins and histories, cited
earlier. All these terms fit both Jane 23 and Sidra’s storylines, framing
issues of psychological subjectivity but also the grounded nature of
engineered selfhood, while the characters’ productive ‘deviation’ from
social, cultural and embodied norms serves to remind readers of the
disability logic that runs through Chambers’ work. The origins of both
characters are situated within profoundly disabling environments of
trauma and dislocation, their ‘impurities’ mark them with difference
(as with Jenks in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) even in the
complex multiplicities of Chambers’ fictional universe, while their
adaptations address the challenges they experience as a result. “The
law forgot to make space for people like me. People like her”, Pepper
asserts at one point, discussing the ways that both she and Sidra are
excluded from the mainstream practices of the worlds in which they
live.111 For both characters, existence is a state – of embodiment,
socialisation and experience – removed from their peers.
In A Closed and Common Orbit, however, other ‘cross-overs’ create
an enabling scaffold of identification. Pepper ‘implements’ the changes
that make Sidra’s embodiment, and then her networking, possible and
it is her skill as an engineer, her ability to ‘borrow and adapt’, that
drives much of the possibility for agency in the novel. “It was always
good, finding the bits that worked” the ten-year-old Jane 23 says at
the very start of her section of the novel, prefacing not only her char-
acter’s grounded sense of embodied self but also the technological
expertise that underpins the overall sense of how the novel’s assem-
blages (of all kinds) ‘work’.112 Gender is central to this construction,
with all three novels in the trilogy featuring central female characters
whose subjectivities defy ideas of compulsory heteronormativity. Both
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and Record of a Spaceborn Few are
animated by a queer sensibility: Rosemary, the central protagonist of
the first novel and administrative officer aboard the Wayfarer, develops
a relationship with Sissix, a female Aandrisk alien; Kizzy, one of the
ship’s mechanics, has two fathers; and, as characters shift between
118 Disability and the Posthuman

genders, the pronoun ‘xe’ is commonly used. In Record of a Spaceborn

Few, Isabel – the archivist who is at the core of the narrative’s stress on
ideas of culture, history and inheritance – develops her views of social
difference through interactions with her wife Tamsin and as part of an
ethnographic research project with a female alien academic.
Such queering is only one example of the intersectionality at the
heart of Chambers’ work that sees species, bodies, sexualities, tech-
nologies, languages and cultures all mix in what is ultimately a
non-hierarchical depiction of social space. It is especially of note that
across the trilogy it is women who engineer both bodies and narra-
tive events. Engineered bodies in science fiction are frequently the
product of male expertise and actions; men both make bodies in their
role as creators and place these bodies in contexts of conflict and
violence. In Scott’s Blade Runner, the replicants return to meet the man
responsible for their production: “it’s not an easy thing to meet your
maker” Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) says to Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the
head of the Tyrell Corporation, immediately before he kills him, also
calling him “Father” and “the God of Biomechanics” in this climactic
scene. The ways in which men produce women in science fiction
cinema frequently enacts the traits identified by Short in her critical
genealogy; in Blade Runner the Tyrell Corporation construct Rachael
(Sean Young), the most sophisticated of all the replicants. But even
with Tyrell’s death, Rachael is merely passed on to Deckard (Harrison
Ford): as Short notes, through his physical possession of her “Deckard
effectively replaces Tyrell in reprogramming her to his needs”.113 Scott’s
film, in which Deckard noticeably destroys the two rogue female repli-
cants through extreme violence but is not responsible for the ‘retiring’
of the male robots (one is in fact killed by Rachael, the other ‘expires’
at the end of his life span), is only the most complex of film narratives
in which men construct, possess or eliminate cyborg women.114
Chambers’ fiction, however, operates in entirely different spaces. It
is her central female characters, particularly in A Closed and Common
Orbit, who negotiate both the creation and experience of different
embodiment. While not entirely absent, violence is rare across the
Wayfarer series and is never used to articulate ideas of male fragility or
capability.115 Female productivity is depicted in entirely different ways,
figured as complex and challenging both intellectually and through
invention and adaptation. While Jane 23 is made, as a disposable
genetic anomaly, by the Enhanced, she herself becomes the designer
and engineer of Sidra, a process that involves engagement with tech-
nical, philosophical, legal and social contexts. And Sidra becomes her
own confrontation with these questions, particularly those of self and
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 119

embodiment. As mentioned previously, Sidra is the reboot of Lovelace,

the A.I. in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Following an attack on
the Wayfarer at the end of that first novel, Lovelace undergoes a hard
reset in an attempt to recover her systems. The reset fails and a new
A.I., who becomes Sidra, is created. Initially, Sidra knows nothing of
Lovelace’s character or history, but in a telling moment in A Closed and
Common Orbit, she encounters the Lovelace A.I. model in a shop. As a
product to be purchased before installation, Lovelace is a globe sitting
on a shelf. Sidra picks it up, “cupping it gently. She could see the kit’s
face reflected in the globe’s plating”.116 Here, Sidra is literally faced by
her former self, yet in a sign of the novel’s intricate depiction of tech-
nology this Lovelace is of course not that from the Wayfarer but rather
a consumer object, hardware and software waiting to be connected
to the networks of some other, unknown, ship. The moment exem-
plifies the novel’s nuanced presentation of posthumanist subjectivity:
an embodied A.I. encountering a version of her former self, physically
connecting through touch and psychologically through Sidra’s own
‘messy history’ (“synthetic personalities are just that: synthetic” the
seller says to Sidra, completely unaware of how her personality has
developed).117 But at the same time Sidra is distanced; the Lovelace
she holds is not the A.I. who preceded her. It provides no answers to
her quest.
As all these examples show, Chambers crafts narratives that push
the boundaries of the intersections between selves, bodies, commu-
nities, gender and technology. The future she depicts are those that
Kafer wishes for when she writes of the intersections between femi-
nism and disability, the “desirably disabled futures” made possible by
not seeing either ‘disabled’ or ‘woman’ and the connections between
them as problematic terms.118 Part of this desirability in Chambers
work is inflected by her stress on women as designers, producers and
adapters of technology. There is no recourse to the ‘genius’ of the male
inventor in A Closed and Common Orbit; the Frankenstein narrative is
entirely absent. Rather, Chambers’ engineering is a fraught and often
conflicted process. In the manner in which it falls away from models
of heroism it enacts multiple other differences: of place, self, body,
relationship, or sexuality. Chambers queers and crips posthumanist
technology and (crucially) she does so through her engagement with
what Ato Quayson has termed the “crisis of representation” that disa-
bility produces in literature. For Quayson, the “embarrassment, fear
and confusion that attend the disabled in their everyday reality is
translated in literature and the aesthetic field into a series of structural
devices”.119 For Chambers, these devices are located in science fiction’s
120 Disability and the Posthuman

aesthetics and textual spaces, but in a revision of Quayson’s thinking

they do not begin from ‘fear and confusion’ but rather an acceptance
of embodied difference as a starting point for explorations of all the
elements of her fictional worlds. Many of the fictional texts analysed
in this study so far have fallen through their own representation crisis,
pulled into humanist models of individuals and communities even
as they are seduced by the glamour and potential of the posthuman.
Chambers’ work does not avoid the messy contradictions of fictional
aesthetics, but it suggests possible shapes for engineering a disabled
and feminist portrayal of technological futures.

Conclusion: Peppers

This chapter has been bookended by the tale of two Peppers. In

Sheffield, the SoftBank Pepper appeared striking in terms of potential:
for activity, function and a new conception of posthuman care. For now,
however, Pepper’s pleasing humanoid shape and possible capabilities
present as a project to be developed more than a model of sophisti-
cated companionship. Chambers’ Pepper, by way of contrast, possesses
all the advantages of being imagined. She articulates complex modes of
being and belonging: with origins in technology, without community
and any awareness of a wider world, she progresses to become designer
and engineer of the spaces in which she lives. Precisely because she
contains all the multiplicities of fiction – the overlapping of genre, plot,
characterisation, topic and metaphor – Pepper inhabits story spaces
that carry details the ‘real’ Pepper cannot hope to match. This is not to
say, of course, that Softbank’s Pepper is not to some degree the product
of narrative and surrounded by the stories that mark a place in the
world; clearly all the choices that have gone into her/its/his develop-
ment speak of a moment in the hopes and desire that characterise our
increasingly technologised history. But Chambers’ Pepper deploys the
unlimited possibilities of fiction and so can explore interactions with
technology that our present moment envisages, without the need for
the actual laws of physics. The Pepper of A Closed and Common Orbit
is also more secure in her status as female than the robot. Chamber’s
Pepper is a clone, but (as with Sidra) her atypical origins only add to
her complex characterisation as a woman. Softbank’s Pepper, by way of
contrast, appears indicative of a confusion about gender, labelled male
but at times read as female. Possibly it will take a period of usage of
Pepper in people’s homes, interacting with them on a daily basis, before
that exact terminology is worked through.
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 121

Both Peppers inhabit discourses of expectation. It may well be that

future historians of disability technology look back on the develop-
ment of the companion Pepper as a seminal moment in a trajectory
of post/non-human care and this particular Pepper will be remem-
bered long after Chambers’ writings are forgotten. But the imagined
Pepper is no less valuable. Precisely because she is fictionalised, she
functions not only as part of a richly textured and made-up world;
she also reminds readers of the ways in which stories are told of the
possibilities of present technology and the sometimes hidden fictions
of design and production. It is through this idea of expectations that
each Pepper intersects with disability futures, either through the
immediate possibility of care or the imagined science fiction universe.
At the end of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Donna Haraway writes that
conceiving of science and technology through cyborg imagery “means
embracing the skillful [sic] task of reconstructing the boundaries of
daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with
all of our parts”. Communicating with ‘all of our parts’ is a powerful
disability statement, recognising the body and its activities in its
rich diversity. It is also a statement about engineering, recognising
that the design and production of parts is central to the construc-
tion of the cyborg. Any number of non-dualistic positions, Haraway
notes, “require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts”. Both disability
and engineering are also grounded in the experience of daily life that
Haraway identifies here, an experience that her work explores addi-
tionally in terms of gender, through the “dailiness […] that makes
visible unvalued female activity”. In the end, Haraway asserts, “Cyborg
gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance […] There is no
drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate expe-
rience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction”.120 Such
terminology is apt for the kinds of gendered, designed and engineered
disability this chapter has explored, though possibly we might extend
‘global’ to now become ‘planetary’.

Notes

1 In a 2014 article describing Pepper’s development and production, Erico

Guizzo uses the gender neutral ‘it’ throughout to describe Pepper: ‘How
Aldebaran Robotics built its friendly humanoid robot, Pepper’, IEEE Spectrum,
December 26, 2014, https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/home-robots/how-
aldebaran-robotics-built-its-friendly-humanoid-robot-pepper. Accessed July
16, 2018. Writing in The Guardian in July 2018 about Pepper’s potential to
work in social care, John Harris notes that “Pepper has been given a male
122 Disability and the Posthuman

pronoun, for some reason”: Harris, ‘Robots could solve the social care crisis
– but at what price?’, The Guardian, July 2, 2018, www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2018/jul/02/robo-carers-human-principles-technology-care-
crisis. Accessed July 16, 2018.
2 https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/cool-robots/pepper. Accessed
March 29, 2017.
3 Guizzo notes that at Pepper’s launch event it was “unclear how much
autonomy the robot has […] most of its actions were clearly preprogrammed”.
4 Despina Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural
Work of Artificial People (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University
Press, 2014), p. 13.
5 See Raymond Holt and Stuart Murray, ‘Prosthesis and the engineered
imagination: reading augmentation and disability across cultural theory,
representation and product design’, Medical Humanities 41, no. 2 (2020),
pp. 55–62.
6 Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers,
and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (London: Granta, 2017),
pp. 118–119.
7 O’Connell, To Be a Machine, pp. 121–122.
8 Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot, p. 81.
9 See the essays in Richard Grusin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017) for a critique of masculinist techno-
approaches in articulating transhumanism.
10 Nina Lykke, ‘Between monsters, goddesses and cyborgs: feminist confronta-
tions with science’ in Gill Kirkup et al. (eds), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 84.
11 Julie Wosk, My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids and Other Artificial Eves
(New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), p. 153.
12 Wosk, My Fair Ladies, p. 154.
13 Jennifer Robertson, ‘Gendering humanoid robots: robo-sexism in Japan’, Body
and Society 16, no. 2 (2010). See also Wosk, My Fair Ladies, pp. 159–162.
14 Cary Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ in Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. ix.
15 It is instructive to consider how engineering associations and institutional
regulators engage with questions arising from such detail. In October 2005
the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, in association with the Engineering
Council and following a series of consultation events, published a Statement
of Ethical Principles, later revised in July 2017. The academy’s statement
“covers ethics in engineering education, ethics in practice and the issues
surrounding emerging engineered technologies” and outlines four “funda-
mental principles for ethical behaviour”: ‘honesty and integrity’, ‘respect for
life, law, the environment and public good’, ‘accuracy and rigour’ and ‘lead-
ership and communication’. Under the second of these the statement notes
that engineering professionals should “protect, and where possible improve,
the quality of built and natural environments” and “maximise the public
good and minimise both actual and potential adverse effects for their own
and succeeding generations”. Such a focus on the ‘public good’ is, relatively
speaking, rare in scientific industries often built around corporate engage-
ment and client demand, and while the academy’s outline of ethics is not
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 123

a set standard, it extends to underpin the various codes of conduct of the

different bodies of the Engineering Council (the organisation that deals with
chartered engineering registration). The Institution of Mechanical Engineers
(the branch of engineering that connects most to the design and production
of assistive technologies for people with disabilities), for example, adapts the
academy’s statement in the ‘Code and Conduct of Regulations’ section of
its own Royal Charter & By-Laws. The IMechE Code requires its members
to practise a “duty of care” and “be alert to the ways in which their duties
derive from and affect the work of other people, respect[ing] the rights and
reputations of others”. In addition, members must “place responsibility for
the welfare, health and safety of the workforce and wider community at all
times before responsibility to the profession” and “embrace the needs of the
community and future generations and adopt practices that have minimal
adverse effects on social, cultural, archaeological and ethnic heritage, and the
broader interests of humanity as a whole”. Given that this is a code of conduct
regulating the practice of chartered engineers, individuals sign up to it and
can be struck off for any failure to adhere to its principles.
Seen through a specific disability optic, we might note that mechanical
engineers (or at least, here, IMechE members) working on the design and
production of assistive technologies for people with disabilities are required
to consider not only their subjects’ health and welfare in the immediate
present, but also ‘future generations’ of disabled people and their interaction
with the increasingly complex worlds of technological development. And, if
those with disabilities are considered to have a ‘cultural heritage’ or belong
to a community, as stated by the code (and it is important to view disability
identities in such terms), then engineers must work with an understanding
of that heritage and community belonging in all that they do. What, exactly,
might this mean if we subject this to a critical disability reading? First, such
explicit direction on issues of respect requires that engineers employed in the
production of technologies should not view disabled users as incomplete or
defined by notions of loss or absence; and then working with a “duty of care”
positions engineers in an ethical space that should foreground the complexi-
ties of such ‘care’. See Royal Academy of Engineering, ‘Creating systems that
work: principles of engineering systems for the 21st century’, www.raeng.org.
uk/publications/reports/rae-systems-report.
16 Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 2009), pp. xv and 4.
17 Pullin, Design Meets Disability, p. 45.
18 Pullin, Design Meets Disability, pp. 89–90.
19 Louis L. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 1994), p. 11.
20 Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers, pp. 18–19.
21 Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers, p. 19.
22 Pullin, Design Meets Disability, p. 90.
23 Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers, p. 195.
24 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Manifestly Haraway, pp. 8–9.
25 Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 33.
124 Disability and the Posthuman

26 Judith Squires, ‘Fabulous feminist futures and the lure of cyberculture’ in Jon
Dovey (ed.), Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1996), p. 195.
27 Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (London and
New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 172–173.
28 Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the
Posthuman Body (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 21.
29 Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, pp. 24 and 21.
30 Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, p. 26.
31 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
p. 103. Braidotti produced a revised and extended edition of the book, also
published by Columbia University Press, in 2011. See also the collection
Braidotti edited with Nina Lykke, Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs:
Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace (London: Zed
Books, 1996).
32 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 105.
33 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming
(Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp. 177–178.
34 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 179.
35 Critical work on the topic before Kafer’s study was largely exploratory and
limited, but for thoughtful investigations of the place of social theories of disa-
bility in debates around feminist technoscience see Donna Reeve, ‘Cyborgs,
cripples and iCrip: reflections of the contribution of Haraway to disability
studies’ in Dan Goodley, Beverley Hughes and Lennard J. Davis (eds),
Disability and Social Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 91–111,
and Sharon Betcher, ‘Putting my foot (prosthesis, crutches, phantom) down:
considering technology as transcendence in the writings of Donna Haraway’,
Women’s Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (Fall 2001), pp. 35–53.
36 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (New York: New York University Press,
2013), pp. 105 and 107–110.
37 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, pp. 112–113.
38 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 116.
39 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, pp. 106 and 116.
40 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 118.
41 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 119.
42 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 117.
43 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 120.
44 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 120; emphasis in original.
45 Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, pp. 8–9 and 61. Haraway observes that:
“Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and some-
times do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with
other communication devices” (61). While such language appears problem-
atic, Kafer notes that Haraway was probably unaware of the shift in language
from ‘handicap’ to ‘disabled’ as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. Feminist,
Queer, Crip, p. 111.
46 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, pp. 106 and 105.
47 See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, ‘The vamp and the machine: tech-
nology and sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’, New German Critique 24/25
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 125

(Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), pp. 221–237, and Minsoo Kang, ‘Building the
sex machine: the subversive potential of the female robot’, Intertexts 9, no. 1
(2005), pp. 5–22.
48 As Julie Wosk notes, Maria “embodies the familiar archetype of a woman who
is both harlot and saint, angelic comforter and diabolical destroyer”, Wosk,
My Fair Ladies, p. 72.
49 Huyssen, “The vamp and the machine”, p. 236.
50 Kang, “Building the sex machine”, p. 5.
51 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), p. 120.
52 Kang, “Building the sex machine”, pp. 5–6.
53 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 169.
54 Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot, p. 3.
55 Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot, p. 4.
56 I do not have the space here to do justice to the complexities of Vonnegut’s
novel, but it conveys a powerful (if largely backward-looking) critique of a
mechanised postwar society in the US. In terms of my focus on gender in
this chapter, Vonnegut’s acerbic vision of an automated society includes deft
portrayals of the role of men and women. Almost without exception, the
engineers and managers in the novel are men, while women are wives and
secretaries. In the novel’s envisioning of an engineered future, the rise of the
machines creates the parallel rise of those men who use them to control the
economic and social means of production. In turn, this reinforces the stark
and strict gender binaries that offer women no real power whatsoever in a
developing of postwar American society. Alex Goody writes perceptively on
automation, production and consumption in the novel’s representation of a
“new Americianism”. See Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge:
Polity, 2011), pp. 150–152.
57 See Stuart Murray, ‘The ambiguities of inclusion: disability in contemporary
literature’ in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds), The Cambridge Companion
to Literature and Disability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
pp. 91–93. In Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) this sense of restriction and confine-
ment takes a specific technological turn in the protagonist’s repeated use of
a tape-recorder to relive his memories. For an analysis of this, see Goody,
Technology, Literature and Culture, pp. 154–157.
58 Gibson’s post-punk futureworld is saturated with ideas of engineering and
technological innovation that, through their invocation of digital futures,
maintain a contemporary feel. In Neuromancer (1984), the first novel of the
trilogy, developments in genetic engineering, neurosurgery and synthetic
organ production create multiple possibilities for bodily adaptation, and
questions of engineered embodiment suffuse the novel. Case, the central
protagonist, begins the narrative with his nervous system deliberately
damaged “with a wartime Russian mycotoxin” after he is caught stealing from
his employers, while Molly, the femme fatale and central female character,
has mirror glasses that are, in fact, “surgically inset, sealing her sockets”,
and “ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades” that emerge from her
nails to be used as weapons. In the late capitalist, brand-soaked, world of the
novel’s urban environments, the physical or cognitive enhancement produced
by engineering is a given, something (particularly) to be purchased, and it is
126 Disability and the Posthuman

often rather the quality or value of the work that has been undertaken that
is the relevant issue. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins,
1993), pp. 36–37.
The topic’s coverage in science fiction is too multiple to detail here, but
milestone texts include Anne McCaffery’s short story ‘The ship who sang’
(1961, later developed into a novella), Martin Caidan’s Cyborg (1972, spin-
offs of which became the television series The Six-Million Dollar Man and The
Bionic Woman), and the ground-breaking work of Octavia Butler, particularly
the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989). Ramez Naam’s Nexus trilogy (2013–2015)
is also worthy of mention here because of Naam’s previous career as a tech-
nology engineer at Microsoft, where he was part of teams developing Outlook
and Internet Explorer, among other programmes. Naam’s novels are fluent in
the language of post- and transhumanism and he is also the author of non-
fiction studies of the subject. See, for example, More Than Human: Embracing
the Promise of Biological Enhancement (London: Broadway Books, 2005).
There is a growing output of cyborg romance fiction as well, in which the
generic codes of romance fiction take new forms across human/technology
boundaries.
59 It is worth noting that this idea is common in cinema, with Weird Science and
Zoe being the most prominent examples. In Making Mr. Right, the gender rela-
tions are inverted to some extent, with a woman working in public relations
(Ann Magnuson) having to ‘humanise’ an android scientist (John Malkovich).
It is important to note that the woman is therefore not the literal creator here
and that maternal and paternal roles are largely still preserved.
60 Thomas Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2005), p. 1.
61 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 3.
62 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 30.
63 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 30.
64 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 102.
65 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 102.
66 See Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self
(London: Sage, 2002).
67 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, pp. 65 and 61–64.
68 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, pp. 134–135.
69 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 195.
70 Berger, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, p. 198.
71 James Porter, ‘Foreword’ in David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (eds), The
Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), pp. xiii–xiv.
72 Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 7.
73 Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow, p. 8.
74 Lars Schmeink, Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science
Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), p. 32.
75 Michael Bérubé, ‘Afterword’ in Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann,
and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (eds), Disability Studies: Enabling the
Humanities (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002),
p. 323.
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 127

76 Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow, p. 9.

77 Kathryn Allan, ‘Reading disability in science fiction’ in Allan (ed.), Disability
in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), p. 2.
78 Manuela Rossini, ‘Bodies’ in Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), p. 164.
79 Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow, p. 21.
80 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 135 and 30.
See also pp. 127–130 and 135–149.
81 Sue Short, Cyborg Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005/2011),
p. 94.
82 Short, Cyborg Cinema, p. 83.
83 In the shooting script, although not in the film, Nathan’s surname is
given as Bateman in what appears to be a clear allusion to Jason Bateman,
the psychotic protagonist of Bret Eason Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho.
See www.slguardian.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ex-Machina.pdf.
Accessed June 7, 2018.
84 The film echoes Shelley’s novel not only through its central narrative but in
its clever use of location and environment. Nathan’s secluded facility is care-
fully filmed to evoke ideas of the sublime, with framing shots of mountain
and trees. In a similar vein, Nathan and Caleb have an important conversation
about the philosophy underpinning the creation of Ava next to a cascading
waterfall, that most traditional motif of the Romantic sublime. It is no coinci-
dence that, in contrast to the idea that Nathan’s ‘genius’ is set in ‘nature’, Ava
escapes to the city, and specifically a busy and crowded road intersection.
85 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990).
86 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press;
2008), pp. 101 and 110. See pp. 96–119 for the full outline of the concept
of ‘disability as masquerade’. Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer also
discuss Sedgwick’s study as an intersectional disability text that helps further
articulate their theory of crispistemologies. Sedgwick’s unpacking of the
closet, they note, is “useful in for locating cripistemology within terminolog-
ical geopolitical crises of our moment and for asking questions about remote
locations, styles, and modes of transmission for prohibited knowledge about
disability”. ‘Crispistemologies: introduction’, Journal of Literary & Cultural
Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014), p. 130.
87 Though the book is now old, Mary Anne Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism,
Film Theory and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991) is still an excellent
feminist study of masquerade, especially in relation to spectatorship.
88 Danielle Wong, ‘Dismembered Asian/American android parts in Ex Machina
as “inorganic” critique’, Transformations 29 (2017), pp. 36–38. See also LeiLani
Nishime, ‘Whitewashing yellow futures in Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, and
Advantageous: gender, labor, and technology in sci-fi film’, Journal of Asian
American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017), pp. 29–49.
89 Mel Chen, ‘Unpacking intoxication, racialising disability’, Medical Humanities
41 (2015), p. 25. For more general critiques of posthumanism from critical
race perspectives, see Kristen Lillvis, Postmodern Blackness and the Black Female
128 Disability and the Posthuman

Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017) and Matthew Taylor,

Universes Without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press, 2013).
90 This is especially noticeable in, for example, the Japanese Chiba City loca-
tions at the start of Gibson’s Neuromancer or the off-world, Japanese-derived
cultural setting of the powerful ‘Geisha Bank’ in Sterling’s Schismatrix. Both
writers also explicitly use the zaibatsu, the business and finance corporations
that underpinned the economies of Imperial Japan, refitting it for the post-
industrial worlds they create. As with so many technofantasies, and as with
Ex Machina, the stereotypes of Japanese culture here combine with those of
sexualised women. Cyberpunk fiction undoubtedly depicts a posthumanist
space of multiple potential embodiments, but it appears as a landscape for
boy’s games in which various exciting others are appropriated to come within
reach. For more on these contexts, see the essays in David Roh, Betsy Huang
and Greta Niu (eds), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction,
History and Media (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press,
2015), especially those in part II by Julie Ha Tran and Kathryn Allan.
91 Short, Cyborg Cinema, p. 97.
92 Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 2015), p. 96.
93 Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, pp. 252–255 and 203.
94 Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, p. 253.
95 Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
2016), p. 91.
96 Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, p. 32.
97 Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, pp. 57–58 and 109.
98 Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
2016), pp. 5–6.
99 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 7.
100 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 209; italics in original.
101 Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow, p. 5.
102 Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow, p. 6.
103 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 60.
104 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, pp. 193–194.
105 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 302.
106 Pramod Nayar uses Giorgio Agamben’s work on homo sacer to discuss how the
posthuman condition can involve the creation of bodies and lives “that may be
terminated […] without attracting punishment”. Such description fits Jane’s
experience on the planet on which she grows up. See Nayar, Posthumanism
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 61.
107 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 69.
108 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 85.
109 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 361.
110 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 359.
111 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 302.
112 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 14.
113 Short, Cyborg Cinema, p. 91.
114 A disability reading of Blade Runner might nevertheless pick up on a number
of features. The four-year lifespan of the Nexus-6 replicants – termed
Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body 129

“accelerated decrepitude” by Pris (Darryl Hannah) – and the fact that

J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) has ‘Methuselah Syndrome’, which creates
premature ageing, suggests that shortened life expectancy functions as a form
of disablement. In addition, the final fight scene between Deckard and Roy
sees the former’s body repeatedly broken by the ‘superhuman’ strength of
the latter. The iconic shots in which Batty breaks Deckard’s fingers, before
returning his gun to his mutilated hand, leaves Deckard reduced physically
and totally vulnerable in this key moment of conflict. It is noticeable that
Deckard does not ‘recover’ from this to destroy Batty; the replicant ‘expires’
naturally.
115 Following an alien attack on the Wayfarer in The Long Way to a Small Angry
Planet, the crew is helpless in the face of the superior strength of the attackers
and it requires the negotiating skills of central character Rosemary to defuse
the situation.
116 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 248.
117 Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, p. 246.
118 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 68.
119 Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 19.
120 Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, pp. 67 and 66.
 CHAPTER THREE

Visualising and Re-Membering

Disability Body Politics in
Filmic Representations of the
‘War on Terror’
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics

Introduction: global acts of biotechnologies

and disability viewings

In this chapter I want to follow and extend the critical energy that
comes from the complex interweaving of body, technology (espe-
cially prosthetics) and gender characterised in Chapter 2. In doing
so I am interested in the ways in which disability, as represented on
film, creates what we can recognise as new focal moments on global
articulations of the human and posthuman as they play out through
the systems, international economies and politics of the technologi-
cally embodied. It is vital to consider both disability and posthumanism
in terms of the global, an approach that is often absent from critical
practices that concentrate on each as they are experienced and repre-
sented in European and American situations alone. What Michael
Davidson has termed “the work of disability in an age of globalization”
frames questions of embodiment, technology and race (in particular)
within contexts where assumptions about what constitutes disability
are expressed through multiple and overlapping frames of reference. To
analyse texts that focus on the global through a critical disability lens
involves what Davidson calls a re-evaluation of “some of the keywords
of disability studies – stigma, normalcy, ableism, difference – from a
comparative cultural perspective”.1 Such perspectives produce situ-
ated and localised patterns of disabled difference that articulate crucial
topics such as poverty, labour, access to resources and the meanings of
individuals and communities within global dynamics of political health.
My focus in this chapter is on the cinematic representation of war
and conflict, read as specific examples of this intersection of disability,
132 Disability and the Posthuman

technology and the global, and it will develop arguments that work
to utilise the different cultural inflections identified by Davidson in
reading two distinct sets of films. The first is a set of high-profile,
commercial features from the US that depict either the conflict in Iraq,
or issues of ‘terror’ that are seen to arise as a consequence of American
military intervention abroad. I will analyse several films, but my main
texts are Source Code (2011), read as a narrative exploring the war
on terror as it is imagined within the US itself, and then Green Zone
(2011), The Hurt Locker (2008) and American Sniper (2014), all focused
on the military presence in Iraq. The second is a group of films made
within conflict zones (particularly Iraq and Iran) either occupied or
destabilised by US military presence. The principal focus here will
be on the Iraqi feature Alhaam (2005) and the Iraqi/Kurdish drama
Turtles Can Fly (2004), two films that centre on events immediately
before and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Reading disability within a global frame poses challenges. As
Clare Barker has noted in a discussion of the heritage of postcolonial
and decolonising histories that created numerous disabilities through
conflict or political productions of poverty: “In the present day, the
wars, debt, migrations, and disasters brought about by decoloniza-
tion, as well as neo-colonial activities such as economic sanctions and
western military intervention in the Middle East, persist in disabling
postcolonial citizens. To tell a story about colonialism or its aftermath,
it is often necessary to tell a story about disability”.2 Disasters and
sanctions are good examples of events that not only produce specific
disabilities, but also create levels of poverty that are clearly disabling in
both the experiences of everyday life and implications for future health.
Standards of living for those with disabilities in Europe and North
America (although of course below the national average) are frequently
higher than those classified as non-disabled in low-income countries.
As this observation suggests, global economic policy has a huge impact
on processes of disablement. Robert McRuer has read questions of
disability globalisation in key terms – “displacement”, “dispossession”,
“inhabitable spaces” – that chart the architecture of contemporary
neoliberalism and policies of austerity: “the global austerity politics
that escalates super-exploitation of workers globally and protects capi-
talists while slashing services to the poor would be a clear example of
[…] accumulation by dispossession: wealth is redistributed to/accumu-
lated by those at the top while those at the bottom are dispossessed
of resources, public services, or secure networks of care”.3 In a more
overt social science critical tradition, both Nirmala Erevelles and Helen
Meekosha have explored questions of the (in)visibility of disability
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 133

within what Erevelles terms “the social relations of production and

consumption of transnational capitalism”. For Erevelles, such arrange-
ments create the question of why “some bodies matter than others”
in global formations of capital, and as a consequence why “it does not
even matter to us that some bodies are actually invisible” within such
configurations.4 Meekosha has observed that the invisibility created by
the combination of economic and social forces obscures a full recog-
nition of disability globally: “Maybe it is too confronting to deal with
the continuing disability of people in the global South because in
trying to claim the positives of a disability identity it becomes difficult
to acknowledge the overwhelming suffering that results from coloni-
sation, war, famine, and poverty”.5 Such difficulties create different
dispossessions in different locations, as encounters with austerity are
inflected through experiences produced in individual societies.
In addition, specific cultural determinants pertain. The distinct
conceptions of embodiment or beliefs about selfhood that are woven
through cultural histories mean that disability is not understood as
a single state. Autism, to give one example, is fundamentally read
as a biomedical condition in nearly all high-income countries, but
frequently understood in terms of spirituality or psychological damage
in locations where health is conceived of through different logic. Limb
loss in a UK military veteran, who as a result of service has access
to the latest prosthetics and assistive technology, means something
very different to the equivalent in a child in sub-Saharan Africa who
has had meningitis and, as a result, is less able to secure employment
that will sustain her family. How disability is seen, both literally and
conceptually, varies across the globe.
Seeing disability is crucial to film. A camera can linger on a
disability, foregrounding it and creating what Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson terms “scenes of staring”, where “a desire for visual
stimulation” meets “our brain’s search for novelty […] amid a land-
scape flattened by familiarity”.6 Or it can create a misè-en-scene in
which the disability is precisely part of that familiarity, built in to
the fabric of the storyline and its visual expression and not drawing
attention to difference. The way disability is visualised on film has
different heritages across different cultural traditions. Hollywood,
for example, has always favoured stories of individual struggle and
heroic recovery, whereas (to give a counter example relevant to this
chapter) Iranian cinema, both in the current new wave and in films
that predate this, has emphasised more lyrical, philosophical or social
approaches to disability subject matter. As Emily Jane O’Dell observes:
“Contrary to most films in the ‘west’ about disability, Iranian cinema
134 Disability and the Posthuman

has not historically portrayed disabled subjects as mere objects of pity

or courageous souls overcoming obstacles. Since the 1960s, Iranian
filmmakers have fashioned ‘disability’ as a springboard from which to
launch social, economic, and religious critiques, and a protected space
to raise existential, theological, and spiritual questions”.7 In advancing
critical opinions on disability across global film cultures, it is essential
to take these variations into account.
Scholarship on disability in global cinema is still sparse. In his
introduction to the 2016 collection of essays Cultures of Representation:
Disability in World Cinema Contexts, Benjamin Fraser notes that “despite
the growing […] number of book publications on disability in general,
there are only a small handful of these each year that relate to non-
Anglophone contexts” and that “when one askes how many of these
books systematically deal with artistic representations or humanities
cultural products – films or otherwise – the total number of relevant
publications is greatly lessened indeed”.8 While this is possibly not
as surprising as Fraser intimates – ‘disability’ is such a huge category
reaching across so many disciplines that critical humanities approaches
are bound to be relatively small as a percentage of published outputs
– his point concerning disability in global film is well made. It is,
however, indicative that Fraser notes that his own collection actually
“struggle[s] to find ‘global’ coverage” and that because of this struggle
can only constitute “the mere beginning of a more global discussion
of disability”.9 It is unfortunate that Fraser’s introduction to Cultures
of Representations works largely through posing questions and does not
(indeed apparently cannot) suggest any kind of critical frame for the
discussion of disability in global cinema. The problem is, however,
revealing. The complex intersection of aesthetic practice, cultural
variation, differing business models, diverse audiences and modes of
spectatorship seemingly makes evaluating global disability film, other
than in local contexts, beyond current scholarly reach.

