Posthuman Body in Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Öz

This study aims to analyse the posthuman body in Nights at the Circus (1984) by Angela Carter from the perspective of posthuman feminism. Posthuman feminism explores the humanist ideology that hierarchically categorizes and separates human and nonhuman, man and woman, self and other. It offers perspectives on the meaning of being human which is a historical construct and the complexities of gender, species, and identity, blurring the boundaries between the categories of human, species, and gender. Nights at the Circus can be read alongside posthuman feminist philosophy in its attempt to destabilize the limits of humanist rationalism to reckon alternative subject positions. This study explores how Carter deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be human, and femininity and otherness in the novel. The main character, Sophia Fevvers has a body which is in a state between human and nonhuman as she is a woman with the wings of a bird. Her hybrid body is a posthuman body that is constructed with bodily ambiguity. Her embodiment transgresses beyond being human, there is no separation between her body and nature. Fevvers’s posthuman body gives her freedom.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Angela Carter
• Boundary
• Hybrid
• Posthuman Feminism
• POsthuman Body

Angale Carter’ın Sirk Geceleri Romanında Posthüman Beden

Öz

Bu çalışma, Angela Carter'ın Sirk Geceleri (1984) romanındaki posthüman bedeni posthüman feminizm çerçevesinde incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Posthüman feminizm, insanı ve insan olmayanı, kültürü ve doğayı, benliği ve ötekini ve erkeği ve kadını hiyerarşik olarak kategorize eden ve ayıran insan merkezli hümanist düşünce geleneğiyle ilgilenir. İnsan, tür ve toplumsal cinsiyet kategorileri arasındaki çizgiyi bulanıklaştırarak, tarihsel bir yapılandırma olan insan olmanın ne anlama geldiğine ve cinsiyet, tür ve kimliğin karmaşıklığına dair bakış açıları sunar. Sirk Geceleri, alternatif özne konumlarını hesaba katarak hümanist rasyonalizmin sınırlarını istikrarsızlaştırma girişiminde bulunan posthüman feminist felsefeyle birlikte okunabilir. Bu çalışma, Carter’ın romanda insan olmanın ne anlama geldiğini, kadınlığı ve ötekiliği nasıl yapı bozuma uğratıp yeniden inşa ettiğini inceler. Ana karakter Sophia Fevvers, insan ve insan olmayan arasında bir bedene sahiptir çünkü kuşkanatlarına sahip bir kadındır. Onun melez bedeni bedensel belirsizlikle inşa edilmiş bir posthüman bendendir. Bedensel varoluşu insan olmanın ötesine geçe, bedeni kesin sınırlarla doğadan ayrılmamıştır. Fevvers’ın posthüman bedeni onu özgürlüğe kavuşturur.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Angela Carter
• Sınır
• Melez
• Posthüman Beden
• Posthüman Feminizm

Kaynakça

1. Alaimo, S. (2000). Undomesticated ground: recasting nature as feminist space. Cornell University Press.
2. Binding, T. J. (1982). Firebird 1: Writing today. Penguin Books.
3. Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight, feminism, western culture, and the body. University of California Press.
4. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Policy Press.
5. Braidotti, R. (2022). Posthuman feminism. Polity Press.
6. Bristow, J. & Broughton, T. L. (1997). The infernal desires of Angela Carter: fiction, femininity, feminism. Longman Inc.
7. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble feminism and the subversion of ıdentity. Routledge.
8. Carroll, R. (2000). Return of the century: time, modernity, and the end of history in Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus.” The Yearbook of English Studies, 30, 187–201. https://doi.org/10.2307/3509252

9. Carter, A. (1984). Nights at the Circus. Vintage.
10. Clarke, B. & Rossini, M. (2017). The Cambridge companion to literature and the posthuman. Cambridge University Press.
11. Dennis, A. (2008). “The spectacle of her gluttony”: the performance of female appetite and the Bakhtinian grotesque in Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus.” Journal of Modern Literature, 31(4), 116–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167573
12. Finney, B. H. (1998). Tall tales and brief lives: Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, 28(2), 161–185. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225490
13. Foucault, M. (2005). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. Taylor and Francis e-Library.
14. Gamble, S. & Watz, A. (2025). Angela Carter’s futures: representations, adaptations and legacies. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
15. Gilbert, S. M. & Gubar, S. (2020). The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Yale University Press.
16. Gustar, J. (2004). Re-membering Cassandra, or Oedipus gets hysterical: contestatory madness and illuminating magic in Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 23(2), 339–369. https://doi.org/10.2307/20455193
17. Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century. Routledge.
18. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. The University of Chicago Press.
19. Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one. Cornell University Press.
20. Kristeva, J. (2024). Powers of horror: an essay on abjection. Columbia University Press.
21. Kerchy, A. (2008). Body-text in the novels of Angela Carter: writing from a corporeagraphic point of view. The Edwin Mellen Press.
22. Munford, R. (2006). Re-visiting Angela Carter: texts, contexts, intertexts. Palgrave Macmillan. Punday, D. (2002). Narrative performance in the contemporary monster story. The Modern Language Review, 97(4), 803–820. https://doi.org/10.2307/3738613
23. Russo, M. (1994). The female grotesque: risk, excess and modernity. Routledge.
24. Sage, L. (1992). Women in the house of fiction: post-war women novelists. Bloomsbury Publishing. Stoddart, H. (2007). Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. Routledge.
25. Weiss, G. and Cohen, J. J.(2003). Thinking the limits of the body. State University of New York Press.
26. Wolfe, C. (2010). What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press.