Post-Embodied Forms

Narrative, Body, and Performance across East Asia and Its Diasporas

In aespa’s recent WDA lore, the group’s artificial counterparts appear to displace or outlive the human idols, unsettling the distinction between the embodied performer and her reproducible image. In Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, artificial perception reorganizes the boundaries of care, desire, and agency. On China’s 2026 Spring Festival Gala stage, humanoid robots performing martial arts alongside children transform bodily virtuosity into a national spectacle of technological futurity. Meanwhile, in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s desire to become vegetal imagines another departure from normative embodiment: the human body is reoriented toward plant life, photosynthesis, and stillness. Across these works, the body becomes artificial, vegetal, reproducible, replaceable, or networked.

This virtual seminar invites papers on “post-embodied forms” across East Asian and East Asian diasporic literature, performance, film, television, digital media, and popular culture. By “post-embodied,” we refer to cultural forms in which embodiment is reorganized across human performers, artificial agents, plants, animals, machines, screens, platforms, data, environments, and spectators. The body persists, but no longer as a self-contained or exclusively human form.

We ask how literature and media imagine embodiment beyond inherited distinctions between human and nonhuman, organic and technological, material and virtual. How do fiction, film, and television narrate artificial perception, vegetal transformation, algorithmic intimacy, distributed agency, or nonhuman modes of consciousness? How do K-pop, dance, theatre, and televised spectacle relocate performance across choreography, avatar, camera, machine, and platform? When bodies are copied, transformed, or dispersed, what happens to liveness, labor, and authenticity? How do apparently autonomous avatars, robots, or artificial agents obscure the performers, programmers, annotators, choreographers, and care workers whose labor sustains them? Possible theoretical approaches include posthumanism, new materialism, cyborg feminism, critical plant studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, performance theory, affect theory, media archaeology, platform studies, and theories of simulacra and hyperreality. We especially welcome papers that place literary analysis in conversation with performance, media, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies.

By bringing literary, visual, environmental, and performance-based approaches into conversation, this seminar asks what the body becomes when embodiment is distributed beyond the singular human form.