Biopolitics, precarious life, and debility

I will explore all of the films in this chapter through readings of

narrative and deployment, visual aesthetics and the social contexts
of their making, but because of the ways in which they enact a
series of crossings between the global North and South (in terms
of production, locations and reception), the films can be produc-
tively, if problematically, framed through an analysis of the ways in
which disability functions in contemporary posthumanist global
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 135

biotechnology economies. If this is a surprising choice of investigation,

given the prevalence of more standard modes of reading film texts, I
aim to show that it provides a particular insight into the relationship
between disability and increasingly global posthumanist technologies
of health, those forms and spaces where lives are circumscribed by
what Melinda Cooper has called “the science politics of the neoliberal
era”.10 Cooper’s analysis shows that the global expansion of US power
in the twenty-first century, a combination of neoliberal economics
and military intervention, has brought about a specific “US defense
discourse” that has become tied to bioeconomic systems that mobilise
what she terms “the name of life in its biospheric dimension”. Under
such circumstances, “war is no longer waged in defense of the state”
but rather constitutes an operating model of ‘whole life’ that links
the military to the global economies of capital and the life sciences.11
Disability, in such a scenario, is placed in a precarious position. For
all that it is problematic to over-associate disability with a language of
vulnerability, it is nevertheless true that, within the juggernaut logics
of the economies Cooper describes, those with disabilities are made
vulnerable in multiple ways. Disabled people are both denied full citi-
zenship in the new, emerging conceptions of postgenomic biological
‘life’ and subjected to the consequences of neoliberalism and its relent-
less drive to marketise all aspects of existence.12
For Rosi Braidotti, warfare in the contemporary era is recognis-
ably posthumanist. “Posthuman wars”, she notes, “breed new forms
of inhumanity”.13 Adapting Achille Mbembe’s idea of necro-politics,
Braidotti links the development of global capitalism and “the politics
of death” to new forms of “post-anthropocentric technologies” that
now dominate war.14 Thought of in such terms, there is no distance
between posthumanist networks – of capital, technology or command
and control – and the grounded realities of destruction, death and the
creation of disability that they produce. As we shall see in the films
from Iraq and Iran discussed later in the chapter, those figures denied
citizenship and ‘life’ because of the practice of the ‘war on terror’ are
subject to military technologies that enact the complexities of posthu-
manist assemblages, even if these cultural stories seem more ‘local’
and more concerned with raw survival than such a global context
suggests. What Braidotti terms “the era of orchestrated and instru-
mental massacres” is posthumanist in its assembled and interlaced
orchestration and instrumentalisation, but needs to be understood as
still being about the reality of massacres.15 The films analysed in this
chapter portray posthuman death and disability from different view-
points, but they remind us that the relationship between technology
136 Disability and the Posthuman

and embodiment in warfare encompasses both the most sophisticated

weaponry on the planet and the grounded worlds of the individuals
and communities that weaponry often destroys.
An idea of ‘whole life’ and concomitant states of vulnerability,
precarity and liminality play significant parts in the kinds of exchange
this chapter will chart. Numerous critics read such positions as exem-
plifying many aspects of contemporary life, whether individual or
communal, and many see new global formations of health as being
intrinsic to the construction of such states. In her 2004 study Liminal
Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontier of Biomedicine, Susan Merrill
Squier writes of the “inherently unstable” nature of lives that are
“generated at […] nodal points of biomedicine and culture”. These
lives are, she continues, “the product of a volatile convergence of disci-
plines, discourses, practices, events and people”, a range that captures
the multiplicity of disability expressions across the cultures this
chapter explores. Echoing some of Braidotti’s observations, Squier’s
interest “lies in the way that biotechnology is reshaping the human
body”, a process she reads in terms of the liminal. “The human bios”,
she observes, “is changing so quickly that zoë, the simple fact of being
alive, is no longer stable”. Any reading of the ‘stability’ of being alive
raises questions of disability, and not just seen in pejorative assump-
tions that this means ‘instability’; Squier’s conceptualising of the
‘liminal life’ also refers “to those beings marginal to human life who
hold rich potential for our ongoing biomedical negotiations with, and
interventions in, the paradigmatic life crises: birth, growth, aging and
death”. While a disability studies viewpoint might pause at the use of
‘marginal’ here, Squier makes it clear that she is speaking of a margin-
ality that, while recognising the grounded experiences of excluded
communities, includes all human beings, and on a global scale. She
writes that all of us

living in the era of these biomedical interventions [are] liminal

ourselves, as we move between the old notion that the form and trajec-
tory of any human life have certain inherent biological limits, and
the new notion that both the form and trajectory of our lives can be
reshaped at will – whether or own or another’s, whether for good or
ill.16

Though she does not use the term posthumanism, Squier’s ‘new
notion’ of ‘reshaped’ lives here aligns with many strands of post-
humanist thinking, while the broad sweep of her work is rich in its
potential for disability-led theories of selves and environments.
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 137

Judith Butler’s writing on precarity in her 2004 book Precarious Life

navigates similar terrain. Theoretically driven through core reference
to Foucault and Levinas in particular, the study is equally grounded
in explorations of the creation of vulnerability and precarity by US
state power. In terms highly apposite for this chapter, Butler outlines
the “indefinite detention” that has accompanied US governmental
and military action since 9/11 (both in specific reference to inmates
in Guantanamo Bay and beyond). “The future becomes a lawless
future” she observes, “not anarchical, but given over to the discre-
tionary decisions of designated sovereigns […] who are beholden to
nothing and to no one except the performative power of their own
decisions”. One result, Butler notes, is that state recourse to violence
produces a certain kind of vulnerability, one that is “a vulnerability
to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden
address from elsewhere that we cannot pre-empt”. In relation to the
US campaign in Afghanistan, Butler notes that its “scenes of pain and
grief […] either represent American triumph, or provide an incitement
for American military triumph in the future. They are the spoils of war or
they are the targets of war”.17 As this chapter will show, Butler’s iteration
of ‘performative power’ ‘bodily life’ and understanding of ‘precari-
ousness’ operate across Hollywood’s representations of bodies in its
narratives of the ‘war on terror’. The performing of military action
(both actual and in fiction) is knitted to the unstable and discretionary
performances central both to the liminality of bodily life and to narra-
tive itself, while the ‘spoils’ and ‘targets’ of war enact an idea of global
precarity underwritten by the nightmare vagaries of state power.
It is in the work of Jasbir K. Puar, especially her 2017 monograph
The Right to Maim, that the links between liminal and precarious life,
globalisation, conflict and disability are most precisely named. Puar’s
critical concepts of debility and capacity articulate the biopolitical
drives through which “some bodies may not be recognized as or iden-
tity as disabled” but nevertheless “may well be debilitated, in part by
being foreclosed access to legibility and resources as disabled”. In turn,
the “biopolitics of debilitation” create bodies that “may well be disa-
bled but also capacitated”, a consequential set of processes by which
experiences of disability become rendered as complex sites of bodies
and their contexts, produced through social controls.18 She links these
to the “global circuitry of the US war machine”, noting that in the
ways such circuits function “one can clearly discern how debility can
get translated into a form of capacity”, through the kinds of foreclo-
sure and rendering described above. She continues: “Via this circuitry,
disability – or, rather debility and debilitation – is an exported product
138 Disability and the Posthuman

of imperial aggression”; and when the “targets of the war on terror

are not civilians” because they are “deemed terrorists”, the disa-
bilities produced in such a war become justified. This is what Puar
terms “disavowed, belated disability”, a culture of toxic maiming and
injuring that combines with (particularly) the politics of racial preju-
dice to manufacture “a constant state of becoming disabled” in Iraq
and Afghanistan especially.19
This chapter is informed by these ideas of debilitated, liminal,
precarious, vulnerable and surplus lives. As we shall see, a disability-
inflected criticism, aligned with the range of cultural contexts on
display, mean that the different films encode each term in a different
way; disability writes ‘vulnerable’ or ‘precarious’ in distinct and
specific forms, and not always in terms of loss. In light of Squier’s and
Butler’s work, I want to keep alive both the problematic and potentially
productive meaning of the marginal and liminal as equally excluded
and transgressive. And, as I hope is clear, such interactions are also
the stuff of fictional narrative, the messy contradictions and revealing
aesthetics that have drawn me to representations of disability and the
posthuman throughout this study. Squier is clear that her own book
is driven by such an approach. Fiction, she writes (which of course
includes fiction film), functions “as a crucial site of permitted articula-
tion for the desires driving these new biotechnologies”; it articulates
“what might be, all transgressions of the (socially constructed) boundary
of fact”, giving “access to the biomedical imaginary: the zone in which
experiments are carried out in narrative, and the psychic investments
of biomedicine are constructed”.20 The networks of military power,
fragile embodiment, global health, visual codes and narrative methods
in the films this chapter will analyse are all part of this ‘biomedical
imaginary’. It is a space where representations of posthumanist tech-
nology – the might of the American military–industrial complex
– enact the kinds of desire towards, and rejection of, the possibilities
such depictions suggest, in ways that are commensurate with the texts
that have been explored in this study to date. It has always been the
case that war films are among the most humanist of filmic narratives.
As we shall see, that humanism receives particular inflections in the
disability/technologised worlds of recent conflicts.

Disability, technology and ‘the everywhere war’

Some of the films I analyse here deal directly with the detail of combat
while others work allegorically and through tropic reference, but
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 139

each serves as an examples of what Derek Gregory has termed “the

everywhere war” that has followed in the wake of 9/11, a conflict in
which “war has become the pervasive matrix within which social life is
constituted” and one that is “barely known but vividly imagined”, an
observation certainly true in terms of the conflicts’ filmic representa-
tion.21 In the films in question, disability not only reorders ideas about
the body and the human, but through this also inserts itself into and
reconfigures trajectories of capitalist bioeconomies and the various
projections inherent in American military power and its place in what
Zygmunt Bauman termed, in 2001, the “wars of the globalization era”.
For Bauman: “By far the most prominent and seminal feature of our
times is the emergence of ‘global figuration’: of a network of depend-
encies which covers the entirety of the planet”. As I hope to show,
Bauman’s ‘network of dependencies’ can be configured as a matrix of
posthumanist connections, linking individual disability to wider ques-
tions of technology and history. When Bauman asserts that “nothing
that happens anywhere on earth can be safely left out of account in
calculations of causes and effects of actions: nothing is indifferent,
or of no consequence, to the conditions of life anywhere else”, he is
suggesting a frame that allows for links between individual disability
and global histories and economies (of all kinds).22 As we shall see,
this idea of a projected technological capacity, in which the human is
removed and deferred into modes we might recognise as posthuman
(and indeed a prostheticised posthumanism), is common in the films in
question. In each, we can read this process as an example of disability
at work; in nearly every case the manner in which bodies are taken
apart and put back together again is constitutive of disabled modes of
being and the alterity disability brings to bodies and their contexts.
In what follows, I am making a claim that the US military pres-
ence and function in Iraq and Afghanistan can be read as enacting
the posthuman. Given the tragic cost in all-too-human lives and the
destruction of whole societies, this needs some justifying. Donna
Haraway has noted that a major context for her writing her cyborg
manifesto in the early 1980s was her experience of “the military
industrial complex as it is embodied, embedded, in elite research appa-
ratuses and in real places” during her time teaching and researching
in Baltimore and Hawaii, both locations of military command and
research centres.23 Her cyborg (and its posthumanist afterlifes) can,
then, be understood as a figure that, in part, emerges from considera-
tions of military power. Extending this, the core of my claim lies in a
reading of power and technology as a particular form of network and
assemblage, part of what Pramod Nayar has observed as the “ways
140 Disability and the Posthuman

in which the machine and the organic body and the human […] are
now more or less seamlessly articulated, mutually dependent and
co-evolving”.24 Nayar sees this process in positive terms, noting that
it “offers a more inclusive and therefore ethical understanding of life”,
but I would contend that these kinds of interactions can also be seen in
the applications of killing technologies.25 It is, for example, the ‘seam-
less articulation’ of technology, military power and human decision
making that makes drone warfare possible, often with what appears to
be an absence of moral oversight, and reserving what Puar describes
as “the right to maim”, the sustained practice of imperial violence
injuring and destroying both bodies and infrastructures through
conflict.26 Gregory notes in his study of drone warfare as a case study
of “late modern war” in Iraq and Afghanistan that “the effortless sense
of time–space compression” in the deployment of drones “is exceeded
only by its casual imperialism […] and these remotely piloted missions
not only project power without responsibility – as the Air Force
frequently asserts – but also seemingly without compunction”.27 The
reference to ‘power without responsibility’ is an echo of Butler’s theo-
rising of precarity and vulnerability, but it also makes clear that there
is no benevolent version of posthumanist assemblage here.
Gregory shows in his account of the “kill-chain” that leads to the
deployment of drones that it is a process that is defined by networks of
technology: “the kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distrib-
uted apparatus, a structure of actors, objects, practices, discourses and
affects, that entrains the people who are made part of it and consti-
tutes them as particular kinds of subjects”.28 Such subjects, I argue,
are productively read as being posthumanist. The connections across
geographies (different units connected to a single attack are frequently
situated in locations that span continents), the facts of dispersal and
distributions (and Gregory lists many other examples, from real-time
intelligence processing about targets to lawyers consulting about
the (il)legality of the process), as well as the reliance on non-human
technologies as the actual instruments of killing, are all examples
of a performative network in action, one defined by capabilities that
can only exist as a technological extension, and arguably a surpassing,
of human action. Similarly, in his study of the production of satellite
imagery as part of what he calls an “imperial gaze” and “battles-
pace awareness”, Chad Harris notes how military image intelligence
systems render “extreme forms of violence […] everyday, bureaucratic
and even mundane” because of their conceptions of distance and
visualisation. Harris stresses the workings of an “interoperable ‘assem-
blage’ of shifting authority, social practices, and technological systems
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 141

[…] resulting in the creation of an omniscient, surveillant subject far

removed from the violence […] being perpetuated on the ground”.29
‘Interoperability’ is a key term here, one taken from computer and
network systems literatures that describes how systems coordinate
their operations and activities within other systems. For Harris, this
opens up possibilities “for understanding how a technology of control
and transparency is associated with nation state power”, and it is
precisely that such power might be exercised from within the logic
of a “system of systems” that renders it posthumanist in its reach. As
we will see, these ideas of violence and remote warfare are central
to the films I will analyse here, whether The Hurt Locker, in which
embodiment and mobility are altered by support technology created
over distances, or Source Code, where one of the ‘systems’ involved is a
life-support mechanism that keeps a disabled protagonist ‘alive’. More
generally, however, Harris, like Gregory, stresses that the assemblages
and networks of modern conflict have to be understood as operating
at a supra-human level.30
But if the idea of a performative posthumanist assemblage as exem-
plified in the connected technologies of aerial warfare might seem
obvious, I want to claim that it also exists at the micro level of soldiers
operating on the ground. In my reading of the films in the first half
of this chapter I am interested in the ways that bodies interact with
clothing and armour for example, or individual weaponry and vehi-
cles. These elements are the fine detail of the operation of military
power, but they are equally networked and part of the representation
of a killing process that is global in its connectivity. Though I share
Vivian Sobchack’s suspicions concerning the endless proliferation
of ideas of “the prosthetic” – she characterises it neatly as an appar-
ently “sexy new metaphor that, whether noun or (more frequently)
adjective, has become tropological currency for describing a vague
and shifting constellation of relationships among bodies, technologies
and subjectivities” – I cannot help be drawn to the potentially produc-
tive elements of understanding US military power in Iraq partially in
terms of prosthesis.31 The suit that protects the bomb-disposal expert,
the rifle that allows for long-distance killing, or the fleet of vehicles
that undertakes the incursion into ‘hostile’ space: all exemplify the
projection of power at a distance from, but connected to, the body.
As such, they create new ideas of dispersed embodiment and agency.
It would be wrong to write of such metaphors and extensions as the
only examples of disability in the films in question (this would be crit-
ical appropriation of the worst kind), and my focus will be on actual
instances of the representation and deployment of disabled bodies and
142 Disability and the Posthuman

minds, but it is the case that thinking of military power as posthu-

manist prosthesis in this way allows for the mobilisation of a critical
disability perspective that sheds new light on questions of conflict,
technology and embodiment.
There is, however, a more obvious idea of ‘the human’ at play in the
films through narratives of individualised characters, as opposed to the
distances involved in drone and aerial warfare. The stories that focus
on specific personnel become vehicles for powerful reflections on
humanism, bodies and their relationship to the technologies and poli-
tics of killing. Here, as we shall see, characters often inhabit spaces
of the human and posthuman through the portrayal of their vulner-
abilities and intimacies, those moments when bodies encounter, enact
or transgress thresholds and limits. As a product of war, disability is
central to these processes and, in the films to be analysed here, there
are crucial instances in which disability makes narrative meanings
possible because of the ways in which it informs how we read the
boundaries of the body. As so often in the texts analysed in this study,
obsessions with the complex technologies of the present and future
become channelled into humanist stories of precarious selves, narra-
tives both of violent power and individual worry.
That the critical reading processes have to be rooted in visuality
is obvious; the films are specifically visual texts, and the bodies and
contexts they depict fundamentally make sense through strategies of
looking. But the processes of visualisation they produce are complex,
and nothing about visualising disability is ever straightforward. In
addition, in these films the visibility of the disabled body works in
concert with what a number of writers have noted about the visual and
spatial nature of modern warfare: Gregory discusses “the spatiality
of the war zone” and “scopic regime” through which military opera-
tions take place, while also mapping “fields of violence” on to “fields
of vision” in the “techno-cultural apparatus” of war;32 and Harris
outlines his theories of imaging and conflict through notions of the
“gaze” and the “omniscient eye”.33 These outline contextual specifics
that link the visual to the processes of “taming the world with our
eyes”, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it in her foundational work
on disability and staring. Staring is, as Garland-Thomson asserts, “a
conduit to knowledge. Stares are urgent efforts to make the unknown
known, to render legible something that seems at first glance incom-
prehensible. In this way, staring becomes a starer’s quest to known
and a staree’s opportunity to be known”.34 Watching a film (and seeing
characters look at each other) is not, of course, the same as looking
at or photographing real individuals, but the forms of knowledge that
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 143

emerge from the scopic environments created by the texts enlighten

understandings of both disability and conflict. According to James
Der Derian in his book Virtuous War: “The new wars are fought in the
same manner as they are represented”. Although he is more interested
in relations between the film industry and politics than actual film
texts, Der Derian’s comment is one that we might appropriate. In the
juxtaposition of his analyses of real military and political events with
filmic, gaming and wider media representations of war, Der Derian
notes how such interactions lead to new “screen […] configuration[s]
of virtual power”.35 As such, he reminds us that the multiple ways of
seeing war, like those that enable seeing disability, create core catego-
ries and mechanisms of meaning. How we see, and how we are shown,
the technologised bodies of war and conflict are processes that produce
rich sites of the intersections between disability and the posthuman.
These complex processes of disability, technology, posthumanist
conflict and visuality come together in Duncan Jones’ 2011 film Source
Code, a science fiction meditation on technology, individualism and
the presence of the war on terror in the US itself. The film begins
with US Army pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhall) waking abruptly
on a Chicago commuter train, having no idea where he is and seem-
ingly not himself but rather (as he finds when he consults documents
in his wallet) a schoolteacher called Sean Fentress. As he begins to
process his situation, the train explodes, killing the majority of people
on board. The film’s narrative unfolds to reveal that, in fact, Stevens
has previously been fatally injured in a mission in Afghanistan and
his death reported to family and friends. Rather than being allowed
to die, however, Stevens has been saved by the military and turned
into a biohybrid figure – his maimed body inserted into a techno-
logical matrix in what is very much an example of posthumanist
assemblage – as part of an experimental intelligence project called
‘Source Code’.36 Stevens is connected to and controlled by military
handlers through both physical and cognitive prostheses that estab-
lish his selfhood as a networked presence. Physically cocooned in a
pod-like structure within a military complex, he is an uncanny incar-
nation of what Lambèr Royakkers and Rinie van Est, writing on
modern digitalised warfare in conflicts such as those in Afghanistan
or Iraq, call the “cubicle warrior”, an isolated but nevertheless spatially
connected operator of weapons systems. As Royakkers and van Est
note, “a cubicle warrior finds himself in a unique situation: on the one
hand, the socio-technical system enables him to fight [a] war from a
remote place, on the other hand the same system connects the soldier
to the war zone […] thus enabling some form of tele-presence”.37
144 Disability and the Posthuman

The biohybrid soldier in the military matrix: Colter Stephens

(Jake Gyllenhaal) in Source Code

Both remote and connected, Stevens is the quintessential assembled

posthumanist warrior. Here, however, assemblage is not simply a tech-
nological process but also one of reconstituted embodiment; it is in
his cubicle and via the possibilities it creates that Stevens can become
physically whole again.
Stevens is enabled by Source Code to enter an alternative timeline
in which he can experience the final eight minutes of another person’s
life. Informed that the explosion on the train was due to a terrorist
attack, Stevens is ordered to re-enter the time immediately before the
blast, locate the bomb, and apprehend the perpetrator. After multiple
separate returns into the eight-minute timeline before the explosion,
each one providing more evidence of the bomber than the last, he
is successful: the lives of the commuters are saved and the terrorist
(interestingly, given the context, a white male) is apprehended.
Source Code appears in many ways to be a paradigmatically post-
humanist film, suggesting enabling ways to think about embodiment,
technology and selfhood through a series of complex assemblages. Its
narrative is founded on the imaginative possibilities offered by the
integration of human and machine produced through radical desta-
bilisations of corporeal integrity and wholeness, while its treatment
of time evidences a move away from standard linear conceptions of
storyline progression and the memory of event. As Anneke Smelik
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 145

observes, the film displays “a deliberate blurring between different

time lines, spaces and realities”. As a consequence, “the complexity
of the narratives becomes part of the visual pleasure”.38 Through this
narrative complexity, the film becomes many things. Although it never
makes any explicit comment on contemporary politics, it is obviously
a 9/11 fantasy in which the attacks on the World Trade Center are
prevented; as in New York, the bomb on the train explodes during a
morning rush hour dominated by a bright blue sky. But more impor-
tant for my arguments is that Source Code is a disability narrative that
addresses both posthumanist explorations of the interaction between
man and machine, and a humanist validation of individual agency and
will. Stevens’ body is dismembered to the point that the Source Code
cubicle functions as a de facto life-support machine and a late scene
reveals, in a powerful visual moment that invites exactly the kinds of
stares described by Garland-Thomson, that his actual body consists
of his head, torso and one arm, spliced into a web of technological
attachments. The film’s content is, then, driven all along by a technol-
ogised prosthesis, but the narrative revolves around an explicit idea of
re-membering human wholeness. Stevens’ opportunities to continually
revisit the moments immediately prior to the catastrophe allow him,
in effect, to overwrite human processes of memory on each occasion,
building a meaning of time through the added knowledge and control
the additional experiences provide. The film charts his progression
from a terrified, unconnected amnesiac opening to a position of final
personal control.
Stevens averts disaster through his belief that, contrary to all under-
standings of how Source Code works as technology, a final entry into
the timeline will allow him not only to alter the nature of the event
itself, in effect producing an act of faith in his own ability to effect
change, but also to subsequently survive as Sean Fentress. He argues
for, and is allowed, this one last return to the train, and saves those on
board, a move followed by the ‘death’ of his original self in the military
installation when the machine to which he is connected is turned off
by a sympathetic handler, Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). Aligned
with this assertion of normative embodiment and agency, Colter
enacts other recognisably humanist plot devices: pursuing a romantic
narrative with a fellow commuter, Christina (Michelle Monaghan),
whom he convinces of his ‘true’ identity; and even managing to have
a farewell phone conversation with his grieving father, in which he
poses as a friend who confirms how much Stevens loved his family.
As such, the posthumanist possibilities of cyborg identity and narra-
tive disruption fail to lead to any actual exploration of how a future
146 Disability and the Posthuman

technologised disability body might be formed, and what it might

mean. Rather the fantastic machinery on show and the looping story
operate merely as visual markers and narrative riddles for the viewer
through processes of innovative, if recognisable, spectatorship. Source
Code’s real depths rather lie in standard humanist tropes: individual
achievement, civic responsibility, romantic completion and familial
affiliation. The personal values then map on to social equivalents:
military personnel are still heroic, fighting ‘terror’ is just, disabled
bodies can be repaired and an appropriate morality can resolve collec-
tive trauma. The film conforms perfectly with Cooper’s reading of the
contemporary biotechnological dimensions of the war on terror. When
she observes that “the doctrine of preemptive warfare assumes that
the only way to survive the future is to become immersed in its condi-
tions of emergence, to the point of actualizing it ourselves”, Cooper’s
ideas of pre-emption, immersion into and survival of the future, emer-
gence and actualisation are all literally played out in and through
Stevens’ actions.39
Ultimately, Source Code asserts that positive interventions to counter
threats to either the individual or social body are fundamentally ques-
tions of character. As we shall see in a number of the other films
discussed in this chapter, this is a familiar narrative. Such characters
are always normative and able: they may threaten to be consumed by
precarity and vulnerability and their bodies may become marked by
technologies of conflict, but these narrative moments are deceptive
and only ever temporary tangents. Indeed, Stevens’ hyper-capable,
able-bodied, masculine hetero normativity actually functions to the
point of erasure. In his trajectory to embodied wholeness, he replaces
Sean Fentress at the film’s conclusion. Fentress’ character (never actu-
ally depicted) vanishes, a victim of the desire to pre-empt catastrophe
and keep the integrity of both individual and community bodies intact.
One reading of this narrative power is that a film such as Source Code,
set in the US itself, requires a successful humanism to establish that
attacks to American values can be neutered. No ‘kill-chain’ can be
allowed within the geographical boundaries of the US, a point the film
makes with its assertion of Stevens’ individualism and triumph over
technological systems, as well as concomitant closure of the unethical
Source Code programme. But even the most strident supporters of
resolution and reassurance cannot pretend such conditions apply to
the conflict abroad. In Iraq, catastrophe cannot be averted. How such
catastrophe is imagined, however, brings together further messy inter-
actions between bodies and technology, with disability again central
to the ways in which these stories are told.
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 147

Fragile bodies and the prostheticised self

In technologies of war, male selfhood is both weaponised and highly

fragile. As Source Code demonstrates, men may be inserted into the
machinery of conflict, in terms of armament and the full capacity
of war materials, but such power cannot offset the vulnerability
subsequently produced. Whether through the failure of the physical
body or mental health trauma, such vulnerability becomes inescap-
able. In terms of combatants, war both isolates the individual and
creates (predominantly male) communities, factors that I will analyse
here within the logic of humanist conceptions of selfhood. War also
encounters and creates community in those spaces where it takes
place, and this chapter will also explore how characters in the non-US
films are figured in terms of family and culture, depictions that often
stand in stark contrast to the technologised self of the soldier.
There is a pivotal scene about a third of the way through Paul
Greengrass’ 2010 feature Green Zone that speaks of disability’s rela-
tion to technology, conflict and ideas of the human. Freddy (Khalid
Abdalla), an Iraqi translator employed in Baghdad by Chief Warrant
Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) and working for the US Army, runs
from a conflict scene carrying a notebook of information that will lead
to the disclosure of the non-existence of weapons of mass destruc-
tion (WMD). Pursued by Miller and his unit, Freddy is cornered in
an alleyway. As he attempts to climb a wall to escape, a soldier grabs
him, only for his crude prosthetic leg to come off as he is manhandled.
Following a succession of frenetic camera movements and edits during
the chase, the film pauses suddenly as Freddy becomes the subject of
the multiple gazes of the chasing platoon. “What more I have to do for
you?” he shouts, hopping on his one leg, his anger suddenly exploding.
In response to Miller asking him how he lost his leg, Freddy replies:
“My leg is in Iran, since 1987”, before giving an impassioned speech
that, in its controlled emotion and relative quiet, contrasts starkly with
the violence – helicopter assaults, screamed interrogations, handheld
camerawork, fast-paced editing – that has dominated the film up to
this point: “Me too I fight for my country”, Freddy says. “Reward? You
think I do this for money? […] You don’t think I do this for me, for my
future, for my country, for all these things? Whatever you want here
I want more than you want. I want to help my country”. Miller, who
has been all masculine able-bodied dynamism up to this point, stands
confused, speechless and suddenly vulnerable by way of response.
The scene enacts a complex intersection of multiple topics and tropes
through its sudden and surprising focus on disability (Freddy has been
148 Disability and the Posthuman

in several previous scenes with no hint as to his limb loss). The pros-
thetic limb itself is first an indexical personal and historical marker,
a permanent reminder for Freddy of his part in the Iran–Iraq war of
the 1980s. But it is also iconic, in that it breaks the logic of Miller’s
insertion, as a willing combatant, in the military/technological infra-
structure of the US presence in Iraq. Instead, he witnesses (as does the
audience) a revelation of what is clearly presented as a powerful core
humanity, an individual story that forces him to revise his allegiance to
his mission. Here, Freddy’s prosthesis performs the double movement
common to disability signification that this study has noted previously;
it signals both loss, in that Freddy’s body is ‘incomplete’ and as such
stands in for the trauma of the Iran–Iraq war and pity for its victims,
but it is also excessively human, producing an overflow of emotion encap-
sulated in Freddy’s speech and Miller’s arrested response. It is when
facing Freddy’s disability that Miller is first forced to confront the ‘cost’
of his participation in what the film, from this scene onwards, will
show to be the fruitless search for Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons.
As a consequence, Miller turns from a cog in the military machine to
an idealist searcher for the truth, later confronting his superiors with
the details of their cover-up and fabrication of evidence. In a time of
what Edward Luttwak has called the new ‘postheroic war’, Green Zone
seeks to rewrite the soldier as a liberal humanist.40
Beyond the immediate context of the narrative, the signifying
humanism expressed through Freddy’s disability becomes the vehicle
for a consideration of the very public foreign policies that led to the
catastrophic intervention in Iraq. Miller is a surrogate in the articula-
tion of the liberal view that wishes the 2003 invasion had not taken
place; an outlook that, in its imagining of history, seeks to rewrite the
events of the war. His humanity, conveyed by a powerful yet fragile
body (he is beaten on a number of occasions, including the scene
immediately before the conversation with Freddy), counters the
post-truth rationale of his Pentagon superiors (encapsulated in the
character of Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear)) who justify the fiction
of WMD. The film’s humanism is, in narrative terms, brought to the
fore through the sudden startling focus on Freddy’s disability and then
sanctioned by the actions that flow from this deployment, particularly
the overt criticism of government agencies who are represented as
being explicit in their cover-up of the truth.
In Green Zone, it is crucial that the audience understands Miller’s
individualism, humanity and the resulting humanist re-membering of
the war in Iraq is in opposition to the posthumanist assemblage of
the military machine and kill-chain. Damon’s acting, and the way in
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 149

