"I Don't Want to Be Flesh": Feminist Transhumanism in Years and Years (Part Two)

“I Don’t Want to Be Flesh”: Feminist Transhumanism in Years and Years (Part Two)

by Daisy Reid

This brings me to the second half of this study, which explores the ways in which Bethany’s representation in Years and Years frustrates both the hyper-masculine tropes commonly attached to transhumanist doctrine, and popular feminist technoscientific understandings of cyborgian human-technology configurations, in order to open up an undertheorized category of what we might term feminist transhumanism.

Feminist interventions such as Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto have long considered the philosophical and political implications of our multitudinous bodily entanglements with technology: “We are all chimeras,” Haraway famously writes, “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (7). Emphasising boundary porosity as a site of socialist-feminist potential, Haraway’s cyborg is ultimately a celebration of multiplicity, insisting that such distinctions as human/machine, human/animal, and natural/artificial are ultimately untenable in a world where everyone can be partly someone else.

In attempting to anchor Davies’ representation of Bethany Lyons within a theoretical framework, Haraway’s cyborg is certainly a seductive, if not the default, figure to explore. When Bethany’s body is fully integrated with technological interfaces, with transmitters embedded in her fingers and cameras fitted into her eyes, she becomes a hybrid being imbued with a radical new potential to enact political disruption – and this, it should be noted, she eventually does, by using her tech to expose government-sponsored death camps throughout the UK. As such, she seems the epitome of the “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (14) that lie at the heart of Haraway’s feminist cyborg myth. 

However, posthuman[1]thinkers such as Katherine Hayles have suggested that the Harawayian cyborg is in fact “no longer the most compelling metaphor through which to understand out contemporary situation” (165). Hayles suggests that, as a figure defined by its boundary-crossing potential, Haraway’s cyborg remains somewhat paradoxically invested in the very existence of the binaries and split it purports to refute.

To put it another way, if Bethany’s implants are what make her a cyborg, then the label “cyborg” becomes locked to certain bodies – thereby suggesting an essentialised difference between such tech-assisted bodies as Bethany’s, and “pure,” or “natural” bodies belonging to other, non-transhumanist bodies.

In a critique of Haraway levied from a disability studies perspective, crip scholar Alison Kafer contends that the common practice of looking to biotechnologies such as cochlear implants or prosthetic limbs as exemplary of the cyborg condition suggests that “there is an original purity that, thanks to assistive technology, has only now been mixed, hybridized, blurred” (108).

In such a hasty framing, we can identify an oblique investment in the maintenance of essentialising categories, rather than their dissolution via an emphasis on the dynamic and co-evolving flows of an interconnected system – this latter framework being one that, according to the likes of Hayles, is more productive for theorising the present posthuman moment.

Nor, indeed, would Haraway herself be at all content if Bethany’s transhumanism were framed as cyborgian in her own use of the term. Transhumanism in its present, post-Extropian form is deeply anthropocentric in scope, and as such is far too invested in developing something like a human-exceptionalist Nietzschean Übermensch, than one could reasonably hope to reconcile with Haraway’s own dedication to “sympoiesis,” or a philosophical mode that aims to de-centre the human by demonstrating the transversal relationality between human and other-than-human beings. In fact, Haraway has oft expressed her frustration with the manner in which A Cyborg Manifesto has been co-opted for transhumanist theorising, denouncing such initiatives as “a kind of techno-masculinism of a self-caricaturing kind” (Gane & Haraway 146). 

This, indeed, is a facet that renders Bethany’s narrative in Years and Years particularly interesting. Transhumanism has been well documented as being predominantly the interest of men; TheGuardian’s 2017 exposé on the subject was unselfconsciously entitled “When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans” (Adams, emphasis mine), and of the movement’s key figures, from Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson to Kevin Warwick, there is a notable dearth of female names.

