This article was downloaded by: [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona]

On: 05 May 2015, At: 04:36

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:
Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription
information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrev20

Pandoric Dystopias in Latin American Science

Fiction: Gynoids and Virtual Women
Teresa López-Pellisa
Published online: 30 Apr 2015.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Teresa López-Pellisa (2015) Pandoric Dystopias in Latin American Science
Fiction: Gynoids and Virtual Women, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 48:1, 79-84, DOI:
10.1080/08905762.2015.1020718

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2015.1020718

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)
contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our
licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication
are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &
Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use
can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 90, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2015, 79–84

Pandoric Dystopias in Latin

American Science Fiction: Gynoids
and Virtual Women1
Downloaded by [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona] at 04:36 05 May 2015

1
This article is part of the
project “Industrias culturales
e igualdad; textos, imágenes,
públicos y valoración
Teresa López-Pellisa
económica,” funded by the Translated by Jason Weiss
Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness
(FF12012-35390).

Teresa López-Pellisa (Spain) is on the editorial board of Pasavento. Revista

de Estudios Hispánicos, and is editor-in-chief of Brumal. Revista de
Investigación sobre lo Fantástico. She is the author of Patologías de la
realidad virtual. Cibercultura y ciencia ficción (in press), and co-editor of
Ensayos de ciencia ficción y literatura fantástica (2009) and Visiones de lo
fantástico en la cultura española (1970-2012) (2014).

One of the symptoms that we can detect in literary and film texts of science
fiction is the Pandora syndrome. Anthropogenic myths (usually connected
to cosmogonic myths) narrate the origin and birth of human beings, as
well as their relations with the creator. But when we refer exclusively to the
birth of woman, parallel etiological myths arise which generally maintain
that she was created after man, and often with other kinds of materials and
techniques. The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea helps us identify and
analyze gender roles in texts where artificial women appear, but by
including the Pandora syndrome I’m trying to claim the need to combine
that story with the myth of Pandora, as a fitting analytical perspective for
dealing with those works of science fiction that revolve around the creation
of artificial women (see López-Pellisa, 2012a).
Let’s take a tour through a brief selection of Latin American stories and
novels whose themes revolve around heteronormative amorous and sexual
relations between men and gynoids, and also with virtual women (we’ll
leave aside cases of genetically engineered women and female sex dolls).

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2015 Americas Society, Inc.
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2015.1020718
 80 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

From the perspective of the Pandora syndrome, we will analyze a series of

texts with artificial women as protagonists, whose virtual nature, whether
of silicon or software, doesn’t stop them from bearing misfortune to their
Pygmalions. The myth of Pandora proposes the fabrication of artificial
female life from a truly patrilineal perspective, since Pygmalion needs the
mother-Venus in order to breathe life into his creature, and Pandora was
created by Hephaestus on orders from Zeus. Galatea is a woman angel of
the home, who brings stability to the patriarchy and happily lives her
ancillary condition beside her lover and creator, whereas Pandora reveals
herself (actively or passively) to be opposed to the men for whom she was
made and destroys their world.
Downloaded by [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona] at 04:36 05 May 2015

What do these artificial women represent? They are no more than the
projection of male narcissism which reproduces them in its onanistic fan-
tasies. If woman, as such, is no more than the fruit of a cultural construction,
the artificial woman suffers a double patriarchal subordination. Germán
Cano (2010) maintains that woman is a reflection of the narcissism and
fetishism of man, who starts with courtly love and gets as far as Hollywood,
creating female images that are no more than projections of that male
narcissism. In the following pages, I will show how those techno-iconic
projections have been transformed (or not) through the imaginary of
Latin American science fiction and literature of the fantastic.

1. Gynoids

Gynoids or female androids are not “a caricature of real women, but an

ideal image of femininity, which in extreme fantasies and in myths, man
creates for his own enjoyment” (Pedraza, 1998: 21). It is probably
nineteenth-century literature that engendered the artificial characters
who have most influenced the realm of science fiction. This period is
marked by fear of the industrial revolution and technological progress.
And if this distrust takes shape in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818),
techno-Pandoras soon appear who turn into the incarnated fears of
women’s emancipation and the luddite loathing of technological progress.
The classic precedent regarding this theme is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story
“The Sandman” (1817), where the gynoid Olympia has a Pandoric
function that has converted her into the paradigm of sinister forces in
Western culture. The Olympian techno-Pandora is distinguished by her
silence, like the one in “Horacio Kalibang o los autómatas” (1879) by the
Argentine writer Eduardo L. Holmberg, where the engineer makes a replica
of Luisa, the adolescent whom he loves, and since she does not love him in
return he has his automaton “who will love me perpetually, without change
or modification, because she will be my love engraved indelibly in the
sincere responses of her springs” (1879: 15, the italics are mine).
One of the gynoids that has most influenced the technosexual
imaginary of the West is Hadalay in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel The
 Pandoric Dystopias in Latin American Science Fiction 81

