Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
SÖYLEM, cilt.7, sa.3, ss.742-756, 2022 (Hakemli Dergi)
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.