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Bodies that (don't) matter: feminist cyberpunk and transgressions of bodily boundaries
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Ertung, Ceylan |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | Science Fiction, through its flexible nature provides a most suitable medium for writers to speculate on social, political, linguistic and cultural issues and to invent new worlds, new universes from where they can examine the present day concerns and experiment with new alternatives. Although Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus has been claimed by many as the first science fiction novel, until the 1970s science fiction had been a predominantly male authored genre. In the 1970s, however, feminist science fiction emerged as a separate and highly influential genre. Cyberpunk literature, a sub-genre of science fiction, is a phenomenon of the 1980s and it addresses the dissolution of the subject through the figure of the cyborg, a humanmachine coupling alongside the electronically constituted and disembodied reality of cyberspace. The author whose work is analyzed in this paper, namely, Pat Cadigan and her 1991 novel Synners, questions whether the bodily transgressions of the cyborg and the bodiless space of virtual reality present women with an emancipatory space where the traditional gender dichotomies are nonexistent, as it was suggested by the cyberfeminists of the early 1990s. The answer Cadigan offers is that although through these new factual and fictional technologies sexual identity can be altered, rendered multiple and fluid, the society remains to be hierarchical and bifurcated. As Cadigan’s novel shows, in spite of its revolutionary promise as a gender free space, cyberculture, in its actual manifestations and literary representations, duplicates the power dynamics of sexist and racist practices perpetuating inequality. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 28 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.edebiyatdergisi.hacettepe.edu.tr/index.php/EFD/article/download/501/361 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://dergipark.org.tr/download/article-file/613144 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
