En postmodern PrometheusNatur, teknikoch transtematik i Frankisssteinav Jeanette Winterson

Abstract

This essay applies a trans ecological perspective to the transgender motif in Jeanette Winterson’s novel Frankissstein. A love story, a novel about transhumanism, artificial intelligence and humans relationships to the body, nature and technology. I examine how the transgender character in Frankissstein relations to ideas about nature-culture, biology-technology, and mind-body. Trans ecology is a new field, combining transgender studies and ecocriticism in order to examine how transgender bodies are depicted in relation to nature, the natural and the environment. While queer theroy and transgender studies often dismiss the natural, transecology rexamines the human relationship with nature. Drawing from the new materialist theory of Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby, the essay examines the possibilites of a materialist trans ecology that still understands both identitites and bodies as constructed. The essay demonstrates that the transgender character Ry Shelley is a hybrid character, combining male-female, biology-technology and nature-culture in a single person. While the other major character, Victor Stein, detests the material and wants to become pure mind, the narrator Ry Shelley shows the importance of the body and becomes an illustration of how human identity is not just a discursive construction, but also a biological and technical material construction. In Frankissstein the transgender character is a symbol for how all humans are hybrids.