Posthumanism
Posthumanism – a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach that questions the classical humanist understanding of the human being as an autonomous, rational, universal, and central subject. Posthumanism challenges the idea that “the human” is the highest measure of all things and reconsiders the boundaries between human beings, animals, nature, technology, machines, and other forms of life and matter.
Unlike transhumanism, which usually emphasizes the technological enhancement of human capacities, posthumanism is primarily concerned with critically rethinking the very concept of the human. It examines how the image of the “universal human” has historically been constructed through exclusions based on gender, race, class, colonial status, bodily normativity, species, and other forms of difference.
From the perspective of gender and feminist theory, posthumanism is significant because it challenges the implicitly masculine, Eurocentric, rationalist, and disembodied model of the subject that dominated classical humanism. Feminist posthumanism analyzes embodiment, technology, reproduction, vulnerability, materiality, ecological interdependence, and the boundaries between the human and the non-human. In this sense, it is connected with feminist critiques of androcentrism, biological determinism, gender hierarchy, the domination of nature, and the exclusion of women and other marginalized subjects from the category of the fully “human.”
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