Posthumanism and Identity in Titane: Gender, Technology and the Cyborg Body

Abstract

Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) is one of the most unsettling cinematic  expressions of what it means to  be human in a world where flesh and metal are no longer fixed binaries. This essay analyses the film  through Donna Haraway’s essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), N. Katherine Hayles’s monograph How We Became Posthuman (1999), and later posthumanist interventions by Rosi Braidotti and Claire Colebrook. Moving towards a rich theoretical engagement, this essay argues that Titane constructs a world in which identity, gender and intimacy are continually recomposed through trauma and technology. The essay explores three axes, namely, cyborg embodiment, posthuman intimacy and non- biological kinship to reveal how the film dramatises the collapse of fixed human boundaries and the emergence of a hybrid, fluid ontology.