Aline Ferreira

"Imaginative versions of human cloning have fascinated writers and philosophers for a long time and have been dramatized in myths and fiction, while its theoretical underpinnings and potential pragmatic ramifications have been explored by a great variety of thinkers, long before the very possibility of cloning was even mooted. The purpose of this book is to trace these fictional illustrations of the dream of human cloning from some of their earlier manifestations through to the proliferation of contemporary responses to the issues raised by this dream.
Privileging a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective, the book examines representations of parthenogenesis and other related fantasies, arguing that cloning could be an important tool in helping women achieve a more egalitarian status. Through the analysis of a cluster of recent texts, consideration is given to new family and societal reconfigurations, as well as to their psychological, cultural and political consequences. The book theorizes the new psychological cartography for humanity which will arise as a result of the development and application of genetic engineering and the possible implementation of human cloning.
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The long-standing ambition to extend the human lifespan and postpone ageing has always been a potent force driving bioscientific advances. Fantasies of rejuvenation, including the acquisition of new organs and - more radically - new bodies, have become increasingly common in fiction and film, articulating a deep-seated wish to prolong life and eventually vanquish death. This ambition, however, can often only be envisaged at the expense of using the organs or the entire bodies of disadvantaged people, those who lack financial means and state support, thus effectively becoming biological slaves.
Texts where rampant biocapitalism and biocontrol conspire to render destitute people invisible and disposable include Padmanabhan's Harvest (1997), Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Holmqvist’s The Unit (2006), which share a number of topics such as organ trafficking and donation as well as the exploitation of weaker, poorer citizens. These fictional second-class citizens can be seen as paradigmatic examples of the “precarious” and “ungrievable” lives” discussed by Judith Butler, inscribed in our biotechnological, biocapitalist society, forcefully warning us of potential dangers to come in a bioeconomy saturated with social inequalities.

This essay considers the plight of the protagonist of Saramago’s O Homem Duplicado (The Double) in terms of the ways a singular identity is negotiated and the human condition is problematized. O Homem Duplicado will be inscribed alongside two other novels that similarly question the quandaries attendant upon the fragile process of maintaining a stable sense of identity when confronted with potentially threatening circumstances that might endanger that feeling of individuality: Henry James’s The Sense of the Past (1917) and Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat (1957). The three novels share a number of striking similarities: their protagonists are historians who feel at a crossroads in their monotonous, unfulfilled lives and who have profoundly uncanny and disturbing encounters with their Doubles, with whom they trade places.
The dénouement of O Homem Duplicado is open to further interpretations. The other doubles that might keep on appearing, ad infinitum, in a seemingly endless perpetuation of identical multiplied selves can be regarded as clones, the possible offspring of an unethical experiment. O Homem Duplicado, a novel about identity, dualism, reflections, doubles and clones, can not only be read as a parable about the fear of standardization and endless reproduction in contemporary society, but also as prophetically cautioning against the unethical use of new reproductive technologies, such as cloning.

What is a mother? At a time when new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, three-parent embryos and surrogacy are challenging long-standing perceptions of what a mother is, new reconfigurations of motherhood will surface, introducing testing changes that will radically transform life in society. This essay looks at a number of interlinked questions: What is a mother in a future age of biorobotic reproduction when hybrids of human and machine can become pregnant, and, relatedly, what is a human being if the child is not gestated inside a woman’s uterus? Is being born of a woman what defines a human being?
These are extremely challenging questions that have been addressed in a cluster of recent films and texts, including Dennis Villeneuve’s movie Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Grant Sputore’s movie I Am Mother (Australia, 2019) and Ian McEwan’s recent short story “Düssel…” (2018). Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), in turn, a much earlier text with some salient similarities to Blade Runner 2049, provides illuminating insights and comparisons. It is some of these speculative scenarios I will be concerned with in this essay.

This essay examines the fantasy of life extension enabled through the transfer of one’s consciousness to new, cloned bodies in the event of disease, accident, or old age. This vision has recently been dramatized in both fiction and film, bearing witness to the power of this imaginary scenario. This eventuality would raise wide-ranging ethical issues, which speculative bioethics should begin to contemplate. Interestingly, it is young adult fiction that has recently provided an extensive and consistent cluster of novels dealing not only with this topic but also with the interrelated notion of clones purposely grown to replace a loved one, with a concomitant array of further ethical concerns. These and related topics will be examined here through the lens of fiction and recent theoretical work on future biotechnological scenarios.

This essay reflects on the concept of cryonics as a technology that will in the future enable cryopreserved people to be returned to life when the cure for the disease that killed them is found. The longstanding dream of prolonging human existence, mainly with recourse to cryonics, will be examined through the lens of Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016), Robert Begam's courtroom thriller Long Life (2008) and Clifford D. Simak's Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967). The fantasy of cryonics is becoming increasingly visible in contemporary culture, with recent books and films addressing this subject. The utopian, transhumanist vision of a future where much longer life spans will be achievable is a dream that only the wealthy elites can afford, with megacorporations usually exploiting those with less funds but who also wish to undergo cryosuspension for later resurrection. Recent work by a number of bioethicists such as Francesca Minerva (2018), Ole Martin Moen (2015) and David Sh...

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the changes that the implementation of artificial wombs would bring to society, the family, and the concept of motherhood and fatherhood through the lens of two recent books: Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season and Rebecca Ann Smith’s Baby X. Each of the two novels, set in a near future, follows the work of a scientist who develops artificial womb technology. Significantly, both women experience concerns about the technology and its long-term effects that make both of them leave their laboratories and rethink the technology they invented, while considering its many ethical implications. Both novels can be seen as feminist revisionary rewritings of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, rejecting the vision of rows of mass-produced, anonymous babies in artificial wombs, stressing instead the closeness of the parents to their offspring. They nevertheless critically evaluate not only the many potential benefits for women of ectogenetic technology but also the possible disadvantages and pitfalls

Altered Carbon (Lenic & Kalogridis, 2018-) is centrally about the fantasy of eradicating death, as well as the survival and negotiation of identity in a new body. This fantasy, coupled to that of extending the human life span, has been a long-standing, persistent dream, given recurrent expression in mythological and Biblical accounts, in early epic narratives and in art. A considerable number of recent works, both literary and cinematic,  engage with the possibility of almost infinite life extension, usually by being reborn in a new body. This lengthy list of visual and fictional narratives dealing with the age old ambition of quasi-immortality bears witness to a genetic, transhumanist imaginary that is taking the goal of progressively abolishing death more seriously. Altered Carbon can be inscribed in this increasingly emphatic thematic cluster that envisages novel ways of prolonging life, offering its own solutions to the inevitability of death, including new (cloned) bodies for the extremely wealthy. The premise of erasing death is not new, of course, neither is the concept of body hopping or body swapping,  but the extent to which it is applied in Altered Carbon, where it is valid for everybody, is unprecedented. These fantasies have been updated by envisaging the possibility of avoiding or postponing death by being reincarnated into a new body or, more radically, by always having cloned versions of one's body ready to receive one's memories, kept in a "cortical stack," as is the case in Altered Carbon. These cloned versions can only be afforded by the extremely rich, which yet again introduces dystopian capitalist hierarchy and selection into this transhumanist scenario where death has been all but eliminated. While Altered Carbon

Richard Powers's novel "Generosity: An Enhancement" (2009) engages with the contemporary anxiety over whether genetic enhancement will inexorably lead to the end of human nature as we know it, a concern deeply etched into the genetic imaginary that increasingly characterizes Western society. In "Generosity", Powers concentrates on the pursuit of happiness in terms of the potential of a genetically engineered sense of contentment and euphoria. Indeed, the novel revolves around a character who appears to be so consistently happy that one of her teachers, a writer, and later a geneticist, comes to believe that her state of hyperthymia may have a genetic basis. The novel chronicles her gradual descent into depression through constant exposure to the media and the greed of people who want to partake of her eternal bliss. The announcement of the discovery in her genome of a gene that appears to have a direct influence on people's predisposition for happiness leads to a media furore that drives her to isolation and a pronounced state of anxiety. The role of nature versus nurture is thoroughly interrogated while the potential and threat of chemically induced contentment for the masses is reminiscent of a similar debate rehearsed in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), as is the future scenario of genetically enhanced beings or designer babies. This essay attempts to tease out the main ramifications of these issues with recourse to recent scientific findings in genetics as well as the ethics of human enhancement.