Indeed, one might go so far as contend that the very project of enhancing the human body using technology and cybernetics echoes the masculinist principles of Enlightenment thinking; Fuller and Lipinska even describe it as “ultra-Enlightenment” (25), giving primacy to the white male symbolic domain of rationality and logic over and above the more feminine-allied notions of affect, emotionality, and matter.

Francesca Ferrando additionally notes that the transhumanist aim of uploading the mind as “software” and leaving the bodily “hardware” behind, “genealogically stands as a cyber twist to the dualism which has been structural to the hegemonic Western tradition of thought: the symbolic flesh (a.k.a. body/material/female/black/nature/object, etc.) shall be overcome by symbolic data (a.k.a. mind/virtual/male/white/culture/subject etc.)” (3).

What, then, is at stake for the transhumanist narrative in Years and Years in the fact that Davies makes Bethany a female character – or, more specifically, that she is Black and female?

One perspective might be that this question is presaged by the scene to which we have periodically returned throughout this paper, in which Bethany’s parents assume she is transgender, rather than transhuman. That Bethany aspires to be, “Not male. Or female. But better” (Years and Years E1) again recalls Haraway, in her provocative statement that, “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world.”

However, retrospective interviews have revealed that Haraway was dissatisfied with the way this comment had been construed; she did not, she claims, intend to suggest that, “Ah, that means it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman anymore” (Gane and Haraway 137).

Instead, she retroactively likens her use of the term “post-gender” to the way in which women-of-colour theorists employ the term “intersectional,” identifying the ways in which race, gender, and class “torque” one another to form a cyborgian, non-totalising subjectivity. As Cox glosses, “Women of colour readily demonstrate the queer torqueing of identity categories, since they are a priori excluded from full integration into any one social grouping…They stand at the margins of these identity labels and destabilize or queer them from this outside position” (324).

From this perspective, as a Black biracial woman, Bethany always already occupies a cyborgian post-gender subjectivity by virtue of her very non-adherence to unitary hegemonic identity categories. Her desire to become transhuman, however, is motivated by an entirely different impetus: rather than queering normative identarian classifications with recourse to the outsider position afforded by her cyborgian status as a woman of colour, Bethany appears to wish to exist in a techno-utopian world in which masculinity and femininity do not exist at all; in other words, the “post-gender world” that Haraway insists is a misinterpretation of her original writerly intention.

Bethany thus suggests that she wants to take on an unmarked identity, a neutral space of rationality and liberty that surpasses the split of sexually dimorphic biologies and the arbitrary power structures we attach to them. We might deduce, then, that what she wishes to inhabit is a form of subjectivity that has, historically, been the domain of white masculinity: that of being the default, the objective, the free and unimpeded. As such, Bethany’s desire to transcend her feminine corporeal frame in order to become immaterial, rational “data” might indeed be approximated to a desire to become, in a vastly expanded sense, transgender; that is, to take on an alternative mode of embodied performativity that has, historically, been frequently attributed to maleness. 

By way of contextualising this, we might briefly look to the show’s transgender character of Lincoln Lyons, Bethany’s younger cousin. Lincoln’s transition throughout the series is so unanimously accepted by her family as to almost fly under the radar in terms of plot; one or two older characters comment vaguely upon her new habits of wearing skirts and ribbons, gently acknowledging that a change is taking place in her gender presentation, but the need for a spectacularised coming-out narrative is completely evinced.

Nor, indeed, is Lincoln depicted as encountering the tired prejudices of so-called “TERFs” (or “Gender Criticals”), and their violent indictment of transwomen as threatening or aberrant, that are so rife in the United Kingdom at the present moment. In Years and Years, Lincoln simply starts presenting as female around 2027, and that is that; no need for further discussion or debate.

In a similar manner, Daniel Lyons – Bethany’s uncle – is unquestionably accepted as a gay man, without this facet of his identity ever being either flattened or ignored, nor made out to be a point of contention. Given that Russell T Davies has been demonstrably committed to chronicling authentic LGBTQ+ stories for much of his career, most famously through the 1999 TV series Queer as Folk, this decision to depict an unquestioning acceptance of gender and sexuality as fluid and non-totalising signals Davies’ broader investment in tracking the historical progression and speculated futures of queer and trans* subjectivities across a cross-section of British culture.

