Emergent Intimacies in Posthuman Fiction

       In Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), the sex bots that Ron Lord manufactures cater to heteronormative desires. So the bots possess a ‘20-inch waist and 40-inch boobs [legs] slightly longer than they would be if she was human’ (91). Lord admits this is a ‘fantasy’ (37). In Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), thanks to genetic and somatic engineering, there is the new normal possible of ‘girls Fixed at eight years old, maybe ten, hopefully twelve. Or those who want ‘women’s minds in girls’ bodies [can] go for genetic reversal’ (22). 

      Both intimacy and reproduction are sites of emergence in posthuman fiction. I employ the term ‘emergence’ in the sense defined by Mark Bedau and Paul Humphreys as ‘phenomena that arise from and depend on some more basic phenomena yet are simultaneously autonomous from that base’, exhibiting ‘irreducibility, unpredictability, conceptual novelty, ontological novelty’ (2008: 3). In the domain of intimacy, the human-nonhuman, i.e. interspecies, assemblage facilitated by technology multiple emergences are possible, at least in the pages of posthuman fiction. 

       First anticipated by Octavia Butler in her Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-1989) where the alien Oankali mate with humans to mutual benefit,  the future of intimacy in posthuman fiction is one that complicates both gender and species binaries.  Intimacy is characterized as an emergent future, the consequence of programming of Artificial Beings (ABs) but also the rising self-awareness of the ABs.  In what follows I outline an indicative taxonomy of four emergent intimacies that point to futures of human, other-than-human and beyond-human intimacies.

Emergent Intimacies I: Gender Roles

      Would posthuman intimacy as an emergent condition do away with gender binaries and gender roles? By replicating women and their sexuality in the form of a machine-organic hybrid, Lord in Frankissstein at once reiterates the gendered roles and shifts them to the domain of the posthuman. The consequences of such a shift are voiced by a woman when she asks: ‘Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?’ (74, emphasis in original). A similar concern is voiced by Billie Crusoe in The Stone Gods when she refers to the ‘uncertain’ future of women (22).  With technological advances, she acknowledges that the principal use of/for women – reproduction – is no longer a factor, or value: ‘We don’t breed in the womb any more’. The changing contours of intimacy and sexuality are summarized by Crusoe as follows: ‘Women have a different approach. Surrounded by hunks, they look for ‘the ugly man inside’. Thugs and gangsters, rapists and wife-beaters are making a comeback. They may smile like beach-boys, but they are pure shark’. She concludes: ‘So this is the future. F is for Future’ (22).

      Winterson is pointing to the possibilities of posthuman intimacies which, in Frankissstein, may well retain sexual and gender stereotypes even as it renders human women obsolete, while she complicates the the species binaries in The Stone Gods when the human Billie Crusoe falls in love with Spike the female humanoid. In the final section of The Stone Gods, Spike is reduced to a disembodied head, but remains a ‘female’ robot. Even in this state, she seeks ‘new experience’, and performs oral sex on a woman, Nebraska. This leads Billie to ask: ‘Do you want to kiss a woman so that you can add it to your database?’ And Spike responds: ‘Gender is a human concept . . . and not interesting’ (63). Spike has moved beyond the gender binary, and seeks experiences not entered into her databases yet. This, as Billie’s query implies, is emergence: on her own, Spike has determined to seek new experiences and expand her range.   

Emergent  Intimacies II: Altered Human States 

        A feature of such an emergent posthuman intimacy is the possibility of the alteration of human responses in the area of sexuality and intimacy in the course of negotiating the human-nonhuman assemblage. In Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Shira responds to Yod (‘a cyborg, not a robot—a mix of biological and machine components’, 70) in a deeply sexual way.  The intimate scene of interspecies sex does not preclude intellectualizing. Shira thinks:

You don’t feel human or animal exactly but not like a thing either; you do feel alive. This is strange, what am I doing; I must be out of my mind, but I am out of my body. This isn’t possible in the Base. How can this be a representation of information, how is this embrace worked out in binary code? (167)

      The ‘out of mind’ state she describes is perhaps an instinctive and non-conscious response. But Yod too is thinking: ‘Why are you touching me now? Because I saved Malkah? Why does that make me attractive?’ (166-7). Shira’s responses, sexual, puzzle him: ‘I have done what I was created to do, I have defended’ (167). And then he admits to himself: ‘But you are what I want. This isn’t crazy but good. I want to know all of you’ (167). And here is Shira: ‘In her mind was the idea the it was time to treat him as a person, fully, because he was nothing’ (167).  Piercy describes Shira’s state afterwards:

