An Agential Realist Approach to Posthumanist Relational Subjectivity in Jeanette Winterson’s "The Stone Gods"

Abstract

This paper examines, through the lenses of agential realism, the uncanny sense of posthumanist relational subjectivity that Winterson’s utopia evokes through the twofold romantic encounter between female scientist Billie Crusoe and humanized sherobot Spike. This same-sex cross-species futuristic love affair that develops across two different space-times succeeds in blurring the boundaries between humans and machines, thus prompting readers to overcome their anthropocentric worldview and to abandon the deep yet narrow concern for the moral and cognitive implications of the humans’ fate at the end of the de-centring process brought about by the posthuman turn, urging them to consider, instead, more significant and wider issues such as accountability and responsibility. Thus, it can be viewed as a fictional narrative embodiment of Karen Barad’s theoretical reconfiguration of materiality as discursive and of performativity as a dynamic process of constraining iterative intra-actions rather than of determining interactions.