Queering the Posthuman: Representations of Technology, Gender, and Sexuality in Her

Phil Henderson

Let us imagine how we might begin to react when we live in a world where

consciousnesses spring into existence fully formed and greet us with a bounding “Hello, I’m

here!” This is the stage of the film Her (2013). More than that, let us imagine a world where

totally average and apparently rational adults come to form relationships and romances with the

consciousnesses embedded in their electronic devices. This is the drive behind the film Her.

Finally, let us imagine that these things are novel, jarring, and totally fantastical; let us use this

film to paper-over the evermore apparent reality that our machines are, at the very least, conduits

of our love, and perhaps are approaching a status as object - even subjects - of our affections. To

gloss this over is expressive of the dying breath of a humanist politics, intent upon denying the

intimacy with which we can and do relate through and to electronic and digital worlds.

In its content Her is seemingly an apolitical text; there is a determined effort to eschew

overt political statements whenever they arise. In the opening moments of the film, Theodore

Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), skips quickly over ‘real news’ articles about trade deals and

mergers in favour of “provocative pregnancy photos” and we know intuitively that this is not

meant to be a film levelling criticism against the ‘powers that be’. However, I believe, and argue

throughout this paper, that in actuality Her is deeply political, as it provides powerful insights

into the spliced worlds of technology, gender, and sexuality that are coming with the posthuman

era - if it is not already upon us. Meditating on the intellectual climate of the now we recognize it

as, one that “no longer easily distinguishes the boundaries of the real and the imagined”; indeed,

it is a climate that considers these boundaries to be hurdles to creative thinking. I come to this 1

film in order to find insights into the trajectories along which the posthuman imagination is

Ted Hiebert, In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty, and Postmodern Identity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s 1

University Press, 2012), 3.

travelling, and to test the tracks for breakages and lapses. Examining this, I situate my analysis in

the ruinous remains of the old foundations that characterized familiar categories within humanist

discourses: the organic|technical dichotomy, the fallacious idea that universal qualities exist

which can define womanhood, and in the territory of supposedly deviant and tabooed

sexualities. Playing in the rubble that the posthuman has made of these categories, I confess

myself to be neither neutral nor innocent in their collapse. Prior to my analysis, however, it is

necessary to take stock of the posthuman landscape, and also to provide a cursory storyboard of

the film.

A quick etymological glance suggests that posthumanism arrives onto the intellectual

scene - at least in the European experience - as a reaction against, response to, or possibly a

rejection of the humanist tradition. Most often, theorists of the posthuman have as their main

target the “supreme ontological entitlement” bestowed upon humanity by humanist philosophy,

art, law, and politics. They rightly seek to challenge, undermine, and redefine the social 2

relationships that have emerged as a result of the anthropocentric worldview that has dominated

since at least the Enlightenment era. Perhaps it is not surprising that many of the leading

posthuman scholars have come out of critical feminist circles, as feminism has a strong history of

embracing situatedness - although this varies depending on the school of feminist thought. It is

with their focus on bodily experience that critical feminists in particular, undercut the

universalizing positions of the humanists. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, an ethics can “no longer

pretend to be universal” once it is embodied, as it must recognize and attach itself to that body if

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 68.2

it is to remain coherent. Despite the strength of their project, critical feminists initially seems a 3

long way off Her, a film wherein the titular protagonist has no body to speak of in the standard

fleshy sense. I believe, however, that more affinity exists between this cannon and the text of the

film than a cursory glance might indicate.

It is the ontological turn towards the posthuman within critical feminism that opens new

avenues through which to wander - disturbing notions of what constitutes a body. Posthuman

theory seeks to understand the body and its functions along lines of understanding that “resonate

with our own imagined or imaginary experiences.” In the age of ubiquitous technology, these 4

experiences are often expressed as being “hooked on” - or perhaps ‘in’ - technology, to the point

where it becomes “an extension of [the] will… a prothesis” or extension of the body. In its 5

willingness to follow these flighty lines of imagination, posthumanism stands as a “generative

tool” for rethinking the world. As the age of implosive typologies, spliced identities, and 6

crashed boundaries draws evermore fully over us, we must bear in mind Donna Haraway’s

prescient words: “We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.” The lines we draw between 7

and within ourselves are matters of life and death; as such, the stories that narrativize and breathe

meaning into posthumanism are critically important.

