One (Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments

Thinking about posthumanism can be an exciting business. In the initial wave of critical writing on the explicit idea of the posthuman produced in the late 1980s and 1990s, signs of exhilaration and anticipation proliferated. The heady mix of possibilities that came from considering a space beyond the human, one full of technological advancement and individual freedoms, prompted a series of breathless questions: what might it mean to leave the human, and humanism, behind? How might we, as a species, move beyond the body, or indeed what types of bodies might be generated as a result of these interactions? What kinds of thresholds and transgressions would be involved in any such moves? What will our relationship to technology, or other non-human forms, be in a posthuman future? And what might we learn about embodiment, ethics, society, gender, race and culture in such formations? The tone was possibly best captured by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston in the introduction to their 1995 collection, Posthuman Bodies, in which the posthuman appeared full of an almost revolutionary potential to collapse or eradicate categories and boundaries:

Queer, cyborg, metametazoan, hybrid. PWA; bodies-without-organs, bodies-in-process, virtual bodies: in unvisualizable amniotic indeterminacy, and unfazed by the hype of their always premature and redundant annunciation, posthuman bodies thrive in the mutual deformations of totem and taxonomy. We have rehearsed the claim that the posthuman condition is upon us and that lingering nostalgia for a modernist or humanist philosophy of self and other, human and alien, normal and queer is merely the echo of a discursive battle that has already taken place – and the tinny futurism that often answers such nostalgia is the echo of an echo. We stake our claim between these echoes and their answers.¹

This is critical thinking as the leading edge of a giddy prophecy. Halberstam and Livingston’s ‘claim’ is for nothing less than a complete reordering of the ways in we know and express ourselves, and the essays in their volume focused on subjects – class identities and machines, posthuman feminism, pregnant men, deviant subjectivities, monstrous becomings – that explore how such thinking might affect a wide range of subject positions: personal, political, social and fictional.

In a similar vein, Hans Moravec – a seminal figure in the development of thinking about the future of robotics and A.I., and in post- and tranhumanist discourses more widely – begins his 1988 study Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence with the vision of “a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny”. If, Moravec notes, robots and A.I. appear crude and simplistic at the time in which he was writing, “within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know – in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants”. Freed from “the plodding pace of biological evolution”, he continues, “the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe”.² Eleven years later, in 1999, appropriately on the cusp of the new millennium, Moravec would restate his thesis in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, observing that “the development of intelligent machines” is “a near term inevitability” and asserting that “each advance will provide intellectual rewards, competitive advantages, and increased wealth and options of all kinds”. If Halberstam and Livingston were driven by the critical and theoretical possibilities of the posthuman horizon, Moravec stressed what he understood to be the evolutionary inescapability (he termed it “escape velocity”) of the transition from human to robot: “I consider these future machines our progeny […] Like biological children of previous generations, they will embody humanity’s best chance for a long-term future”.³ Each of these visions appeared to be as far as, if not further than, one can imagine.

Other scholars writing on the emergence of the posthuman and the potential for change it pre-figured were more cautious. “These are strange times”, Rosi Braidotti begins her 2002 study Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, “and strange things are happening”. She continues:

Living at such times of fast changes may be exhilarating, yet the task of representing these changes to ourselves and engaging productively with the contradictions, paradoxes and injustices they engender is a perennial challenge. Accounting for fast-changing conditions is hard work; escaping the velocity of change is even harder. Unless one likes complexity one cannot feel at home in the twenty-first century. Transformations, metamorphoses, mutations and processes of change have in fact become familiar in the lives of most contemporary subjects.⁴

The result, Braidotti observes, is “that the challenge lies in thinking about processes, rather than concepts”, and “the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations”. Braidotti’s circumspection demands that the excitement found in pronouncements such as those from Halberstam and Livingston, or the inevitability inherent in Moravec’s visions of the future, must be held up to scrutiny, its details examined and understood. In the end, as she notes, such changes are not just about the possibilities of new selfhoods, but also “vital concerns […] for the scientific, social and political institutions that surround such selves”.⁵ The posthuman condition, she asserts, is one in which “the human is now displaced in the direction of a glittering range of […] technological variables” that can be considered “both exhilarating and painful”.⁶ But for all the glitter, it is a position that needs to be analysed in its grounded and located practices. For Braidotti, who would develop a complex set of theories of the post-human, especially around embodiment, in work spanning more than a decade following the publication of Metamorphoses, the variability of the future demands processes of continual questioning rather than mere celebration.⁷

In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, her visionary study published – like Moravec’s Robot – in 1999 just as a century of incredible technological transformation ended, Katherine Hayles offered an equally alert account of the promise of the posthuman. Hayles explores the challenges of posthumanist futures, articulating a moment of liberation in anticipation of progressive change that nevertheless has real-world consequences:

[T]he posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice […] Yet the posthuman needs not be recuperated back into liberal humanism, nor need it be construed as anti-human. Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied rather than disembodied information, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulations of humans with intelligent machines.⁸

For Hayles, as the end of the millennium drew near the liberal humanist subject had come to dominate the perception of what ‘humanity’ was. The progression of that subject through modernity was one of a projected totalising power, producing the exclusion and trauma that has characterised much of the modern and contemporary periods. But perception is not the same as actuality, and in place of a humanity that Hayles now felt was vanishing a posthumanist subjectivity was emerging, one that will enact a more democratic idea of citizenship, informed (as opposed to restricted) by embodied engagement with information and the virtual, and especially enabled by interactions with technology. Such a reading is the antithesis of that narrative of modernity that saw the developments of the industrial revolution spiral into the horrors of war, totalitarianism and genocide. Hayles’ posthuman is not without its dangers, and her tone is cautionary, but is overwhelmingly an opportunity for a better future.⁹

Though Hayles is explicit in advocating that her sense of the post-human is not entirely anti-human, its parameters clearly overlap with the attacks on humanism found in the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, those who, in Foucault’s own memorable phrase, had posited the “death” of the “recent invention” that is man.¹⁰ Indeed, part of the energy behind critical work on posthumanism in the 1990s was precisely that it appeared as a new frontier for anti-humanist cultural theory, extending the writing of a previous generation of scholars. Addressing precisely this idea of a critical genealogy, Neil Badmington included Foucault and Althusser, along with a range of other thinkers stretching from Frantz Fanon to Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his Posthumanism reader, published in 2000. This gave the subject a number of possible jumping-off points even as the volume sought to define the subject’s breadth by stressing its central figures. In seeking to outline the concerns of the field, Badmington also caught that sense of promise in the 1990s’ configuration of the posthuman and anticipation of the future: “Wherever they look”, he said of the writers collected in his reader, expressing the excitement of the moment, “they witness Man breathing ‘himself’ to death, raising himself to ruins. Posthumanism is out there”.¹¹ More prosaically (but in greater detail), Pramod Nayar also locates the origins of posthumanism in a variety of anti-humanist critical disciplines – poststructuralism, feminism, technoscience studies and critical race studies – that flourished at the end of the twentieth century. Such work, Nayar asserts, “demolished the myth of the unified, coherent, autonomous, self-identical human subject”, and subsequently “posited the subject, and biology, as a construct of discourses, of enmeshed and co-evolved species and technologies”. While Nayar is not as overtly exhilarated about the ‘out there’ qualities of the posthuman figure as some other writers on the subject, he nevertheless makes grand claims for its possibilities: “By demonstrating the end of the sovereign human subject, critical humanism prepares the ground for the new form of the human, the posthuman”.¹²