Beyond this, the myriad parallels that are drawn throughout the series between transhumanism and transgenderism, from Bethany’s “coming-out” narrative to the nurse’s offhand comment about surgery regulation, plant the seed in the viewer’s mind that the perceived ontological split between human and technology will, in the future, be universally considered as much of an arbitrary social construct as gender norms will grow to become.

Further, to return to the nurse’s comparison between face lifts, gender reassignment, and transhuman surgery, we might note a subtle insinuation that, like its surgical predecessors, biohacking will soon become a properly regulated process absorbed into the medical industrial complex – a nod, of course, not only to Bethany’s later public-funded surgeries, but also to the potentially radical medical futures to which transhumanism might give rise in our own lives.

With all these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might now briefly revisit Bethany’s “coming out” episode. Given that transhumanism is still a relatively obscure, borderline eccentric philosophy in today’s society, as viewers of this scene we are implicitly aligned with Celeste: requiring an explanation as to what “transhuman” entails, and cultivating a deep scepticism about what we hear in response.

This scene is represented as happening in 2024, by which time it is fair to predict that the dangers and more extreme cases of biohacking may have started to filter into the mainstream media, most likely framed as a subversive countercultural threat that targets vulnerable young people (again, a familiar narrative to many LGBTQ+ folks). Celeste’s enraged rejection of Bethany’s “coming out” is thus conversant with the trope of the queer and/or trans* teen coming out to a prejudiced family, in addition tothe way in which one might anticipate a parent to respond to their daughter wanting to engage in potentially dangerous biohacking activity – a more extreme iteration, perhaps, of a mother being unable to stomach the idea of her daughter getting an illicit tattoo or piercing.

The incident with Lizzie’s eye only seems to corroborate Celeste’s (and, implicitly, our) perspective: transhumanism is a threat, both bodily on an individual scale, and existential on a societal, moral scale. However, the show’s unique format in spanning such an extended timeframe permits for such perceptions to shift, organically and believably, within its characters – and, therefore, for we as viewers to imagine our own worldviews shifting with them.

By the end, Davies depicts transhumanist biohacking as gradually becoming the new normal, incrementally shifting from its cultural perception as a “wacky cyborg plan” to a sort of natural “evolution” (Renstrom) in professional and medical development. As such, it becomes as seamlessly integrated into the quotidian social and economic life of the Lyons family as their much-used, Alexa-like virtual assistant, “Señor” (incidentally, a superb example of what Bruce Sterling terms “design fiction,” or a believable diegetic prototype of a fictional object – and another example of a technology to which the older Lyons were originally resistant, and yet which is transformed into an object of necessity, even affection, by the end.

Transhuman biohacks, we surmise, are a similarly conceived design fiction that will follow an analogous trajectory). Tracking the progression of biohacking from a transgressive and threatening subcultural activity in early episodes of Years and Years, to a government-sponsored and meticulously regulated process at a later point in the narrative, thus encourages viewers, via the shifting perception of Celeste, to question the ways in which our contemporary scepticisms, disbeliefs, or even prejudices against transhumanist philosophy or biohacking activity might evolve towards something like wide acceptance in coming decades.

In his particular depiction of LGBTQ+ subjectivities, Davies seems to suggest that such an evolution echoes the ways in which mainstream antipathy and moral panic directed towards the queer and trans* community in the UK might continue to progress into something like widespread inclusiveness, and acceptance to the point of being unremarkable – yet without straying into erasure.

That said, to stake a claim that Bethany’s desire to become transhuman is ultimately a desire to discard her own femininity in favour of a body that performs as maleis to overlook the myriad embodied pleasures and textured impressions to which her transhuman and biohacked, yet unquestionably feminine, body gives her access.

