ABSTRACT
Rumor has it that cyberpunk is dead, the victim of its own failure to live up to its extravagant pretensions (Easterbrook, “Arc” 378). Initially touted as an imaginative engagement with the postmodem condition, cyberpunk envisions human consciousness inhabiting electronic spaces, blurring the boundary between human and machine in the process. Cyberpunk’s deconstruction of the human body first appeared to signal a revolution in political art. However, closer examinations of the movement have revealed that its politics are anything but revolutionary. In his study of William Gibson’s quintessential Neuromancer (1984), Neil Easterbrook concludes that the novel’s worldview is “wed to exploitive technologies, obeisance to authority, and the effluence of fashion” (391). Furthermore, Nicola Nixon points out that cyberpunk is guilty of a “peculiar avoidance of rather obvious and immediate political SF precursors,” namely, the feminist SF of the 1970s and 1980s and its exploration of gender relations (222). Cyberpunks are almost invariably male-hypermasculine ones at that-and, as a rule, they have little time for issues of sexual politics. As Veronica Hollinger has observed, cyberpunk “is written for the most part by a small number of white middleclass men, many of whom, inexplicably, live in Texas” (“Cybernetic” 207). It is these writers, and the critics who analyze their work, who have declared cyberpunk defunct. Apparently, however, not everyone agrees with this diagnosis. In the last
few years, several women novelists have arrived on the cyberpunk scene, and a flicker of life has reappeared in this otherwise moribund movement. This emergent body of work, which I will call “feminist cyberpunk” to distinguish it from earlier (masculinist) cyberpunk, blends the conventions of cyberpunk with the political savvy of feminist sf. This revolutionary blend points out new avenues for feminist sf and, ultimately, for feminist theory. Feminist cyberpunk envisions something that feminist theory badly needs: fragmented subjects who can, despite their multiple positionings, negotiate and succeed in a high-tech world. Literary theorist Robert Hodge points out that, even while they function as “systems of control which limit semiosis and the free production of meaning,” genres also have the potential to become “the site of genuine resistance and a powerful extension of
meaning” (31). Women writers have begun to use cyberpunk for just that purpose, resisting the conservative politics of their masculinist predecessors, grappling with the realities of technology, and exploring new forms for the subject of feminism. Masculinist cyberpunk is very much a boys’ club. The protagonists of
cyberpunk novels are nearly always male. When women do appear, they hardly ever transcend feminine stereotypes. In the writings of the 80s, strong women characters are hard to find. Molly, the mirror-shaded and razorfingered assassin who appears in Neuromancer and its sequel Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), and Sarah, an assassin in Walter Jon William’s Hardwired (1989), are two rare examples. But even Molly and Sarah, as Nixon argues, have been “effectively depoliticized and sapped of any revolutionary energy” (222). Tough though they may be, these characters aren’t feminists. Sarah’s only concern is making money and, when Molly becomes a bodyguard for a young girl, she is subsumed into a more acceptable quasi-maternal role (Nixon 223). Even when the central protagonist is female, as is the case with Laura Webster in Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988), it is difficult to see her as a heroine. Laura is rather helpless, “perpetually in need of rescue from prisons, would-be assassins, and terrorists” (Nixon 223). This is not a woman who pits her wits and hardware against the world; she is no feminist cyberpunk role-model. And beyond Laura, Molly, and Sarah, there are precious few female characters at all in cyberpunk. The one consistent exception to this rule has been the work of Pat
Cadigan, the sole woman novelist in the cyberpunk canon. Strong female characters like Allie in Mindplayers (1987) and Gina and Sam-I-Am in Synners (1990) are an important part of Cadigan’s work. However, despite her admirable characters, Cadigan never fully engages with feminist concerns. Indeed, Jenny Wolmark argues that “gender relations are sidestepped by Cadigan” (125). Synners, in particular, frequently conflates technology and masculinity, leaving intact the typical cyberpunk depiction of women as Other. Her analysis of Synners leads Wolmark to conclude that “cyberpunk is fairly intractable as far as the representation of gender relations is concerned” (Aliens 126). Wolmark’s dismissal of cyberpunk as a forum for feminist concerns seems
