Two Hundred Years of Technodystopia: AI and the Politics of Embodiment in Winterson’s Frankissstein

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.