In Episode Five’s scene that shows her sitting in a hospital gown, glowing with happiness at the result of the “upgrade” that has rendered her body a fully integrated human-machine interface, Bethany attempts to explain the novel sensations she is experiencing to her parents. She sits with her hands spread open over an electronic tablet, almost resembling a seer in her posture (fig. 1). Slow piano music begins to build as she interacts with the screen using only small twitches of her bionically altered fingers. At no point does she need to touch the device itself; it dances in perfect harmony with her thoughts.

As Bethany’s thoughts speed up, her musings becoming more layered and complex, new windows build above the screen in a clean visual reflection of her cognitive processes. Stacks of images extend beyond the edges of the device and appear to float just above it, forming a quivering, almost magical material-immaterial interface between the tablet and Bethany’s innermost thoughts. Settled in this visionary-like position, tablet in hand, she speaks dreamily to her parents as the camera slowly zooms in on her face:

I’m trying to explain it in ways you can understand. But the connection is so much more. While we were talking, at exactly the same time, I wondered about the Eighty Days of Rain. Where it came from. Why it was. What comes next. And I keyed into satellites, just 30 seconds ago, so I can see the course of El Niño. And I can tap into pressure sensors along the Atlantic coast. And barometric readings from ships at sea. If I put all that together…I am there. I’m inside it. The tide. The depth of the sea. And the curl of the waves. Within me…It’s joy. In my head. It is absolute joy. (Years and Years E5)

Fig 2. Bethany (Lydia West)’s technological “integration.” Russell T Davies, Years and Years Episode 5, HBO & BBC, 2019, 31:08. Screen capture from HBO Max. 

Bethany’s transhuman experience ultimately speaks less to a dissolving of her embodiment, as to its radical extension and recalibration. The profoundly spiritual affect imbuing the scene, assembled through a combination of Bethany’s prophet-like posture, blissful intonation, and the meditative soundtrack, implements a strict break with the techno-hyper-masculinist affect one might associate with the transhumanist cyborg transformations depicted in, for example, Robocopor Iron Man– although it is worth pointing out that Bethany’s characterisation also resists pigeonholing into the trope of the sexualised female cyborg, as is epitomised by characters such as Ava in Ex Machina.

Instead, Bethany’s feminine transhumanist experience is one of embodied joy, of emotion, and – notably – of calm oneness with the tides, a domain maintaining cultural associations to femininity, organicism, and nature. Nor is her experience strictly anthropocentric; she pursues avenues of relationality with other-than-human entities, exerting neither mastery nor violence over what she finds, but rather dwelling within them and responding with what we might see as a feminist ethics of care.

The “data” to which Bethany aspires cannot, therefore, be reduced to a brute overcoming of fleshly femininity in order to achieve Robocop-esque characteristics of masculine rationality, progress, and technoculture – the Extropian-inflected “techno-masculinist” transhumanism lambasted by Donna Haraway. Instead, it is posited as something organic and affective, sensual and deep, allowing her to inhabit several non-isomorphic and intersectional categories simultaneously yet without losing either her identity or her embodied materiality in the process.

This framing of a feminine-allied transhumanist transformation is reiterated in the closing scene of the final episode, in which the character of Edith Lyons is becoming one of the first subjects to upload their brain to the cloud. In the year 2034, she is living out the dream that Bethany was so admonished for coveting as a teenager. Edith muses upon the process slowly, ecstatically, as she lays in an airy laboratory:

“I’m not a piece of code. I’m not information. All these memories, they’re not just facts, they’re so much more than that. They’re my family. And my lover. They’re my mum, and my brother who died years ago. They’re love. That’s what I’m becoming now. Love. I am…love” (Years and Years E6).

Even as she participates in the extreme, fringe limits of transhumanism – that of relinquishing the body altogether and downloading the brain as code – Edith, too, rejects the overly masculinist undergirding of transhuman transformation as one grounded in logic, in violence, in sovereignty, in mastery, and in individualism.

