What Makes LEGO LEGO?: An Interview with Jonathan Rey Lee (Part Two)

While the idea of creating a toy for both boys and girlswas part of the brand message from the start, you critique the implicit and explicit construction of gender around the brand. What are the mechanisms by which gender ideologies are structured into the LEGO culture?

 This is such an important question!  Countless commercial toys are marketed as if children’s gendered differences came already fully formed, although toys absolutely contribute to gendered socialization.  Childhood is an incredibly formative time for establishing social identities, so we need to interrogate why our contemporary children’s culture is so strongly gendered. I am no child psychologist so this is a bit of a hot take, but I might go so far as to say that our society will never be able to develop a genuinely equitable gender dynamic without also reimagining children’s culture.  

Some of the feminized stereotypes of LEGO Friends on display in a Toys R Us (photo by Jonathan McIntosh).

 The most clearly gendered dynamic I explore in the book is the feminized stereotypes of the LEGO Friends product line, which hits pretty much every cliché from the pink-and-purple pastels to the preponderance of fluffy animals and cupcakes.  This has drawn a lot of well-deserved criticism from LEGO fans, parents, activists, and scholars, so it’s important to keep digging deeper into how gendered dynamics unfold pretty much anywhere you look with LEGO.  Subtle gendered ideologies popped up no matter what I was intending to analyze, often having to do with the masculinization of core aspects of LEGO play (such as the rational organization of suburban spaces in the Town Plan or the action-packed militarized play of LEGO Star Wars). 

 I also consider how LEGO bodies play with assumptions about embodied gender and how LEGO problematically masculinizes construction play and feminizes social play.  This shows that gendering is not just something children bring to toys but is also ideologically infused into the toys themselves.  Like many who grew up loving LEGO, I find this deeply disappointing because I personally believe LEGO could appeal to both girls and boys without relying on such reductive stereotypes.  

 LEGO is often discussed as fostering open-ended creativity and there has been some critique of the rise of playsets, especially those linked to particular media franchises, as scripting children’s play. Yet, you suggest the situation is more complex than this.  From the start, you suggest LEGO has been shaped by tensions between “freedom and constraint.” Explain. 

 This is one of the first things people mention when I talk about the cultural impact of LEGO and it’s easy to see why. Intuitively, a Star Wars playset feels more scripted than a generic space set and a generic space set feels more scripted than a simple box of bricks.  This is not wrong per se, but we can nuance this narrative in a few ways. 

 Briefly, the first way to complicate this narrative is to recognize that there was no moment in LEGO history where the system consisted entirely of random abstract blocks.  LEGO was always representational, ideological, and socializing.  In the book, for instance, I explore how the early Town Plan that popularized LEGO toys was based on a strongly suburban ideology with clear socializing tendencies (brand logos like Esso and Volkswagen appeared on LEGO sets as early as 1956).  It’s important to avoid nostalgically overstating early LEGO abstraction in ways that unintentionally make it harder to see and critique the scripts that have accompanied LEGO all along.  

This early set from 1961 shows that LEGO was never just abstract blocks. The bricks themselves contain clearly architectural elements and the road signs and Esso logo clearly represent particular cultural institutions.

 The second way to complicate this narrative is to see freedom and constraint as two sides of the same coin.  LEGO creativity is a form of bricolage, the creative reassembly of already significant elements.  LEGO is all about discovering new possibilities within the things you already have, which is to say it’s all about finding freedom in constraints. Every time LEGO weaves a fragment of ideological content into its design, it simultaneously adds to the scripts that constrain play and adds new meaningful elements to play with.  In other words, LEGO scripting is inextricable from LEGO’s creative possibility space.  So, instead of characterizing constraints as simply limiting creative freedom, this book asks critical questions about how what kinds of ideological entanglements this interplay of freedom and constraint produces.  

 Your book identifies five “playscripts” surrounding LEGO play, each of which links to larger histories of the logics of children’s play. Can you break these down for us?

 If toys are things and play is an activity, playscriptsare explicit messages or implicit norms that suggest how toys are to be played with (Robin Bernstein has done fantastic workon toys as scriptive thingswhere she breaks down this idea in much more detail). Like theatrical scripts, toy playscripts prompt players to play in certain ways while also leaving space for interpretation and expression.  Unlike theatrical scripts, toy playscripts tend to be more implicit and function more like ideologies or social norms.  In this way, toy playscripts are perhaps closer to improv theater—a set of broad guidelines and constraints for how a scene might play out with a significant degree of freedom in how to reinterpret or reassemble the given elements.The five playscripts I name in this book, which can overlap and combine in interesting ways, are construction play, dramatic play, digital play, transmedia play, and attachment play:

o  Construction play is what people might first think of when they think of LEGO: the piecing together of physical bricks into structures.  While it’s tempting to think of this physical construction as abstract or neutral, LEGO has been scripting construction play according to an ethos of suburban architectural design that continues to shape the medium.

o  Dramatic play is what people might first think when they think of dolls: the puppeteering of characters to dramatize scenes or stories.  This involves creatively reassembling fragmented storytelling props to build new scenes.  With LEGO, players literally build the stages for their dramatic play, which significantly complicates the scripting of such performances (including adding a problematic gendered dynamic).

o  Digital play might make people think first of videogames, but I see digitality as something that bridges material and virtual spaces.  This only makes sense if we move beyond only thinking of digitality in terms of the technology involved (videogames use so-called ‘digital’ technology) to the type of thinkinginvolved.  So, I look at how all LEGO play—material and virtual—plays with digital ways of thinking, like how discrete, indivisible LEGO elements are pieced together into larger assemblages.

o  Transmedia play is an evolution of dramatic play in which the core narrative elements are drawn from licensed media franchises.  This is interesting because transmedia play in LEGO usually involves translating narrative media (which tell canonical stories) into playscripts (principles for telling player-created stories) associated with a play medium (LEGO).  So, a child playing with LEGO Star Wars may feel pulled simultaneously by the sometimes-conflicting scripts of the source narratives, the LEGO media narratives, and the toys themselves.  

o  Attachment play is more about the larger cultural idea that playing together is a way to reinforce social bonds.  In a sense, the material connectivity of LEGO serves as a metaphor for the social connectivity of people playing with LEGO.  I explore this through how the characters in The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Movie 2mediate their relationships primarily through the toy stories they tell with LEGO.  

Jonathan Rey Lee researches material play media, especially toys and board games. He has published articles on LEGO, Catan, and the Star Wars CCG. His book Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside, where he studied nineteenth-century realist novels and philosophy (especially Wittgenstein). He currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities and writing courses for the University of Washington and Cascadia College.

What Makes LEGO LEGO?: An Interview with Jonathan Rey Lee (Part One)

Sometime in the late 1960s, Santa Claus brought me my very first LEGO set. My brother and I spent hours assembling houses and other structures using its distinctive snap-on bricks. I am pretty sure those original bricks ended up in a random bucket at our family lake house where for decades to come it would be a good way to spend rainy days when we couldn’t go out and swim or boat. I was never a hardcore LEGO fan — not of the kind we’ve heard so much about since but like most children of my generation, LEGO lurks in some distant memories.

This is one of many stories one can tell about LEGOS. My old MIT colleague Eric Von Hipple has used LEGO’s relations with its most dedicated consumers as a primary example to illustrate his concept of Lead Users. We featured Matthew Shifrin on our How Do You Like It So Far? podcast not very long ago, discussing his campaign to get the company to offer braille versions of their instructions to support the wide interest the product enjoys amongst the visually impaired. And last year, I enjoyed the reality competition program, LEGO Masters, which issued a series of challenges to some dedicated brick builders.

Jonathan Rey Lee’s Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play offers a number of other stories and insights, discussing LEGO as both a toy company and a media producer. This is a book that will be of much interest to my readers who are concerned with the study of play, children’s culture, transmedia storytelling, and participatory culture, and that surely covers most of you. At first, I wondered how anyone could fill a book theorizing this deceptively simple product, but the deeper we get into this substantive analysis, the more I wanted to learn. Lee writes with wit and thoughtfulness, tracing diverse conceptual frames by which we might reflect on LEGO’s impact on contemporary culture and showcasing diverse projects (commercial, artistic) to which LEGOS have been applied. I am delighted to share just a small glimpse into what you can learn from Lee’s book in the interview which follows.

An image of Deconstructing LEGO photographed by Aaron Legg, whose Storm Trippin’ brickfilms starring the two depicted minifigure characters are featured in one of the book’s Post-scripts.

Let's start with the basic question: Why write a book about LEGO?

Well, the short answer is that it was largely a series of fortunate accidents.  The long answer goes back to a transformative encounter I had as an undergraduate with J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant novel Foe, which exposed the central ideological fictions of colonialism by rewriting the classic tale of Robinson Crusoe.  This encounter inspired me to study literature and haunted me well into graduate school, where I found myself searching for critical frameworks to help articulate my feelings toward this novel. After exploring a variety of perspectives, I thought I’d see what Adaptation Studies had to offer, so I set my sights on attending the Penn Humanities Forum on Adaptation.  This was in 2012.  I really wanted to participate but didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute to discussions of literature-to-film adaptation, so I was frantically searching for a different way in.  I eventually came up with the idea of presenting LEGO Star Warsas a form of playful adaptation.  

I had such great conversations at the forum that I started thinking it would be worth trying to refine my presentation into an article, but when I started researching the topic in earnest, I was completely shocked at how little scholarship I could find (quick shoutout to the often-unheralded Maaike Lauwaert, who should be credited as an early pioneer in studying LEGO).  Even though recent years have shown a marked uptick in publications, there can’t be many pop culture phenomena with more widespread cultural impact and less published scholarship than LEGO.  

Unable to find the theoretical frameworks I needed, I ended up writing a more philosophical article on LEGO to serve as a background theory and again set out to write the LEGO Star Wars article.  I just kept collecting material and brainstorming ideas until I had maybe 60 single-spaced pages of text and no clue about how to make it cohere into a single article.  I had already started drafting the book I was intending to write on literary reference and the philosophy of language when I realized that my fun little side project had somehow become more book-like than my main project.  In the end, I just threw up my hands and decided that this seemed to be happening anyway, so I might as well just roll with it. 

I suppose I’d say that rather than making a conscious decision to study LEGO, I just kept following my intuition as a researcher until I ended up writing the book that I would have liked to have read back in 2012.  

You tell us that LEGO is a “toy medium” and a “media toy.” Explain the distinction you are making here. Why is it important to you to think of LEGO as a “toy” as opposed to others you cite who discuss it as a building material or tool?

