Beyond the human : posthumanism and the radical updates of the girl's bildungsroman

Abstract

This dissertation conceptualizes the posthumanist Girl’s Bildungsroman as an emergent genre of female coming-of-age narratives that reimagines identities beyond the constraints of humanism, patriarchy, and linear development. Contrasting the classical Bildungsroman—which charts a normative path toward womanhood through psychological maturation, heteronormative romance, and domestic containment—this study examines how Poor Things (2023) and Titane (2021) radically subvert these conventions. The female protagonists in both films, Bella and Alexia, forge hybrid subjectivities, nonlinear trajectories, and multispecies kinships that dissolve the boundaries between human, animal, and machine. Drawing on Braidotti’s concepts of zoe and potentia, Haraway’s concepts of cyborg and oddkinship, Kochhar-Lindgren’s technologics, Halberstam’s queer temporality and Butler’s gender performativity, this dissertation proposes an integrated posthumanist framework to interrogate the humanist, anthropocentric and patriarchal assumptions embedded in the classical Bildungsroman. Bella and Alexia exemplify zoe-driven becoming: their posthumanist transformations—through trauma, resurrection, and techno-organic embodiment—bypass gendered conditioning and linear development, forging relational, non-binary pathways of agency and affirmative ethics. Through close textual and aesthetic analysis, this study demonstrates how Titane’s body horror and Poor Things’ surrealist experimentation materialize the protagonists’ posthumanist identities and alternate kinships. That said, residual humanist elements—such as Bella’s medical pursuit and Alexia’s maternal legacy—reveal that posthumanist becoming is not a total rupture from humanism, but a negotiated, evolving terrain. By intersecting posthumanist theories with the Girl’s Bildungsroman, this dissertation fills a scholarly gap and offers a critical framework for understanding feminine subjectivity in an entangled, post-anthropocentric world. It establishes Poor Things and Titane as pioneering examples of the posthumanist Girl’s Bildungsroman—a genre that resists closure, embraces multiplicity, and reimagines what it means to become in the posthuman age.