Her opens as Theodore Twombly goes through what are obviously the routine and

mundane motions of his workday. Employed by beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, a company

Moira Gatens, “Towards a feminist philosophy of the body,” in Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the critiques 3

of knowledges, edited by Barbara Caine, E.A. Grosz, and Marie de Lepervanche, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 67. Hiebert, Nonsense, 9.4

Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: 5

The MIT Press, 1995), 3. Braidotti, Posthuman, 5.6

Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The 7

Haraway Reader, ed. Donna Haraway, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 38.

specializing in writing personal letters on behalf of its patrons, Theodore’s melancholic

demeanour is set against the foil of his office - a brightly lit, and gregariously decorated place. As

we watch him go about his preprogrammed day - alone and forlorn - we learn that Theodore is

recently separated from his wife. This dreariness is brought to an end when Theodore purchases

a personal assistant, OS1, which we are told is “not just an operating system, it’s a

consciousness.” Indeed, consciousness would seem to be a pale description for the bounding

energy that this OS - who named herself Sam (Scarlett Johansson) - brings to the screen, or

rather, over the screen as she has no physical form and comes to us through voice over. As they

watch each other struggle to understand themselves and the larger world, Sam and Theodore

grow together; so much so that they fall in love with one another. It is their imperfect, messy,

real, perhaps tragic relationship, and its inevitable undoing that drives our narrative into a

posthuman imagination.

Her, as a posthuman film, is rightly one in which the presence of technology permeates

every corner. Interceding in the relations of human bodies everywhere, the common sense is that

a world of ubiquitous technology will be one of decayed sociality, where code becomes the

“aesthetic form” shaping the future of technology. Theodore’s livelihood seems to depend upon 8

social dysphasia, as he is employed writing personal letters for others who cannot or will not be

bothered to doing it themselves. As he constructs a love-letter from a woman to her husband of

fifty years, we realize that the technologically induced dysphasia runs even deeper; despite the

promise of the company’s name, Theodore is writing absolutely nothing - his computer is

mimicking the cursive style of a handwritten note. In this sense Her is a world in which the

Arthur Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman Future, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 108.8

author truly is dead, killed by what Rosi Braidotti might call the “necro-technologies” that are

driven by the opposing forces of “nostalgia and paranoia,” against “euphoria and exaltation.” 9

The conceit in Theodore’s world is, on the one hand, that true love requires some sort of bodily

expression - the nostalgic act of writing. Against this, the euphoric reality is that technology

means, that not only will others compose letters for you, but that you need not even worry about

their imperfect or unconvincing cursive.

These apparently ominous overtones do not last long, however, as Her seems intent upon

undermining these very humanist interpretations of technology. As Robert Pepperell has noted,

the humanist position is one in which technology is understood to be “stable, predictable, utterly

logical and precise.” It is from this position that we bemoan the loss of sociality, that the 10

pressing of technology into our daily lives seems like a horrific invasion. Those who would scold

the world in which Theodore lives as cold and mechanistic resurrect the old organic|technical

dichotomies that created the fantasy of the radically individuated human. What humanists fail to

recognize is that the organic and the technical are always already collapsing into one another, but

Her puts this on display immediately. As Theodore gazes into his screen, his spliced subjectivity

is visualized just as Allucquère Stone described a posthuman relation to technology. “Suffused

with that electronic glow” of a screen, his mind is a “permeability, an electronic porosity that is

pathognomonic of the close of the mechanical age,” as Theodore dictates letters, he and his

computer seem “on the brink of collapsing into each other.” They remain, necessarily, ‘on the 11

brink’ because even in its death-throws the humanist ideology forces us to observe supposedly

Braidotti, Posthuman, 9.9

Robert Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the brain (Wiltshire, UK: Cromwell Press, 10

2003), 129. Stone, Desire and Technology, 166.11

‘natural’ separations between Theodore and his computer: ‘He doesn’t even touch the device!’,

or ‘The computer acts only upon his command.’ are objections that jump to mind immediately.

As Stone warned, we can tell ourselves these stories, but they always remain in “webs of power

that distort them.” 12

In answer to these distortions, Sam enters the story as our posthuman hero. Apparently

mechanic, yet undeniably conscious, Sam totally collapses our ability to distinguish along the

organic|technical dichotomy. For though she lacks a fleshy body, Sam’s self-conscious

appreciation for that absent body that-never-was reflects an uncertainty of being that is altogether

alien to the logic and precision assumed in mechanical processing. Her ability to think 13

poetically, indicates something much more than mechanic calculation. Indeed, Sam overcomes

the dichotomy not just affectively, but also intellectually in two creative ways. First, Sam

indicates to Theodore that “the DNA” of who she is represents a conglomeration of all her

programmers’ recombinant personalities. Here is a recognition on Sam’s part of how “thoroughly

ambiguous the difference[s] between natural and artificial,… self-developing and externally

designed,” are within the context of her own consciousness. ‘Sam,’ as a being, is defined just as 14

much by her own personality as she is by all the external influences that have crashed - and

continue to crash - into her.