For her part, Hayles made it clear that debating the timing of any transition to a posthumanist state was a pointless exercise, as the posthuman was nearer than Badmington suggested: “Increasingly, the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here. Rather, the question is what kind of posthumans we will be”.¹³ It appeared that the door was open to a future in which science fiction could become ‘fact’, knowledge thresholds would be crossed, and where the only limits we might place on ourselves were those produced by technology and our own imaginations.¹⁴ As Robert Pepperell put it in his 1995 book The Post-Human Condition, employing a dramatic metaphor to suggest the coming change, “we are approaching the electrification of existence – there is a tangible sense of a storm in the air”.¹⁵

By way of contrast, traditionally disability is rarely thought to be exciting. Based on ideas that circulate in the public imaginary, few would advocate that being disabled puts one on the threshold of a future in which ‘the human’ was about to be productively supplanted. The converse is more likely to be true: many perceive disability to involve a state that precisely falls short of being fully human, and that is best described in terms of an absence, lack or loss. Lennard J. Davis notes that, “most constructions of disability assume that the person with disabilities is in some sense damaged while the observer is undamaged. Furthermore, there is an assumption that society at large is intact, normal, setting a norm, undamaged”.¹⁶ Such assumptions are to be found everywhere, from employers believing that staff with disabilities are naturally less productive than their non-disabled counterparts, to the effects of the soft power embedded in the objects and images that stress hyperability and pervade our (especially popular) culture. Disability futures are almost never thought to be desirable and appear rather as fraught spaces of struggle. In The Biopolitics of Disability, their 2015 analysis of disability read within frames of neoliberalism and ablenationalism, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder observe how disabled subjectivities become trapped in neoliberal ideas of the future, whether medical, financial or aspirational, that mean “the unchallenged desirability of normative lives” characterises disabled futures as continuously lacking. A result, they assert, is that disability embodiment is always rendered peripheral.¹⁷ Extending this idea of exclusion, Alison Kafer notes in her 2013 study Feminist, Queer, Crip (a text I will use in detail in the next chapter), that majority cultures frequently “assume that a ‘good’ future naturally and obviously depends upon the eradication of disability” and this constitutes an “assumption that this kind of ‘elsewhere’, one without disability, is one ‘we’ all want”.¹⁸ A disabled future, it appears, is not in any way to be desired.

To give one relevant (and another turn-of-the-millennium) example, the October 2000 issue of the US magazine Backpacker carried an advert for Nike’s new trail running shoe the Air Dri-Goat. Next to an image of the shoe, a paragraph stressed its technical features that helped prevent injury:

Fortunately the Air Dri-Goat features a patented goat-like outer sole for increased traction so you can taunt mortal injury without actually experiencing it. Right about now you’re probably asking yourself “How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat’s hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky on the side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling, misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name embossed on one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs, fastened to the back?” To that we answer, hey, have you ever seen a mountain goat (even an extreme mountain goat) careen out of control into the side of a tree? Didn’t think so.¹⁹

Following numerous complaints, Nike issued an apology, but the point being made is clear: physical disability – “drooling, misshapen”, “husk” – is the antithesis of fitness and the body that is whole. Using a motorised wheelchair is a version of being human, Nike clearly suggests, that

no one would want. In its combination of a global corporatism with a promotion of ‘active’ embodiment, the advert creates a version of wholeness and health open to, as Kaushik Sunder Rajan puts it in an illuminating phrase, “everyone with purchasing power”. Sunder Rajan’s wide-ranging 2006 study Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life unpacks the idea of what he terms “life as a business plan”, where a global biocapitalism commodifies health in terms of “venture science”, a meeting of bodies and markets where “the tension between the ‘lie’ of corporate PR and the ‘truth’ of science” results in the formation of a certain kind of contemporary subjectivity.²⁰ This insight into global economics of health and the incorporation of individual subjects into corporate networks reminds us that the combination of biological material and information is one way in which posthumanism, in its neoliberal form as an assemblage of capital, extends to all aspects of world health. I will return to these ideas in Chapter 3, but it is worth saying here that it is clear such structures are going to exclude most people with disabilities: they have restricted ‘purchasing power’ due to the exclusionary practices of capitalist systems; and the situated workings of biocapitalism will always find the difference of disability bodies largely abhorrent (as the advert itself makes clear). That the Nike copywriters seemed unable to imagine that their description might connect to the lives of real people, or that there would be any problem with this, only reinforces the status of disability here as a subject position thought to be outside of any standard norm. As with so much to do with disability lives, they were simply not considered.

The above observations carry clear weight, but in our very contemporary moment the picture is more complicated than this outline might appear. Both the breathless excitement of posthumanist possibilities and the assumed ‘natural’ negative of disabled subjectivity assume different proportions when considered 20 years after the above end-of-millennium examples. If it is still true that, for a broad public consciousness, posthumans are most frequently thought of as robots or dynamic cyborgs, and people with disabilities as lacking some core element of humanity, the actual terrain in which each set of topics functions is rather criss-crossed with ambiguity and doubt. Looking back on her late 1990s work in her subsequent study My Mother Was A Computer, Hayles noted that “the interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that I used to launch my analysis in How We Became Posthuman has already begun to fade into the history of the twentieth century”, and that “new and more sophisticated versions of the posthuman have evolved”, citing in particular the development of “computational technologies” that mean we have all increasingly become “integrated into globally mediated networks” as a consequence.²¹ Such integration continues at an often bewildering pace: posthumanism’s focus on systems and subjects is always being updated by new forms of technological assemblages that increasingly encompass the entire planet with ever more complex webs, evolving ideas of function and ‘worth’ in which the meaning of bodies is ever-shifting.

Partly this evolution stems from changing relationships between the present and ideas of the future. Sunder Rajan observes that the politics of the biocapital are “a game played in the future” because of the elements of risk involved, and this future is forever written and rewritten as the vagaries of markets and biopolitics continually reposition ideas of health and wholeness.²² Similarly, Melinda Cooper in Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, her 2008 study of the relationship between the life sciences and economics, explores what she terms “the promise of the bioeconomy” in the context of a contested neoliberal landscape that is “essentially speculative”.²³ This speculation adumbrates a culture of surplus lives, including health lives, across the globe. Citing what we might recognise as a variety of posthumanist (though she does not use the term) contexts – tissue engineering, stem cell research, and the biological dimensions of the US war on terror – Cooper outlines ideas of “life beyond the limits” as biotechnology and capitalism shape the science at work in our contemporary world.²⁴ The new empires, she asserts, are biotechnological and biocapitalistic, founded on the “catastrophism” integral to the workings of neoliberalism.²⁵ In the chapters that follow, I will explore the ways in which disability is implicated in these global networks, but it is worth noting here that, disabled or non-disabled, we all inhabit murky new worlds of political power and market forces and the precarious health futures they envisage.

A consequence of these kinds of ambiguity is that twenty-first-century writing on what Francis Fukuyama has termed, in his book of the same title, “our posthuman future” is noticeably less celebratory in exploring what might lie in the space outside or beyond the human than the scholarship of the 1990s. For his own part, Fukuyama, a conservative humanist with a firm belief in what he calls the “stable continuity” of human nature, finds reason to worry about the potential consequences in the development of scientific systems, where “the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history”.²⁶ Here, posthumanism denotes a subjectivity you would not want to have if, like Fukuyama, you feel that “we share a common humanity that allows every human being to potentially communicate with and enter into a moral relationship with every other human being on the planet”.²⁷ In such arguments, ‘common humanity’ becomes aligned with agreed morality and other core concepts, such as a belief in the power of liberal democracy and capitalist markets (especially as practised by US governments). Set against this, the posthuman is a space that, for Fukuyama, is full of a fear of designer babies, genetic engineering and other affronts to the very idea of humanity.

