Oryx and Crake
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Here are a few key points about Oryx's backstory and attitude: - She was taken from her village as a child and trafficked into sexual slavery. This was done without her consent and took away her autonomy over her own body. - However, Oryx does not see herself as a passive victim. She takes pride in her skills and feels she has some control and agency in her situation. - Some feminists argue that even in oppressive circumstances, women can still exercise some level of choice and agency. Oryx's attitude could be seen as reflecting this perspective. - Others may argue her situation of sexual slavery as a child fundamentally deprived her of true consent and agency. Her attitude could
Oryx and Crake
- 1. Snowman’s World We encounter this new world through Snowman’s eyes as he tries to remember words and phrases, and tries to interpret the detritus of the old world to the Crakers, making up origin myths and explanations for all the STUFF that has been left behind. Let’s encounter our own current stuff and imagine it remains in a world where its use and everyday mundanity is gone. What is the story you would tell about it? You can choose an item you are carrying with you (let’s try to not all write about our smartphones, though) or you can choose an item from this box. These items in the box are my STUFF, so please return. The goal is to either use the item to explain something about our current society, or to make up a story that recasts our current society. You choose.
- 2. Oryx & Crake THE POST HUMAN EXPERIENCE FIRST IN A TRILOGY, FOLLOWED BY YEAR OF THE FLOOD (2009) AND MADDADDAM (2013)
- 3. Post-Humanism Posthumanism considers the possibility that historical phenomena (such as advances in technology or discoveries about animals) are leading to fundamental changes in the human species and its relationship with the world. It thus involves radically rethinking the dominant, familiar humanist account of who “we” are as human beings. According to the humanist model (a clear and influential example of which can be found in the seventeenth-century writings of Rene Descartes), the figure of the human has a natural and eternal place at the very center of things, where it is clearly distinguished from machines and animals, where it shares with all other human beings a unique and universal essence, where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of history, and where it acts according to something called “human nature.” For humanists, “Man,” to use the problematic gendered term often employed in accounts of “the human condition,” enjoys a position of automatic and unquestionable hegemony. “Man” is the measure of all things. Posthumanism, by way of contrast, begins with the recognition that “Man” is not the privileged and protected center, because humans are no longer – and perhaps never were – utterly distinct from animals and machines, are the products of historical and cultural differences that make any appeal to universal human essence impossible… —The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
- 4. Post-humanism More simply, posthumanism considers what it means to be human, dissolves some of the binaries between human and machine, as well as the relationship between being human and evolutionary biology Zombies are a posthuman construct. So are corpses. Posthumanism is also referred to as transhumanism: a being that looks like a human, perhaps, but has abilities that transcend our understanding of what it means to be human.
- 5. Posthuman terrors & pleasures “The terror is relatively easy to understand. ‘Post,’ with is dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the days of ’the human may be numbered… ...what about the pleasures? For some people...the posthuman evokes the exhilerating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means...” M. Katherine Hayles, “What Does It Mean to Be Posthuman” (conclusion from How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics)
- 6. Posthumanism + gender As we’ve discussed, binary gender tends to categorize people into roles, and roles tend to create hierarchies, aka power structures and oppression Traditional feminist thought focuses on that oppression, on patriarchy and its consequences You could argue (and many have) that this traditional feminist lens is at odds with third-wave feminists, queer theory and the like because the latter groups are less concerned with oppression and more concerned with identity politics than with identification of oppressive structures. Transhumanism is more concerned with the fusing of thoughts regarding biological determinism with the advances of technology and science. In other words, what can science and technology bring to the desires of the post-binary world?
- 7. Have we gone as far as we can? “Efforts to ameliorate patriarchy and the disabilities of binary gender through social, educational, political and economic reform can only achieve so much so long as the material basis, biological gendering of the body, brain and reproduction, remains fixed. Postgenderism confronts the limits of a social constructionist account of gender and sexuality, and proposes that the transcending of gender by social and political means is now being complemented and completed by technological means.” —Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary By George Dvorsky and James Hughes, PhD Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
- 8. Conflicting schools of thought The emergence of ecofeminism in the 1980s as a 180 degree turn away from radical social constructionism back to biological gender essentialism (Sturgeon, 1997) was an acknowledgement of the inescapability of a biological basis for sex, gender and sexual preference. The ecofeminists integrated naturalism and deep ecology into their framework and celebrated the gender binary. In the ecofeminist narrative women's brains and their role in reproduction made them more nurturant, while testosterone-poisoned male brains just wanted violence, and to rape women and nature. While a few feminists in the 1970s, such as Shulamith Firestone (1970), had suggested that reproductive technologies could liberate women from biology, ecofeminists saw technology as a part of the suppressive superstructure of male patriarchy. —Ibid
- 9. Consider the “future” in the novel Jimmy and Crake live on the CorpSeCorps compound. Current parallels? (keep in mind Atwood wrote this book in 2003). Apparently no government, only corporate surveillance. Any current parallel to that? Jimmy and Crake spend a lot of their time online in some form, and searching for hidden/dark web content. What about today? How do you think their environment impacts Jimmy and Crake’s stance toward life? What about today? The game "Extinctathon" plays a foreshadowing role in the novel. Jimmy and Crake also play "Barbarian Stomp" and "Blood and Roses." What comparable video games do you know of? What do you think about virtual violence? Are there advantages? Are there disadvantages?
- 10. Biotechnology In the novel, we see all sorts of “futuristic” biotechnologies taken for granted. How close are we now? ChickieNobs Cross-species gene splicing? Well, we have gene editing and the human genome has been mapped. And it’s in use. Shortest video I can find on gene editing. Biohacking goes mainstream Other weird shit? Seriously, this is happening now
- 11. Fan Art: ChickieNobs (Travis Smith)
- 12. Of course, we have biohacking now If you could “make” an improved human being, would you do it? What features would you choose to incorporate? Why would these be better than what we've got? We have technology for improved eyesight Plastic surgery Sex-reassignment surgery prosthetics
- 13. Our characters How would you describe Jimmy and Crake’s relationship? What do you think Atwood is trying to say about male friendships in this novel? What role does Oryx play in their relationship?
- 14. Homosocial Concept described by gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedwick in her seminal book “Between Men”: “Homosocial desire,” to begin with, is a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with “homosexual,” and just as obviously mean to be distinguished from “homosexual.” In fact, it is applied to such activities as “male bonding”…To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for man, in our society, is radically disrupted…I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual desire as “at the root of” other forms of male homosociality—but rather a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other men.
- 15. Triangles Sedgwick goes on to discuss a book by Rene Girard in which he traced examples of triangular relationships in literature: “For instance, Girard finds many examples in which the choice of the beloved is determined in the first place, not by the qualities of the beloved, but by the beloved’s already being the choice of the person who has been chosen as a rival. In fact, Girard seems to see the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved. And within the male-centered novelistic tradition of European high culture, the triangles Girard traces are most often those in which the two males are rivals for a female; it is the bond between males that he most assiduously uncovers.” —Sedgwick, “Gender Assymetry and Erotic Triangles”
- 16. Oryx’s life Taken from her village Trafficked as a sex slave What is her attitude about it and how does that reflect feminist arguments regarding women’s agency over their own bodies?