Imagining Techno-Transcendence : Power and Culture in Transhumanist Imaginaries

Hoyle, Emily and Ferreday, Debra and Singleton, Vicky (2025) Imagining Techno-Transcendence : Power and Culture in Transhumanist Imaginaries. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Transhumanism is an emerging subject of interest within the social sciences and this thesis is a contribution to this field of study situated at the intersection of Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology. I uniquely conceptualise transhumanism as imaginaries that are brought into being and materialised by discourses, practices, bodies and technologies. Transhumanist imaginaries are collective imaginings of a future that will have the technoscientific capabilities for humans to live longer through the ‘enhancement’ or total transcendence of their fleshy body. I argue this is not a fantasy of a genderless or post-gender future by showing how white cis abled-bodied masculinities are being re-produced and re-imagined in the production of transhumanism. This is across discourses, material-semiotic practices, science fiction narratives and visual cultures that work to bring transhumanist imaginaries into being. To do this, I trace the figure of the technological futurist - as a self-birthing ventriloquist for the technoscientific future - through sociocultural sites where transhumanist imaginaries are enacted and re-produced. Rather than considering imagining as apart from the materiality of social relations, I centre the imagination and the figural in my analysis of the body politics of transhumanism. Influenced by Leila Dawney’s (2011) work on imaginaries, I combine the ideas of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics (1996) with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality: volume one (1978) to argue imagining is an embodied, affective and socio-material practice that re-produces specific power-knowledge relations. Drawing upon genealogies of Feminist Technoscience and Trans Studies, this thesis is an examination of how patriarchal power-knowledge relations are re-produced in dominant imaginings of technoscientific futures, emphasising how privileged subjectivities are fundamental to the production of transhumanism. Using decolonial feminist thinking in dialogue with Trans Studies and Disability Studies, I expand on Haraway’s Modest Witness (1997) to argue transhumanist imaginaries are gender, race, sexuality, class, and ableism in-the making. This thesis is a feminist sociological account of how gender relations, and other intersecting relations, are being re-produced and re-imagined within transhumanist imaginaries.