a little too hasty. While it is true that Cadigan replicates certain features of traditional cyberpunk and generally avoids overt feminism, she nevertheless does sometimes manage to subvert cyberpunk’s masculinist conventions in important ways. Even if she hadn’t, it would be unwise to abandon the entire movement simply because one woman writer fails to incite a feminist revolution. Feminist sf cannot afford to dismiss the potential of cyberpunk. Women sf writers came into their own in the 70s and 80s but, as Joan
Gordon points out, feminist sf has, in the past, been “characterized by soft rather than hard science, by emphasis on character and interpersonal relations” (197). Often, feminist sf replicates the cultural stereotype that equates technology with masculinity. Many feminist utopias-Sally Miller
Gearhart’s Wanderground (1979), for example-depict pastoral worlds where women live in harmony with nature. Conversely, feminist dystopias often take as their starting point an oppressive patriarchal order obsessed with the technologies of war. Some forms of biological science are tolerated-as in Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986)—but hard science is frequently demonized, as if it were inevitably and eternally bound to patriarchy and oppression. The tendency to avoid science also occurs in theoretical discussions of
feminist sf. Some theorists look at feminist sf with an eye towards recuperating certain works from the debilitating stigma of genre fiction. Towards this end, Marleen Barr has coined the term “feminist fabulation,” an umbrella concept that includes “feminist speculative fiction and feminist mainstream works by both men and women” (10). These works are united in that they all take “the insights of this century’s waves of feminism as fictional points of departure” (11). While this classification is useful in many ways, it is limiting in others. In defending her choice of the term “feminist fabulation” over “feminist sf,” Barr argues that “‘science,’ in the sense of technology, should be replaced by a term which has social connotations and focuses upon new sex roles, not new hardware” (5). However, the exchange that Barr imagines is not a simple replacement. As historians of science like Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding have aptly demonstrated, gender and science are not mutually exclusive categories. For example, one of the most common metaphors of modem science is the masculine pursuit of the feminized (and sexualized) object of “Mother” Nature.1 In addition, science has been and is frequently used to justify differences between the sexes. Given these observations, it would appear that new hardware and new sex roles are not completely independent achievements. Hence, taking the science out of feminist sf strips the genre of its power to critique and reimagine the intersections of technology and gender. Sf provides a space for theorizing the future, near and far, and for imagining strategies for survival. Ignoring or dismissing the connections between gender and science will only cripple us as we attempt to negotiate an increasingly high-tech world. It is for this reason that cyberpunk can be useful to feminist visionaries. As Gordon puts it, “cyberpunk embraces technology” (199). Since any credible version of the near future includes computer-based technologies, cyberpunk opens up a space for feminists to imagine how “to shape and manage our futures rather than escape them” (Gordon 199). Cyberpunk charts a course between utopia and dystopia. Most often set
in the near future, cyberpunk imagines a world where technology is a tool of both oppression and liberation. Poverty is pervasive in cyberpunk, and technological resources are expensive luxuries. Those without access to computers are effectively kept in the underclass. New cyberpunk writers like Mary Rosenblum and Laura Mixon depict female characters who find ways to work around or within the system. Ruby Kubick, the protagonist of Mixon’s Glass Houses (1992), supports herself and her lover by projecting
her consciousness into robot waldos and hauling in salvage from places too dangerous to go in person. Rosenblum’s Chimera (1993) follows Jewel Martina as she learns the nuances of electronic business. These characters appropriate and wield the technological tools necessary for survival. These technically capable heroines are what Donna Haraway has called
cyborgs, “hybrid(s) of machine and organism” (149). Now, the cyborg metaphor has enhanced and expanded many discussions of cyberpunk, and a paper on this topic would hardly be complete without some reference to Haraway’s work. Yet what is often ignored about the cyborg is that it arose out of Haraway’s desire “to build a political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (149). Masculinist cyberpunk is faithful to none of these. In fact, one might even say that it builds itself in opposition to these concepts. That Haraway’s cyborg has become the metaphor of choice for such a movement is both strange and ironic. This apparent contradiction resolves itself when one considers that there
is more than one way to be a cyborg. As Haraway says:
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet… about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