I used that kind of mirrored language because I wanted to commit to a both/and approach (instead of an either/or approach) that could explain LEGO as a genuine hybrid that fully embodies the characteristics of both toy and medium.  The nuance between the two terms is that “toy medium” indicates how LEGO deploys its toy elements as part of a complex meaning-making system (medium), while “media toy” indicates how LEGO situates its toys within larger media franchises, including both its own LEGO brand and many licensed tie-ins.  A toy like Meccano is more toy medium than media toy and a toy like G.I. Joe is more media toy than toy medium, but LEGO fits squarely in both camps.  

I would say that much of what makes LEGO interesting comes from how it bridges toy and medium.  At the same time, I find it particularly telling that there seems to be more resistance to treating LEGO as a toy (which seems blatantly obvious) than to treating LEGO as a medium (which seems much less obvious).  Although I don’t think anyone honestly believes that LEGO is nota toy, I do see fans and scholars occasionally trying to downplay its toy status to divert attention to how LEGO functions as a ‘serious’ medium.  At its core, I believe this reflects a deeply ingrained cultural bias that trivializes everything to do with childhood, play, and toys.  This is the sentiment that the father in The LEGO Movie expresses when he argues that LEGO is ‘not a toy’ to justify his adult hobbyist play and his exclusion of his son from that play.  

A novelty shirt that quotes the father from The LEGO Movie arguing that LEGO is “not a toy.”

While I understand the temptation to overstate things when cultural pressures trivialize what you care about, this kind of thinking can damage pop culture scholarship by reinforcing the misguided notion that some parts of culture are worthy of study and some are not.  However, when we recognize that popular culture phenomena are always worthy of study because they are meaningful to people, we can better understand the depth of our cultural practices.  While people have certainly done many ‘serious’ things with LEGO, I believe the most serious thing about LEGO is how its toys have shaped generations of children’s play.  

You write, “While I believe LEGO has incredible potential for promoting creativity, being a product of a capitalist system means that LEGO is necessarily branded and commodified in ways that ideologically inflect the kinds of creativity it promotes.” What do you see as the potentials and what do you see as the constraints that come with LEGO?

LEGO has many ways of promoting creativity, so I’ll answer this first from the material perspective and then again from the ideological perspective.  Materiality matters for any toy or medium because that’s where creative thinking becomes real.  So, the creative potential of LEGO starts with its well-designed material system—how the bricks click together.  I am constantly amazed by how LEGO makes such a wide, flexible possibility space so accessible and fun.  Children build genuinely creative things with LEGO bricks, while dedicated artists and fans build things of jaw-dropping beauty and complexity from the same pieces. 

Of course, like any medium, LEGO has material limitations.  But many of those limitations only add to the unique creative problem solving needed to build with LEGO.  So, I’d say the main material detriment is just that LEGO is extremely expensive. Ink and paper (and word processing) are extremely cheap, so my creative vision for novel-writing will run out long before my material resources will.  Most LEGO builders experience the opposite—their collection runs out long before their creative vision.  So, our ability to be creative in LEGO is directly impacted by our ability to participate in LEGO consumption, which raises vital questions of economic access.  

 Ideologically, LEGO genuinely values creativity but also has a branded vision of what creativity looks like.  In something of a spin-off article in the Cultural Studies of LEGO, I deconstruct how LEGO Foundation research reports on creativity and The LEGO Movie construct a particular vision of creativity again tied to capitalist consumption.  This is symptomatic of a larger trend in consumer culture toward thinking that the best ways to promote educational or creative development in children are to buy more and more of the ‘right’ products.  So, the issue here is not that LEGO stifles creative expression but rather that LEGO sells particular visions of creativity that strongly suggest certain potentially problematic values.  

 No toys are entirely neutral, so there’s not much point in arguing against ideological content in toys altogether. Nor do I think the LEGO ideologies are uncomplicatedly bad.  Still, I want to challenge some of these ideologies because—let’s face it—we live in a culture where corporate authorship plays a major role in children’s ideological formation, and even benevolent corporations are not always rewarded for promoting more ethical ideologies over more profitable ones.  I believe my responsibility as a media scholar is to deconstruct corporately-authored media products—not necessarily so that we can change a company’s trajectory as consumer activists (although it’s great when that happens), but because nuanced critical understandings are some of our best antidotes against being captivated by corporately-constructed ideologies.  

You place LEGO alongside Froebel’s gifts, building blocks (and I might add, erector sets and Lincoln Logs). What distinguishes LEGO from earlier generations of construction toys? In other words, what makes LEGO LEGO?

“Construction toys” is already an odd, somewhat fuzzy category.  It might make more sense to think of “construction toys” as naming several parallel histories, including that of abstract educational/developmental toys like building blocks, that of engineering-oriented toys like Meccano and Erector Set, and that of architectural toys like Richter Blocks and Lincoln Logs.  And even within these particular histories, each different construction system has its own unique material characteristics that provide highly distinctive play experiences.  In particular, one of the most distinctive things that makes LEGO LEGO is how it draws a little bit from each of these three traditions, simultaneously promoting abstract, engineering-oriented (especially TECHNIC), and architectural thinking.  

And more than mixing different construction toy traditions, LEGO is also a hybrid between construction toys and other toy genres such as dolls, action figures, and playsets.  Consequently, LEGO promises distinct and sometimes contradictory kinds of play in ways that sometimes send mixed messages about what kind of toy it is.  For example, one core LEGO strategy is the “hard fun” mentality of advertising the implicit developmental benefits of a construction toy masked within bright, thematic, consumer-oriented play.  A big part of what this book is about is deconstructing the sometimes strange, sometimes questionable ideological formations that arise when LEGO tries to hold all these types of meaning together.  

 Jonathan Rey Lee researches material play media, especially toys and board games. He has published articles on LEGO, Catan, and the Star Wars CCG. His book Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside, where he studied nineteenth-century realist novels and philosophy (especially Wittgenstein). He currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities and writing courses for the University of Washington and Cascadia College.

Feeding the Civic Imagination: Call for Papers

The Civic Paths research group invites you to contribute to a special issue of the cultural studies journal, Lateral. Details are below.

Forum: Feeding the Civic Imagination!

Abstract proposals of 200 words due July 30, 2021 (form)
Completed submissions of 2,000 words due January 15, 2022

You stroll by a bakery. The door opens, spilling the smell of fresh bread onto the street. You cannot resist. Soon you hold a warm loaf in your hands. Your fingers scrape the flaky golden-brown crust. Will you taste it or wait to share it? Will you be motivated to learn more about where this food came from? Will you be inspired to embark on your own baking adventure? Or, perhaps you stumble onto a cooking video on YouTube. Mesmerized, you watch spices sizzle before other ingredients are added to create a Punjabi-style cauliflower sabji. Before you know it, you are transported to another time and place, immersed in a memory of a meal shared many years ago. In an instant, the past collides with the present, inviting you to weave together the sprawling connections that are revealed.

Food can nourish and inspire us. Food can be used to shame us. Food can connect us to each other. Food can divide us. Food can remind us of the past. It can also inspire us to think about the future, to imagine culinary possibilities, even as we encounter real world constraints, tensions, and challenges. With a mindfulness towards how food has historically often been used in framing racist, gendered, ableist, fatphobic, heteropatriarchal, colonialist, and ethnonationalist imaginings of civic participation, we aim to channel our collective energies and shared emotions in relation to food to pave the way for tangible social change. It’s not about choosing one food item over another. It’s about reaffirming and challenging our beliefs in the power of food to protect our rights and fight for justice. It’s about charting paths through the creative, ambivalent, or painful ways that food shows up in our lives. How can we imagine more just and inclusive ways to involve food in civic imagining?

Help us explore these connections! This is a call to practitioners, artists, community leaders, scholars, and others who want to share their lived and observed experiences with baking, cooking, and eating as a shared, emotional, critical, challenging, creative, civic, even nostalgic experience. We invite you to contribute to a Lateral Forum focused on food and civic imagination, curated by the Civic Paths Group at the University of Southern California. The Civic Paths Group explores continuities between online participatory culture and civic engagement through outreach, creative work, popular culture, storytelling, research, and academic inquiry. 

We define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic Imagination is the foundation of a greater process in which members of a society come together to share their memories and future change they want to see in their world. We think of imagination as a force with power, and collective imaginations as civic arenas where serious issues can be explored, critiqued, and aspirational futures can be crafted through, among other things, eating, cooking, and baking. Whether it is cooking a recipe passed down over generations, fighting food injustice, valuing the fleeting experience of a shared meal, relearning how we relate to what we eat, exploring a flavor combination learned over YouTube, or deepening the connections we make by sharing our bakes on social media in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, food has the power to connect, challenge, and inspire us.

For this Lateral Forum, we welcome contributions focusing on different dimensions of the relationships (emergent and long standing) between appreciating and questioning food, cooking, baking, imagination, and memory. Some questions of special interest include:

• How does food inspire or stifle an inclusive imagination? How can we encourage ways to involve food in civic imagination and debates on justice?

• How can we inspire our shared imagination as we prepare meals, serve dishes and eat what we made? How does food connect with our memories and aspirations?

• How can the media and popular culture support food and civic imagination? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? How to reckon with the history and heritage of the food we fuse?

• How do we connect imagination, cooking, and political meaning?

• How can we confront the structural barriers and limitations around food justice, that go beyond a poor food system onto the legacies of settler colonialism?

• How can we resist and imagine alternatives to (racist, sexist, ableist) power structures that dictate who and which bodies are “allowed” to interact with foods?

• What has the pandemic taught us about food and framing the imagination? What examples and approaches need to be documented at this moment in time?

• How can we cook with civic imagination? What are the “recipes” that could guide us?

• How do we want cooking practices to look like in the future?

We aim to create a space for these conversations around food and the civic imagination. We are open to experiences, case studies, annotated recipes, or critical short pieces that provoke thought and reflection. Written submissions should adhere to the 2,000 word limit. Media-rich and interactive pieces that make use of Lateral as an open-access, web-based platform will be scoped on a case-by-case basis.

"I Don't Want to Be Flesh": Feminist Transhumanism in Years and Years (Part Two)

“I Don’t Want to Be Flesh”: Feminist Transhumanism in Years and Years (Part Two)

by Daisy Reid

This brings me to the second half of this study, which explores the ways in which Bethany’s representation in Years and Years frustrates both the hyper-masculine tropes commonly attached to transhumanist doctrine, and popular feminist technoscientific understandings of cyborgian human-technology configurations, in order to open up an undertheorized category of what we might term feminist transhumanism.

