ABSTRACT
The rise of new and increasingly sophisticated technology in Western society has not left the West’s social relations and philosophies unaffected. One trend of thought inspired by technological advances is transhumanism, which defends the further “evolution” of the human species through direct technological interventions to provide the human body with a new functionality. Among the endless possibilities for prosthetic and other interventions in the human body is the use of prosthetic contraceptives to control female bodies and fertility. The use and exploration of prostheses as contraceptives can be traced in the Irish former journalist June Caldwell’s collection of short stories Room Little Darker (Caldwell 2018). She explores a number of social issues in a conservative and rather patriarchal fictional twenty-first-century Dublin, paying close attention to the genderization of bodies through sophisticated technology. In “The Implant,” the short story analyzed in this paper, the body female protagonist undergoes an operation that will implant a prosthetic contraceptive as a kind of self-punishment after her long-term boyfriend commits adultery. The aim of this paper is to find evidence of how the prosthetic contraceptive reconfigures the female protagonist into a transhuman subject and the possible consequences—that is, to discern whether the prosthetic contraceptive empowers or oppresses her under the new transhuman or not.
