Unruly Bodies and Astral Corporealities in Science Fiction Cinema and Television Series

This special issue examines how science fiction cinema and television represent forms of embodiment that exceed conventional models of identity. The essays collected here address bodies marked by technological mediation, altered materiality, disability, gender variance, monstrosity, affective unruliness, and cosmic displacement. In each case, the body becomes a critical surface on which cultural assumptions about value, vulnerability and recognition are inscribed. As Balirano and Parlati (2024) argue, corporeality should be understood as inherently plural, shaped by multiple forms of specificity that resist reduction to a single normative model. This perspective is particularly productive for science fiction, a genre that persistently reimagines embodiment through technological transformation, posthuman becoming, and encounters with radical alterity.