This chapter focuses on the contemporary Japanese fiction author Natsuko Mori’s “Pet Boy” and “Unmoral Contraption,” short stories in one of the author’s collections of erotic speculative fiction. It problematizes gender constructs and economics in relation to needs mapped to a distinction of new-type people (vampires) and old-type people (ordinary humans). “Pet Boy” explores sustenance within emergent life systems that place personal preferences at odds with heteronormative limitations on these systems. Romantic love plays the role of reinforcing the irony of being forced into an economic dependency while being deprived of the luxury of loving a partner within this world. The young male human is arguably the primary point-of-view character, suffering and forced to adapt to conditions. In this science fiction short story featuring situationally obligatory bisexuality, Mori satirizes hard rules wired into vampiric futuristic “new humans” that prey on the “old humans.” Mori also turns the phallic tentacles of octo-porn-like insertion into a vaginal extraction technology; as a new human, a female vampire must instrumentalize the “young fruit,” employing a device with “tentacles lavishly writhing like sea anemone and winding around,” language invoking Donna Haraway’s sense of the Chthulucene. However, the story world shows not the cooperation of an idyllic merging of human and nonhuman forces, but rather a splintering of humans into classes, thus combining Chthulucene-posthuman elements with an implied postapocalyptic or other world-transformative condition. This chapter links the kin and swarm to implicated larger societal relations as well as posthuman speculative biotechnologies, including the vampiric and various science-fictional nova for cleaning the house and extracting sexual energy. The title story, “Unmoral Contraption,” is shown to explore the role of nonhuman sexual partners in coming-of-age contexts.

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

Posthuman Sexualities in Natsuko Mori’s “Pet Boy” and “Unmoral Contraption”

  • Dean Anthony Brink

摘要

This chapter focuses on the contemporary Japanese fiction author Natsuko Mori’s “Pet Boy” and “Unmoral Contraption,” short stories in one of the author’s collections of erotic speculative fiction. It problematizes gender constructs and economics in relation to needs mapped to a distinction of new-type people (vampires) and old-type people (ordinary humans). “Pet Boy” explores sustenance within emergent life systems that place personal preferences at odds with heteronormative limitations on these systems. Romantic love plays the role of reinforcing the irony of being forced into an economic dependency while being deprived of the luxury of loving a partner within this world. The young male human is arguably the primary point-of-view character, suffering and forced to adapt to conditions. In this science fiction short story featuring situationally obligatory bisexuality, Mori satirizes hard rules wired into vampiric futuristic “new humans” that prey on the “old humans.” Mori also turns the phallic tentacles of octo-porn-like insertion into a vaginal extraction technology; as a new human, a female vampire must instrumentalize the “young fruit,” employing a device with “tentacles lavishly writhing like sea anemone and winding around,” language invoking Donna Haraway’s sense of the Chthulucene. However, the story world shows not the cooperation of an idyllic merging of human and nonhuman forces, but rather a splintering of humans into classes, thus combining Chthulucene-posthuman elements with an implied postapocalyptic or other world-transformative condition. This chapter links the kin and swarm to implicated larger societal relations as well as posthuman speculative biotechnologies, including the vampiric and various science-fictional nova for cleaning the house and extracting sexual energy. The title story, “Unmoral Contraption,” is shown to explore the role of nonhuman sexual partners in coming-of-age contexts.