BIO
Ana Ugarte is Assistant Professor in the department of World Languages and Cultures at The University of Scranton. Dr. Ugarte graduated from Duke University in 2018. Her research interests include Caribbean cultural production, disability studies, health humanities, and posthumanism. Her book in progress, "Laboratory Fictions: Reading Disease, Corporeal Difference, and the Test Subject in Hispanic Caribbean Literature and Cultural Production", explores how authors from the early twentieth century to the present expose the historical functioning of tropical territories as laboratories for political, economic, and scientific experimentation.
TITLE
“Prosthetic, Posthuman Cuba: Reading Corporeal Difference in Maielis González Fernández’s Fictions”
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the opposition between nature and artificiality, which is characteristic of science fiction and key to posthumanism, through the lens of another dichotomy, that is, the abled subject—the epitome of the normative and the normal—versus the disabled subject. It focuses on the work of Cuban writer Maielis González Fernández, who foregrounds in her collection of short stories, Sobre los nerds y otras criaturas mitológicas (Of Nerds and Other Mythological Creatures) (2016), various cyborg technologies that attempt to improve, perfect, or cure faulty human bodies. The recurring theme of prosthetics in González Fernández’s text develops on two levels. On the first level, the prosthesis motif affects the plot; that is, how characters use or act as prostheses, and in which ways the discourse of anomaly frames their posthuman exceptionalities. On the second level, prosthetics concerns the act of representation—science fiction itself acts as a prosthetic device that supplements a lacking (Cuban) reality (my use of the adjective “prosthetic” here gestures towards the word’s etymology, from the Greek “prosthesis” meaning “addition”). This paper thereby examines how the material and tropological experiences of the prosthetic in González Fernández’s collection affect her text and, subsequently, inflect the interrelated tenets of (post)human normality, genre normality, and what could be broadly identified as Cuban normality, referring to the set of cultural narratives around exceptionalism that have constructed and projected hegemonic images of the island.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
Ana Ugarte is Assistant Professor in the department of World Languages and Cultures at The University of Scranton. Dr. Ugarte graduated from Duke University in 2018. Her research interests include Caribbean cultural production, disability studies, health humanities, and posthumanism. Her book in progress, "Laboratory Fictions: Reading Disease, Corporeal Difference, and the Test Subject in Hispanic Caribbean Literature and Cultural Production", explores how authors from the early twentieth century to the present expose the historical functioning of tropical territories as laboratories for political, economic, and scientific experimentation.
TITLE
“Prosthetic, Posthuman Cuba: Reading Corporeal Difference in Maielis González Fernández’s Fictions”
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the opposition between nature and artificiality, which is characteristic of science fiction and key to posthumanism, through the lens of another dichotomy, that is, the abled subject—the epitome of the normative and the normal—versus the disabled subject. It focuses on the work of Cuban writer Maielis González Fernández, who foregrounds in her collection of short stories, Sobre los nerds y otras criaturas mitológicas (Of Nerds and Other Mythological Creatures) (2016), various cyborg technologies that attempt to improve, perfect, or cure faulty human bodies. The recurring theme of prosthetics in González Fernández’s text develops on two levels. On the first level, the prosthesis motif affects the plot; that is, how characters use or act as prostheses, and in which ways the discourse of anomaly frames their posthuman exceptionalities. On the second level, prosthetics concerns the act of representation—science fiction itself acts as a prosthetic device that supplements a lacking (Cuban) reality (my use of the adjective “prosthetic” here gestures towards the word’s etymology, from the Greek “prosthesis” meaning “addition”). This paper thereby examines how the material and tropological experiences of the prosthetic in González Fernández’s collection affect her text and, subsequently, inflect the interrelated tenets of (post)human normality, genre normality, and what could be broadly identified as Cuban normality, referring to the set of cultural narratives around exceptionalism that have constructed and projected hegemonic images of the island.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