This paper reflects on the potential psychological effects of the development of pharmacological means to enhance or diminish emotions such as love. According to the psychiatrists Lewis, Amini and Lannon, the “body’s physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities” (A General Theory of Love, 2007, viii). What if the “biological reality of romance” (viii) could be induced with pills? That is the premise that drives the narrative in two recent texts that address this very question: Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect (2012) and Mike Uden’s novel Chemical Attraction (2014). Both narratives revolve around the effect of testing new antidepressant drugs on healthy volunteers in clinical trials. It is suggested that some chemicals, such as oxytocin and vasopressin, might indeed have contributed to what appears to be an unexpected rate of apparently incompatible volunteers falling in love. Yet another way of making people fall in love with a certain person can be achieved, in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015), through a form of imprinting by means of brain surgery, a contemporary revision of the love potion in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595).
What if, in related vein, a pill could be developed that makes people fall out of love, a possibility envisioned by the bioethicists Julian Savulescu, Brian D. Earp and others? As has been argued, “the individual, voluntary use of anti-love biotechnology (under the right sort of conditions) could be justified or even morally required” (Brian D. Earp et al. “If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup”, The American Journal of Bioethics, Vol. 13, 11, Nov 2013: 3-17). Further research into this thought experiment is conducted in Earp and Savulescu’s recent book Love is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships (2020), which argues that a measure of chemical control over romance and potentially painful break-ups is already within reach. Love in the time of romance-controlling drugs would undergo profound and unpredictable changes, some of which are dramatized in the fictional narratives under consideration.
Would this kind of emotional engineering be unethical? Who would control its application? The further question these texts ask is related to the problem of identity and consciousness: who is the “I” that thinks and feels under the influence of these designer drugs?
The limits of neuroscience and psychopharmacology are thoroughly tested and revised in the two books under examination, which dramatize the potential impact on individuals and society of tinkering with the neurochemical underpinnings of the biology of love and attachment to shape relationships and bioengineer people's life decisions.

Feminist utopias can be described as thought experiments in speculative fiction,
extrapolating into the future new family, social and political scenarios deemed more adequate to
feminine visions of a better world, freed from repressive patriarchal structures. They can thus become
useful narrative instruments in terms of imagining more egalitarian worlds. Dystopias, in turn,
usually appear in times of crisis, fictionally dramatizing the dominant questions and taking the
potential repercussions of these problems to their most drastic consequences. They are thus cautionary
tales, warning against those future dangers that may still be prevented if sufficient attention is paid
to solve them. Alongside a general overview and contextualization of the most important clusters of
feminist utopias and dystopias, this article will analyse some of the most relevant thematic concerns.
Particular attention will be given to the ways in which biology has conditioned women’s roles as well
as the potential for change as a result of the implementation of new reproductive technologies.

As utopias feministas podem ser descritas como exercícios intelectuais de extrapolação futura e invenção crítica de novos cenários familiares, sociais e políticos mais adequados a visões de um mundo melhor, de um ponto de vista feminino, liberto de rígidas e repressivas estruturas patriarcais. Neste sentido transformam-se em instrumentos extremamente úteis na visualisação de mundos mais igualitários. As distopias, por seu lado, surgem predominantemente em tempos de
crise, dramatizando as problemáticas dominantes e por vezes levando as suas possíveis ramificações até às consequências mais drásticas, constituindo-se como um aviso e chamada de atenção para problemas futuros que poderão ainda ser prevenidos se lhes for prestada a atenção devida e encontradas soluções para os resolver. A par de uma visão geral e contextualização dos maiores agrupamentos de utopias e distopias feministas este artigo elencará algumas das temáticas sobre as quais estas narrativas incidem mais enfaticamente e analisará mais em pormenor de que maneira a biologia feminina tem condicionado o papel da mulher, reflectindo também sobre as possibilidades de mudança que se perfilam num horizonte próximo como resultado da implementação de novas tecnologias reprodutivas.

My purpose in this paper is to examine the artistic trope of death depicted as a woman, departing from José Saramago’s book As Intermitências da Morte (2005, Death With Interruptions). Saramago’s novel deals with the intermittent disappearance or cessation of death in an undisclosed country, where this phenomenon causes innumerable disturbances. When Death decides to visit this country she takes the shape of a beautiful young woman who develops a romantic interest for a cello player, following him in his daily activities. In Saramago’s novel there is a fascinating reversal of the “Death and the Maiden” theme in art, which in As Intermitências da Morte becomes “Death and the Young Man”. Traditionally, Death has been represented in the arts under a masculine guise but there is a small, though significant number of instances of works that depict Death as a woman, in particular, it seems to me, in artists of the fin de siècle. A good example, which reminds me of the figure of death as a beautiful young woman and potential bride in Saramago’s novel is Thomas Gotch’s painting Death the Bride which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895. Alfred Kubin’s early drawing The Best Doctor and Marianne Stokes’s painting Young Girl and Death (1900) are other representative examples of this reversal of the “Death and the Maiden” theme.
The butterfly is another symbol central to Saramago’s book with a long tradition in the visual arts. In a memorable scene, the cello player is at home perusing a book on entomology, pausing at a page which shows a type of butterfly popularly known as a “Death's Head Sphinx Moth” and whose scientific name is acherontia atropos. This butterfly is often used as a death symbol due to what appears to be a skull on its back. Atropos is also the name, in Greek mythology, of one of the three Fates, or Moirae, the goddesses that rule over life: while Clotho is responsible for spinning life’s thread and Lachesis to supervise its length, Atropos’s duty is to cut it, thus representing death. Gustav Klimt used this motif in one of the paintings in his monumental Beethoven Frieze of 1902, with Atropos, incarnating Death, leering behind three women, as did Goya in his Atropos,also calledThe Fates(Las Parcas) (1820-23), included in Black Paintings. It is then this nexus of thematic resonances that I wish to investigate here, the intertextual, intermedial intersections that constitute a body of literary and visual motifs with important ramifications in other areas such as philosophy and sociology.

A substantial number of recent works, both fictional and filmic, engages with the possibility of infinite life extension, usually by being reborn in a new body. Altered Carbon can be inscribed in this increasingly emphatic thematic cluster that envisages novel ways of prolonging life, including new (cloned) bodies.
The essay addresses a number of interrelated thematic concerns dramatized in Altered Carbon predominantly from a philosophical, psychoanalytical and bioethical point of view. How does the almost radical abolition of death impact human existence? Is a life that is no longer finite still considered meaningful? Is the need to move into a new body to continue living, amounting in effect to being born again, perceived as potentially traumatic? Pregnancy appears to have been virtually erased, with the concomitant disappearance of birth, until now a decisive and structuring element of being human. On the other hand, religion still shapes the decisions of many citizens, with Catholics in particular resisting or refusing the elimination of death by being resleeved into a new body, especially when there is often no choice of which body. The extremely wealthy, however, have their own, cryopreserved cloned bodies at their disposal whenever they are needed. Class and socioeconomic forces are still very much at play in this future society.
If humans in a potential utopian future become no longer beings-towards-death, in Freud's and Heidegger's formulation, but instead beings-towards-life, the foundational premises of human existence would be thoroughly revised and rewritten. Unbound by finitude, humanity would enter a new utopian (dystopian?) era, where it could become fundamentally free, an impossibility until such time since we are always already inevitably circumscribed by death, which inexorably closes off our temporal horizon.

This essay reflects on the politics of meat as they intersect with gender politics, using three novels that powerfully dramatize these issues as case studies: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007), Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1990) and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998). The protagonists of these books are young women who feel trapped and constricted by society’s strong patriarchal conventions, attempting to escape them by eschewing meat, equated with the exploitation of women, animals and the environment. In addition, they develop an overpowering empathy with plants, which eventually leads them to avoid eating even the latter. Meat-eating and animal farming, as well as the ways in which they intersect problematically with the sexual objectification of women as meat to be consumed, a longstanding, vexed trope, are the main thematic concerns in the three novels, which can be seen as engaged in a critical dialogue. These topics are addressed by drawing on recent theoretical work on gender studies and ecofeminism, reflecting on the link between the commodification of women as meat, as well as considering the strategies that might enable the protagonists to escape this persistent trope.

This essay reflects on the concept of cryonics as a technology that will in the future enable cryopreserved people to be returned to life when the cure for the disease that killed them is found. The longstanding dream of prolonging human existence, mainly with recourse to cryonics, will be examined through the lens of Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016), Robert Begam's courtroom thriller Long Life (2008) and Clifford D. Simak's Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967). The fantasy of cryonics is becoming increasingly visible in contemporary culture, with recent books and films addressing this subject. The utopian, transhumanist vision of a future where much longer life spans will be achievable is a dream that only the wealthy elites can afford, with megacorporations usually exploiting those with less funds but who also wish to undergo cryosuspension for later resurrection. Recent work by a number of bioethicists such as Francesca Minerva (2018), Ole Martin Moen (2015) and David Shaw (2009) on the case for and against cryonics from a bioethical point of view will help shed light on the main thematic concerns these works of speculative fiction engage with, pointing the way to future scenarios that the rapid advancement of biotechnologies will make possible.

