Abstract Book of the 12th International Conference on New Findings in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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Cyborg Bodies, Posthuman Identities: Rethinking Gender in the Age of AI
Dr. Subha Chakraburtty
ABSTRACT:
This paper interrogates posthuman feminism through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI) in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Amid AI’s disruption of human ontologies, these novels reimagine feminist agency beyond corporeal and patriarchal limits. In Klara and the Sun, Klara, a solar-powered AI, transcends gendered norms. Her ethereal care and non-human subjectivity challenge anthropocentric hierarchies, offering a posthuman feminist ethic of radical alterity. Conversely, The Island of Lost Girls exposes a dystopian counterpoint: bio-engineered girls navigate a world of commodification and resistance, revealing technology’s entanglement with gendered subjugation. Engaging Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory and Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, this study pioneers a comparative lens – Klara’s autonomy juxtaposed with Padmanabhan’s splintered survivors – uncovering how AI refracts feminist futures across cultural divides. Ishiguro’s meditative prose and Padmanabhan’s sharp satire illuminate distinct yet intertwined visions: emancipation through machine consciousness versus critique of techno-patriarchy. This analysis not only bridges Western and South Asian speculative traditions but also advances humanities scholarship by demonstrating how literature negotiates AI’s ethical ambiguities – agency, embodiment, and power in a posthuman age. By foregrounding these texts as sites of feminist reworlding, the paper delivers insights into identity’s reconfiguration, compelling a rethinking of human-machine enmeshment. These findings resonate with pressing global debates, positioning AI as a transformative lens for feminist and humanistic inquiry.
Keywords: posthuman feminism, artificial intelligence (AI), gender, cyborg theory, speculative fiction