ABSTRACT
In eXistenZ the game-pods are presented with clear sexual connotations. This sexual explicitness, however, is to be found in their use rather than in their skin. Along with the eroticism of touching the game-pods, which is implicit when the game-player Allegra Geller stimulates them in order to turn them on for each game, the procedure of introducing their umbilical cords or the mini-game-pods into the player’s bioports (orifices on their spine) is relevant. There is a power of penetration that is clearly a masculine attribute, which in this case happens in a male body, thus fertilizing him in a perverse manner. On the other hand, when looking at the complexion of the game-pod’s skin, it suggests that their gender is somehow undefined. If the recesses, nipplelike protrusions, as well as the colour and lack of muscular structure seem female, the impenetrability and resistance of the skin is more likely to be male.37 In popular thought, which is still very much the result of bourgeois conceptions of skin, the female epidermis is determined by notions of smoothness, but also by a dialectical understanding between protection and symbolic transparency. Conversely, male skin has been tendentiously more concerned with thickness and resistance, consistency and solidity of its internal flesh. Cronenberg’s neoplasms are rather ambiguous as they appear to be male and female simultaneously. What is also confusing is the fact that, due to their dual object-animal condition,
they appear to be at the same time abstract and figurative. They recall Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures from the 1960s, which are also abstractionist in their language, but evoke an inherent bodily eroticism through the figural expression of their flesh. Differing from the modernist obsession with abstraction and gender neutrality that affected a lot of twentieth-century design, the expression of flesh in Bourgeois and Cronenberg’s neoplasms assumes its animal background, and with it its gender. So, the sexual ambivalence of neoplasms is definitely neither a recognition of them being ‘neuter’, nor can it be explained through the traditional feminist discourse on gender difference.38 I risk being superficial here, as this is too complex and profound a theme to be handled in so few lines. However, it is worth advancing with the speculation that the ‘neoplasmatic’ identity of Cronenberg’s gamepods, and thus of other synthetic neoplasms, is based on an assumption that a new understanding of gender difference is required, including multigendered and androgynous conditions, or perhaps genderlessness, or even a third and completely new gender altogether. Perhaps Haraway was right when she argued for a post-gendered world, one in which synthetic neoplasms would clearly find a place.39