The thinking soldier as liberal humanist hero: Roy Miller

(Matt Damon) in Green Zone

which the camera focuses on him, consistently present Miller as a site

of personal confliction; his facial twitches, explosive physicality and
confused anger all express an extended state of constant frustration.
Such human characteristics are set against the technology of brutal
Special Forces helicopter assaults or depersonalised systems that
demand obedience in the perpetuation of state falsehoods. Greengrass’
film is achingly liberal in many ways. It ends with Miller emailing a
document outlining all the official lies he has discovered to multiple
media outlets across the globe, accompanied by a one-line message:
“Let’s get the story right this time”. More widely, Miller’s desire for
what he perceives as truth and justice saturate the film: in response
to his sergeant’s assertion that, in following orders to visit potential
WMD sites that the army know to be empty, “with all due respect
Chief, we’re here to do a job; reasons don’t matter”, Miller counters
immediately that “they matter to me”. In a similar vein, when asked by
CIA operative Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) why he thinks he is
in Iraq in the first place, he replies, “I came to find weapons and save
lives, and I didn’t find shit. I want to know why”. Miller’s individu-
alism and humanism is, ultimately and unsurprisingly, colonial; his
actions appear to be directed towards the idea of a benign US rule over
Iraq, even though the film’s own post-event knowledge and scepticism
knows this to be impossible.
Crucially, Freddy’s disability and the idea of embodiment it
conveys writes an additional layer of complexity into an already
150 Disability and the Posthuman

chaotic and incoherent narrative. In the narrative denouement, it is

Freddy who intervenes and kills General Al-Rawi (Igal Naor), a key
figure from the Saddam Hussein regime who has been hunted by US
forces for much of the film. Freddy’s sudden appearance in this scene,
intervening and killing Al-Rawi just as Miller is about to do so, is
highly anomalous, given his disability and that all the other charac-
ters involved have been involved in a long foot race that has careered
through the narrow streets of Baghdad. But narrative consistency is
not the point here: what matters is that, as a central touchstone of
Green Zone’s humanist guilt, Freddy can carry out the murder that
the film’s complex politics projects as being an act beyond Miller. His
actions appear as revenge for the decimation of his country, although
it is telling he enacts this against Al-Rawi, while regarding the US
Army here (personified by Miller) as a friend and not an invading
enemy. Green Zone may present a powerful critique of the US in Iraq,
but not powerful enough to have a non-combatant Iraqi citizen shoot
an American soldier.41 The US presence in the country is a disaster,
but Iraqis still kill each other as a way of providing closure for liberal
hand-wringing.
Key to my argument, however, is that it is a disabled character that
fulfils this role. The trace-like presence of Freddy’s absent leg runs (I
use the verb deliberately) through the film, operating to provide base-
line ideas about embodiment and narrative prosthesis familiar from
disability theory. Freddy’s body is definitely “complex”, fitting the
articulation of complex embodiment advanced by Tobin Siebers; it is
“vital and chaotic” and explicitly associated with “human mortality
and fragility”. But whereas Siebers asserts that “Disability gives even
greater urgency to the fears and limitations associated with the body”,
Green Zone appropriates the representation of the disabled body to
limit the ‘fears’ of an able-bodied audience, with Freddy functioning
as a limping avenger who can assuage both Miller’s and the predomi-
nantly American audience’s guilt.42 It is possibly more straightforward
to see the film in the classic terms of narrative prosthesis advanced
by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, as both “a stock feature of
characterization and […] opportunistic metaphorical device”.43 The
‘one-legged man’, with its heritage of metaphorical meaning – Ahab
in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Long John Silver in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Treasure Island – allows for the mobilisation of Miller’s
singular, personal, humanist truth in the face of networked posthu-
manist technologies and government system. In the end, we might feel
that Green Zone is every much a sham as Frank Baum’s Emerald City,
but without the self-awareness.
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 151

Like Green Zone, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 feature The Hurt Locker also
examines the nexus of prosthesis, the human and military power; and,
on certain levels, it does so to explore similar questions of humanism,
posthumanist assemblages and the body. The limits and boundaries
of the body are central to the film and, as with Greengrass’ feature,
are explored in relation to the technologies that surround (but also
threaten) the bodies on display. The Hurt Locker is, however, a more
complex narrative than Green Zone, with a storyline that complicates (as
opposed to advocates) the singular presence of the heroic male figure.
Its representation of disability is subtler as well, eschewing the crude
conception of the body signalled by Freddy’s missing leg for a nuanced
examination of the liminality of the precarious and vulnerable body,
as well as issues of mental health that arise as a consequence of war.
In Bigelow’s film, disability is used to question the power humanism
might be expected to express as a response to the trauma created by
conflict and ‘terror’.
The Hurt Locker’s opening scene offers a micro example that encap-
sulates many of the wider dynamics the film visualises and displays:
a US Army bomb disposal team led by Sergeant Matthew Thompson
(Guy Pearce) attempts to detonate an improvised explosive device
(IED) in a Baghdad street. Following protocol, Thompson and his
team deploy a robot carrying explosives to set off the bomb (the film
actually opens with footage from a camera mounted on the robot, a
small non-human aside in a scene otherwise focused on human limita-
tions), the technology functioning as a prosthetic extension of military
capability and the externalising of force beyond the body of the combat
soldier. But the trolley the robot is carrying breaks when a wheel falls
off and Thompson has to intervene, inserting his own body in a Kevlar
protection suit, leaving the protection of the mobile base from which
he was controlling the robot, and attempting to manually carry the
broken trolley with its explosives to the bomb. The action fails, the
device is detonated remotely, and Thompson is killed.
The need for Thompson to use his own body stems from a techno-
logical failure that creates a vulnerability that, in turn, leads ultimately
to his death. The human, the film’s opening makes clear, is a fragile
entity, a state that fits an understanding of the Iraq war as a conflict
where the rules of engagement lack clarity and definition (the initial
scenes are full of quick edits and untidy framing and shots from the
soldiers’ point of view that replicate fears of the threats posed by
unseen civilians). Robert Burgoyne observes that the technical aspects
of the film’s opening, particularly its music and editing, “emphasize the
vulnerability of Thompson’s body, a vulnerability that is exaggerated
152 Disability and the Posthuman

The fragile human: Matthew Thompson (Guy Pearce) walks to his

death in The Hurt Locker

by the suit of armour”. Encased in his protective suit, Thompson’s

“laboured breathing, the physical effort of moving, the sensation of
paralysing weight” create a precarious humanity that contrasts with
the “speed and fluency of the camera work” in the opening scene.44
But, it should be stressed, Thompson only has to intervene because of
faulty technology; the trolley carrying the explosives is so basic in its
construction that its inadequacies offer an obvious comment on the
poverty of military ordnance (“Did you build that?” Thompson asks
fellow team member Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). “No”
Eldridge replies with sarcasm, “the US Army did”). For all the vulner-
ability of the human then, the complexity of the military machine
offers no better protection. Here, US Army engineering appears as
exposed and thin as the human body.45
Thompson’s death is, however, only the prequel for a longer medi-
tation on the qualities and place of the human as seen through the
actions of his replacement, Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner).
Where Thompson followed protocols and worked closely with his
team, James is a renegade; he ignores orders and the safety of the
men he works with, rejects using technology, and deactivates devices
through intuition. In place of what should be an efficient and devel-
oped technological system, in which danger is externalised through
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 153

the prosthetic extension of engagement – what Gregory, in his anal-

ysis of contemporary drone warfare, terms “optical detachment”
– James is the human run riot.46 His risk-taking is unplanned and
beyond programming; it disrupts the logic of assemblage central to
the systems of a posthuman war fought at distance. James literally
climbs into the devices he deactivates: a car in the second mission
he undertakes and, in a powerful scene, when extracting explosives
from within the body of a dead boy being used as a ‘body bomb’.
He overpowers the enemy’s improvisation with his own, illustrating
human capabilities that are victorious over an opponent that would
kill by stealth.
As such, within a standard cinematic narrative trajectory of char-
acter development and individual achievement James should function
as an exemplar of humanism; it is, after all, his maverick personality
that guides his actions. For Burgoyne, this element of the personal
drives the film. “The Hurt Locker”, he writes, “foregrounds the idea of
private experience and pleasure as a somatic engagement that takes
place in war, rendering war as a somatic engagement that takes place
outside any larger meta-narrative of nation or history”.47 But while
this seems to be a potentially valid reading of the film, disability and
posthumanist perspectives revise the notion of ‘private experience
and pleasure’, dispersing it from ideas of origin or centred selfhood.
For James is clearly disabled, a psychologically damaged figure who
is, in fact, completely alienated from the core elements that should,
within a humanist narrative, underscore his individual presence. He is
distanced from his family and accompanying idea of home or commu-
nity: he is unable to speak to his wife when he calls her from Iraq, for
example, and ultimately rejects his son during a brief visit back to the
US before returning to another tour of duty; is incapable of bonding
with his peers while serving; and is portrayed as profoundly anti-
social. In The Hurt Locker then, qualities seen as specifically human,
particularly individualism and embodiment, and humanist, especially
familial/social affiliation, become stripped of accompanying value
and, ironically, are projected in terms of emotionless automata. The
film’s narrative ends not with any homecoming, but rather with the
powerful image of James, eyes fixed ahead and expressionless, starting
his new year-long tour and striding down a Baghdad street that bears
a marked resemblance to that on which the story opened. Unlike Green
Zone, The Hurt Locker, then, eschews notions of teleology and progres-
sion – any sense of an individual ‘journey’. In contrast, James is caught
in a loop that signifies disconnections, alienation and pathology more
than any conventional sense of ‘pleasure’.
154 Disability and the Posthuman

In addition, James’ ‘private experience’ is still about processes of

public memory. Although Burgoyne reiterates that, in The Hurt Locker,
“the figure of the combat soldier is divorced from any national or social
meta-narrative. Instead, a mood of pure visceral excitement prevails”,
the film’s move towards a pattern of repetition more properly consti-
tutes a form of cultural forgetting.48 If Green Zone wants to assert that
there are still narratives of ethics and citizenship to which individ-
uals can connect, basically that good is still possible in the world, The
Hurt Locker – as a posthumanist narrative of looping and repetitious
assemblages – erases such possibilities. ‘Visceral excitement’ is in
fact more a numbed amnesia, a state that has a powerful connection
to a social narrative in which the American public wishes to forget
the war in Iraq. For all that disability appears peripheral in Bigelow’s
film, it actually makes possible a posthumanist argument of prosthetic
distance and cultural amnesia that reads both individual and collective
in terms of difference.
William James has his name for a reason. The film evokes the
nineteenth-century American philosopher of the same name and, in
doing so, raises a specific model of interpretation provided through
a psychological reading. James the philosopher is widely held to be
one of the founders of functional psychology, in which an individual
mental life finds meaning in terms of a relationship with an environ-
ment. The Hurt Locker ascribes much of its ideas of the meaning of the
conflict in Iraq in such terms. After the death of Thompson, Eldridge
is visited by an army psychiatrist (Christian Camargo) as he plays a
violent video game. In response to some standard questions about
his state of mind and the need “to start thinking about other things”,
Eldridge repeatedly raises and pretends to fire his weapon. “This is a
war” he says, “people die all the time. Why not me?” The scene ends
with the psychiatrist unable to comment, and the doctor will later be
killed while out on a mission with Eldridge. There is no therapy in this
environment, and Eldridge is traumatised throughout each mission he
undertakes until he is himself disabled with a serious leg injury near
the film’s conclusion. As he is evacuated, he screams abuse at James,
who has been the cause of his injury. All of the major characters in The
Hurt Locker are depicted with significant psychological damage.
The representation of trauma as disability is central to many
films depicting US military involvement in the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Alexandre Moor’s 2017 feature The Yellow Birds, adapted
from the novel by Kevin Powers (who served in Iraq), is centred on
the mental health struggles of its two young combatant protagonists
(Alden Ehrenreich and Tye Sheridan) who fail to adapt to deployment
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 155

in Iraq and the authority of a senior figure (Jack Huston) who is himself
traumatised. Nick Broomfield’s 2007 Battle for Haditha constructs its
entire narrative around the extreme violence produced by trauma,
reconstructing a 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians by US Marines in
the Western Iraqi city of Haditha. Shot in a semi-documentary style,
Broomfield’s film portrays the Marines’ response to the death of a
colleague as a pathological (mis)function of the US mission, in which
the logic of murder and the kill-chain become materialised in an act of
barbarism.49 At the same time, the film carefully creates a potentially
explanatory context for some of the perpetrators, presenting them as
clearly psychologically damaged by the circumstances in which they
find themselves.50 Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007) also loosely
dramatises an historical event, a rape and subsequent murder of a
family that took place in Samarra, in central Iraq, in 2006. Like Battle
for Haditha, Redacted characterises US soldiers as impaired, disturbed
predators and narrativises such a state as a natural consequence of
the conflict in Iraq. In De Palma’s film, however, there is no repre-
sentation of any chain of command or wider military context before
the atrocity, no connection to what Cooper identifies as the “strategic
redefinition of the tenets of U.S. defense” that occurred in the first
decade of the twenty-first century, where “full spectrum dominance,
counterproliferation and pre-emption” are central.51 In the absence of
this, the depiction of sexual violence as perpetrated by ‘traumatised’
individuals in the film effectively absolves the broader military and
state of any responsibility for the actions that follow. While both Battle
for Haditha and Redacted aim to offer clear critiques of the US presence
in Iraq, their concentration on questions of mental health as ultimately
being personal and individualist raise troubling questions surrounding
the attribution of violence and issues of structural accountability.
Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s 2010 documen-
tary Restrepo is far less sensationalist and caricatured than either
Broomfield’s or DePalma’s film, but it still emphasises the centrality
of trauma in conflict situations. The film follows a single platoon
engaging the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan during a 15-month
deployment over 2007–2008, a cycle that, as one soldier (Staff Sergeant
Joshua McDonough) notes, was the longest period of sustained combat
the US military had undertaken since Vietnam. Interviewed on his
journey back to the US after his tour of duty, McDonough anticipates
an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder that will follow the
return of combatants because of a lack of knowledge about the psycho-
logical effects of such prolonged fighting: “They’re gathering intel right
now basically on how to deal with us” he observes, “because there’s
156 Disability and the Posthuman

no real research or intel on how to treat us right now […] Dealing with
guys who are coming back”. As is made clear in Restrespo, the mental
health costs of participating in conflict are considerable. One articula-
tion of the posthumanist version of the military is that of the ‘ultimate
warrior’ whose body is modified through the addition of technology
or drugs that allow for 24/7 operation in a permanent war. But it
is perfectly possible to read the globalised network of US military
power as being a posthumanist assemblage that ultimately disables
its protagonists. To make this argument is not to subscribe to some
stock concept of the ‘contained’ humanist individual; soldiers such as
McDonough are not stripped of their place in complex bioeconomies
and technological operations because of the reality of trauma. Rather
it is more instructive to recognise and understand disability trauma as
a product of the posthumanist connections that the war on terror has
produced.
The combination of trauma, disability and a prostheticised, posthu-
manist military capability intersects in 2014’s American Sniper, directed
by Clint Eastwood and loosely adapted from the memoir written by
ex-Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, published in 2012. Kyle served four tours
of duty in Iraq and was credited with more confirmed kills than any
sniper in US military history. Following his discharge in 2009, Kyle
worked with veterans and was killed in 2013 by an ex-Marine with
PTSD. Pre-production on American Sniper was in process at the time
of Kyle’s death and the resulting film becomes in effect a memorial to
him, a celebration of life and service. At the same time, Eastwood’s
film evidences the central fragility and posthumanised networks of the
military discussed earlier. Its narrative of technical excellence and male
capability (Kyle’s proficiency as a sniper) is underwritten by a story of
vulnerability. On the surface, this is a standard (and therefore mascu-
line) humanist narrative: a man fulfilling his duty is dehumanised by
war and made to face a potentially emasculating state of vulnerability, to
then be rescued through a re-engagement with family and an acceptance
of precarity that is channelled into the public space of help for others.
But such a trajectory cannot contain another story, one about ideas of
distance, prosthetics, the contextual meaning of war and the hetere-
onormativity of family, that runs thread-like through the film. It is this
latter story that frequently pivots around representations of disability in
crucial scenes that underwrite much of the film’s narrative power.
As a sniper, Kyle (Bradley Cooper) kills from a distance. In standard
cinematic practice viewers are incorporated into the scopic act of this
as the camera adopts the sighting position of his rifle, though this
does not appear at any point to implicate the audience in the violence
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 157

and serves more to bolster an understanding of Kyle as an individual.

For all his technical excellence, however, the film displays a complex
conceptualisation of distance and proximity in which disability and
vulnerability are crucial elements. Kyle’s killing is presented as an act
of singularity; he individualises the power of the US military in the
single shot. His rifle is an obvious prosthetic appendage, symbolising
and enabling, in micro, the kind of “surgical, sensitive and scrupulous
[…] precision-strike capability” Gregory attributes to contemporary
warfare.52 In being an extension of his body, Kyle’s rifle and the hybrid
self it produces fulfils all of Gregory’s terms: it allows for precision-
level surgery (he never misses); it is sensitive in its creation of a
human/non-human embodiment (Kyle is taught, and we are shown,
the importance of regulating his breathing in the acting of firing,
while his interaction with his weapon is one of clear conjoinment);
and it is scrupulous in that Kyle can always justify his kills, to himself
and others, as preventing further deaths (whether American or Iraqi).
Kyle and his rifle are an assembled form of embodiment, created
through the kinds of processes Pramod Nayar identifies as a post-
humanist “reformatting” of the body. Together, man and weapon
materialise the technological, globalising and moral systems of the
US military in Iraq, in a process Nayar terms an “evol[ution] with
technology and then environment, where identity emerges as a conse-
quence of the layered flows of information across multiple routes
and channels”. Kyle is networked in exactly these ways: he is physi-
cally and environmentally connected to the troops on the ground his
sniping protects, while his decision-making is communicated and
authorised through various audio command channels, enacting what
Nayar terms an “info-flow”, a process “materially produced through a
mix of human and non-human actors where the possibility of action
is embodied as both territory and bodily locations”.53 Kyle’s action
takes place across and through the technology he uses (these even –
improbably – include phoning his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) in the US
while he is under fire). For all that he might appear as an individual-
ised, coherent and centred self (and is constructed as such through
the film’s narrative concentration on his subjectivity), his environment
is in fact a matrix often composed of distributed relationships made
meaningful through distance.54
Up close, things are different. With proximity, the fragility of the
body cannot be denied, and technology loses much of its effect. As
a sniper, Kyle operates mainly on rooftops, but on the first occasion
he joins a house-to-house search in a search for information about
suspects, he is confronted with a young girl who has had her arm
158 Disability and the Posthuman

Weaponry as prosthesis: Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper)

in American Sniper

amputated by Al Qaeda because her family spoke to US troops.

His response to the visceral here, a disabled body right in front of
him, is to be shocked in a manner that echoes Miller’s encounter
with Freddy in Green Zone: the proximity of the young girl and her
presence in a small, crowded room reconfigures Kyle’s engagement
with bodies in conflict. A similar moment comes when Kyle is back
in the US on a break between tours and is approached by a young
ex-Marine, Mads (Jonathan Groff), who informs him that Kyle saved
his life in Iraq in his role as a protector of troops on the ground. In
response to Kyle’s question about how he is coping, Mads rolls up his
trouser leg to reveal a prosthetic leg. Kyle is clearly uncomfortable
by the display, especially because it takes place in a confined situa-
tion (a small reception area) and is made more so when Mads talks
about the soldiers who have returned from Iraq with psychological
problems: “they made it back but they’re just not right”. Mumbling
platitudes and unable to properly respond to Mads’ invitation to visit
a veterans’ centre, Kyle leaves. Similarly, when Kyle’s friend Biggles
(Jake McDorman) is shot in the face and blinded, Kyle’s hospital visit
again produces an uncomfortable confrontation with the materiality
of disability, his awkward support and forced humour symptomatic
of a removal from his technologised comfort zone. The untouchable
performer with the “long gun” (as one of his fellow combatants terms
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 159

it) is unnerved and disturbed by the physical difference war produces

when he is forced to encounter it.
In the final combat scene in the film (somewhat ridiculously punc-
tuated by his calling Taya to say he is coming home), Kyle is injured
and left scrambling to climb aboard a vehicle leaving the conflict
scene. As he does so he drops his rifle, and the camera focuses on it
in a single, short close-up. The gun, it is clear, is now rejected; it is to
be left behind as the militarised killer, having completed his service,
refutes his role. There will be no distance following his return. Rather
the film’s narrative arc then focuses upon Kyle’s struggle to accept
the dehumanisation he has experienced because of his exposure to
conflict. Trapped within memories of Iraq when he is back home, Kyle
hears explosions in the closing of every car door and is obsessed with
televised news of the conflict. He withdraws into a classic PTSD posi-
tion, one the film reads in terms of a consequential absence of his
individual humanity: “I need you to be human again” Taya says to
Kyle when his suppressed trauma is at its worst; “I need you here. If
you leave again, I don’t think we’ll be here when you get back”. “Even
when you’re here, you’re not here” she adds, encapsulating the idea of
the schizoid veteran unable to adjust to his return.
Kyle’s return to wholeness is, however, ultimately utterly predict-
able. The creation of family dynamic is, in the end, successful, while
his selfhood is regained through an engagement with disability. Kyle
becomes a confidante and lay therapist for returned veterans, the impli-
cation being that he can conquer his psychological wounds through an
engagement with others with disabilities (real disabled veterans play
themselves in these scenes). Now, proximity is positive; it is personal,
conversational and supportive. The film, however, can only be desta-
bilised by its final act: the murder of Kyle by an ex-Marine unable to
process the trauma of the war. And Kyle’s death takes place on an
average day at home, outside of the geographies of conflict and the
distance-killing of Iraq. As such, the carefully constructed narrative of
restitution in American Sniper cannot contain the excessive complexi-
ties that are raised in its deployment of networked and technologised
bodies. Human wholeness cannot replace posthumanist dispersal; the
successful transition to family is negated by the deadly legacy of trau-
matic distance.
The three central characters discussed in the films in this section
– Miller in Green Zone, James in The Hurt Locker and Kyle in American
Sniper – are all examples of Squier’s liminal lives and Puar’s char-
acterisation of debility and capacity. The intersections between their
bodies, selves and the posthumanist militarised technologies they
160 Disability and the Posthuman

inhabit exemplify the “unstable, porous, and culturally implicated

practice” Squier identifies as central to contemporary representations
of biotechnological liminality, while Puar’s stress on how “prevailing
notions of chance, risk, accident, luck and probability” interact with
the body to “give rise to a new set of bodily capacities” is captured
by the films’ complex stories of individualisation.55 Whatever their
narrative resolution, each character is, for the bulk of their stories
(and, indeed for the entirety of James’ experience in The Hurt Locker),
positioned on an edge defined by a struggle between a desired singu-
larity and performative distribution. Within this frame, the constant
narrative need for disability in the three films performs complex acts
of welcome and rejection. Read positively, ‘unstable’ and ‘porous’
constitute a set of disability revisions to humanist categories of
coherent and centred selfhood, and Green Zone and American Sniper
contain such possible revisions: in the powerful revelation of Freddy’s
leg and Kyle’s acceptance of vulnerability, for example. These are akin
to those moments of visualisation identified earlier in Source Code,
where Stevens’ networked body can only function because it is disa-
bled and different. They are all instances of a posthumanist disability
presence, spaces of a potentially radical reconfiguration of bodies
and selves. As we have seen, however, each is closed down through a
humanist process of narrative resolution. For its part, The Hurt Locker
remains precariously balanced on a liminal edge, refusing to commit
to any standard conclusion that stresses individual worth. Because of
this, its depiction of trauma keeps the possibility of difference open
and its representation of one character’s exposure to the conflict in
Iraq acts to interrogate, rather than endorse, ideas of centred, rational
personhood. While it would be wrong to claim it as any kind of show-
case for a progressive deployment of posthumanist disability, The
Hurt Locker’s narrative and aesthetics are suggestive of possible new
delineations of technologised bodies. Such suggestions are rare in US
films focused on the conflict in Iraq, however, and Bigelow’s feature
is the exception in a genre otherwise committed to resolution. As
we have seen though, while such commitment might be desired it is
often undermined and critiqued by the presence of the unruly disa-
bled body that pushes back against easy closures.
Analyses of US films about disability, technology and conflict tell
multiple stories of how the messy intersection between posthumanism
and humanism inflects the ways in which bodies are written, but it
requires an obvious counterpoint. Most disabilities produced by the
conflict in Iraq are not American, and they do not allow for the kinds
of restitution and renewal central to many Western narratives. This
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 161

is as much a literal understanding of the workings of situated poverty

as it is any heritage about the ways character trajectories work in
cinema across cultures; physical restitution through complex medical
prostheses, for example, is impossible for nearly all civilians wounded
following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rather disability has become
everyday and ordinary in the ruined frontiers of those Middle Eastern
communities brutalised by the war on terror. Writing on cinema from
the region, Karen Lury points to the ways in which film reflects the
“conflicted and blurred geography of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan”, and
the deployment of disabled bodies is common as part of such conflic-
tion and blurring in features that represent the conflict.56 This does
not mean, however, that technology is absent from these portrayals
or of course that embodiment is not central to narrative. As opposed
to the violent power of US military ordnance as represented in the
films discussed above, technology in films from Iraq, Iran, Syria or
Afghanistan becomes repurposed and revived, in some cases as a
response to disability. The bodies that interact with this technology
do so in the specific social and cultural contexts that provide them
with meaning. But if disability and technology are plentiful in these
films, is the category of the posthuman – used as a description of
connected environments or critical approach – in any way useful?
Can the relentless and microscopic focus on networked, interfaced
and porous assemblages from the global North, so evident in scholar-
ship on posthumanism, have any relevance for films that tell stories
of brutality from war-torn communities? In asking these questions I
want to make it clear that I am differentiating between a specifically
critical posthumanist analysis and the recognisable post-structuralist
critical humanisms that, at the end of the twentieth century, undid
ideas of the rational, centred and autonomous subject and the notions
of history that accompanied this. The methodologies share much in
common but, as we have seen in previous chapters, processes of post-
humanist enquiry increasingly shape readings of the new complexities
of a contemporary technologised world. Given that ongoing war across
boundaries is a contemporary constant, can posthumanism contribute
to reading the storylines and aesthetics of Middle Eastern films that
visualise bodily difference in situations where vulnerability and
precarity are a constant? In the next section of this chapter, this is one
of the questions that will be teased out.
162 Disability and the Posthuman

Reformatting and reuse: films from the Middle East

Even before the US invasion in 2003, filmmaking in Iraq, Iran and

the surrounding region was a perilous process. Authoritarian regimes
and economic sanctions made the establishment or continuation of
the necessary structures for filmmaking especially challenging. Iran’s
production heritage especially, both pre-and post- the 1979 revolution,
constitutes a major body of work, though the sanctions of the 1990s
curtailed output and productions were still shut down and films were
banned for political reasons.57 In Iraq itself, making dramatic features
was more or less impossible after 2003: indeed both Oday Rasheed’s
2005 drama Underexposure (the first film made in Iraq following the
invasion) and Mohamed Al-Daradji’s 2008 documentary, Iraq: War,
Love, God & Madness, are productions explicitly about the difficulties of
making films in the context of the American occupation (Al-Daradji’s
film focuses on the problems encountered making his 2006 feature,
Ahlaam, discussed below). The majority of the films that have been
made are low-budget documentaries aimed at capturing the lived
experiences of the social and political transformations the nation has
experienced.58
Unsurprisingly, given the destruction caused by conflict, depicting
and deploying disability has been central to films produced in the
region in the contemporary period. In the films discussed here, disa-
bility is routine and everyday, rarely charged with the narrative focus
on overcoming or achievement typical of much Western commercial
filmmaking. Rather, representations of disabled bodies and trauma are
often accompanied by imaginings of fractured families, communities
and environments and in many of the features characters are forced
to be mobile; imperilled, vulnerable or neglected they move across
landscapes and between social configurations. In The Color of Paradise
(1999) a blind boy moves from Tehran to the countryside, to be then
passed between family members and strangers before he falls to his
death from a bridge across a river. Tramontane (2016) also centres on
blindness as a blind musician travels across Lebanon in search of his
identity following the violence of the civil war. In My Mother’s Arms
(2011) is a drama about a man running an orphanage in Baghdad,
providing support for traumatised children across the city who have
lost their parents following the 2003 invasion. In the 2000 Iranian/
Kurdish feature A Time for Drunken Horses, two Kurdish brothers and a
sister who have been orphaned through conflict criss-cross the Iran/
Iraq border, smuggle goods in an attempt to raise funds for the opera-
tion that the younger, severely disabled brother requires in order to
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 163

prolong his life. In both Tramontane and A Time for Drunken Horses
disabled characters are played by disabled actors (Barakat Jabbour in
the former and Madi Ekhtiar-Dini in the latter), though arguably it is
wrong to term Ekhtiar-Dini’s presence in A Time for Drunken Horses as
acting. In the film it is clear that Ekhtiar-Dini is himself in constant
pain and the story revolves around his actual and viscerally visible
disabilities as it portrays the plight of stateless Kurds lost between
and across borders. A Time for Drunken Horses utilises Ekhtiar-Dini’s
extraordinary deployment of his disability to underwrite a narra-
tive that eschews metaphor or morality and blurs the line between
fiction and documentary in its depiction of embodied personhood. At
the close of the film, the two brothers embark on another trip across
the border with no end in sight of their hardships and no prospect of
accessing medical help.59
Unlike the films mentioned above, Mohamed Al-Daradji’s 2006
feature Ahlaam focuses on the specific impact of the US invasion of Iraq
in 2003 and, as such, offers the potential for comparative readings with
the US features discussed earlier. As with Green Zone, Ahlaam opens
at the moment of the initial attack on Baghdad. Where Greengrass’
film begins with television commentary and generated images of the
opening bombardment, Ahlaam uses news footage of the bombing of
the city. But in contrast to Green Zone’s seamless post-credits transition
into the US Army search for WMD, Al-Daradji’s film juxtaposes the
attack with scenes of patients in Baghdad’s major psychiatric hospital
screaming as the building is rocked by the resulting explosions. The
narrative then goes back five years to develop three narrative strands
that come to intertwine at the point of the 2003 bombardment: title
character Alhaam (Aseel Adil) is traumatised when her fiancé Ahmed
(Mortadha Saadi) is arrested by state police on the morning of their
wedding day; two soldiers, Ali (Basher Al-Majid) and Hasan (Kaheel
Khalid), are sent to occupy border positions as part of their national
service; and a medical student Mehdi (Mohamed Hashim) works to
become a newly qualified doctor. Alhaam’s grief results in her referral
to the hospital because of the mental illness it creates; Ali fails to save
Hasan’s life when their post is attacked by US and UK aircraft as part
of Operation Desert Fox in 1998, and is subsequently tried for deser-
tion, sent to military prison and then, heavily traumatised, hospital;
and Mehdi is forced to undertake military service before being able to
take up a medical position as a new doctor at the psychiatric institu-
tion. When the film returns to the 2003 present (using the same news
footage as the opening), the audience realises that two of the patients
screaming in fear at the start are Ahlaam and Ali.
164 Disability and the Posthuman

If Green Zone or The Hurt Locker portray the immediate world of

post-invasion Baghdad as a set of spaces dominated by US military
technology, in Ahlaam it has become an environment suffused with
disability. The bombing destroys much of the hospital and the patients
flee to roam through the city. In a series of highly charged shots,
Ahlaam walks through the rubble and deserted streets of Baghdad
in her wedding dress (it is implied that she has been wearing it for
five years), confused and desperately seeking Ahmed. Ali likewise
wanders, semi-naked, through the devastation, trying in moments of
lucidity to find other patients and help them return to the hospital.
Mehdi, who has been beaten during the looting of the hospital, organ-
ises people to also help bring to safety any patients that can be found.
The film creates the environment of Baghdad’s streets in the imme-
diate aftermath of the invasion as a space of trauma and mental illness.
City residents flee the emerging chaos of looting and local militias as
numerous patients stumble in fear through the devasted remains of
abandoned and destroyed buildings. Ahlaam portrays the destruction
of lives and communities through a disability lens, with social break-
down mirrored by the traumatised presence of individuals broken by
the onset of war. Despite the striking imagery, however, the film does
not use disability as a metaphor. The Baghdad streets become spaces
of embodied experience: fantasising that a man she meets is Ahmed
and agreeing to let him help her, Ahlaam is raped, beaten and thrown
from a moving car; while Ali is killed by a militia sniper as he attempts
to help two fellow patients back towards the hospital.
In Ahlaam, Baghdad becomes the space at the end of the ‘kill-chain’.
The film eviscerates the logic of a military process that purports to
create precise and efficient warfare with minimum cost and casualties,
or one that (as in Green Zone) seeks to search for ‘truth’. The destruc-
tion of the city in 2003 was enabled by a posthumanist network of
command and control of the kind outlined by Gregory and others;
orchestrated from distance, the bombardment identified specific
targets in a mapped devastation. But Al-Daradji’s film shows that the
damage created exceeds and breaks down all notions of autonomous
precision. In the closing scenes of the film, Ahlaam has become sepa-
rated from all those searching for her on the streets and is alone at the
top of a tall building in the centre of Baghdad. Covered with antennae,
it appears to be some centre for communications (though the exact
detail of this is not made clear) and offers a panoramic view over the
city. Crucially, however, such a vantage point provides no knowledge
or further understanding of either Ahlaam’s predicament or that of
her community. Any authority over space that might be presumed
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 165

The end of the kill-chain: Baghdad in Ahlaam

by a final position of surveillance is undercut because of the nature

of Ahlaam’s trauma. The final shots of her alone, lost and confused
convey a powerful sense of fragmentation, incoherence and distress.
While this lends substance to a reading of disability in the film that
stresses standard tropes of lack and loss, this is contextualised by
Ahlaam’s aesthetics. The film places trauma centrally, particularly in
its second half. It figures the bodies of the patients as exemplars of the
effects of devasting warfare, and not as peripheral to a broader narra-
tive of overcoming. There is no restitution for Ahlaam, Ali or Mehdi,
no recovery from the onslaught that destroys their lives. Destruction
and consequential disabilities, it is suggested, will be permanent states
in Baghdad for as long as can be imagined.60
In the contemporary era US military technology is the product
of a vast assemblage of research, manufacture and deployment. As
Cooper observes, it drives contemporary revolutions in biotechnology
in order to reach into all aspects of health and life sciences, producing
bodies in which the interface between individual and machine, and
then between the technologised subject and networks of communi-
cation and control, become commonplace. Gregory’s category of the
‘everywhere war’ reminds how these bodies and networks are situated
across all aspects of US-led conflicts in the contemporary era. The war
zones affected by these US invasions cannot escape the extent of this
166 Disability and the Posthuman