Frankenstein appears to have a strong appeal for young adult fiction writers. Shelley’s novel revolves around a number of deep-seated fears, which often emergen in adolescence: the search for biological origins, the fear of abandonment, anxieties about corporeal image and worries about not fitting in. The grotesque body of Frankenstein’s creature aptly emblematizes and parallels in crucial ways the unruly and disorderly adolescent body. These issues are powerfully articulated in a number of recent young adult novels that engage with these Frankensteinian tropes: Sangu Mandanna’s The Lost Girl (2012), Neal Shusterman’s Unwind (2012) and Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts (2016).  Indeed, these texts, which revise Shelley’s narrative of bodily technogenesis and re-creation, owe a huge debt to Frankenstein in their insistence that differently created or distinctly embodied people are worthy of respect in their physical diversity, while also stressing the bio-exploitation some of the characters are subjected to, having body parts removed for subsequent transplantation. These vexed issues will be examined with recourse to recent theoretical work in biomedicine and bioethics as well as discussions of prosthetic, posthuman and liminal bodies, with their promises and discontents.

This essay examines the fantasy of life extension enabled through the transfer of one’s consciousness to new, cloned bodies in the event of disease, accident, or old age. This vision has recently been dramatized in both fiction and film, bearing witness to the power of this imaginary scenario. This eventuality would raise wide-ranging ethical issues, which speculative bioethics should begin to contemplate. Interestingly, it is young adult fiction that has recently provided an extensive and consistent cluster of novels dealing not only with this topic but also with the interrelated notion of clones purposely grown to replace a loved one, with a concomitant array of further ethical concerns. These and related topics will be examined here through the lens of fiction and recent theoretical work on future biotechnological scenarios.

This article reflects on potential future configurations of the human/robot relationship, mainly through the lens of fiction. I will compare and contrast Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It (1991) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), two novels with many thematic similarities and a special focus on the romance between the protagonists and the robots they have helped to program. The main focus of my analysis will be the interplay between cognition and emotion, drawing on recent studies in the field of neurosciences. Referring to HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rosalind Picard argues that hope for the future of a humanised HAL depends on the feasibility of teaching machines how to feel (2000), since emotion is a crucial aspect of intelligence.

Another feature of the robots’ programming that will be investigated is the influence of gender-inflected data in their programming on their cognitive development and the ways in which they relate to the world, particular care being invested in the effort to prevent, for instance, the overmasculinisation of those data. Indeed, the great majority of what I am here calling Pygmalion tales, going back to the story of Pygmalion and Galatea recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, have featured male characters bringing female statues to life and educating young women, shaping them to their makers’ desires, as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Pygmalion (1762) or George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). On the other hand, Piercy’s and Winterson’s novels are crucially structured around primal scenes of the education of the newly created robotic creatures, where the traditional male scene of creation and instruction is subverted, replaced by a feminine point of view.

These texts thus open up new spaces for developing innovative relational dynamics not confined to androcentric models in their revisions of the Pygmalion myth, a founding story of male myths of creation, suggesting that increasingly organic robots with evolving emotions are an inevitable feature of a (post)human future.

This essay analyses representations of ectogenesis, in particular artificial wombs, in selected films. Indeed, the ectogenetic imaginary is strongly present in cinema. Filmic images of artificial wombs, however, tend to be presented in predominantly negative contexts, hinting at the potentially nefarious consequences of the ectogenetic technology. Films depicting the creation of life by (usually) male scientists, with recourse to incubators and other similar devices, clearly conforming to a psychological dynamic characterised by womb envy, appear to suggest that the deliberate elision of women from the primal scene of creation can only lead to monstrosity and grotesque progeny, even though the responsibility is normally seen to rest with the scientists themselves. Indeed, the creatures gestating inside the pods or incubators are usually monstrous, grotesque, alien and dangerous. Examples of such creatures occur in such films as Ralph Nelson’s Embryo (US, 1976), Roger Donaldson’s Species (US, 1995), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (US, 1997) and Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (Canada/France/USA, 2009).
James Whale’s Frankenstein (US, 1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (US, 1935) are amongst the first films to use protoversions of artificial wombs. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (US/Japan, 1994), in turn, in the vein of Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, portrays a highly technological birth scene with recourse to versions of artificial wombs replete with amniotic fluid and the paraphernalia of a technological birth. In Andy and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix (US/ Australia, 1999) and Michael Bay’s The Island (US, 2005) humans are also developed in womb-like containers in a laboratory environment.
This plethora of highly cautionary filmic representations of artificial wombs, then, has been the main purveyor of the predominantly negative images that circulate in the popular media and popular unconscious pertaining to the artificial uterus imagery. These and other filmic examples will be analysed as instantiations of this ectogenetic imaginary, an integral part of the increasingly prevalent biogenetic imaginary which dominates our contemporary world, with recourse to recent critical work not only on the ethics of the potential future implementation of ectogenesis but also on the vexed psychological components of this highly controversial future technology.

This essay considers the vexed question of women and violence by briefly analysing a number of representative dystopias: Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Kanshou (2002), Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North (2007) and Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016). Recent theoretical work on violence, including that of bioethicist Julian Savulescu, will be used to tease out the main contours and negotiations of these knotted issues as well as the implications and desirability of a politics of nonviolence dramatized in the above-mentioned dystopias.

The influential " Today & Tomorrow " series of books published in London in the 1920s and 30s, which reflected on the future of science, technology and the arts, included a volume devoted to the future of food, Olga Hartley and C. F. Leyel's Lucullus; or, The Food of the Future (1926). The authors predict a number of scientific advances that will lead to synthetic food, with the Neo-Vegetarians evoking the possibility of plant consciousness, a topic which is receiving increased attention nowadays. With lab-produced meat having already been developed, and plant awareness driving further research into synthetic nutrition, these texts provide thoughtful speculation on the future of food and the urgent need to achieve a sustainable environment. Resumo: A influente série de livros " Today & Tomorrow , publicada em Londres nos anos 20 e 30 do século passado, que desenvolveram uma reflexão sobre o futuro da ciência, tecnologia e das artes, incluía um volume dedicado ao futuro da comida, Lucullus; or, The Food of the Future (1926) da autoria de Olga Hartley e C. F. Leyel. As autoras imaginam vários avanços científicos que conduzirão à comida sintética e um grupo de Neo-Vegetarianos invoca mesmo a possível existência de uma consciência vegetal, um tópico que hoje em dia está a ser cada vez mais estudado. Enquanto carne produzida em laboratório já é uma realidade, a ideia que as plantas possuem um tipo de consciência impulsiona a investigação em nutrição sintética. Estes textos oferecem especulações produtivas sobre o futuro da alimentação, assim como em relação à necessidade urgente de promover a sustentabilidade do meio ambiente.

Visions of alternative types of pregnancy and reproductive scenarios abound in science fiction and utopian or dystopian literature. However, representations of older pregnant women have been mystifyingly absent from fiction, a situation which, given medical developments and longer life spans, would appear to be somewhat strange since women in their 60s are increasingly making headlines for bearing children. On the other hand, very late pregnancy is still considered anomalous, grotesque and even monstrous.
This article examines Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder (2011) where women bear children practically to the end of their lives, often in their seventies, an event that is regarded as natural in the Amazonian tribe they belong to. It is outside observers who feel wonder and awe at these “monstrous” pregnant women, who, to the outsiders, effectively correspond to Bakhtin’s depiction of a pregnant hag: “There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body (Rabelais and his World, 25-6). This putatively grotesque concept interfaces with the antagonism often vented towards older women who wish to become mothers, which in Marge Piercy’s view “sounds just like the general hostility toward older women in our society, who are considered ugly and useless” (“Love and Sex in the Year 3000”, 2003, 134). While men often have children late in life, in their 70s and even 80s, women’s reproductive years are much shorter, an aspect that is often perceived as not simply unfair, but as a distinct disadvantage when it comes to career or other options. The scenario envisaged by Patchett provides an alternative, albeit "grotesque" and even, to some, "monstrous" vision of the Bakhtinian pregnant crone.
The potential repercussions for women and the future of the family in the light of these new reproductive scenarios, situated in a loaded context of visual regimes of representation and embodiment, will be analysed drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic work on the dynamics of a different natality and birth, in particular that of Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva, as well as recent work in the field of women’s studies by Rosi Braidotti and Barbara Creed amongst others.

