Girl parts: The female body,subjectivity and technology in posthuman young adult fiction

Abstract

Futuristic fantasy fiction that is produced for female adolescent readers offers a vision of the relationship between the female body, feminine subjectivity and technology that is both unique and ideologically complex because of the way in which it simultaneously interrogates and adheres to liberal humanist conceptualisations of the subject. This article examines three contemporary works of young adult fiction — Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (2005), The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson (2008) and ‘Anda’s Game’ by Cory Doctorow (2008) — in light of Donna Haraway’s emancipatory vision of the cyborg, investigating how such narratives construct the ideological relationship between technology and feminine subjectivity.

Keywords

cyborgs embodiment non-representational theory performativity posthumanism representations of subjectivity technology and literature young adult fiction

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