Embodying the Posthuman Subject: Digital Humanities and Permeable Material Practice

Abstract

Since the introduction of digital technologies within traditional humanities education, a reconfiguration of both academic disciplines (that is the so-called posthumanities) and the subjectivities that such institutional bodies include as contexts for analysis (that is the so-called posthuman subject) are clearly in process. Such radical transformations provide a generative basis for a feminist genealogical analysis and critique. Under the pressures of this revisionary posthumanities imperative, new epistemological perspectives are emerging to reshape core values and re-inscribe the boundaries of the human. The disruptive knowledge communities of the new (digital) academy and their attendant revolutionary critical practices actively engage and promote convergent, hybrid and ontologically complex techno-human subjects, and together they re-think the role of the human in Humanities. I offer a context for understanding how feminist interventions in the field are connected to understanding and revealing the new material practices that traverse the boundaries between humans, technical agents, and others.