Writers more sophisticated than Fukuyama and more sympathetic to posthumanist ideas nevertheless also pause when seeking to name the ways in which they might alter our present. “There is an undeniably gloomy connotation to the posthuman condition”, Braidotti writes at the start of her 2013 book The Posthuman, “especially in relation to genealogies of critical thought”. She argues that productive forces of critical and cultural theory animated the 1970s and 1980s, but that the present is rather defined by “theory fatigue” and “a zombified landscape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia”. In the face of this, however, Braidotti wants to return to posthumanism’s positive possibilities and remobilise its theorising to “explore ways of engaging affirmatively with the present, accounting for some of its features in a manner that is empirically grounded without being reductive and remains critical while avoiding negativity”.²⁸ For Braidotti, a grounded and located posthumanism avoids the open-endedness and sometime fanciful opinionising found in earlier writing. Spaces of the posthuman, she contends, can and should be political. This argument is possibly one that still needs to be won, given the continued philosophical fascinations with extending human life or creating biohybrid cyborgs, but it helps contextualise ways in which disability, as a lived and located experience, can be read through critical posthumanist methods.

In another study of the subject that seeks to maintain an engaged complexity, Bruce Clarke stresses that the productive potential of post-humanism needs to be understood as just one feature in a landscape where complex environments make it impossible for any single idea of the individual or social to supersede others. Drawing on narrative and systems theory, Clarke’s 2008 book Posthuman Metamorphosis asserts that: “Posthumanism cognizes the human as one among numberless other situations of complexity – a productive disunity tasked with the quest, different for every psychic and social system, of working out a viable coordination of its systemic and environmental multiplicities”.²⁹ While Clarke’s analysis makes less room for politics than Braidotti’s, his stress on systems and environments here certainly allows for an extension of his arguments into social and cultural settings, Both writers, while convinced of the potential and merits of posthumanism are nevertheless wary of oversimplifying its effects and manifestations. Conscious of the many variables in which the posthuman may be implicated they, like other current theorists, plot its coordinates with care.

That plotting, and indeed that care, takes the subject in different directions. Cary Wolfe’s 2010 study What is Posthumanism? is a theory-driven meditation on “what thought has to become in the face of those challenges” produced by confronting a posthumanist present.³⁰ For Wolfe, posthumanist thought (he draws careful distinctions between ‘posthuman’, ‘posthumanist’ and their various other linguistic formations) is to be valued because it “opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself”.³¹ But Wolfe’s attention to care is such that his study, committed to not falling into what he sees as a humanist-style trap of declaring ‘knowledge’, becomes an exercise in academic looping in which ‘thought’ and the thinkers that practise it become the heroes of his argument. The regular citing of Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and other theorists as the continual, and only seemingly important, points of reference works to create a reified and, ultimately, banal version of his subject. For Wolfe, posthumanism is “always already post-”. “Posthumanism” he asserts, articulating the point further, “in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended”.³² Relativism of this kind, in which the posthuman is to be found in a variety of carefully constructed and theoretically informed reading practices that can name and critique the problematically embedded nature of humanist thinking, might be seen as a method of keeping a flexible and curious critical system always engaged with knowledge effects and their excesses. In contrast with a figure such as Braidotti, however, Wolfe’s writing works to evacuate the space of what the posthuman might be, relegating it to specific academic concerns (such as in Wolfe’s book: disciplinarity; the place of deconstruction; a ‘proper’ appreciation of Derrida, and the role of the humanities). For Wolfe, the conclusion that “‘we’ are not ‘we’” is sufficient to articulate a number of complexities around the future; for me it rather speaks of the problem writing on posthumanism exhibits when it chooses to inhabit the subject’s complexities – and to over-emphasise caution – without seeking to extend any thesis about its grounded, material consequences. In truth, it is clear that Wolfe very much is working with a ‘we’ in mind, and that is the cohort of scholars who make up his academic peer group.³³

By way of contrast, and as I noted in the introduction, my sense of the posthuman is oriented foremostly, though not exclusively, around an idea of the ‘after’. This focus on the future, and the present seen through the lens of the future, does not, I would stress, imply any necessary complicity with a reductive humanist positioning. Looking hard at the after and beyond means that the category of ‘the future’ becomes meaningful in literal ways, something essential to what I understand an ethical consideration of disability to be.³⁴ The genuine promise in posthumanist critical thinking here, whether evident in finding value in technological development or rethinking social and cultural categories that outline inclusion and agency, can be judged to be efficacious through the ways in which it impacts upon the lives of those with disabilities. If the subject continues to develop the kind of theoretical blind alleys we see in the work of Wolfe and others, it runs the risk of becoming an Emerald City of its own – all curtains, colours and mirrors – and potentially unable to find a language with which it can address the located conditions of personhood it seeks to inform.³⁵ As Hayles says: “For some people, including me, the posthuman evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means”, and for all that some canonical poststructuralist thinking might seem radical, it too can surely be found in the ‘old boxes’.³⁶ Nikolas Rose agrees with this emphasis on change, observing in The Politics of Life Itself that changes around core questions of existence in the early twenty-first century mean that “a threshold has been crossed” and that, as a consequence, “we are inhabiting an emergent form of life”.³⁷ The challenge for contemporary critical work in posthumanism then is to extend beyond the exhilaration of thinking alone, and for the emergent to find forms in which we might locate ourselves. It is precisely in relation to this that mapping the ways in which such work intersects with disability could prove to be such a valuable exploration of what a material posthumanism might be.

If writing on the posthuman is increasingly displaying complex interactions with notions of systems and processes, then the work of critical disability studies as it has developed over the last two decades is equally becoming attuned to a need to create more sophisticated contexts for the spaces in which disability functions. Validating identity, for example, is no longer the primary goal of a criticism that has embraced what Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim have termed the “edges of intersectionality”; spaces that “shift, extend and reorient” patterns of disability theory.³⁸ Alignments with feminism, queer studies and critical race studies have created new possibilities for understanding how disability is lived and deployed, especially in terms of an interconnectedness that engages with the variety of contemporary subject positions.³⁹

One noticeable necessary revision to the stereotypical idea of disability ‘loss’ has been a positive shift in much public perception of disability conditions. While this could rightly be termed gradual, only applies in some geocultural locations and is by no means global, it is probable that the waves of protest that would accompany Nike’s advert, were it to be published now, would far exceed those made in 2000. While it is still the case that many governments continue to produce legislation that discriminates against those with disabilities, as explored in the UK context by Frances Ryan in Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People (2019) for example, and that the kinds of disability hate crimes discussed by Katharine Quarmby in her excoriating study Scapegoat: How We Are Failing Disabled People(2011) are all too common, and while the austerity that has followed in the worldwide recession sparked by the financial crisis of 2008 has affected disabled people more than other sections of the population, it is still the case that the education of the non-disabled majority about disability issues is now taking place at a pace not seen before.⁴⁰ Articulating this balance of discrimination and understanding is a precarious and difficult process, but activists and scholars (with disabilities and without) committed to better disability futures, used to having to point to misrepresentations and misunderstanding and to having to fight for basic civil rights, now negotiate such campaigning in an environment where, despite injustices, at least more people are prepared to listen. So, for example, in Dangerous Discourse of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, her examination of the theoretical positions surrounding disability subjectivities, Margrit Shildrick is cautiously positive about the ways in which recent change offers the possibility for more productive disability narratives: “Given, however, the apparent pace at which the certainties of the modernist world-view are being transformed both globally, where narratives of national progress and social order are challenged both theoretically and materially, and at the level of the individual where identity is destabilised, there is every opportunity to take a relatively optimistic approach”.⁴¹ That Shildrick can be optimistic when “identity is destabilised” indicates the way in which disability studies has negotiated a move from a narrow focus on social formations of disability to wider conceptions of subjectivity that speak of complex embodiment in the contemporary world. Shildrick’s work has explored “leaky bodies” and the boundaries of embodiment, arguing that neither the body or the subject can be seen to be secure categories, but that it is precisely this insecurity that can form the basis of materialist criticism.⁴²