Feminist interventions such as Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto have long considered the philosophical and political implications of our multitudinous bodily entanglements with technology: “We are all chimeras,” Haraway famously writes, “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (7). Emphasising boundary porosity as a site of socialist-feminist potential, Haraway’s cyborg is ultimately a celebration of multiplicity, insisting that such distinctions as human/machine, human/animal, and natural/artificial are ultimately untenable in a world where everyone can be partly someone else.

In attempting to anchor Davies’ representation of Bethany Lyons within a theoretical framework, Haraway’s cyborg is certainly a seductive, if not the default, figure to explore. When Bethany’s body is fully integrated with technological interfaces, with transmitters embedded in her fingers and cameras fitted into her eyes, she becomes a hybrid being imbued with a radical new potential to enact political disruption – and this, it should be noted, she eventually does, by using her tech to expose government-sponsored death camps throughout the UK. As such, she seems the epitome of the “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (14) that lie at the heart of Haraway’s feminist cyborg myth. 

However, posthuman[1]thinkers such as Katherine Hayles have suggested that the Harawayian cyborg is in fact “no longer the most compelling metaphor through which to understand out contemporary situation” (165). Hayles suggests that, as a figure defined by its boundary-crossing potential, Haraway’s cyborg remains somewhat paradoxically invested in the very existence of the binaries and split it purports to refute.

To put it another way, if Bethany’s implants are what make her a cyborg, then the label “cyborg” becomes locked to certain bodies – thereby suggesting an essentialised difference between such tech-assisted bodies as Bethany’s, and “pure,” or “natural” bodies belonging to other, non-transhumanist bodies.

In a critique of Haraway levied from a disability studies perspective, crip scholar Alison Kafer contends that the common practice of looking to biotechnologies such as cochlear implants or prosthetic limbs as exemplary of the cyborg condition suggests that “there is an original purity that, thanks to assistive technology, has only now been mixed, hybridized, blurred” (108).

In such a hasty framing, we can identify an oblique investment in the maintenance of essentialising categories, rather than their dissolution via an emphasis on the dynamic and co-evolving flows of an interconnected system – this latter framework being one that, according to the likes of Hayles, is more productive for theorising the present posthuman moment.

Nor, indeed, would Haraway herself be at all content if Bethany’s transhumanism were framed as cyborgian in her own use of the term. Transhumanism in its present, post-Extropian form is deeply anthropocentric in scope, and as such is far too invested in developing something like a human-exceptionalist Nietzschean Übermensch, than one could reasonably hope to reconcile with Haraway’s own dedication to “sympoiesis,” or a philosophical mode that aims to de-centre the human by demonstrating the transversal relationality between human and other-than-human beings. In fact, Haraway has oft expressed her frustration with the manner in which A Cyborg Manifesto has been co-opted for transhumanist theorising, denouncing such initiatives as “a kind of techno-masculinism of a self-caricaturing kind” (Gane & Haraway 146). 

This, indeed, is a facet that renders Bethany’s narrative in Years and Years particularly interesting. Transhumanism has been well documented as being predominantly the interest of men; TheGuardian’s 2017 exposé on the subject was unselfconsciously entitled “When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans” (Adams, emphasis mine), and of the movement’s key figures, from Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson to Kevin Warwick, there is a notable dearth of female names.

Indeed, one might go so far as contend that the very project of enhancing the human body using technology and cybernetics echoes the masculinist principles of Enlightenment thinking; Fuller and Lipinska even describe it as “ultra-Enlightenment” (25), giving primacy to the white male symbolic domain of rationality and logic over and above the more feminine-allied notions of affect, emotionality, and matter.

Francesca Ferrando additionally notes that the transhumanist aim of uploading the mind as “software” and leaving the bodily “hardware” behind, “genealogically stands as a cyber twist to the dualism which has been structural to the hegemonic Western tradition of thought: the symbolic flesh (a.k.a. body/material/female/black/nature/object, etc.) shall be overcome by symbolic data (a.k.a. mind/virtual/male/white/culture/subject etc.)” (3).

What, then, is at stake for the transhumanist narrative in Years and Years in the fact that Davies makes Bethany a female character – or, more specifically, that she is Black and female?

One perspective might be that this question is presaged by the scene to which we have periodically returned throughout this paper, in which Bethany’s parents assume she is transgender, rather than transhuman. That Bethany aspires to be, “Not male. Or female. But better” (Years and Years E1) again recalls Haraway, in her provocative statement that, “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world.”

However, retrospective interviews have revealed that Haraway was dissatisfied with the way this comment had been construed; she did not, she claims, intend to suggest that, “Ah, that means it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman anymore” (Gane and Haraway 137).

Instead, she retroactively likens her use of the term “post-gender” to the way in which women-of-colour theorists employ the term “intersectional,” identifying the ways in which race, gender, and class “torque” one another to form a cyborgian, non-totalising subjectivity. As Cox glosses, “Women of colour readily demonstrate the queer torqueing of identity categories, since they are a priori excluded from full integration into any one social grouping…They stand at the margins of these identity labels and destabilize or queer them from this outside position” (324).

From this perspective, as a Black biracial woman, Bethany always already occupies a cyborgian post-gender subjectivity by virtue of her very non-adherence to unitary hegemonic identity categories. Her desire to become transhuman, however, is motivated by an entirely different impetus: rather than queering normative identarian classifications with recourse to the outsider position afforded by her cyborgian status as a woman of colour, Bethany appears to wish to exist in a techno-utopian world in which masculinity and femininity do not exist at all; in other words, the “post-gender world” that Haraway insists is a misinterpretation of her original writerly intention.

Bethany thus suggests that she wants to take on an unmarked identity, a neutral space of rationality and liberty that surpasses the split of sexually dimorphic biologies and the arbitrary power structures we attach to them. We might deduce, then, that what she wishes to inhabit is a form of subjectivity that has, historically, been the domain of white masculinity: that of being the default, the objective, the free and unimpeded. As such, Bethany’s desire to transcend her feminine corporeal frame in order to become immaterial, rational “data” might indeed be approximated to a desire to become, in a vastly expanded sense, transgender; that is, to take on an alternative mode of embodied performativity that has, historically, been frequently attributed to maleness. 

By way of contextualising this, we might briefly look to the show’s transgender character of Lincoln Lyons, Bethany’s younger cousin. Lincoln’s transition throughout the series is so unanimously accepted by her family as to almost fly under the radar in terms of plot; one or two older characters comment vaguely upon her new habits of wearing skirts and ribbons, gently acknowledging that a change is taking place in her gender presentation, but the need for a spectacularised coming-out narrative is completely evinced.

Nor, indeed, is Lincoln depicted as encountering the tired prejudices of so-called “TERFs” (or “Gender Criticals”), and their violent indictment of transwomen as threatening or aberrant, that are so rife in the United Kingdom at the present moment. In Years and Years, Lincoln simply starts presenting as female around 2027, and that is that; no need for further discussion or debate.

In a similar manner, Daniel Lyons – Bethany’s uncle – is unquestionably accepted as a gay man, without this facet of his identity ever being either flattened or ignored, nor made out to be a point of contention. Given that Russell T Davies has been demonstrably committed to chronicling authentic LGBTQ+ stories for much of his career, most famously through the 1999 TV series Queer as Folk, this decision to depict an unquestioning acceptance of gender and sexuality as fluid and non-totalising signals Davies’ broader investment in tracking the historical progression and speculated futures of queer and trans* subjectivities across a cross-section of British culture.

Beyond this, the myriad parallels that are drawn throughout the series between transhumanism and transgenderism, from Bethany’s “coming-out” narrative to the nurse’s offhand comment about surgery regulation, plant the seed in the viewer’s mind that the perceived ontological split between human and technology will, in the future, be universally considered as much of an arbitrary social construct as gender norms will grow to become.

Further, to return to the nurse’s comparison between face lifts, gender reassignment, and transhuman surgery, we might note a subtle insinuation that, like its surgical predecessors, biohacking will soon become a properly regulated process absorbed into the medical industrial complex – a nod, of course, not only to Bethany’s later public-funded surgeries, but also to the potentially radical medical futures to which transhumanism might give rise in our own lives.

With all these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might now briefly revisit Bethany’s “coming out” episode. Given that transhumanism is still a relatively obscure, borderline eccentric philosophy in today’s society, as viewers of this scene we are implicitly aligned with Celeste: requiring an explanation as to what “transhuman” entails, and cultivating a deep scepticism about what we hear in response.

This scene is represented as happening in 2024, by which time it is fair to predict that the dangers and more extreme cases of biohacking may have started to filter into the mainstream media, most likely framed as a subversive countercultural threat that targets vulnerable young people (again, a familiar narrative to many LGBTQ+ folks). Celeste’s enraged rejection of Bethany’s “coming out” is thus conversant with the trope of the queer and/or trans* teen coming out to a prejudiced family, in addition tothe way in which one might anticipate a parent to respond to their daughter wanting to engage in potentially dangerous biohacking activity – a more extreme iteration, perhaps, of a mother being unable to stomach the idea of her daughter getting an illicit tattoo or piercing.

The incident with Lizzie’s eye only seems to corroborate Celeste’s (and, implicitly, our) perspective: transhumanism is a threat, both bodily on an individual scale, and existential on a societal, moral scale. However, the show’s unique format in spanning such an extended timeframe permits for such perceptions to shift, organically and believably, within its characters – and, therefore, for we as viewers to imagine our own worldviews shifting with them.

By the end, Davies depicts transhumanist biohacking as gradually becoming the new normal, incrementally shifting from its cultural perception as a “wacky cyborg plan” to a sort of natural “evolution” (Renstrom) in professional and medical development. As such, it becomes as seamlessly integrated into the quotidian social and economic life of the Lyons family as their much-used, Alexa-like virtual assistant, “Señor” (incidentally, a superb example of what Bruce Sterling terms “design fiction,” or a believable diegetic prototype of a fictional object – and another example of a technology to which the older Lyons were originally resistant, and yet which is transformed into an object of necessity, even affection, by the end.

Transhuman biohacks, we surmise, are a similarly conceived design fiction that will follow an analogous trajectory). Tracking the progression of biohacking from a transgressive and threatening subcultural activity in early episodes of Years and Years, to a government-sponsored and meticulously regulated process at a later point in the narrative, thus encourages viewers, via the shifting perception of Celeste, to question the ways in which our contemporary scepticisms, disbeliefs, or even prejudices against transhumanist philosophy or biohacking activity might evolve towards something like wide acceptance in coming decades.

