SF-TH Inc

Posthuman, Postdefinitional
Posthuman Bodies by Judith Halberstam; Ira Livingston
Review by: Ann Weinstone
Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jul., 1996), pp. 303-305
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240521 .
Accessed: 07/01/2014 05:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 83.111.36.170 on Tue, 7 Jan 2014 05:13:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOKSIN REVIEW

303

Posthuman,Postdefinitional.JudithHalberstam
andIraLivingston,eds.
PosthumanBodies. IndianaUniversityPress, 1995. x+275. $35.00 cloth,
$17.95 paper.
ATP (adenosine5'-triphosphate).
Readany basicmolecularbiologytext,
andyou'll find somethinglike "ATPis a moleculethatuponhydrolysis,releases energyto drivemanyof the chemicalreactionsin cells." ATP is also
the acronymfor A ThousandPlateaus,the influentialworkby Deleuzeand
Guattarithatmightin turnbe saidto providethe energythatdrivesmanyof
the reactionsin PosthumanBodies. Theposthumanis, of course,postdefinitional.Orbetter,continuallyopento redefinitions
andbinary-smashing
oversignifications.Afterreadingthe thirteentexts thatcomprisethe volume(inIFminclinedto view theposthuman
as thephenomecludingthe Introduction),
cell. Manyof theessaysdraw
nologicalfieldrefiguredas a phenomenological
cellularrhetoricalenergyfromA ThousandPlateaus(ATP),to talkof postrandommutation,
humanityin termsof politicalstrategiesof recombination,
and viral attack.As enactedhere, the posthumanis, most insistently,an
andverb-nounal
witha queer,in-yourassemblageof noun-verbal
phenomena
face feel. Resonance.Interference.Redistribution.
Intensity.Flow. EmerDeterritorialization.
gence. Coition.Coalition.Reterritorialization.
Depredation.Mutation.Infection.Contagion.Vibration.Disintegration.
Hybridization.
Ambiguation.Channeling.Swarming.And then a swarm of becomings.
Becoming-subject.
Becoming-multiple.
Becoming-lesbian.
Becoming-insect,
Becoming-landcrab
(yes!) to namebut a few.
ThisATP-energy,suffusingacrossa wholevolume,doestendto makeone
awareof inhabitinga particulartheoreticalmoment.Yet it is
uncomfortably
one of the greatstrengthsof Posthuman
Bodiesthatthe editors,in theirIntroductionandchoiceof essays,builda complexlylayeredsenseof conversation
and convergencesamongtheoretical-political-cultural
discoursesfrompostcolonialismto feminismto queertheoryto theartsandartifactsof film, literaIn this
ture, medico-systems,cyborgs, aliens, and otherbecoming-entities.
andLivingstonarecarefulto displacewhattheyview as the
light, Halberstam
"Thesenarrativesshow how the body
utopiannotionof inter-disciplinarity.
andits effectshavebeenthoroughlyre-imagined
throughan infra-disciplinary
interrogation
of humanidentityandits attendant
ideologies"(4; italicsmine).
Infra-disciplinarity
works,notby transcending,
butby the stealthandperversion of a spy plane that crosses space at an odd-lowangle with respectto
detectionsystems, subvertingthem and renderingthem visible at the same
time. (Here, the authorof this reviewengagesin a suspectinfra-mixingof
biologicalandmilitarymetaphorsthatis toutela rage.)
PosthumanBodies has four sections: "Multiples";"Some Genders";
and"TerminalBodies."an appropriate
"Queering";
mutationof ScottBukatman'sTerninalIdentities.Manyof the essaysdealwithsubjectspertinentto
sf, especially sf consideredin its culturallyexpandingstate. Allucquere
RosanneStoneleadsthe volumewith "Identityin Oshkosh," a continuation
of
her previouslypublisheddiscussionsof "multiples."Havingdrawntogether
the avatarsof virtualrealityandher notionof a post-surgical,post-transsexu-

This content downloaded from 83.111.36.170 on Tue, 7 Jan 2014 05:13:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

304

SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES,VOLUME23 (1996)

