Medieval Posthumanism: Embodiment and Gendered Cyborgs in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale

Amanda Fawcett’s Honors Thesis project is a deftly woven analysis of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina film and Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale as storytelling that critiques and challenges our concepts of gendered bodies. Drawing from medievalism, postmodernism, philosophy, and film theory, Amanda examines Western concepts of dualism and cyborg technologies as ways to explore “the territories between male and female, denaturalizing the expectations for the manifestation of gender on the body” (Fawcett, 15). She takes a creative, exploratory, and thorough approach to research, organizing diverse sources in order to place them in conversation with each other. Dr. Kate Koppelman (English), her faculty member, comments, “The project speaks to a broader audience than just medievalists and asks questions about gendered embodiment that are particularly relevant and vital at this cultural and historical moment. It offers a new way to read a medieval text while also raising questions about how medieval texts can help us ask more immediately important questions about how gender expectations act upon individual bodies in the real world.