The Tiger Flu: a critical posthumanist response to the Illusion of transhumanism

Calvo Pascual, Mónica Carolina (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018) is an example of speculative fiction set in a dystopian context of climate devastation marked by a struggle for the global control of knowledge and the economy on the part of two opposed technological corporations in a futuristic North American region dominated by Old China. This article analyzes how the novel builds a critique upon the excesses and potential risks of current transhumanist philosophy, engaged in the technological enhancement of human beings, and the concurrent social exclusion and exploitation of the underprivileged minorities barred from access to it. My aim is to demonstrate that the ethical alternative proposed by the novel embraces the postulates of critical posthumanism defended by leading theorists like N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, who put forth a postanthropocentric position of embodied embeddedness as opposed to other posthumanist approaches, like cybernetic posthumanism, which vindicated the transcendence of the human mind by dislodging it from the body.

Idioma: Inglés

Año: 2021

Publicado en: Hélice 7, 1 (2021), 99-110
ISSN: 2792-3452

Originalmente disponible en: Texto completo de la revista

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/H03-17R
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2019-106855GB-I00

Tipo y forma: Article (Published version)

Área (Departamento): Área Filología Inglesa (Dpto. Filolog.Inglesa y Alema.)