Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought

5. The Anatomy of Dystopia

5. The Anatomy of Dystopia Female Technobodies and the Death of Desire in Richard Calder’s Dead Girls [A]n apparatus of gender organizes the power relations manifest in the various engagements between bodies and technologies. . . . Gender . . . is both a determining cultural condition and a social consequence of technological deployment. —Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body ‘‘L’Eve Future, and their descendents, the Lilim, retain in themselves a model of the quantum field, a model of creation, a bridge, if you like, between this world and the mind of God.’’ —Toxicophilous, Dead Girls T he beginning of the new millennium is defined by globalization —in all its diverse and conflicting manifestations. While Western superpowers reinforce their dominant position politically and economically, one aspect of leftist discourse is concerned with the ramifications of a technologized globalization that reinscribes power relations into racialized and gendered bodies. Feminist voices point to the invasion of the female body and its social environment by technology and call for the examination of what Anne Balsamo terms ‘‘technologies of the gendered body.’’ Since globalization is driven by technology, late capitalism is defined by the commodification of biotechnologies and research. Therefore, a feminist debate without a critical examination of technoscience is incomplete . As a genre defined by its relationship to technology as well as by its futuristic framework, science fiction is understood as a cultural arena that explores the anxieties of the human/machine interface . The subgenre of feminist science fiction creates representations of the female body within technoscientific relations and explores possible subversive political identities that might develop within those rep- 184 POSTHUMAN EMBODIMENT resentations. The ambivalent and diverse portrayals of female bodies within feminist science fiction point to the contradictory effects technology has on women’s lives and to the continual necessity to explore conflicting positions within this debate. A good example of ambivalent representations of female bodies modified by technology can be found in Richard Calder’s science fiction novel Dead Girls (1992),1 the first of his Dead trilogy.2 While the British author usually is not considered to be a feminist writer, his consistent focus on denaturalized female bodies and desires within a technologized future poses questions of possible female posthuman subjectivities . Calder creates a dystopian vision of posthuman embodiment with his life-size ‘‘dolls’’: young girls infected with a nanovirus who transform into mechanical automata that seduce and infest men, dooming humankind to gradual extinction. The story is organized around Enlightenment ideology’s conflicting binaries of modern/postmodern culture, West/East, and colonialism/postcolonialism, which pervade every aspect of the narrative. Strategically set in Great Britain and Thailand, Dead Girls depicts a posthuman, consumer-driven world that is dominated by wars over contested social and political boundaries (most notably between human and machine) that are structured by sexual and racial difference. The racialized female body is commodi fied through the mass production of ‘‘gynoids,’’ lifelike dolls designed for male sexual pleasure. Through the story of Primavera, a girl-turned-machine, and her human-boy lover, Iggy, we learn of the second-generation dolls’ transformation from humans into machines and of the attempts of fascist humanists to eradicate anything not human. Cyborg feminism contends that technoscience destabilizes the essential dualism of reason versus nature. The denaturalization of bodies and thus of identities, though dangerous and harmful in many ways, offers moments of disruption with potentially liberating new constellations based in partiality. When we read science fiction texts from this vantage point, the question that becomes paramount is whether feminist subjectivity is facilitated by technology. Does gendered power disappear between nonessential bodies? Can desire and sexual relations be transformed by technology? The body’s (gendered) affiliation with technology is at the center of much of cyberpunk fiction although most of these texts create a normative male subject. Cyberpunk’s decentered subject is the (usually male) console cowboy navigating both the ma- THE ANATOMY OF DYSTOPIA 185 terial realities of the urban ‘‘Sprawl’’ and, more significantly, the abstract realm of infinite cyberspace.3 These two spaces mirror an inherent tension within cyberpunk around the body’s role in constituting a postmodern subjectivity: an ‘‘oscillation . . . between a biological-determinist view of the body and a turn to technological and cybernetic means in order to escape such determination’’ (Foster, ‘‘Meat Puppets’’ 11). This oscillation is ‘‘gendercoded in the...