‘everywhere’; they are inevitably subject to its technologies and their

lethal consequences, Puar’s maiming. But for all of the overwhelming
nature of such force, part of a process of resistance produced by the
communities affected is the creation of technological meanings of
their own. Whether through the co-option of the materials of invasion
or the development of everyday objects in newly accentuated forms,
the worlds of the dispossessed and displaced furnish alternative ways
to tell stories of the relationships between human and non-human,
and between bodies and environments.
Bahman Ghobadi’s 2004 feature Turtles Can Fly is set in the Kurdish
village of Kanibo on the Iraqi–Turkish border in the period imme-
diately up to the US invasion in 2003. Like Ghobadi’s earlier A Time
for Drunken Horses, it focuses on children and work, and has a special
concentration on disability; and like Ahlaam it especially centres on
events immediately surrounding the US invasion of 2003. An early
scene establishes a subtle play on the meaning and use of technology
that subsequently run through the film. 15 men stand on a hillside
outside a village, each holding a television antenna that they move
slowly in response to shouted orders from children in the houses
below. No matter what direction the antennae are turned, however,
reception is impossible, and it is left to the resident expert in tech-
nology, a young boy appropriately named nicknamed Satellite (Soran
Ebrahim), to convince the villagers that they will only be able to gain
access to the television news they crave if they come together to buy a
satellite that he will then install. Any idea that a technological upgrade
– and Satellite needs to trade in all the village’s radios to help purchase
the new dish – will result in improved information proves illusory,
however; when the regional governor and elders meet to watch the
newly accessible CNN news, no one is capable of understanding what is
being said. Pushed into service as a translator, Satellite’s basic English
only allows him to surmise that a complex discussion of a possible US
invasion is a weather forecast predicting rain. Nothing is gained here
from being networked to the world’s news; there is no new informa-
tion as to whether or when the US Army or Iraqi resistance will come
to Kanibo, and the moment is rather defined by a grim humour.
Satellite is a dealer and fixer (“all the villages in this area want me”
he boasts at one point, in reference to his skills with technology), and
the leader of a group of children who work for him collecting deacti-
vated mines and other detritus, to sell and use, left over from various
border conflicts.61 In a number of long shots, the children are pictured
uncovering the mines, strung across the landscape in rows and working
the fields as if they were farmers, inching forward with wicker baskets
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 167

as they reap a deadly harvest. This reusing of technology for local ends
(it is American and Italian mines that fetch the most money; Iraqi ones
are worth nothing) is a constant throughout the narrative; numerous
scenes take place against the background of a waste land composed of
shell casings and discarded, forgotten military vehicles. In a powerful
set of images, used shells are thrown from a trunk and gathered by
children who are paid to stack them together. In one shot capturing
the process, the camera is positioned on the ground and the empty
casings appear to be falling from the sky, a reminder of past conflicts
and portend of the violence that awaits the village.
In The Hurt Locker, the deactivation of IEDs is central to a narrative
that explores questions of individual worth. Bigelow’s film interrogates
the US presence in Iraq through James’ encounters with the technolo-
gies of destruction produced by the Iraqi resistance. As each bomb is
rendered safe, additional emphasis is placed on the value of individual
action set against the US military assemblage and unseen Iraqi assail-
ants. The devices themselves, however, become meaningless once
their threat is contained and they are discarded, occupying no further
place in the film’s storyline. Deactivated mines in Ahlaam function
differently. They are reworked and recycled as part of a community
economy, becoming objects that transcend their technological origins
as they become part of the village’s social fabric. In Kanibo, access to
mines is access to power, but of a wholly different kind than that in US
discourses of the conflict’s technology.
Even though the contexts are very different, it is possible to see
this reimagining and reusing in terms of Louis Bucciarelli’s ideas
of the “other stories” and “other processes” that can be brought to
engineered artefacts. As detailed in the last chapter, Bucciarelli
stresses how “other social processes of impacts, of […] reconstruc-
tion, and use” are part of the ways in which the “artefact as object
can live again”. He continues: “It can become a nexus or icon of social
discourse or exchange. In its use it can impose, block, enable, shape
social connections and the aspirations of those it meets. There are
other object worlds within which the artefact can be seen and used
in different ways”.62 This is, in fact, a precise description of the ways
in Turtles Can Fly that defunct military technology becomes repur-
posed through transactions within the village. The objects, removed
from the matrixes in which they were deployed, are transformed
into a local currency that helps structure developing social relations
in Kanibo. Hierarchies function through access to technology, as the
scene with the village elders shows. It is Satellite, with his knowledge
of new communication equipment and (however basic) English, who
168 Disability and the Posthuman

commands the space in that moment, overriding the authority of the

elders and acting as the intermediary between the village and a world
beyond its borders.63
In addition, Bucciarelli’s idea of the artefact/object as ‘nexus’ also
fits what can be seen to be an extension of the film’s environments to
include posthumanist ideas of networks and boundaries. The fallout of
US or Iraqi military assemblages is thrown into encounters with the
civilian communities that bear the brunt of invasion or repression. As
objects and artefacts become repurposed, they cross spaces of meaning,
but the meticulous visualising in Turtles Can Fly – its creation of the
ordnance as a constant presence in images of the village – ensures that
they maintain the trace elements of their origins. There may appear to
be an unbridgeable chasm between lives lived in border conflict zones
and the workings of posthumanist theorising, but the two can in fact be
seen to clearly come together in a powerful representational example of
such technology use: the drone strikes that, managed through intercon-
tinental networks of military control, have killed numerous innocent
civilians across conflicts in the twenty-first century. These high-profile
manifestations of the war on terror exemplify what Gregory terms the
“bloody geographies” that are the consequences of posthumanised and
technologised warfare.64 They have a clear and deadly reach into the
situated lives of real people and it is worth noting that in Turtles Can
Fly one of the two trucks unloading the shell casings suddenly (and
inexplicably) explodes, killing and wounding several villagers. In light
of these examples, a critical posthumanist reading becomes a valuable
analytic tool, one not simply interested in outlining and describing the
manifestations of military networks, but also working – through an
emphasis on practices of decentring and deconstructing – to critique the
logic behind claims of ‘surgical strikes’ and precision-based non-human
technologies. In Ghobadi’s film, lives and bodies are transformed as
a direct result of military decisions made thousands of miles away;
the vulnerability of a child deactivating a mine is, the viewer comes
to realise, part of a pattern that originates in communication channels
located elsewhere. But the film also gives the lie to claims that contem-
porary technologised warfare is somehow made productively transparent
because of the sophistication of the machinery involved. Rather the
narrative presents a chaotic cascade of technology on which meaning
has to be written and, for all that used military ordnance provides a
means of exchange in the village, it is still shown to be unpredictable
and lethal.
At one point, about a third of the way through the film, a truck
arrives in Kanibo to distribute gasmasks, part of a widening panic
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 169

Disability and the detritus of war: Hengaow (Hiresh Feysal Rahman)

in Turtles Can Fly

as the threat of US invasion becomes more likely. “War doesn’t

warn of its coming” Satellite says, incongruously framed against
the landscape as he stands on one of the trucks wearing a gasmask:
“bombardment could start at any time”. In fact, the war has already
come. The border village has become the site of a refugee camp as
people flee from escalating regional conflicts. Following the murder
of their parents, brother and sister Hengaow (Hiresh Feysal Rahman)
and Agrin (Avaz Latif) have come from Halabjah, a city in Iraqi
Kurdistan close to the Iranian border, bringing with them a small boy
Riga (Abdol Rahman Karim) who is blind.65 Hengaow has lost both
arms (it is implied through the conflict, but precise detail of this is
not given) and is first seen in the film carefully deactivating a mine
using his teeth. His disability goes unremarked, part of a pattern
in the film in which bodily difference is accepted. Satellite’s closest
friend Pesheow (Saddam Hossein Feysal) can only use one leg and
needs a crutch, but no narrative stress is placed upon this and, unlike
the films discussed earlier, there is no use of any prosthetic meta-
phors to establish an exterior meaning.66 Instead Pesheow’s disability
becomes woven into the everyday life of the village, just as Hengaow’s
and Riga’s become part of their wider predicament as refugees. While
the camera focuses on their bodies as the narrative requires (as with
the striking and powerful scene in which Hengaow deactivates the
mine), there is no moment where such visualising becomes a spec-
tacle. In the film’s images, the body is pulled away from casual and
accepted notions of corporeal integrity.
170 Disability and the Posthuman

Thought of in posthumanist terms, bodies in Turtles Can Fly become

reformatted, particularly in the context of the spaces they inhabit.
This is, obviously, not the kind of reformatting through high tech-
nology that characterises posthumanism’s often breathless emphasis
on body morphology but is rather a disability-led reconstitution of
embodied and physical space conveyed through the image. To assert
this point is not to advocate any apolitical reading of the film, nor does
such an approach deny the fact that the story imagines individual and
communal identities torn apart by war. But, as this study has tried
to show throughout, there is no need to decouple posthumanist crit-
ical methods from the understanding of identities and situated ideas
of disability futures. In Turtles Can Fly, the hardships of refugee life
are never denied and are often brutally highlighted, but this does not
mean that the events the film portrays cannot be thought of in terms
of networks or non-unitary and dispersed subjects.
The film’s resistance to orthodox conceptions of character and
event can be further seen in its depiction of care. At the start, viewers
are led to believe that Riga is the young brother of Hengaow and Agrin
(Satellite refers to him as such at one point), but it emerges that he
is in fact Agrin’s son as a result of her rape during the attack that
killed her parents. Throughout the story, Hengaow is a careful and
patient carer for Riga, carrying and feeding him (in a powerful scene
Hengaow holds a spoon in his mouth as he gives Riga dinner) and
looking after him at night. In contrast, Agrin rejects the boy on almost
every possible occasion: “Isn’t he the child of our parents’ killers”, she
says of Riga to Hengaow, “who did this to me?” As it becomes clear
that the US invasion is coming, Agrin suggests to Hengaow that they
leave without Riga and at one point takes him away from the camp
and abandons him, leaving him tied to a tree before Riga frees himself
and returns. There is no conformity to gender roles or family struc-
tures in these scenes; rather they have been totally deconstructed by
the barbarism of war. And there is no positive resolution or restitution
to the story: Agrin drowns Riga in a lake before committing suicide,
with both Hengaow and Satellite left inconsolable.
The characters of Turtles Can Fly live on a literal border between
Iraq and Turkey, but their lives speak of a wider precarious liminality.
They enact Squier’s identification of the inherent instabilities and
volatile convergences created by enforced marginality. The disabled
bodies that the film visualises, however, also articulate the second
meaning Squier attributes to the ‘marginal’, as a locus of “rich poten-
tial” for the further understanding of liminality. Such potential runs
through Turtles Can Fly; in Satellite’s engagement with the boundaries
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 171

of technology, for example, or the everyday and accepted nature of

disability. It is most apparent, however, in the film’s startling revela-
tion that Hengaow is a visionary who can prophecise future events. He
sees not only moments of public futures (the arrival of American heli-
copters and the eventful downfall of Saddam Hussein at the end of the
war), but also those that are personal (the deaths of Agrin and Riga).
Hengaow is, in fact, a striking example of Squier’s precarious and
Janus-faced idea of the marginal, in that his visions focus on death and
destruction, but their source is (arguably) the most disabled person
in the film. Disability is again here difference, with the elusive and
quasi-mystical nature of Hengaow’s prophecies set against the tech-
nology and objects that otherwise form the backdrop to life in Kanibo.
It should be stressed that Hengaow’s ability is in no way any kind of
compensation for his disability; there is in fact no narrative connec-
tion between the two and indeed Hengaow’s visions (especially that of
Agrin and Riga) are tumultuous and disturbing events that only prob-
lematise his life. But the potential here is of radical insight (seeing
the fall of Baghdad even before the war has commenced, for example)
from within the most complex of embodiments.
Close to the end of the film, Satellite is wounded by a landmine and
requires crutches to be mobile (it is unclear whether he will have a
long-term disability, but the damage done to his leg suggests this might
be the case). In the final scene, he stands on a roadside outside Kanibo
as US forces drive past as part of their offensive. He is approached
by Pesheow, who, mindful of Satellite’s enthusiasm for everything
American, asks: “Didn’t you want to see the Americans coming?”
Satellite’s face as he looks at his friend reflects the clear trauma he
has experienced, and he appears incapable of any response. Without
saying anything and awkwardly using his crutches, he turns his back
on the convoy before walking out of frame, followed by Pesheow. The
final shot is complex: the film ends with two disabled children, their
future uncertain, leaving the image as the US invasion continues, but
a gap in the procession of trucks and running soldiers means that the
fixed camera’s focus in the final seconds after the boys have left is
on the static, ruined military technology from previous conflicts that
litters the road.67 The ending is a sombre presage of the destruction
to come, anticipating that the mobility and capability of US military
power will likewise be reduced to wreckage.
Turtles Can Fly was one the first films made in Iraq following the
collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. Its narrative is itself part of a
war-torn region in flux and without stability. It speaks to the brutality
of history but, unlike the American features discussed earlier, it never
172 Disability and the Posthuman

resorts to humanist and individualist arguments of restitution and

return. Lives, bodies and communities are not made whole again. The
film’s location in the rawness of the invasion and its grounded specifi-
cities might appear to make it impossible to claim that it is in any
way a posthumanist text, but a critical posthumanist and disability-
led reading illuminates its constant decentring: the grand narratives of
history and technology undone by networks of mystical foresight; the
power of the military countered by new patterns of reassembling and
reuse; and the ‘functional’ able body reformatted as capable, if fraught
and vulnerable, disabled difference.

Conclusion: warfare, disability and ‘life’

Melinda Cooper has observed that, for US defence organisations

involved in pursuing the war on terror following 9/11, developing tech-
nologies in which the “frontier” between warfare and health became
“strategically indifferent” became a key goal.68 It is a telling observa-
tion that is articulated through all the films analysed in this chapter.
The commercial US features discussed earlier all speak to the ‘frontier’
between the individual body, immediate environment and enactment of
warfare, usually mediated by military technology. In productions from
Iran and Iraq, the frontiers are personal, communal and geographical/
environmental. In both sets of films, however, warfare and health are
collapsed into one another as Cooper suggests. In Source Code, Green
Zone, The Hurt Locker and American Sniper the body becomes vulnerable
and fragile, despite the technology that is designed to protect it and
expedite a precise and efficient military victory. In Ahlaam, Turtles Can
Fly and other films from the Middle East, warfare dominates health,
with communities destroyed and bodies disabled by the conflict. But
whereas the frontier in the US features speaks of a precarity that
creates a disabling trauma, undermining the vast assembled power of
the military machine, the visceral destruction perpetuated in the fron-
tier war makes disability everyday and ordinary in features originating
from those locations targeted by this power. The frantic obsession with
individual capability and threats it encounters, so intrinsic to the US
features, are absent from films made in Iraq and Iran, where interac-
tions with community feature far more strongly.
Cooper’s observation, however, is not one simply expressing
conventional ideas about warfare and health, and how one produces
changes in the other. Rather her argument is the two come together
because of (as the subtitle of her book notes) “biotechnology and
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 173

capitalism in the neoliberal era”. The extension of military technology

into the life sciences is, as her book makes clear, partly because of the
alignment between biology, capitalism and an aggressive US foreign
policy that targeted much of the world as a potential terrorist threat.
But her assertion that US organisations promoted a national security
platform that wanted a “defense discourse” that would “push further
and incorporate the whole of life, from the micro- to the eco-systemic
level, within its strategic vision” can be applied to the films analysed
in this chapter.69 Embodied, personal and social formations are part of
these micro- and eco-systems and, time and again, the features show-
case the outcomes of the neoliberal biopolitics that produce the kinds
of surplus lives Cooper discusses.
Unsurprisingly, capitalism saturates the US films. The source code
programme itself in Source Code, the scenes inside the actual Green
Zone (with swimming pool parties and takeway food) in Green Zone,
and the military technologies in The Hurt Locker and American Sniper are
all made possible by particular formations of capital that underwrite
US imperialism in the contemporary era. The elements of the films
that appear to critique such formations – Stevens’ rejection of military/
scientific knowledge in Source Code or Miller’s liberal disdain for the
invading regime’s lies in Green Zone – simply repeat their mechanics
through other means, particularly the emphasis on individual success
and fulfilment. Capital exchange is central to the films from the Middle
East as well, though here it is configured differently. The smuggling
in A Time for Drunken Horses is part of a process of bare survival, while
trade in Turtles Can Fly operates in the only economy possible in a border
conflict zone. In these examples, health (particularly the prominence of
disability in each film), war and economics are folded into one another
in exactly the kind of total life experience Cooper outlines.
In her analysis of contemporary conflicts and the ways in which
they can be read through a critical posthumanist lens, Rosi Braidotti
observes: “New forms of warfare entail simultaneously the breath-
taking efficiency of ‘intelligent’ un-manned, technological weaponry
on the one hand, and the rawness of dismembered and humiliated
human bodies on the other”. This is, she makes clear, “the specifically
inhuman edge of the posthuman condition […] This deployment of
technologically mediated violence cannot be adequately described in
terms of disciplining the body, fighting the enemy or even as the tech-
niques of a society under control”.70 The films discussed here bear this
out. The bodies in the US features are not disciplined; they are precar-
ious and frequently out of control. As we have seen, reading them in
terms of disability highlights the often chaotic alignment of vulnerable
174 Disability and the Posthuman

precarity and violence that unveils cultural fears about the meaning
of the ‘war on terror’. Equally, it is wrong to call the bodies on show
in the films from Iran and Iraq disciplined. They are subject to the
crushing impact of war, but – as their own deployments of disability
show – they rework embodiment to narrate stories of personhood and
community in which disabled selves become normal, part of warfare’s
social consequences.
Both sets of films articulate Squier’s notion of the ‘liminal’ and
Butler’s ‘precarious life’, though the frontiers between technology
and health through which they do so differ. Squier observes that
“the liminal lives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” reveal
“biomedicine to be an unstable, porous and culturally implicated
practice”.71 We might note that the same is true of technology as well,
for all its desire to be autonomous and efficient. What Butler terms “the
power of violence” is an intrinsic part of the way such technology func-
tions. As she notes, the mobilisation of post-9/11 military logic came
through the recognition that “the national border was more permeable
than we thought”. As a result, “our general response is anxiety, rage;
a radical desire for security; a shoring-up of the borders against what
is perceived as alien”.72 When borders are permeable and porous, and
lives liminal and surplus, disability is not simply a set of embodied
states that arise as a consequence of technology and its violence; it also
offers a way of analysing and critiquing the processes that form such
states. It is precisely because lives lived with disability often occupy
porous and liminal frontier spaces that a disability-led critical meth-
odology can unpack the meaning of the technologies and bodies on
which this chapter has focuses; and, again, for all that contemporary
posthumanist networks are part of the production of such violence,
critical posthumanist perspectives can align with disability critiques
to further extend an understanding of how bodies are produced in
contemporary conflicts. The power of the films analysed here is unde-
niable. In their different ways they visualise and narrate the unstable
relationships between technology, individuals and community. Seeing
them as disability stories makes reading their power more possible.

Notes

1 Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 168 and 172.
2 Clare Barker, ‘“Radiant Affliction”: Disability Narratives in Postcolonial
Literature’ in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds), The Cambridge Companion
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 175

to Literature and Disability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),

pp. 105–106.
3 Robert McRuer, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (New York:
New York University Press, 2018), p. 57. It is important to stress that as well
as these practices of disablement, McRuer sees active signs of resistance, aspi-
ration and aesthetic novelty in many instances of disabled global poverty. See
also Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand, pp. 170–171 for a series of observa-
tions on disability and contemporary global formations.
4 Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a
Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 13.
5 Helen Meekosha, ‘Decolonising disability: thinking and acting globally’,
Disability and Society 26, no. 6 (2011), p. 677.
6 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), p. 95.
7 Emily Jane O’Dell, ‘From leprosy to The Willow Tree: decoding disability and
Islamic spirituality in Iranian film’, Disability and Society 30, no. 7 (2015),
p. 1126. There are not as many scholarly investigations into disability in
Hollywood as might be expected. See Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of
Isolation: A History of Physical Disabilities in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1994), although it is dated now; and some of the
essays in Marja Evelyn Mogk’s more recent edited collection Different Bodies:
Essays on Disability in Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Company, 2013).
8 Benjamin Fraser, ‘Disability studies, world cinema and the cognitive code of
reality,’ in Fraser (ed.), Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema
Contexts (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 2–3.
9 Fraser, ‘Disability studies, world cinema and the cognitive code of reality,’
p. 9. Only one of the 18 contributors to the volume is from the global South.
10 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal
Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), p. 14.
11 Cooper, Life as Surplus, p. 98.
12 See also Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic
Life (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006) for a similarly
excellent examination of the ways biotech companies construct genes and
genomics, on a corporate scale, across global markets.
13 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 122.
14 Braidotti, The Posthuman, pp. 123 and 127. She quotes Mbembe’s definition of
necro-politics – “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and
the material destruction of human bodies and population” – on p. 122.
15 Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 124.
16 Susan Merrill Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of
Biomedicine (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 17
and 9.
17 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London
and New York: Verso, 2006 [2004]), pp. 65, 29 and 143. Italics in original.
The specific ‘scenes’ Butler is describing in the latter quotation are those of
Afghan women published in the US media.
18 Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. xv and xiv.
176 Disability and the Posthuman

19 Puar, The Right to Maim, pp. 89–92.

20 Squier, Liminal Lives, p. 17. Italics in original.
21 Derek Gregory, ‘The everywhere war’, The Geographical Journal 177, no. 3
(2011), p. 239.
22 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Wars of the globalization era’, European Journal of Social
Theory 4, no. 1 (2001), p. 11. For all that Bauman remained a socialist
throughout his career, his later work on postmodernism revealed him to have
a sure critical sense of ideas such as networks, assemblages or (Bauman’s own
term) ‘liquidity’. An extension of his work to consider posthumanism makes
for, I hope, a profitable critical continuity. See Postmodernity and Its Discontents
(New York: New York University Press, 1997) and Culture in a Liquid Modern
World (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
23 Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2016), p. 203.
24 Pramod Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 8. My use of
‘assemblage’ in this chapter follows Nayar’s articulation, but also includes
Margrit Shildrick’s Deleuzian formation in which to be ‘assembled’ means
“all distinctions are troubled, whether between self and other, or between
the categories of human, animal, and machine”. This sense of ‘troubling’ is
evident in many of the films analysed. See Shildrick, ‘“Why should our bodies
end at the skin?”: embodiment, boundaries, and somatechnics’, Hypatia 30,
no. 1 (2015), p. 14.
25 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 8.
26 Puar observes: “Maiming thus functions not as an incomplete death or an
accidental assault on life, but as the end goal in the dual production of perma-
nent disability via the infliction of harm and the attrition of the life support
systems that might allow populations to heal from this harm”. As a result,
she notes, “Maiming is required” in the practice of war and conflict. The Right
to Maim, p. 143.
27 Gregory, ‘From a view to a kill: drones and late modern war’, Theory, Culture
and Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011), p. 192. Braidotti reads the use of drones as
part of posthumanist patterning: The Posthuman, pp. 125–127.
28 Gregory, ‘From a view to a kill’, p. 196.
29 Chad Harris, ‘The omniscient eye: satellite imagery, “battlespace aware-
ness,” and the structures of the imperial gaze’, Surveillance & Society 4, no. 1/2
(2006), p. 102.
30 Harris, ‘The omniscient eye’, pp. 102–105.
31 Vivian Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: prosthetics, metaphor and materiality’
in Marquand Smith and Joanna Morra (eds), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a
Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 2006), p. 19.
32 Gregory, ‘From a view to a kill’, p. 190; ‘Seeing red: Baghdad and the event-ful
city’, Political Geography 29 (2010), p. 266.
33 Harris, ‘The omniscient eye’, pp. 101–121.
34 Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look, p. 15.
35 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military–Industrial–Media–
Entertainment Network 2nd ed. (New York: Westview, 2009), p. xxviii. Der
Derian’s chapter on film is on pp. 151–176.
36 ‘Source code’ is a term used in computing, outlining a broad range of systems
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 177

software working. The somewhat vague inclusiveness of the term fits the
film’s fantasy use of technology: suggestive but lacking technical details.
37 Lambèr Royakkers and Rinie van Est, ‘The cubicle warrior: the marionette of
digitalized warfare’, Ethics and Information Technology 12 (2010), p. 291.
38 Anneke Smelik, ‘Film’ in Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), pp. 115–116. Smelik mentions Source Code only in
passing, but it is part of a wider argument she advances concerning narratives
of “posthuman hybridity” that explore “the relation between the supe-
rior memory of the computer and the failing memory of the human being”
(p. 114).
39 Cooper, Life as Surplus, p. 80.
40 Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, revised ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. xii.
41 “It is not for you to decide what happens here” Freddy tells Miller, explaining
why he has killed Al-Rawi. It is an incongruous comment in a conflict (and
indeed in a film) where that is exactly what does take place.
42 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
2008), p. 26.
43 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and
the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
2000), p. 47.
44 Robert Burgoyne, ‘Embodiment in the war film: Paradise Now and The Hurt
Locker’, Journal of War & Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2012), p. 14.
45 The idea that the objects of ordnance themselves could be part of posthu-
manist narration of war is explored in the striking form of Harry Parker’s
2016 novel Anatomy of a Soldier, in which each chapter is explored from the
point of view of a different item involved in the war in Afghanistan, from
the materials carried by the soldiers to possessions belonging to the Afghan
resistance.
46 Gregory, ‘From a view to a kill’, p. 191. James refuses to use the robot on his
first mission. On his second, he removes his protective suit while defusing
a bomb: “If I’m gonna die” he tells Eldrige, “I wanna die comfortable”. In
response to his actions and the information that up to that point he has
disarmed 873 bombs, his senior officer approvingly terms him a “wild man”.
47 Burgoyne, ‘Embodiment in the war film’, p. 13.
48 Burgoyne, ‘Embodiment in the war film’, p. 13.
49 The Marines are constantly represented as being hysterical, screaming at one
another in preparation for action, eyes wide in an overt fanaticism: “You’re
a fucking machine and you act like a machine” one Marine officer (Andrew
McLaren) says to his platoon before they venture out into the city from their
base, adding “that’s why we train, train, train; to kill, kill, kill”.
50 One soldier involved in the massacre, Corporal Ramirez (Elliot Ruiz), admits
to an officer before the atrocity that he feels psychologically disturbed and asks
to see a doctor, to be told that because of “Marine policy” such help is only
available at the end of a tour of duty. Ramirez instigates the massacre when he
executes five unarmed Iraqi men shortly after the request. In the final scene
of the film, Ramirez imagines again entering the house where the majority of
civilians were killed, but this time he creates a fictional alternative in which
178 Disability and the Posthuman

no shots are fired, and he rescues a young Iraqi girl. His voice over comments:
“We’ve all seen a lot of action at a young age. I’m 20 years old and this is my
third tour of duty. We’ve all seen things that will haunt us for the rest of our
lives. And I guess that after a while you just get hardened. You become numb”.
51 Cooper, Life as Surplus, p. 75.
52 Gregory, ‘From a view to a kill’, p. 188.
53 Nayar, Posthumanism, pp. 56 and 66.
54 It is instructive to juxtapose American Sniper with the 2017 feature Insyriated,
made by Belgian director Phillipe van Leeuw and set in Damascus during the
Syrian civil war. The first word of the film is “sniper” as a group of individ-
uals are fired on in the street. The narrative follows the story of Oum Yazan
(Hiam Abbas) and three generations of her family trapped inside her apart-
ment because of the danger outside. Insyriated is expressly about space: the
claustrophobia and fear of those in the apartment and the unseen (the sniper
is never revealed) threat in the public space outside. If American Sniper legiti-
mises the killing point of view, Insyriated dramatises the space of not knowing
where the killing originates.
55 Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 19.
56 Karen Lury, ‘Children in an open world: mobility as ontology in new Iranian
and Turkish cinema’, Feminist Theory 11, no. 3 (2010), p. 285. Turtles Can Fly
is one of the films Lury examines in her article. She notes that films that
come from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan “are often categorized as New Iranian
Cinema” (p. 285). Although she observes that this category is “elastic”
(p. 286), I avoid the phrase in this chapter as some of the films I discuss come
from other Middle Eastern countries.
57 Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1990 feature Time of Love was made in Turkey because
of political opposition in Iran. It was banned in Iran itself.
58 See, for example, The Dreams of Sparrows (d. Hayder Mousa Daffar, 2005).
59 Although it does not explicitly feature disability, Mohamed Al-Daradji’s
2010 feature Son of Babylon follows a narrative trajectory similar to those
films mentioned here. Three weeks after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s
regime, Um-Ibrahim (Shehzad Hussein) and her grandson Ahmed (Yassir
Talib) begin a 600-mile journey from northern Iraq to the south of the
country to search for their missing son/father Ibrahim, who vanished during
the fighting against US and UK forces in the Gulf War of the early 1990s. As
with the points made about other Kurdish/Iraqi/Iranian films in this chapter,
however, there is no resolution to the quest. Ibrahim is not found (his body
is almost certainly in one of the unmarked graves Um-Ibrahim and Ahmed
visit) and the grandmother dies from grief, leaving Ahmed alone.
60 For more on the making of the film, its screening in Baghdad and comments
from Al-Daradji, see ‘New films throw light on the Arab world’, The National,
www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/new-films-throw-light-on-the-arab-world-
1.632583#full. Accessed September 17, 2018.
61 Lury’s focus in her article is children and she writes on what she calls “the
political implications emerging from the representation of the child and its
interaction with the land”, p. 284.
62 Louis L. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 1994), p. 195.
63 In the midst of all the recycling and complex relationships between the
Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics 179

villagers and their technology, it is, however, Satellite’s bicycle that remains
the most constant object in the film. With multiple mirrors and festooned
with brightly coloured ribbons, the bicycle is an aesthetic object but also
a symbol of power (no other child in Kanibo has one). Satellite uses it to
transport refugees and fellow villagers, but also to carry water, the satellite
he buys for the village and the automatic weapons he purchases following
the US invasion (the market selling communication technology early in the
film has been transformed into a space only selling weapons and armaments
by the end). The bicycle’s utility is straightforward and part of a world in
which technology is valued for its use value, but it stands in contrast to other
objects because of the degree to which it is personal. Satellite despairs when
he thinks he has lost it, and generally his status as an unofficial village leader
is enhanced by his possession of it.
64 Gregory, ‘The everywhere war’, p. 242. On the same page Gregory gives an
example of one such drone strike, on a village in Pakistan in 2011.
65 Halabjah is the site of a 1988 chemical attack by Saddam Hussein’s army
during the Iran–Iran war in which thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed
in a genocidal massacre.
66 In one scene next to a fence that marks the Iraqi/Turkish border, Pesheow
raises his disabled leg like a gun and pretends to shoot a Turkish border guard
in a tower on the other side. It is the one ‘prosthetic’ use of his body in the
whole film, and a grim reminder of the material of killing rather than any
moral or humanist meaning.
67 Pehseow brings Satellite one final message from Hengaow, that “in 275 days
something else will happen in this area”, though it is not made clear what this
event will be or if the boys will still be in the village.
68 Cooper, Life as Surplus, p. 75.
69 Cooper, Life as Surplus, p. 80 (italics in original).
70 Braidotti, The Posthuman, pp. 122 and 124.
71 Squier, Liminal Lives, p. 274.
72 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 39.
 CHAPTER FOUR

Reading Disability in a Time

of Posthuman Work: Speed,
Sleep and Embodiment
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work

Introduction: coming at you

In preparation for writing this book I spent a lot of time looking for
media stories about robots. Robots catching the public’s attention is
nothing new as a phenomenon of course: social fascination with tech-
nology has always fixated on robots and automata as strong signifiers
of a technologised future and, as such, they have become arguably
the most visible manifestation of a broad idea of ‘the posthuman’ as
it functions across a wide cultural consciousness, especially in the
twenty-first century. Between 2016 and 2019 it was notable that one
storyline about robots appeared to dominate the ways this fascina-
tion was articulated, namely the focus on the danger of the ‘inhuman’
nature of robots and the threat posed to humanity by the accelerated
pace of their development. Such a scenario was repeated regularly in
news editorial and opinion media, with the same social activity nearly
always invoked each time as the clearest example of the supposed
coming catastrophe: work, labour and employment. ‘The robots are
coming to take our jobs’ appears as one of the most consistent refrains
of the very contemporary period, with faceless and soulless technolo-
gised units seemingly poised to replace workers across a whole range
of employment sectors; not only the mechanical and labour-intensive
realm of production, but also middle-class professions and sections
of the service industry. In the ways in which they are characterised
in these narratives, these robots are always, it appears, mobile: in
a series of ableist metaphors they are moving upwards or forwards,
always on a remorseless trajectory of ‘conquest’ or ‘coming’, persis-
tently threatening.1 Robots are not “moral actors and they have no
182 Disability and the Posthuman

feelings” worried an editorial in the Guardian in March 2016: “What

they have is power, but this power is growing at a rate that should
frighten us all”. The very title of the opinion piece – ‘The Guardian
view on robots and humanity’ – struck an air of portentous concern,
as if having a ‘view’ met a need for clear-sighted comment amid a
whirl of technological overload.2
Shuttling between the fear of replacement and the seduction of
enhancement is, as Minsoo Kang has shown, a central part of the
long history of automata. “Artificial beings”, Kang notes, “were seen
from the beginning as inherently unstable”, with “the image of the
mechanized man” oscillating between “that of a superhuman and a
god or a slave and a monster”.3 The first use of the word ‘robot’ – in
Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – connected
the idea of the automaton to modern labour: ‘robota’ means ‘forced
labour’ in Czech and Čapek’s drama, set in a robot production plant,
is an allegorical and satirical investigation of a modern work culture in
which robots are created to replace ‘imperfect’ humans and increase
productivity.4 But the Guardian’s concerns update these older narra-
tives, particularly their negative visions, into the contemporary world
of global economics. “Their power”, the paper continued in its discus-
sions of robots and the networks in which they are situated, “will be
used to make money for the firms that finance their development, and
then for others quick and clever enough to take advantage of the new
world. It’s hard to imagine them being used to dent inequality of either
wealth or power, globally or within countries”. Instead, the editorial
continues, “it is far more likely that they will increase inequality and
still further hollow out the middle classes as we move towards an
hourglass society in which everyone is either very rich or very poor
and likely indebted”.
What nearly every such editorial, appearing as they did across
media and technology outlets globally, had in common (apart from a
frequent misunderstanding of much of the work being undertaken in
robot technologies) was a strong evocation of a set of core humanist
principles. It was implied that, by all accounts, humanity is to be
‘lost’ in a robot-dominated employment future. “Machines can’t
feel or do many of the things that make us human” ran the byline
under the title of the Guardian’s piece; “Sadly that doesn’t dispel the
concerns about them putting people out of business”, evidencing
a neat fit between ‘machine’, ‘human’ and ‘business’ that speaks
volumes about how the three are, for many, connected. Equally,
an article on the idea of taxing robots in the same newspaper from
March 2017 asserts:
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 183