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s: Converging Realms. Ed. by Márcia Lemos and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 136-154.


This article investigates the concept of ectogenesis or extracorporeal gestation and the debate that accrued around it in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, especially as it was discussed in the “Today and Tomorrow” series of books and the circle of intellectuals associated with it. I will look in particular at British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923), which launched the series, Anthony Ludovici’s Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman (1924) and Vera Brittain’s Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929).
I will also briefly examine some contemporary fictional depictions of ectogenesis, which were clearly influenced by the books mentioned above, and which directly intervened in the debate around the development of fetuses in artificial wombs. Although Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) was the most famous fictional rendition of the notion of extra-uterine gestation there were many other, less well-known texts. Victorian Journalist Fred T. Jane’s “The Incubated Girl” (1896) is an earlier example as is Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926), a novel that also discusses the concept of ectogenesis. Rebecca West’s “Man and Religion” (1932), in turn, ends with a version of a sex-role reversal society, brought about by a number of scientific discoveries that have provided women with great physical vigour, a longer life span and allowed gestation to take place outside the womb. Neil Bell’s The Seventh Bowl (1934) also toys with the idea of ectogenesis while in August Anson’s When Woman Reigns (1938), another sex-role reversal utopia where women rule the world, ectogenesis has played a fundamental role in bringing about this dominance. All of these texts can be seen as centrally engaged in a critical dialogue with some of the books of the “Today and Tomorrow” series.
While ectogenesis stands at the root of a fantasy which could be equated with masculine womb envy, the dream of becoming a male mother and thus dispensing almost totally with women, for women, on the other hand, extra-uterine pregnancy, combined with cloning techniques, could constitute an enabling vision of autonomy from the male, but also a potentially threatening one, as Ludovici propounds. I propose thus to examine some of the vexed issues surrounding the fantasy of extra-uterine gestation.

This essay reflects on the topic of human/animal hybrids as they appear dramatized in Maureen Duffy's Gor Saga (1981), Pat Murphy's" Rachel in Love"(1987), and Charis Thompson Cussins's short story" Confessions of a Bioterrorist: Subject Position and ...

The fantasy of preserving and prolonging life is a longstanding dream, often dramatized in literature. A common plot device includes placing the main character in a deep, long-lasting sleep and having him/her wake up many decades, sometimes centuries later to a completely different society. Cryonics, although using a very different technology from suspended animation, already on offer in 3 facilities in the United States and one in Russia, provides a scientific, medical avenue suggesting this dream might one day be fulfilled.
I will analyse Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016) as a philosophical meditation on human life and death with strong posthumanist and transhumanist overtones. I read it as an allegory of the vicissitudes of human existence and the promise of an afterlife, of coping and desisting, of a journey into the underworld of myth and fantasy, couched in a post/transhumanist hope that technology, in this case cryonics, will deliver people in suspended cryonic animation from their limbo into the future world of meaningful existence, including potentially meeting that person’s loved ones again or their descendants. In certain important ways it parallels Dante’s journey through the nine circles of Hell guided by Virgil, an intertextual echo that will be analysed.
As a theoretical framework I will engage with the recent work of a number of bioethicists such as Ole Martin Moen and David Shaw on the case for and against cryonics from a bioethical point of view.

This paper will examine two recurring tropes in the 1940s and 1950s fiction and film: the creation or duplication of women by male scientists and the visual expression of these topics in cover art, especially in pulp magazines. These motifs articulate two interrelated impulses: the male drive to reproductive autonomy, and his ambition to (re)create woman according to his own desires and specifications. The huge glass tubes where the newly created women are displayed, proto versions of artificial uteruses, also speak to this male fantasy and implicit womb envy.
As representative examples I will analyse Terence Fisher’s Four-Sided Triangle (1953), based on William F. Temple’s novella of the same name, first published in Amazing Stories in 1939. Fisher’s film is a revision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and more specifically of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), to which Fisher later returned in his Frankenstein Created Woman (1967).
Some contemporary instances of this trope, showing its persistence/ in the popular imaginary, will also be briefly considered, such as Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) and Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015), while filmic versions include Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) and Frank Oz’s 2004 version, as well as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). The perpetuation of this longstanding fantasy will be considered with recourse to recent theoretical work addressing gender and technology in their multiple ramifications.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the topic of alternative reproductive scenarios, in particular oviparity and xenosurrogacy, in selected texts by Naomi Mitchison and George Bernard Shaw. In “One Couldn't Tell the Papers” (1956) and Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) Mitchison, a tremendously prolific novelist and essayist, considers these and other possibilities in terms of their evolutionary advantages. The protagonists in both narratives are biologists and communication experts, who establish connections with alien species and study them.
Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) (1921), in turn, also contemplates the desirability of oviparous posthumans. In this play the future humans hatch fully formed from eggs while in Farfetched Fables (1948), a companion piece, the human descendants manufacture themselves scientifically in Genetic Institutes. The ultimate goal in both plays is for humanity to evolve into beings who are mostly mind, having discarded their physical bodies.
In the context of other early works envisaging the prospect of oviparous birth, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1917), this paper will reflect on the potential evolutionary benefits and ramifications of the fantasy of oviparity, which will be considered within a feminist framework.

This paper argues that the advent of artificial wombs will be a welcome addition to reproductive technologies, not only in therapeutic terms but also as a contribution to achieving greater gender egalitarianism both at work and at home, with enhanced reproductive parity. The repercussions of ectogenesis for surrogacy, abortion and gay parenting are also addressed.

The “Today & Tomorrow” series of books published in London in the 1920s and 30s, which reflected on the future of science, technology and the arts, included a volume devoted to the future of food, Olga Hartley and C. F. Leyel’s Lucullus; or, The Food of the Future (1926). The authors predict a number of scientific advances that will lead to synthetic food, with the Neo-Vegetarians evoking the possibility of plant consciousness, a topic which is receiving some attention nowadays. I will place this book in dialogue with Naomi Mitchison’s Not By Bread Alone (1983), a prescient utopian novel about the introduction of genetically modified food in developing countries, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, where these topics are also profusely dramatized, with the so-called God’s Gardeners as a close equivalent to the Neo-Vegetarians.
With lab-produced meat having already been developed, and plant awareness driving further research into synthetic nutrition, these texts provide thoughtful speculation on the future of food and the urgent need to achieve a sustainable environment.

This paper will reflect on the related topics of biocapitalism and biocontrol as they are dramatized in Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015), Holmqvist’s The Unit (2009) and Padmanabhan's Harvest (1997), works that share a number of topical issues. Amongst the most salient the question of citizens’ perceived freedom, diluted by biosurveillance and digital technologies, is powerfully articulated in these texts. While Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last can be seen as a dystopian comedy, Holmqvist’s The Unit as a biotechnological dystopia and Padmanabhan's Harvest as a tragicomedy, they all dramatize very serious topics such as organ trafficking and donation as well as the exploitation of weaker, poorer citizens.
A crucial question these narratives pose is the following, amongst others: is it possible that we are all living in a kind of panopticon, the prison system first described by Jeremy Bentham and then updated by Michel Foucault? Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, whose narrative revolves around a prison, and Holmqvist’s The Unit, where the “dispensables” are imprisoned in a type of “gilded cage”, as are the destitute Indians in Harvest, go a long way towards suggesting that perceptions of freedom and unfreedom in contemporary societies can be undergoing profound changes. Indeed The Heart Goes Last can be read as a satirical twist on the current American trend of “for-profit prisons”, while some citizens in The Unit and Harvest, giving in almost willingly to their own captivity, become paradigmatic examples of the “precarious lives” discussed by Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben.
These vexed, highly contentious issues will be discussed with recourse to recent theoretical work on the (political, digital, biotechnological) forces shaping society, often surreptitiously and with unexpected and unforeseen consequences, instantiating the pervasiveness and ubiquity of biopower in its many ramifications.

