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Abstract
This dissertation explores how robot fiction uses pain and trauma to interrogate the boundaries of selfhood, embodiment, and empathy. Across a range of texts, artificial humans, though typically portrayed as immune to pain, are nonetheless depicted as undergoing suffering, bodily deconstruction, and psychological distress (trauma). These narratives use robotic bodies as symbolic vessels through which unresolved human traumas are displaced and made visible. Central to this project is the idea that violence against robots is not always simply spectacle, but a narrative tool for unmaking identity and enabling the (re)creation of the self. Drawing on Elaine Scarry’s seminal work on pain and her framework of making/unmaking, this dissertation explores the process of identity creation at sites of transference within robot narratives. Tony M. Vinci’s work with trauma and Victoria Nelson’s with transference further grounds the analysis, with additional attention directed to the transference of human anxieties and “assumed knowingness” onto emergent technologies like LLMs (colloquially referred to as “A.I.”) Through close readings of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the video game Detroit: Become Human, Park Min-gyu’s short story “Roadkill,” and Ichikawa Haruko’s manga Land of the Lustrous, this dissertation traces how violence against artificial beings in robot fiction operates as a medium for exploring posthuman identity and failed empathy. It ultimately argues that, through cycles of bodily destruction and transferred (human) trauma, artificial humans are frequently remade into subjects of empathy, agency, or transcendence.