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Francesco Bottone, Independent Scholar, ItalyAbstract
This paper examines how contemporary British fiction deploys posthuman and transhuman figures to interrogate the political mechanisms through which human value is allocated, withdrawn, and technologically managed. Focusing on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun together with Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, it argues that these novels stage worlds in which biotechnology and artificial intelligence intensify rather than abolish entrenched hierarchies of recognition. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notions of grievability and precarity and on feminist posthumanist theory, the paper traces differential regimes of value across biological, synthetic, and hybrid bodies. It develops the concept of protective disposability to describe how care can coexist with instrumentalisation, allowing bodies to be protected or cherished while their value remains conditional on the purposes they serve. Reading Ishiguro’s Morningdale episode alongside the stratification of lifted and unlifted children in Klara and the Sun reveals how technological intervention is accepted when it reinforces existing distributions of advantage and feared when it threatens them. Winterson’s gynoids expose the same politics of value through gendered commodification, sexual availability, and the structural impossibility of refusal. The paper contends that these texts resist both techno-optimist and apocalyptic narratives by foregrounding disposability as a structuring logic of contemporary life. Through close readings of biomedical extraction, enhancement, artificial companionship, and technological substitution, it suggests that British posthuman fiction does not simply imagine what comes after the human, but diagnoses how late-modern societies reorganise humanity along axes of usefulness, vulnerability, and replaceability.
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Conference: ECAH2026Stream: Humanities - Literature/Literary Studies*
This paper is part of the ECAH2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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