The aim of this paper is to analyse Paula Rego’s series Moon Eggs (2005) from the point of view of the sexual politics it irreverently and profanely rehearses. It will be argued that in Rego’s customary satirical vein Moon Eggs illustrates in symbolic guise the feminisation of men, metaphorically metamorphosed into chickens kept and fed by the women who supervise them and collect their eggs. The men are thus doubly subordinated, both as domesticated animals at the women’s service and made to play roles traditionally associated with the latter. Men in prone, passive positions, sitting on the women’s laps or amongst them, pervade Rego’s work, while strong-willed, sturdy girls and women are also conspicuous features.
Relatedly, hybrids of women and animals abound in Rego’s oeuvre, with the women’s becoming animal suggesting greater physical power and control. The hybrid men in Moon Eggs, by contrast, become subservient and humiliated, undergoing the undignified life-cycle of a hen. Indeed, Galinhas Bebés depicts what could be the offspring of the men who have laid the eggs, hybrid babies of human and chicken. This lithograph can also be read as an illustration of the creation of hybrids by genetic engineering techniques, as well as potentially a warning against the power of science to develop such creatures. If the idea of a woman laying eggs is sufficiently disruptive, while feasible by dint of an imaginative leap, since women have ovaries, the possibility that men might lay the eggs is doubly subversive and sarcastic, leveraging a Bakhtinian confusion of the laws of nature. Rego thus revises Aesop’s story “The Hen and the Golden Eggs” from a feminist perspective, with the irreverence of the subject extending to the theme of reproduction, destabilisingly allocated to men.
In Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2010) Susan M. Squier muses: “What does it mean, to feminism and to agriculture, that women are like chickens and chickens are like women?” Rego’s series Moon Eggs can be read as rephrasing this question as  “What does it mean, to feminism and to agriculture, that men are like chickens and chickens are like men?” In order to tease out some of the many potential interpretative layers of Rego’s lithographs, recent work on gender and visual studies, such as that by Haraway (2007), Rosengarten (2010) and Braidotti (2013), will be drawn on.

O objectivo desta comunicação consiste em reflectir sobre a localização e posicionamento ético do observador de alguns aspectos da cultura e política contemporânea a partir de dois textos ficcionais e um visual: Never Let Me Go de Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” de Ursula K. Le Guin e Landscape with the Fall of Icarus atribuído a Pieter Brueghel. A análise destes textos incidirá especificamente sobre a temática da (in)tolerância à integração de alguns grupos discriminados devido a práticas científicas de cariz eugénico, assim como o princípio utilitário da exploração de alguns para o bem de muitos. É neste contexto que se pretende repensar a questão da cumplicidade implícita de grandes sectores da sociedade quando confrontados com situações insustentáveis, transformando-se em observadores passivos e coniventes, que escolhem ignorar esses acontecimentos, em vez de actuarem como agentes interventivos num plano moral e ético.
Tanto os clones descartáveis e desumanizados de Never Let Me Go, resultado de hubris científica, cujas vidas são eminentemente precárias na terminologia de Judith Butler e Agamben, como os habitantes da ilusória utopia de Omelas, assente na existência de uma vítima sacrificial, dependem da ignorância deliberada da sociedade em que se integram. Os cidadãos destas comunidades podem assim ser metonimicamente assimilados à maioria dos habitantes das sociedades ocidentais a observar, entre outros exemplos, a tragédia dos emigrantes no Mediterrâneo que, como Ícaro, tentam chegar a terra, muitas vezes sem sucesso.

O objectivo desta comunicação é analisar algumas personagens que de várias maneiras descendem temática e simbolicamente de Caim, assim como dois tópicos intimamente relacionados com essas figuras: a imortalidade e o Duplo.
Nessa linhagem de descendentes de Caim situam-se os protagonistas do romance Frankenstein (1818; 1831) de Mary Shelley e Cain de Lord Byron (1821), uma peça que Shelley admirava. Tanto Frankenstein como Cain são por sua vez profundamente devedores do poema épico Renascentista de Milton, Paradise Lost, que William Blake, um confesso admirador de Cain de Byron, ilustrou profusamente, incluindo litografias de Caim. A concentração da minha análise fundamentalmente em obras do período Romântico decorre do aumento de visibilidade e interesse na temática do Herói, que assume várias características comuns às personagens principais das obras mencionadas: a rebeldia contra Deus, a identificação com Lúcifer, a ânsia de imortalidade e revolta contra a condição humana, agrilhoada a um corpo finito. A presença de um Duplo, o castigo de ter de vaguear solitário, assim como o não assumir a responsabilidade pelos seus actos, abandonado aquele que se tornou na sua vítima são outros traços partilhados e salientes. Estas personagens articulam assim emoções ligadas à perda e expulsão do Paraíso: vergonha, culpa e a ambição de imortalidade, entre outras. As semelhanças entre Caim e Abel e os protagonistas de Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein e a sua Criatura, também eles alternando entre Criador e Criatura, Deus e Lúcifer, irmãos e Duplos, são numerosas e significativas, assim como entre Cain de Byron e o Caim de José Saramago (a temática da Morte e do Duplo, de resto, atravessam e estruturam a obra saramaguiana).
Esta confluência de personagens e temáticas será então analisada a partir de Caim de Saramago, assim como algumas das ressonâncias da história bíblica de Caim e Abel na sociedade contemporânea. Como mitos de criação, com numerosos ecos em desenvolvimentos científicos actuais e antecipados, mitos esses que incluem uma ambígua relação com a possibilidade do prolongamento da vida (uma extensão parcialmente conseguida ou imaginada pela ciência) estas histórias, como herança de Caim, possuem uma cada vez maior actualidade.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on what I call the “Minute Sublime”, the aesthetics of the very small. The impact of these Nano-aesthetics will be considered with special reference to both artistic and scientific representations of the brain, as illustrative examples of the fertile intersections between science and art. I will focus on selected works by Andrew Carnie, Susan Aldworth and Greg Dunn as representative of this questioning of the very small.
Scale is of fundamental importance in examining, interpreting and creating art from microscopic organic material. The images provided by powerful electron microscopes, fMRI scanners and other strong visualisation techniques are allowing scientists and artists to probe deeper into what has so far remained unseen and unseeable. In this collaborative effort, science can draw on art to provide more easily intelligible and applicable interpretations of experimental results, while art can derive inspiration from the methods and results of those experiments, taking them to novel, aesthetic dimensions. These new types of art, then, can be described as a fitting vehicle for a new sublime, a “bio-sublime”, which would represent an updated version of what Edmund Burke called “sublime reduction” and “the wonders of minuteness” in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). It is this infinitely small sublime, which the ever-increasing power of microscopes will continue to detect, as well as the productive ramifications and impact of these new visual representations for science, medicine, human perception and cognition, that this paper will be concerned with.

Much has been written about the fantasy of ectogenesis, the development of artificial womb technology that would allow women to circumvent the gestation process. In this paper, however, I wish to concentrate on some contemporary representations of the male fantasy to become pregnant, in the context of a traditional marriage background: Thomas M. Disch’s science fiction novel 334 (1974), L. Timmel Duchamp’s “The Man Who Plugged In” (2008) and British playwright and screenwriter Joe Penhall’s Birthday (2012). All set in the near future, they share the premiss that the three  husbands decide to become pregnant instead of their wives, who seem to be unwilling to undergo the traditional gestational period in order to bear a baby. The medical procedures needed to accommodate their pregnancies are described in some detail, including the development of external artificial wombs that can be worn as a prosthesis or a womb transplant.
Their condition as pregnant men radically changes their vision of themselves, as well as their function in society and within their marriage, making them more empathetic towards the women’s physical role in motherhood. If enough men adopt this new reproductive technique it is feasible that significant changes might result from this kind of “feminization” of society. Indeed, philosopher Deirdre M. Condit diagnoses the emergence of patriarchy as directly connected to the fact that men do not give birth and thus feel disconnected from the birth process.
The three texts conduct a thoroughgoing revision of myths and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and invoke alternative near futures predicated on a recasting of gender roles that might bring about more egalitarian societies.

O objectivo  deste ensaio é reflectir sobre a cada vez maior exposição mediática do embrião e do feto tanto na cultura científica como no imaginário cultural e popular, assim como sobre as consequências e contestações dessa maior visibilidade, a partir de algumas representações artísticas e literárias. Será dada especial atenção ao trabalho dos artistas Suzanne Anker, Damien Hirst e Marc Quinn, assim como da escritora Sylvia Plath, como ilustrações contemporâneas da aparente autonomia e cada vez maior iconicidade dessacralizada do feto, que inserido num discurso que enfatizava a “santidade” do embrião ressalta agora a sua faceta mais profana e secular. Será utilizado especialmente o trabalho teórico da historiadora de ciência Donna Haraway, de Paul Virilio e de Giorgio Agamben, em particular “Elogio da Profanação”, para ajudar a analisar a ética visual das representações em questão.

