Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction
Booth, Austin. "Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction." Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture pp. 2-40.
The Works Cited offers an excellent brief bibliographic guide to the literature (in both senses) on the topic.
From the opening of the chapter:
Women's cyberfiction exposes cyberspace to be a much more treacherous and vulnerable terrain than previously imagined, and places questions of embodiment and subjectivity in a more complex cultural context of race, history, sexuality, nation, and class.
Women's cyberfiction predates the almost exclusive male cyberpunk movement of the mid-1980s. C. L. Moore was writing about the relationships between humans and machines as early as the 1940s, and Anne McCaffrey and Alice B. Sheldon [...] were writing about cyborgs in the 1970s. As noted in the introduction [...], Samuel Delany argues that the existing cyberpunk itself is indebted to feminist science fiction as an "absent mother." [...] Women's cyberfiction functions as both part of and resistance to the larger cyberpunk culture of which it is a part [...] (p. [25]) * * *
Like the cyberpunk authors of the 1980s, today's women cyberpunk writers examine the pleasures and anxieties that accompany the dissolution of the boundaries between human and machine and between reality and virtuality [VR]. [... But] Women's cyberfiction exposes cyberpunk's treatment of the anxiety over disembodiment and the dissolution of stable, unified identity as a particularly white male anxiety, an anxiety that might be figured and experienced differently, although not necessarily beneficially, by women. In addition, unlike many male cyberpunk authors, women writers do not feminize cyberspace, nor do they figure jacking in to digital networks as heterosexual coupling. In Pat Cadigan's Synners, for example, men who wish to enter cyberspace are implanted with sockets, [... so] the male characers are the receptors, rather than the "jack" that plugs into a feminized cyberspace. (p. 26).
Subsequent sections are titled "Technologies," "Identities," and "Bodies" and cover such works as Trouble and Her Friends, Chimera; He, She and It; The Fortunate Fall, Escape Plans, Arachne, Left to His Own Devices, Bone Dance, Midnight Robber, Red Spider White Web, The City, Not Long After, Always Coming Home.
"Technologies" section deals with women's cyberfiction as often an examination of and challenge to "the very definition of technology, exposing the stories we tell about technology, what technology is for, and even what constitutes technology as just that — stories" (p. 30). Getting more specific (and arguably backing off from a "hard, ontological" post-Structuralism, Booth notes that the narratives Reload deals with
expose definitions of technology as constructions that work to exclude what women do and redefine technology to include communication, emotion, and magic. Jewelle Gomez's "Lynxx and Strand" and James Tiptree Jr.'s Up the Walls of the World, for example, describe women who are able to merge or cross subjective boundaries. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels and many of Pat Cadigan's works also portray characters who possess a technology-enhanced sense of empathy. These works draw connections between technology, magic, and spiritualism. Emmma Bull's Bone Dance and Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber combine artificial intelligence, cyborgs, and Voudon. And both Le Guin's Always Coming Home and Misha's Red Spider White Web show intersections between Native American mysticism and technoculture. In these works information technology is an integrated part of the natural world, not set in opposition to it. (pp. 30-31)
"Identities" notes VR used "to explore themes of difference in Chimera and the parallel in He, She and It between "the treatment of cyborgs in technoculture with the treatment of Jews in Renaissance Prague," the site of the original Golem stories (p. 31). There is a quick survey of female cyborgs and robots from "Helen O'Loy" through novels like The Silver Metal Lover and The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid and from "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" and "No Woman Born" to The Silent City, where "the cyborg Elisa goes so far as to kill her maker" (p. 32).
"Female cyborgs in women's cyberfiction represent both the triumph of a male technological culture (the machine-woman as object) and the triumphant emergence of the female technology user of the future who upsets the alignment of masculinity with technology. Indeed, the cyborg in women's cyberfiction serves as an image for this contest over the meanings or implications of technoculture for women" (pp. 32-33).
"Bodies" makes the very important point that cyberpunk written by men tends "to privilege disembodiment over embodiment," indulging the desire "to escape the body through technological transcendence" (p. 34). Contrasts this with women's works such as Synners and the insistence that people are always embodied, and in bodies marked by gender and race. "The refusal to give up the body also reflects these [female] author's understanding of the complexity of the relationship between embodiment and cyberspace. In women's cyberfiction the virtual body is not imagined as completely separate or separable from the physical/material body" (p. 36) — i.e., nothing like the technological "separable soul" — our use of the folklore term — of much male-written cyberpunk and other SF.
RDE, finishing, 5Jul23, 27Jul23
