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The present article analyses the liminality of food in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel, The Windup Girl. It interprets the novel as inaugurating a subversion of the humanistic notions of food as something inert and external to the body. It also attempts to present the posthumanisation of food in the novel by interweaving biotechnological innovations that blur the boundary between the organic and the synthetic with the ontological position occupied by windups whose subjectivity is rhizomatically defined rather than fixed in a static schema of sex, sentience, and gender. The posthuman concerns of the novel examined here are two-fold: transcending human/machine dualisms as explored through the complex materiality of Emiko, the eponymous windup girl, who as a member of “the New People” is considered less than human, and conceptualising food, as exemplified by ngaw, as posthuman.
Dr. Sambhu R. “Posthuman Liminalities: Reimagining Food and Embodiment in The Windup Girl.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 114-128. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.8.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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