Artificial corporalities for a posthuman future: deconstructing romantic love

The parodic story Sad End by Patricia Esteban Erlés does not answer to reader expectations on several levels: both in terms of literary genre—playing with the combination of a classic romantic comedy film and a science-fiction storyline—and in terms of the gender binary system. Moving away from the long tradition inWestern prospective literature of artificial women, this short fiction presents the non-human body as a figure of potentiality when it comes to imagining alternative subjectivities in Western culture. It also opens us to the possibility of seriously considering other entities—organic or not—as cognitive partners and collaborators in the formation of knowledge about the world.