Uzaylının Cinsiyeti: Lisa Tuttle'ın "Wives" Adlı Öyküsünde Bedenlenmiş Benliğin İnsanötesi Yorumu

Year 2022, , 742 - 756, 30.12.2022

Rıza Çimen

https://doi.org/10.29110/soylemdergi.1169340

Abstract

Egemen söylem, günlük deneyimleri ve rutinleri düzenlemeyi amaçlayan yaygın girişimlerle her epistemik yapıya hâkim olmaya çalışır. Kültürden dile, cinsiyetten siyasal organizasyonlara kadar değişiklik gösteren disiplin uygulamaları hiyerarşik bir yapıda çok yönlü iktidar ilişkileri teşkil eder ve öznelerin yaşamaları için belli koşulları üretir. Beden alanındaki eleştirel çalışmaların da gösterdiği gibi beden hâkim söylemin temel hedeflerinden biridir; zira ideolojik bir yazım sahası olması itibariyle, düzene sokulmuş bir bedensellik deneyimi hâkim paradigmanın devamlılığını sağlar. Lisa Tuttle’ın “Wives” (“Zevceler”) adlı kısa hikâyesi bedenleşme etiğini merkeze alarak insanbiçimci sınırların dünya dışı varlıkların cinsiyetsiz bedenlerine nasıl işlendiğine odaklanır. Bilim-kurgu türünün özelliklerini taşıyan bu feminist anlatıda, insan-merkezli söylemin heteronormatif yapısı politik gündemini gerçekleştirebileceği yeni bir gezegen keşfeder. Hikâye, ideoloji ve bedenlenmiş öznellik arasındaki tehlikeli ilişki çerçevesinde insan-merkezli rejimin işleyişini sorgular. İktidar ilişkilerinde direniş içkin olduğu için, sömürgeleştirilen gezegenin yerli halkı bir biçimde hayatta kalmayı başarır; ancak bu hayatta kalma hali, Giorgio Agamben’in “çıplak yaşam” – ihtimallerden ve nitelikten arındırılmış bir yaşama biçimi - olarak adlandırdığı konuma indirgenmek pahasına mümkün olur. Bu çalışma Lisa Tuttle’ın “Zevceler” adlı hikâyesindeki ideolojik bedenlenme dinamiklerine insanötesi bir yorum getirir ve ideolojiyle beden arasındaki tehlikeli devamlılığı sorgulamayı hedefler.

Keywords

Lisa Tuttle, Zevceler, İnsanbiçimci bedenleşme, çıplak yaşam, insanötesi etik

Sexing the Alien: A Posthuman Hermeneutics of the Embodied Self in Lisa Tuttle’s “Wives"

Abstract

Dominant discourses seek to take hold of every epistemic stratum through ubiquitous attempts to regulate quotidian experiences and routines. Ranging from language to culture, from gender to political organizations, disciplinary practices constitute a complex web of relations in hierarchical structures and produce specific identities and situations for subjects to inhabit. As critical scholarship in body studies has shown, body is among the central focuses of dominant discourses in that a regulated experience of corporeality secures, as a site of ideological inscription, the continuity of governing paradigms. Lisa Tuttle’s “Wives” calls for a reformulation of the ethics of embodiment and explores how anthropomorphic demarcations are imprinted upon the genderless bodies of extra-terrestrial beings. In this feminist narrative featuring the generic qualities of science fiction, the heteronormative register of the anthropocentric thought finds a new space (a different planet) to actualize its political agenda. The story interrogates the functioning of the humanist set of beliefs against the background of the precarious relation of ideology to embodied subjectivity. As resistance is an immanent constituent of power relations, the nonhuman inhabitants of the colonized planet somehow manage to survive upon being captured by men; nevertheless, this happens at the expense of being reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” a way of living that is stripped of its potentials and qualities. This study offers a posthuman hermeneutics of the ideological embodiment in Lisa Tuttle’s story and seeks to question the precarious continuity between ideology and the body.

Keywords

Lisa Tuttle, Wives, anthropomorphic embodiment, bare life, posthuman ethics

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