Transhuman Perfection: The Eradication of Disability Through Transhuman Technologies

Abstract

This paper examines transhuman technologies that seek to eradicate disability - primarily prostheses and implants. While most would agree that disability denies individuals the same quality of life as those deemed “abled,” this eradication ultimately relies upon secular humanist notions of the perfect human. Transhuman technologies hold obvious implications for the human body, however they also hold implications for what it means to be an acceptable body; ultimately these technologies aim to create the perfect human by eradicating the disabled Other. This paper uses these notions to question concepts of “hierarchies of life,” at which disabled individuals are most commonly moved towards the bottom, or at the very least considered nonhuman. This article seeks to provide alternative theory to the eradication of disability, which states that these individuals may not have the same mode of existence, but that their mode/s are just as valid as those lived by “abled” individuals through an examination of Braille.