The metamorphic body in science fiction: From prosthetic correction to utopian enhancement

Abstract

The basic grounding of a productive approach to disability in science fiction stems from two interrelated assumptions: (1) that science fiction (SF) narratives dealing with disabled bodies usually are narratives of technological embodiment that can range from simple mechanical prosthesis to (post)human-machine hybridization and (2) that in the ontological (relating to the modes of being) and the epistemological (relating to the modes of knowledge and its appropriation by beings) planes, these narratives of technological embodiment have incomparably more affinities with a social model of disability (which rests in the distinction between disability and impairment) than with a biomedical model.