Posthuman Body in Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

This study aims to analyse the posthuman body in Nights at the Circus (1984) by Angela Carter from the perspective of posthuman feminism. Posthuman feminism explores the humanist ideology that hierarchically categorizes and separates human and nonhuman, man and woman, self and other. It offers perspectives on the meaning of being human which is a historical construct and the complexities of gender, species, and identity, blurring the boundaries between the categories of human, species, and gender. Nights at the Circus can be read alongside posthuman feminist philosophy in its attempt to destabilize the limits of humanist rationalism to reckon alternative subject positions. This study explores how Carter deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be human, and femininity and otherness in the novel. The main character, Sophia Fevvers has a body which is in a state between human and nonhuman as she is a woman with the wings of a bird. Her hybrid body is a posthuman body that is constructed with bodily ambiguity. Her embodiment transgresses beyond being human, there is no separation between her body and nature. Fevvers’s posthuman body gives her freedom.