From Natural to Cyber. A Transmedia Approach to Body Representation in Techno-Dystopias

The aim of this study is to interpret the role of the body within techno-dystopian narratives, characterized by the overcoming of nature/culture and mind/body dualisms. The techno-dystopias, especially cyberpunk narrate the contradictions of postmodern society, taking to the extreme the ruptures of risk society and the reconfiguration of a social system. In these narratives, the body reflects the symbolic meanings that covey these cracks, becoming a battlefield in increasingly fluid identity processes, managing to narrate contradictions through the representation of the relationship between flesh, consciousness and technology. The body itself becomes a manifestation of the habitus in techno-dystopian societies. Through a transmedia approach we want to analyze the representations of the body through identity, the Self, bearer of symbolic values at the individual level, and aesthetics, the Persona, the communicative act of the body at the social level, between soft and hard traits. Analysing the intertextual storyworld, developed on a corpus of 35 selected dystopian texts (from 1995 to 2022; including films, series, anime, books, comics, video games), it emerges how representations of the body shift on a continuum between a natural state of the body (total rejection of technology) and a meta-corporeal state (abandonment of corporeality).