Shattering and Reshaping Corporeality in Science Fiction Film and Television

Few genres have explored the body as persistently as Science Fiction, where questions of embodiment, identity and human becoming have long provided a means of interrogating the limits of the human itself (Hayles 1999; Vint 2007). In film and television, corporeality often becomes the point at which questions of identity, technology and power are made visible. Through these media, the speculative body is rarely a stable object: it is exposed to processes of alteration that challenge inherited ideas of normality/normativity and compel viewers to reconsider how humanness is defined. This special issue examines how science fiction cinema and television represent forms of embodiment that exceed conventional models of identity. The essays collected here address bodies marked by technological mediation, altered materiality, disability, gender variance, monstrosity, affective unruliness, and cosmic displacement. In each case, the body becomes a critical surface on which cultural assumptions about value, vulnerability and recognition are inscribed. As Balirano and Parlati (2024) argue, corporeality should be understood as inherently plural, shaped by multiple forms of specificity that resist reduction to a single normative model. This perspective is particularly productive for science fiction, a genre that persistently reimagines embodiment through technological transformation, posthuman becoming, and encounters with radical alterity.