Sex-Bots Revisited: Bioethics and Parody in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015)

Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's most celebrated and iconic writers, has shown an interest in exploring issues relevant to contemporary audiences in her fiction since the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Atwood's diverse body of literary work addresses important current concerns such as gender inequality, technology, consumerism, and the climate crisis. In her more recent dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last (2015), Atwood imagines the US as a wasteland devastated by economic crisis. Within this fictional landscape, a social experiment emerges as a seemingly ideal social model, while the survivors must navigate new and complex circumstances. The novel contains several instances of parody and satirical commentary on contemporary consumerist practices and the obsession with technology and artificiality. Sex dolls, referred to as prostibots in The Heart Goes Last, play a pivotal role in Atwood's exploration of technological progress and its implications for humanity. Drawing on theories of posthumanism, bioethics, and narratology, this paper aims to analyse Atwood's inherently parodic construction of sex dolls as Gothic embodiments of artificial others. These prostibots not only redefine what it means to be human but also draw attention to the anxieties associated with the emergence of posthuman replicas, which, in turn, raise various biological and ethical issues.