In his particular depiction of LGBTQ+ subjectivities, Davies seems to suggest that such an evolution echoes the ways in which mainstream antipathy and moral panic directed towards the queer and trans* community in the UK might continue to progress into something like widespread inclusiveness, and acceptance to the point of being unremarkable – yet without straying into erasure.

That said, to stake a claim that Bethany’s desire to become transhuman is ultimately a desire to discard her own femininity in favour of a body that performs as maleis to overlook the myriad embodied pleasures and textured impressions to which her transhuman and biohacked, yet unquestionably feminine, body gives her access.

In Episode Five’s scene that shows her sitting in a hospital gown, glowing with happiness at the result of the “upgrade” that has rendered her body a fully integrated human-machine interface, Bethany attempts to explain the novel sensations she is experiencing to her parents. She sits with her hands spread open over an electronic tablet, almost resembling a seer in her posture (fig. 1). Slow piano music begins to build as she interacts with the screen using only small twitches of her bionically altered fingers. At no point does she need to touch the device itself; it dances in perfect harmony with her thoughts.

As Bethany’s thoughts speed up, her musings becoming more layered and complex, new windows build above the screen in a clean visual reflection of her cognitive processes. Stacks of images extend beyond the edges of the device and appear to float just above it, forming a quivering, almost magical material-immaterial interface between the tablet and Bethany’s innermost thoughts. Settled in this visionary-like position, tablet in hand, she speaks dreamily to her parents as the camera slowly zooms in on her face:

I’m trying to explain it in ways you can understand. But the connection is so much more. While we were talking, at exactly the same time, I wondered about the Eighty Days of Rain. Where it came from. Why it was. What comes next. And I keyed into satellites, just 30 seconds ago, so I can see the course of El Niño. And I can tap into pressure sensors along the Atlantic coast. And barometric readings from ships at sea. If I put all that together…I am there. I’m inside it. The tide. The depth of the sea. And the curl of the waves. Within me…It’s joy. In my head. It is absolute joy. (Years and Years E5)

Fig 2. Bethany (Lydia West)’s technological “integration.” Russell T Davies, Years and Years Episode 5, HBO & BBC, 2019, 31:08. Screen capture from HBO Max. 

Bethany’s transhuman experience ultimately speaks less to a dissolving of her embodiment, as to its radical extension and recalibration. The profoundly spiritual affect imbuing the scene, assembled through a combination of Bethany’s prophet-like posture, blissful intonation, and the meditative soundtrack, implements a strict break with the techno-hyper-masculinist affect one might associate with the transhumanist cyborg transformations depicted in, for example, Robocopor Iron Man– although it is worth pointing out that Bethany’s characterisation also resists pigeonholing into the trope of the sexualised female cyborg, as is epitomised by characters such as Ava in Ex Machina.

Instead, Bethany’s feminine transhumanist experience is one of embodied joy, of emotion, and – notably – of calm oneness with the tides, a domain maintaining cultural associations to femininity, organicism, and nature. Nor is her experience strictly anthropocentric; she pursues avenues of relationality with other-than-human entities, exerting neither mastery nor violence over what she finds, but rather dwelling within them and responding with what we might see as a feminist ethics of care.

The “data” to which Bethany aspires cannot, therefore, be reduced to a brute overcoming of fleshly femininity in order to achieve Robocop-esque characteristics of masculine rationality, progress, and technoculture – the Extropian-inflected “techno-masculinist” transhumanism lambasted by Donna Haraway. Instead, it is posited as something organic and affective, sensual and deep, allowing her to inhabit several non-isomorphic and intersectional categories simultaneously yet without losing either her identity or her embodied materiality in the process.

This framing of a feminine-allied transhumanist transformation is reiterated in the closing scene of the final episode, in which the character of Edith Lyons is becoming one of the first subjects to upload their brain to the cloud. In the year 2034, she is living out the dream that Bethany was so admonished for coveting as a teenager. Edith muses upon the process slowly, ecstatically, as she lays in an airy laboratory:

“I’m not a piece of code. I’m not information. All these memories, they’re not just facts, they’re so much more than that. They’re my family. And my lover. They’re my mum, and my brother who died years ago. They’re love. That’s what I’m becoming now. Love. I am…love” (Years and Years E6).

Even as she participates in the extreme, fringe limits of transhumanism – that of relinquishing the body altogether and downloading the brain as code – Edith, too, rejects the overly masculinist undergirding of transhuman transformation as one grounded in logic, in violence, in sovereignty, in mastery, and in individualism.

As another figure of what we might term feminist transhumanism, she too emphasises relationality and symbiosis in her transformation, expressing a sprawling sense of interconnectedness, affect, care, and a profoundly feminine positionality that rejects reduction of memories into hard code and an attendant disavowal of the (feminine, subjective, natural) flesh.

Just as Russell T Davies prompts viewers to imagine slow changes in the ways we will culturally perceive biohacking and technological modifications in the future, so too do such scenes as this lead us to imagine a gradually developing future of transhumanist philosophy that is uncoupled from the cult of Elon Musk and Extropianism, transforming from “techno-masculinism of a self-caricaturing kind” to a relational philosophy embedded in a feminist ethics of care, radical political potential, and an intersectional formation of gendered subjectivity.

And yet even Bethany’s “fully integrated” feminist transhuman futurity, transplanted straight from science fiction as the image seems to be, may not be far off as one might expect. Today, when biohacking attempts are successful, they are often described in a language of expanded embodiment, of (extra)sensory pleasures, and of blissful interconnectedness that strongly recall Bethany’s own description of being transported “inside” a wave, a tide, or an electronic connection.

In a 2019 study, scholar London Brickley describes his encounter with Matt Henna, a lifelong science fiction fan and biohacker who had embedded neodymium (N52) magnets under the flesh of his fingers five years before. Brickley writes,

As the fingers healed and the nerves grew back around the magnetic strips embedded within, his sensitivity to the metal’s vibrating pull was becoming ever more acute. This new sense allowed him to communicate with the world around him in a whole new way, and he was learning to interpret its whispers. He can now sense when he is around power structures by how his nerves begin to hum. He can run his hand over his electronics and feel the boundaries of their presence, is even able to diagnose his laptop’s dying battery whenever the pulse of its heart starts to slow and skip a beat. He can sense the kind of electricity that is in the air. (10)

For Matt, as for Bethany, to be a biohacker – a transhuman, a cyborg, a human-machine hybrid – is not so much to uncouple mind from body, as to radically reimagine the entanglement between the two. Corporeal sensation and affect still reign supreme; for Matt as for Bethany, one can hardly say that the body is disposed of altogether. Instead, it becomes embroiled in a whole cacophony of more-than-human forces, structures, and networks to which our sensory capacities in their present form do not permit us access.

The body is not disavowed; it becomes something new. Brickley sharply articulates the nature of the shift, as he notes that the integration of mechanical parts into the organic body:

transforms the hacker into someone/something that no longer simply communicates with other human users through technology but communicates with other technology through the body. The classical digital paradigm of bodies communicating a message through a digital medium or screen…becomes inverted, as the communication now takes place between the pieces of electronic tech using the organic flesh as the medium of transport. (22)

The experience of Matt and other biohackers might therefore be approximated to a proto-iteration of the sort of feminist transhumanist transformation embodied by Bethany Lyons – a state in which transhumanist subjects will not yet have attained the status of pure data like Edith Lyons, but will still inhabit an embodiment far different to ours as we currently understand it. One will be able to live digitally through technological embodiment; to experience the rich textures and diffuse pleasures of a transversally interconnected more-than-human world, all the while without doing away with the sensations, consciousness, and phenomenology of the organic flesh, nor discarding its intersectional torques and gendered subjectivities.

Extrapolating from the underground practices of present-day transhumanist subcultures, to the queer techno-dystopian/techno-utopian future imagined by Russell T Davies, an examination of Bethany’s storyline in Years and Years thus permits one to reflect creatively and critically upon the future of biohacking, cyborg identities, and a speculative transhumanism that might be queer, feminist, and intersectional in scope rather than violently masculine; a feminist transhumanist turn that, indeed, might be upon us sooner than we expect.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. “When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans.”Guardian, 29 Oct 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/transhuman-bodyhacking-transspecies-cyborg. Accessed 21 Feb 2021.

Banbury, Tamara. “Where’s My Jet Pack? Online Communication Practices and Media Frames of the Emergent Voluntary Cyborg Subculture.” Unpublished MA Thesis, Carleton University, 2019. https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/etd/387fa17a-003c-4dd9-a1bd-7fc3b8e27cc3/etd_pdf/12c315671b2bc4dbcbaec32c0c7f4aa0/banbury-wheresmyjetpackonlinecommunicationpractices.pdf. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Brickley, London. “Bodies Without Borders: The Sinews and Circuitry of ‘folklore’+.” Western Folklore, vol. 78, no. 1, 2019, pp. 5-19.

Cox, Lara. “Decolonial Queer Feminism in Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985).” Paragraph, vol. 41, no. 3, 2018, pp. 317-332.

Davies, Russell T, creator. Years and Years. BBC and HBO, 2019.

Davies, Russell T. Screenplay of Years and Years, Episode 1. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/Years-and-Years-Ep1.pdf. Accessed 24 February 2021.

Delaney, Brigid. “Years and Years is riveting dystopian TV – and the worst show to watch right now.” The Guardian, 7 Apr 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/07/years-and-years-is-riveting-dystopian-tv-and-the-worst-show-to-watch-right-now. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Ferrando, Francesca. “Is the post-human a post-woman? Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence and the futures of gender: a case study.” European Journal of Futures Research, vol. 2, no. 43, 2014, pp. 1-17.

Fuller, Steve, and Veronika Lipinska. “Transhumanism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, vol. 3, no. 11, 2014, pp. 25-29.

Gane, Nicholas, and Donna Haraway. “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pp. 135-158.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Harawayby Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 5-90.

