Mason, Julia

The commodification of the female body is a vital concern that can be seen throughout history from the rhetoric consumed by societies. This thesis will give a rhetorical analysis of the websites of the milk banks of Prolacta Bioscience, Medolac, and The Human Milk Banking Association of North America. This will demonstrate how commodification, erasure, and disembodiment occurs to the mothers who donate their milk. I will examine how each organization offers up mothers, their milk, and infants as complete separate entities. My argument will propose a new metaphor I will define as the unfiltered raw public. I will demonstrate how this metaphor might better serve to restructure rhetoric to tether the mothers back to their bodies more sustainably for a cyborg future. The unfiltered raw public seeks to shift future discourse to reflect one more inclusive to difference rather than a future that commodifies the female body.

I argue that Margaret Atwood’s work in MaddAddam is about survival; it is about
moving beyond preconceived, thoughtless ideology of any form with creative kinship.
Cooperation and engagement cannot be planned in advance, and must take the form of
something more than pre-established ideology. I will discuss MaddAddam in light of
Donna Haraway’s recent work in which she argues that multispecies acknowledgement
and collaboration are essential if humans are to survive and thrive in the coming
centuries. By bringing the two texts into dialogue, one sees that Atwood’s novel
constitutes the kind of story deemed necessary by Haraway for making kin in the
Chthulucene. Various scenes depicting cooperation and interdependence among humans
and other animals offer chthonic models of kinship; these relationships, as opposed to
ideological and anthropocentric isolation, will serve as the means of surviving and
thriving within an ongoing apocalypse.

A hallmark of the cyberpunk era, virtual reality is now a real and readily available
medium for technological entertainment and lifestyle. Cyberpunk texts and contemporary
SF that incorporates virtual reality provide a framework for considering the implications
of this newly popularized technology. By allowing the user to explore new forms of
identity in an alternate reality, virtual reality poses many interesting opportunities for
undermining current social constructs related to gender, race, and identity. This thesis
investigates real and fictional examples of virtual reality and the significance of
authorship and narrative construction, race and social hierarchies, death and selfpermanence,
and gender performance across the boundary between virtual and material
space.

The topics of identity and subjectivity are well-trodden paths in posthuman
thought, and the trend has been to reduce the self to its material, social, and technoscientific components. Yet the posthuman model of subjectivity—influenced by the tenets of postmodernism—tends to be disabling because it does not focus on the subject’s agency or the possibility of liberation from social tyranny. In this thesis, I use a sampling of what I call “religious wisdom literature”—specifically, the wisdom books of the Old Testament and contemporary Buddhist writings—to challenge the assumption that the self is indistinguishable from the ideologies that produce it. I provide models from religious texts that instead, emphasize critical agency, flexibility, and resistive power. I also suggest that focusing on these qualities may ultimately be useful in the composition classroom, where we can use “self-centered” expressivist techniques (reflective assignments, emotional awareness) to meet the social-epistemic goal of ideological critique. Ultimately, posthumanism, with its emphasis on the construction of subjectivity, is better suited to question strict materialism and inquire into the inspiring possibilities of ancient wisdom.