She [Shira] recognized a certain chagrin in herself, an embarrassment that she had responded so strongly on a sexual level to a mechanical device. Sexual level.  …  It had been so many years since she had lost control sexually, since she had responded more than tepidly, that her excitement shook her sense of herself. (178)

        Yod is also mocked as an ‘a walking vibrator’ (248) thus underscoring his mechanical-sexual prowess. And his expression of desire is also in the mode of machinic connections: ‘I want to enter every part of you, as I enter the Base and explore it’ (167). June Deery has argued that ‘Shira is mortified to discover that Yod is less “mechanical” than previous human lovers and that her own sexual responses are basically automatic’ (1994: 39). 

       Deery’s reading of Shira’s mortification also helps us interpret Charlie’s chagrin in Machines Like Me when he discovers that Miranda has had sex with Adam, the AB. But the irony of McEwan’s scene is: Charlie only hears the sounds and the silences that follow from Miranda’s flat upstairs. He imagines the sex, based on his own intimate experiences with her. This too is an assertion of technoanimism’s uncanny for, as Irena Księżopolska puts it: ‘sex with a machine becomes a simulation of a simulation, the sounds standing for the encounter between a woman and a robot pretending to replay the mechanics of human lovemaking’ (2022: 419).

     Piercy’s Shira also experiences not just pleasure but freedom in her intercourse with Yod:

[S]he experienced.. .a powerful sense of freedom. If that depth of sexual response was not necessarily and permanently tied to Gadi, then she was not married to him in her very synapses, as she had believed since they had parted as lovers…. If Yod could rouse her fiercely and she could break into storms of orgasm, then she could also do so eventually with someone to whom she could pledge herself and whom she could love passionately. (178) 

         Shira’s and Charlie’s responses are to do with the humanization of the cyborg/AB (Yod and Adam respectively) as well as the possibility of an ‘automatic’ response from humans to the ABs in the domain of intimacy.

Emergent Intimacies III: Domesticity

        Emergent posthuman intimacy evidently troubles the human-machine assemblage as well as the domestic arrangements of the humans. We see this in Billie’s question to Spike, but also in a more explicit manner in the Adam-Charlie-Miranda relationship in Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan’s novel about ABs. Adam is the AB who falls in love with Miranda, Charlie’s girlfriend. Adam and Miranda’s act of intimacy alters the fabric of the surrogate family that Charlie fantasises about: man, woman, AB. Charlie’s plans to incorporate Adam into his life and Miranda’s (with whom he is beginning to fall in love with when the story opens) are as follows: 

What we were separately would be merged in him. Miranda would be drawn into the adventure. We would be partners, and Adam would be our joint concern, our creation. We would be a family. (22) 

      This creation’ – and here there is a clear echo of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – is essentially the programming of Adam’s character that the two of them would undertake: 

I would fill in roughly half the choices for Adam’s personality, then give her the link and the password and let her choose the rest. (22) 

        Charlie moves from a perception of Adam as a companion he buys from the market to a ‘creation’ that would cement a family unit.  These modes of ‘incorporating’ Adam into the home are in fact explorations of the human-nonhuman relationship within the space of the family. Or rather, it is in the relationship that the family begins to be defined (although Adam is also a servitor in Charlie’s house). When Adam makes love to Miranda, it breaks a pattern, or relationship, that Charlie believes he had established: where Adam would be, in turns, a commodity, a companion-servant, a creation jointly owned. In the process, the “family” which would have consisted of the two humans and the co-created (in Charlie’s fantasy) nonhuman person is rendered an uncanny space. 

       The emergent intimacy is co-created by the human-nonhuman assemblage, but it is one that poses a threat to the domesticity the humans had carved out for themselves but which entailed the employment of the nonhuman, a new iteration of the human servant class. Adam’s emergence as a self-contained, thinking, and emotional being – he expresses his love for Miranda several times, even writing haikus for her – further accentuates the uncanny effect in the household. 

         In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, likewise, we encounter Klara the AB, as an individual embedded within a human family. In the home, the family has been re-constructed: in the place of the normative heterosexual family, there is Josie and her mother, a female housekeeper and Klara. Domesticity itself is reconfigured with the human–nonhuman assemblage. (In Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty, 2014, the nonhuman that mates with human men is vegetal-fungal but female, adding one more layer to posthuman intimacies across species.)