Robots won’t just take our jobs – they’ll make the rich even richer […]
the real threat posed by robots isn’t that they will become evil and kill
us all […] it’s that they will amplify economic disparities to such an
extreme that life will become, quite literally, unliveable for the vast
majority […] What’s different this time is the possibility that tech-
nology will become so sophisticated that there won’t be anything left
for humans to do.5

The idea of ‘our’ central humanity (a notion critiqued so effectively

by both disability and posthumanist scholarship) being engaged in a
battle with automated opponents might appear to belong more to the
pages of science fiction than news media, but it is intriguing that the
spectre of the robot here leads to such crude generalisations about that
which supposedly constitutes its opposite: the human. The reality that
robotics technology is being developed to aid people (for example those
with disabilities or the elderly) is simply not entertained by a thesis
that envisages defenceless humans crushed by an onslaught of robots
purely functioning as the tech wing of a global neoliberal economy.6
Martin Ford’s 2016 book The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the
Threat of Mass Unemployment crystallises such arguments. Ford makes
it clear that the threat robots embody is especially connected to, and
meaningful in relation with, work. “We are in all likelihood at the
leading edge of an explosive wave of innovation that will ultimately
produce robots geared toward nearly conceivable commercial, indus-
trial and consumer task”, he observes. Not only, Ford argues, will
robot technologies replace low-wage service and industrial jobs (he
cites numerous instances, such as the fast food industry, where this
is happening already), but “the machines are coming for the high-
wage, high-skill jobs as well”.7 The technologies will transform higher
education and healthcare, Ford argues, as well as future patterns of
consumer behaviour and the development of industry.
There is an element of breathless drama in Ford’s survey of the
contemporary world of work and technology. While he is in no doubt
that an increased use of A.I. and technology could result in positive
benefits in some work sectors, the image of lines of unemployed workers
nevertheless looms throughout the book, deployed to always undercut
the idea that the posthuman future of which he writes might contain a
progressive dimension. Given his concentration on business models, I
am not best placed to comment on Ford’s vision and arguments, but it is
noticeable that the approach he takes focuses almost exclusively on the
development of technology and automated networks and he has little
or nothing to say about the economic and social systems that will use
184 Disability and the Posthuman

robots. The neoliberalism of these networks is taken as a given in the

book, overriding any sense that robots and assistive technologies could
be made to work in any other way, or that there might be alternatives.
Kathi Weeks notes in The Problem With Work (2011), for example, that
faced with the powerful orthodoxies of work cultures, it is important to
“insist that there are other ways to organise and distribute that activity”
and that it is “possible to be creative outside of the boundaries of work”,
because “there might be a variety of ways to experience the pleasure
that we may now find in work, as well as other pleasures that we may
wish to discover, cultivate and enjoy”.8 A specific argument about tech-
nology and alternative work environments is made by Nick Srnicek and
Alex Williams in their 2015 book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and
a World Without Work, where they assert that full automation should be
seen as a desirable ‘post-work imaginary’. “The tendencies towards full
automation and the replacement of human labour” they note, “should
be enthusiastically accelerated and targeted as a political project of the
left”.9 While Srnicek and Williams’ vision differs radically from Ford’s,
it is arguable that those with disabilities have little to gain from either
scenario given that a persistent exclusion from many economic spaces
(whether market- or state-derived) makes access to the potential of new
technologies frequently prohibitive. So, when Ford details how develop-
ments of autonomous care robots for the elderly will result in the loss
of healthcare and nursing jobs, it should be observed that it is already
the case that many ageing people who require daily care simply lack the
money that can cover the costs involved.10 For all that there are repeated
worries that using robot carers might seem ‘inhuman’, it is hardly the
case that current situations exemplify dignity and respect.11
The suggestion of a new technological ‘wave’ that will see humans
supplanted by robots and software is one example of what we might
understand as a space of posthuman work.12 Such a space is one where
notions of extension and enhancement play out in terms of produc-
tivity, immediacy and efficiency, and are characterised by time and
speed as these are changed by developing technologies. Posthuman
work creates economies and consumerism, but also produces bodies
and subjectivities that operate within and across these spaces. Even if
it does not appear immediately obvious, all are affected by, and speak
to, disability in the ways in which they create ideas of embodiment,
particularly in terms of ‘capacity’ or ‘function’. In this chapter I will
explore a range of texts that represent disability within ideas of work,
speed and time, and will analyse the bodies, minds and selves that
are produced within such contexts. I will concentrate on representa-
tions of mobility and speed, body augmentations that allow for more
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 185

‘efficient’ work, and sleep, an experience frequently being eroded

given perceptions that it obstructs productivity. While reading sleep
in conjunction with disability might seem unusual, I argue that it is
an example of the wider argument of this book; namely the productive
use of critical disability logics to allow for the investigation of non-
disability states. There are disabilities associated with sleep of course
– including narcolepsy and fatal familial insomnia – but the combina-
tion of reading disability and work opens up new ways to understand
sleep and its place in the contemporary world more generally.
The first half of the chapter will focus on ideas of time, how they
suffuse contemporary understandings of work, and how within them
disability is read in terms of a constructed ‘efficiency’. It will also,
however, show how the time of a disabled body at work challenges
the assumptions such constructions produce. Time is foundational in
thinking about health and disability. Susan Wendell’s work has shown
how notions of ‘chronic’ health revolve almost exclusively around
temporality; the problem of ‘now’ or ‘soon’, or the potential cure
that always belongs to the future.13 Alison Kafer, Robert McRuer and
Margaret Price all articulate the idea of ‘crip time’, what Kafer calls
“a challenge to normative and normalizing expectations of pace and
scheduling”, and I will use their work throughout the remainder of
this chapter, especially in establishing the terms of how, to cite Kafer
again, “crip time bends the clock to meet disabled minds and bodies”.14
The bent clock is a marker of the processes through which disability
changes the terms of debates around contemporary practices of work.
In the chapter’s second half the analysis will specifically consider
questions of bodies, speed, movement and space in relation to labour,
and the ways in which the difference of disability affects norms about
mobility and productivity texts. Ultimately, I will argue that disability
aesthetics unlock what can appear to be the remorseless logic of work
cultures and their seemingly inevitable insistence on greater produc-
tivity, and that in so doing they reconfigure the standard notions of
lack and absence with which disability conditions are so often associ-
ated. As we shall see, disability not only adds to what we know, but
the work that we undertake to know it.

The pace of posthuman work and the time of disability

The twenty-first century has seen the consolidation of a neoliberal,

post-industrial conception of work that, as many commentators
have noted, increasingly revolves around ideas of speed, function,
186 Disability and the Posthuman

productivity and efficiency. What Jonathan Crary in 24/7, his 2013

essay on the workings of late capitalism, terms the “expanding, non-
stop life-world” of contemporary life is increasingly dominated by a
search for perfect, endless production and consumption, or what Crary
calls “a generalized inscription of human life into duration without
breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning”.15 Similarly,
Robert Hassan notes in his 2019 study The Empire of Speed: Time and the
Acceleration of Politics and Society: “We have never experienced such a
world where rapidity – speed – is at the very core of our collective and
individual experience”. Contemporary social formations, he goes on,
are marked by an “open-ended form of speed, which means that the
rate at which humans communicate and the rates of increase in produc-
tivity and efficiency can never be fast enough. In this postmodern
economy the rate at which we do things has become the defining
factor”.16 Likewise, John Tomlinson, exploring speed in terms of an
idea of immediacy in his 2007 book The Culture of Speed: The Coming of
Immediacy, maps out the contexts of technology, the media, institution-
alisation, regulation and the everyday that have combined to produce
“a broad condition of immediacy” that establishes “cultural assump-
tions and expectations of effortlessness, ubiquity and endless delivery
in a fast-paced, technologically-replete and telemediated world”.17 As
all three writers show, effortless efficiency, delivered constantly, has
become the expectation in many contemporary spheres of activity.18
I will use Crary’s work, especially his focus on sleep, later in this
chapter, but it is worth noting here that his writing offers a searing
critique of the processes of neoliberal economics as they impact upon
workers. These processes create, he notes, a “24/7 environment that
has the semblance of a social world, but […] is actually a non-social
model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does
not disclose the human costs required to sustain its effectiveness”.19
This is not so much Ford’s ‘rise’ of technology and the deployment of
actual robots, but rather a wider idea of atomisation and the creation
of machine-like, non-human, systems as a consequence of economic
demands.20
For their part, both Hassan and Tomlinson write in the wake of
Paul Virilio, whose work since his ground-breaking 1986 text Speed
and Politics has connected speed to questions of power and violence
and an idea of ‘hypermodernism’.21 For Virilio, interviewed in 2012,
speed’s “damage is its success” and “its success is also its damage”.22
His writings outline a world where speed has been at the heart of
social and (especially) technological development; but in the contem-
porary period we have hit what he has termed a “wall of acceleration”
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 187

where such ‘progress’ and linearity is no longer possible.23 Virilio’s

work allows for the connection of ideas of speed to the emerging
space of the posthuman; his claims about the current critical point of
society chart currents of spatial and technological transformation that
align with the kinds of landscapes described in the writings of Donna
Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti and other writers at the
vanguard of critical posthumanism. Virilio’s exploration of ideas of
“lost dimensions”, “tele-presence” and “visual machines” maps on to
the kinds of post-anthropocentric formations central to what Braidotti
has termed “the Posthuman as Becoming-machine”, the processes
through which the human and non-human interact.24 In particular,
Virilio paints such moments as being constituted of fear and panic; a
loss of logic as speed, in effect, becomes impossibly fast.
Virilio’s stress on speed’s relationship with power and contem-
porary manifestations of space, like Hassan’s characterisation of its
inherently imperial nature, speaks to its connection to work, given it is
an obvious space of power configurations. It is in structures specific to
work environments and practices that ideas of efficiency and the speed
of productivity in particular accrue vital meaning. In virtual work
cultures especially, what Virilio calls the “direct perception of objects,
surfaces and volumes” becomes lost, replaced with an “indirect and
mediatized reception” that, precisely because of its lack of presence,
can be accelerated to produce the kinds of contemporary speed, with
the consequent emphasis on immediate efficiency, explored by Hasan
and Tomlinson.25 Hasan cites, for example, working in the realm of
computer-based temporality as the perfect exemplar of such a notion,
where it is “seen as a badge of honor to speak of one’s life as existing
in the 24/7 society”, while Tomlinson cites what he terms the “weak
demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’” that results because of “the
reach of capitalist (or capitalist-inflected) work relations into private
life”.26 The speed of contemporary work, both writers stress, influ-
ences and indeed often regulates core notions of how we have come to
define individuals, families, community and society.
In Exits to the Posthuman Future (2014), Arthur Kroker sees a time
of the posthuman specifically in terms of acceleration. In an echo
of Hans Moravec’s ideas on the inescapable velocity of technological
futures, Kroker notes:

All our lives have been spent as crash victims of violent, but deeply
seductive, technologies of acceleration – speed technologies that move
bodies, our bodies of earth and fire and water, to escape velocity […]
When events move at the speed of light, traditional frameworks of
188 Disability and the Posthuman

interpretation are themselves destabilized, weakened in detail and

definition as useful indicators of what a future of technological innova-
tion entails.27

Such a culture of acceleration, with its crashes and weaknesses, leads

not only to the social consequences charted by Hassan and Tomlinson,
but extends Virilio’s ideas that the mechanisms by which these are
assessed are also brought to a point of fracture. Kroker character-
ises this as ‘drift’, namely the “the quintessential sign of twenty-first
culture” and, as he sees it, the paradigmatic state of posthumanism:
“the essence of the data storm that engulfs us” and “ontological foun-
dation of the posthuman axiomatic”. Within such drifting he observes,
“something fundamental has just happened”, processes by which
“bodies, metals and AI recombine into new species-forms”.28 Whether
thought of as code, history, archives, screen or media (Kroker’s exam-
ples of drift culture case studies), the posthuman is characterised by
constant and perpetual motion.
Within such a context, disability occupies what is an all too often
familiar and stereotypical position. In Kroker’s theorising, ‘bodies’
rarely means specific bodies and certainly not the grounded complex
embodiment inherent to disabled bodies; as is common with much
writing on posthumanism, disabled experience is simply omitted.
In turn, for all that the insight displayed by Hassan and Tomlinson
allows us to see how disability is read as ‘lack’ and ‘inefficiency’ in
terms of the contemporary time of work, their analyses give no recog-
nition to work undertaken in the private and domestic spheres. As
with women’s labour, much disability productivity takes place in the
home, where (crucially) it makes time frames of its own. Such differ-
ence is one example of crip time, where disability works through
subversion and critique to reorient the normalcy of ‘progression’
through which it is often framed. Wendell observes that “when the
pace of life in a society increases […] fewer people can meet expecta-
tions of ‘normal’ performance; the physical (and mental) limitations of
those who cannot meet the new pace become conspicuous and disa-
bling”; but, as Kafer asserts, cripping these expectations of normalcy
revises the way time can be conceptualised: “Crip time is flex time
not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions
of what can and should happen in time, or recognising how expecta-
tions of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and
bodies”.29 In a similar vein, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue
for the positive “reworking” of “non-productive bodies”, a process they
see as an “insurrectional force” created by the “definitively multiple
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 189

forms of nonnormative embodiment”. Such embodiment reconfig-

ures the time of labour and “challenges productivity as a basis for an
adequate measure of human worth”.30
This chapter will work through a number of imaginations and
fictions where these processes takes place, but it needs to be admitted
that cripping work and valuing non-normative bodies takes place
in challenging contexts, particularly in times of austerity. McRuer
observes that “crip times […] can and will only end with an aspiration
to the outward-looking vision proffered by the indignant ones”, and
indignancy is a fine concept and position in which to situate disability
resistance to contemporary work structure.31 But ‘outward-looking’
visions need to work through ever-more complex and restrictive
practices of employment, where ideas of time and speed work to
characterise disability as a problem that it is easier to jettison than
accommodate. McRuer is right to couch indignation within aspiration,
but even aspiring can be daunting when circumstances are consist-
ently exclusionary.
In the introduction to the ‘Work and Employment’ section of the
2011 World Health Organization World Report on Disability, the authors
note that “working age persons with disabilities experience signifi-
cantly lower employment rates and much higher unemployment rates
than persons without disabilities”.32 In exploring this, they go on
to outline the misconceptions and processes of discrimination that
surround people with disabilities when being considered for work,
observing that “such attitudes may stem from prejudice or from the
belief that people with disabilities are less productive than their non-
disabled counterparts”.33 In recommending that social attitudes, as
much as laws and regulations, are changed, the WHO report identifies
a need to “instil a belief among the public that people with disabili-
ties can work, given the proper support”.34 The somewhat patronising
idea of ‘support’ notwithstanding (might not all those striving to work
need support?), it identifies the intersection between the kinds of
speed economies as outlined by Hassan and Tomlinson and the public
perception of the extent to which those with disabilities are seen as
‘productive’ or ‘efficient’. As Katherine Quarmby puts in bluntly in
Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People (2011), a study in which she
recounts numerous accounts of hate crimes and violence towards disa-
bled people: “Disabled people are not seen as equal citizens. They are
seen as a useless burden”, and in the context of work ‘burden’ takes on
a specific dimension.35 It connects the perception of lack and absence,
common to many social views of individuals with disabilities, to levels
of productivity that they are understood never to be able to meet; and
190 Disability and the Posthuman

it then reads the necessity to ‘make up’ the ‘shortfall’ that such under-
productivity produces, in terms of benefits and allowances that society
has to pay to support people deemed unable to contribute effectively.
An idea of the ‘deserving poor’ is, of course, nothing new. But
I want to claim here that it is the particular character of speed and
efficiency in the workplace that lends the contemporary moment its
power. Such characterisation is a unique constellation in which ideas
of the human, and increasingly the non-human and posthuman, form
complex patterns of deployment and meaning – especially in relation
to embodiment and cognition – that increasingly shape both disabled
lives and the perception of the people who live them, frequently in
pejorative terms. And, I want to assert, this character and the mean-
ings it accrues are thrown into sharp vision by contemporary cultural
narratives that explore how disability and work interact. As we have
noted before in this book through references to the work of Tobin
Siebers and Michael Davidson, there is both a disability aesthetic,
produced from within an understanding of disability experience,
and an aesthetics of disability, symptomatic of wider expressions of
disability representations, that come to the fore in texts that self-
consciously seek to explore the nature of human difference.
In this chapter I want to place my arguments within the lines of
these positions and will do so by looking at a range of fiction – concen-
trating on the novels The Unnamed (2010) by Joshua Ferris, Under
the Skin (2000) by Michael Faber, and Fight Club (1996) by Chuck
Palahniuk, as well as Hauraki Murakami’s short story ‘Sleep’ (1993) –
that situate issues of disability and posthuman difference within (very
different) work settings. As we will see, The Unnamed investigates work
in urban contexts of speed living and the corporate ‘hypereconomy’
of the legal profession, while Under the Skin explores ideas of a slower
cycle of harvesting and production, in which an alien posthuman seeks
to define subjectivity and belonging through work centred around
bodily difference. In both texts, ideas of a singular and coherent body
or self, a humanist ‘proveable identity’, are critiqued through a creative
disability lens and its interrogation of the constitution and conse-
quences of work. Palahniuk and Murakami both focus on sleep, using
it to read altered states of consciousness that impact directly on work.
As I will show, a critical disability reading of the consequences of work
and sleep, as deployed across these texts, produces exactly the kinds
of enrichment and complication of which Siebers and Davidson write.
Within this we can see again the central thesis of this book, an inter-
section of productive disability and posthumanist perspectives and the
ways they illuminate a range of social and cultural moments.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 191

While work is a much discussed and central category in under-

standing social experiences of disability, the ways in which it is
represented through fictional narratives has received far less attention.
This is almost certainly because the link between work and quality of
life has been, and continues to be, so important across the disability
rights agenda and is rightly the focus of much disability advocacy. But
a concentration on the social consequences of disability, employment
and the nature of work should not be at the expense of our under-
standing of the ways in which cultural representations of disability
change how we see work, and what this might mean. As we shall see,
the fiction examined here offers powerful insight into work environ-
ments precisely because of its disability focus and the power of the
aesthetics that extend from this.
Throughout history, those with disabilities have been seen as
being unable to contribute to work as effectively as those without.
Such perception has usually been read in terms of a ‘limiting’ phys-
ical difference or cognitive deficiency and frequently codified within
law and public policy.36 But the kinds of speed economies Hassan and
Tomlinson outline present new contexts for our understanding of
disability and work. In an internet-based, connected, workplace for
example, physical impairments may not be as much of a limitation
as they were during a period of machine and engineering domina-
tion. Indeed, a culture of work acceleration and multiple-project
multitasking or, conversely, sustained concentration and single
tasking, might seem to welcome the forms of cognitive variation
inherent in some neurobehavioural conditions. Extending this, the
kinds of networked assemblages identified by scholars of posthu-
manism, with their focus on non-linear, symbiotic and co-evolving
existences, also appear to lend themselves towards the inclusion of
those with different bodies and minds. When Pramod Nayar speaks
of “the human as a dynamic hybrid”, for example, focused “not on
borders but on conduits and pathways, not on containment but on
leakages, not on stasis but on movements of bodies, information and
particles all located within a wider system”, there is an apparently
easy move to see how such plasticity can incorporate the divergent
states disability brings with it, and to claim that work might be one
of the locations within which an enabling hybridity might flourish.37
But for the most part the kinds of immediacy demanded by contem-
porary employment regimes lack this broad view of systems. Hassan
stresses that it is “constant acceleration” (my emphasis) that is “the
defining process of our postmodern, post-Fordist and post-industrial
age”, and this stress on the constant, the need to always be mobile,
192 Disability and the Posthuman

responsive and flexible, in fact produces work cultures that – as the

bare statistics of the WHO report testify – are not designed for those
with disabilities.38
Indeed, it is intriguing to note the ways in which the language that
frequently describes contemporary work cultures contains multiple
metaphors that invoke disabled states of being. When Hassan notes
that, for proponents of neoliberalism, acceleration equates to ‘effi-
ciency’, he goes on to observe that within this logic:

To be efficient is also necessarily to be flexible – to be physically, cogni-

tively, psychologically and metaphorically able to ‘move fast’ when the
time comes […] To be efficient and flexible is to be able to move rapidly
in response to ‘outside’ economic influences that constantly demand
our attention. To be willing and able to move fast means that you can
be ‘successful’ in your life, be able to ‘synchronize’ with fast-changing
scenarios and rapidly unfolding events, staying ‘ahead of the game’ and
hopefully out of trouble […] In the opening decade of the twenty-first
century, we find the pursuit of purported efficiency through speed
almost everywhere. To be outside the network is to be cut off from the
spaces and times of economic opportunity.39

Here, the language of speed explicitly connects to physical mobility,

with ‘flexibility’ and its connection to ‘success’ employing a particu-
larly overt reference to bodies and norms. One can only be successful it
seems if one is not simply able-bodied (the kind of ‘compulsory’ able-
bodiedness articulated by McRuer), but rather, in addition, athletic
and fast. In what follows I will ask how disability interacts with ideas
of ‘slow’ or ‘weak’ time and strength in the context of hyperacceler-
ated work, set against what Thomas Hylland Eriksen, examining the
concept of ‘slow time’, has called “the tyranny of the moment”, where
the very idea of the speed of the present moment is subject to change.40
For now, however, we might focus on how we can better understand
the seemingly pervasive ubiquity of the immediate and accelerated in
work cultures of the present.
The ways in which we might all make our bodies and minds faster
are part of the characterisation of work speed and efficiency, and
its consequences for our physical and cognitive selves, which flood
contemporary media networks. Traditional diet, workout and medi-
tation regimes have been supplemented by ideas – from mindfulness
to biohacking – that specifically aim not simply at well-being but
also, in language that often borrows from posthumanism, at enhance-
ment. To take one example, the team behind Nootrobox, a pharma/
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 193

tech start-up firm based in Silicon Valley, market Nootropics, prod-

ucts presented as “a broad classification of cognition enhancement
compounds” designed to accentuate the augmentation of creativity,
memory and concentration. According to Nootrobox’s publicity,
those who take Nootropics are engaged in an explicit process of
“hacking your biology” to produce “optimal cognition” and the direct
development of their neurophysiology.41 “Humans are the next plat-
form”, Nootrobox’s co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Woo observes in
an October 2016 interview, using the classic contemporary start-up
mix of science and business language that saturates everything the
company does. (Fellow co-founder Michael Brandt adds at one point in
the interview: “The way Nike owns physical performance […] we want
to own mental performance”.)42 But if it seems that Nootropics might
appear to promote a general improving of health, it is clear many of its
products are in actuality aimed at enhancing work performance. One
of its four major product groups, for example, SPRINT, is essentially a
compound of caffeine, L-Theanine and various Vitamin B complexes,
to be taken when needed in order to produce greater productivity.
SPRINT can (as the website puts it) “help improve attention, provide
jitter-free energy and decrease fatigue” and thus create “the ideal
mental flow state to get the job done”.43 Nootrobox’s website is full
of links to articles and ‘critical studies’ that purport to give a scien-
tific basis to its materials, but its “cornucopia of self-actualization”, as
journalist Alex Morris puts it in his interview with Woo and Brandt,
seems more interested in the assumption that, more than anything
else, we all want to work harder and faster.44
Whether through enhanced cognition or optimised physicality then,
contemporary employment environments seek to produce workers set
on pursuing the ever-disappearing horizon of ‘efficiency’ in ways that
have changed dramatically in the last ten years. In a time of posthu-
manist work, the idea of the worker as a unit challenges the idea of
a self-contained and autonomously rational human agent. Faster and
more flexible threatens to go beyond the characteristics that suppos-
edly make the human being knowable and expressible. But while such
processes enact revisions of humanist conceptions of the self, various
states of disability have long been sites of embodiment difference in
the time and spaces of work. Even as evolving practices of employ-
ment were central to the production of disability categories during a
developing modernity, the extent “to which the body becomes think-
able when its totality can no longer be taken for granted” (to again cite
Davidson’s phrase used earlier) allows us to see the limitations and
boundaries of work cultures, however sweeping their effects.45 And
194 Disability and the Posthuman

this new thinking suggests a different pace, an alternative texture and

experience of labour that exemplifies crip time. Making meaning of
disabled ontologies in a time of accelerated immediacies is no simple
task, but we might start with a narrative of the body in motion.

Not being able to stop

It is precisely ideas of speed, mobility, work and their connection to

achievement and success (and to concomitant topics such as family
and community), that are critiqued in Joshua Ferris’ 2010 novel The
Unnamed. Ferris’ work overall is strongly focused on work practices
and environments: his 2007 novel, Then We Came to the End, takes
place almost exclusively within the offices of a Chicago advertising
agency; while To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, his most recent (2014)
novel, revolves around a New York dentist, again with much of the
narrative set in the workplace. For Ferris, work is one of the ways in
which the contemporary moment is most clearly defined and is the
context for many of the major themes of his writing.
The Unnamed centres on Tim Farnsworth, a successful Manhattan
lawyer, who suddenly develops a condition that causes him, against
his will, to have to walk without stopping. Farnsworth’s walks
take him through and out of New York, often only stopping when,
exhausted, he falls asleep. His walking literally embodies the idea
of a self out of control: “He looked down at his legs. It was like
watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the
walker. This was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes
are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of this
wayward machine”.46 Farnsworth can be read in a number of ways:
as a contemporary flâneur, a mechanised automaton, a self lost in
an existential, absurdist universe, or as a man experiencing a crisis
of masculinity for example; while the novel itself obviously links his
walking to ideas of narrative progression.47 It is a disability reading,
however, that enriches these perspectives and provides a productive
and incisive way to unpick the complexities of his embodiment and
environment. Stressing Farnsworth as a disabled character, and his
presence as a disability presence, points both to the place of affect
and embodied difference central to his mobility, as well as the
cultural and social networks through which these operate.
Because of his inability to stop moving, Farnsworth is thrown
into a disability that functions both as grounded actuality and meta-
phorical extension. The condition’s origins baffle clinical expertise,
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 195

while Farnsworth himself can only describe its manifestations and

sensations in “nonmedical and not very useful ways”; he talks of
feeling “jangly, hyperslogged, all bunched up”, noting that “he spoke
a language only he understood”.48 In a clever analysis of the poverty
of medical knowledge surrounding many neurobehavioral conditions,
Ferris has Farnsworth subjected to multiple opinions from different
medical specialists: he is, varyingly, referred to neurologists, psychia-
trists, and environmental psychologists; is subjected to multiple MRI
scans; has group therapy suggested because of possible problems with
compulsion; given a list of urban toxins as a possible cause; prescribed
muscle relaxants; and has rebirthing recommended. One clinician tells
him that, given that there is “no laboratory examination to confirm
the presence or absence of the condition” it might not “even exist at
all”; while another diagnosis “benign idiopathic perambulation”, is a
nod to the idea that, in a world governed by new neurological knowl-
edge, any unusual activity can be seen as a syndrome.49 Although “the
health professionals suggested clinical delusion, hallucinations, even
multiple personality disorder” Farnsworth is sceptical of their exper-
tise. Echoing the Cartesian emphasis on the superiority of the mind
over the ‘base’ elements of the body, he believes that “his mind was
intact, his mind was unimpeachable. If he could not gain dominion
over his body, that was not ‘his’ doing. Not an occult possession but
a hijacking of some obscure order of the body”.50 For Farnsworth,
the possibility that such an “obscure order”, affecting the body but
located in the brain, is the cause of the walking allows him to admit
to a disability while preserving the sense that, psychologically, his
mind is intact. As the above description of the walking makes clear,
he understands his self to be at the ‘mercy’ of mechanical control.
If The Unnamed presents a clever spin on the mind/brain conun-
drum, much of the force of Ferris’ presentation of Farnsworth’s
syndrome lies in the ways in which it offers a specific critique of the
culture of work. As a trial lawyer, Farnsworth’s world is the detailed
preparation of cases that involve endless late nights in the office, or the
total commitment to work that demands travel all over the country.
The financial rewards are considerable but, Ferris makes clear, it is the
work itself that drives Farnsworth:

The point was Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Charleston,

Manhattan – wherever the trial was. The trial, that was the point. The
clients. The casework. The war room […] And he worked in midtown
amid the electricity and the movement. And his view of Central Park
was amazing. And he liked the people. And the money was great. And
196 Disability and the Posthuman

the success was addictive. And the pursuit was all-consuming, And the
rightness of his place was never in doubt.

On one occasion when he is remembering working into the dark

of another late night, Farnsworth observes simply: “That was
happiness”.51
But his condition destroys this capacity for work. Unable to physi-
cally stay in his office, attend meetings and see clients, Farnsworth
becomes desperate. In an environment that demands immediate
expertise and continuous productivity, and ironically given his own
mobility, he cannot keep up. Having to explain his multiple absences, he
falsely claims that his wife Jane has cancer and ultimately fails in his
duty to defend a high-profile client, who is (wrongfully) convicted of
murder. When he does attempt to attend the trial in a frantic attempt
to intervene, Farnsworth experiences a walking episode, leaving the
Manhattan courthouse and finally waking up “in a booth in a KFC in
Queens […] a crazy man possessed”.52 This change in location, from
smart midtown to working-class suburb, and Farnsworth’s shedding
his bespoke work suit as he walks, serve as a marker of the change
(here, the literal journey) his disability produces.53 He is sacked, and
while he is rehired as a lowly staff attorney following an excruciating
interview (“Oh please, please take me back!” his internal monologue
recounts; “Grant me the full measure of life again […] I will be good,
will do as told. No more breakdowns, promise, promise”), he again
fails to hold down this job.54
Farnsworth’s walking not only stops him from working, but in an
ironic twist it undermines the very idea of work. He is in constant
motion and always active, but the results of this are completely unpro-
ductive. When he walks, Farnsworth is continually ‘doing’, and his
activity should be understood in gendered terms as a critique of the
ideas of male stamina and capability in terms of work culture; but,
crucially, such labour produces nothing. Rather his body renders its
own physical activity as something mysterious, illegible and ultimately
pointless, all of which are anathema to notions of work driven by
concepts of endless driven efficiencies. Here, embodied alterity returns
as an uncanny obliteration of capitalist management and discipline; for
all its effort, the body that cannot stop produces no returns.
Farnsworth’s commitment to work means he is frequently absent
from his wife Jane and daughter Becka. Ferris presents this as an
all-too-common deal in the world of high-pressure employment,
supposedly justifiable because of the remuneration. But in the same
way as Farnsworth’s walking destroys his ability to function as a
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 197

24/7 employee, it also totally reorders his relations with his family.
“I’ve always felt a strong sense of duty to provide for you and your
mom. I’ve worked hard so that you would never have to work hard
for anything”, Farnsworth says to his daughter, in a rare moment
when they are in the house together, only to be met with the retort: “I
don’t really think that’s why you worked hard”. But Farnsworth is, in
fact, working up to a confession: “Point is […] I hid behind my duty.
I used work as my excuse to avoid you”.55 Despite such seeming self-
knowledge, Farnsworth cannot process this to produce greater insight
into his closest relations: Becka’s response – “The only reason you’re
apologising is because you’re sick again. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t
even have thought about it. You could have been stoned on crack since
I started high school, nothing would have been different” – is with-
ering in its summation and contempt.56 Farnsworth’s failure as father,
unable to help Becka through her teenage anxiety about her appear-
ance, is matched by his being powerless to stop Jane’s drinking or
understand her version of living with his illness, while his condition
changes the literal space of the family home. In a desperate attempt
to prevent the destructive consequences of his walks he is restrained
in his bedroom, tied to a bed while his legs move constantly and with
either Jane or Becka watching over him.
The novel also connects Farnsworth’s condition to wider narratives
of American individualism and success: “Before he got sick, he was
under the illusion that he needed only to seek help from the medical
community, and then all that American ingenuity, all that researched
enlightenment, would bring about his alienable right to good health”.57
But, as Ferris makes clear, a humanist language of rights, enlighten-
ment and scientific knowledge constitutes an illusion when disability
effectively casts Farnsworth into the world of another America, one of
unemployment, homelessness and despair; a space governed by what
Andrew Tate, in his reading of the novel, terms “a pre-apocalyptic
mood”. Tate observes that Farnworth’s “aimless journeys by foot […]
separate the protagonist from a secure, suburban domestic life and
propel him into the wilds of an America tainted by environment ruin;
these abandoned edgelands suggest that a wealthy nation is in the
midst of a catastrophe”.58
Farnsworth believes in his ‘right’ to offset such catastrophe, to be
successful at work through study and application, and then consequen-
tially develop self-knowledge, achievement and the qualities that allow
for earned advancement. It is precisely such logic that his condition
unpicks. Disability here counters the speed of the efficient and imme-
diate workplace, the endless drive of casework and trials, with the
198 Disability and the Posthuman

different, embodied, pace of Farnsworth’s walking. His body’s motion

and mobility destroy not only the possibility of his work (and indeed
work itself), but the sense of self and the meanings he derives from it.
In the end, Farnsworth literally walks out of the narrative of his work
self and his place in his family. As Jane becomes genuinely sick with
cancer and Becka’s adult life continues with her wedding, Farnsworth
is estranged from them both. He follows a loop of continuous walking
until, by the novel’s end, he lies down in a tent in a snowstorm, appar-
ently to die, feeling that, “He never had to rise again […] Never had to
walk”.59
Crucially, Ferris presents Farnsworth as a figure who learns little
or nothing from his walking. He barely registers the details of the
environments through which he passes, nor is he prompted to reflec-
tion by them. The Unnamed is not a disability narrative that resolves
itself through a protagonist finding ‘human’ meaning because of their
condition. “Try your best that he doesn’t forget what it means to be
human” a doctor tells Jane after another failed medical interven-
tion.60 But it is precisely this forgetting and failure the novel charts.
Exiled from posthumanist spaces of work, Farnsworth has become
non-human by the story’s end, animal-like in his roving across the
landscape at the mercy of nature. The Unnamed refutes the notion, inte-
gral to a long tradition in American writing, that there is individual
or social insight to be gained from a flight from the complexities of
society back to nature.61
But if Farnsworth fails to understand the effects his disability has
on his life, this is certainly not true for the novel’s readers. Ferris’
central conceit – a pace that cannot be controlled in a world moving
ever faster – presents a masterful destabilising of the world of contem-
porary work. The disability optic the novel utilises operates the kinds
of aesthetics outlined by Davidson: the idea that ‘the body can no
longer be taken for granted’ and that the social and cultural meanings
associated with it can no longer ‘be assumed’ fit The Unnamed perfectly.
It is precisely because Farnsworth’s body rebels, through its excessive-
ness, that the meanings it produces, especially those related to work,
are thrown into relief and challenged. With a body that cannot be won
over by casework, or long hours in the office – indeed, one that is in
fact immune to any attempt to establish argument through precedent
– Farnsworth is projected into a realm for which he has no expression.
Instead, Ferris unmasks the extent to which ‘success’ is constituted
through many vectors of ableism: the compliant body; the idea of a
unified self; the internalisation of the need for competition; and the
heteronormativity of family. As Farnsworth’s disability highlights the
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 199

collapse of boundaries between the different states that he assumes

made up his self, these all fall away, one step at a time.

