Becoming replicant: mutant identities in science fiction

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Published 25-03-2022
Pablo Francescutti

Abstract

Science fiction, initially emerged with the purpose of imagining the possible futures of a changing society, soon discovered the complex issue of identity. This article shows how, following the trail of Victorian horror literature, the genre born of the Industrial Revolution and of the social acceleration updated the themes of the Double, the split personality and other motives which exposed the folds and cracks of the bourgeois Self within a context of an increasingly technification of everyday life. Through figures of Otherness like extraterrestrials, robots, mutants and clones, the science-fiction staged nightmares of depersonalization, accompanied the decentering of the cartesian subject, and illuminated the construction and deconstruction of social actants’ representations. Valuable documents of the changes affecting contemporary subjectivities, these narratives help us to rethink the limits of personal, ethnic, gender and human identities.

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Keywords

science fiction, identity, robots, clones, mutants

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Section
Inherited Identity