I sing the body dystopic: Utopia and posthuman corporeality in P.D. James’s The Children of Men

Abstract

The resurgence of novels dealing with dystopian cosmogonies since the 1990s may reveal a newtrend in Utopian Studies. If classical dystopia was defined by the imposition of collective political and social structures upon the individual and out of which there was no escape (as constructed, mainly, by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), these contemporary dystopian novels critically construct posthuman societies where the focus is on the development of the dystopian body, which questions andreinvents the very definitions of humanity. This article aims at examining theeffects of posthuman critique upon the construction of the dystopian body in P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men.