Future Eve (1886). Villiers’s influence is seen in Clemente Palma, Horacio

Quiroga, and Adolfo Bioy Casares; his work was also the inspiration for
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), based on the novel by his wife and co-
scriptwriter Thea von Harbou. But the characteristics that Holmberg’s
Fritz attributes to his gynoid are the nineteenth-century version of what
Bukowski proposed in his story “The Fuck Machine,” where the German
engineer Von Brashlitz “had made a mechanical woman. Which could
give a man more pleasure than any real woman in all of history . . . plus
with no tampax, or crap, or arguments” (1978: 180), since almost all these
texts share the same characteristics—the artifact’s beauty, submissive
personality, and durability.
Downloaded by [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona] at 04:36 05 May 2015

I would like to highlight Guillermo Samperio’s saga of gynoids, since

he presents us with a series of Galateas who coexist in harmony with
their biological companions. In “Sybil” (2002), Wendy is a gynoid who
incarnates all the fears of the freak who made her in order to subjugate
her to his control: she is unfaithful, she contracts a sexually transmitted
disease, and she ends up pregnant. The female artifacts are replicas of
real women, but the simulacrum usually negates the biological woman’s
fertility except in a few instances like this. The male creator gains the power
to generate (artificial) life, but cannot perpetuate himself among his
creatures, as happens with the artifemales in Clemente Palma’s XYZ,
Faustine in Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel, the plastic-
wrapped actresses in Kalman Barsy’s Amor portátil, or the Plastisex© in
Arreola’s “Anuncio.” But in Guillermo Samperio’s case we find an
exception and José Luis Roma’s gynoid can conceive. The engineer ends
up pardoning Wendy’s infidelity in order to raise together their techno-
daughter Sybil.
Samperio wrote another story as a sequel, where he proposes to produce
his Wendy on a larger scale like “La esposa RX-25” (2002), as a silicone
device of cybernetic eroticism: the doll RX-25 always waits for him at
home; she doesn’t scold him when he arrives late. One can even list the
advantages. You can call her any name you want; you don’t have to give
her a credit card or a cell phone; she plays chess with you; she goes with
you to all the soccer games or boxing matches; she’s not counting how
many glasses you drink.
The Mexican writer continued the saga with “Waleska, el polaco”
(2004), where a dwarf businessman requests a dwarf RX-25 model, now
that there’s a whole market which doesn’t respond to Hollywood’s
standards of beauty. Getting a sexual slave to satisfy one’s desire, without
the social repression that enslaving a human being would entail, is one of
the impulses underlying these texts. New technologies offer us the
possibility of creating custom-made female bodies through esthetic
surgery. Though sometimes they are not Galateas, but Pandoras. And if
Ibsen’s Nora was culturally programmed and managed to decode herself in
order to become emancipated through the slamming of a door, in the
 82 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

Peruvian writer José B. Adolph’s story “Hablando de cocodrilos” (1975),

the gynoid programmed specially for her user similarly abandons him with
suitcase in hand and a slam of the door, successfully freeing herself from
her binary programming.

2. Virtual Women

Virtual women are those female productions that appear immaterially in

beams of light, like ghosts or projections, and in most cases usually
perform the same functions as their gynoid and mannequin counterparts,
although there are cases where the artificial woman is a recreation of the
Downloaded by [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona] at 04:36 05 May 2015

lost woman and the dead wife, a revenant. In other cases, the recreation
lacks bodily representation because it is merely software wrapped up in
flashy hardware, as happens with Laura in La ciudad ausente (1993) by
the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia.
As a precedent to this type of simulacrum it would be worth citing
Jules Verne’s The Carpathian Castle (1892). In the novel, the engineer
Orfankik draws on a combination of cinematic and photographic devices
to generate a female proto-hologram that recovers the figure and voice of
the deceased opera singer Stilla. In the realm of Latin American literature,
we should mention Horacio Quiroga’s “El vampiro” (1935), where we
again find the double of a Hollywood actress whose Pandoric function
ends with the life of the inventor Rosales. These cinematic bodies are
“bodies that overflow with desire and, even when they disappear, once the
projection is over they leave their mark on the screen and in the viewer’s
subconscious like the residue of a visual flood” (Prado, 1998: 214).
Residues that become the remains of a narcissistic projection which is also
reflected in Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel (1940), where we
find a physical polysensory holograph. There it’s a matter of a projected
woman with whom we have no capacity to interact, and whose function is
also Pandoric, as much for its creator, Morel, as for the protagonist who
falls in love with her image.
Among examples of the virtual woman who returns as a revenant
projected by the memory of the widower/lover, I would like to mention
“En memoria de Paulina” (1948) by Adolfo Bioy Casares and “El puente”
(1975) by José B. Adolph. In the Peruvian writer’s case, Don Ramiro’s wife
is an impression, an extra-physical dimension that remains in this world
because it resides like a trace in the individual psyche of her widower.
What’s exceptional about the story lies in the fact that this virtual woman
has the capacity to reconstitute herself in atoms in order to keep up sexual
relations with the widower, while on other occasions she remains a
ghostly being. By contrast, Paulina’s ghost torments with her presence. In
the Bioy Casares story, the virtual woman reappears after she’s murdered
out of jealousy, and her projection is generated by her lovers’ imagination:
she doesn’t speak, but she disturbs.
 Pandoric Dystopias in Latin American Science Fiction 83

