Abstract
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) poses questions about the ethics of creating artificial life and the alleged superiority of the (male) human body over all forms of “life.” The movie focuses on Ava (Vikander), an artificial intelligence that assumes (to later consciously adopt) gendered traits in traditional humanoid ways to achieve her aims and, ultimately, to reassure herself. This chapter engages with contemporary debates on techno-culture and feminist posthumanism—Hayles, Braidotti, and Vint—and considers Ava as a cinematic variation of the posthuman. Ex Machina stands as a valid example of how the posthuman consciously appropriates existing structures of knowledge and power and uses them to manipulate the prevailing system and fight against patriarchy, this process ultimately working as a kind of healing therapy.
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Notes
- 1.
As a movement, transhumanism opts for a radical transformation of the human condition by existing, emerging, and speculative technologies, such as regenerative medicine, radical life extension, and speculative technologies, such as mind uploading and cryonics. In general terms, it suggests the end of the biological body and advocates self-responsibility in maintaining health and well-being. This movement—also referred to as utopian posthumanism and advocated by Nick Bostrom, Hans Moravec, Max Moore, or Natasha Vita-More—is directly linked to the enhancement of the body and to ideas of immortality within cyberspace. In broad terms, it encourages the evolution of the human into something superior to our critical condition.
- 2.
In Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), Susan Jeffords believes that the male body is central to popular culture and, accordingly, is classified into two categories, hard and soft, arguing that there has been a change between Reagan hard-body movies and Bush soft-body images in films from the early 1990s. This pattern corresponds, at the same time, with the two prototypes that have delineated and defined US masculinity through the years.
- 3.
For more information about the representation of masculinity and science fiction film, see my study Of Men and Cyborgs: The Construction of Masculinity in Contemporary U.S. Science Fiction Cinema, available at http://rabida.uhu.es/dspace/handle/10272/4129.
- 4.
I wish to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Research Project “Bodies in Transit 2”, ref. FFI2017–84555-C2–1-P), the European Regional Development Fund, and the Spanish Research Agency for the writing of this essay. Also, the funding provided by the Regional Ministry of Economy, Knowledge, Enterprise and Universities of Andalusia, and the European Regional Development Fund for the writing of this essay. Project “Embodiments, Genders and Difference: Cultural Practices of Violence and Discrimination”, ref. 1252965.
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Carrasco-Carrasco, R. (2022). Becoming Woman: Healing and Posthuman Subjectivity in Garland’s Ex Machina. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_13
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