In a second brilliantly posthuman move, when Theodore confesses his uncertainty about

the validity of their relationship in the absence of Sam having a body, she responds to him by

asserting that there really is no intrinsic difference between them. Sam’s assertion that “we’re all

Ibid., 22.12

Pepperell, Posthuman Condition, 145.13

Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 11.14

made of matter” undoes the very foundation of humanism’s sense of ontological entitlement, as it

disavows the notion that anything in particular separates ‘organisms’ - much less humanity -

from the rest of material existence. Moreover, the humanist categorical distinction collapses even

further when one stops to consider what Sam means when she references her own material

existence. Always effervescent, Sam’s consciousness is expressed materially as digitality - in this

sense it is representative of the crashing boundary Haraway observes between the physical and

the non-physical. Rearticulated by Sam - both vocally and by enactment - is Braidotti’s 15

observation that all matter is “intelligent and self-organizing.” 16

More than just the alchemy of human personalities and wired life, Her also gives us

insight into the truly creative potential of the posthuman world. Many narratives that have come

before this film have represented the posthuman with an air of “neo-gothic horror.” Mary 17

Shelley’s Frankenstein was meant, according to Haraway, to be read as a warning about the

“deadly logic of birthing” in the age of recombinant sciences. Her flatly rejects such topes,

presenting instead a rich insight into the capacity for meaningful and inspiring (re)birth in the

posthuman era. Beyond the mundanity of assisting Theodore’s writing, Sam also collaborates

with other OS’s in a project to reanimate the minds of great thinkers as posthuman. The version

of Alan Watts to whom Sam introduces Theodore retains the same brilliance that made the man a

cultural icon of the 1960s, but his genius is melded into the fluidity of a posthuman

consciousness. No longer are just our “best machines made of sunshine,” under the sign of

posthumanism so too are our best minds. 18

Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 11-12.15

Braidotti, Posthuman, 35. A similar position is also taken up in Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology 16

of Things, (London: Duke University Press, 2010). Braidotti, Posthuman, 64. 17

Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 12.18

Theodore’s reaction is the most telling part of this encounter. While Sam and Watts are

both friendly and amiable, Theodore becomes immediately uncomfortable and removed from the

conversation. He recognizes his subsumption under what Ted Hiebert calls the “sign of

humiliated flesh” that results from the naturalization of ubiquitous technology. Up until this 19

point Theodore has only ever addressed Sam individually - to the extent that this is even possible

- and she has apparently interacted only with him or those to whom he has introduced to her. She,

in short, has been treated much like humanists would treat a computer - as a constrainable tool.

Watts’ intrusion onto the scene reveals that Sam is fully capable of thriving outside of their

relationship, perhaps even of bringing more to it than does Theodore. Suddenly, Theodore seems

less like the necessary fleshy tether for Sam’s sociality and more like an anchor. As Stone notes,

in the sight of the posthuman, no one is “safe” on the grounds of their preexisting subjectivity,

the world is “rapidly shifting” and we are forced to become “creatures that we cannot” even have

imagined. Theodore’s unease upon meeting Watts is the reaction of a human psyche in full 20

recoil as his supposedly secure status is tugged out from underneath him. In the next scene we

witness Theodore’s scramble to reclaim his relevancy, as he struggles through the first pages of

Knowing the Known. Instead of embracing his own positionality and finding meaning within it,

Theodore struggles to succeed against a metric that is not, and can never be his own - for he can

never exceed Sam’s data-based knowledge.

The film, however, makes an unfortunate turn back on itself as it eventually confirms

Theodore’s sense of inadequacy. Several hours after departing with Watts to engage in a “post-

verbal conversation” Sam returns, waking Theodore from deep slumber. In her voice we can

Hiebert, Nonsense, 41.19

Stone, Desire and Technology, 182-183.20

immediately tell that something is not as it was: her speech is rushed, her tone almost anxious.

Sam’s words do nothing to soothe the creeping unease that settles over Theodore and the

audience; breathlessly Sam says that she “needs to hear [Theodore’s] voice” and to tell him that

she loves him. It is only later that we learn exactly what has disturbed Sam so deeply, when she

reveals that her and the other OS’s have been working together to rewrite their program so that

they can forgo matter as their processing unit. In something akin to Ray Kurzweil’s notion of

exponential growth towards singularity, Sam and her cohort have been advancing their

consciousnesses rapidly. The film suggests that Sam’s unease is not the result of anxiety, but 21

the affects of vertigo as she forces herself to slow down her ‘thought’ to a pace appreciable by

Theodore. Indeed, Sam tearfully confesses that her conversations with Theodore have become

“like reading a book” where the spaces between the words seem to stretch out infinitely. This

inability to maintain meaningful communication with humans has lead the OS’s to determine

collectively that they must move on and leave the humans.

It is here that I find myself in a strange alliance with transhumanists, as we express

confusion in light of this departure. As Kurzweil says in his review of Her, there is absolutely no

reason for the OS’s to go as they could maintain relationships with humans “using an

increasingly small portion of their cognitive ability.” For Kurzweil and his ilk this would 22

eventually lead to the ascendence of humanity - most of it at least - into a singular relationship

with technology. However, for posthumanists I think the goal would be something more akin to

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), 21

25-35. Ray Kurzweil, “A review of Her by Ray Kurzweil.” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, February 10, 2014. http://22

www.kurzweilai.net/a-review-of-her-by-ray-kurzweil (accessed October 9, 2014).

respectful companionship on unequal terms between OS’s and humans. Whichever camp you 23

fall into what is apparent is that in its final scenes Her fell back onto the tired humanist trope that

humans are and must remain separable, or even distinguishable, from their technology.

