ABSTRACT

In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti asks the essential question, “Where does the posthuman condition leave humanity?” (3). I propose that embedded within this question is the more ominous and evocative question, “Where does the posthuman condition leave men and masculinity?” In this paper, I argue that, amid fluctuating contemporary codes of masculinity, “posthumanism” is an imperfect term for what is, fundamentally, postphallocentrism and the ultimate death of man. Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina exemplifies the degree to which hegemonic masculinity is culturally entrenched and the lengths humanist man will go to to preserve himself. The posthumanist conversation, while thought-provoking in theory and compelling at its core, tends to overlook or to underestimate man’s self-preservative resistance to an ontology that heralds his obsolescence. Ex Machina articulates this resistance and exposes male anxieties in the face of posthuman reconfigurations of subjectivity and redefinitions of masculinity in a technocentric era.

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