Work was the cure

The Unnamed explores the relationship between work, speed and

the body through a concentration on contemporary ideas of time
and pressure. What Tate observes as Farnsworth’s “loneliness […]
estrangement from family […] and any sense of community” tells
a story of a present that readers may recognise and connect with.62
Other fictions explore these topics in other ways. In Michael Faber’s
novel Under the Skin, published in 2000, a very different kind of work
serves as the focus for an exploration of ideas of difference, the body
and selfhood. The central character, Isserley, is an alien sent to Earth
by her employers, Vess Incorporated, to trap and kill humans who are
then processed into exotic food products (voddissin) for consumption
by the elite of her home planet. Isolated apart from a few colleagues
who work in the production and packaging of the human meat for
transportation, she drives back and forth across the often deserted
roads of the far north of Scotland, luring male hitchhikers into her car,
which is specially adapted to anaesthetise passengers using a sedative
called icpathua delivered through needles in the seats. Isserley takes
the bodies to a farm that serves as a cover for the processing of the
human meat, which is transported home through a regular delivery
schedule. In a clever twist that informs much of the novel’s politics of
embodiment and physical difference, the aliens refer to themselves as
human and the humans on Earth as ‘vodsels’.
The novel situates the idea and practice of work as the context for a
series of questions about subjectivity and agency. Isserley is solely on
Earth to gather bodies because she is an employee, and only agreed to
take the job because refusal would have meant being condemned to
the ‘New Estates’ back on her home planet. The Estates are an under-
ground housing complex composed of an “unmistakable ugliness”
where “decay and disfigurement were […] par for the course”, and
where overcrowding, poor diet and sanitation, and a lack of medical
care, produce what she terms “an almost subhuman taint”.63 But the
price Isserley pays to avoid this future is her own disfigurement, as to
work on Earth requires radical surgery that renders her alien features
unrecognisable to vodsels. It is in the subtleties of this presentation
of bodily change that the novel can be read within a set of disability
aesthetics, as Isserley’s frequent reflections on what she sees as her
200 Disability and the Posthuman

‘enfreakment’ punctuate her developing psychological awareness

of the alien race she is encountering and her place on their planet.
Isserley has had a series of major operations to prepare her for work
on Earth. She has “had half [her] backbone amputated, and metal pins
inserted into what was left” in order to remove a tail and, because of
this, has had to relearn how to walk – on two legs as opposed to her
normal four – and balance.64 In addition, she has had “strange humps
grafted onto” her body, her “breasts removed” to be replaced by vodsel
breasts based on those of a glamour model, and her “fur shaved off”.65
Her “once-beautiful body” has become, in her eyes, that of a “muti-
lated cripple” with “scarred flesh”, while her face “was the only bit
she could look at nowadays without self-loathing, the only bit that had
been left alone”.66 The gender implications of the changes, and their
interactions with ideas of work, are subtle: Isserley does not associate
her previous ‘beauty’ with any model of the feminine, and her new
breasts fundamentally serve a work purpose, creating an attraction
that lures hitchhikers into her car. As such, even though she does not
consider herself a sexual being and although the work she is doing
involves the capture and processing of food, Isserley’s labour here
offers clear parallels to that of a sex worker, with her driving being a
form of reverse kerb crawling. Faber’s skill is to write this grounded
gender narrative, with all its associations, while at the same time
maintaining the genuinely ‘alien’ subjectivity of the novel’s central
protagonist.67
Ultimately Isserley is, she feels, “a freak”, someone who has been
made into a “hideous animal” by the transitions necessary for her to
take up her new job.68 In the face of such difficulties of self-image,
she initially falls back on the routine and detail of work to provide
her with stability. “To stop herself thinking about the more embit-
tering specifics of her sacrifice, Isserley abruptly decided to get back
to work […] Work was the cure” she asserts.69 But unlike the ideas
of corporate efficiency and urban speed explored in The Unnamed,
work in Under the Skin is less a process of continual 24/7 engagement.
Although Isserley’s drives across the Scottish roads are a constant,
finding vodsels is frequently occasional and random. As such, work
prompts a more a more reflective state, and its time functions in a
different way: “Nothing happened”, the narrative notes at one point
while Isserley waits in her car for a vodsel to appear, “and time stub-
bornly refused to pass”.70 Isserley is still subject to the demands of
Vess Incorporated’s business model and its need for product and has
to work to timetabled requirements surrounding delivery and quantity,
but she is left to herself for the majority of the time and decides upon
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 201

her own driving routes and methods of vodsel capture. As such her
reflection on her own perceived disabilities, a process that becomes
integral to her sense of self as she realises the extent to which she is
alienated from a sense of home, takes place in a slow time of contem-
plation and learning, what Tomlinson has termed “slow values”.71
Central to this is a realisation that work, in fact, is not a cure for the
complexities of her position. Upon learning that the price of voddissin
is so prohibitively expensive back home that almost no-one can afford
it, Isserley is also informed that there are moves to make a synthetic,
substandard, replacement. “Do me out of a job?” she responds, laconi-
cally, fully realising that in all likelihood such circumstances will leave
her ‘mutilated’ self useless and with no possibility of return.72
Isserley’s selfhood is a careful construction of a subjectivity
that sees itself as human and vodsels as alien. In one passage, Faber
astutely reveals Isserley’s value system through a description of vodsel
limitations:

In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really
defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t meshnistil,
they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved
to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins
did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or
even chailsinn.73

While this is a powerful statement of the contempt Isserley feels

for the inhabitants of Earth, at no point in the novel are any of the
non-English words explained, so there is no possibility of the reader
identifying with Isserley’s own core ‘definitions’ of human agency and
community. Seeing herself as human but ‘crippled’ by the violence
produced by her surgery, Isserley is posthuman only within the context
of our reading; her embodied difference working through the refraction
created by our apprehension of our own ‘humanity’. Such a process
illuminates the ways in which the novel’s inversions enact numerous
processes of critique. As well as the points noted above about gender,
for example the treatment of the vodsels after capture, in which they
are “shaved, castrated, fattened, intestinally modified [and] chemically
purified” during their processing, works as a clear comment on the
nature of contemporary meat industries.74
If Farnsworth’s walking in The Unnamed raised the possibility of
posthumanising processes in which human becomes machine, then
Under the Skin suggests a parallel process of becoming-animal, a critical
exploration central to much recent scholarship on posthumanism.75
202 Disability and the Posthuman

As Sarah Dillon has shown, the novel is full of inversions that tease
out questions of species identification, particularly through linguistic
transformations.76 Dillon notes how Isserley replaces possible empathic
connections to vodsels with a more focused “animation of the inami-
nate”, particularly (though Dillon does not stress this) in relation
to the objects that are central to her work: “While the vodsels are
drained of life, cars, road networks, tractors, steering wheels, factories,
icpathua needles, machines, shower nozzles, windows and chocolates
are all imbued with an uncanny vitality. Isserley seems strangely
capable or more empathy with, and care of, her car, than with the
vodsels”.77 But such identification is not strange if we understand that
Isserley is seeking to ‘cure’ her sense of her own freakishness through
a concentration on work. Though Under the Skin is full of material for
the kind of human/non-human animal comparisons in which Dillon
is interested, the use of a disability optic to read the novel in terms of
its presentation of embodied work alters the terms in which we might
read Isserley as a character invested in ‘becoming’. While Isserley can
be read in terms of ‘becoming-animal’, she is clearly – in her own
terms – attempting a process of self-identification through which her
attitudes to work might reclaim her ‘human’ self from the mutilated,
disabled subject she feels she has become.
But Faber makes it clear that cure and, concomitantly, Isserley’s
self-identity as a productive and respected worker, are not possible.
Crucially, Isserley is working at the end of the novel when a car acci-
dent leaves her trapped and bleeding to death. The narrative concludes
with Isserley at the point of committing suicide, about to detonate
hidden explosives rather than allow herself to be identified by a
woman who comes to her aid. Work has not saved her, and it is rather
an idea of connections to the natural world that appear as her last
thoughts: “When it snowed, she would be part of it, falling softly to
earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation. When it rained,
she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned firth to ground.
She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always
be transparent to the stars. She would live forever”.78 In place of trying
to negotiate the complexities of a disabled body through the detail of
work, Isserley finally appears to reject embodiment altogether. The
ending is, however, ambiguous: in her desire to become “part of the
sky” through her death, Isserley rejects both her adapted body and the
terms of the employment that have defined her, but the novel offers
little evidence that such abstraction is anything other than a final
fantasy.79 Isserley exits the vodsel world, probably blown “into the
smallest conceivable particles”, with the same absence of full meaning
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 203

with which she arrived.80 During the interval of her stay, however,
her narrative enables a highly perceptive account of the nature of
embodied work.
The disability aesthetics at work in The Unnamed and Under the Skin
create powerful reworkings of time and the body as they are inflected
through work. If Ferris’ novel articulates the complexities of speed
and immediacy when read as determinants of efficiency and produc-
tivity, it is important to stress that the ‘slow time’ of Faber’s narrative
does not suggest a more enabling counter-discourse. The (apparent)
death of both protagonists shows that slow time (and slow work) is
no antidote to the destructive properties of the ever-increasing speed
of contemporary labour; it is rather its own space of restrictions and
pejorative codifications. Any expectation that disability experiences
might somehow constitute a preferred ‘slow’ mode of work is, in fact,
just part of the same logic that assumes those with disabilities cannot
be efficient or productive because they lack some attribute that quali-
fies all those without disabilities to work ‘normally’. As Tomlinson
argues: “The slow movement […] is congruent with the condi-
tion of immediacy, matching both its mood of fluid complexity and
over-determination, and the individualizing effects of both telemedia-
tization and the shaping of consumption towards delivery” (this last
point rings especially true for the work practices explored in Under the
Skin).81 In fact, advocates of slow time, and those who write on the
topic, often invoke an idea of a collective ‘us’ in their discussions of
how ‘we’ operate in the modern information age, a mode of writing
essentially humanist in its assumptions around rationality, agency and
individual action.82 As Under the Skin shows, Isserley’s slow time does
not allow for any such comforting affiliations.
It is more productive to read both novels in terms of the way they
articulate moves away from the various categories – fast/slow, human/
alien, identified self/erased self, embedded/dislocated – that at first
seem central to the representations of their protagonists and envi-
ronments. In each, work identities fall away because of the messy
embodied nature of disability, which proves to be beyond either insti-
tutional structures of control or any idea of self-will that might change
the body back into some ‘preferred’ mode. It is important to stress
that, although both Farnsworth and Isserley are frequently at war with
their newly disabled bodies, neither novel posits disability experience
itself as negative. Both authors refuse to indulge in the standard narra-
tive moves – sentimentality, melodrama, or overcoming/restitution
– that traditionally create sympathy for the disabled protagonist when
a character is understood to be ‘suffering’. Rather each novel uses the
204 Disability and the Posthuman

clarity provided by a disability perspective to unpick the network of

assumptions that underwrite ableist work environments and subjec-
tivities. At the same time, these disability perspectives do not suggest
that there is a simplistic process by which one mode of identity, the
self as defined through work, is replaced by another, that of the disa-
bled outsider. There are no “fantasies of identification” in either text,
to adapt Ellen Samuels’ useful phrase, no straightforward labels
of belonging that offer restoration to some more ‘authentic’ subject
position.83 Instead, disability functions in both novels to stress the
non-normative nature of the body and its connections across objects
and locations, as opposed to any iteration of an essentialising mastery.
Whatever Farnsworth and Isserley might wish for their selves, their
bodies refuse to submit to the centrifugal forces that might convey
wholeness or some sense of unified being-in-the-world.
In this way, both The Unnamed and Under the Skin portray disability as
a set of anormative positions and experiences that rewrite assumptions
about ‘being human’ or dehumanisation. Because of their disabilities,
Farnsworth and Isserley are seemingly caught on the wrong side of a
boundary, that of class in The Unnamed and species in Under the Skin.
But through highlighting the disabled body, each text demonstrates
the fictional nature of enforcing such boundaries. The building blocks
of – respectively – prosperity and human/non-human identification
are shown to be fragile entities rather than secure foundations. Here,
then, we find a space of interaction between the relational, plural and
unsettling productivities of disability critique and the positive ener-
gies of a critical posthumanism as envisaged by writers such as Hayles,
Braidotti, Nayar and others. What Kafer asserts as the “collective
affinities” of disability, and its status as “a site of questions rather than
firm definitions” (here understood through crip time in particular),
are matched by Hayles’ claims for the posthuman as being a condition
that marks “the end of a certain conception of the human”.84 As Hayles
adds, in terms that speak to the processes of critique at work in Ferris’
and Faber’s novels: “Located within the dialectic of pattern/random-
ness and grounded in embodied rather than disembodied information,
the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulations of
humans”.85 The combination of these two positions frames what I
hope has been the articulation of my central concerns here and indeed
with this book as a whole, that the aesthetics of disability representa-
tion not only engage with such ‘site of questions’ and ‘rethinking’, but
indeed go further: mobilising critical insight into human activities that
further reveals the differences of, within and between bodies as they
engage with the world.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 205

I am thus drawing a distinction between the nature of post-

humanist work, which we can characterise in the kinds of terms of
neoliberal demands discussed at the start of this chapter, and the
acuity of a critical posthumanist studies, which serves as an assembly
of disciplines that functions to read the terms of contemporary bodies,
cultures and societies. Disability is only one part of this assembly, but
its place in intersectional arguments that also welcome discussions of
gender, race and forms of the non-human is vital. To focus the power
of this critical investigation upon employment and work is especially
fruitful, given their ubiquity across multiple and various manifesta-
tions within global societies. Stereotypes abound when constructions
of the body are aligned with ideas of work but, as Ferris and Faber
demonstrate, disability reformats this relationship.

Sleeping is for losers

There is a huge literature covering the cultural, philosophical and

social meanings of sleep and its relationship to wakefulness. If being
awake is, as Jonathan Crary puts it in 24/7, a state of “self-awareness
in which one has the ability to evaluate events and information as a
rationale and objective participant in public or civic life”, then sleep
retains the capacity of an often indescribable unknown or vacancy and
is usually seen as inherently private.86 Representations of an absence
of sleep, as opposed to a comparison between the two states, insert
a further complex variable into such categorising, frequently accentu-
ating notions of the mysterious and non-rational in understanding the
sleep deprived. Mathias Énard’s 2017 novel Compass takes place over a
single sleepless night, with a protagonist lost in doubt and vulnerability
as he is forced to revisit and evaluate recollections and feelings over
the key relationships in his life. In Stephen King’s 1994 novel Insomnia,
the lack of sleep experienced by the two central characters becomes
central to an exploration of different states of embodied consciousness
and, indeed, the apprehension of a coming apocalypse. In Christopher
Nolan’s 2002 film, also called Insomnia, the white nights of an Alaskan
summer and subsequent lack of sleep force police detective Will
Dormer (Al Pacino) to confront personal guilt and corruption during
a murder investigation after he shoots and kills his partner.87 Each
morning, staggering from an angst-ridden night into work, Dormer
becomes progressively emotionally incoherent and desperate. His
death at the end of the narrative is presented by the film as a release
from the torment that an absence of sleep has created.
206 Disability and the Posthuman

For its part, science and speculative fiction frequently explores

the relationship between sleep and labour. Possible most famously,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s visionary One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
recounts how an insomnia plague descends upon the town of Macondo,
with the result that the inhabitants develop acute memory loss and
objects need to have labels placed on them to remind people what they
are and how they must be used. Nancy Kress’ 1991 novella Beggars in
Spain revolves around the idea that rich parents can genetically engi-
neer their children so that they become ‘Sleepless’, with a specific
view that, as the children become adults, they will achieve more in
terms of education and work than their sleeping peers. As a result, the
book suggests, the Sleepless will pioneer an idea of “mutual coopera-
tion” and “beneficial trade” through a form of benign capitalism based
around notions of complete efficiency.88 In a dark twist, ‘Sleepers’
turn on the Sleepless because of their difference, passing ordinances
and regulations that block many of their civic rights – to rent apart-
ments or serve on juries for example – and even banning them from
operating 24-hour businesses because such activities create “unfair
competition”.89 In Beggars in Spain, the Sleepless become a feared and
outlawed community, despite what appear to be their manifest advan-
tages. In its representation of prejudice and persecution, Kress’ fiction
raises clear parallels with disability and the extent to which difference
is excluded. In a more contemporary moment, Karen Russell’s 2014
novella Sleep Donation, possibly inspired by Garcia Marquez, centres
on an insomnia plague that sweeps across the US, killing much of the
population through suppressing the production of the neuropeptide
orexin. It is countered by a process of ‘sleep donation’ or transfu-
sion, in which healthy volunteers donate to a ‘sleep bank’ that is then
used to treat the most chronically afflicted. Russell’s narrative intro-
duces the conceit of making the sleep of babies the most powerful and
‘pure’, thereby investigating the ethical, legal and social consequences
of medical practices through the dilemmas faced by the protagonist,
Trish Edgewater. Trish advises on the donations following the death of
her own sister (“she died awake, after twenty days, eleven hours, and
fourteen minutes without sleep. Locked flightlessly inside her skull”)
from the plague.90
Similar in its exploration of the social meanings of sleep, Lionel
Shriver’s 2016 novel The Mandibles is an excoriating presentation of
the US as it undergoes an economic disaster in the mid twenty-first
century. In a world of hyperinflation and the crash of property prices,
rich characters can sleep in induced comas as a way to avoid any need
to work. With citizens forced to work multiple jobs simply to reach
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 207

barely minimal living standards, and drugs having been legalised (so
that they can be heavily taxed), such ‘slumbering’ emerges as the
“ultimate narcotic”. That sleep does not involve costs is additionally
part of its attraction: “A pharmaceutical nudge into an indefinite coma
was cheap, and a light steady dose allowed for repeated dream cycles.
Inert bodies expended negligible energy, so the drips for nutrition
and hydration had seldom to be replenished”. Given that “the regular
turning to prevent pressure sores provided welcome employment for
the low skilled”, sleep actually becomes a job creator. In Shriver’s caus-
tically imagined future, ‘rest homes’ are now simply “warehouses of
the somnambulant, who were only roused and kicked out when their
pre-payments were extinguished”. Where before the rich saved for
pensions, they now hoard their money “with an eye to dozing away
as many years of their lives as the savings could buy” in order to avoid
the demands of employment in a catastrophic recession.91
Kress, Russell and Shriver examine issues of sleep in connection
to the private world of family (The Mandibles has the subtitle ‘A Family
2029–2047’, and Mandible is the surname of the dynasty at the centre
of the story) and the public world of economics and social (in)cohe-
sion. Crary, reading Emmanuel Levinas’ work on insomnia, notes that,
for Levinas, insomnia is “neither in public or fully private” and “always
hovers between self-absorption and a radical depersonalization”, and it
is this space of ‘hovering’ between states, and the physical and cogni-
tive changes that accompany it, that most fit pluralist conceptions of
posthumanist states.92 It is the in-between nature of sleep depriva-
tion that those, like the Nootropics team with their stress on greater
work efficiency, want to eradicate. Crary laments the culture of 24/7
work precisely because it seeks to erase what he terms the “shadows
and obscurity […] of alternative temporalities”. He continues: “A 24/7
world […] is a world identical to itself, a world without the shallowest
of pasts, and thus in principle without specters. But the homogeneity
of the present is an effect of the fraudulent brightness that presumes
to extend everywhere and to preempt any mystery or unknowability”.93
By way of contrast, Crary argues that, “in the context of our own
present, sleep can stand for the durability of the social”, and that,
as such, it “might be analogous to other thresholds at which society
could define or protect itself”.94 If, as Crary suggests, contempo-
rary formations of posthumanist work want to negate sleep (as he
observes, the “stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value
can be extracted from it […] within the globalist neoliberal para-
digm, sleeping is for losers”) might disability be one of these social
‘thresholds’ in which we can reconfigure embodied experience and,
208 Disability and the Posthuman

as a consequence, the boundaries of selfhood?95 Within disability,

we can read states of embodied difference that exemplify the kind of
‘durability’ Crary identifies here, understood as social in the broadest
sense. What, then, might a disability-inflected reading of sleep and
work look like?96
A productive disability reading of sleep, and its relation to post-
humanist constructions of work, might emerge around axes of
reciprocity that Crary identifies, namely “between vulnerability and
trust [and] between exposure and care”.97 All four words suggest
concepts in which disability is central, both in terms of links to lived
experience and as potential points of critical departure. A culture of
posthumanist work oriented around the pursuit of endless immediacy
and efficiency has no place for vulnerability, or the possible selfless-
ness (but also the unpaid labour) inherent in care. What Crary terms
the “weakness and inadequacy of human time, with its blurred, mean-
dering textures” is scorned in configurations of work that see the
human body as a biohackable platform.98 But such meanderings can be
claimed as critical disability tools, in the ways in which they empha-
sise the distinctiveness that different bodies and minds produce. The
seeming straightforward nature of the Nootrobox team’s approach to
cognition, noted earlier, namely that it is in effect a process of identifi-
able physiological function, masks a reality in which many consumers
of ‘smart’ drugs do so for reasons of mental ill health or psychological
‘exposure’. An appreciation of the solicitude and interdependencies
that surround sleep – watching others sleep, caring about them as this
takes place, placing trust in others to watch over us – is another of
those activities made richer through its disability connotations.
Though it is rarely read as such, Chuck Palahniuk’s iconic 1996
novel Fight Club is a narrative about sleep, work and disability, and a
text that can productively be read through the terms of Crary’s crit-
ical axes noted above. In a 2014 article entitled ‘Insomnia and Me’,
Palahniuk spoke both of his own insomnia and its place in the genesis
of his most well-known work:

In 1993, I found myself stranded in Reno, Nevada, with no money

and nowhere to stay. At night I wandered sleepless through the empty
all-night casinos and restaurants, exhausted, delirious, and inventing
a story about a man who thought he had insomnia but was actually
living a double life: whenever he thought he was asleep, his alter ego
would venture forth to have all the adventures he, himself, could never
consciously dare. As the sun rose over the “biggest little city in the
world”, I had the basic novel written in my head.99
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 209

For Palahniuk, imagining fights (especially losing fights) became a

way into sleep: “My long, imaginary fights would be wordless and
brutal, and then I’d lose and fall asleep”.100 And while much criti-
cism of the novel has focused on its deployment of ideas of bodies,
masculinity and violence, there has been much less on the idea that
it is a disability narrative centred around the absence of sleep and the
exposure and vulnerabilities that arise from this. Yet sleep is central to
the story: “The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep”, the narrator says
as he attempts to piece together the reality of his self following the
novel’s central revelation, that “Tyler is a projection. He’s a dissocia-
tive personality disorder. He’s a psychogenic fugue state. Tyler Durden
is my hallucination”.101 Continuing, he remembers: “I took a vaca-
tion, I fell asleep on the beach and when I woke up there was Tyler
Durden”, except – as he now realises – “When I fall asleep, I don’t
really sleep”.102 What appeared as a narrative of insomnia is, in fact, a
novel centred on the combination between schizoid disassociation and
a lack of sleep.103 That such a position renders the narrator vulnerable
and exposed is clear. While placing his body in the way of violence is
a deliberate act, the mechanics and consequences of such actions are
unknown. Not knowing the truth of his disassociated, disabled self
leaves him in an exposed state of partial understanding, but it is an
exposure that we, as readers, can use as a lens through which to see a
critique of embodied wholeness and the demands of neoliberal work.
It is when the narrator is most disassociated that the practices of work
cultures he encounters – the exploitation and deception, the lack of
opportunities for empowerment – are most laid bare.
Fight Club is also rooted in the idea that the participants in the
clubs and their extension, the anarchic ‘Project Mayhem’, are recon-
figuring their identities as workers. The forgettable “kid who works
in the copy center” becomes memorable when he “kick[s] the air out
of an accountant representative twice his size […] and pound[s] him
until the kid had to stop”.104 As the fight clubs develop and spread
throughout the US, the narrator finds himself coming across fellow
fighters, but almost exclusively in work settings: “Now I go to meet-
ings and conferences and see faces at conference tables, accountants
and junior executives or attorneys with broken noses spreading out
like an eggplant under the edges of bandages or they have a couple of
stitches under an eye or a jaw wired shut”.105 Here, it is the individ-
uals conceived of in terms of the jobs they do that is striking; the copy
centre kids, accountants, junior executives and attorneys are the host
identities, we are told, of the “quiet young men” who eschew sleep
to meet and fight in the early hours of the morning. And the looks
210 Disability and the Posthuman

they exchange (“we nod to each other”), the shared bond of fight club
‘membership’, articulates an idea of care that, Palahniuk suggests,
possesses real value despite its genesis in the splitting of the narrator’s
consciousness.106
Much has been made of Fight Club’s representations of bodies and
violence as stemming from ultimately fascistic world views. The many
variations of this argument can be encapsulated in Robert T. Schultz’s
assertion that the narrator “is like a Nazi leader” and Tyler “an egotis-
tical maniac who sees himself as a god”; but there are other ways
to read the differences of the body that the novel portrays.107 While
I do not agree completely with Olivia Burgess’ argument that the
novel presents positive possibilities for utopian change, I do think
that her assertion that Palahniuk’s narrative advances the “body as
a marker of possibility” is enabling.108 Burgess notes that “exhausted
bodies […] are the opportunities for change”, while she perceptively
observes that the Narrator’s attempts to combat his chronic insomnia
– attending support groups for cancer survivors and the terminally ill –
all “revolve around the body in some way: testicular cancer, parasites,
brain dysfunction, degenerative bone disease, leukemia”.109 Equally,
the stories Tyler Durden tells of his early acts of public disruption –
urinating in soups when working as a waiter in high-end restaurants;
splicing split-second shots of erect penises and vaginas into films when
employed as a projectionist – involve what Burgess calls “the abject
lower body” with its “rejected and unwanted waste and excess”.110
Similarly, Marla Singer, the novel’s central female protagonist,
possesses a body that appears to be always on the point of disintegra-
tion. Emaciated, animal-like and with burned, scabbed and cracked
skin, Marla states proudly “I embrace my own festering diseased
corruption” as she deliberately burns herself in front of the narrator.111
A character who “never has any fat of her own”, Marla imports her
mother’s collagen to sell on, only for the narrator to then steal it in an
anarchist soap-making venture.112 Whether broken and beaten in the
fights themselves, or as represented in associated states of abjection,
bodies in Fight Club diverge from normative notions of the able-bodied
and the values that accompany them. The labour of the bodies in the
novel can be read as being inherently a process of disability.
Seen in this way, Fight Club’s bodies become a perfect example
of Tobin Siebers’ theories of complex embodiment. For Siebers, the
disabled body not only speaks of an understanding of “the effects of
disabling environments on people’s lived experience of the body”, it
also stresses “that some factors affecting disability, such as chronic
pain, secondary health effects, and aging, derive from the body”.113
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 211

The complexity here, then, is to see the situated locations of the social
processes that produce disabled bodies and the physical, somatic
bodily difference that arises from human variation. A consequence of
this, Siebers notes, is that “complex embodiment theorizes the body
and its representations as mutually transformative”.114 As such, the
working bodies of Fight Club, battered and broken in protest at a capi-
talistic system against which they rebel, are at one and the same time
disabled bodies, marked by physical limitations and a chronic absence
of sleep. The combination of the two produces versions of work,
masculinity, embodiment and mental health that are more complex
than are the case if we leave disability out of the critical frame. The
novel’s world of work, understood as a location and culture of disable-
ment, is opened up through such a reading, and the representation of
the narrator’s mental health is seen in a more critically informed light
as a consequence.
Siebers almost appears to be talking about Palahniuk’s novel
when, in noting how straightforward it can be to pass from being
abled-bodied to being disabled, he notes: “The disabled confront the
intolerance of society on a daily basis. In nearly no other sphere of
existence, however, do people risk waking up one morning having
become the persons [sic] whom they hated the day before”.115 The
narrator of Fight Club does not, in fact, wake to find himself in such
a position and Tyler appears as a hero/role model for that section of
the narrative when the two identities appear separate; but the reali-
sation that he is not waking, but rather that Tyler is the pathological
extension of his self, begins the process by which the narrator starts
to disassociate himself from Tyler and his ‘terrorist’ project. It is not
‘hatred’ maybe, but it is a violent rejection.
In assessing the politics of Fight Club as a text it is, however, the
terms of this that require scrutiny. The narrator’s rejection of Tyler
in fact represents a twist away from the kinds of embodied possibili-
ties described above. Upon realising that Tyler is not a separate entity,
but rather an extension of his self, the narrator immediately comes
to view Tyler’s actions as problematic and dangerous: “The second I
fall asleep”, he observes, “Tyler takes over and something terrible will
happen”. His subsequent need to “undo the damage” Tyler is seen to
cause rewrites the kinds of complex difference as described by Siebers.
The narrator’s frantic search for the architects of Project Mayhem,
to stop their actions, reins in the productive potential suggested in
the bodies up to this point in the novel. All of a sudden, the novel’s
representation of sleep changes. “For years now, I’ve wanted to fall
asleep”, the narrator observes, “the sort of slipping off, the giving up,
212 Disability and the Posthuman

the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do”.116
In needing to “do something to get rid of Tyler”, the narrator moves
from a disassociated state of sleep-deprived disability to one where the
lack of sleep becomes refigured in terms of productivity and action,
mobility and knowledge.117 Where before the novel’s bodies and minds
suggested possibilities of reconfigured selfhoods, now the need to halt
all of Tyler’s actions signals a return to ideas of wholeness: “I think
fight club has served its purpose”, the narrator tells the assembled
men at one club meeting, adding “Project Mayhem is canceled […]
This game is over”.118 As it approaches its conclusion, the novel takes
a turn towards an ending in which the abject, the deranged and the
different body are disavowed. For all that he ends the narrative institu-
tionalised and on medication, the narrator is clear that his excising of
Tyler is a rational act that prevents further violence.
Fight Club’s turn to restitution keeps its complex and unruly bodies
at bay. Although the narrator ends the novel (presumably) in an
altered mental state, the drive of the last quarter of the story is towards
completion and the resolution of a difference that is ultimately seen to
be problematic. As the narrator’s desire to shut down Project Mayhem
makes clear, such resolution is equally applied to the representation
of work. The anarchic work spaces that dominate the majority of
the novel are dismantled, replaced by a dramatic finale in which the
narrator and Tyler tussle on the roof of a skyscraper as police heli-
copters hover overhead and Marla appears with “all the people from
the support group” to try to prevent the narrator from what appears
as suicide.119 It is a twist on the cliff-hanger ending, with the fight
between hero and villain actually the final confrontation of the halves
of a schizoid self. Ideas of fracture, splitting or liminality here cannot,
however, disguise the novel’s wider move towards the attempted refor-
mulation of coherence
If Fight Club resorts to (even partial) resolution in its final chap-
ters, Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Sleep’, from his 1993 collection
The Elephant Vanishes, refuses such closure. The story begins with the
unnamed female narrator stating: “This is my seventeenth straight day
without sleep”.120 What she has though, she stresses, is “nothing at all”
like insomnia: “I just can’t sleep. Not for one second. Aside from that
simple fact, I’m perfectly normal. I don’t feel sleepy, and my mind is as
clear as ever. Clearer, if anything”.121 The narrator lives in a Japanese
household in many ways defined by work: her husband is a dentist
who is “serious” and “works hard”, and her role as wife, mother and
homekeeper is presented in terms of work responsibilities: “you’ve
been working too hard”, her husband tells her at one point when he
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 213

notices her behaviour changing.122 Murakami places his narrator’s life

(her own and that within her family) firmly within the context of a
contemporary Japanese demand for work immediacy and efficiency.
‘Sleep’ critiques this demand in a number of ways, utilising the
language of disability and norms surrounding the idea of the ‘working
self’ to do so. In contrast to the narratives described so far in this
chapter, Murakami’s story reclaims the ostensibly ‘private’ world of
home as a space of work that it then transforms. As such, it illuminates
the limitations of conceptions of work (such as Tomlinson’s, noted
earlier) that set private against public constructions of labour, revealing
especially the ways in which these fail to capture the complexities of
gender. The home has, as Silvia Federici has shown, always been a
place of women’s work, not least of reproduction.123 Murakami’s
story captures this, with the narrator gradually withdrawing from
her regular work routine and the attention she pays to her husband
to rather obsessively read. She reads and rereads Anna Karenina (“as
many times as I could”), an engagement with a famous narrative of
marital conflict that illuminates her growing awareness of the restric-
tions of her own relationship, before moving on to Dostoyevsky, and
all the time “I could read book after book with utter concentration
and never tire. I could understand the most difficult passages without
effort. And I responded with deep emotion”.124 Rather than these
total levels of concentration, undisturbed by sleep, being evidence
for some kind of biohacking perfection, however, the narrator begins
to understand her housework as “chores I perform day after day like
an unfeeling machine […] Push the buttons. Pull the levers. Pretty
soon, reality just flows off and away. The same physical movements
over and over”.125 Here it is reading, the consuming desire for which is
produced by the absence of sleep, which causes the narrator to recog-
nise the ‘non-human’ manner of her daily work. But within a context
of normalised capitalism and the pattern of work the story otherwise
reproduces, reading is, of course, an activity that is unproductive. The
narrator’s reading transforms her sense of herself but adds nothing to
the sense of her marriage and family being a (conventionally under-
stood) working unit.
While such a critique of gendered work is a subtle unpicking of
some of the core constituents of Japanese society, it is the story’s asso-
ciated concentration on bodily difference that provides a specific link
between sleep, work and disability. A striking feature of the narrative
is the way in which, as her time without sleep develops, the narrator
becomes absorbed by the idea that her body is transforming. She
finds that she has broken “the connection between my mind and my
214 Disability and the Posthuman

body […] While my body went about its business, my mind floated
in its own inner space. I ran the house without a thought in my head,
feeding snacks to my son, chatting to my husband”. Increasingly, this
mind/body division leads her to revise her notion of her own reality as
a worker:

