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

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
The Queer Inheritance of the Posthuman: Reproductive Futurity in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me
Authored By — Siddhartha Dey

Abstract

"We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child," writes Lee Edelman in his 2004 work on queer theory and the death drive. Taking this formulation as its point of departure, this article examines the centrality of the Child in Ian McEwan's novel Machines Like Me (2019) and argues that this implied telos places the humanoid robot Adam in a structurally queer position. By analysing the novel's politics of "reproductive futurism," the paper shows how Adam- through his non-reproductive pursuit of pleasure and experience, and his moral and intellectual superiority—not only stands in opposition to the heteronormative domestic order of Charlie and Miranda but also destabilises its humanist assumptions. To contextualise this argument, the paper reads the novel alongside McEwan's earlier work Enduring Love (1997), where the explicitly queer character Jed Parry similarly unsettles the domestic stability of the childless couple Joe and Clarissa. Despite differences in ontology and narrative context, as the study reveals, both novels deploy analogous strategies of containment. Finally, the paper argues that the sidelining of Adam through destruction and the marginalisation of Jed Parry through psychiatric pathologisation function as expressions of the same futurist logic that treats queer positions as failed—due to their inability, in Sara Ahmed's terms, to "return the gift of the line" - and therefore disposable. In tracing this continuity, the paper demonstrates how post-human figures such as cyborgs and intelligent machines inherit a historically queer position within humanist regimes of futurity, where lives or systems that disrupt the heteronormative order of reproductive continuity are rendered easily expendable.

Keywords

Reproductive Futurism, Queer, Posthumanism, Narrative, McEwan.

Read/Download Full Article