In the novel, Emiko brings to light the contradictions of the humanist prejudices inherent in anti-posthuman discourse, as she is discriminated against by nearly every character in the novel for being “non-human.”[…] Like Victor Frankenstein’s creature and its progeny, Emiko is a deeply maligned technoscientific posthuman; she therefore provides a lesson in hospitality as theorized by Jacques Derrida in his later work—the objective of welcoming alterity (the other), no matter who or what it might be. The hard lesson of hospitality in The Windup Girl is one of working through the ideology of the “human being” in order to welcome the new subjectivities that have been wrought through technoscience. To be clear, the reader is called upon to identify with Emiko and her plight by relinquishing a rigid notion of the “human being” and cultivating hospitality to her as a being who is “new” only from a position invested in preserving the conventional liberal-humanist subject.

Subject to racial discrimination and under a state of constant uncertainty and competition, Emiko’s and Hock Seng’s narratives are closely linked in their political exclusion as illegal aliens and their reduction to replaceable labor. […] Hock Seng is thus positioned as migrant labor and, like Emiko, a refugee who must live in transit while denied social and political agency. By exploring these diverse characters as they are affected by different political, social, and economic positions, The Windup Girl’s use of racial representations recognizes the complex history of race relations in Thailand, fractuting an Orientalist construction of Asia as a homogeneous region. 

[NOTA: Hock Seng es un trabajador, poseedor de una ‘yellow card’, una identificación con movilidad limitada; se trata de un antiguo hombre de negocios chino exiliado de Malasia tras una purga de la minoría china].

Although the Japanese genetically engineer all kinds of workers to supplement their low population, including monstrous soldiers and multi-armed factory laborers, the only actual “new people” we see directly in the novel are the “windup” girls, who work as secretaries, translators, and sex toys. Since Emiko was abandoned by her Japanese master in Thailand (it was cheaper to leave her there than fly her home, as if she were excessive baggage), her only choice is to work as a prostitute. Called “windups” because they are engineered to move like an old-fashioned wind-up toy with jerky motions, these girls stand out in a crowd if they move. Yet they also have superior resistance to human diseases, superhuman speed, and beautiful, virtually pore-less, skin. Of course, the lack of pores means that they cannot sweat, so they overheat terribly, a distinct disadvantage in the tropics of Thailand that have become even hotter with global warming. Still, in the genetic warfare of Bacigalupi's world, they have a great advantage, for the moment, when it comes to surviving filth, pollution, and bodily waste.

Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2009), while decidedly dystopian, offer more ambiguous conclusions that suggest the possibility of a utopian future,  one  that may or may  not  include the corporation—or humans. Bacigalupi’s and Winterson’s use of a literal cyborg as the main characters for their critical dystopian novels—Emiko and Spike, respectively—produces optimism in the narrative, raising the question of whether the cyborg might be the key to saving the corporation and humanity alongside it.