Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
Posthuman Desire in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction: Embodiment, Technocapitalism, and Relational Co-emergence
Authored By — FÁtima Silva

Abstract

This essay examines how Jeanette Winterson mobilises posthuman desire as a critical and analytical category capable of destabilising the humanist imaginaries that have shaped technoscientific culture since cybernetics and artificial intelligence emerged as cultural forces in the mid-twentieth century. Its specific intervention is to argue that desire - a distributed, materially embedded, ontologically unstable practice - is a more adequate analytical category than affect or intimacy alone, foregrounding the productive, world-making dimension of posthuman entanglement rather than its merely relational aspect. Through close readings of Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) and The Stone Gods (2007), the essay argues that Winterson rejects both the transhumanist dream of disembodied consciousness and the technocapitalist reduction of intimacy to programmable affection, advancing instead a posthuman ethics grounded in vulnerability, hybrid embodiment, and relational co-emergence. Grounded in feminist materialism, queer theory, and critical posthumanism - particularly Haraway, Braidotti, Barad, Preciado, Hayles, Berlant, and Halberstam - the essay reads these frameworks not as a sequential inventory but as intersecting and occasionally divergent positions that Winterson's fiction mediates. In Frankissstein the tension between Ry Shelley's embodied becoming and Victor Stein's disembodiment project exposes the stakes of posthuman subjectivity, while Ron Lord's sexbots dramatise the technocapitalist capture of affective existence. The Stone Gods extends this critique into a speculative ecology where the cyclical collapse of worlds renders the "human" a precarious historical effect rather than an ontological ground, and the evolving relationship between Billie and Spike shows posthuman desire to be constituted not through optimisation or similarity but through shared exposure, risk, and the capacity to respond to radical otherness. The essay's principal contribution is to show that Winterson's formal choices - ironic intertextuality, iterative structure, speculative ecology - do not merely illustrate existing theory but enact modes of posthumanist argumentation that press those frameworks where theoretical accounts leave off.

Keywords

Jeanette Winterson; Posthumanism; Posthuman Desire; Embodiment; Queer Futurity; Technocapitalism.

Read/Download Full Article