Becoming-Alice in Underland and Greta's Muchness in the Anthropocene

This chapter examines Disney's Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) as twenty-first-century reimaginings that foreground the complexities of posthuman subjectivity, gender politics, animal ethics, and ecological interdependence through Carrollian becomings reconfigured for the Anthropocene. Focusing on the adult Alice's process of becoming-heroine, becoming-Alice, and becoming-earth, the analysis attends to the protagonist's identity crisis, sartorial metamorphoses, and relational becoming-with nonhuman others. The chapter reads Alice's journey through posthumanist frameworks of nomadic subjectivity, post-anthropocentrism, and bioegalitarian ethics, articulating how the films interrogate normative models of embodiment and engage with disability, madness, and ecological collapse. At the same time, the films’ investment in entrepreneurial success, innovation, and capitalist expansion complicates their posthumanist gestures. Drawing on Braidotti, Haraway, and Deleuze and Guattari, the chapter situates the Red and White Queens, the Mad Hatter, and anthropomorphic animal figures as figurations of posthuman difference, while the figure of Time and the Chronosphere instantiate a dynamic, non-linear temporality. By connecting Alice's muchness to Greta Thunberg's activist agency, the chapter contends that the Disney Alices emerge as complex conceptual personae who both reflect and reshape the ethical and political imaginaries of the posthuman predicament.