"The question of violence has been at the centre of most utopias or dystopias written by women. While they all defend non-violence, sometimes the means to achieve that peaceful state can involve the use of weapons and force. This paradoxical situation has been the object of reflection on the supposedly non-violent nature of women, tied in to essentialist notions of woman and nature, woman as nurturer and mother. While ideally non-violence should be a desideratum to achieve peace and prosperity what some of these narratives suggest is the need to engage in some violent acts to erase a future need for further violence, questioning whether violence is ever justified.
This paper will examine this vexed question by analysing a number of dystopias that will serve as case studies: Joan Slonczewski’s Door into Ocean (1986), Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) and Sarah Scott’s Daughters of the North (2007). I will draw on recent theoretical work on violence, including that of bioethicist Julian Savulescu, to tease out the main contours and negotiations of these knotted issues as well as the implications and desirability of a politics of non-violence dramatized in the above mentioned dystopias.
"

My purpose in this paper is to consider a number of biotechnologies that purport to enhance human beings and will bring about a panoply of physical, biological changes that will radically transform the human landscape. I will consider proposals such as that by bioethicist Julian Savulescu who defends the ethical imperative for moral bioenhancement in order to prevent environmental and other catastrophes, such as violence and war, that would lead to suffering and the loss of life. In vitro “eugenics” is another potential area subject to an array of ethical questions with the prospect of being developed in the near future, as bioethicist Robert Sparrow observes, with recourse to the creation of embryos using eggs and sperm derived from stem cells, a technique that could lead to the selective breeding of individuals with particular genotypes. Yet another future technology is the development of artificial wombs, with bioethicist Anna Smadjor considering that there is nothing less than a “moral imperative” for ectogenesis.
These and other biotechnological advances will also be analysed through the lens of fiction, by looking mainly at how the putative implementation of these or similar techniques are dramatized in two novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009).
These biotechnologies envision new configurations of the human deeply embedded in posthuman scenarios that will drastically change the conception of personhood and embodiment, with biopower as an inescapable structure of dominance and agent of change, bringing science fiction close to science fact. I will draw mainly on the work of the bioethicists mentioned above, as well as recent work on biopolitcs.

The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the ways in which the genetic imaginary, which plays such a profoundly structuring role in contemporary Western society, is examined through the lens of fiction in two recent novels: Harry Mulisch’s The Procedure (1998) and Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009).
Both novels deal with scientists who wish to take evolution in their own hands and create or recreate life in the laboratory. The writing process and the (re)creation of life are examined in both novels with recourse to a reflection on the alphabets that underlie both procedures. In this context, the human genome with its four letters, AGCT, is regarded as the Book of Life, containing the instructions for manufacturing new narrative codes and new entities. Both novels can also be said to be centrally about the parallels and affinities between the languages and repertoires of literature and science.
In Dutch writer Harry Mulisch’s The Procedure the protagonist, Victor Werker, named after Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, a fundamental intertext, attempts to create artificial life, an organism he calls eobiont as a tribute to his unborn daughter, Aurora.
Richard Powers’s latest novel, Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), in turn, engages with the possibilities and ramifications of rewriting the human genome, addressing the contemporary anxiety over whether genetic enhancement will lead inexorably to the end of human nature as we know it, a concern deeply etched into the genetic imaginary that increasingly characterizes Western society. Powers himself explains that Generosity started as a novel “about the genomic age”, but then it gradually became a dramatization of and reflection on the desire to “read the compositional process that is written inside ourselves” and of “rewriting who we are”, maybe revising that “astonishing text” that is our genome (“The Book of Me”).
As Judith Roof puts it in The Poetics of DNA, in the twenty-first century DNA has become the “symbolic repository of epistemological, ideological, and conceptual change” (2). As Roof muses, condensing the narrative drift of both novels, “If genes are books and DNA is an alphabet, then what is to stop us from changing the story?” (The Poetics of DNA, 160).
This paper will attempt to tease out the main ramifications of these issues drawing not only on the latest scientific findings in genetics but also on recent work that addresses the interfertilization which occurs between the narratives of science and other narratives, grounded as they all are in a linguistic matrix of metaphors and symbols that construct the cultural and ideological meanings that underpin both human identities and the physical world.

My purpose in this paper is to analyse representations of ectogenesis, in particular artificial wombs, in selected films. Indeed, the ectogenetic imaginary is strongly present in cinema. Filmic images of artificial wombs, however, tend to be presented in predominantly negative contexts, hinting at the potentially nefarious consequences of the ectogenetic technology. Films depicting the creation of life by (usually) male scientists, with recourse to incubators and other similar devices, clearly conforming to a psychological dynamic characterised by womb envy, appear to suggest that the deliberate elision of women from the primal scene of creation can only lead to monstrosity and grotesque progeny, even though the responsibility is normally seen to rest with the scientists themselves. Indeed, the creatures gestating inside the pods or incubators are usually monstrous, grotesque, alien and dangerous. Examples of such creatures occur in such films as Ralph Nelson’s Embryo (US, 1976), Roger Donaldson’s Species (US, 1995), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (US, 1997) and Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (Canada/France/USA, 2009).
James Whale’s Frankenstein (US, 1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (US, 1935) are amongst the first films to use protoversions of artificial wombs. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (US/Japan, 1994), in turn, in the vein of Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, portrays a highly technological birth scene with recourse to versions of artificial wombs replete with amniotic fluid and the paraphernalia of a technological birth. In Andy and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix (US/ Australia, 1999) and Michael Bay’s The Island (US, 2005) humans are also developed in womb-like containers in a laboratory environment.
This plethora of highly cautionary filmic representations of artificial wombs, then, has been the main purveyor of the predominantly negative images that circulate in the popular media and popular unconscious pertaining to the artificial uterus imagery. These and other filmic examples will be analysed as instantiations of this ectogenetic imaginary, an integral part of the increasingly prevalent biogenetic imaginary which dominates our contemporary world.

My purpose in this paper is to offer a Deleuzian reading of Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago, 1987-1989), with special emphasis on such concepts as the rhizome, hybridity and hierarchy around which the novels centrally revolve. Both Memoirs of a Spacewoman and the Xenogenesis trilogy propose a number of rhizomatic reconfigurations of the self, nature and society which amount to a utopian vision of a less hierarchical society, structured around notions of hybridity and nomadism, as well as on a strong sense of relationality and connectivity. Mitchison and Butler’s fictional scenarios can be seen as aptly fitting Deleuze’s call for decentered, polymorphous, non-hierarchical alternative frameworks and contours that would better suit the increasingly more rhizomatic configurations of contemporary and future life. The novels under investigation also constitute instantiations of what Rosi Braidotti, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, describes as a “nomadic post-anthropocentric philosophy” (Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 103) and “bio-centred egalitarianism” (109).
The stress in these novels falls on assimilation and symbiosis, on assemblages and multiplicities, on deterritorialization and reterritorializations, as well as on the kind of symbiotic metamorphosis Deleuze and Guattari describe through the image of the wasp which pollinates the orchid: the becoming-wasp of the orchid and the becoming-orchid of the wasp, an image that also centrally appears in Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman. Human becomings will, in their multiplicity and unpredictability, extend the potentialities of the human form along with relational possibilities and assimilation with other life forms which will, in numerous and varied lines of flight, suggest new avenues of political, social and biological intervention, issues which are fictionally illustrated in Mitchison and Butler’s novels.
My main concern will thus be with the Agambenian concepts of bios and zoë, as well as the double edges and boundaries that have to be negotiated in order to keep the margins of the self but that also often need to allow interpenetration as a survival strategy, in what effectively amounts to rhizomatic becomings.

Keywords:
Deleuze, Guattari, rhizome, becoming, biotechnology, hybridity, nomadism

Women’s dissatisfaction with their situation in the first decades of the twentieth century found expression in a variety of  fictional and essayistic modes which gave vent to their discontent and desire for a more egalitarian world. This longing often took the contours of utopian scenarios that not only conveyed a restless yearning for different social and political configurations but also offered concrete solutions, even if sometimes in highly speculative form.
In this paper I wish to focus on the solutions offered by two books with, significantly, almost the same name-- Man, Proud Man. These texts, in distinct but complementary ways, are principally concerned to confront and revise male myths of womanhood. The first is a collection of essays published in 1932 and edited by Mabel Ulrich, called Man, Proud Man. A Commentary, with contributions by such writers as Storm Jameson, Rebecca West, Mary Borden, E.M. Delafield and Susan Ertz, while the second is a novel by Katharine Burdekin, Proud Man (1934). It is probably not coincidental that Burdekin referenced the same line from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, for she moved in similar circles to Jameson and West and knew their work.
I will look in particular at Storm Jameson’s essay “Man the Helpmate”, in which she offers a vision of a type of sex-role reversal society, paralleled in such contemporary utopian novels as for instance Victoria Cross’s Martha Brown, M.P. A Girl of Tomorrow (1935) and Burdekin’s The End of This Day’s Business (1935), and at Rebecca West’s “Man and Religion”, a topic which had already been the object of scrutiny in Winifred Holtby’s Eutychus: Or the Future of the Pulpit (1928), included in the “Today and Tomorrow” series published in London by Kegan Paul in the 1920s and 1930s. In her essay West tackles the question of religion and of woman’s place in the hierarchy of organized religions, and ends with another version of a sex-role reversal society, brought about by a number of scientific discoveries that provided women with great physical vigour, a longer life span and allowed gestation to take place outside the womb. Burdekin’s Proud Man, in turn, is an incisive satire on many of the deeply entrenched myths of masculinity and femininity in British society in the first decades of the twentieth century, drawing on such utopian tropes as time travel to bring a “Person” from the future, a hermaphroditic, self-fertilizing being who considers the sexist society s/he observes as subhuman.
Along with many contemporary texts by women, then, both approaches can be seen to offer spaces for utopian visions in a variety of societal dispensations, which were perceived as masculine bastions in need of transformation. This paper would attempt to read these two texts in terms of each other while gesturing towards the wider contexts of women’s utopian desires of the period, in particular those of the interwar years.