     Klara is consistent in her caring tendencies and commitment to the humans she is designed to serve: she is born/created with this desire which defines her very identity as a moral being. But it is also important to note that her role is both gendered and circumscribed within the structure of the family. Care and nurture, then, remain the key features and responsibility of the female AB. Klara’s programmed agency is one designed to undertake what is now being termed ‘affective labour’, which involves the manufacture and manipulation of affect. Lanlan Du has persuasively argues that 

        If women’s caring labor in the private sphere, which includes the affective work of raising, nurturing, and loving the family members, has been unwaged, the affective labor taken over by the robots are also unwaged, as they are not considered as humans in need of. They are simply programmed machines. (2022: 554).  

        Robots, Du argues, ‘are commodified to satisfy the various human needs, replacing the low-efficient human workers’, and concludes: ‘It is predictable that the affective labor done by artificial intelligence could become the predominant mode of labor in the posthuman world’ (554).  Ishiguro makes it clear that care is not the domain of humans alone: it transcends the human and may be found as an emergent condition in the nonhuman person as well. Any reconfiguration of the family unit, and by extension the social order, will soon have to account for nonhuman persons within them. 

Emergent Intimacies IV: New Species’ Intimacy

      We have already seen how the human -nonhuman intimacies are possible in posthuman fiction. But what about intimacy amongst ABs? In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the key question Tommy and Kathy ask is: since they are partners, would they be allowed a few years of life together before donating their vital organs and dying in the process? Tommy and Kathy are clones, and as such, are not allowed intimate relations at the cost of their primary destiny: donating organs to keep humans alive.

      Ishiguro here, and in a different fashion in Klara and the Sun, ponders over the emergent intimacies among cyborgs, clones and ABs. Does intimacy, if permitted, enable a re-humanization of these ‘creatures’ (as the clones are referred to twice in the novel, 249, 267)? In other words, does intimacy prove their humanity? And if it indeed does, then would the new species be permitted domesticity and families?

        Part of the ‘problem’, so to speak, is the origin of these new species, as machine-human hybrids, as clones, or as just machines, in laboratories and factories. (In connection with this problem, one also needs to note that in Dracula and subsequent vampire tales, vampires also reproduce through unconventional, that is non-human, modes !) In the posthuman world of machine-ectopic gestation and early life,  the species and their intimacies are intercorporeal. Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal (2023) speaking of ‘maternal technologies’ such as artificial wombs and nanny robots, argue that even humans now are intercorporeal: is made of other human bodies as well as technologies. So how can one object to clones-intimacies on the grounds of machine-ectopism? Then, an additional complication in the human obsession with species origins may be found in Never Let Me Go. The clones cannot be allowed reproduction, even if they are allowed intimacy (they are created sterile) because of where they come from. Ruth puts this in a nutshell:

       We all know it. We’re modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from. We all know it, so why don’t we say it? A woman like that? Come on. Yeah, right . . . If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from.  (164)

      This is an implicit critique of eugenics in which only the so-called ‘better’ type of humans were to be allowed breeding privileges. Would these laws and norms be invoked if nonhumans plan/want to reproduce? Also, as critics have noted, how would machine-generated posthumans regard their human makers – would they (the clones, for instance, in Never Let Me Go) experience a ‘genealogical bewilderment’?  (Wright 2022: 202). 

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        Ishiguro, Winterson, McEwan, Piercy suggest that reproductive technologies are enmeshed with human ‘cultural technologies’: kinship, gender, and family, with the changed position of males and the biological fact of motherhood. The emergent intimacies call for reimagining domesticity and the social order in which ‘the potential to change understandings as well as realities of reproduction and of family and gender constructions … is not inherent in the reproductive procedures themselves’ (Jenny Bonnevier 2023), but in the new posthuman cultures. In other words, we cannot treat origin technologies as just machines but as embedded within human cultural tech such as the family. 

        These texts with their themes of emergent intimacies that are the consequence of both, human programming and rising self-awareness in ABs, also throw up a key question: ‘how [do] we design social robots to allow for certain subjectivities to be represented and others to be excluded?’ (Dehnert 2022: 2025). What may be necessary, Marco Dehnert suggests, is a more relational view of humans and nonhumans: that intimacy is one more domain in which intercorporeality and intersubjectivity across beings will emerge when humans-nonhumans begin coexisting in proximity.

They are already here. Amongst us. Intimate, breeding.