ABSTRACT
Despite the conservative gender politics of early cyberpunk literature, the possibilities for engaging with the body and technology placed the mode in conversation with cyborg feminism and its originating text, Donna J. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Drawing upon both Haraway’s cyborg politics and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on ‘assemblages’ as ways of theorizing the posthuman cyborg, this chapter explores the rise of a distinctly feminist cyberpunk that largely began in the early-1990s and opened cyberpunk fiction to ask how gendered power shifts between non-essential bodies and how desire and sexual relations are transformed by technology, in a way that early, largely masculinist, cyberpunk was ill-equipped to address. The chapter draws on feminist criticism of cyberpunk from Nicola Nixon, Anne Balsamo, and Karen Cadora, and feminist and queer fiction from Pat Cadigan, Marge Piercy, and Laura J. Mixon among others.
