What is Left of Human Nature?

Posthuman Subjectivity in Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man”

Abstract

The paper examines Joanna Russ's The Female Man and its radical challenge to the neoliberal concept of humanity. Throughout Western thought, the human has been hierarchically positioned in relation to the non-human realm. This symbolic structure has not only supported human dominance over animals and the natural environment, but has also perpetuated sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and ethnocentric assumptions within human society. Drawing from the ideas of post-structuralism, deconstructionism, ecology, and feminism, Russ challenges traditional assumptions by blurring boundaries between humanity and the environment, culture and nature, and human and non-human entities (animals and machines), as well as between men and women.

While the novel primarily addresses the problematic definition of female subjectivity, both individual and collective, it also presents an alternative concept of human subjectivity in general. Russ's text presents a view of human nature as a process rather than a stable entity, which can be interpreted as anti-essentialist. This perspective anticipates some of the key aspects of critical posthumanism.

The main category in the representation of this alternative subjectivity is hybridization, which Russ identifies as a principle of poietic and narrative composition that informs the entire novel. This strategy operates on three interconnected levels: thematic hybridization, conveyed through hybrid figures such as the cyborg, android, female man, and transgender character; ontological hybridization, conveyed through the trope of parallel universes commonly found in science fiction; and linguistic and narrative hybridization in the text's postmodern style. At the first level, I focus on the role of technology as an instrument of hybridization and historical change through its capacity to transform the human body. At the second level, I demonstrate how Russ's use of the multiverse narrative challenges Western ontology by rejecting the traditional idea of a unitary essence as the foundation of reality and instead embracing a vision that anticipates the relational ontology of philosophical posthumanism. At the third level, two stylistic strategies are employed to express a new subjectivity: the uncertain and shifting identity of the narrative 'I' and the blurring of the boundaries between the author and the characters. Identity is thus understood not as a fixed and uniform entity but rather as a dynamic process of composition and reconfiguration of fragments.