My purpose in this paper is to look at two related motifs, the “human zoo” and the “tree of life”, in a selection of texts: David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924), Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963) and Will Self's Great Apes (1997). Read through a Darwinian lens, these novels question, often in a parodical vein, the primacy of human beings in a hierarchical tree of life, while also offering a sharp critique of the widespread spectacularization of non-Western human beings in zoos or other themed parks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Permeated with Darwinian tropes and rhetoric, in Garnett’s satirically humorous A Man in the Zoo the protagonist provocatively decides he wants to be exhibited in London Zoo in the Ape-house, to “complete the collection” (10), as he puts it. Boulle’s Planet of the Apes and Will Self's Great Apes can be described as contemporary satirical fables which, by portraying a society where great apes are the dominant species and humans are treated like apes, call attention not only to the similarities between the two societies and their contrasts, but also to the treatment of humans who are considered as bestial. Such counter-narratives serve as a reflection on the future of human nature, by decentering the human being from its anthropomorphically central perspective, suggesting the precariousness of that position and the porosity of the genetically coded boundaries between humans and the great apes. I will also illustrate this analysis with a number of visual representations of the Darwinian motifs of the “human zoo” and the “tree of life”, contemporary to Darwin but also extending to David Garnett’s time and beyond, which function as challenging visual companions to the ideas circulating in the novels, including Alexis Rockman and Tony Matelli’s work.

Visions of alternative types of pregnancy and reproductive scenarios abound in science fiction and utopian or dystopian literature. However, representations of older pregnant women have been mystifyingly absent from fiction, a situation which, given medical developments and longer life spans, would appear to be somewhat strange since women in their 60s are increasingly making headlines for bearing children. On the other hand, very late pregnancy is still considered anomalous, grotesque and even monstrous.
I will examine Ann Patchett’s recent novel State of Wonder (2011) where women bear children practically to the end of their lives, often in their seventies, an event that is regarded as natural in the Amazonian tribe they belong to. It is outside observers who feel wonder and awe at these “monstrous” pregnant women, who, to the outsiders, effectively correspond to Bakhtin’s depiction of a pregnant hag: “There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body (Rabelais and his World, 25-6). This putatively grotesque concept interfaces with the antagonism often vented towards older women who wish to become mothers, which in Marge Piercy’s view “sounds just like the general hostility toward older women in our society, who are considered ugly and useless” (“Love and Sex in the Year 3000”, 2003, 134). While men often have children late in life, in their 70s and even 80s, women’s reproductive years are much shorter, an aspect that is often perceived as not simply unfair, but as a distinct disadvantage when it comes to career or other options. The scenario envisaged by Patchett provides an alternative, albeit "grotesque" and even, to some, "monstrous" vision of the Bakhtinian pregnant crone.
As a related theme, I will also briefly contrast the for some “monstrous” possibility that women might bear children to the end of their lives with the no less potentially “monstrous” development of an artificial womb. In a world where foetal incubators became the norm the category of birth, as well as a world view grounded on the philosophical category of natality, would undergo unprecedented paradigm shifts.
The potential repercussions for women and the future of the family in the light of these new reproductive scenarios, situated in a loaded context of visual regimes of representation and embodiment, will be analysed drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic work on the dynamics of a different natality and birth, in particular that of Julia Kristeva and Donna Haraway, as well as recent work in the field of women’s studies by Rosi Braidotti and Barbara Creed amongst others.

No contexto de um imaginário genético e tecnológico colectivo que domina o mundo contemporâneo, proponho-me traçar alguns aspectos de uma fantasia biotecnológica cujos primeiros exemplos remontam a fins do século XIX. Trata-se da fantasia de prolongar a vida através de transplantes de cérebro para um corpo mais jovem ou, alternativamente, manter o cérebro a funcionar fora do corpo, num recipiente especificamente criado para o efeito, ligado a fontes de alimentação e electricidade. Surgem assim intimamente interligados os sonhos de imortalidade e transplante de orgãos que promovam a longevidade.
Analisarei um agrupamento de textos que dramatizam e reflectem sobre esta temática: “The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham” (1896)  de H. G. Wells, “The Talking Brain” de M. H. Asta (Amazing Stories, vol. 1, nº 5,  (August 1926) e J. D. Bernal que no seu importante livro de previsões futuristas, The world, the flesh and the the devil (1929), sugere a possibilidade de um “brain in a vat”, uma visão muito parecida com a proposta por M. H. Asta em “The Talking Brain”.
Estas fantasias irão sendo retomadas ao longo dos séculos XX e XXI, tanto a nível ficcional como científico, como é o caso de The Body (2002) de Hanif Kureishi, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest (2011) de Richard T. Kelly e “Cryogenics: A Symposium” (2011) de Margaret Atwood, e pelos transhumanistas, mas é naquele grupo de narrativas do virar do século que a sua génese aparece mais profusamente elaborada.

My purpose in this paper is to examine the artistic trope of death depicted as a woman, departing from José Saramago’s book As Intermitências da Morte (2005, Death With Interruptions). Saramago’s novel deals with the intermittent disappearance or cessation of death in an undisclosed country, where this phenomenon causes innumerable disturbances. When Death decides to visit this country she takes the shape of a beautiful young woman who develops a romantic interest for a cello player, following him in his daily activities. In Saramago’s novel there is a fascinating reversal of the “Death and the Maiden” theme in art, which in As Intermitências da Morte becomes “Death and the Young Man”. Traditionally, Death has been represented in the arts under a masculine guise but there is a small, though significant number of instances of works that depict Death as a woman, in particular, it seems to me, in artists of the fin de siècle. A good example, which reminds me of the figure of death as a beautiful young woman and potential bride in Saramago’s novel is Thomas Gotch’s painting Death the Bride which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895. Alfred Kubin’s early drawing The Best Doctor and Marianne Stokes’s painting Young Girl and Death (1900) are other representative examples of this reversal of the “Death and the Maiden” theme.
The butterfly is another symbol central to Saramago’s book with a long tradition in the visual arts. In a memorable scene, the cello player is at home perusing a book on entomology, pausing at a page which shows a type of butterfly popularly known as a “Death's Head Sphinx Moth” and whose scientific name is acherontia atropos. This butterfly is often used as a death symbol due to what appears to be a skull on its back. Atropos is also the name, in Greek mythology, of one of the three Fates, or Moirae, the goddesses that rule over life: while Clotho is responsible for spinning life’s thread and Lachesis to supervise its length, Atropos’s duty is to cut it, thus representing death. Gustav Klimt used this motif in one of the paintings in his monumental Beethoven Frieze of 1902, with Atropos, incarnating Death, leering behind three women, as did Goya in his Atropos,also calledThe Fates(Las Parcas) (1820-23), included in Black Paintings. It is then this nexus of thematic resonances that I wish to investigate here, the intertextual, intermedial intersections that constitute a body of literary and visual motifs with important ramifications in other areas such as philosophy and sociology, as well as bios and zoe, in their Foucauldian and Agambenian multiple implications.