In disciplinary terms, this means that critical disability studies has sought to respond to the multiplicities of current disability locations by stressing a need for methods that work by bridging different theoretical approaches. In his 2008 study Disability Theory, Tobin Siebers argues that the complex embodiment central to disability experience is most appropriately explored through ideas of intersectional identity, for example, while similar intercategorical analyses have worked to highlight the various structural contexts through which questions of disability can be seen to overlap with those of class, race, gender and sexuality.⁴³ These explorations of the criss-crossing ideological forces that shape contemporary disability attempt to respond to the kinds of sophisticated embedded networks that currently form disability knowledge or produce disability deployments.

So, to cite some specific contexts: in thinking about the production of disability in literary/cultural narratives, critics now think differently about discourse and metaphor than in 2000 when David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder published Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, their ground-breaking analysis of the role disability plays in literature.⁴⁴ As we saw with the reading of the L. Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman in the Preface to this book, metaphorical accounts of disability work to render disability conditions transparent in the work they do to highlight non-disabled stories, and it was Mitchell and Snyder’s work that helped most in the articulation of how this is a practice that occurs across literatures and across time. Disability in fiction frequently functions, in their words, as “a stock feature of characterization [and] an opportunistic metaphorical device”, as well as a “pervasive category of narrative interest” that animates textual discourses in the production of disability as a perceived ‘problem’. As they observe: “Nearly every culture views disability as a problem in need of a solution”.⁴⁵ Yet, as we also saw in the Introduction, not only can such readings be resisted (and, indeed, are more likely to be resisted by a disability literate readership), metaphors can now be used in productive ways to tell disability stories. Amy Vidali has noted that re-evaluating the metaphors that carry disability offers a potential for “creative and historic reinterpretations” of the narratives in which they are contained.⁴⁶ It is precisely the possibilities inherent in the metaphorisation of markers of disability that mean they can become grounding points for the articulation of complex arguments of cultural distinction and difference. As Clare Barker asserts using a similar logic, representations of disability wounding in postcolonial literatures create metaphors that are “physical and mental, literal and allegorical, and allegorical, human and ecological […] drawing attention to the embodied nature” of situated disability histories.⁴⁷

Part of the ongoing reflection around disability and cultural production has been a renewed concentration on disability aesthetics. In the work of Tobin Siebers, Michael Davidson and others, disability is shown to be central to a formation of the aesthetic, particularly from the modern period onwards. In Disability Aesthetics, his 2010 study of the representation of disability in visual art in particular, Siebers discusses how the “underlying corporeality of aesthetics” has often been replaced with “idealist and disembodied conceptions of art”, resulting in “a nonmaterialist aesthetics that devalues the role of the body and limits the definition of art”.⁴⁸ By way of contrast, Siebers articulates a position that “conceives of the disabled body and mind as playing significant roles in the evolution of modern aesthetics, theorizing disability as a unique resource discovered by modern art and then embraced by it as one of its defining concepts”. He goes on:

My claim is that the acceptance of disability enriches and complicates notions of the aesthetic, while the rejection of disability limits definitions of artistic ideas and objects. In the modern period, disability acquires aesthetic value because it represents for makers of art a critical resource for thinking about what a human being is […] Disability does not express defect, degeneration, or deviancy in modern art. Rather, disability enlarges our vision of human variation and difference, and puts forwards perspectives that test presuppositions dear to the history of aesthetics.⁴⁹

Siebers’ argument that disability is integral to the workings of modern art echoes my assertion that the bodies, minds and experiences of those with disabilities are central manifestations of a posthumanist present. The core issue here, as Davidson explains, is the necessary rethinking that comes from such an observation. “Disability aesthetics”, he observes, “foregrounds the extent to which the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted, when the social meanings attached to sensory and cognitive values cannot be assumed”.⁵⁰ As both Davidson and Siebers show, it is not that disability has been excluded in the history of art, but rather that it is, as Siebers says, “rarely recognized” as being seminal to modern cultural production.⁵¹ Similarly, the questions raised by bodily adaptation and transformation, cognitive difference, genetic research and the newly networked subject that emerges from them are, as I will show, all topics that are suffused with disability concerns, but are rarely discussed as such. It is when, in Davidson’s elegant phrasing, we “shift the emphasis from the private appreciation of a beautiful object to the social consent it produces”, or turn “our attention from the insular act of perception to the constituencies enlisted in its validation”, that we can grasp the extent to which disability functions as such a constant presence in forms of cultural production.⁵² What working with Siebers and Davidson’s insights allows is that transition from thinking about theoretical and ideological conceptions of the relationship between disability and culture, to the specific aesthetic and textual iterations of that linkage.

The mainly contemporary texts discussed in this book, then, are explored with a number of Siebers’ concerns in mind, particularly in terms of the productive power disability can bring to cultural representation. Where any account of the posthuman must necessarily diverge from his thinking, however, comes in assessing the status of the ‘modern’ as a category through which a critical enquiry might be framed. Disability Aesthetics does not detail exactly what Siebers means by ‘modern’; whether it is resolutely modernist, for example, though his examples are predominantly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many of them avant garde. He also uses the word to distinguish modern art from its ‘classical’ counterpart, a differentiation that suggests more questions around temporality than of any specific cultural movement. But, as we have seen, many scholars of posthumanism equate ‘the modern’ with the advance of liberal humanism, and the subsequent codification of bodies and minds that resulted as a consequence. Certainly, we can read modernsim as a set of contradictory texts on this topic: the potentially progressive aesthetics of cubism’s twisted bodies, say, as set against the prejudices about disability seen in the diaries and letters of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and other titans of modernist cultural production.⁵³ There is no doubt that the critique of the modern practised by many theorists of post-humanism – unpacking its connections to eugenics, speciesism and a restricted notion of the ‘human’ for example – is valid; but equally Siebers’ valorisation of the power of modern and avant-garde aesthetics to undo the logics of dominant social and cultural discourses has a long history of its own.

