Cyborg Bodies, Posthuman Identities: Rethinking Gender in the Age of AI

Abstract

This comparative analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s The Island of Lost Girls (2015) employs a feminist posthumanist lens, augmented by disability studies, trans technofeminism, and decolonial AI ethics, to interrogate artificial and engineered female embodiments. It explores negotiations of vulnerability, care, surveillance, and biopolitical regulation, guided by five research questions: conceptualizations of posthuman female embodiment and emergent ethical-political-affective possibilities; manifestations of feminist posthumanist themes like relationality and techno-agency; enrichments from crip and queer technofeminist perspectives on embodied difference; influences of cultural locations on posthuman paradigms sans West/South Asia binaries; and a comparative mapping of care, resistance, and technological governance intersections. Findings delineate contrasting yet complementary posthuman visions. One is grounded in relational ethics, while the other is shaped by necropolitical control, affirming literature’s capacity to theorize the ethical and political stakes of AI-mediated futures.