Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction. Feminist Transhuman Embodiments in Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot

Abstract

The visual power of the female-cyborg metaphor has been sensationally exploited in science fiction by rendering transhuman pictures of the female body and mind that often perpetuate old patriarchal clichés. The transhuman cyborg-woman is thus embodied as an improved female young, heterosexual, white, hypersexualized, and disposable commodity. Jasper Fforde’s novel The Woman Who Died A Lot (2012) unfolds a self-critical approach to feminist discourse that presses on the issue of female ageing as it intersects with the transhumanist construction of female biological/technological sexual desire and reproductive potential by representing ageing women as disabled.