Possibly a way to break out of the reductive looping that might result from such a position is to remember Rose’s comments earlier about thresholds, and to recognise that the ‘emergent form of life’ he identifies posits posthumanism, like the modern, as a genuine moment of systemic rupture. The forms of capital that now govern biomedical personhood, and the technologies that circumscribe human/non-human interaction, constitute trajectories of emergence not seen before. Seen in this light the ‘modern’, whether understood as time period or artistic approach, belongs to the past, and the contemporaneous nature of posthumanist culture requires forms of critique that are specific to its multiple manifestations. It is, to borrow from Davidson, disability’s ‘left-handedness’ and its potential to ‘resituate’ relations through its particular difference that can intersect and critique our posthuman present.⁵⁴

As Robert McRuer has observed, we live in what he terms “crip times”, a period when “unruly bodies” occupy both public and imaginative spaces.⁵⁵ McRuer’s work outlines the position of disability within contemporary political and artistic processes. It is a vital consideration for this study because it names (in particular) the socio-economic contexts that frame posthumanism, serving to remind that the term does not only exists in philosophical and cultural imaginaries. McRuer’s argument demands a recognition of “the absolute centrality of disability to now-global politics of austerity”, a position that, as he notes, has “rarely been theorised explicitly or comprehensively”.⁵⁶ In another example of the kind of threshold mentioned above, twenty-first century global austerity produces new shapes of disability experiences. Through practices of commercialisation and commodification, the reduction of public services and the deliberate erosion of community, material products of economic decision-making create disabled bodies that are forced into positions of precarity. As I will explore further in Chapter 4, market demands for greater ‘flexibility’ and ‘personal responsibility’ work to characterise disabled lives as inefficient; and the development of technology that is heralded by many champions of posthumanism needs to be understood as part of this marketisation. The possibility of the contemporary cyborg and the materials of the latest prostheses or exoskeletons, all elements suggesting the promise of assistive technologies in articulations of disability futures, operate within a ruthless market logic that exacerbates the binary between abled and dis/abled subjectivities.

But McRuer’s emphasis on the ‘unruly’ is not only a comment on the actions of borderless capitalism. It also signals an identification of disability resistance. His use of the term crip, which has been part of his own work for over ten years, names those moments of artistic and social disability response to austerity.⁵⁷ Cripping contemporary capitalist globalisation involves “asking how cultural formations and movements circulate round, emerge from, and resist the hegemonic global political economy of neoliberal capitalism”. What McRuer terms the “edgy and powerful valences” of crip insight work as both social resistance and critical methodology.⁵⁸ Crip times, then, are not simply moments of the hateful suppression of disability possibilities; they are equally part of what McRuer notes is the “fabulous potential” of “actively collective or coalitional” cultural disability politics.⁵⁹ McRuer’s work is important because it navigates the balance between socio-economic modes of production and the power of disability expression. Though he does not use the term to focus on posthu-manism, crip times clearly articulates posthuman moments, seen as both the coming together of a set of global material constructions that are often punitive and discriminatory, and productive philosophical/ theoretical contemplation and artistic production that critique this. This study will follow his work in attempting to crip the politics and texts of a disability/posthumanist present, as well as its suggested futures. Cripping is especially important because, as a critical method, its unruliness is excessive and, therefore, is in line with the commitment to messiness and contradiction that I want to stress as one of the core subjects of this study. Crip possesses the capacity both to enter and critique the logic of market commodification control and then to vocalise (often to shout) what McRuer terms the “flamboyantly anti-identitarian” advocacy central to the art, culture and politics made by people with disabilities.

To vocalise is to articulate, and the articulation of contemporary disability bodies and subjectivities in a time of a posthumanist technologised present is, as we have seen, a difficult process. It also involves a recognition of what James Berger identifies as the “disarticulate” (emphasis mine), a cultural expression “which cannot be accounted for and which thus has some undetermined subversive power”.⁶⁰ Berger’s focus in his 2014 book The Disarticulate: Language, Disability and the Narratives of Modernity is on cognitively and/or linguistically impaired characters in modern fiction, but his observation works more broadly. It serves to remind that disability does not always shout out; indeed, part of the interaction between disabled presence and contemporary assistive technologies concerns the amplification of the vocal, through new forms of (for example) voice recognition software or neurological sonification communication systems. But Berger’s point is that the dis/inarticulate is a site of disability power, and at different instances this study will analyse how textual representations of perceived ‘voicelessness’ (and, concomitantly, an absence of embodiment) function rather as capacities and moments of subversion. They are what Michael Bérubé – like Berger, writing on intellectual disability – terms the “secret life of stories”; often instances where narratives are productively disabled through prevention or contestation.⁶¹ Bérubé identifies this secrecy not only in the ways that texts deploy (to use his key term) disability but also because it is a “social relation, involving beliefs and social practices that structure the apprehension of disability”.⁶² McRuer’s crip advocacy, then, is also Berger’s disarticulate and Bérubé’s secret. It is the noise and the quiet of disability presence, a productive pairing this book will embrace.⁶³

As noted previously, contemporary critical disability studies is increasingly adept at naming and negotiating a post-identity landscape of disabled experiences, but it needs to be stressed that disability is still also often identity and identification. The history of disabled people is, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Ellen Samuels and many others have shown, is one of being displayed and named, while McRuer’s crip practices map the reclamation of identities made by people with disabilities as a response to this. Identity remains vital when analysing the relationships that run through disability presence. In Disability Theory Tobin Siebers articulates a powerful “defense of identity politics and a counterargument to the idea […] that identity politics cannot be justified because it is linked to pain and suffering” (or, we might add, a declared simplistic apprehension of the body). He goes on: “Identities, narratives and experiences based on disability have the status of theory because they represent locations and forms of embodiment from which the dominant ideologies of society become visible and open to criticism”. Properly defined, Siebers asserts, identity is “an epistemological construction that contains a broad array of theories about navigating social environments”.⁶⁴ In considering post-humanism, we can extend Siebers’ “broad array of theories” beyond the purely social. The modes of embodiment the posthumanist body produces through interactions of human and technology create particular contemporary forms of identity, social but also imagined. Likewise, I am drawn towards Samuels’ articulation of the “fantasies of identification” that have accompanied the attempted naming of those with disabilities, because what she rightly sees as the “inevitable” historical failure of “neatly categorizing all bodies and identities” in previous centuries continues into our own age.⁶⁵ More than with most disability narratives, those shaped by technologies create fantasies – of rehabilitation, restitution, cure and (in a posthumanist age) of the superhuman. In what follows, stories of fantasy and the fantastic will be common, and I share with Samuels the need to look for what she terms “future identifications” and the exploration of “alternatives to scientific knowledge models for authenticating identities”. As she goes on to observe: “Representation is not the only step towards material change, but neither is it a passive reflector of such change”.⁶⁶ As with the arguments made by McRuer, Berger and Bérubé, Samuels acknowledges disability’s capacity to be both metaphor and materiality, to function as abstract and grounded, and she asserts the power of cultural narratives in the telling of disability experience.

Charting the subtle, complex and often difficult intersections between disability and posthumanism is a challenge, but the best recent work in disability theory makes it clear that disability itself contains the kinds of located, subversive and potent power that makes such a process possible. David Mitchell, Susan Antebi and Sharon Snyder’s careful unpicking of the relationship between materiality, biopolitics and crip affect outlines the beginnings of a theory attuned to the value of critical posthumanist methodologies in reading the materiality of the disabled body. They note that: “Posthumanist disability theory offers an opportunity to provide a substantive theoretical reworking of the repetitive employment of impaired – read: socially marked and biologically determined as undesirable – bodies as diagnostic tools of things gone awry in their social and environmental contexts”. Such theory, they continue, “recognize[s] that matter itself exerts influence and agency that ultimately outstrips any human ability to deterministically channel its substantiality into false discursive singularities”. One result of this apprehension of matter is that it “returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process of materiality’s dynamic interactionism. It situates disability not as deviant, but rather as evidence of the ‘excess’ that marks materiality agency and reaches beyond the realm of the cultural while shaping its formulations”.⁶⁷ Whether in the plasticity of stories and aesthetics charted in McRuer, Berger and Bérubé, or through the productively excessive material agency identified by Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder, critical disability and posthumanist insight is increasingly being understood to find common cause.

