Bleeding Chrome: Technology and the Vulnerable Body in Feminist Post-Cyberpunk Science Fiction

Abstract

<p> Emerging out of feminist and cyberpunk science fiction of the 1980s, feminist post-cyberpunk SF is a subgenre that is rife with anxieties over novel technologies (such as cloning, genetically modified foods, nanotechnology, virtual reality, telepresence, and artificial intelligence), as they infiltrate daily life and threaten to transform the definition of human being. In this project, Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, Tricia Sullivan's Maul, and Laura Mixon's Proxies are read as indicative examples of feminist post-cyberpunk, as they all give voice to the increasing shared cultural preoccupation with technology and the body. The thesis is particularly interested in the way these texts expose - and insist upon - the vulnerability of the fleshy body, rather than perpetuate notions of technophilia and technological transcendence. Drawing on the (corporeal) feminist theory of Elizabeth Grosz and Margrit Shildrick (in particular her theorization of the vulnerable body), and on the feminist posthumanist work of N. Katherine Hayles and Elaine Graham, this thesis focuses attention on issues of technological embodiment and the changing definition of what constitutes human corporeal experience and embodiment. Ultimately, the thesis proposes that feminist post-cyberpunk condemns the exploitation and control of, what Shildrick terms, the "visibly vulnerable" body and insists on recognizing the vulnerability of the flesh as a defining trait of what constitutes human being.</p>