As another figure of what we might term feminist transhumanism, she too emphasises relationality and symbiosis in her transformation, expressing a sprawling sense of interconnectedness, affect, care, and a profoundly feminine positionality that rejects reduction of memories into hard code and an attendant disavowal of the (feminine, subjective, natural) flesh.

Just as Russell T Davies prompts viewers to imagine slow changes in the ways we will culturally perceive biohacking and technological modifications in the future, so too do such scenes as this lead us to imagine a gradually developing future of transhumanist philosophy that is uncoupled from the cult of Elon Musk and Extropianism, transforming from “techno-masculinism of a self-caricaturing kind” to a relational philosophy embedded in a feminist ethics of care, radical political potential, and an intersectional formation of gendered subjectivity.

And yet even Bethany’s “fully integrated” feminist transhuman futurity, transplanted straight from science fiction as the image seems to be, may not be far off as one might expect. Today, when biohacking attempts are successful, they are often described in a language of expanded embodiment, of (extra)sensory pleasures, and of blissful interconnectedness that strongly recall Bethany’s own description of being transported “inside” a wave, a tide, or an electronic connection.

In a 2019 study, scholar London Brickley describes his encounter with Matt Henna, a lifelong science fiction fan and biohacker who had embedded neodymium (N52) magnets under the flesh of his fingers five years before. Brickley writes,

As the fingers healed and the nerves grew back around the magnetic strips embedded within, his sensitivity to the metal’s vibrating pull was becoming ever more acute. This new sense allowed him to communicate with the world around him in a whole new way, and he was learning to interpret its whispers. He can now sense when he is around power structures by how his nerves begin to hum. He can run his hand over his electronics and feel the boundaries of their presence, is even able to diagnose his laptop’s dying battery whenever the pulse of its heart starts to slow and skip a beat. He can sense the kind of electricity that is in the air. (10)

For Matt, as for Bethany, to be a biohacker – a transhuman, a cyborg, a human-machine hybrid – is not so much to uncouple mind from body, as to radically reimagine the entanglement between the two. Corporeal sensation and affect still reign supreme; for Matt as for Bethany, one can hardly say that the body is disposed of altogether. Instead, it becomes embroiled in a whole cacophony of more-than-human forces, structures, and networks to which our sensory capacities in their present form do not permit us access.

The body is not disavowed; it becomes something new. Brickley sharply articulates the nature of the shift, as he notes that the integration of mechanical parts into the organic body:

transforms the hacker into someone/something that no longer simply communicates with other human users through technology but communicates with other technology through the body. The classical digital paradigm of bodies communicating a message through a digital medium or screen…becomes inverted, as the communication now takes place between the pieces of electronic tech using the organic flesh as the medium of transport. (22)

The experience of Matt and other biohackers might therefore be approximated to a proto-iteration of the sort of feminist transhumanist transformation embodied by Bethany Lyons – a state in which transhumanist subjects will not yet have attained the status of pure data like Edith Lyons, but will still inhabit an embodiment far different to ours as we currently understand it. One will be able to live digitally through technological embodiment; to experience the rich textures and diffuse pleasures of a transversally interconnected more-than-human world, all the while without doing away with the sensations, consciousness, and phenomenology of the organic flesh, nor discarding its intersectional torques and gendered subjectivities.

Extrapolating from the underground practices of present-day transhumanist subcultures, to the queer techno-dystopian/techno-utopian future imagined by Russell T Davies, an examination of Bethany’s storyline in Years and Years thus permits one to reflect creatively and critically upon the future of biohacking, cyborg identities, and a speculative transhumanism that might be queer, feminist, and intersectional in scope rather than violently masculine; a feminist transhumanist turn that, indeed, might be upon us sooner than we expect.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. “When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans.”Guardian, 29 Oct 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/transhuman-bodyhacking-transspecies-cyborg. Accessed 21 Feb 2021.