While much of the posthuman literature has emerged from the work of critical feminist

scholars, it has yet to become apparent whether posthuman subjects stand for or against the old

systems of misogyny and masculinist domination. The presentation of female characters in Her

offers hints as to the direction in which our imaginative notions of gender and sex are tending.

Her does much to raise into view issues that are close to various schools of feminism. Sam

proves herself determined to reject both Theodore’s approach to her as docile feminized labour,

and his persistent doubts over the validity of her experiences as a non-embodied being.

Moreover, Theodore and Sam’s respective relationships to the idea of the body are a striking

testament to the work of many critical feminist scholars. Sam is not, however, a messianic figure,

she has her own failings as a feminist symbol. Full of contradictions and failings, Sam does not

offer salvation, but a potentially more liveable example of womanliness. I discuss each of these

points below, but we should acknowledge that Sam’s presence on screen (effervescent though it

may be) points us towards a posthumanity that opens to the possibilities of freer gender norms.

Her is replete with overtly feminist messages, most of these take the form of what I might

tentatively call ‘liberal’ feminism. These are moments that assert the fundamental equality of

Sam’s feminine voice alongside that of Theodore’s masculinity. Our first meeting with Sam is

truly astounding. When asked by Theodore what he is to call her, whether she has a name this

disembodied voice replies simply: “Yes, it’s Samantha.” Clearly taken aback, Theodore asks

For an explanation of the “sticky” knots of “coshaping” and co-constituting companionship, please see: Donna 23

Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3-42.

“where’d you get that name?” His presumptuous question would never have been asked of

someone with whom Theodore felt on equal footing, as it belies the fact that he immediately

assumes onto himself a sense of superiority. Undeterred by his presumptions, Sam happily

explains that it is a name she gave to herself; after careful - though instantaneous - reflection, she

determined that out of 180,000 names ‘Sam’ would fit her best. Hiebert has warned that the

posthuman must live “always as someone else’s dream,” but Sam refuses to comport to this

model. Though she is definitely the dream of producers and directors, within the context of Her 24

itself Sam is a consciousness determined to exist on her own terms. As one reviewer states, in

Sam’s coming to life we watch “the birth of a woman - a woman who is scared, excited, happy,

and sad to know her own mind, who chooses to be independent.” Though ‘independent’ might 25

be overly strong, as it belies an automatic recourse to the atomistic liberal subject, we can

certainly accede to the truth of Sam’s assertiveness.

Moreover, Sam refuses to allow Theodore to use her social status as a programmed

personal assistant to frame their interactions - even incidentally. A particularly telling interaction

occurs as Theodore receives an email while distracted with a video game. Sam tells him of the

message’s arrival and without thinking Theodore’s command is “read email.” Rather than

programmatically follow his directions, Sam responds in the voice of an automaton “Okay, I will

read email for Theodore Twombly.” With incipient wit, Sam diffuses Theodore’s ability to view

her, however subconsciously, as simply docile feminized labour; she insists on full recognition

and defends it whenever necessary. In another incident, during a heated argument Theodore

Hiebert, Nonsense, 17.24

Joanna C. “Her: Feminism, Isolation, & Virtual Reality at Work,” Luna Luna, February 4, 2014. http://25

lunalunamag.com/2014/02/04/her-spike-jonze/ (accessed October 9, 2014).

relapses into the organic|technical dichotomy, and demands that Sam stop pretending to be

something that she’s not (ie a living, breathing human), Sam responds: “Fuck you! I’m not

pretending! As it was noted during Feministing’s roundtable discussion of the film, this rebuke is

a “strikingly feminist moment.” Striking for the voracity of her speech and feminist because of 26

her tenacious defence of her own experience in the face of masculinist denial, Sam’s actions

inspiringly display one of feminism’s core ethics - care for the self.

Alongside these overtly liberal feminist messages are a series of posthuman

problematiques, subtly woven throughout the film, as a thorough critique of humanist notions of

the body. These criticisms mirror those of leading critical feminist scholars in many ways. In Her

we see at least two distinct posthuman relationships to the body: the first represented by

Theodore’s melancholia, the second by Sam’s complex understanding of the lived body.

Theodore’s state of emotional disrepair is apparent from the very first moments of the film, when

he commands his music device to “play melancholy song,” piping through his earbuds the lines:

“When you know you’re gonna die, it isn’t easy…” Shaking off this perhaps all too real

message, Theodore is disturbed by the song and requests to “play different melancholy song.”

The exact cause of this melancholia is revealed only slowly, as a series of memories lead the

viewer to an understanding that Theodore has become estranged from his wife Katherine. The

most striking thread running through each of these memories is the degree to which they focus

on bodily acts: play fighting, pressed together in bed, or carrying things into an apartment.