Hayles, Katherine N. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pp. 159-166.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Oremus, Will. “Choose Your Own Sixth Sense: DIY superpowers for the cyborg on a budget.” Slate, 14 Mar 2013, https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/cyborgs-grinders-and-body-hackers-diy-tools-for-adding-sensory-perceptions.html. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Regis, Ed. “Meet the Extropians.” Wired, 1 Oct 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/10/extropians/. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Renstrom, Joelle. “What Would It Mean for Humans to Become Data?” Slate, 30 Jul 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/years-and-years-finale-bethany-transhumanist.html#:~:text=Years%20and%20Years'%20transhumanist%20character%20demonstrates%20the%20conundrum,by%20merging%20human%20and%20machine.&text=In%20the%20premiere%20of%20the,scheduled%20a%20talk%20with%20them. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Rogers, Adam. “HBO’s Years and Years Unlocks Sci-Fi’s Ultimate Potential.” Wired, 11 Jul 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/review-years-and-years-hbo/. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Rothblatt, Martine. “Mind is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form.” The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More. Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2013, pp. 317-326.

Subba, Nikhil. “Elon Musk’s new co could allow uploading, downloading thoughts: Wall Street Journal.” Reuters, 27 Mar 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-musk-neuralink/elon-musks-new-co-could-allow-uploading-downloading-thoughts-wall-street-journal-idUSKBN16Y2GC. Accessed 21 Feb 2021.

“Years and Years: Series 1 (2019.)” Rotten Tomatoes, 2019,https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/years_and_years/s01. Accessed 26 Feb 2021. 

[1]The terms “transhuman” and “posthuman” are often confused. While transhumanism refers to ideologies of human enhancement through science and technology, posthumanism is a philosophical praxis that critiques the Western intellectual traditions of humanism and anthropocentrism. Both transhumanism and posthumanism share a common interest in the ontological dimension of technology, but transhumanism is centred upon augmenting the human condition – while posthumanism is broadly invested in dismantling human exceptionalist discourse by drawing attention to humankind’s embroilment in an extensive network of relations with more-than-human entities, processes, and interlocutors. 

Daisy Reid is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include speculative and science fictions, critical plant studies, posthumanism, (feminist) materialisms, and the Environmental Humanities. Her current work focuses on SF depictions of plant life and fungi in their manifold imbrications with issues of gender, sexuality, erotics, and desire.

"I Don't Want to Be Flesh": Feminist Transhuman Futures in Years and Years (Part One)

If you have not watched Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years, currently playing in the United States on HBO Max, you have missed something … memorable. Imagine This Is Us set in a near future UK when the world continues to collapse around us in plausible yet forward looking ways. We refract this dystopian world through the eyes of various members of one extended family whose lives is touched by the turmoil that surrounds him. For me, it did not always work but it hit a lot of raw nerves and it has been hard to get it out of my head. I’ve thought about the series often across the past year since I first watched it. More than anything else I saw, it captured the structure of feeling of the world at the current moment. I was delighted when Daisy Reid, a PhD student in Comparative Literature, chose to write about the series in my Science Fiction as Media Theory seminar. I asked her if I could share what she wrote here.

“I Don’t Want to Be Flesh”: Feminist Transhuman Futures in Years and Years

by Daisy Reid

The year is 2024. Donald Trump is approaching the end of his second term as President of the United States; extreme storms, floods, and heatwaves around the world have become so common as to be barely newsworthy; Angela Merkel has just died, leaving Germany in mourning. And, in a visibly upper-middle-class home in London, a seventeen-year-old girl initiates a nerve-wracking conversation with her parents.

Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, she begins. “I think I’ve been uncomfortable for a very long time…Ever since I was born. I don’t think I belong in this body. Oh my God.” Her parents’ eyes are full of sympathy, willing her on.

In reality, they have already snooped on their daughter’s internet history and found searches for “trans helpline,” “a trans life,” and “trans for teens.” They have all the right words prepared. They strain closer. When Bethany finally works herself up to it, blurting out, “I think I’m trans,” her parents, Celeste and Stephen, practically fall over themselves in their rush to comfort her. They assure her of their unwavering love and their wholehearted support for her transition from female to male. For her parents, this explains everything – from their daughter’s withdrawn nature, to her constant hiding behind screens and tech. They are confident they can get her the help she needs.

Bethany, however, is briefly thrown by their reaction. She is not transsexual, she corrects them, but transhuman: “I said, I’m not comfortable with my body. So I want to get rid of it. This…thing. All the arms and legs and every single bit of it. I don’t want to be flesh. I’m really sorry, but I want to escape this thing. And become digital.” Pressed by her parents, she continues, “I want to live forever. As information. Because that’s what transhumans are, mum. Not male. Or female. But better. Where I’m going, there’s no life or death, there’s only data. I will be data.”

Her parents stare at her, visibly dumbstruck, before the scene jump-cuts to Bethany running up the stairs, eyes streaming with tears, and the bedroom door slamming violently in her wake. Celeste is hot on her heels, charging after her with shouts and threats, positively boiling over with rage. In many ways, this has settled neatly back into the recognisable trope from which it was only briefly derailed: that of the troubled young person sharing a theretofore concealed aspect of their identity to their family, and being subsequently banished in disgrace.

            Such runs a key scene in the first episode of Years and Years, a six-part TV drama created by Russell T Davies and jointly produced by the BBC and HBO in 2019. The show follows the multigenerational Lyons family over a period from 2019 to 2034, tracking their interlocking lives against a snowballing backdrop of global economic, political, environmental, and technological turmoil. The show is, of course, ultimately fictional in scope – Brigid Delaney of The Guardian refers to it as “dystopian TV,” Adam Rogers of Wired designates it a work of “sci-fi,” and Rotten Tomatoes simply calls it “a nihilistic projection of the future” – but, in a similar vein to such productions as Black Mirror, its core discomfort can be located in the very plausibility of the nightmarish world it constructs.

The global events we witness unfolding in Years and Years, from banking collapse, blackouts, and mass flooding, to the rise of far-right populist politics in Europe and an eerily prescient outbreak of “monkey flu,” are grimly aligned with an entirely conceivable version of the future towards which we all seem to be headed. Indeed, notes in the screenplay alert producers to the real-life events upon which the plot points are based: in a scene featuring a town of shipping containers cobbled together for an influx of refugees, for example, the script reads, “They’re being suggested now, in 2017 – search ‘shipping container homes’ or Container City” (Davies, “Episode One” 27).

Grounded as the show is within a reasoned extrapolation of contemporary reality rather than pure imaginative fiction, a “what if” scenario that inputs our current situation and pumps out a projection of where it could take us, this paper proposes that one can look to the transhuman storyline of Bethany Lyons (played by Lydia West) as taking seriously the idea that such concepts as uploading one’s brain as software, and enhancing the organic body with machinic implants, might begin a slow transition from the domains of science fiction and cyberpunk cultural production to that of tenable reality within the next few decades.

The science fictional mode is thus deployed in Years and Yearsas a metanarrative in order to not only speculate upon the future of human-technology interfacing, but also to question the very role of sci-fi in shaping it.

Bethany’s 15-year narrative arc throughout the show sees her maintaining her transhumanist impulses despite her parents’ initial explosive reaction. She soon receives public funding to have telephone technology embedded in her hand, and eventually becomes “fully integrated” with implants in every finger, digital lenses in her eyes, and the ability to interact with electronic devices using a tiny “wafer” embedded in her brain. Her transformation is, notably, facilitated by her career as a data miner; the government sponsors her surgeries, which in turn guarantee her high-earning employment in the public sector while vast sectors of industry are phased out due to automation.

This paper proposes examining the progression of Bethany’s speculative transhumanist future in Years and Yearsthrough the diffractive lens of real-life transhumanisms past and present, tracking elements of Bethany’s story back to the underground activity of fringe “biohacking” communities in existence today, in addition to exploring its links to, and tensions with, the masculine genealogies of Extropianism and Silicon Valley pro-market capitalists.

Anchoring the depiction of Bethany’s transhuman journey in dialogue with the posthuman and cyborg philosophies of Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway respectively, in addition to outlining the myriad ways in which Bethany’s transhuman subjectivity both complicates and epitomises theories of gender performativity and intersectionality, this paper goes on to propose that Bethany’s is a uniquely feminist transhuman futurity that resists dissolution into the hyper-masculine tropes typical of Extropian technical progressivism by insisting upon symbiosis, relationality, and an ethics of care – thereby positing a recalibrated form of transhumanist embodiment that permits one to live digitallywithoutdisavowing the materiality of the feminine flesh, nor the attendant forces of affect, sensuality, connection, or emotion.

The term “transhumanism” was first coined in 1951 by Julian Huxley, younger brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley. An extension of what he termed “evolutionary humanism,” Huxley’s transhumanism essentially suggested that humans should be able to take an active role in their own evolutionary advancement. As such, he proposed implementing population-wide improvements via mechanisms of social and cultural control, so as to shape a more refined stage in the development of the species as a whole. Huxley’s transhumanist thinking ultimately strayed uncomfortably into the realm of eugenics, but his core doctrine of pushing humankind into the next “phase” of its evolutionary development persisted, and was picked up again in the 1980s and 1990s by the so-called Extropian movement in Southern California.

A group of majority cis-male, white, affluent techno-progressivists, the Extropians believed in the basic premise of fighting “entropy – the natural tendency of things to run down, degenerate, and die out – with its polar opposite, ‘extropy’” (Regis). Extropian transhumanism eschewed Huxley’s eugenicist angle, but instead proposed freely taking the work of humankind’s evolution into one’s own hands with recourse to developments in the realms of technology and science.

Such thinking drew directly and self-consciously from the techno-utopian aesthetics at the heart of much sci-fi, manga, and cyberpunk, taking seriously the potential for the widespread availability of such speculative technologies as brain-computer integration, cryonics, bionics, and advanced AI that would afford humans an expanded level of cognitive, sensory, and bodily being in the world.

Fast-forward to today, and transhumanism continues to exist as a fringe movement (albeit a growing one) largely associated with libertarians and pro-market Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk; in fact, the latter is currently pumping funding into the development of so-called “neural lace” technology, hoping to one day “implant[] tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts” (Subba). The sustaining transhumanist mission in the twenty-first century, propagated by the likes of Musk alongside such institutions as Humanity+ and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, is to radically extend the capacities and possibilities of the human form through technological upgrades, with a view to eventually transcending the final limitation imposed upon the human form: overcoming death itself, by activating a cyberpunk future in which we are no longer restrained by the ageing and flawed materiality of the human body.

Much like the young Bethany Lyons, many transhumanists ultimately hope to live forever as information – and, again mirroring Bethany’s fraught “coming-out” experience, they are treated with a hearty dose of scepticism, if not outright ridicule, within both the media and intellectual circles.

