Le metamorfosi della natura umana nelle utopie fantascientifiche degli anni Settanta

The dissertation aims to demonstrate how the most significant utopias of the 1970s anticipate some of the key themes of philosophical posthumanism through a radical revision of the idea of human subjectivity implicit in the neoliberal culture of the United States. The investigation was conducted on five texts: Ecotopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach; The Word for World is Forest (1972) and The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula Le Guin; The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975) and Women on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy. The focus of the research is the challenge that each text poses to the vision of the human being implicit in the ideology of neoliberalism, culturally dominant at the time. In Western thought, the human has historically been inscribed in a hierarchical scale with respect to the non-human realm. This symbolic structure has not only supported the primacy of humans over animals and the domination of the natural environment, but has also shaped the human sphere itself with sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and ethnocentric assumptions. Drawing on ideas from post-structuralism, deconstructionism, ecology, and feminism, these texts overturn these assumptions, or some of them, by blurring the traditional boundaries between humanity and environment, culture and nature, human and non-human (animal and machine), man and woman. My goal is, on the one hand, to examine the antagonistic conception of human nature exhibited by each text and, on the other, to test the varying effectiveness of the literary strategies implemented by each text in conveying the implications - political, social, and psychological - of an alternative view of humanity. Through this journey, I have shown that a proper posthuman perspective is best conveyed by the crucial mediation of feminist writers who have radically transformed the narrative conventions of both traditional literary utopia and science fiction. The authors, in particular, use conventional SF tropes such as parallel worlds, alternative futures, and planetary colonization to open up utopia and place it in dynamic interaction with other alternative societies. Utopia is thus presented as a process in constant flux. Both these narrative strategies and the meditation on the potential of technology to radically transform even human biology support a conception of the human subject no longer as an autonomous entity but as a node in a network of relationships with other subjects, human and non-human.