After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality

is, how easy it is to make it work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just
a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s
just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You
adjust the gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over
and over.126

Intriguingly, this process of becoming-machine (“No matter how

mechanically I worked”, she observes, “no one noticed that I had
changed”) is matched by a growing obsession the narrator has with
the uncanny nature of bodies, and especially faces.127 While walking
around her home at night she finds herself staring at her reflection in
the bathroom: “I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror – just
look at it for fifteen minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I’d stare
at my face purely as a physical object, and gradually it would discon-
nect from the rest of me, becoming just some thing that happened to
exist at the same time as myself”.128 This body dysmorphia intensi-
fies as the narrator continues to go without sleep. She finds herself
frozen in a dream, unable to move her limbs, and then focuses on a
“mistlike something, hung there inside my body like a certain kind
of potential”, before asserting that “I wanted to purge my body of
something by exercising it to the limit” but adding: “Purge it – of
what?”129 Finally, another encounter with her reflected self in front of
the mirror leads her to “discover that my body appeared to be almost
bursting with vitality” without “the slightest hint of excess flesh”.
Following this surprise, she “sat down and looked at my face for a
good thirty minutes. I studied it from all angles, objectively […] What
was happening to me?”130 Without sleep, and with a transforming
attitude towards the patterns of work that have come to define her
sense of self, the narrator enters a space where bodies, and the mean-
ings applied to them, appear to shift.131 For Murakami’s narrator, any
number of totalities – especially those connected to family, responsi-
bility and self-image can no longer be taken for granted. ‘Sleep’ is very
much a narrative in which assumed meanings and values can be seen
to lose their attachment to the norms through which they might be
understood to operate.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 215

In the story, the narrator’s dysmorphic gaze extends to her imme-

diate family. She finds herself unable to apprehend her husband’s body:
“How long had it been – years? – since the last time I had studied his
face as he slept?” she asks one night while watching her husband; and
continues:

So there I stood, looking at him sleeping as soundly as always. One

bare foot stuck out from under the covers at a strange angle – so
strange that the foot could have belonged to someone else. It was a big,
chunky foot. My husband’s mouth hung open, the lower lip drooping
[…] There was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed,
the lids slack, covers made of faded human flesh. He looked like an
absolute fool! […] How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly
face! It’s just too gruesome, I thought.132

This slippage of affection extends to her son – “something about my

son’s face annoyed me” she observes at one point, before noting: “And
then it hit me. What bothered me about my son’s sleeping face was
that it looked exactly like my husband’s […] Stubborn, self-satisfied”.
The revelation is, it appears, conclusive: “This little boy is a stranger to
me, finally. Even after he grows up, he’ll never be able to understand
me, just as my husband can hardly understand what I feel now”.133
The blank, posthumanised faces that appear at the start of the story
become signifiers of strange alienation by the end. The intersection of
an absence of sleep, a revision of notions of work, and the perception
of body-as-machine/body-as-other, makes for a haunting narrative in
which any concept of self is highly unstable.
Murakami ends ‘Sleep’ in a manner that appears to point to the idea
of sleep as a mysterious, unknowable entity. Wearing her husband’s cap
and performing yet another body shift through her choice of clothes –
“I look like a boy” – the narrator goes out for a night drive. She sees
the road full of people on their way to work, “Those guys don’t sleep
at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater effi-
ciency”, and feels she has joined their ranks, her new state meaning
she has moved beyond biology and nature: “I’m beyond that. A priori.
An evolutionary leap. A woman who never sleeps. An expansion of
consciousness”.134 But this seeming connection to a state of ‘greater
efficiency’ is destroyed when her stationary car comes under attack
from a crowd of men. Unable to get out, the narrator finishes the story
“locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the
night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to
turn it over”.135 The ambiguity is challenging. Is this a reminder of the
216 Disability and the Posthuman

brutal power of conventional gender roles and a reversion to a former

state (the ‘little box’)? Is it punishment for hubris? The product of a
sleep-deprived mind? A reminder of the inherent precariousness that
comes with difference? Whichever way the ending is read, it appears
that, ultimately, the belief that sleeplessness is indeed some form of
posthumanist evolutionary leap, or indeed any coherent activity, is a
delusion. Murakami challenges us to configure precisely what sleep,
and its absence, might mean.
The complexities of ‘Sleep’ present the non-sleeping state as a
space of blurred boundaries, thresholds and ambiguities. Murakami’s
unstable bodies, wild spaces and the threats to the recognition of the
familiar that the story presents can all be understood as the work-
ings of a creative aesthetic that match the hovering indistinctness that
Crary finds and celebrates in Levinas. The narrator of ‘Sleep’ is in many
ways empowered by the world she finds when she fails to sleep, but
– as the end of the story displays – she is also rendered acutely vulner-
able. When Crary outlines the reciprocities of the vulnerability/trust
and exposure/care axes he notes that they articulate “the cohesion of
social relationships [that] come together around the issue of sleep”.136
‘Sleep’ functions in precisely such terms of the troubled reciprocity
surrounding relationships and cohesion. The story’s critique of a rigid
and gendered culture of work comes in the shifting uncertainties of
bodies and minds that fill the narrator’s waking nights. Crucially, the
story ends in such a vulnerable and exposed space, unlike Fight Club
with its desire for an individual-centred (however split) resolution. Its
aesthetics stress the provisional nature of both sleeping and wakeful-
ness; what the body or mind means, and what it might do, hover in a
liminal difference.

Conclusion: mundane work

2017 and 2018 saw the publication of a slew of publications that

showcased an ongoing obsession with how people sleep. The most
prominent of these was neuroscientist Matthew Walker’s book Why We
Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams. For Walker, sleep is first and
foremost about embodiment. A 24-hour circadian rhythm, the nightly
release of melatonin and growth hormone, and the extent of blood
sugar levels, brain cell regeneration and structures of memory are
only some of the ways in which the body and sleep interact. Equally,
Walker shows how type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attacks
and cancer are all more likely in individuals who are sleep deprived.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 217

At every turn, Why We Sleep returns to the body, foregoing discussions

of psychology and lifestyle for detailed analysis of brain activity and
bodily response.137
Walker’s study is also one focused on time. It is the different times
within sleep, particularly the relationship between REM and NREM,
that regulate health. Understanding this allows for a consideration
of sleep as a way in which different bodies pace themselves – how
disability and sleep are linked. The sleep experienced by many people
with autism for example, works to different rhythms than those who
are not autistic, while research into sleep disorders in both adults
and children with cystic fibrosis shows that obstructive sleep apnea
is common. There are numerous other disabilities that necessitate
different patterns of sleep across the 24 hours of the day.
The promise of an automated work future is that it will provide 24/7
productivity; robots, after all, do not sleep. In this dizzying imagining
of a hyper-efficient future, compliant technologies simply respond
to commands and create employment environments of desirable
monotony (it is noticeable that such visions rarely consider the limita-
tions of such technologies or their inability to perform functions). At
the end of 24/7, Crary posits that sleep can be the condition that coun-
ters the overwhelming acceleration and intensification of technological
labour. Sleep harbours the promise of what he terms a “radical inter-
ruption […] a refusal of the unsparing weight of our global present”.
This might, he notes, look towards a “future other than barbarism
or the post-human”.138 Crary’s equation of these two states is telling:
the posthuman is, he feels, a danger, potentially a carrier of those
processes of technological change that will irreparably alter humanity.
Within his humanism, however, there is a disability logic. Crary
even uses the word “disabled” to describe those last moments before
sleep: “the lying awake in quasi-darkness, waiting indefinitely for the
desired loss of consciousness”. He continues: “During this suspended
time, there is a recovery of perceptual capacities that are disabled or
disregarded during the day”.139 The word ‘disabled’ here is positive; a
process of accessing a liminal space in which norms, both those of the
body and the pressures of societies that shape those bodies, do not
apply. Within this state, we access “the most mundane level of every
experience”, a level that “can always rehearse the outlines of what
more consequential renewals and beginnings might be”.140
It is only a partial against-the-grain reading that can characterise
Crary’s vision of the future as a space of disability. As this book has
argued all along, the mundane and ordinary are sites of disability pres-
ence, and often critique. The mundane levels of the everyday are the
218 Disability and the Posthuman

spaces where experiences take place, both those of disability and not.
They are the grounded actuations of what Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder
term the matter of disability, locations of materiality and affect that
provide “evidence of embodiment’s shifting, kaleidoscopic, dynami-
cally unfolding agency”.141 These include work in all its manifestations,
from the banal to the profound, but as we are reminded here, the disa-
bled body in particular calls into question, through its nonnormative
agency, the ‘naturalness’ of late capitalism’s creation of work cultures.
What Mitchell and Snyder elsewhere term the “social relationships
indicative of an evolving society of control” are pivotal in the establish-
ment of contemporary labour formations, but the “strategic fluidity”
of disability presence, both individual and collective, allows for the
“disability countercultural formations” that challenge the seemingly
inevitability of such worlds.142
This chapter has shown how a certain posthumanist idea of
work threatens to eclipse difference and extend the boundaries that
limit employment for many people with disabilities. But it has also
promoted disability as a disruption of these process, a pushing back
against practices of technological uniformity. The texts examined here
unpick assumptions in which technology ‘marches’ into the future.
They suggest a derailing, a pulling off the tracks or the change of the
beat that guides such a march. Disability work will continue and the
pace it creates will be within a time of its own making.

Notes

1 See, for example, a leader in The Economist in June 2016: ‘March of the
machines: what history tells us about the future of artificial intelligence –
and how society should respond’, www.economist.com/leaders/2016/06/25/
march-of-the-machines. Accessed January 6, 2017. The metaphors are used
more widely across other forms of publications. See, for example, Martin
Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment
(London: Oneworld, 2015) and Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: The Lost
History of Cybernetics (Melbourne and London: Scribe, 2016).
2 ‘The Guardian view on robots and humanity: passing Go’. March 9, 2016,
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/09/the-guardian-view-on-
robots-and-humanity-passing-go. Accessed March 27, 2016.
3 Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European
Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 21 and 13.
4 See Despina Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema and the Cultural
Work of Artificial People (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University
Press, 2014), pp. 134–140 for a specific discussion of robots and work in
Čapek’s play.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 219

5 Ben Tarnoff, ‘Robots won’t just take our jobs – they’ll make the rich even
richer’, The Guardian, March 2, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/
mar/02/robot-tax-job-elimination-livable-wage. Accessed March 4, 2017. A
more balanced and less dramatic account of technology in the development of
twenty-first century work can be found in Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans:
Work and its Absence in the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2017),
though Avent still frames his arguments within the “belief in the capacity of
humanity” to oversee the development of new worlds of work (p. 241).
6 A standard narrative of human superiority over robots and A.I. is common
in contemporary fictional explorations of the interaction between the two,
whether humans overcoming a global robot uprising in Daniel H. Wilson’s
2011 novel Robopocalypse, or the more mundane exploration of robots, rela-
tionships and society in Ian McEwan’s 2019 Machines Like Me. The novels
are very different, both in terms of content and style, but united by a core
humanist conviction in human superiority manifested in both the nature
of human actions and (crucially) the ability of humans alone to control the
meaning of the story that emerges from the engagement with emerging tech-
nologies. (In relation to the above note, it is worth observing that McEwan’s
novel touches briefly on the idea of taxing robots when central character
Charlie has Adam, his robot, take over his stock market speculation and,
through knowledge of A.I. systems, substantially increase Charlie’s income.)
7 Ford, The Rise of the Robots, pp. 6 and 27.
8 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and
Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC and London, 2011), p. 12.
9 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World
Without Work, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2016), p. 109.
10 Ford, The Rise of the Robots, pp. 161–165.
11 Stewart Dakers, ‘A robot carer? No thanks – we still need the human touch’,
www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/01/robot-carer-human-paro-seal.
Accessed February 27, 2017.
12 See Illah Reza Nourbakhsh’s Robot Futures for a thoughtful assessment of the
topic from a roboticist’s point of view. In a powerful metaphor, Nourbakhsh
describes a “robot smog” that will descend on contemporary societies driven
by technological change. “Whether or not the mass of robots that comprose
our robot smog will be members of a single megacolony is open to debate”,
he observes. “But what is certain is that our robot smog will have massive
connectivity with itself and with the information superstructure of the digital
world”. Nourbakhsh, Robot Futures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 42.
13 Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 35–38;
and ‘Unhealthy disabled: treating chronic illnesses as disabilities’, Hypatia 16,
no. 4 (2001).
14 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2013), p. 27. See also Margaret Price, ‘The bodymind
problem and the possibilities of pain’, Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015), pp. 268–284.
15 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Cambridge: Verso,
2014), p. 8.
16 Robert Hassan, Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society
(Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2009), pp. 7–8 and 17.
220 Disability and the Posthuman

17 John Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy (London: Sage,
2007), p. 158.
18 For an idiosyncratically personal and conservatively humanist analysis of the
speed of contemporary life at the end of the twentieth century, see Stephen
Bertram’s Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).
For Bertram, “the explosion of technology” is part of a “warp speed [that]
disengages us from the past” and “plunges us towards the future”. It trans-
forms (as Bertram’s chapter titles attest) the individual, the family, social,
democracy, the environment and international relations. Bertram’s concerns
about the future echo those of Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future
(analysed in Chapter 1). “We must”, Bertram asserts, “reassert control over
technology [and] look beyond the artificiality and impermanence we have
created to recapture a sense of what is natural, enduring and true”. Bertram,
Hyperculture, pp. 2–3 and 194.
19 Crary, 24/7, p. 9.
20 Such a world is critiqued in the biting satire of Douglas Coupland’s 1995
novel Microserfs, in which a group of Microsoft employees largely fail to avoid
work dominating their lives through the kind of feudal relationship suggested
by the book’s title. Coupland’s novel, set in the early 1990s, is one of the first
to anticipate the kind of posthuman work environment that has developed
with the digital age. Coupland returned to the idea (and form – both novels
intersperse chunks of code, emails, lists and data readings with ‘standard’
prose; both are written on the central characters’ laptops) of the novel in
the 2006 JPod, which follows a group of video game programmers brought
together within an intense and dominating work culture.
21 See Ian James, Paul Virilio (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 29–44.
22 Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, with Bertrand Richard, trans Ames
Hodges (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 69.
23 John Armitage (ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001),
pp. 97–98.
24 See Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. D. Moshenburg (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1991) and The Vision Machine, trans J. Rose (London: British
Film Institute, 1994); Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013),
pp. 89–95.
25 Virilio, The Lost Dimension, p. 84.
26 Hassan, Empires of Speed, p. 23; Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed, p. 88.
27 Arthur Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman Future (Cambridge: Polity, 2014),
pp. 11–12.
28 Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman Future, pp. 15–16.
29 Wendell, The Rejected Body, p. 37; Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 27.
30 David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability:
Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2015), pp. 211, 214 and 216. The authors outline
that: “Nonproductive bodies are those inhabitants of the planet who, largely
by virtue of (in)capacity, aesthetic nonconformity, and/or nonnormative labor
patterns, have gone invisible due to the inflexibility of traditional classifica-
tions of labor (both economical and political. They represent the nonlaboring
populations – not merely excluded from, but also resistant to, standardized
labor demands of productivity particular to neoliberalism” (p. 211).
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 221

31 Robert McRuer, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (New York:
New York University Press, 2018), p. 54.
32 World Health Organisation, World Report on Disability (WHO, 2011), p. 235.
33 World Report on Disability, p. 240.
34 World Report on Disability, p. 251.
35 Katharine Quarmby, Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People (London:
Portobello Books), p. 226.
36 There are many histories of the development of disability through patterns of
employment, but Sarah F. Rose’s No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability,
1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is
a stand-out text. Though focused on the US, its examination of the ways in
which those constructed as ‘disabled’ became separated from the category of
‘worker’ during the development of industrial modernity has wide applica-
bility. As Rose observes, a “perfect storm” of “changes in family capacity, the
rapidly evolving labor market, public policies that sought to deter dependency,
and the mutability and complexity of disability itself” resulted in bodies that
“were now deemed unproductive, or insufficiently productive, by employers
and lawmakers”. A result, she notes, is that “the common twentieth-century
notion of equating ‘disability’ with unproductivity, poor citizenship, and
dependency on public or charitable assistance was, truly, an invention”
(p. 13).
37 Pramod Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 10.
38 Hassan, Empires of Speed, p. 19.
39 Hassan, Empires of Speed, pp. 19–20.
40 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the
Information Age (London: Pluto, 2011).
41 Nootrobox, ‘The Complete Full Stack’ and ‘The Biohacker’s Guide’, https://
nootrobox.com. Accessed January 23, 2017.
42 Alex Morris, ‘The pill freaks of Silicon Valley’, New York Magazine, October
19, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/article/327687787/The-Pill-Freaks-Of-
Silicon-Valley. Accessed December 6, 2016.
43 See https://hvmn.com/sprint (accessed November 12, 2018). An earlier 2017
description of SPRINT asserted that it produced “higher-order cognitive
work”, though this term has now disappeared from the product description.
44 Morris, ‘The pill freaks of Silicon Valley’.
45 Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), p. 4.
46 Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 33.
47 Peter Ferry writes on Ferris’ novel in terms of masculinity, New York and the
tradition of the flâneur (which he terms “the definitive figure of the post-
modern age”) in ‘Reading Manhattan. Reading masculinity. Reintroducing
the flaneur in E.B. White’s Here is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed’,
Culture, Society and Masculinities 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 49–61. The idea of
Farnsworth lost in an unknowable and unnameable crisis surely owes
much to the link between Ferris’ title and Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The
Unnameable. Beckett’s famous ending – “I can’t go on, you must go on […] you
must go on, I can’t go one, I’ll go on” – frames ideas not only of Farnworth’s
walking, but also the contested meaning attached to it. Samuel Beckett, Three
Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (New York: Grove Press, 2009),
222 Disability and the Posthuman

p. 407. For Marina Ludwigs, “Tim’s uncontrollable leg and […] resisting
mind” enact a mind-body division that “taps into the heart of narrativity
[…] the text’s metanarrative emphasis throws light on the captivating and
irresistible nature of narrative desire”. Ludwigs, ‘Walking as a metaphor for
narrativity’, Studia Neophilologica 87 (2015), p. 116.
48 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 126.
49 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 41.
50 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 24.
51 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 37.
52 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 103.
53 In an interview he gave the week before The Unnamed was published, Ferris
reflected on New York not only as an environment for his fiction but as a
place itself for his own work. The city, he says, is “a very nurturing place, but
the work itself is at odds with that impulse because the work itself requires
so much time and attention”. And, in an interesting link between his own
working practice and an explicit disability frame of reference, he goes on:
“The city is a guarantor of ADD, and you have to be steeled against your
worst impulses”. See Tara Atkinson with Joshua Ferris, ‘Vacuuming the
Whole House and Where Do We Go Now: A conversation with Joshua Ferris’,
The Iowa Review 40, no. 2 (2010), p. 127.
54 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 129.
55 Ferris, The Unnamed, pp. 34–35.
56 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 36.
57 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 63.
58 Andrew Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 88.
59 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 310.
60 Ferris, The Unnamed, p. 117.
61 For more on ideas of ‘the national’ in Ferris’ work more generally, see Ruth
Maxey, ‘National stories and narrative voice in the fiction of Joshua Ferris’,
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 2 (2016), pp. 208–216.
62 Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction, p. 88.
63 Michael Faber, Under the Skin (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014), p. 64.
64 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 127.
65 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 232.
66 Faber, Under the Skin, pp. 64, 284, and 88.
67 There is not sufficient space here to properly analyse Under the Skin as much
as I would have liked in terms of either gender or (thinking through the
resonances of ‘alien’) race. It is clear that there is a process of ‘becoming-
woman’ in Faber’s novel, as it is only in the scene of the car crash at the
end that a vodsel is noticeably and continually described as “female” and “a
woman”, in a move that suggests that Isserley’s slow learning has reached at
a point where she identifies – through the woman who comes to her aid – a
possible emerging gender of her own. Equally, the novel’s many descriptions
of skin, fur and bodily difference invite a critical race reading that offers more
evidence of its productive aesthetic strategies.
68 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 75.
69 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 65.
70 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 88.
71 Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed, p. 147.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 223

72 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 234.

73 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 174.
74 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 97.
75 See Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012); Pramod Nayar,
Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 77–99; Cary Wolfe, What is
Posthumanism? (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University of Minnesota
Press, 2010), pp. 99–144; and Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the
Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2013).
76 Sarah Dillon, ‘“It’s a question of words, therefore”: becoming-animal in
Michael Faber’s Under the Skin’, Science Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (2011),
pp. 134–154. Dillon characterises the novel as being ‘science fiction’, although
Faber has expressed reservations about the label. For more on the relationship
between posthumanism, science fiction and disability, see Elaine Graham,
Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture
(Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2002); Neil Badmington, Alien
Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London and New York: Routledge,
2004); Kathryn Allan (ed.), Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of
Technology as Cure (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): Lars Schmeink,
Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2016); as well as my analyses of Becky Chambers’
writing in Chapter 2.
77 Dillon, ‘It’s a question of words’, p. 143.
78 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 296.
79 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 296.
80 Faber, Under the Skin, p. 295.
81 Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed, p. 149.
82 See Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment pp. 147–164; and Bertram, Hyperculture.
83 Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York:
New York University Press, 2014).
84 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2013), p. 11; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 286.
85 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 287.
86 Crary, 24/7, p. 23.
87 Nolan’s film has fun with names. As well as that of Pacino’s character, the
Alaskan town at the heart of the narrative is called Nightmute.
88 Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain (Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor,
1991), p. 92. Kress’ story was originally published, in 1991, in Isaac Asimov’s
Science Fiction Magazine. Kress subsequently revised the text and published it
as a stand-alone text in 1993 as well as producing two sequels: Beggars and
Choosers (1994) and Beggars Ride (1996).
89 Kress, Beggars in Spain, p. 113.
90 Karen Russell, Sleep Donation (Atavist Books, 2014, Kindle. EBook).
91 Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (London: Borough Press,
2017), p. 418.
92 Crary, 24/7, p. 19.
224 Disability and the Posthuman

93 Crary, 24/7, p. 19.

94 Crary, 24/7, p. 25.
95 Crary, 24/7, pp. 11 and 14.
96 It has to be noted that Crary’s withering critique of contemporary construc-
tions of sleep maintains a degree of nostalgia for an analogue age. He observes
that “the uncertain status of sleep has to be understood in relation to the
particular dynamic of modernity which has invalidated any organization of
reality into binary complementaries” and that “sleep is now an experience
cut loose from notions of necessity or nature”. For the most part, the book
presupposes a coherent self that has lost meaning as sleep has been eroded
and for all of the sharp insight, especially around the development of global
technologies, there are humanist structures to his arguments. Even with his
use of cultural theorists who are central to much posthumanist thinking,
such as Deleuze, Crary is pulled towards the idea of a more ‘natural’ time for
sleep and notion of health, for all that such time contained innumerable other
health hazards (pp. 12–13).
97 Crary, 24/7, p. 28.
98 Crary, 24/7, p. 29.
99 Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Insomnia and me’, The Guardian, April 19, 2014, www.
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/19/chuck-palahniuk-struggles-
insomnia. Accessed March 27, 2015.
100 Palahniuk, ‘Insomnia and me’.
101 Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (London: Vintage, 2006), pp. 172 and 168.
102 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 173.
103 David Fincher’s 1999 film version of Fight Club prioritises the question of sleep
at the outset of the narrative, with the narrator remarking “For 6 months I
couldn’t sleep” in the film’s first few minutes. He then visits a doctor seeking
medication, only to be told “you need healthy, natural sleep”.
104 Palahniuk, Fight Club, pp. 48–49.
105 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 54.
106 Palahniuk, Fight Club, both p. 54.
107 Robert T. Schultz, ‘White guys who prefer not to: from passive resistance
(“Bartleby”) to terrorist acts (Fight Club)’, The Journal of Popular Culture 44,
no. 3 (2011), pp. 593–594.
108 Olivia Burgess, ‘Revolutionary bodies in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club’,
Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (2012), p. 271.
109 Burgess, ‘Revolutionary bodies’, p. 267 (emphasis in original) and
pp. 270–271.
110 Burgess, ‘Revolutionary bodies’, pp. 271–272.
111 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 65.
112 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 91.
113 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2008), p. 25.
114 Siebers, Disability Theory, p. 25.
115 Siebers, Disability Theory, p. 26.
116 Palahniuk, Fight Club, all p. 181.
117 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 182.
118 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 178.
119 Palahniuk, Fight Club, p. 204.
Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work 225

120 Haruki Murakami, ‘Sleep’ in The Elephant Vanishes (London: Vintage, 2003),
p. 74.
121 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 76.
122 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, pp. 105 and 93.
123 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist
Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012). Federici’s analysis is particularly
astute in its exploration of the sexual division of labour and its place in devel-
oping global practices. Her focus on care work and the elderly is especially
pertinent to Murakami’s story and to disability readings more widely: see ‘On
Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism’, pp. 115–125.
124 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 101.
125 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 99.
126 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 96.
127 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 96.
128 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 81.
129 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 93.
130 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 97.
131 Murakami’s narrator can here be seen to link to Isserley’s views on her body
in Under the Skin. As both characters come to increasingly inhabit similar soli-
tary spaces, they experience a change in how they see their bodies in relation
to the new parameters of their work environments.
132 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, pp. 102–103.
133 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, pp. 104 and 105.
134 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, pp. 106–107.
135 Murakami, ‘Sleep’, p. 109.
136 Crary, 24/7, p. 28.
137 Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (London:
Penguin, 2017). See pp. 109–111, 114–115, 157–163, 169–171 and 183–186.
138 Crary, 24/7, p. 128.
139 Crary, 24/7, p. 126.
140 Crary, 24/7, pp. 12, 8.
141 David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Introduction’
in Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder (eds), The Matter of Disability: Materiality,
Biopolitics, Crip Affect (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), p. 2.
142 Mitchell and Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, p. 216.
 Conclusion:
On Not Wanting to End
Conclusion

T he theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died in March 2018.

Later that year a collection of his essays, entitled Brief Answers
to the Big Questions, was published.1 The topics covered in the book
ranged from the theological to the cosmological, exploring issues
relating to – among others – technology, philosophy and the environ-
ment. It seemed somehow fitting that a visionary scientist whose life’s
work involved considering the nature of the universe should be able
to speak from beyond the grave; and not only speak, but consider the
future of artificial intelligence, life on earth and the very trajectory of
humanity. Here was an intelligence – a “rare genius” as proclaimed
on the back of the book – evidencing one last example of its precocity.
Hawking was, of course, a disability icon, possibly the most effec-
tive public figure in rebutting the idea that to have a disability was
to be all-pervasively associated with loss or lack. Hawking’s disabled
body was so obvious, so visceral. His story appeared to be primarily
one of physical decline, from his diagnosis with amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis aged 21 in 1963 to the recognisable later figure in
a wheelchair communicating through voice-assisted communication
technology. But the disability went hand in hand with and did not
restrict the intelligence and achievement, something felt by a public
that would self-admittedly never understand Hawking’s research.
Later, Hawking became a celebrated figure, featuring in The Simpsons
and The Big Bang Theory as an emblematic representation of scien-
tific capabilities, while his life was dramatised in the 2014 feature
The Theory of Everything. The voice produced by his speech technology
became his own voice, owned in the same way as his body was clearly
his body. Hawking’s combination of technology and selfhood was
228 Disability and the Posthuman

an exemplary disability narrative in terms of his embodiment, first

and foremost about everyday life; but it was revelatory in the way it
carried the presence of that embodiment into recognition of his intel-
lectual achievement. His body became the site in which disability met
‘rare genius’.
To call Hawking a cyborg or posthuman figure during his life
seemed almost diminishing, an objectifying gaze that lacks recogni-
tion of his intelligence, possibly even a dehumanising process.2 While
this might be true, much of his experience as an adult was that of
an interaction between human and technology, involving personal
and intimate acts, and the kinds of issues surrounding access and
mobility common to millions of people with disability. If a term such
as cyborg can have the breathless excitement stripped away from it,
then there is much to see in Hawking’s life as evidence of the inter-
section between disability and emerging technology, an experiential
articulation of something that might correctly be identified as ‘post-
human’. If such a view is contentious, however, it does not take much
of a critical twist or linguistic sleight-of-hand to see the posthumous
publication of Brief Answers to the Big Questions as an obviously post-
humanist event: Hawking pontificating on the ‘big questions’ from
an after-human position, new knowledge still evident despite his
death.
The book’s essay on whether artificial intelligence will “outsmart
us” rehearses a familiar rewards vs risks argument about a future
increasingly shaped by A.I. There may well be, Hawking observes, “no
physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that
perform even more advanced computations than the arrangement of
particles in human brains”, while he also notes that “AI can augment
our existing intelligence to open up advances in every area of science
and society”. But, he goes on, “the concern is that AI would take off on
its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are
limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be
superseded”.3 There are few details of future technologies in the essay
(in one Hawking says he believes that “the future of communication is
brain–computer interfaces” and he observes that his disabilities mean
that he finds “appealing” the possibility of “creating realistic digital
surrogates of ourselves”) and it concludes with an appeal to generic
wisdom: “Our future is a race between the growing power of our tech-
nology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that
wisdom wins”.4
For all that Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a posthumous
publication, Hawking’s writing skirts around the idea of endings,
Conclusion 229

possibly sensibly given his knowledge of an expanding universe. His

view of the future is that it is to be approached with caution, that
humanity needs to trust in science and should be guided by appro-
priate competence and the best capacity of human judgment. To those
transhumanists eager for technologies that counter ageing, boost
intelligence or create hyperable bodies, Hawking is perhaps a disap-
pointment, especially because his intelligence is exactly the kind of
quality they would wish to preserve and subsequently learn from.
The transhumanist strand of posthumanism abhors endings, unless
they are the ending of what they consider to be the ignorance of the
present.
Such perspectives on the problematic ending of life appear to be
increasingly common. In To Be A Machine, Mark O’Connell travels
to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in the Sonoran Desert in
Arizona to meet Max and Natasha More. Max More is Alcor’s presi-
dent and CEO and oversees the foundation’s cryopreservation facility.
The facility takes the recently dead bodies of clients who have paid
to have their bodies preserved in anticipation of future scientific
developments that will allow for physical and cognitive regeneration.
O’Connell notes that Alcor’s mission “is presented as a humanitarian
one” but is nevertheless driven by core business concerns and the
need “to expand their customer base”; for all the talk of preserving
life, the frame of its activities is fundamentally and foundationally
capitalistic.5 He also cannot contain other senses he experiences as
he walks through the facility’s corridors: that the place has the air
of suggested religious redemption; that it enacts a strange contem-
porary version of American Manifest Destiny – “boundless national
potential and individual fulfilment”; or that its “morbid ritual” feels
like a “B-movie dismemberment”.6 The people stored at the facility,
O’Connell notes, will never be brought back to life, but this fact
seems to have no effect, indeed is not recognised, on More’s transhu-
manist vision of transcendence.
It is in conversation with Natasha More that O’Connell encoun-
ters the most succinct version of this vision. She dreams of what she
terms “a platform diverse body”, where – as O’Connell summarises
– “the human form itself was entirely replaced by a sleekly anthro-
pomorphic device […] which would be inhabited and controlled by
an uploaded, substrate independent mind”. But, O’Connell wonders,
“wasn’t Natasha’s vision of a wholly mechanized body, of an impen-
etrable shell of technology, also a dream self-portrait – a creative
denial of her own fragility and mortality?” More’s response evidences
a pure transhumanism: “‘If this body fails’, she said, ‘we have to have
230 Disability and the Posthuman

another one. You could die at any moment, and that’s unnecessary
and unacceptable. As a transhumanist, I have no regard for death.
I’m impatient with it, annoyed. We’re a neurotic species – because of
our mortality, because death is always breathing down our necks’”.
For O’Connell, such comments “reminded me of what I had always
found so disturbing about transhumanism. There was the truth of its
premise, that we were all of us trapped, bleeding, marked for death.
And there was the strangeness, that technology could redeem us,
release us from that state […] None of it was remotely plausible, as far
as I was concerned, and yet here we were”.7
Transhumanism is explicit in seeing biological death as a state that
can eventually be avoided. In so doing, it obviously wishes to eradi-
cate disability. Within its own logic, this is a humanitarian good: if
all bodies can be changed, augmented and enhanced, then an end to
disabilities is simply part of a wider process through which humanity
as a species improves and betters itself. Such a position masks more
insidious thinking of course. Inherent in transhumanism’s fear of
death is a hatred of the ageing body and the disabilities that come
with this. In turn, this is a hatred of the body that is seen to be
failing, so that even before old age the disabled body is seen to be a
signifier of something gone wrong, a malfunction or error. This is a
contemporary retelling of humanism’s hatred of disability. Its appeal
to technological knowledge is simply an updated version of an old
story that in its ultimate form leads to genocide and the characterisa-
tion of a ‘life not worth living’. Every transhumanist would deny this
vehemently and yet running through most transhumanist thinking is
a desire to change bodies, and that desire is not limited to the wish to
preserve life.
Given transhumanism’s vision of the future, it might appear coun-
terintuitive to suggest that fundamentally it lacks imagination. But
this is the case. It articulates a sometimes ferocious logic of perfec-
tion and betterment but ignores everything that does not come within
its tunnel vision. As O’Connell walks with Max More through the
Alcor facility, he is struck as much by what is not there, what goes
unacknowledged, as by the various assertions of profundity uttered
by More, so that, for example, More’s excitement at the prospect of
potentially preserving brain activity in cryonically suspended heads
“deflected attention away from the fact that what we were talking
about was severed heads”, a move that O’Connell drily notes was “not
entirely successful”.8 The technical language of the processes – vitrifi-
cation, cephalon, patient care, dewars – literally fails to see, and indeed
masks, the versions of embodiment it produces.
Conclusion 231

There are uncanny similarities between O’Connell’s visit to Alcor

and Don DeLillo’s 2016 novel Zero K. The novel focuses on exactly
the kind of facility overseen by the Mores, even with similarities as
to the location. O’Connell talks of encountering “a squat gray block
of a building” as he arrives at Alcor, in “a landscape reclaimed from
the radiant emptiness” of its desert setting.9 Zero K starts with
its protagonist, Jeffrey Lockhart, arriving “following a marathon
journey” in a desert of “salt flats and stone rubble”, to find “several
low structures, possibly interconnected, barely separable from the
bleached landscape”.10 But where Alcor appears resolutely American
in its mission, the facility in DeLillo’s novel (called the Convergence)
is transnational, located somewhere (it is never precisely named)
between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Where Alcor is a product of
a peculiarly American ideas of the self, the Convergence is made by
global capital; its no-space status is a tribute to the lack of borders in
the international bioeconomy. It erases its location because it has the
power to do so, eradicating the possibility of other spaces; there is no
question that the technology the facility has at its disposal might be
available to anyone outside.
Lockhart has been summoned to the Convergence by his father,
Ross, who wants him to be present at the moment his stepmother
Artis is taken for cryogenic suspension. Ross is a billionaire hedge
fund manager and investor in the facility’s transhumanist project,
and the novel is full of proclamations of what is promised in its vision
of a “future beyond imagining”.11 Jeffrey listens while Ben-Ezra, the
mysterious figure who runs the Convergence, outlines its aims:

We understand that the idea of life extension will generate methods

that attempt to improve upon the freezing of human bodies. To re-engi-
neer the aging process, to reverse the biochemistry of progressive
diseases. We fully expect to be in the forefront of any genuine innova-
tion. Our tech centres in Europe are examining strategies for change.
Ideas adaptable to our format. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is
where we want to be.

