Exploring alterities and empathy through posthuman feminine bodies in Under the Skin and Her

• Main Author: Tang, Hoiye
• Other Authors: Chiang Hui Ling Michelle
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2025
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/182269
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this essay, the two films of interest are Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). The films’ portrayals of posthuman feminine subjects are mediated by gendered concerns as presented through the posthumanist lens. Posthumanism questions the self-assured binarism upheld and enforced by humanist tradition and its anthropocentric ideologies. Science fiction has contributed significantly in the posthumanist discourse, being imperative in the disruption of human-centric narratives through its depiction of non-human subjects. Florence Chiew further states that posthumanism recognises that “human ways of knowing and being in the world do not have privilege or priority over the myriad variety of ways that nonhuman entities… encounter and apprehend the world” (2). The non-human subjects in Her and Under the Skin present such alterities whose perspectives are focalised and given voice to in the films.