ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways in which queer theory can help us to understand how questions of sexuality are represented in cyberpunk. Beginning with cyberpunk’s paradigmatic text, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the chapter demonstrates multiple ways in which queer theoretically-informed readings can aid in understanding the ways in which this text is both anxious about sexuality and gender and also always already (proto)queer. The chapter then asks how LGBT writers approach cyberpunk’s categorical potential to investigate the multiply queering possibilities of the mode. Using Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends and Kelley Eskride’s Solitaire as case studies, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which the two novels invoke the mode in very different ways in order to queer characters, societies, virtual realities, and cyberpunk itself. Finally, the chapter looks at some more recent examples of queer cyberpunk, including works by Mario Acevedos, Nisi Shawl, and Janelle Monáe, to see how contemporary cultural products are deploying cyberpunk’s potential for queerness and how such works reflect changes in cultural conceptions and expectation of sexuality and gender which have themselves been influenced by queer theory and queer politics.