            How, then, are we to understand the progression depicted in Years and Years from transhumanism being framed as a fringe ideology, a silly notion entertained by a troubled and vulnerable teenager – to its depiction in later episodes as a highly regulated and widely practiced tenet of modern Western society, with transhumanist body modifications a necessary prerequisite for stable participation in the work economy? As is characteristic of Years and Years, we can track the show’s projected future back to rumblings in the present moment.

Briefly putting to one side the hyper-visible, Musk-esque Silicon Valley superstars of transhumanism, we might instead turn to the “biohackers,” an underground community that has been steadily expanding since the early 2000s, as a key point of reference for understanding the show. Otherwise known as “grinders,” biohackers are known to actively insert microchips, implants, and magnets into their flesh in an attempt to speed up the transition to a transhuman future akin to that depicted towards the end of Years and Years. At present, these implants are relatively undeveloped; cybernetics professor Dr Kevin Warwick, for example, has a radio frequency transmitter inserted into his arm that automatically unlocks the doors of his university lab as he enters (perhaps, incidentally, the inspiration for one of Bethany’s own implants, which unlocks the doors of her workplace without the need for a key-card). Will Oremus of Slate suggests that we call these biohackers “practical transhumanists”: “people who would rather become cyborgs right now than pontificate about the hypothetical far-off future,” while Carleton University’s Tamara Banbury, a PhD candidate and biohacker herself, employs the designation, “voluntary cyborgs.”

Being medically unnecessary, such body modification procedures cannot currently be legally performed by health professionals – so biohackers regularly resort to self-surgery in order to attain their transhumanist goals, which has led to abundant images of gore and infection circulating among online community spaces for grinders, such as biohack.me. As a result of the risky lengths to which biohackers will willingly and very visibly go for transhumanist body modifications, journalistic exposés frequently frame them as an extreme subculture, teetering discomfortingly between pseudo-intellectualism, idiocy, and an outright threat, both to the bodily health of its individual members and the moral economy of society writ large. 

The lack of regulation, countercultural leanings, and dangerous reputation that encircle the biohacking movement in its minor percolations in the present moment can be understood as an important precursor to a particularly visceral scene in Episode Three of Years and Years. Depicted as the year 2026, the episode sees Bethany and her friend Lizzie sneaking out to get digital implants inserted into their eyes without their parents’ knowledge. Unqualified foreign practitioners carry out the surgery on a boat off the British coast, working under the radar so as to avoid detection – but they end up botching the operation, and Lizzie’s new eye jerks about crazily, her vision transplanted into a laptop nearby rather than “integrated” into her head (fig 1). 

Fig 1. Lizzie (Shannon Heyes)’s digital eye. Russell T Davies, Years and Years Episode 5, HBO & BBC, 2019, 50:42. Screen capture from HBO Max. 

Extrapolating a few years from the bungled self-surgeries that are routinely posted on biohack.me, this scenario seems like a perfectly feasible successor to the underground activities of grinders happening in the present moment. As such, we might see such pursuits, in both Years and Yearsand its real-life subcultural referents, as the darker, lower-budget underside of the glossy transhuman future imagined by the likes of Elon Musk.

Pursuant to the surgery, as the characters of Lizzie, Bethany, and Celeste seek proper medical help in an NHS hospital, a nurse observes, “It’s been going on for decades. Cruise ships arrive at the docks, specially adapted as hospitals….And people go on board for cheap operations. It was facelifts in the 90s. Gender reassignments in the 2000s. Now they’ve discovered transhumans” (Years and Years E3). In other words, Lizzie’s is not a unique case; in Davies’ imagined future, unregulated individual biohacking is exceeding its obscure status to become a more popular pursuit, exposing a growing influx of young grinders to its many health risks.

It is worth dwelling here, however, upon the fact that the nurse frames transhuman surgery as something of a logical follow-on to gender reassignment surgery in terms of its cultural positioning – again, recalling the lexical mix-up depicted in Bethany’s “trans” coming-out scene.

This comparison between transhumanism/biohacking and transgenderism is one that persists on a number of levels throughout the show, and it is a crucial one to investigate in terms of parsing out Russell T Davies’ speculations upon how transhumanism might be incrementally absorbed into something like social normativity. Trans* thinkers such as Martina Rothblatt have long posited a continuity between transgenderism and transhumanism, predicting that, “First comes the realization that we are not limited by our sexual anatomy. Then comes the awakening that we are not limited by our anatomy at all” (318).

While it certainly merits clarifying that gender reassignment is a medical treatment and, as such, can hardly be approximated to a biohacking “enhancement” of the body, Rothblatt’s suggestion that both transgenderism and transhumanism pertain to a sense of morphological freedom over the way the body is shaped and performs in society is one that does seem to hold considerable weight in Davies’ speculative future.

By way of contextualising this, we might briefly look to the show’s transgender character of Lincoln Lyons, Bethany’s younger cousin. Lincoln’s transition throughout the series is so unanimously accepted by her family as to almost fly under the radar in terms of plot; one or two older characters comment vaguely upon her new habits of wearing skirts and ribbons, gently acknowledging that a change is taking place in her gender presentation, but the need for a spectacularised coming-out narrative is completely evinced. Nor, indeed, is Lincoln depicted as encountering the tired prejudices of so-called “TERFs” (or “Gender Criticals”), and their violent indictment of transwomen as threatening or aberrant, that are so rife in the United Kingdom at the present moment. In Years and Years, Lincoln simply starts presenting as female around 2027, and that is that; no need for further discussion or debate. In a similar manner, Daniel Lyons – Bethany’s uncle – is unquestionably accepted as a gay man, without this facet of his identity ever being either flattened or ignored, nor made out to be a point of contention. Given that Russell T Davies has been demonstrably committed to chronicling authentic LGBTQ+ stories for much of his career, most famously through the 1999 TV series Queer as Folk, this decision to depict an unquestioning acceptance of gender and sexuality as fluid and non-totalising signals Davies’ broader investment in tracking the historical progression and speculated futures of queer and trans* subjectivities across a cross-section of British culture. Beyond this, the myriad parallels that are drawn throughout the series between transhumanism and transgenderism, from Bethany’s “coming-out” narrative to the nurse’s offhand comment about surgery regulation, plant the seed in the viewer’s mind that the perceived ontological split between human and technology will, in the future, be universally considered as much of an arbitrary social construct as gender norms will grow to become. Further, to return to the nurse’s comparison between face lifts, gender reassignment, and transhuman surgery, we might note a subtle insinuation that, like its surgical predecessors, biohacking will soon become a properly regulated process absorbed into the medical industrial complex – a nod, of course, not only to Bethany’s later public-funded surgeries, but also to the potentially radical medical futures to which transhumanism might give rise in our own lives.

With all these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might now briefly revisit Bethany’s “coming out” episode. Given that transhumanism is still a relatively obscure, borderline eccentric philosophy in today’s society, as viewers of this scene we are implicitly aligned with Celeste: requiring an explanation as to what “transhuman” entails, and cultivating a deep scepticism about what we hear in response. This scene is represented as happening in 2024, by which time it is fair to predict that the dangers and more extreme cases of biohacking may have started to filter into the mainstream media, most likely framed as a subversive countercultural threat that targets vulnerable young people (again, a familiar narrative to many LGBTQ+ folks).

Celeste’s enraged rejection of Bethany’s “coming out” is thus conversant with the trope of the queer and/or trans* teen coming out to a prejudiced family, in addition tothe way in which one might anticipate a parent to respond to their daughter wanting to engage in potentially dangerous biohacking activity – a more extreme iteration, perhaps, of a mother being unable to stomach the idea of her daughter getting an illicit tattoo or piercing.

The incident with Lizzie’s eye only seems to corroborate Celeste’s (and, implicitly, our) perspective: transhumanism is a threat, both bodily on an individual scale, and existential on a societal, moral scale. However, the show’s unique format in spanning such an extended timeframe permits for such perceptions to shift, organically and believably, within its characters – and, therefore, for we as viewers to imagine our own worldviews shifting with them.

By the end, Davies depicts transhumanist biohacking as gradually becoming the new normal, incrementally shifting from its cultural perception as a “wacky cyborg plan” to a sort of natural “evolution” (Renstrom) in professional and medical development. As such, it becomes as seamlessly integrated into the quotidian social and economic life of the Lyons family as their much-used, Alexa-like virtual assistant, “Señor” (incidentally, a superb example of what Bruce Sterling terms “design fiction,” or a believable diegetic prototype of a fictional object – and another example of a technology to which the older Lyons were originally resistant, and yet which is transformed into an object of necessity, even affection, by the end.

Transhuman biohacks, we surmise, are a similarly conceived design fiction that will follow an analogous trajectory). Tracking the progression of biohacking from a transgressive and threatening subcultural activity in early episodes of Years and Years, to a government-sponsored and meticulously regulated process at a later point in the narrative, thus encourages viewers, via the shifting perception of Celeste, to question the ways in which our contemporary scepticisms, disbeliefs, or even prejudices against transhumanist philosophy or biohacking activity might evolve towards something like wide acceptance in coming decades.

In his particular depiction of LGBTQ+ subjectivities, Davies seems to suggest that such an evolution echoes the ways in which mainstream antipathy and moral panic directed towards the queer and trans* community in the UK might continue to progress into something like widespread inclusiveness, and acceptance to the point of being unremarkable – yet without straying into erasure.

MORE TO CoME

Daisy Reid is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include speculative and science fictions, critical plant studies, posthumanism, (feminist) materialisms, and the Environmental Humanities. Her current work focuses on SF depictions of plant life and fungi in their manifold imbrications with issues of gender, sexuality, erotics, and desire.

Science Fiction Representations of Cyborgs in Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine”

Seoyeon Lee, a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, is a student this semester in my seminar, Science Fiction As Media Theory. For her first assignment, she wrote about Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine”, a work little known outside of South Korea. I thought there would be broader interest out there on this topic. For those who would like to know more about Korean science fiction, check out this episode of How Do You Like It So Far?, the podcast that I co-host with Colin Maclay.

Science Fiction Representation of Cyborgs in Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine”

by Seoyeon Lee

Introduction

As a techno-dystopian locale for human trafficking and prostitution, Asia has been depicted against a dark, rainy background full of neon signs in Blade Runner (1982), Ghost in the Shell(1995), and Blade Runner 2049(2017). The Western fear of and fascination with technologized Asia recently shifted from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Seoul, for example, in the cyberpunk film Cloud Atlas(2012), which presents the SF trope of a female cyborg as the very image of a futuristic East Asia. In this film, South Korea in 2144 is depicted as a dystopia governed by transnational corporations that divide the world into the upper-level and the underworld, where the genetically transformed human clones are treated as slave labor.Cyborgs or humanoids in an Asian female figure are no longer unfamiliar in science fiction (hereafter SF) literature, film, and animations. 

