Three-Body Problem: Humans, Enhanced or Mutated Bodies, and Technological Bodies as Feminised/ Naturalised Others in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Cyberpunk and Posthumanism, Habib Tekin,İrem Atasoy, Editör, Istanbul University Press, İstanbul, ss.112-128, 2025

Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) is a postmodern novel that propounds three-fold storylines in four parts

with recurring characters and vicious cycles of human destructiveness. Amalgamating the traits of literary genres

such as SF, cyberpunk, and historical metafiction, Winterson represents human and nonhuman bodies, specifically

in the first and last parts of the novels, shaped by the dominant capitalistic systems that use and abuse technology,

biogenetics, and propagate disembodiment in a twisted Cartesian manner. However, the bodies that serve their

purpose or have agency are marginalised in these plotlines and pushed out of the centre. This chapter aims to

discuss that Winterson’s depiction of three types of bodies in this ustopian novel – natural human bodies, enhanced

and fixed or mutated human bodies, and technological bodies – critiques the androcentric system’s feminisation

and naturalisation of bodies to marginalise and instrumentalise them and see them as uncanny and abject in a

gendered way, through which the system turns them into disposable bodies. In the light of Donna Haraway’s concept

of cyborgs and Rosi Braidotti’s becoming and nomadic subjects, the chapter discusses that these bodies, through

their feminisation and naturalisation, turn into nomadic subjects as well as cyborg bodies, embedding themselves

or through the intersectionality of the organic and the technological. Although all the storylines end in failure due

to the androcentric exploitation of the planets, feminised bodies that defy the norms form an alternative to human

destruction through co-existence and cohabitation, and offer a sense of hope.