Assignment Paper

When writing your essay, please draw on relevant references from the module (and/or beyond). References are excluded from the word count.

Please ensure that you structure your essay appropriately (i.e. it should have an introduction, main body and conclusion) and ensure that your points are presented in a logical manner.

Please ensure that you include a full bibliography. References should follow the Harvard style referencing system

Weighting: 100%
Word Count: 3000 words

Choose one of the following questions to answer for your essay. You can choose any question that you find easy to talk about from this list.

1. There are many definitions of the posthuman. Outline N. Katherine Hayles’ version of posthumanism and compare it to that one other posthuman theorist of your choice.
2. Focus on an event you have been to: a club night, a festival or theme park. Discuss how the experiences and emotions it evokes are mediated through a range of objects and materials to create particular atmospheres.
3. In her cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway tells us “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics”. What does she mean and why is it important?
4. Drawing upon readings from the module, and using one specific example, analyse the social and cultural politics of a recent (commercialised or in development) technology that is trying to replace animal tissues with a human-produced alternative.
5. What does it mean to say the body is a ‘heterodox assemblage’? Use ideas from the module and your own examples to explain. Include a discussion of why it is valuable to understand the body as a heterodox assemblage.
6. “I love dogs, but I couldn’t eat a whole one”. Examine the politics of this joke using theoretical ideas from the module.
7. Judith Halberstam argues that the novel Frankenstein suggests that ‘it is people (or at least, bodies) who terrify people, not ghosts or gods’. What makes the posthuman body ‘monstrous’ in this way? Discuss with reference to examples from representations of the posthuman in the media.’
8. To what extent can the concept of posthumanism explain the changing media coverage of disabled athletics?