Two centuries after Mary Shelley imagined creation without the female body, Jeanette Winterson's Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) responds with a contemporary interrogation of the problematic, gendered trajectories of scientific innovation. Winterson critiques techno-utopian posthumanism by juxtaposing Shelley's embodied authorship with a dystopian vision of AI-driven futures. Ron Lord's sexbot industry and Victor Stein's mind-uploading both seek to dominate or eliminate the reproductive body, while Ry Shelley, a trans figure, reclaims embodiment as knowledge by embracing their technologically-modified body. Through the interwoven writings of female figures across time, reproductive grief and embodied labor become essential data through which the distributed feminist epistemology manifests in Frankissstein.
Seohyon Jung (Thu,) studied this question.