ality, here Stone usefully draws a third multiple onto the field, so-called
Multiple PersonalityDisorder, to suggest thatbeing multipleis the posthuman
condition. Steve Shaviro gets the agent provocateur award for his "Two
Lessons from Burroughs" in which he proposes a "biological approach to
postmodernism"(38). Shaviro championsviolent viral replicationsand insect
strategies such as swarming. He suggests that we find out about the other by
becoming other, by posing "the question of radical otherness in biological
terms, instead of epistemological ones.... resolving such a problem would
involve the transfer, not of minds, but of DNA" (47). Memo to Calgene:
Clear the lab of frogs and tomatoes. Susan Squier traces the lineage of three
images: the ectogenic fetus, the surrogatemother, and the pregnantman, from
Mary Shelley's Frankensteinto Octavia Butler, ElizabethJolley, and Angela
Carter.
Some of the best essays appear in the final sections, "Queering" and
"TerminalBodies." Three of these engage with sf texts and films. Camilla
Griggers' "Phantomand Reel Projections: Lesbians and the (Serial) KillingMachine," does not address sf, but must be mentioned. Griggers writes of
Aileen Wuornos, a homeless prostitutelabeled by the press "the first lesbian
serial killer." Ignore the stupefying overdose of ATP in the opening paragraphs. It wears off quickly. This is the essay in the volume that most effectively confrontsthe question:And what of the bodies of poor people? Griggers
shows how the body of the "lesbian predator"is used to "channel and then
screen a potential contagion of violence erupting from the breakdownof the
sex-gender system in the so-called 'healthy' heterosexual social body" (16869). In the final two and a half pages of the essay, Griggersdelivers a tour de
force articulationof the complex significations attachingto our "re-membering" of Aileen Wuornos.
In "ReadingLike an Alien," Kelly Hurley discusses a numberof sf films
that fall under the rubric of body horror, "a hybrid genre that recombinesthe
narrativeand cinematic conventions of the science fiction, horror, and suspense film in order to stage a spectacle of the human body defamiliarized,
renderedother" (203). Hurley questions the practice of reading body horror
as catharsis or the return of the repressed. She argues convincingly that the
subgenrepresents an "alternatespecies logic" and an "ontologicalchallenge."
This is a challenge that operates via signification overload to rupturemore
conservative readings of the logics of sexual identity, difference, and the category of the human. As a bonus, Hurley inadvertently(?) provides the moment
of high-theory comedy when she terms the armpit "a hugely undertheorized
zone" (212). Finally, Eric White's "Once They Were Men, Now They're
Land Crabs" is a fascinating discussion of "bodily nomadism"in three B sf
films and Alain Resnais' My Uncle in America. These "evolutionistfilms,"
White argues, enact the human body as an evolutionarytime bomb of latent
non-humanparts. Humans get in touch with their inner crab monsters, killer
insects, land crabs, and rodents, revealing a "disturbingtruth--namely,that
'human nature' is not except as a monstrous amalgam of the non-human"
(245).

This content downloaded from 83.111.36.170 on Tue, 7 Jan 2014 05:13:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOKSIN REVIEW

305

Posthuman Bodies contains some fine essays. And the cumulativeeffect

is even better.I came away with a helpfullyenhancedsense of the ways in

which bodies and "the body" are conductors and constructors (the editors
would say "nodes")of emerging political and culturalcurrents.But I have my
complaints. Although the editors thankfully eschew the excesses of what I

wouldcall, withoutreferringto biologicalmales, "theboys withtoys" set

those whose gleeful posthumanitymanifests as the urge to merge with the
sleek, orificeless objects d'tech on the Fetish page of Wired-they do make
some awfully big claims. Claims about the death of history as a useful way of
processing meaning; about the demise of western white male metaphysicsand
attendantmetanarratives;and about the post-historicityof the posthuman,all
capped by the post-Nietzscheanproclamationthat "the human is dead." Call
me a tired old feminist, but I still want to ask: Whose history? For whom are
these statementsmeaningful?Fortunately,one of the best essays in the volume
takes up these questions directly, and its inclusion speaks to the editors'
integrity: they are walking the walk.
Carol Mason, in "TerminatingBodies," worries the worrying question of
cyborgism as a myth that might be appropriatedby right wing militaristsand

thequeerestposthumans
alike.Masonproposesfocusing"onthehistoricaland
discursive interplay among bodies ratherthan on the bodies themselves," on
"cyborgismas a readingpractice that reveals how subjectivitiesare made and
remade-how they are reproduced"(226). She challenges the editors' posthistoricity and mounts "a defense of history as a safeguardagainst a cyborgism
that swings both ways" (228). What follows are two relatedand highly useful
exemplars of just the type of reading practice she advocates. Mason performs
an analysis of the "discursivemachinery"that shapes the relationshipbetween
Sarah Connor, the white mother-revolutionaryof Terminator2, and Miles
Dyson, the black inventorof an automateddefense system, Skynet, thatthreatens biological humans with genocide. She contends that the "real" cyborg in
the film is not the body of the Terminator,but Connor-Dyson. "They work
together as a reproductivemachine lubricatedby these historical residues...
specifically a history of eugenics, lynchings, and populationand reproductive
control" (228). "It's the examinationof contingent and perpetualprocess of
historical and discursive re-production that can allow us to better locate,
articulate, and specify the aims of this 'political unity' or 'posthuman''we"'
(237).
Mason then moves to a similarly conducted discussion of the abortion
debate, providing a corrective to some of the excesses of the Introduction,and
indeed, the excesses of cyborg discourses at large.-Ann Weinstone, Stanford University.
The Story of Jules Verne-the Anglo-American One. Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk, The Jules Verne Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD, & London:
Scarecrow Press (800-462-6420), 1996. xvii+257. $54.50.
This long-overdue book is a noteworthy publication for three reasons.
First, it helps to provide an understandingof how the legendaryFrenchauthor

This content downloaded from 83.111.36.170 on Tue, 7 Jan 2014 05:13:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions