| In this project, I will explore the trope of city as body—the body politic—in a diverse array of seminal texts in science fiction literature, films, and critical essays. I choose science fiction (SF) because it provides the kinds of imagery and topos unique to the genre that allow us to examine the kinds of attitudes and assumptions that undergird the metaphor of the city as body and allow it to circulate and function as a social discourse. For instance, a present-day metropolis with components that are completely intertwined with digital technologies like satellites, cell phone towers, and video surveillance systems doesn't necessarily resemble the idealized "master body" of antiquity. What this city does resemble, however, is the figure of the science fiction cyborg, a hybrid body of human and machine. In fact, today's cities look less and less like the traditional idealized human body: the sense of estrangement and vertigo that comes with our digital and globalized age is described better by the alien cities of SF and the alien bodies that occupy these urban spaces. SF cities offer us new models of the body politic that we can recognize in our daily lives, not in spite of their strangeness but because of it—tropes that we cannot find in texts of straightforward narrative realism. |
