| Sumario: | Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015) contributes to an ecofeminist dialogic by complicating representation through linguistic systems. I examine the novel's starship to look at the body's role in identity formation within a confining linguistic system. Moving from a singular female "I," to the plural genderless "We," the starship resists the reductive tendencies of binary systems, shifting from a definitional role as a surrogate womb to posthuman selfhood as a collective. This essay enacts a psychoanalytic reading, employing a Lacanian framework extended by Judith Butler, who examines identity systems built by social, cultural, and historical contexts. From Butler, the essay moves on to ecofeminism, considering how identity continua complicate binary identity systems without rejecting them outright, thereby effectively creating continually traversable, overlapping channels among identity nodes. Achieving selfhood through identity continua allows the ship to access the posthuman, a step that promises the ethical, sustainable future called for by ecofeminists. Fulfilling its anthropocentric body burden highlights the social, cultural, and historical obstacles barring this potential future that considers, values, and protects the "we" implicit in all living and nonliving material actors.
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