“Those of us who are here don’t belong anywhere else”, Ben-Ezra

continues, “We’ve fallen out of history. We’ve abandoned who we were
and where we were to be here […] Those who eventually emerge from
the capsules will be ahistorical humans. They will be free of the flat-
lines of the past, the attenuated minute and hour”.12
While Jeffrey wants to respect the feelings of his family, like
O’Connell he is drawn to everything that is not said or shown at the
232 Disability and the Posthuman

Convergence. “Did such a man have a family?”, he wonders of Ben-Ezra,

“Did he brush his teeth, see a dentist when he had a toothache”.13 The
facility building itself is featureless, a series of levels containing empty
hallways and basic, utilitarian rooms: “Blank walls, no windows, doors
widely spaced, all doors shut”. The doors themselves are “painted in
gradations of muted blue” and when Jeffrey knocks on them he receives
no answer.14 The only objects at the Convergence that deflect from the
logic of its mission are mysterious screens that randomly descend when
Jeffrey walks the silent halls and show images of disaster: tsunamis and
earthquakes destroying buildings, or people being consumed by fire.
In the face of such a seemingly pristine transhumanism, DeLillo
inserts two corrections: language and the complexities of embodied
difference. The idea of a new language is central to the Convergence
project: Ben-Ezra asserts that it will be “a language isolate, beyond all
affiliation with other languages […] To be taught to some, implanted
in others, those already in cryopreservation”, a language that “will
approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathematics in everyday
speech. No similes, metaphors, analogies”.15 But Jeffrey becomes
the vehicle for the novel’s critique of this; he displays an obsession
with linguistic meaning, telling stories of how, in his past, he found
himself forced to look up words in dictionaries, only then to follow
word chains as the referents escaped him. DeLillo notes that to try
to limit language is impossible. Jeffrey narrates how he discovered his
father changed his name from Nicholas Satterswaite to Ross Lockhart
(predictably more masculine but, of course, more revealing in the
choice of surname). He reacts to this recognition of “Names. Fake
names” by inventing names for people he knows, turning words over
as he imagines whether they fit the characters in question.16 He also
brings such creativity to his thinking about his own self, observing
that “certain words seemed to be located in the air ahead of me,
within arm’s reach. Bessarabium, penetralia, pellucid, falafel. I saw myself
in these words”.17 Language swirls around Jeffrey, and it is exactly
this sense of a sliding difference that he brings to his reading of the
Convergence project and its quest for everlasting life.
Language and the imagination, DeLillo asserts, are what tran-
shumanism lacks in its articulation of technological renewal, and it
is the messy, inexact language of fiction – always relative and slip-
ping away – that Zero K gives its readers. The novel as a whole is a
strange and shimmering text, narrated and described as if, no matter
the effort, words cannot fully name the acts, emotions or objects they
encounter. It is full of inexplicable moments that appear to defy defini-
tion: mannequins appear in the facility’s corridors and suggest links
Conclusion 233

to the real naked, shaved bodies that are preserved; Jeffrey debates if
the images on the screen are real footage or computer-generated, only
then to be shocked as what appear to be real people come out of the
screen and run down the corridor towards him. “Do I ask the question
or do I accept the situation passively?” he says to his father early in the
novel; “I want to know the rules”.18 But it turns out that this is Jeffrey
trying to talk to his father in the elder’s terms. His own actual appre-
hension of ‘the rules’ is not something that can be answered in such a
clear and deterministic fashion.
DeLillo makes it clear that the difference of language is inherently
connected to the difference of the body. It is as Jeffrey chases words
following the discovery of his father’s real name, for example, that
he develops a fake limp: “The limp was my faith […] something to
cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person
who was doing this. Define person, I tell myself. Define human, define
animal”.19 It is important to stress here that fake does not mean unreal.
It is precisely this imagining of himself within these shifting definitions
that allows Jeffrey not to submit to the monotonous logic of the novel’s
transhumanism. This is emphasised by those moments when he
encounters people with disabilities, whether inside the Convergence or
beyond its walls. When, early in the novel, he meets a boy in a motor-
ised wheelchair in a corridor he is surprised and “didn’t know what to
say”. As a locater of his identity and to break the silence, Jeffrey says
his own name:

Then he began to speak, or to produce what sounded like a random

noise, a series of indistinct sounds that were not mumbled or stut-
tered but only, somehow, broken. He was expressing his thoughts but
I wasn’t able to detect a trace of any known language, or a nuance of
meaning, and he showed no awareness that he could be understood.

Fixated on the idea of the boy being ‘broken’, he takes his hand
and conjectures on “how much time remained to him. In his phys-
ical impairment, the nonalignment of upper and lower body, in this
awful twistedness I found myself thinking of the new technologies
that would be one day applied to his body and brain, allowing him to
return to the world as a runner, a jumper, a public speaker”.20 Jeffrey’s
immediate reaction to the boy is to see absence and loss, and to
conjecture on a technology-as-cure narrative that will save him from
his disability.
But Jeffrey’s encounters with bodies as the novel progresses change
this. His lack of conviction in the justification the Convergence makes
234 Disability and the Posthuman

for the trajectories its bodies take, and the supposedly straightforward
act of transcendence that underpins the journey, opens up a more
complex version of embodied difference. Through his girlfriend, a
teacher at a school for disabled children, Jeffrey meets a group of chil-
dren with a range of disabilities, “from speech disorders to emotional
problems”. “All these disorders had their respective acronyms”, he
observes, “but she [his girlfriend] said that she did not use them”.
He then notices a boy who, though Jeffrey does not comment on this,
appears to be a version of the boy he had seen at the Convergence:

There is the boy at the end of the table who can’t produce the specific
motor movements that would allow him to speak words that others
might understand. Nothing is natural. Phonemes, syllables, muscle
tone, action of tongue, lips, jaw, palate. The acronym is CAS, she said,
but did not translate the term. It seemed to her a symptom of the
condition itself.21

‘Nothing is natural’. At this moment, DeLillo makes clear the

embodiment of language. Jeffrey connects the body to the physical
production of language but notes that the issue here is whether the
other has ‘words that others might understand’. The words Jeffrey
has heard at the Convergence are often incomprehensible, a babble
of technospeak that he likens to a cult or the speech of religious
prophecy. This moment of speaking/not speaking with the disa-
bled boy is, however, of a piece with the way DeLillo stresses that
language actually works. The two differences converge. The force
of this is confirmed when the boy (still unnamed but again appar-
ently connected to the previous depictions) appears at the end of the
novel, on a bus with Jeffrey in New York, and at that rare Manhattan
moment when the sun aligns with the city’s street grid. “His hands
were curled at this chest”, Jeffrey observes, “half fists, soft and trem-
bling […] The boy bounced slightly in accord with [his] cries and they
were unceasing and also exhilarating, they were prelinguistic grunts.
I hated to think that he was impaired in some way, macrocephalic,
mentally deficient, but these howls of awe were far more suitable than
words”.22 The boy’s disabled difference produces a version of presence
that is superior to any fixed version of language. Rather than the
obsession with the ‘end’ that consumes the transhumanist project of
the Convergence, the boy’s joy at seeing the sun on a cross-town bus
emphasises diversity and difference in the stress on the ‘suitability’ of
language. And, crucially, it does so in the imagined world of fiction,
created through DeLillo’s language and with a sliding, contradictory
Conclusion 235

and impressionistic method that match the complexities of the bodies

it depicts.

There is no grand gesture towards the future with which to conclude

this book, although there is a series of hopes. One is that an under-
standing of the interaction between disability and posthumanism can
become more global, and especially that the formations this interac-
tion take outside of Euro-American locations can drive new theories,
grounded in local specifics, of how bodies find meaning in techno-
logical networks. I hope that the analyses of race and cultural texts
from the Middle East and Japan in this study have moved towards
this, but it is obvious that more work needs to be done.23 Another is
straightforward: that there might be greater clarity of perception that
allows the recognition of the foundational position disability holds
in any consideration of how the nexus of bodies and technologies
work. Scholarship on posthumanism needs to look in even as is looks
out; to consider the everyday and ordinary as much as the allure of
brave new worlds of the beyond. As ever with disability, this involves
greater listening: to the ways disabled lives and experiences are told
and to how these can ground theories of technological futures. A
third hope is that more attention is paid to fiction’s vital place in
the formation of the cultural imaginaries that express, shape and
contain posthumanist bodies. In a world where biotechnologies hold
such power in the articulation of disability it can be easy to forget the
power of stories; yet stories (of all kinds: narrative, episodic, critical,
tenuous, evanescent) are how senses of worlds are made. Ignoring
their power and reach is a failure of imagination, be that personal,
civic or political. Particularly when it is the potentially blank canvas
of futures that is under discussion, the shapes stories make of what
bodies might be are more necessary than ever.
I do not foresee any moment of singularity or the possibility of
shared hyperabilities producing any sudden technological transforma-
tions of lives. I have no great knowledge on this topic, but it is clear
that for all that modernity, whether analogue or digital, has revo-
lutionised how all of us live over the last 150 years, even the most
profound changes have been incremental and multifaceted, and there
is no reason to suppose that this will not be the case in the future.
In developing these ideas, I am drawn towards Nikolas Rose’s subtle
formation of the question in The Politics of Life Itself:

As with our own present, our future will emerge from the intersec-
tion of a number of contingent pathways that, as they intertwine,
236 Disability and the Posthuman

might create something new. This, I suspect, will be no radical trans-

formation, no shift into a world ‘after nature’ or a ‘posthuman future.’
Perhaps it will not even constitute an ‘event.’ But I think, in all manner
of small ways, most of which will soon be routinized and taken for
granted, things will not be quite the same again.24

Rose’s suggestion here that there may be no posthuman future will

disappoint those ardent advocates of posthumanism that foresee
amalgamations and networks of person, machines and environments
that cross the boundaries of human and non-human, whether tech-
nological or species. But this does not mean that these crossings will
not take place, rather that they will not announce their presence with
banners, fireworks and the full ceremony of a radical emergence.
This observation, I would argue, can be understood to be a
disability statement. As I hope this book has shown, interac-
tions between the human and non-human take place all the time
in disability lives and do so in everyday ‘taken for granted’ ways.
Technology, embodiment and disability have been connected for as
long as humans have made interventions in health or responded to
congenital physical differences. This is bound to continue and, as
ever, it will be transformative. But disability transformations are not
the same as those that herald the comings of (some) posthuman
futures. As part of the schemata of the body, disability is the base
for extraordinary theory, versions and visions of embodiment, cogni-
tive states, selfhoods and communities that are rich and complex;
but this theory is, at its, best grounded in material experience. It
is philosophical and situated, abstract and local. It finds, as I hope
I have displayed, common cause with those critical posthumanist
expressions that seek to do justice to the emerging technologised
bodies of the present and to do so through connections to the ways
in which those bodies live. Rose’s ‘contingent pathways’ are many
things and the site of many moments in which complexities come
together: these include not only disabled bodies, properly config-
ured, but also the narratives and stories that are told about them
and their futures. Representations and deployments will continue to
be among the most important ways through which we make sense
of the ever-moving horizon of the present as it takes us, with all our
body shapes, towards whatever the next version of technologised
embodiment may be. As much as ever, we need them to help explain
to (all of) us who we are, and who we might be.
Rose’s pathways are also, of course, the yellow brick roads of Oz
and, in seeing them as such, this book comes full circle. For all the
Conclusion 237

advice to, as the song puts it, “follow the yellow brick road”, it should
be noted that in both books and film there is more than one such road
in Oz. There are in fact numerous crossroads and intersections where
decisions need to be made about which directions to follow and which
paths to take. There is no singular or coherent route and, even then,
as we saw in the preface, there is no guarantee that the Emerald City
will be what it seems when and if there is any arrival: it may well not
be an ‘event’ or promise of a passage home. “The disability to come”,
Robert McRuer observes, “will and should always belong to the time
of the promise”, a promise to “comprehend disability otherwise” and
“collectively, somehow access other worlds and futures”.25 If a passage
along roads becomes both a journey of all types of people, in all forms,
as well as a time of future promise, then it is towards a world worth
making.

Notes

1 Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (London: John Murray,
2018).
2 This did not stop some people from trying of course. The question was a
favourite in internet forums and on question platforms.
3 Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, pp. 187 and 186.
4 Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, pp. 194, 191 and 196.
5 Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers,
and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (London: Granta, 2017),
p. 31.
6 O’Connell, To Be a Machine, pp. 31 and 27.
7 O’Connell, To Be a Machine, pp. 39–40.
8 O’Connell, To Be a Machine, p. 27.
9 O’Connell, To Be a Machine, p. 21.
10 Don DeLillo, Zero K (London: Picador, 2017), p. 4.
11 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 15.
12 DeLillo, Zero K, pp. 126 and 129–130.
13 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 126.
14 DeLillo, Zero K, pp. 10 and 23.
15 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 130.
16 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 104. I considered inserting another mention of the Tin
Woodman, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, here in relation to the clear reso-
nances of ‘Lockhart’ but thought that those who have read this far will have
worked this out for themselves. It is also worth noting that Artis, a Celtic
name meaning ‘noble strength’ is of course only a single letter away from
‘artist’. Max More also changed his surname, from O’Connor to More, to
signal the promise of the world he wishes to enter.
17 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 107; italics in original.
18 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 29.
238 Disability and the Posthuman

19 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 103.

20 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 94.
21 DeLillo, Zero K, pp. 189–190.
22 DeLillo, Zero K, p. 274.
23 In 2006 Julie Livingston noted that “while four-fifths of the world’s disabled
persons live in developing countries, there is a relative dearth of humanities
and social science scholarship exploring disability in non-Western contexts”.
While the situation has improved, it is clear that this imbalance is still
a significant problem, especially given, as Jasbir Puar and Kaushik Sunder
Rajan have noted, one manifestation of a capitalistic posthumanism’s claim
on the makeup of bodies and health is precisely that it can control the avail-
ability of medical technologies in the global South. See Livingston, ‘Insights
from an African history of disability’, Radical History Review 94 (Winter
2006), p. 125, n. 16; as well as the discussion of the problematic relation-
ship between disability and critical postcolonial scholarship in Clare Barker
and Stuart Murray, ‘Disabling postcolonialism: global disability cultures and
democratic criticism’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 3
(2010), pp. 219–236.
24 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), p. 5.
25 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New
York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 208.
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 Index
Index

A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 1–8n6,

162–163, 166, 173 9–10, 12, 14, 31n10, 77
Adam, Alison 85–86 Bauman, Zygmunt 139, 176n22
Ahlaam (2005) 132, 162, 163, 164–167, Beckett, Samuel 96
172 Berger, James 52, 53, 54, 61–62
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) 96 The Disarticulate 52
Alita: Battle Angel (2019) 96 Berger, Thomas
Allan, Kathryn 102, 104 Adventures of the Artificial Woman
Alraune (1928) 104 97–100
Althusser, Louis 38 Bertram, Stephen
American Sniper (2014) 132, 156–159, Hyperculture 220n18
172 Bérubé, Michael 52, 53, 54, 61–62,
Antebi, Susan 54, 218 102
artificial intelligence (AI) 95–100, narrative deployments of disability
116–117, 188, 228 29
Asimov, Isaac 18–19, 74 The Secret Life of Stories 69n62
Atwood, Margaret 79 Blackford, Russell 57, 64
Avengers film franchise 96 Blade Runner 2049 (2017) 91–92, 96
Blade Runner (1982) 91, 96, 104, 112,
Backpacker magazine 40–41 128–129n114
Badmington, Neil 38–39 Bostrom, Nick 55, 71–72n83, 78–79
Balsamo, Anne 78–79, 85–86 Braidotti, Rosi 43–44, 45, 54–55, 64,
Technologies of the Gendered Body 85 78–79, 101, 135, 173–174, 187,
Banks, Iain M. 18–19 204
Barker, Clare 48, 132 feminist engagement with
Battle for Haditha (2007) 155 technology 86–87
Baum, L. Frank 30n8, 48, 150 Metamorphoses 37, 86
Ozma of Oz 8n9 Nomadic Subjects 86
The Patchwork Girl of Oz 8n9, 30n8 Posthuman Knowledge 55, 86
The Tin Woodman of Oz 14–16, 48, The Posthuman 43–44, 86
63, 64, 76–77, 89, 108, 114 Brandt, Michael 193
254 Disability and the Posthuman

Bucciarelli, Louis L. 89, 90, 167–168 Dick, Philip K.

Designing Engineers 83, 84 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Burgess, Olivia 210 96
Burgoyne, Robert 151–152, 153–154 Dillon, Sarah 202, 223n76
Butler, Judith 140, 174 disability
Precarious Life 137, 138 critical disability futures 46–50
Butler, Octavia 18, 19, 126n58 effect of globalisation and context
Xenogenesis trilogy 104 131–134
narrative of rights and activism
Caidan, Martin 24–27
Cyborg 126n58 pace of work and productivity
Čapek, Karel 185–194
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) 182 perceptions of disability as absence
Chambers, Becky 19, 114–121 or loss 39–43, 46–47, 57, 188
A Closed and Common Orbit 103, relationship with technology 55–56,
113–121 147
Record of a Spaceborn Few 103, representations of the ‘War on
112–113, 117–118 Terror’ 131–179
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet speed, sleep and work in posthuman
103, 111–113, 117–118, 119 era 181–225
Chen, Mel 110–111 technologised 7, 9–10, 17, 20–22,
Clark, Andy 56 25, 28
Clarke, Bruce technology and ‘the everywhere
Posthuman Metamorphosis 44 war’ 138–143
Compass (2017) 205 Tin Man transformation narrative
Cooper, Melinda 135, 146, 155, 165, 1–8
172–173 warfare and humanism 172–174
Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and work and employment 22
Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era Downey Jr, Robert 4–5
42–43
Coupland, Douglas 220n20 engineering 17, 19–21, 23, 76–77,
Crary, Jonathan 207, 216 80–91, 95–101, 102–104, 118, 121
24/7 186, 205, 217–218, 224n96 Institute of Mechanical Engineers
Crawford, Cassandra 78–79 code of conduct 122–123n5
robotics 73–76, 80–81
Davidson, Michael 48, 49, 50, 61–62, Royal Academy of Engineering code
131–132, 190, 193, 198, 214 of conduct 122–123n5
Davies, Tony 11 Erevelles, Nirmala 132–133
Davis, Lennard J. 39 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 192
DeLillo, Don Ex Machina (2014) 96, 103, 104–111,
Zero K 231–235 128n90
Der Derian, James Eyler, Joshua R. 8n9
Virtuous War 143
Derrida, Jacques 44–45 Faber, Michael 204–205
design 14–15, 19–20, 23, 76, 77–81 Under the Skin 190, 199–205, 222n67
and disability 82–84, 91 Fanon, Frantz 38
‘imagineering’ 102–103 Federici, Silvia 213
‘lifehackers’ 23 Ferris, Joshua 204, 204–205,
see also engineering 221–222n47
Index 255

The Unnamed 190, 194–199, 204 Halberstam, Judith and Ira

Then We Came to the End 194 Livingston
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour 194 Posthuman Bodies 35–36, 37
Fight Club (1999) 224n103 Hall, Louisa
Filer, Nathan Speak 96–97
The Heartland: Finding and Losing Haraway, Donna 25–26, 78–79, 88, 89,
Schizophrenia 8n8 91, 102, 187
filmmaking in Middle East 162–172 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ 81, 85–86,
Flanagan, Martin, Mike McKenny and 106, 121, 124n45, 139
Andy Livingston Harris, Chad 140–141, 142
The Marvel Studios Phenomenon Hassan, Robert 188, 189, 191–192
8n7 The Empire of Speed 186
Fleming, Victor Hawking, Stephen
The Wiz 4 Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Ford, Martin 186 227–229
The Rise of the Robots 183–184 Hayles, Katherine N. 37–38, 39, 45–46,
Foucault, Michel 38, 137 66n9, 187, 204
Fraser, Brendan How We Became Posthuman 37–38,
Cultures of Representation 134 39, 42
Fukuyama, Francis 43, 55, 78–79 My Mother Was A Computer 42
precarity of posthumanism 43 Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man
(2010) 4
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Her (2013) 91–92, 96
One Hundred Years of Solitude 206 Herbrechter, Stefan 68n35
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 53, 93, Herr, Hugh 78–79
133, 142, 145 Hoffman, E.T.A.
‘disability gain’ 17–18 ‘The Sandman’ 3
Gattaca (1997) 96 humanism
gender 19–20, 21, 47, 79–81, 85–87, considerations of disability 5–6,
90–91, 99–100, 104, 113, 117–118, 11–12
121, 126n59, 200, 205, 213 fear of disability 11–12, 25
posthuman subjects 35, 87, 103 fragility of human body and
posthumanism 21, 78–79 prostheticised self 147–161
robotics 77–79, 78–80, 85–87, normativity of body and self
95–96 9–10
Ghost in the Shell (2017) 63–65, sense of embodied wholeness 3, 6
72n85–97, 91–92, 96 Huxley, Aldous
Gibson, William 96, 111, 112, 125n58 Brave New World 96
Neuromancer 32n16, 128n90 Huyssen, Andreas 92
Goody, Alex 30n8
Graham, Elaine L. I, Robot (2004) 96
Representations of the post/human In My Mother’s Arms (2011) 162
33n20 Insomnia (2002) 205
Grandin, Temple 27, 67n33 Institute of Mechanical Engineers code
Green Zone (2011) 132, 147–151, 154, of conduct 122–123n5
158, 159, 163, 172, 173 Iraq: War, Love, God and Madness (2008)
Gregory, Derek 138–139, 140–141, 142, 162
152–153, 157, 164, 165–166, Iron Man trilogy (2008–2013) 4, 8n7,
168 82, 96
256 Disability and the Posthuman

Jackson, Liz 23, 84 Moravec, Hans 36–37, 78–79, 187

Jackson, Shelley Mind Children: The Future of Robot and
Patchwork Girl 8n9 Human Intelligence 36
Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent
Kafer, Alison 40, 46, 87–91, 95, 102, Mind 36
111, 119, 185, 188 More, Max 78
Feminist, Queer, Crip 40, 87–89 More, Max and Natasha Vita-More 78
Kakoudaki, Despina 66n9, 78–79, 95 The Transhumanist Reader 56,
Anatomy of a Robot 76 70n72
Kang, Minsoo 2, 92–93, 94, 182 More, Natasha 229–230
Kim, Eunjung 46 Morris, Alex 193
King, Stephen Murakami, Hauraki
Insomnia 205 ‘Sleep’ 190, 212–216
Kress, Nancy
Beggars in Spain 206–207 Nakatami, Hajime 64–65
Kroker, Arthur 188 Nayar, Pramod 10–11, 39, 101, 104,
Exits to the Posthuman Future 33n17, 117, 128n106, 139–140, 157, 191,
187–188 204
Kuppers, Petra 59–60 Neill, John R. 31n10
Kurzweil, Ray 78–79 Newitz, Annalee
Kyle, Chris 156–159 Autonomous 96–97
Nussbaum, Martha
Lars and the Real Girl (2007) 96 Frontiers of Justice 25
Latour, Bruno 44–45
Lawrence, D.H. 50 O’Connell, Mark
Levin, Ira To Be a Machine 77–78, 229–231
The Stepford Wives 96 O’Dell, Emily Jane 133–134
Levinas, Emmanuel 137, 207, 216 Oshii, Mamoru 63, 64–65
Livingston, Julie 238n23
Lucy (2014) 96 Palahniuk, Chuck
Luhmann, Niklas 44–45 Fight Club 190, 208–212, 216
Lury, Karen 161 Parker, Harry
Luttwak, Edward 148 Anatomy of a Soldier 177n45
Lykke, Nina 79–80 Pepper (robot) 73–79, 120–121
Lyotard, Jean-François 38 Pepperell, Robert
The Post-Human Condition 39
McEwan, Ian Poe, Edgar Allen
Machines Like Me 219n6 ‘The Man That Was Used Up’ 3
McRuer, Robert 6, 51–52, 53, 54, Porter, James 100, 107
61–62, 132, 185, 189, 237 posthumanism
Making Mr Right (1987) 96, 126n59 artificial ‘person’ 95–100
Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) 96 capitalism and global politics
Mbembe, Achille 135 134–138
Meekosha, Helen 132–133 disability and globalisation 131–134
Metropolis (1927) 91–95, 100 gendered narrative 21, 78–79
Mitchell, David 53, 54, 188–189, 218 ‘imagineering’ female bodies in
Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder science fiction 100–101, 104–111
Narrative Prosthesis 48, 150 initial wave of critical writings
The Biopolitics of Disability 40 35–43
Index 257

pace of work and disability 185–194 Russell, Karen

place of animals in contemporary Sleep Donation 206–207
writing 26–27 Ryan, Frances
posthumanist subjectivity 38 Crippled: Austerity and the
precarity 43–46, 134–138 Demonisation of Disabled People
questions about subjectivity and 46–47
agency 199–205
rereading of the human body 11–12, Samuels, Ellen 53, 204
18–21 Sandberg, Anders 55–56, 56–57, 78–79
Powers, Kevin 154–155 Sanders, Rupert 63
Price, Margaret 185 Savulescu, Julian 55–56
Prince-Hughes, Dawn Schmeink, Lars
Songs of the Gorilla Nation 27 Biopunk Dystopia 101–102
prosthesis 6, 8n9, 16–17, 20, 31n13, Schultz, Robert T. 210
51, 63, 83, 91, 93, 108, 133, 139, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
141–142, 156–160 Epistemology of the Closet 107–108
Puar, Jasbir K. 137–138, 159–160, 166, Shelley, Mary 79
176n26, 238n23 Frankenstein 94–95
Pullin, Graham 90 Shildrick, Margrit 26, 47, 78–79, 98
Design Meets Disability 82–83 Dangerous Discourse of Disability,
Subjectivity and Sexuality 47
Quarmby, Katharine 68n40 Shirow, Masamune 63, 64–65
Scapegoat: How We Are Failing Short, Sue 111, 118
Disabled People 46–47, 189–190 Cyborg Cinema 104, 111
Quayson, Ato 119 Shriver, Lionel
The Mandibles 206–207
Redacted (2007) 155 Siebers, Tobin 17–18, 47, 48–50, 61,
Restrepo (2010) 155–156 108, 150, 190, 210–211
Return to Oz (1985) 4 Disability Aesthetics 48, 50
Robertson, Jennifer 80 Disability Theory 47, 53
Robocop (1987) 82, 96 sleep 22, 184–185, 190, 205–218,
robotics 181–185 224n96
design of ‘female’ robots 79–80 as disability 185
drone warfare 140, 152–153 Smelik, Anneke 144–145
evolution 74–75 Smith, Sherwood 31n10
gendering of 78–80, 85–87 Snyder, Sharon 53, 54, 188–189, 218
‘hypermasculine’ design 81–82, Sobchack, Vivian 78–79, 141
85–86 Son of Babylon (2010) 178n59
‘robo-sexism’ 80–81 Source Code (2011) 132, 141, 143–146,
threat posed to humans in 160, 172, 173
automation of work flows speed 22, 184–194
181–185 contemporary pace of work and
Robots (2005) 4 production 184–194, 203,
Rose, Nikolas 50 220n18
The Politics of Life Itself 46, 235–237 Squier, Susan Merrill 170–171, 174
Rose, Sarah F. Liminal Lives 136–137, 138, 159–160
No Right to Be Idle 221n36 Squires, Judith 85
Rossini, Manuela 102–103 Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams
Royakkers, Lambèr 143 Inventing the Future 184
258 Disability and the Posthuman

Sterling, Bruce 111 van Est, Rinie 143

Schismatrix 96, 128n90 Vidali, Amy 48
Stock, Gregory Vint, Sherryl 16, 32n16, 100–101, 102,
Redesigning Humans 56 103, 114–115
Sunder Rajan, Kaushik 42, 238n23 Bodies of Tomorrow 100–101
Biocapital:The Constitution of Virilio, Paul 188
Postgenomic Life 41 Speed and Politics 186–187
Szollosy, Michael 74, 76 Vonnegut, Kurt
Player Piano 96, 125n56
Tate, Andrew 197, 199
Terminator trilogy (1984–2003) 96 Walker, Matthew
The Color of Paradise (1999) 162 Why We Sleep 216–217
The Hurt Locker (2008) 132, 141, ‘War on Terror’ 17, 42–43, 131–132,
151–154, 159, 160, 167, 172 137–138, 173–174
The Little Tin Man (2013) 4 Weeks, Kathi
The Perfect Woman (1949) 104 The Problem With Work 184
The Stepford Wives (1975) 96 Weird Science (1985) 96, 104, 126n59
The Yellow Birds (2017) 154–155 Wendell, Susan 185, 188
Thompson, Ruth 31n10 Westworld (1973) 96
Tin Woodman 30n8, 48, 63 Wilson, Daniel H.
actions driven by humanist concerns Robopocalypse 219n6
16–17 Wolfe, Cary 33n24, 44–45, 67n33, 81
disability narrative 5–6, 12–14, 21 What is Posthumanism? 44
loss of humanity 2 Wong, Danielle 109–110
transformation 1–8 Woo, Geoffrey 193
as trope in contemporary media Woolf, Virginia 50
4–5 work 17, 19–20, 22, 189–192, 194–198,
Toffoletti, Kim 86–87 200–203, 205, 209–216
Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls 66n9, 86 automation technology 181–182,
Tomlinson, John 187, 188, 189, 191, 183–185
201, 203 Wosk, Julie 80–81
The Culture of Speed 186 My Fair Ladies 80
Tramontane (2016) 162, 163
Transcendence (2014) 96 X-Men film franchise 58–63, 71n78,
transhumanism 55–56 82, 96
avoiding death 229 X2: X-Men United (2003) 58–63
Turtles Can Fly (2004) 132, 166–172,
172 Yuknavitch, Lidia 79
The Book of Joan 33n21, 96–97
Under the Skin (2013) 96
Underexposure (2005) 162 Zoe (2018) 96, 126n59