Abstract

Abstract:

A distinctly feminist and distinctly Asian-American response to the Blade Runner tradition in sf cinema, Jennifer Phang’s 2015 film Advantageous juxtaposes an ages-old narrative of maternal sacrifice with the futuristic premise of a consciousness-transfer procedure. The film imagines a techno-capitalist dystopia in which early twenty-first-century forebodings about the acceleration of income inequality, economic precarity among skilled professionals and the potential abolition of human labour have only intensified. Phang invites us to find a quiet but radical hope in both new forms of kinship and non-competitive play, forces that may counter the dehumanisation and, indeed, despair depicted as accompanying the technological supplantation of the human body as both economic engine and autonomous moral agent.

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