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ABSTRACT
This paper pushes theological engagements with transhumanism to attend to issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation through analysis of three works of speculative fiction – Greg Egan’s Diaspora, Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. Where Egan, alongside many transhumanists, imagines a future that is mostly disembodied, Afrofuturist thinkers like Butler and Okorafor successfully integrate speculation about the future of humanity with attention to the social formation of bodies. Butler illuminates how histories of oppression are relevant for bioethical debates around purported human enhancements, while Okorafor draws attention to the social practices and bodily constraints on those practices that enable participation in concrete human communities. In light of their work, the paper suggests that theological debates with transhumanists should move away from the question of the limits of human nature, and toward questions of how bodily practices humanize us and enable fellowship with the human Christ.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Kourany, “Human Enhancement,” 985. See also More and Vita-More, The Transhumanist Reader, 55.
2 Various, “Transhumanist FAQ.”
3 McKenny, Biotechnology, Human Nature, and Christian Ethics, 15n.7.
4 See Deane-Drummond and Scott, Future Perfect?; Mercer and Trothen, Religion and Transhumanism; Trothen and Mercer, Religion and Human Enhancement; Cole-Turner, Transhumanism and Transcendence; Donaldson and Cole-Turner, Transhumanism and the Church.
5 Townes, “If You Quare It,” 55.
6 Miller and McFarlane, “Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities,” 213–8.
7 Rabkin, “Science Fiction and Bioethical Knowledge,” 138.
8 Pilsch, Transhumanism, 67–102.
9 Sharon DeGraw outlines the historical Anglo-male dominance of the genre at DeGraw, The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction, 1–9. See also Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction,” 16–20.
10 Anderson, “Afrofuturism 2.0,” 230–1.
11 Holloway, Private Bodies, Public Texts; Jones, Medicine and Ethics.
12 While transhumanists frequently express admiration for Egan’s work, Egan himself has been quite critical of the movement. See his comments at Blackford, “Interview.” Parenthetical references in this section refer to Egan, Diaspora.
13 Hauerwas, Hauerwas Reader, 250.
14 See Jacques Derrida’s critique of “phallogocentrism” and bell hooks’s description of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”; McDonald and Derrida, “Choreographies,” 69; and bell hooks, Killing Rage, 77–85. J. Kameron Carter offers a theological genealogy of the modern subject as normatively white at Race, 79–121.
15 Hughes, “Contradictions from the Enlightenment Roots of Transhumanism.” Mark Bould comments “While Extropians, Transhumanists, and other rich white guys can reimagine white flight not in terms of suburbs, gated communities, or ‘off-world colonies,’ but of libertarian, pro-market, digital disembodiment, the overwhelming majority of the global population can only play in the ruins they leave behind”; Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago,” 181.
16 Balibar, “Racism as Universalism,” 191–204.
17 Moten, In the Break, 205.
18 Ali, “Transhumanism and/as Whiteness,” 1. More extensively, Ali, “‘White Crisis’ and/as ‘Existential Risk,’” 207–24.
19 Rollefson, “The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis,” 107.
20 See especially chapters 5, 11, 14, 15, and 31 of More and Vita-More, The Transhumanist Reader.
21 Egan’s character Orlando Venetti provides a counter-subjectivity at the margins of Diaspora. He is described as a man of color who has chosen to live a fleshly existence, but at one of the book’s climactic moments, Yatima forcibly uploads his consciousness into the polises rather than let Orlando die in a natural disaster. The reader later learns second-hand that this copy of Orlando has killed himself. It is quite possible that Egan is aware of the resonances of Orlando’s story, a repetition of the violence that has been inflicted on Black bodies over and over throughout the history of a very different diaspora. Even so, this is not the story that Egan’s novel chooses to tell; Orlando’s motivations go unexplained. We may perhaps consider this moment an instance of Huey Newton’s “revolutionary suicide,” but Egan’s novel lacks the psychological depth and structural analysis of racialized power that Katy Ryan argues renders this motif so powerful in the writings of Toni Morrison. See Ryan, “Revolutionary Suicide,” 389–412.
22 Magedanz, “Captivity Narrative,” 45–59.
23 Naomi Jacobs writes, “Butler’s trilogy works through a series of perspectives on posthumanity”; Jacobs, “Posthuman Bodies,” 91.
24 Bonner, “Difference and Desire,” 50–92.
25 Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy,” 1–14.
26 Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; Priscilla Wald has also connected Lilith’s story in Dawn to Lacks’s story at Wald, “The Art of Medicine.” On the history of coerced medical experimentation on African-American communities, see Washington, Medical Apartheid.
27 Holloway, Private Bodies, 49–50.
28 Butler, “Making Enhancement Equitable,” 106–121; DeBaets, “Enhancement for All?”
29 Russell, “Questions of Race in Bioethics,” 43–55.
30 Persson and Savulescu, Unfit for the Future? 2.
31 Pasco et al., “Visionary Medicine,” 250.
32 Jacobs, “Posthuman Bodies,” 94.
33 On Butler’s place within this movement, see Womack, Afrofuturism, 109–10.
34 Kilgore and Samantrai, “Memorial,” 356–7.
35 See Marotta, “Nnedi Okorafor’s Afrofuturism,” 10–12.
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Joseph E. Lenow
Joseph E. Lenow is Resident Assistant Professor of Theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, and a priest in the Episcopal Church. His works have appeared in the International Journal of Systematic Theology, Religious Studies, Studia Patristica, and the Anglican Theological Review.