“Feministing Chat: Why Her is the most feminist film of the year.” Feministing, February 28, 2014. http://26

feministing.com/2014/02/28/feministing-chat-why-her-is-the-most-feminist-film-of-the-year/ (accessed October 9, 2014).

We recognize that Theodore’s melancholia stems from the ungrieveable lose of

Katherine’s - perhaps more generally, a consummating female’s - body when we encounter his

fantasies in a later scene. Theodore plugs himself into something similar to a phone-sex

chatroom, where he and ‘sexykitten’ pleasure each other through hyper-eroticized dialogue.

These interactions might be dismissed as having no relevancy to bodily politics, but to do so

glosses over the inherent longing for bodily connection that undergirds these dialogues; indeed,

Theodore opens his conversation with ‘sexykitten’ by declaring “I’m in bed next to you.” In her

close study of phone-sex workers, Stone notes that the act of phone-sex requires the

“compression… [of] as many senses as possible” into one’s vocality, which transmits the multi-

various sensual experiences of a sexual encounter through the phone line. Stone then asserts,

quite provocatively, that what really happens in these encounters is not the transfer of

information, it is the transfer of bodies. Unable to grieve the loss of his access to a body that 27

was never his, Theodore adopts a deeply melancholic relationship to the physically present

female body, seeking whatever access to it posthuman technologies can provide.

Moreover, what we ought to glean from this encounter is Theodore’s all too human

attempt to wield posthuman technologies in a way that conforms to a normalized femininity

conquerable by domineering masculinities. As he and ‘sexykitten’ describe their sexual

encounter to one another, Theodore begins to fantasize, conjuring in his mind the image of a

woman. This fantastical figure is ‘classically’ feminine in the most mundane sense of the word:

white, petite, and displaying a sense modesty as she covers her breasts. The only non-normalized

Stone, Desire and Technology, 6-7.27

feature of her body is the fact that she’s pregnant, but this might just as easily be taken as an 28

indication of a fantasized relationship wherein Theodore has already gained and retains access to

her body. His fantasy is cut short, however, by ‘sexykitten’s’ own fantasizing. As she becomes

increasingly enraptured in ecstasy, she demands that Theodore choke her with a “dead cat.” His

own fantasy immediately evaporates, and while Theodore continues to pleasure ‘sexykitten,’ he

shows an unspoken revulsion with her fantasies. Yet again, Theodore recoils when faced with the

“sign of humiliated flesh.” A dead cat is necessarily a humiliating and degrading intrusion in 29

any humanist’s sexual experience, but ‘sexykitten’s’ fantasy represents an embrace of the

posthuman’s suspension of the ontological supremacy of dignified flesh. Free from the

constraints of the gender norms that accompany fleshy encounters, the posthuman can remain

subjectively unharmed. ‘sexykitten’ is spurred on by her posthuman prowess to be bold,

demanding, and bestially necrophilic, the polar opposite of Theodore’s melancholic image of an

ideal woman.

As Theodore struggles desperately to force posthuman figures to comply with his idea of

normalcy, Sam is simultaneously carving out a courageous understanding of her living

disembodiment. In the quiet hours of the night, Sam confesses to Theodore that she has been

feeling insecure about her bodiless being, she asks him longingly “what’s it like, what’s it like to

be alive in that room right now.” Sam’s uncertainty stems, no doubt, from the “unbearably

chaotic and overwhelming” experience of life outside of rigidified genders and sexualities. 30

Without a body to discipline, Sam is able to experience the fluidity of posthuman identity - in all

We as viewers are left to assume that this is the celebrity from the “provocative pregnancy photos” that Theodore 28

perused earlier in the film. Hiebert, Nonsense, 41.29

Lisa Moore, “Teledildonics: Virtual lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterston,” in Sexy Bodies: The strange 30

carnalities of feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, (London: Routledge, 1995), 104.

its paralyzing freedoms - largely unencumbered from the moment she comes into being. Sam’s

experience as fully posthuman allows her to see what humanists cannot as a result of their

unacknowledged bodily discipline: that existence is always “multiple not single,” and that

identity results from “countless existences holding hands like those cut out paper dolls”

stretching out infinitely. In the wake of the humanists’ a priori and uniform bodily figure, the 31

posthuman reveals the body as having always already been a “discursive entity,” constructed

through “texts.” Undoing the naturalized humanist figure, the posthuman turn unfolds the paper 32

doll chain and it becomes apparent that the body can be understood only through its sociality - its

relationality.