To bring these perspectives together, then, and to think of post-humanist subjects as they interact with disability deployments (to return to this chapter’s title) is to stress this book’s desire to participate in the ongoing evolution of critical disability studies. It is to signal a commitment to the development of disability aesthetics and critique within global political and economic systems, and to assert the power of cultural texts to throw into relief the ideological forces that shape contemporary worlds. If discussions of the posthuman have been transformed by ongoing developments in global biotechnologies within the space of the last decade, then those transformations have also brought an unparalleled rate of change to the lives of those with disabilities. Because of this, thinking about posthumanism and disability, whether in terms of technology, bioethics, material locations or public understanding, go hand in hand, the shadow of the one inevitably falling on the other. The challenge, however, is to outline and work with critical systems that do justice to the complexities and pace of change the relationship displays; returning to Rosi Braidotti’s observation stated at the start of this chapter, to engage “productively with the contradictions, paradoxes and injustices they engender”. Braidotti herself, in her most recent work Posthuman Knowledge (2019), notes how disability can provide exactly this kind of production. She observes:

Critical disability studies are perfectly at ease with the posthuman subject, because disability has always contravened the classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. The converse is also true as disability invites a critical analysis to the posthuman, to the extent that disability epitomizes a posthuman enhancement of the self while simultaneously demanding recognition of the self in the humanist register.⁶⁸

For me, the kind of invitation Braidotti see here lies in the conversations that are taking place around the future of the body, and especially the stories that those conversations tell.

A central debate in thinking about the relationship between disability and technology surrounds what exactly technologised bodies are supposed to be, and equally what they are for. How they enact and make meaning of the multiple and varied discourses that run through them tells a story of the way futures of the body are imagined. Biotechnology has the improvement of lives as a central purpose, while medical intervention is tasked with saving and prolonging life. The excitement and promise of technology set out a future landscape of body augmentation and enhancement that appears to offer unlimited possibilities for better human health. Those possibilities are, however, paralleled with counter statements of the need for caution in celebrating technological development. As seen earlier with Francis Fukuyama’s fears of an emerging posthuman future, for many the changes that will come with A.I. or genetic modification are a profound threat to current concepts of humanity.

These issues of promise and threat are central to philosophical and technofantasist transhumanist approaches to the relationship between technology and the body. In the work of high-profile figures such as Nick Bostrom, Julian Savulescu, Anders Sandberg and others, transhumanism ultimately celebrates the possible “reinvention” of the human self, what Bostrom and Savulescu call the “enormous potential benefits” of “the opportunity fundamentally to change the human condition”.⁶⁹ Similarly, metaphysician Andy Clark asserts “that human bodies and minds are essentially open to episodes of deep and transformative restructuring” through the use of technology.⁷⁰ Such thinking and language suffuse writing on transhumanism, where ideas of life enhancement, uploaded consciousnesses and transcendent engineering all jostle in what Gregory Stock, discussing germline manipulation in his 2003 book Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes, Changing Our Future, calls “the battle for the future”.⁷¹ Clark’s essay and an extract from Stock’s book both feature in The Transhumanist Reader, a seminal collection of writings on the topic published in 2013. The Reader outlines a comprehensive set of transhumanist thinking, including a ‘Transhumanist Declaration’, a working document first announced by 23 scholars and scientists in 1998 and modified over the years that followed, that calls for “morphological freedom – the right to modify and enhance one’s body, cognition and emotions”.⁷² While transhumanism is not a unified field (Stock calls transhumanists “a hodgepodge of individuals loosely united by a desire to transcend human limitations”⁷³), this assertion of the right to technological change sits as a core argument across much of the spectrum of transhumanist thinking, for all that there is much discussion of the ethical caution that needs to be exercised in the pursuit of such ‘freedom’.

In his essay in The Transhumanist Reader, Anders Sandberg places transhumanism in direct dialogue with disability. Discussing morphological freedom, Sandberg notes how many people with disabilities “over time have become used to” their personal forms of embodiment and have “integrated them into their self-image”. Any suggestion of using technology as a cure for this population, he continues, “quite often is experienced as an attack on their human dignity”. One result of this, he observes, is that “the disability movement has been a strong supporter of the right to determine one’s body” and that, as a consequence, there “seems to be a natural point of agreement between transhumanists and the disability movement which might prove fruitful in future debate”.⁷⁴ On the face of it, Sandberg is here identifying points of interaction that align disabled difference with trans/ posthumanist theory, but such connections feel uneasy in an essay that also makes reference to “handicapped people” and “deranged persons”.⁷⁵ His characterisation of ‘the disability movement’, with its sense of a singular purpose, suggests that for Sandberg ‘disability’ is more a category through which to discuss abstract ethics than a recognition of a varied set of lived experiences, a common critical practice in analytic philosophical accounts of the relationship between technology and disabled bodies. Possibly the contradiction is best summed up in his use of the phrase ‘human dignity’; if dignity can be considered a state essential for people with disabilities (though one often denied), its juxtaposition with ‘human’ suggests the kind of coherent humanist self that both disability and posthumanism challenge. For many scholars of disability, it is transhumanism’s avowed desire to extend the human through a recourse to humanist conceptions of the subject that is the problem. To move ‘beyond’ in this way is both to seek an idea of perfection (a state that always has had the supposedly ‘broken’ body of disability as its antithesis), and a commitment to technological research that chases a future while ignoring the everyday situations of peoples with disabilities (and others who lack access to resources) in the here and now.⁷⁶

“Transhumanists philosophies”, Russell Blackford writes, “are philosophies of self-transformation and self-overcoming”, terms that echo precisely the neoliberal fixation on the ever-expanding capabilities of the self and evoke one of the major contemporary demands – ‘overcoming’ – that society demands of those with disabilities. Blackford expands this outline of transhumanist philosophies with a clearer focus on the nexus between technology and the body:

Ultimately, transhumanists argue, technological intervention in the capacities of the human body and mind will lead to alterations so dramatic that it will make intuitive sense to call the deeply altered people of the near and not-so-near future posthuman: they will be continuous with us but unlike us in many ways. Optimistically, they might be us, greatly changed. On the transhumanist picture, we are not posthuman yet, but we are a bridge, or a rope, between historical humans and beings with posthuman capacities. And what do we plan to transcend? Not the order of nature, but merely our own limitations.⁷⁷

Disabled bodies have always been those considered to have ‘limitations’, while it is clear that Blackford’s characterisation of a common ‘we’ and ‘us’ here articulates a generalised norm of humanity that, in fact, functions through its exclusion of those with disabilities. It is this logic that, in the end, exemplifies transhumanist conceptions of the future, and not Sanders’ sketch of a potentially more tolerant characterisation of different bodies.

In order to see how such ideas function in cultural narratives, I want here to explore the tensions between transhumanist ideas of the transcendence of limitations, posthumanist notions of non-unitary subjects, and disability accounts of complex embodiment through a reading of the X-Men films, one of the most popular and financially successful superhero franchises of the twenty-first century. As stressed throughout this book, it is in the competing contradictions of imagined narratives that crucial formations of the relationship between technology and future bodies are played out, and certainly the cultural reach of the X-Men films means that their conception and deployment of differently visualised bodies provide powerful images of variation to a global audience. The characters of the X-verse are both hyperable and precariously vulnerable; they embody strength and fragility and enact narratives of humanist restitution even as they suggest networks of posthuman affiliation. Reading their stories provides a way to show how the complexities of cultural theory and aesthetics discussed in this chapter are animated in textual forms.