At this point, a clear SF pattern is drawn from the Western imagination of the Asianized future: Otherizing the Orient by either over-simplifying or over-fantasizing it in order to alienate it from the Western criteria of humanity and humanism. Facing the West’s projection of its technological fear and fantasies of Asia, how does Asia respond? Are Asian SF writers, especially women writers, able to reappropriate the pattern of yellow peril anxieties of technologized Asia in the age of globalization? Considering that SF cultural products are often associated with various factors, such as transnational capitalism, state censorship, and global technological innovations, how do Korean SF women writers conform to or deviate from the status quo? This paper examines the SF literary representation of female cyborgs in Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine” (2019) from a feminist viewpoint.

Kim Ch’o-yŏp (김초엽1993~) isa South Korean SF woman writer who is interested in the theme of marginalized identity. Kim majored in chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology, and she won the Grand Prize at the 2ndKorea SF Awards with her novella “Book Missing Inside Library” during her graduate year in 2017. Kim’s SF short story, “My Space Heroine” (“Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ” 나의우주영웅에관하여), which I will discuss in this paper, is included in her first SF collection bookIf We Cannot Move at the Speed of Light, which has been a sensation since its publication in 2019. Given that only a small number of studies on Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s selective SF works have been published and no English translations of her works exist, this paper as the first case study aims to explore the trope of cyborgs in Kim’s short story. In the plot, thefemale protagonist Ka Yun and her idol, aunt Jaegyeong become cyborgs through the SF concept of “Pantropy” to explore a new time-space in the universe. Through the process of becoming a cyborg, Ka Yun understands Jaegyeong’s choice of death; and meanwhile, Kim seeks the possibility to build an alternative world that reflects reality and imagines a future. In other words, Kim’s world-building provides an avenue to understand the characters and the world away from a familiar perspective while questioning the criteria of normality. In this respect, I argue that the SF concept of the female cyborg not only reflects on Otherness to challenge the binary demarcation of the center and the periphery, but also blurs the boundary of the nation-state, race and gender while imagining an alternate future.

Science Fiction Concept of Cyborgs: “My Space Heroine”

As Darko Suvin has argued in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” “SF is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 118). According to Suvin, SF is a literature of cognitive estrangement. It is neither metaphysical nor entirely naturalistic, but a meta-empirical genre that emphasizes a strong relationship with the real world(s). SF, thus, does not simply play the role of the prophet that imagines the near or real future of our society in a pessimistic or optimistic way, but rather aims to unfold the present as history in the form of “some future worlds’ remote past” (Jameson 217). 

When it comes to the literary aesthetics of cognitive estrangement, Kim Ch’o-yŏp deploys the SF trope of a cyborg in her short story. If the definition of a cyborg is “a hybrid of machine and organism” (Haraway 291) that is not afraid of “their joint kinship with animals and machines” (295), then Kim’s “My Space Heroine” is a great example to delve into. This short story depicts a female cyborg who changes bodily fluids and organs to complete the global mission of exploring an unknown space in the universe. Kim herself has become a “cyborg” since she was medically diagnosed as having a hearing impairment and wore a hearing aid from her early teens. When asked how it felt as a cyborg to live with a disability, Kim responded that “We are all in symbiosis with technology and we are hybrids of machines and organisms. … We already acknowledge the potential impact of becoming a cyborg which dismantles various dichotomies between machine and organism, human and non-human, and so on. If we cannot stop obsessing about the concept of normality, however, cyborg technology would merely become a means to fulfill the practice of normality. What kind of cyborg shall/should we eventually become?”[1]This response highlights Kim’s main idea of (becoming) a cyborg that is often combined with a transformed body and extended mind to question the criteria for being human.

In Kim’s SF short story, the second-generation female astronaut, Ka Yun, tried to understand the mysterious death of her heroine, aunt Jaegyeong, the first astronaut to participate in the Aeronautics and Space Administration Project. In order to pass through a black hole like a tunnel and arrive at a new time-space in the universe, the selected astronauts were trained to rebuild their bodies through “Pantropy,” a so-called “cyborg grinding project.” During the multilevel training, the original human body is supplemented with artificial organs, skins, and blood vessels to endure the acceleration of gravity and pressure inside the tunnel. After their body fluids were replaced, both Jaegyeong and Ka Yun became cyborgs, hybrids of metal machines and nanobots. Although the first attempt of the project failed due to an unexpected explosion, Ka Yun, inspired by her long-time heroine Jaegyeong, was selected as the final member of the project to accomplish the incomplete mission. Through the process of becoming a cyborg, Ka Yun realized the reality of Jaegyeong’s death and gradually changed her feelings about Jaegyeong from a sense of admiration to betrayal to sympathy. Ka Yun understood why Jaegyeong was not in the spacecraft the day before launch but dived into the deep sea, where her marginalized identity as a disabled Asian single mother was finally liberated from the oppression of normality through the practice of becoming a cyborg.

            Throughout the story that addresses Jaegyeong’s mysterious death from Ka Yun’s perspective, Kim employs the SF trope of a cyborg both to reflect the hierarchical dualism of reality and to imagine an alternate future free from the various social regulations and norms. In particular, when Jaegyeong was selected as the first woman tunnel astronaut, she was embroiled in controversy due to her background: 

[Jaegyeong] was at the center of controversy over the selection of qualified astronauts, when the press released the fact that her skinny, small body had less muscle mass and a lower bone density, which were below the standard of the normal human body. She even had chronic vestibular disorders and was an Asian woman who once experienced pregnancy and childbirth. People were curious about how such an inappropriate agent, Jaegyeong, was chosen to be the representative of human beings. It was not emphasized that Jaegyeong was one of the three final selectees, and the other two astronauts were white men from the Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters.[2]

While Jaegyeong was criticized for beingan imperfect candidate who did not fit into the standardized image of a white male astronaut, she was simultaneously admired as a heroine who was the representative of gender and racial minority groups. Jaegyeong met Yu Jin, Ka Yun’s mother, in an online community, where a single mom raising her non-marital child communicated with others. Jaegyeong and Yu Jin took turns taking care of their daughters and later built an alternative family relationship to live together. This alternate concept of family is considered a big threat to the normative social structure and challenges the heteronormative perspective of family kinship. Jaegyeong acknowledged that a double-edged sword was facing her as if she was the very person to be underrepresented or overrepresented, but she was not able to escape this double burden. In this light, Kim successfully illustrates the tension between fear of losing normative power as hegemony and a fascination for embracing differences in reality through the SF representation of a female cyborg Jaegyeong.

In addition to Kim’s reflection of reality through Jaegyeong’s fragile and disabled body, Jaegyeong’s ironic choice of becoming a cyborg mermaid highlights the subversive version of imagining the alternative future where human normativity is challenged. On the night before the spacecraft was launched, Jaegyeong decided to explore the deep sea rather than achieving the glorious title of being the first Asian woman astronaut. The next day, the media concluded that Jaegyeong committed suicide due to stress, and the public condemned her impulsive choice while proposing a new model of an ideal human that was the opposite image of Jaegyeong. Ka Yun, however, underwent the cyborg grinding process as Jaegyeong did and thought about Jaegyeong’s purpose of jumping into the deep sea as a cyborg body. During the actual diving training that checked whether the transformed cyborg body could withstand pressure, Ka Yun felt an unexplainable sense of freedom under the sea. At this moment, she realized that “what Jaegyeong wanted indeed was not the way of entering the space tunnel but becoming a new human. That is to say, cyborg grinding itself was what she had wanted from the very beginning” (Kim 306). Ka Yun envisioned the alternative space where Jaegyeong already became a cyborg mermaid and breathed freely with her newly implanted gills in the deep sea. This possibility of living in a new world resonated with what Jaegyeong mentioned before: “I want to become a human beyond human” (281). Jaegyeong’s words do not simply mean that she prefers sea to space in order to seek her freedom with her cyborg body. Rather, Jaegyeong’s pursuit of liberation is closely connected with the question of why humans explore new space. For Jaegyeong, regardless of whether the destination is deep space or a dark sea, becoming a cyborg itself provides the opportunity to imagine an alternative future in which a new human, i.e., posthuman decenters the dominant discourse of Western humanity.

 It was not a surprise that the collection of Kim’s SF short stories became a sensational best-seller in South Korea, given that her posthuman narrative not merely reflected global technological innovations in contemporary Korean society but challenged the status quo from the perspective of race, gender, and disability. Although Kim’s vivid embodiment of cyborgs differs from cinematic visualization of cyborgs, her world-building as a communicative form in a written text reveals the power of literary imagination. It refuses to imitate the collective imagery of cyborgs driven by mass communication of audio-visual media; rather, it pushes the boundaries of reality to envision an alternative future making invisible visible.

Conclusion

This paper analyzed Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s “My Space Heroine” to examine the role of the SF trope of cyborgs. Kim provided a creative avenue to empower the act of storytelling through the SF effect of cognitive estrangement. By telling the story about another future, Kim imagined a world that reflects reality impacted by technological innovations and questions current norms to explore the uncertainties. The writer’s scientific imaginations played a significant role in avoiding the reproduction of the Other and blurring the boundary between the center and the periphery. In particular, Kim represented the image of a female cyborg, who was largely marginalized in history, to represent oppressive society and subverted the Western dominant paradigm of normality. Both Jaegyeong and Ka Yun as Asian women astronauts became cyborgs to complete the space mission, but their destinations were different. While thinking about Jaegyeong’s mysterious choice of diving into the deep sea, Ka Yun later realized that Jaegyeong was overrepresented as a part of minority groups and underrepresented as an unqualified agent. Becoming a new human, i.e., a cyborg, was the only way for Jaegyeong to escape the double burden and contest the Western ideal of humanity. Rather than entering the space tunnel to become the first Asian woman astronaut, Jaegyeong chose to belong to nowhere but herself while exploring how to become a cyborg. 

By analyzing Kim’s SF work, I argue that SF as a literary genre is neither a means to propagate science technology nor a mere entertainment to amuse the public; rather it crosses the boundary of science and fiction and its in-betweenness ultimately makes SF writing reflect the present and imagine an alternative future. In this context, SF writers, as well as the audience, should consider the concept of a cyborg that represents the Other within or beyond reality.

