Biomothers and Technobodies: Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story as the Technocritical Hybridization of Trans- and Posthumanism

In Frankissstein: A Love Story, the British writer Jeanette Winterson reclaims the epistemological value of the literary interpretation of existential questions around the posthuman. By retelling Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, Winterson assesses, both ethically and aesthetically, the consequences of artificial intelligence for traditional conceptions of gender, life (re)production, and the commodification of bodily desires, as well as their fusion at the intersection of technology and art. With the methodological support of recent studies on trans-/posthumanism and material/trans-corporeal feminism(s), this article will attempt to show how, by revindicating monstrosity as the legitimization of new forms of life and love, Winterson hybridizes trans- and posthumanist polarities and relativizes the rigidity of the debate around the de- and rematerialization of nature in the face of practices such as mind uploading, the mass production of sex robots, and enhancing biotechnologies, through a technocritical examination of the risks and possibilities of the com-posting of human and nonhuman matter.