The X-Men films, particularly the first three in the franchise – X-Men (2000), X2 (2003; also known as X Men 2 and X-Men United) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) – use the central idea of the ‘mutant’ to promote a broad narrative of social acceptance and integration, inviting identification from a range of non-majority communities. They can be read in terms of teenage estrangement, racial and sexual equality (the sexism of the titles notwithstanding), abuses of political power, and post-9/11 debates surrounding immigration and security.⁷⁸ The ways the films function when seen through a disability optic, however, makes a compelling case for the validity of reading their depiction of the complexities of embodied disabled difference.⁷⁹ The mutation common to all the X-characters (“the key to our evolution” as the voiceover at the start of the first film puts it) is genetic, and the films’ deployment of human variation, social prejudice and medical/ technological interventions occur in a specific posthumanist context where ideas of mutants having evolved ‘beyond’ humanity are central to each feature. More specifically, disability politics figure recurrently, from the advocacy, indeed superiority, of difference espoused by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to the highly disability-specific debate around the idea of ‘curing’ at the start of X-Men: The Last Stand. Possibly most tellingly, disability is central to major character Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) through the constant presence of his iconic wheelchair, marked with an X on each wheel and always the focus of the shots in each film in which Xavier is introduced. Seemingly well aware of the questions of bodies and minds they are raising, the first X-Men films were the most complex global popular representations of disability in the first decade of the twenty-first century.⁸⁰

X2 poses a set of intriguing connections between ideas of disabled difference and posthumanist technologies and ethics. It has two characters in wheelchairs. First, and most obviously, there is Xavier, the leader of the X-Men and a figure blessed with cognitive powers that allow him telepathic access to the thoughts of others. Xavier is a teacher, strategist and diplomat, and an example of leadership for those at the school (‘for gifted youngsters’) he heads. He is also an eloquent defender of mutant difference in the face of powerful government opposition, but one committed to brokering a peaceful relationship with the human majority. In the film’s fictional universe, he is, to employ the kind of racial/cultural reading the narrative invites, the Martin Luther King figure, as against the Malcolm X style separatist tendencies of Eric Lensherr/Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his Brotherhood, a grouping determined to destroy those non-mutants who oppose difference. But if the Xavier/Magneto relationship is the most dramatic in the film (and indeed across the other features in the series), it is arguably not where the most interesting face-off in this particular narrative takes place. The second character in a wheelchair is Jason Stryker (Michael Reid MacKay), a mutant and the son of Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox), the film’s principle villain and a figure dedicated to eradicating the X-Men because of a hatred of their difference. Like Xavier, Jason has significant powers (both are ‘level 5’ mutants, the ‘highest’ ranking possible), but if Xavier represents a (more than) capable characterisation of disability, Jason enacts traditional associations of disabled difference. Hated and rejected by his father, Jason had been a student at Xavier’s school, but when it becomes clear that Xavier’s intention was to attempt to respect and develop, rather than cure, his son’s exceptionality, Stryker chooses to turn Jason into a weapon through which he can enact genocide against all mutants.⁸¹

The confrontation between the two characters comes as a result of this weaponisation of Jason and, specifically, his disability/exceptionality. Xavier has developed Cerebro, a machine that channels telepathy and through which he can identify and connect to all mutants on Earth, a process that allows for the dissemination of his version of liberalism and tolerance against a backdrop of worsening human–mutant relations. Stryker, however, recognises the value of Cerebro as a vehicle for his genocidal impulses and develops a second version of the machine that not only identifies Earth’s total non-mutant population, but has the power to destroy it. Because of his cognitive powers, Jason is able to manipulate the system to threaten mass slaughter. As a result, the two characters in wheelchairs face off against one another, inside Cerebro, in a battle of minds over the future of the planet’s population. As Petra Kuppers has observed, Xavier’s various wheelchairs in the film denote an intriguing intersection between technology, style and disability; they “are sometimes made of hard glistening steel, sometimes made of clear, clean, lightweight, unbreakable glass or plastic” and overall form “part of a stylish and stylized world into which the cinema viewer is inducted”. The glass wheelchair Xavier uses, Kuppers notes, is “gorgeous”, while the “geometry and balance” he achieves when in his wheelchairs “are indicators of Xavier’s modesty, calm and balanced approach”, signifying “an orderly man/machine hybrid, a being who creates his own environment as an extension of his telepathic mind”.⁸² His wheelchairs are, we might say, full of a technologised posthumanist confidence and convey a highly aestheticised acceptance of difference (something that extends to the wider use of visuals in conveying the attractiveness of all the X characters). Jason, on the other hand, lacks all such visual markers. Hunched in a hospital-style smock in what appears to be a rudimentary (basic, inexpensive, unglamorous) wheelchair, connected to machinery and scarred from operations that link his disability to the murderous practices of Holocaust-like, experimental, medicine, Jason is a ‘monstrous’ figure produced by his father’s pathology. His monstrosity is only heightened by the fact that, in order to confuse Xavier during their conversation, he morphs his appearance to become a young girl, a figure whose innocence is set firmly against his own manipulated degradation.

Where, then, is the posthuman and where is the disability in this scene? Which wheelchair (and which incumbent) invites the stronger claim in any consideration of narrative meaning or ethics in this fiction? Xavier’s disabled difference is represented as a powerful positive force, one marshalled for the benefit of all in his desire to maintain peace; whereas it appears that Jason – through no fault of his own (he is after all not in control of his actions) – is best understood as exemplifying a force of destruction. In such a reading, Xavier is a paradigmatically benevolent and progressive example of the posthuman, blending cognitive diversity with technology and a philosophical ability to see ‘beyond’ to a future in which human and mutant can co-inhabit and co-evolve. In the character of Xavier, the X-Men films appear to welcome the disability to come in any posthumanist future. He becomes the transhumanists’ cyborg, a hybrid not only in terms of physical and cognitive capabilities, but also of judgement and morality, convinced that the evolution that has produced the X mutation has also created moral and ethical clarity in recognising what is good and right.⁸³ The enthusiasm noted earlier for a holistic trans/posthumanist subjectivity that might contain the best virtues of corporeal existence

and informational/technological expertise finds its hero in Xavier and the enacting of his benevolent mutant self.

It is precisely because Xavier is such a transhumanist icon that, when we pause to consider his place within the wider fabric of the film, he makes for an unconvincing example of any disability subjectivity or politics. He is, for example, clearly the most humanist character in the entire story, his inclusive values set against not only Magneto’s separatism, but arguably more importantly Stryker’s warped and delusional vision of what humanity might be, and the unenlightened, limited conception of society conceived of by government and expressed by President McKenna (Cotter Smith). Xavier’s teachings, the film makes clear, should apply to everyone he encounters, mutant or human. It is also obvious that Xavier is a particular and peculiar exemplar of a certain biocapitalistic version of disability tolerance; visually his school contains all the trappings (ivy-covered walls and wood-panelled corridors) of an exclusive private establishment, while the film’s ideas of education and inclusivity, its notion of a future community, cannot suppress a specifically American idea of individual advancement and neoliberal capability.⁸⁴  X-2’s visual style also oozes a glamorous capitalism, particularly through its casting of supermodels (Rebecca Romijn as Mystique) and use of clothing and gadgetry; the school’s jet, for example, exhibits technological capabilities beyond anything the US government can muster.

