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PART III
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PART III Posthuman Embodiment: Deviant Bodies, Desire, and Feminist Politics [T]he human has been reduced to a moment, but not an evolutionary moment: it is a moment of flesh that interrupts a more intimate relation between body and machine. —Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Posthuman Bodies For it is a production, usually in response to a request, to come out or write in the name of an identity which, once produced, sometimes functions as a politically efficacious phantasm. . . . [I]dentity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. —Judith Butler, ‘‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’’ Bodies are produced at the intersections of technology, race, class, and gender. Within science fiction, social power is often sexualized, while the narrative drive focuses on other aspects that do not thematize gender hierarchies. The texts I examine here—Richard Calder’s Dead Girls, Octavia E. Butler’s Imago and Wild Seed, and Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man —emphasize sexual difference and the process of regulating desires for ‘‘unfamiliar’’ bodies by declaring them as perverse. The different regimes depicted share an obsession with defining the ‘‘normative’’ versus the ‘‘deviant ,’’ which Foucault has defined as crucial for sexual regulation in Western history. If we consider sexuality and desire as parts of posthuman existence , how do we understand desire within changing technologies of the gendered body? How do feminist (gender) politics translate into fiction, 178 POSTHUMAN EMBODIMENT and what part does desire play? Can desire and the sexual subjects it creates be separated from politics of representation? If feminists understand representations to be irrevocably connected to realities, and fantasy is that which we imagine, how do feminists read the projection of desire onto (female) future bodies? Cyborg feminism takes into account the effects of technology and capitalism on the reconstruction of bodies and identities. It focuses on technological interventions that give us bodies whose ‘‘natural’’ gender/sex is modified and redefined. This is a tendency that Richard Calder also explores in his fiction. Aside from debating technology’s denaturalization of bodies, how do we conceptualize alternative classifications of gender and sexuality not modified by technology? Octavia Butler and Melissa Scott speculate on our response to the materiality of the alien body, which challenges our naturalized binary sex/gender system. The body as the basis for experience is reinserted into the discussion of the correlation of sex/ gender/sexuality and identities, but with at times unsettling and destabilizing phenomenological representations. Technologies of Dystopia Technology has always been controversial in feminist theory and politics. In 1970, radical feminist author Shulamith Firestone, in her book The Dialectic of Sex, called for the complete embrace of technology (especially in terms of reproduction) in order to achieve women’s liberation. Later, ecofeminists and cultural feminists rejected any form of modern technology as an instrument of patriarchal control. Therefore, technology and its implications for feminist politics are at the core of the discourse on imaginary utopian futures. Feminist writers explore different positions in their utopian/dystopian texts. The antitechnology cultural feminist stand was strong in the 1970s in works such as Sally Miller Gearheart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971). A feminist skepticism towards any totalizing concept of gender emerged in the 1980s in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1987). Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1978) both anticipated the complex workings of technology in later feminist science fiction by exploring the advantages of feminist technologies. Cyberpunk’s explorations of technology during the 1980s [54.226.126.38] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:06 GMT) POSTHUMAN EMBODIMENT 179 were the forerunners for writers in the 1990s, who created complex feminist future visions that integrate technology. While cyberpunk is understood to have revolutionized science fiction, today’s feminist science fiction has a much broader approach to technoscience than the original cyberpunk narratives do. It seems more appropriate to speak of a trend in feminist science fiction, which (like other science fiction) has incorporated cyberpunk’s emphasis on technology. Instead of trying to make cyberpunk ‘‘more feminist,’’ these writers place cybertechnology into the context of other technologies, such as reproductive technology, cloning, bio-ecological technology, and medicine. They create explicit political narratives that do not just center...