A Posthumanist Reconfiguration of Moral Agency: Ecologically Distributed Vitality and the Intra-Active Emergence of the More-Than-Human in Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

Abstract

This paper argues that Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl destabilizes the anthropocentric foundations of moral agency by staging their inadequacy against a bioengineered subject they were structurally designed to exclude. Through a sustained textual analysis of Emiko—a "New Person" engineered for servile compliance, legally classified as property, and systematically denied political recognition—this article demonstrates that the Kantian criteria of rational autonomy and the Arendtian criterion of recognized speech are exposed as historically contingent mechanisms of exclusion rather than ontological thresholds of moral worth. Emiko's somatic resistance, affective interiority, and capacity for self-directed action materialize a form of agency that the anthropocentric tradition cannot accommodate. Furthermore, the article argues that the novel distributes causality across a network of other-than-human actants—including rising sea levels, calorie plagues, megodonts, and feral engineered organisms—drawing on Jane Bennett’s thing-power, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and Cary Wolfe’s posthuman decentering to reveal how ecological entanglement renders the sovereign human subject ontologically untenable.