THE POTENTIAL OF POSTHUMANISM: REIMAGINING UTOPIA THROUGH BELLAMY, ATWOOD, AND SLONCZEWSKI by JACOB MCKEEVER Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2014 Copyright © by Jacob McKeever 2014 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements Though on the surface it was the smallest of gestures, this journey could not have begun without Dr. Kevin Gustafson, graduate advisor of English at the time, whose course suggestions helped this once ignorant anthropology major turned hopeful English graduate student begin this path. To Dr. Kenneth Roemer, thesis chair and director, thank you immensely for your insightful comments and guidance throughout this process. Not only were you the ideal committee chair, you were a constant figure of optimism throughout my time in the English program. To Dr. Stacy Alaimo and Dr. Timothy Richardson, committee members, my greatest appreciation goes out for your initial willingness to be a part of this committee and your eventual patience during the final stages. I sincerely appreciate all of you for your roles in both this process and my successful completion of this program. Most importantly, I want to acknowledge my family as my main inspiration and motivation. To Ashley, for subjecting yourself to my endless drafts and for your unending patience every day. And to Alec and Zoe, whose dad can finally come out and play. November 19, 2014 iii Abstract THE POTENTIAL OF POSTHUMANISM: REIMAGINING UTOPIA THROUGH BELLAMY, ATWOOD, AND SLONCZEWSKI Jacob McKeever, M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2014 Supervising Professor: Kenneth Roemer In this thesis, I focus on posthumanist theory, utopia, and the evolving portrayal of technology in the novels of Edward Bellamy, Margaret Atwood, and Joan Slonczewski. The main argument of this thesis is that there is a posthumanist potential within utopia that can be seen as fermenting within Bellamy’s Looking Backward as a way to eliminate social stratification, showing potentiality within Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as a way to open up an other-than-human agency in the form of transgenic organisms, and becoming fully realized in Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean through an all-female, alien civilization that is fully grounded in a material posthumanist world-view of reciprocity, balance, and embeddedness within a larger web of life. In terms of methodology, I draw out this potential posthumanism by focusing on how technology is portrayed in the context of each novel’s categorization in the utopian genre. Specifically, where the relatively traditional and simple utopian form of Looking Backward portrays technology as an abstracted, inevitable force of utopia, both Oryx and Crake and A Door Into Ocean reflect transformations within the utopian genre that result in more complex works, thus portraying equally complex views of technology and scientific epistemologies as intimately tied to social structure, philosophy, and world-view. The result is that technology can be seen as an intrinsically good, driving force of utopia iv in Looking Backward, a more complex biotechnological tool of transcendence for humanity and a possible path to either utopia or dystopia in Oryx and Crake, or fully integrated into a posthumanist society in A Door Into Ocean, whose posthumanist philosophy of reciprocity and material embeddedness quells the transcendent nature of technology and leads to a fully realized posthumanist eutopia. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iv Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Overview of Thesis ................................................................................................. 3 1.2 Background ............................................................................................................. 6 1.2.1 What Is Posthumanism .................................................................................... 6 1.2.2 What is Utopia ............................................................................................... 13 1.2.2.1 Traditional Definitions and Terminology ................................................. 15 1.2.2.2 Utopianism and Social Change .............................................................. 20 1.3 Justifications ......................................................................................................... 23 Chapter 2 Looking Backward to Move Forward: Bellamy’s Utopian Hope ...................... 28 2.1 Genre, Time-period, and Social Reform ............................................................... 30 2.2 Technology: An Abstract Guiding Force ............................................................... 36 2.3 A Burgeoning Posthumanism ............................................................................... 43 2.4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 53 Chapter 3 Transcendent Technology: Rationalizing the Critical Dystopia of Oryx and Crake ............................................................................................................... 57 3.1 From Dystopia to Critical Dystopia: Blurring Genres in Oryx and Crake ............... 59 3.1.1 Dystopia to Critical Dystopia .......................................................................... 60 3.1.2 Blurring Genres.............................................................................................. 63 3.2 Compounds .......................................................................................................... 66 3.3 Biotechnology: The Real and the Imagined .......................................................... 71 3.4 Environment .......................................................................................................... 80 3.5 Posthumanist Implications .................................................................................... 84 vi 3.5.1 Hybridity, Liberation, and the Imaginary Landscape ...................................... 85 3.5.2 Rationalizing Crake’s Desire .......................................................................... 89 3.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 94 Chapter 4 Oppositional Cultures: A Door Into Ocean as Posthumanist Eutopia ............................................................................................................................ 97 4.1 Genre and Utopia ............................................................................................... 100 4.2 Hobbesian Social Contract: Rationalizing Patriarchal Force ............................... 107 4.2.1 The Patriarch as Sovereign ......................................................................... 108 4.2.2 Sovereign Power to Biopower ..................................................................... 110 4.3 Binary Structures: Undermining Sovereignty ...................................................... 112 4.3.1 Posthumanist World-View: Reciprocity and Relationality ............................. 113 4.3.2 Social Stratification ...................................................................................... 117 4.3.3 Centralized Authority ................................................................................... 121 4.4 Posthumanist Eutopia: Lifeshaping Technology ................................................. 126 4.5 Conclusion and Comparisons ............................................................................. 133 Chapter 5 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 138 References .................................................................................................................... 148 Biographical Information ............................................................................................... 153 vii Chapter 1 Introduction “How, utopias ask, can we ensure food, shelter, safety, and fulfillment for all human beings? And what could be more important, more fundamental?” Lyman Tower Sargent, “Choosing Utopia” Perhaps the fact that Lyman Tower Sargent’s assertion that the fundamental question that utopia must ask is, in fact, human-centered is all the justification necessary to write a thesis on utopia and posthumanism. However, perhaps a better use of Sargent’s question is to situate it in a more appropriate context. In this way, it is no wonder that we find our starting point for this thesis just before the turn of the twentieth century and towards the end of the industrial revolution, a movement of industrial and technological progress that held the utopian perception of serving to not only answer Sargent’s proposed questions but also extending this utopian hope as a means for socio- economic and socio-political equality (Roemer, “Paradise Transformed” 82). Popularized by utopians of the late nineteenth century, the path to utopia rested on the notion that technological progress was not only inevitable but that it was intrinsically good. However, the progression of the