My purpose in this paper is to reflect on the (monstrous) creation of hybrid animals and flora through the mediation of fiction and bioart. I will analyse Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) together with a number of contemporary bioart works by such artists as Eduardo Kac, Alexis Rockman and Marc Quinn, all of which can be said to move in analogous terrain, tapping into similar anxieties, while productively engaging in a critical dialogue.
Taking my inspiration from Derrida’s words on the “monstrous hybrid” and the “chimera” (“The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, the new plant and animal beings created with recourse to genetic engineering in Atwood’s novel will be placed in the context of similar beings brought about by biogenetics in Eduardo Kac’s recent work, such as the “plantimal”, a new bio form, a transgenic flower with the artist's own DNA expressed in the red veins, which Kac named “Edunia” (Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/2008). I will also juxtapose them with Alexis Rockman’s monstrous animals and flowers in Half-Life (2009), which explore the dangers of uncontrolled evolution fuelled by genetic engineering of plants and animals, as well as with British artist Marc Quinn’s DNA Garden (2001) and Evolution (2008), works that similarly reflect on the future of evolution, with the proliferation of genetically engineered animals and plants.
Both novels also reflect on future consumer trends as far as food is concerned, describing a number of scientific developments that will lead to novel food items, such as synthetic meat, as well as new genetically engineered, grotesque animals. These technological advances will be examined together with Australian bioartists Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts’s Disembodied Cuisine (2003), an installation that calls attention to the exploitation of animals for human consumption and the cruelty of the techniques often involved in their killing.
These works will be analysed in the light of recent discourses on technobiopolitics, with special emphasis on the work of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. In Haraway’s words, “We are all chimeras” (“A Cyborg Manifesto”, 150), while for Braidotti the “new techno-cultural context writes hybridity into our social and symbolic sphere” (Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 99). I will then situate the texts cited above, together with the bioart works, in the context of this complex and controversial biogenetic, hybrid imaginary.

Richard Powers’s latest novel, Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), engages with the contemporary anxiety over whether genetic enhancement will lead inexorably to the end of human nature as we know it, a concern deeply etched into the genetic imaginary that increasingly characterizes Western society.
Powers himself explains that Generosity started as a novel “about the genomic age”, but then it gradually became a dramatization of and reflection on the desire to “read the compositional process that is written inside ourselves” and of “rewriting who we are”, maybe revising that “astonishing text” that is our genome.
While Zygmunt Bauman identifies happiness as providing the driving impulse in contemporary life, and emphasizes the role of capitalism in catering for the immediate satisfaction of desire (The Art of Life, 2008), in Generosity Powers complexifies the pursuit of happiness in the world we inhabit in terms of the potential of a genetically engineered sense of contentment and euphoria. Indeed, the novel revolves around a character who appears to be so consistently happy that one of her teachers, a writer, and later a geneticist, come to believe that her state of hyperthymia may have a genetic basis. The novel chronicles her gradual descent into depression through constant exposure to the media and the greed of people who want to partake of her eternal bliss. The announcement of the discovery in her genome of a gene that appears to have a direct influence on people’s predisposition for happiness leads to a media furore that drives her to isolation and a pronounced state of anxiety.
The role of nature versus nurture is thus interrogated while the potential and threat of chemically induced contentment for the masses is reminiscent of a similar debate rehearsed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), as is the whole future scenario of genetically enhanced beings or designer people.
This paper will attempt to tease out the main ramifications of the issues addressed in Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement with recourse to both Zygmunt Bauman’s recent work as well as the latest scientific findings in genetics.

In this paper I wish to consider the trope of the genetically modified vampire, a figure that holds intense fascination in a world dominated by the promises of biotechnology and the fantasies of immortality and gene therapy. I will look in particular at Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling (2005) whose protagonist, a young female vampire, can be seen as a new vampire version for our contemporary world, ruled by a genetic imaginary and fantasies of a posthuman future of genetically designed, longer-lived and healthier individuals. A longer, healthier lifespan is precisely what Shori, the female vampire in Butler’s tale, enables the symbionts that make up her circle of humans who are codependent on her to enjoy, even though once they accept to be part of those associated with her they cannot withdraw their allegiance. Shori thus embodies the promises but also the dangers of not only genetic engineering, capitalism and forms of genetic hybridity that will inevitably happen in the not so distant future. As Haraway states, the “capitalization of the genome in the most literal sense is that the genome becomes property within the regulatory regimes of advanced capitalism” (How Like a Leaf, 153). While Ali Bronx reads Shori’s hybridity in Fledgling predominantly through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture I will concentrate more on scientific developments that may see future humans as the recipients of non-human animal organs and tissues, as is already the case, but probably a lot more so.

My purpose in this paper is to reflect on the long-standing fantasies of longevity and rejuvenation through the lens of fiction, by analysing C. P. Snow’s New Lives for Old (1933) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002). Snow’s tale is a satirical take on the repercussions the discovery of a rejuvenating hormone might have on the few who would be able to get it and can be seen as a precursor of the fantasies for radically extended youth and longevity which recent developments in the biosciences suggest might gradually become true. Kureishi’s The Body, in turn, specifically addresses a number of ways in which this fantasy might become fulfilled in the not so distant future by human beings acquiring a new body to replace the ageing one, a fantasy made possible with the implementation of such techniques as whole body or brain transplants, some of these already achieved in animals. I will also analyse a short story by gerontologist Tom Kirkwood which makes up the epilogue of his book Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Ageing (1999) and engages with issues dealt with in Snow and Kureishi’s works. Kirkwood, one of the foremost researchers in the science of aging, uses his story to fictionally conduct a meditation on the consequences at all levels attendant upon great longevity, from personal to family and society dynamics.
The bioenhanced bodies in these tales raise fundamental questions about the deep-seated desire for physical youth and immortality, as well as the nature and potential for evolution of a stable concept of identity under radically changed circumstances. Taking these texts as a starting point, then, I wish to consider some of the philosophical implications of a future way of life that is not always already informed by the unavoidable existence of death and decrepit old age. If humans in future become no longer beings-towards-death, in Freud and Heidegger's formulation, but instead beings-towards-life, the very foundations of human existence would necessarily be thoroughly revised and rewritten. Unbound by temporal finitude, humanity would enter a new utopian (dystopian?) era, where it would need to rearticulate many of the protocols through which life stages are experienced. Questions of distributive justice, connected with the economic implications of the implementation of enhancement biotechnologies, will also be addressed.
As a theoretical framework to think through some of these issues I will draw on contemporary discourses of the posthuman body, such as philosopher Asher Seidel’s Inhuman Thoughts: Philosophical Explorations of Posthumanity (2008) where he argues we should be actively working towards human enhancement, even going as far as turning humans into non-carbon-based post-humans enjoying a virtually endless lifespan. In order to achieve this goal of pronounced enhancement he envisages the necessity for a number of procedures, such as brain and body parts swapping, the overall goal being, in his view, the positive transition from human to posthuman. I will also engage with critiques of this view such as those proposed by Nicholas Agar and Michael J. Sandel amongst others.

In this paper I propose to examine some of the issues associated with the future development of artificial wombs, mainly through the mediation of recent fiction. With the inception of ectogenesis the at present unavoidable fact of being born from a woman would be superseded by the option of having foetuses raised in an artificial womb environment. The crucial, founding act of being born would no longer be part of the long repertoire of potentially damaging experiences both for the child and the mother. In a world where foetal incubators became the norm the category of birth, and a world view grounded on the philosophical category of natality, would undergo unprecedented paradigm shifts.
Although the general consensus at present is that the development of an artificial womb is still decades away, there is no doubt it will be achieved, with researchers in this area stressing the urgent need to address the ethical questions associated with these technologies.
One place where the ethical and other issues are debated is in fiction, both written and filmed, where treatments of the topic abound. In narratives set in the future foetuses are almost always bred in an artificial environment. The Epilogue to Tom Kirkwood’s Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Ageing (1999) consists of a short story which describes a future world where people have much longer life spans, children are created ectogenetically and gestated to term in “foetal incubators” (246). In Jeanette Winterson’s, The Stone Gods (2007) children are not bred in the womb any more and as a result, according to the narrator, the “future of women is uncertain” (22). In Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love (2010) one of the parallel storylines, set in the year 2153, describes a dystopian society where women no longer become pregnant, with the eggs and sperm being harvested and the healthiest fetuses growing in an artificial environment. The extensive use of the trope of extra-uterine gestation in fiction and film is a clear indication of the interest this near-future technological advance continues to attract.
In “Love and Sex in the Year 3000” (2003) Marge Piercy attempts to visualize reproductive scenarios in 3000 and wonders: “Will we conceive? Will we grow babies within us and give birth? Maybe there will be, as I imagined in Woman on the Edge of Time, baby machines, brooders. Maybe some will use them and some won’t” (134). These are the issues I will be addressing with recourse to recent philosophical and psychoanalytic work on a different natality, in particular engaging with the work of Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva, as well as the latest scientific developments in this field.