Traces of posthumanism in cinema: A study in the context of film genres

Today's technological advances and social changes necessitate a reconsideration of the human relationship with the nonhuman. This situation points to posthumanism, one of the most recent conceptual frameworks currently under discussion. Posthumanism is a broad field of research that aims to rethink humans' relationship with technology, nature, other living things, and ethical responsibilities by critiquing anthropocentrism. Discussing the boundaries between humans and nonhumans brings a critical perspective to traditional perceptions of normal or natural, enabling posthumanist approaches to be explored across political, cultural, and artistic dimensions. This approach, which has been explored in fields such as philosophy, literature, science, technology, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, and media, also creates a new field of research in cinema. This study aims to analyze how these transformations are represented in genre cinema and how these representations relate to ethics, politics, existence, and technology. This research aims to reveal the transformative impact of the posthumanist approach on the narrative structures, character motivations, and visual styles of these genres. Posthumanist cinema, a cinematic universe where ethical and existential questions of the relationships between human and nonhuman beings come to the fore, forms the focus of this study. The fundamental research question is how posthumanist cinema reshapes the concepts of subjectivity and relationality in genre cinema and the visual and narrative tools it uses to represent technological, biological, political, and ecological transformations. The elements to be examined in the films are determined by the fundamental principles of posthumanism: inclusivity, rejection of exceptionalism, and decentering. This study adopts a case study method, a qualitative research design, to examine posthumanist cinema across genres. Within this scope, films featuring posthumanist approaches were selected and analyzed using interpretative data analysis, and the results were reported. Films from diverse genres that prominently embody posthumanist approaches constitute the research sample. These films were chosen to demonstrate how the fundamental concepts of posthumanist thought, particularly the principles of inclusivity, rejection of exceptionalism, and decentering, are addressed across genres. The data obtained as a result of the analyses were evaluated from a hermeneutic perspective and the genre-specific narrative and visual strategies of posthumanist cinema were systematically reported.