ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article examines Murata Sayaka's post-human world and its characteristics. The post-human world proposed by Sayaka Murata unfolds in two main directions. One direction, as exemplified in Earthlings, involves escaping from the heterosexist gender structure and oppressive ideology of patriarchal capitalism. The other direction, as depicted in Vanishing World, involves the transformative process toward a post-human society. What are the conditions for posthuman that Murata presents in Earthlings? The patriarchal capitalist reproductive structure imposes a powerful hierarchy between sex, sexuality, and gender on women (bodies) and suppresses them through ideological devices such as bloodlineism and the family system. Escape from this begins with recognizing the materiality of the human body as labor and childbirth. In Vanishing World, the introduction of artificial wombs as a scientific technology is depicted as dismantling the existing social system of sex/sexuality/gender, and deconstructing what were once considered fundamental human traits such as sexual desire and motherhood. The central theme discussed in these two novels is the recognition that the transition to post-human is inevitable and irreversible. Murata raises a skeptical question: if humans are repositioned as post-humans in a way that emphasizes their value as material beings for self-reproduction and eliminates instincts such as sexual desire and motherhood, would we humans approve of such a “animalistic harmony” world?

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