This paper compares AI embodiment in Spike Jonze’s film Her and Kim Bo-young’s novella How Alike Are We? Both works are similar in that they ask whether intelligence and ethical relation can be sustained without a body. The study mobilizes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which foregrounds the primacy of perception and intercorporeality and Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, which exposes the instability of human-machine boundaries to closely compare the two works. The study advances three claims. First, Her stages disembodiment as a condition that expands cognition while weakening reciprocal presence, since a voice that scales beyond place and time cannot fully share sensorimotor attention, which intimate relation requires. Second, How Alike Are We? shows that embodied mediation, realized through proprioception, vulnerability, and public legibility, furnishes pre reflective know how that orients consciousness toward the world and others, thereby supporting recognition that remains fragile in purely virtual forms. Third, the media forms themselves regulate how embodiment is thinkable, as film choreographs voice, framing, and off screen space to render absence palpable, while the novella’s interior focalization and narrative tempo model bodily schemas that guide action and judgment. By integrating phenomenology with feminist posthumanism, the study aims to develop a model of embodiment that maps tradeoffs between cognitive reach and relational depth and clarify when and why the body matters for intelligence across literary and cinematic representation.

Authors:
Minjeon Go, Dankook University, South Korea

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Minjeon Go is currently a research professor in the Institute of Humanities at Dankook University in the Republic of Korea

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