Guest Researcher - Manuela Rossini
Today we welcome Manuela Rossini from the University of Bern, as our new guest researcher. We hope that you will enjoy your time here at the Centre for Gender Research! Read more about Manuela below.
Disciplinary background: English and Spanish Literature, Critical and Cultural Theory
Areas of expertise and research areas:
- Posthumanism
- Animal Studies
- Feminism
- Medical and Environmental Humanities
- Cultural Studies of Science
- Inter- and Transdisciplinarity; conceptualisatiosn of ‘life’ and, related to this, autobiographies/life writing/pathographies
Why did you choose to come to the Centre for Gender Research?
By invitation, which I accepted happily because the Centre is a lively interfaculty place for exchange and debate, with many interesting groups in my areas of research.
Shortly describe your current research project:
Very short version:
“Science/Fiction: Imagineering the Future of the Human”
This monograph examines figurations or “imagineerings” of posthumanity in terms of its inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms (primarily in terms of gender, race, sexuality, species) in what I term “science/fiction”, including literary as well as scientific narratives.
Longer version:
In the wake of the postmodernist challenge to the humanist values of the Enlightenment and, more effectively perhaps, due to the extraordinary advances in computer technology and biomedical engineering, the category of the human and its analogues – humanism, humanity, humane – are undergoing profound transformations. These changes raise the greatest hopes and deepest fears within contemporary human beings with regard to their individual identity as well as with regard to the future of the human species. With the growing intersections between human, animal and technology, there are no longer any clear answers - if ever there were - to questions such as what it means to be 'human' and where 'humanness' or 'human nature' is to be found. Instead, 'we' witness the death of the liberal-humanist subject as a coherent and autonomous being and the concomitant artificial birth of what has been referred to as 'the posthuman' or 'cyborg', an amalgam of various organic and non-organic components, an entity whose boundaries undergo continuous (de)construction and reconstruction. The project focuses on the category of the post/human as constructed primarily in contemporary science fiction written in English but also as 'imagineered' in theoretical and philosophical writings as well as in (popular) scientific texts on reproduction in a wide sense. The research starts from the premise that the popular genre of science fiction is an important cultural resource for dealing with those changes and, in turn, shapes developments in information and biomedical technology in crucial ways. Because of my contention that the hitherto separate spheres of science fiction, science and social reality are collapsing and in order to emphasise the narrative nature of scientific writings, I consider all the selected types of text as 'science/fiction' to be subjected to a careful narratological analysis which is theoretically and methodologically informed by gender studies, bioethics, deconstruction and the cultural studies of technoscience. My main research interests lie in the investigation of how human beings are 'built' textually and how 'human' is differentiated from other organic and non-organic entities. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between different 'imagineerings' of the post/human and prevailing structures of inequality and discrimination: what/who does the term 'human' include or exclude, and in whose advantage or disadvantage are such inclusions or exclusions?
I’m also currently co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Literature and The Posthuman (forthcoming 2015) and working on a co-written book on Life, in Theory … as well as planning a monograph concerned with posthumanist autobiographies.
Publications:
From House to Home. Family Matters in Early Modern Drama and Culture (2004/2009)
Edited: Animal Encounters (2009, with Tom Tyler), Energy Conenctions (2012, open access), Animal Traces (journal issue, 2014), European Posthumanism (journal issue, 2014, with Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter.
You will find further information about Manuela on the websites below.