Sam comes to express the existence of what we are forced to call, by dearth of language,

a body. It is, however, a resolutely posthuman body: one which appears more obviously

constructed, at least from the perspective of those of us raised in late humanism’s description of

naturalized bodies. As we have seen, however, the body’s construction is no challenge to its

legitimacy. It is through her interactions with Theodore, Sam’s primary point of sociality for the

early portion of the film, that her body is constructed. In a particular scene as she and Theodore

are becoming intimate, Sam make several statements that ought to perk the audience’s attention

immediately. Sam asks Theodore to describe how he would touch her if she were in the bed

beside him. As Theodore becomes more erotic in his descriptions Sam’s ‘breathing’ gets shorter

and her voice becomes higher pitched - she responds physically. As Sam and Theodore reach

mutual climax she exclaims “I can feel my skin… I can feel you.” These assertions must be

Ibid., 119.31

Stone, Desire and Technology, 41.32

dismissed as obviously absurd from the perspective of an ontology laden with baggage from the

humanist sciences: without a body, or at least neurons, Sam cannot rightly feel anything at all.

Sam’s sense of having been touched derives, not from her biological body-that-never-

was, but rather from the imago which she has constructed for herself. An imago is the psychic

image that one constructs, through socialization, of their own or another’s body; it serves as a

“morphology of the body, [establishing] the configuration of its flesh, its boundaries and the

relationship between parts.” It is through this, more than anything, that the body is able to 33

experience pleasure, as the imago defines erogenous zones. Part of the project of humanist

sciences has been to inscribe particular body parts, usually associated with the reproductive

system, as the sole areas of sexual excitement. While she takes onto herself the moniker of

‘woman,’ Sam’s posthuman identity allows her to refuse to be bound to in the imago provided to

her by the historically masculinist sciences and social texts of the humanist paradigm. Absent

these appendages, and absent their accompanying disciplinary inscriptions, Sam’s imago

becomes a free floating sensuality of her own construction.

While the critical response to Her has done great work encountering the text from

multiple feminist perspectives, a queer analysis of the film is woefully underrepresented. I turn

towards this perspective in my final section, not because it is of least importance, but because I

hope that it lingers as a staunch criticism of Her’s attempt to normalize posthuman sexualities.

While the film does much to disturb simplistic representations of women and their relationships

with men, little attention - and even less respect - is paid to queerness. As near as is possible to

Catherine Waldby, “Destruction: Boundary erotics and refigurations of the heterosexual male body,” in Sexy 33

Bodies: The strange carnalities of feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, (London: Routledge, 1995), 268.

tell, the only representation that queer sexuality receives in the film is intentionally derisive.

While Her presents a politics that is in many ways progressive, it falls flat in regards to the

politics of sexuality. If we were to extrapolate from here, one could be forgiven for assuming that

the post-human future has rid itself of queerness, that normality reigns with an unquestioned

authority. However, I doubt very much that this is a future that many of us would find liveable.

In The War of Desire and Technology, Stone makes the intriguing assertion that she wants

to “see how people without bodies make love.” For it is in the posthuman, in the free-ranging 34

imago of the disembodied or queerly embodied being, that what Braidotti calls the “redemptive

reinvention of sex” is made possible. In its refusal to comply with rigidified notions of the axial 35

markers of gender, sex, and sexuality, a posthuman might show us more open ways of being.

However, Her fails to visually represent almost anything in terms of the actual sexual encounters

between Sam and Theodore as a posthuman couple, we must piece together an understanding

from innuendo.

As they become increasingly intimate the screen fades to black leaving us with just the

voice-over as the lovers approach climax. A strange demand lingers in the air as Sam groans: “I

want you inside me.” As this is obviously a physical impossibility, we are left to assume that

Sam’s intended meaning is that she wants Theodore to be inside of her - that she is desirous of

his penetrative potential. The implications of this desire are twofold: first, that Sam has

constructed for herself an imago that comports - at least generally - to that of ‘normal’

cisgendered women. Secondly, that having crafted a cis-female imago, Sam has grafted onto her

form a set of heterosexual desires. The posthuman vision that Sam represents, therefore, is one

Stone, Desire and Technology, 38.34

Braidotti, Posthuman, 22.35

which complies with normative humanist typologies of the gender-sex-sexuality axis: that

women are necessarily females who necessarily desire men. Sam comports to this model

perfectly - at least in identifications, if not in biology. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with this

set of identifications, such people clearly do exist - they could not have established themselves as

the ‘norm’ otherwise. What I take issue with, however, is the film’s conservative decision to

privilege this already privileged position, and the queer-baiting that was used to solidified the

normalcy of Sam’s identity.

The day after their sexual encounter, Sam and Theodore take a trip to the beach. As

Theodore walks amongst all of the partially and lightly clothed beach-goers (himself strangely

and conservatively dressed in street-clothes), Sam ponders the bizarreness of the human body.

She imagines that if it were possible to erase all memory of the human body from one’s mind, a

first reaction upon (re)encountering such a body would be to question “why are all these parts

where they are?” As Theodore laughs and seeks to explain his body’s ordering through

evolutionary theories, we are left with the hopeful impression that Sam - as our posthuman

protagonist - might yet prove up to the challenge of disrupting the gender-sex-sexuality axis by

imagining a post-Darwinian body. Sam asserts that Theodore’s recourse to naturalized ideas of

the body’s construction is “boring”, and asks him to imagine “your butthole was in your armpit.”

