Becoming-Heroine and the Technological Posthuman in Nick Willing's Alice (2009)

This chapter explores Nick Willing's Alice (2009) as a posthuman reimagining of Carroll's narrative that stages the convergence of critical and techno-scientific posthumanism in a dystopic, hyper-industrialised Wonderland. Through the figurations of becoming-heroine, becoming-cyborg, and becoming-data, the chapter maps the relational, distributed subjectivities produced and exploited within this Wonderland's biopolitical and necro-political systems. Willing's adult-oriented adaptation, shaped by early twenty-first-century sociotechnical imaginaries, presents affect, attention, and labour as commodified in a cognitive-cultural economy, wherein selected bodies—the Oysters—are harvested for emotional data. The protagonist's journey, read through Maureen Murdock's model of the heroine's quest, configures Alice as a relational subject who resists patriarchal and anthropocentric paradigms. The Casino economy literalises the extraction and trade of affect, while Wonderland's architecture reflects twenty-first-century surveillance capitalism, platform economies, and transhumanist visions of control. The chapter considers the figuration of schizoid bodies and Bodies without Organs as sites of resistance and estrangement within the posthuman milieu. Ultimately, Willing's Alice offers a critique of the inhuman(e) operations of advanced capitalism, while gesturing toward ethical alternatives and the political necessity of a post-anthropocentric reconfiguration of relational subjectivity, affective labour, and ecological sustainability in the Anthropocene.