Banbury, Tamara. “Where’s My Jet Pack? Online Communication Practices and Media Frames of the Emergent Voluntary Cyborg Subculture.” Unpublished MA Thesis, Carleton University, 2019. https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/etd/387fa17a-003c-4dd9-a1bd-7fc3b8e27cc3/etd_pdf/12c315671b2bc4dbcbaec32c0c7f4aa0/banbury-wheresmyjetpackonlinecommunicationpractices.pdf. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Brickley, London. “Bodies Without Borders: The Sinews and Circuitry of ‘folklore’+.” Western Folklore, vol. 78, no. 1, 2019, pp. 5-19.

Cox, Lara. “Decolonial Queer Feminism in Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985).” Paragraph, vol. 41, no. 3, 2018, pp. 317-332.

Davies, Russell T, creator. Years and Years. BBC and HBO, 2019.

Davies, Russell T. Screenplay of Years and Years, Episode 1. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/Years-and-Years-Ep1.pdf. Accessed 24 February 2021.

Delaney, Brigid. “Years and Years is riveting dystopian TV – and the worst show to watch right now.” The Guardian, 7 Apr 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/07/years-and-years-is-riveting-dystopian-tv-and-the-worst-show-to-watch-right-now. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Ferrando, Francesca. “Is the post-human a post-woman? Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence and the futures of gender: a case study.” European Journal of Futures Research, vol. 2, no. 43, 2014, pp. 1-17.

Fuller, Steve, and Veronika Lipinska. “Transhumanism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, vol. 3, no. 11, 2014, pp. 25-29.

Gane, Nicholas, and Donna Haraway. “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pp. 135-158.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Harawayby Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 5-90.

Hayles, Katherine N. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pp. 159-166.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Oremus, Will. “Choose Your Own Sixth Sense: DIY superpowers for the cyborg on a budget.” Slate, 14 Mar 2013, https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/cyborgs-grinders-and-body-hackers-diy-tools-for-adding-sensory-perceptions.html. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Regis, Ed. “Meet the Extropians.” Wired, 1 Oct 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/10/extropians/. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Renstrom, Joelle. “What Would It Mean for Humans to Become Data?” Slate, 30 Jul 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/years-and-years-finale-bethany-transhumanist.html#:~:text=Years%20and%20Years'%20transhumanist%20character%20demonstrates%20the%20conundrum,by%20merging%20human%20and%20machine.&text=In%20the%20premiere%20of%20the,scheduled%20a%20talk%20with%20them. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Rogers, Adam. “HBO’s Years and Years Unlocks Sci-Fi’s Ultimate Potential.” Wired, 11 Jul 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/review-years-and-years-hbo/. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Rothblatt, Martine. “Mind is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form.” The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More. Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2013, pp. 317-326.

Subba, Nikhil. “Elon Musk’s new co could allow uploading, downloading thoughts: Wall Street Journal.” Reuters, 27 Mar 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-musk-neuralink/elon-musks-new-co-could-allow-uploading-downloading-thoughts-wall-street-journal-idUSKBN16Y2GC. Accessed 21 Feb 2021.

“Years and Years: Series 1 (2019.)” Rotten Tomatoes, 2019,https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/years_and_years/s01. Accessed 26 Feb 2021. 

[1]The terms “transhuman” and “posthuman” are often confused. While transhumanism refers to ideologies of human enhancement through science and technology, posthumanism is a philosophical praxis that critiques the Western intellectual traditions of humanism and anthropocentrism. Both transhumanism and posthumanism share a common interest in the ontological dimension of technology, but transhumanism is centred upon augmenting the human condition – while posthumanism is broadly invested in dismantling human exceptionalist discourse by drawing attention to humankind’s embroilment in an extensive network of relations with more-than-human entities, processes, and interlocutors. 

Daisy Reid is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include speculative and science fictions, critical plant studies, posthumanism, (feminist) materialisms, and the Environmental Humanities. Her current work focuses on SF depictions of plant life and fungi in their manifold imbrications with issues of gender, sexuality, erotics, and desire.