Bibliography

Haraway, Donna Jeanne."A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In The Cybercultures Reader, 291-324. Edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 211-24. Edited by Rob Latham. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Kim, Ch’o-yŏp. “Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ.” In Uri ka pit ŭi sokto ro kal su ŏptamyŏn, 273-319.Seoul: Hŏbŭl, 2019.

Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 116-27. Edited by Rob Latham. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

[1]The Korean essay appears in Ch’o-yŏp Kim, “Shinch'ewa kamgagi pyŏnhyŏngdoen uridŭrŭi chilmun,” Sisa-In169, Sisa-In co., Itd. https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=35180

[2]This is my translation from Korean. The original text is found in Ch’o-yŏp Kim, “Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ,” in Uri ka pit ŭi sokto ro kal su ŏptamyŏn(Seoul: Hŏbŭl, 2019), 279-80.

SEOYEON LEE is a second-year Ph.D. student majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. She graduated from Ewha Womans University with a bachelor's and a master's degree in Chinese Language and Literature. Her current research centers on science fiction literature in Korea and China. In particular, she is interested in the intersection of contemporary Korean and Chinese science fiction writers’ works while exploring possibilities of imagining an alternative world beyond the boundaries of gender and race. 

CBS's Clarice: In the Shadows of Lamb and Hannibal

Kyle Moody and Nicholas Yanes are the editors of a recent anthology, Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on America’s Finest Cannibal on Television. I was curious to see what they thought of Clarice, the new series also based on characters from Silence of the Lamb and other books by Thomas Harris. Their book was covered by USA Today. Below is what they shared with mel

CBS's Clarice

In the Shadows of Lambs and Hannibals

by

Kyle Moody, Ph.D. and Nicholas Yanes, Ph.D.

We have spent the last several years with Bryan Fuller’s and NBC’s Hannibal(now streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime). With our book, Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on America’s Favorite Cannibal on Television– now published through McFarland Press – it is time for us to look at the future of the characters created by Thomas Harris. As of now, this future is CBS’s Clarice, currently airing Thursday nights on the broadcast network and streaming the next day on Paramount+. (Clarice’s homepage can be found here.)

It is somewhat odd to talk about this show because of the differences between Clarice and Hannibal. The productions are obviously separated by  multiple years (Hannibal ended its broadcast run in 2015, while Claricebegan airing this year). However, the impact Hannibal had on the broadcast and TV environment cannot be overstated, and it is clear that Clarice had to find its own identity by navigating in the shadow of what came before. 

After all, Hannibal was one of the rare shows to inspire a passionate fandom - a feat which remains unusual for modern scripted network programs (we see you out there, #Fannibals!); it also launched its titular Dr. Lecter – Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen – into superstardom with him appearing in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and set to star as Gellert Grindelwald in future Fantastic Beasts films.And as we are in the midst of the Streaming Wars, Hannibal became a streaming sensation when it finally landed on Netflix during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing others to catch up on the show during the Peak TV era.

The visual language Hannibal deployed is a major reason for its continued longevity; as a matter of fact, our book uses academic examinations to tackle those tableaus that generated excitement and produced multiple meanings. The recurring black stag, the sensual crosscutting between violence and banal activities, the layout of bodies in ghastly yet beautiful displays, the presentation of meals in a manner that entices and disgusts – all of this was produced weekly during Hannibal’s initial run. Fuller’s production was aesthetically pleasing and cinematic, subverting the cinematic and violent boundaries of network television. But Hannibal was so much more than a visual tableau. 

In many ways, Hannibal retained such a loyal fanbase because it made the audience an accessory to Dr. Lecter’s crimes. Viewers knew that Hannibal was a monster, but the artistry of his work caused us to see him as an artist. So, for some fans, Hannibal is less a show about a serial killer and more a show about a culinary artist whose preferred materials are human parts.

Legal Issues and a Missing Doctor 

Due to complicated rights agreements between Hannibal and Thomas Harris’s estate, Clarice can not legally show or mention Dr. Hannibal Lecter. This sets up a massive obstacle for the CBS series because the star of this franchise is not Starling or Graham, it is Lecter. Our over educated and culturally refined cannibal is more than the primary antagonist; he is the center of gravity that these stories will always orbit around. 

Remember, some of the most riveting moments of Hannibal and Silence of the Lambs are when Dr. Lecter is facing off against FBI agent turned patient Will Graham in Lecter’s office for psychiatric sessions or when he is verbally manipulating Starling. Hannibal did this to such a great extent by using the visuals of “mind palaces” and by focusing on subtext; creative decisions derived from Hannibal’s presence which showed the ways that Lecter was a master manipulator and polite interloper. (Contributors further explored this perspective by examining the ways Lecter used psychology and Gothic imagery, along with elements of mythology, to create mental palaces that helped guide Will Graham, Jack Crawford, and later Lecter himself to decode the scenes of the crime.)

With that said, it was surprising to see Clarice start in a psychologist’s office with a combative meeting between Agent Starling and her FBI therapist. This opening scene is clearly crafted to echo Hannibal the character and Hannibal the show without being able to discuss them. Furthermore, allusions to an “inmate” with whom Clarice became “intimate” are all that remain in this framing device. Moreover, while the sessions between Graham and Lecter in Hannibal and the encounters between Starling and Lecter in Silence of the Lambs were layered with subtext and pushed the characters to evolve, Clarice’s session seems to simply function as an exposition drop to help bridge Silence of the Lambs o this show.

Soon after discussions of her personality and PTSD, she is shuttled to a crime scene that is shot much like a Hannibal crime scene, but without the shot composition and strong writing that characterized Fuller’s show. In other words, it tries to echo the ghoulishly artistic style of Hannibal, but comes off as a generic procedural show with a different filter.

 The lack of Dr. Lecter in Clarice not only deprives another actor of the opportunity to bring this character to life, it means that the show suffers from the lack of a memorable villain. Leaving Clarice with no mirror to highlight her weaknesses and strengths as Lecter did.

Gender Uncomplicated

In addition to the lack of Lecter leaving Clarice devoid of a main villain to push the heroine forward, it is one of the many elements that erases the issues of gender complexity from this franchise. After all, with Hannibal not being legally allowed to appear in this show, Clarice becomes a world that communicates the misogyny of the Silence of the Lambs without understanding it. Jonathan Demme’s masterful adaptation of Harris’s second novel emphasized the demure size of Jodie Foster’s Clarice in a largely male world of violence and bureaucracy, but found time to ensure that Clarice was a force of her own, driven by a clarity of purpose.

Clarice, on the other hand, is focused on building a world where Clarice can show up week after week, solve a crime, slowly integrate with her FBI team of doubters, and move away from her “inmate.” Moving away from Hannibal proves to be a more difficult task when the show borrows liberally from the visual elements of its predecessor without totally understanding how the visual vocabulary and cinematic language was applied in the first place.

That may not be a bad thing for our heroine on the surface. After all, Clarice is finding her voice and strength throughout the first two episodes, illustrating how her intellect and background in behavioral sciences is essential for unraveling the mysteries of the murdered women in the pilot. While Starling gains one male ally in her new team, her main allies are the women in her life. One bright spot in the world is Clarice’s fellow agent and friend Ardelia Mapp, played with scene-stealing verve by Devyn A. Tyler. She generates questions and frustrations for Starling all while letting her stay in her Washington D.C. loft, even keeping a book of names titled “People I’m Sending to Hell.” Clarice and Ardelia present a hopeful vision of the world and a strong shared chemistry; their scenes together are easily the highlights of the pilot. 

Whether the dynamic between Clarice and Ardelia remains platonic or becomes romantic, it is important to remember that one of the many reasons Hannibal developed such a loyal fanbase was because the world Bryan Fuller crafted was unapologetically queer. It became a show that clearly communicated that people of any sexual/gender orientation were welcomed. In contrast, while Clarice is in no way homophobic, it is clearly falling back on sterotypical and common gender norms within popular crime dramas, especially those present on “America’s most watched network.” Now, part of this can stem from how our culture’s views of people who aren’t cisgendered heterosexuals has evolved. After all, most people were not offended by Buffalo Bill’s depiction as someone with gender dysmorphia in the 1980s and 1990s, but this has changed. 

Just Another Procedural

Clarice is trying to differentiate itself from other criminal procedurals by focusing on some key issues: our culture’s renewed interests in everyday people becoming celebrities, mental health, and women in toxic workplaces. As a result, Claricepresents three main questions. Will Starling be able to overcome her trauma from Silence of the Lambs? Will Starling be able to accept her fame and use it to benefit her work? And will Starling be able to earn the respect of all the men on her team?

The answer to all these questions is yes.

Anyone who watches criminal procedurals – especially criminal procedurals on CBS – already knows the narrative formulas this show will deploy. Clarice is exactly what we feared Hannibal would be when it first aired, a procedural that warps Harris’s characters into a mold that doesn’t fit them. Hannibal took this saleable premise (different killer each week, solved by Will Graham and the FBI) and forced the show to be imagined through Dr. Lecter’s pristine tastes. 

In our book, co-editor Nicholas Yanes was able to interview Nick Antosca. Antosca was not only one of the writers on Hannibalbut he also co-wrote the series finale. When asked why he felt Hannibal was never a ratings hit, Antosca simply responded, “It was too weird. It’s not for everyone.” And he is right. Hannibal was a unique show that demanded a high level of engagement from viewers if they wanted to fully appreciate its various flavors. 

In contrast, Clarice is a solid, watchable CBS show at this time. It’s the Abel Gideon of Thomas Harris televisual adaptations; it knows how to grab our attention, but it doesn’t do anything noteworthy with it just yet. Clariceis ultimately a warm and friendly weekly crime procedural wearing Harris’s license and the visual storytelling of Hannibal like Buffalo Bill wore a skin suit, but has the potential and the lineage to evolve into something so much more.

More about Kyle Moodyand Nicholas Yanes can be found by following them on Twitter.

Kyle Moody (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is an Associate Professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he teaches courses on social media, message design, new and emerging media, and media history. His research interests include the production of culture through new media practices, online community formation, information creation and dissemination, and examining how cultural practices are impacted by a changing media landscape. His recent work has been published by McFarland Press and Springer, along with Iowa Journal of Communication. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts with his wife and two children. 

Nicholas Yanes (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is a freelance writer and vagabond. His first book, The Iconic Obama examined the 2008 presidential election and its relationship to popular culture. Outside of academia, he is a freelance writer who has contributed to CNBCPrime, MGM, ScifiPulse, Sequart, the Casual Games Association, Shudder’s blog The Bite, and several other publications. His academic and professional interests center on researching and analyzing entertainment industries