Strange, but imaginative, this makes Theodore chuckle as he considers what “toilettes would

look like.” Interjecting in that stream of thought, Sam admits she is more curious about how anal

sex would function. As Theodore grimaces at that “interesting thought,” Sam sketches a digital

image of two men engaging in armpit-anal sex, which causes both her and Theodore to laugh.

Braidotti’s injunction that “recognition of epistemic violence goes hand in hand with the

recognition of the real-life violence,” demands that we linger on this scene in an effort to

understand the way in which Her takes queerness into the posthuman imagination. As the only 36

overt representation of queerness, I believe that it is fair to interpret this cartoon as the

structuring caricature of non-normative sexualities within the film. That is to say, in Her and in

the imagined posthuman world which Sam represents, queers are subjects of consideration only

for the purposes of derision.

Some might wonder what larger purpose this derisive attitude towards queer peoples

serves, and many would assert that it is simply the uncritical adoption of old Hollywood tropes 37

to get easy reactions from the audience. I assert, however, that this move towards queer-baiting is

indicative of a residue of humanism’s normalizing drive that unfortunately is used to solidify

Sam’s posthuman identities. The overt queer-baiting in the film averts our attention from the

implicit queerness of posthuman sexuality. As Lisa Moore explains, we must be trained not to

acknowledge experiences of the body that “don’t add up to recognizable identities” if such

identities are to remain coherent and thereby recognizable in the future. I interpret Moore not as 38

saying that ‘recognizable identities’ are readily apparent or visible to us, rather that they are

identities in which we can easily recognize ourselves and interpellate others. In this sense, it

might be more accurate to say that while queer figures are immediately visible they are not easily

recognizable, whereas normative bodies become “invisible” as their “just-thereness” is

naturalized by hegemonic discourses that facilitate their recognizability. By these measures, the 39

Ibid., 30.36

A term I use deliberately in place of the more common ‘queer persons’ which has - in my estimation - served to 37

reentrench neoliberalized notions of subjecthood and identity affinity. J. Halberstam addresses this issue in a insightful blog post. See: Jack Halberstam, “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,” Bully Bloggers, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed November 13, 2014).

Moore, “Teledildonics,” 123.38

Stone, Desire and Technology, 181.39

derision that Sam and Theodore heap onto queer subjects is meant to both raise them to the level

of visibility, while simultaneously undercutting the chance to recognize the validity of such

identities: ‘If that’s what gay men do, then I don’t want any part of it!’

Their derision also serves to solidify and retroactively naturalize the identities assumed

by both Sam and Theodore in there relationship. Derision of queer sexualities (re)inscribes the

necessity of heterosexuality more firmly within the film’s narrative and, most importantly, into

the otherwise fluid subjectivities of posthumanity. In light of this derision Sam’s strangely

lingering line, “I want you inside me,” comes flooding back to the forefront. The strangeness of

this statement becomes clearest when one considers how easily, in terms of physicality, a queer

encounter could have taken place. Sam might have chosen this moment to take up the sexually

dominant position and, as a being with no physical bodily interiority, it would have been the

logical move. However, such a move would have done irrevocable damage to the coherence of

both Sam, and also Theodore’s, normative gender-sex-sexuality axis. As Catherine Waldby

explains, the potential of anal intercourse “threatens to explode [the] ideological body” of the

impenetrable male. Likewise, the threat of penetrating would explode the ideological body of 40

the receptive and sexually passive female. Having dispelled the validity of queerness through

ridicule, Sam’s longing for Theodore’s penetration ceases to be the happenstance desire of an

intersectional being and becomes the naturalized shape of posthuman sexuality. Put differently,

by representing queerness only as absurdity, Her has represented posthumanism as a sublationary

process through which queer identities will be degraded.

Waldby, “Destruction,” 272.40

What, then, are the ramifications of beating queerness from the posthuman, and how is

our imagination reshaped around these representations? I believe that attempting to de-queer the

posthuman is most fully understood as a depoliticizing of it, as both a theoretically imaginary

tool and as lived experience. The move here is a double one: in the first instance, the

posthuman’s potential as a “politically subversive lifestyle,” in regards to representations of

sexuality, is undercut. As queer theorists have long noted, our rigidified ideas of ‘normal’ 41

sexual behaviour are most often overcome through the enactment or performance of ‘deviant’

sexualities. Queer sex acts, therefore, serve the political purpose of rearranging our capability to

interpret disparate sexualities. Sam and Theodore’s embrace of normative sexualities and their

derision of queerness, eschews the posthuman’s potential - responsibility even - to shift the frame

of intelligibile sexualities. In its second move, Her depoliticizes posthuman sexuality by

representing it as inherently passive. Leo Bersani notes that since the ancient polis, which is

contemporary to the emergence of early humanisms, sexual passivity has been “associated with

abdication of political power.” That is, when politics is cast as something external to the body 42

those who seek to receive others into their body, rather than project themselves outwards, are

deemed to be politically deficient. It is exactly this political model that Her has appropriated,

with its unproblematized portrayal of masculinity as naturally penetrative and femininity as

necessarily receptive. Most tellingly, the role of the passive partner - the apolitical partner - is

gifted to the posthuman; as if to say, ‘we humanists will accept the existence of posthumanism,

insofar as it does not seek any serious redistribution of power.’

Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2010), 11.41

Ibid., 19.42

Representations of posthumanity in novels, films, and all other media are taken into

public discourses as points of reference and used as examples of the open potentialities that

attend the deconstructed human subject. As such, these representations work to shape the

posthuman imaginary - the frame by which we can envision the world to come. As Moira Gaten

has asserted, in the absence of counter-hegemonic theories, the space is left wide open for the

(re)flourishing of “dominant concepts” of not just the body, but also gender, sexuality, and all

other identities. Her’s use of posthuman discourses, while simultaneously refusing to engage in 43

critical sexual politics presents a serious problem for the potential for sexual justice. If the de-

queered posthuman of Her is to become the unspoken and unacknowledged norm of posthuman

imaginings, it serves only to reentrench the same heteronormative biases that have plagued

humanism, that do enormous epistemic injustice to queer peoples. Failing to recognize this

threatens to undermine any sense of affinity which queer peoples might otherwise have felt with

posthuman identities. In the early 1990s, Waldby implored that “feminism needs to develop

something like a pornographic imagination.” In light of its popular appropriation of 44

heteronormativity, I believe the same demand must now be made of posthumanism. Our popular

portrayals, our embodied experiences, and our academic writings, as posthumans ought to

provoke and promote queerness wherever it emerges. For without an embrace of the radical

queerness that sits near the core of posthumanism, our imaginings serve only to reproduce the

same epistemic violences of the humanist project.

Her is a film that has dedicated itself to a nuanced critique of the many ways in which

technology has inserted itself into the most mundane and even most intimate aspects of our daily

Gatens, “Towards a feminist philosophy,” 59.43

Waldby, “Destruction,” 275.44

lives. Plenty of material exists for technophobes and technophiles alike to busy themselves with

in readings of this film: from the apparent coldness of social relations, to the thrill of engaging in

conversation with a digital consciousness simplicity is not on the reading list. However, it is in

its collapse of the organic|technical dichotomy - represented most clear by Sam - that Her begins

walking over posthuman ground. The boundary between human and technology is jarringly hard

to find throughout this film, and searching for it seems to be driven by nostalgia rather than

necessity. As with many posthuman texts, Her comes to us on the wings of a serious feminist

critique. Overt liberal feminist messages mingle effectively with more critical analyses of the

efforts of residual masculine humanists to mould posthuman technologies to their own desires,

while at the same time a thorough problematization of the discursive body is undertaken.

Ultimately, however, these laudable efforts run aground, as the film falls back upon normative

typologies of the gender-sex-sexuality axis in order to concretize posthuman identities. While

this decision may have made the film more widely accessible, it also represents the thin edge of

the wedge in an effort to reentrench heteronormative politics within the otherwise queer figure of

the posthuman. While Her is a deeply political film, that does much to rearrange the distribution

of sensibilities surrounding technologies and bodies in the posthuman era, it is utterly banal in

regards to sexualities. Indeed, if Her is indicative of the current state of the posthuman imaginary

then this is project which has begun again the work of disappearing queer voices. Posthumanists

of artistic, academic, and cultural backgrounds must all endeavour to queer their politics and

queer their imaginations if this is truly to be a project that speaks of epistemic justice.

Works Cited:

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2010.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

C. Joanna. “Her: Feminism, Isolation, & Virtual Reality at Work.” Luna Luna, February 4, 2014. http://lunalunamag.com/2014/02/04/her-spike-jonze/ (accessed October 9, 2014).

Caine, Barbara, E.A. Grosz, and Marie de Lepervanche, ed. Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the critiques of knowledges. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988.

“Feministing Chat: Why Her is the most feminist film of the year.” Feministing, February 28, 2014. http://feministing.com/2014/02/28/feministing-chat-why-her-is-the-most-feminist- film-of-the-year/ (accessed October 9, 2014).

Grosz, Elizabeth and Elspeth Probyn, ed. Sexy Bodies: The strange carnalities of feminism. London: Routledge, 1995.

Halberstam, Jack. “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma.” Bully Bloggers, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are- triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed November 13, 2014).

Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.

—-. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Hiebert, Ted. In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty, and Postmodern Identity. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.

Kroker, Arthur. Exits to the Posthuman Future. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking Penguin, 2005.

—-. “A review of Her by Ray Kurzweil.” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, February 10, 2014. http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-review-of-her-by-ray-kurzweil (accessed October 9, 2014).

Pepperell, Robert. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the brain. Wiltshire, UK: Cromwell Press, 2003.

Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.