Queer Sinofuturism
The Aberrant Movements and Posthumanist Mutations of Body, Identity, and Matter in Lu Yang's Uterus Man
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Abstract
In this article, I consider posthumanist and techno-scientific aesthetics in Lu Yang's short film Uterus Man (2013), a film in which a male superhero is interrogating the capacities of a body to mutate, affect, and to be affected. Profoundly influenced by Japanese popular cultural forms such as manga and anime, the artist also draws on sources ranging from Buddhism to developments in neuroscience and biology. I will use the work of post-Deleuzian thinkers Luciana Parisi and David Lapoujade to investigate how the different transformations of the body shown in Uterus Man chart the unpredictable capacity for bodies and matter to mutate in contemporary techno-aesthetic landscapes. In its ambiguity, can Uterus Man contribute to the emergence of a queer Sinofuturism? And what kind of future does the perverse superhero of Uterus Man represent?
Contributor Notes
Gabriel Remy-Handfield is currently a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Montreal in Comparative Literature under the supervision of Livia Monnet. His academic interests are oriented toward contemporary East Asian literature and visual culture, with a focus on speculative fiction, queer studies, new materialisms, critical posthumanism, Deleuze and Guattari studies, and the new media arts. He has participated in many international conferences in North America, Europe, and East Asia. His current thesis project is about queer Sinofuturism, aberrant movements, and queer ecologies in speculative fiction and new media arts in contemporary China and Taiwan. Email: gremyhandfield@gmail.com