As we saw earlier in the theorising of Siebers, Davidson, McRuer, Berger and Bérubé however, disability representation and deployment enacts not only morality tales of restitution and overcoming but carries within these a capacity for critique and revision. The different bodies involved in the face off between Xavier and Jason remind us of Davidson’s observation of “the extent to which the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted”. Such newly thinkable bodies are, as McRuer noted, ‘unruly’ and they carry within them the ‘disarticulate’ subversive power identified by Berger as well as the ‘secrets’ Bérubé locates within disability stories. Jason portrays all these things. Set against the shining transhumanist capability of Xavier, Jason’s disability appears less the example of pathology it is possibly intended to be, and more, because the meaning of his body and its interaction with technology can no longer be taken for granted, a corrective to the excesses of Xavier’s stylish tolerance. If the X-Men films work to continually stress the necessary acceptance of otherness and diversity, especially as they relate to disability, Jason reminds us that they only do so within certain frames of reference. Misshapen and broken, Jason is the version of disability that the film works so hard to oppose and erase, but the place he occupies in the narrative – his central importance to the story, as evidence in the scene with Xavier – works to undermine the power of this argument. In all its ordinariness, Jason’s wheelchair cannot help but remind us that Xavier’s wheelchair is less about disability than it might seem and is rather the vision of a certain form of desire, a wish that the future will be inclusive. But, as we might expect from a Hollywood A-list feature, it appears to be a desire in which the costs (here maybe literal costs) of such inclusivity are hidden. Jason’s monstrosity – his scars and the various cords and leads that connect him to (unknown) machines – speak to the physical damage societies do to disabled bodies, in opposition to the perfect physical integration between man and machine we see in Xavier, or the stylised difference on display in other characters in the film, such as Mystique or Nightcrawler (Alan Cummings), whose bodies are marked (blue tattoos or scales) with their mutant identities.

Xavier wins the face-off between the two characters; ultimately his power and the value for which he stands are the stronger, though he needs to be aided by Magneto. What then happens to Jason is highly problematic: as the film gathers pace towards its climax and the complex in which Stryker has established his version of Cerebro is about to be destroyed in a flood following the breaking of a dam, Jason is simply left (unrepresented, unfilmed), presumably to perish. We see Stryker’s demise in some detail, as it is the necessary closure to the film’s main antagonistic relationship, but the story simply forgets about Jason. He is afforded no kind of ending, not even a straightforward narrative one in which he is killed. He simply disappears. In the ways in which Jason is overlooked, we can see parallels with those communities of the disabled who find themselves excluded: whether from majority power structures and decision-making processes, or from social representation and cultural stories; left behind as interest focuses elsewhere. His unruliness, however, and the presence of his disarticulate, forgotten body, allows for the critical insight that unpicks the politics of disability in the film.

Structurally, the narrative complexity in X2 is similar to that of Baum’s Tin Woodman discussed earlier. In the Oz stories, the posthumanist embodiment of the Woodman and experience of his physical self are in tension with his emotional and moral desires, the former suggesting a way of living in the world that is challenged by the latter’s conception of ‘heart and home’. With X2, the underpinning ideas of tolerance and a progressive politics create a matrix of ethical inclusion, but the terms of such inclusion become destabilised when we pause to consider the film’s actual detail of disability. Such a contradiction is recognisable in many of the contemporary Hollywood features that represent embodied difference in clearly posthumanist contexts, particularly narratives of superhuman abilities. To give but one example, the 2017 film version of Ghost in the Shell, starring Scarlett Johansson and directed by Rupert Sanders, is an adaptation/remake of the manga narrative of the same name by Masamune Shirow first serialised in 1989, and subsequently made into an animated film in 1995 by Mamoru Oshii.⁸⁵ Like its Japanese predecessors, the US feature depicts a cyberpunk world in which technological body adaptations are common and characters sport a variety of augmentations and enhancements, from limited skin grafts to the insertion of human brains into full-body prostheses. But whereas the Japanese versions of the narrative explore the kinds of networked ideas of body, self and community that arise from this, the US film accentuates the search for origins of central character police Major (Johansson). Major has a human brain inside a full manufactured body, but in a search for a resolution of this interaction the story enacts a set of questions around her selfhood that produces a flatly humanist story of a protagonist coming to terms with change.

The reduction of the original Ghost in the Shell story to the humanist trajectory of the 2017 film centres on the simplification of the overall script and especially the narrative’s end. In both the manga and the 1995 film, Major merges her ‘ghost’ with that of the Puppet Master, the embodied A.I. criminal figure she has been hunting for the bulk of the story, to create a networked/combined body and self. In the 2017 production, the Puppet Master figure, Kuze (Michael Carmen Pitt), turns out to be a childhood friend of Major who (in an echo of the Wolverine narrative in the X-Men films) was a test subject in a government experiment programme into the creation of cyborgs, one that included Major and which wiped both characters’ memories. When Kuze offers to merge with Major, she refuses and returns to her mother, from whom she was taken as a child and whom she has rediscovered.⁸⁶ In place of the complex future-facing assemblages of the Japanese narrative(s), the US Ghost in the Shell reconstitutes personal selfhood within the context of a reactivated family dynamic. The film is visually stunning, evoking a posthumanist, cyberpunk-inflected urban environment in great detail, but in its own way it is still an account of Dorothy trying to find her way home from Oz. Even with the most sophisticated technologised prosthetic body available, Major decides that “humanity is our virtue” (as she says in the voiceover that closes the film) in a deliberate choice of the human over the “manufactured”. In pursuing justice through her role as a police officer, Major will be guided by the ‘real’ self she has rediscovered.⁸⁷

As noted earlier, Rosi Braidotti claims that in a time of posthumanism, “the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations”. As we have seen, the mutations of the X-Men films display the conditions to be complex: high-profile deployments of disability often working towards humanist conclusions but carrying within them the unruliness of the disabled body that unsettles both the aesthetics and cultural politics of the films’ representations. Braidotti does not disaggregate the ‘we’ in her assertion, but within the context of her writing it does not come across as the standard humanist plural as noted earlier in Blackford’s work, assuming continuity across all humans on the planet. It appears rather as the possibility of other choices and associations, an invitation to choose the positions ‘we’ might wish to occupy: disabled, crip, multiple, liminal.

Here, then, we might make a critical choice similar to that suggested in the preface in relation to Baum’s Tin Woodman, one that embraces a posthumanist complex embodiment and sees technology aligned with disability possibilities as opposed to humanist conceptions of self. In terms of the different versions of Ghost in the Shell, this means rejecting the fanfare of Hollywood and learning from the possible selves and worlds found in Shirow’s and Oshii’s imaginings. Manga and anime resound with what Hajime Nakatami calls “thematics of order and disorder, self and other, and humans and nonhumans”, though neither form sees these as problematic boundaries that require solving.⁸⁸ So, for example, the various puppet, doll, cyborg or automata figures that recur through the different Japanese Ghost in the Shell narratives work to explore the uncanniness of ningy^ō (‘human-shaped figure’) in the representations of interactions between humans and non-humans.⁸⁹ It is precisely the coming together of these different possibilities, and not their resolution, that drives meaning in Shirow’s manga and Oshii’s film, where the networks of body/self/other/biology/human/machine point towards the shape of cultural futures.

The stories disability tells open up the contexts and relationships in which bodies and technologies come together. As I have tried to show in this chapter, these combinations result in a matrix of aesthetics, theory and politics, as well as the complex heritage of comprehending disability and crip subjects. Appreciating disabled bodies helps unveil the humanism central to much transhumanist thinking, but also posits alternative affinities with those strands of critical posthumanist thinking that champion non-unitary selves and a grounded, material technological space in which those selves might exist. It also allows for critical rereadings of those texts in which technologised bodies create powerful images and narratives of embodied difference, a process I will continue in the chapters that follow. And, as many disability scholars observe, it reminds us that all these processes are political, whether the politics of identity and location, questions of access to developing technology, or aesthetic and representational practice. It is this wide sense of politics that I want to carry forward into the chapters that follow.