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" Virtual bodies : "
Calvert, Bronwen.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1093265
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| Doc. No
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TLets273464
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| Main Entry
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Calvert, Bronwen.
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| Title & Author
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Virtual bodies :\ Calvert, Bronwen.
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| College
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University of East Anglia
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| Date
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2002
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| student score
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2002
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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This thesis offers a new way of reading narratives of cyberpunk fiction. Itundertakes to re-evaluate cyberpunk fiction according to a feminist criticism that takesdirection from Donna Haraway's cyborg politics and Eve Sedgwick's "deconstructive"reading. Both cyberpunk fiction and its criticism are read "deconstructively" in order tocontest the notion that cyberpunk fiction cannot productively be read for feminism. Therepresentation of embodiment and technology in cyberpunk narratives is customarily readin terms of a Cartesian opposition of body and mind, in which the materiality of femalebodies is contrasted with the virtuality of male minds. The feminist analysis in this thesisfocuses upon the way in which cyberpunk narratives can be seen to problematise bothmateriality and virtuality, embodiment and technology.Four novels are examined in detail: William Gibson's Neuromancer, PatCadigan's Synners, Marge Piercy's Body of Glass, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Ineach narrative, conventions of cyberpunk fiction are seen to be subverted and contested.Gibson's novel, which has become accepted as the template of "classic", masculinistcyberpunk fiction, is revealed through this feminist analysis as a narrative which isprofoundly ambivalent in its depictions of technologised male and female bodies. Thisambivalence continues in the versions of cyberpunk offered by Cadigan, Piercy, andStephenson. These readings illuminate the way cyberpunk narratives work to deconstructbinary oppositions through their explorations of gendered bodies, technology, virtuality,and disembodiment. The deconstruction, disruption and dismantling of binarisms areconceptualised in the image of the unnaturally embodied cyborg, which unites genderedembodiment and technological augmentation in an imaginary body.
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| Subject
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Feminism
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| Added Entry
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University of East Anglia
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