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oai:riuma.uma.es:10630/399552026-02-03T11:45:30Zcom_10630_2254col_10630_37956

Outfacing the “In” Face: The Posthuman Wound and the Defacing of Relationality in Joma West’s Face. Chapman, Ana María Ferrández-Sanmiguel, María Muñoz-González, Esther Laguarta-Bueno, Carmen Postmodernismo (Literatura) Literatura contemporánea West, Joma - Crítica e interpretación Crítica textual Joma West’s Face (2022) is set in a near future where digital faces and bioengineered babies determine the characters’ social status in a disembodied and fragmented experience. Individuals are mere data divided into two types: biological information and digital information. The popularity of these two types is based on the aesthetics of perfection in the form of transhumanist biologically modified individuals (the organic face) and the digitalized “face.” Physical boundaries and virtual traces are represented as subordinated to surveillance. Through different narrative techniques, readers discover the entrapment, fear and even ingrained disgust characters feel in the face of close and true contact, either physical or affective. The narrative style brings out questions on the distancing of bodies from the relational and affective standpoint in the desire to reconsider the natural organic and affective response via the fragmentation of the narrative and subjectivity. Through critical posthumanism, this chapter explores the fragmented narratives and the disrupted embodiments and relationality to others towards a more response-able call (Hayles). Face reflects on how embodiment, embeddedness, collectivity and the natural affective response are intertwined with not only an ethical, healthy encounter with the other but also with openness for establishing one’s own subjectivity. 2025-09-17T10:39:59Z 2025-09-17T10:39:59Z 2025-09-17T10:39:59Z 2025-06-17 book part Chapman, A. (2025). Outfacing the “In” Face: The Posthuman Wound and the Defacing of Relationality in Joma West’s Face. In: Ferrández-Sanmiguel, M., Muñoz-González, E., Laguarta-Bueno, C. (eds) The Posthuman Condition in 21st Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-83701-2_7 https://hdl.handle.net/10630/39955 10.1007/978-3-031-83701-2_7 eng PID2022-137627NB-I00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Attribution 4.0 Internacional Palgrave Macmillan