Of Posthuman Born: Gender, Utopia and the Posthuman in Films and TV

The year 2014. A search for ‘utopian sci-fi movies’ in Google reveals only one type of result: a list of dystopian movies where utopia is paired with dystopia, in tales of failed utopian projects. Envisaging the future does not create the future per se, but it has an impact in the generative power that such an imagination can perform in the actual constitution of reality. This will be a selective chapter. It will search for the seeds of the futures (Masini 1999), while focusing on the notion of gender as a biocultural platform for onto-epistemological diffraction (Van der Tuin 2014). The goal of this chapter is to present cinematic and television productions which developed seeds of the futures without falling into discriminatory normative codes. Diversity is one of the main marks of evolution: the gender picture should be as extensive as possible, in order to tune in with the unlimited potential of the natural-cultural posthuman scenario. This chapter will first unveil the sexist, racist and homophobic approaches pursued by the movie and TV industry, a mirror of the human-centric guidelines of their productions. Secondly, it will focus on the posthuman as the progeny of the cyborg, exploring the passage from humans as beings of woman born to posthumans, as beings born out of alternative interactions. The cinematic representation of the supernatural realm — from mystical pregnancies, to vampire shows and superheroines — will be of help in understanding the self as a material network in symbiotic interaction with the ‘others’, deconstructing a fixed notion of identity.