As an example of a digital woman, it’s pertinent to mention the story

“Sexbot” (2013) by the Cuban writer Raúl Aguiar, where the company run
by Remendón-Wintermute digitally offers clients the sexual fantasy of
their desires. In this Havana of 2030 one can choose the personality and
the physical-holographic avatar with which to have sexual relations. The
simulacrum becomes reality, since Señor Hideo seeks a physical avatar
programmed as if she were a girl, and this Pandoric Leinani shows that
she’s opposed to the sadomasochist pederast Hideo, killing him through
the simulacrum. As he cries out, “You’re a goddamn machine and I’m
your owner” (Aguiar, 2013: 73), the virtual woman reacts with a simple
instinct for survival, which perhaps had also been programmed.
Downloaded by [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona] at 04:36 05 May 2015

Through the tour effected in these pages, we can see that a long
tradition exists in the West regarding the fantasy of the inorganic woman
(robot, android, artificial creature, or doll), the fruit of male desire. The
woman’s body has been a historical idea that has kept reaffirming the
patriarchal gaze in the classical discourses prevalent in pictorial, literary,
and cinematic anthropomorphic representations up to the present. And
the woman-body continues being an ideological space of representation.
Usually the construction or creation of these inorganic women is
motivated by the pursuit of a desire and the impossibility of attaining it,
and the fact is that “the twenty-first century will keep playing with dolls,
in two senses. One: along the lines of The Future Eve and the fucking
machines (cyberchicks, robotic automatons, digital marionettes). And
two: by continuing to voyeuristically enjoy the female body as an obsolete
product (the trash woman, strictly speaking)” (Pedraza, 1998: 236). The
technofemale imaginary offered by these examples from Latin American
speculative fiction still represents the same gender roles, creating artifacts
that replace real women in their functions as mothers, sexual slaves, and
housewives, perpetuating the patriarchal utopia, even though now it’s
covered in chips, latex, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

Bibliogr aphy

Adolf, José B. Mañana fuimos felices. Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1975.
Aguiar, Raúl. “Sexbot.” Sexbot. Antología cubana de cuentos eróticos de ciencia ficción.
Madrid: Elfory Atocha Ediciones, 2013.
Bioy Casares, Adolfo. Historias desaforadas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1986.
————. La invención de Morel. Madrid: Cátedra, 2001.
Bukowski, Charles. “La máquina de follar.” La máquina de follar y otros relatos de la
locura cotidiana. Translated by J. M. Alvarez Flórez y Angela Pérez. Barcelona:
Anagrama, 1978.
Cano, Germán. “El indiscreto encanto del fetiche. La ‘mujer’ como proyección
imaginaria del resentimiento masculino.” De Galatea a Barbie. Autómatas, robots y
otras figuras de la construcción femenina. Fernando Broncano and David Hernández
de la Fuente, eds. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2010, 329-368.
 84 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

Holmberg, Eduardo L. Horacio Kalibang o los autómatas. Buenos Aires: Imprenta El

Álbum del Hogar, 1879.
Kurzweil, Raymond. La era de las máquinas espirituales. Barcelona: Planeta, 1999.
Levy, David. Amor + sexo con robots. La evolución de las relaciones entre los hombres y
las máquinas. Barcelona: Paidós, 2008.
López-Pellisa, Teresa. “Antes muerta que sencilla: el artefacto femenino en Adolfo
Bioy Casares.” En Teoría hablamos de Literatura. Antonio César Morón Espinosa
and José Manuel Ruíz Martínez, eds. Granada: Editorial Dauro, 2006. 97-103.
————. “El Síndrome de Pandora: Máquinas de amar de Pilar Pedraza.” Imágenes
Femeninas en la Literatura y en las Artes escénicas (siglos XX y XXI). Francisca
Vilches-de Frutos and Pilar Nieva-de la Paz, eds. Philadelphia: Society of Spanish
and Spanish-American Studies, 2012a. 315-333.
————. “Virtualidades distópicas en la ficción analógica: La invención de Morel de
Downloaded by [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona] at 04:36 05 May 2015

Adolfo Bioy Casares.” Revista Iberoamericana (La ciencia-ficción en América Latina:

entre la mitología experimental y lo que vendrá) LXXVIII:238-239 (2012b). 73-90.
Pedraza, Pilar. Máquinas de amar. Madrid: Valdemar, 1998.
Rueda, Ana. Pigmalión y Galatea: Refracciones modernas de un mito. Madrid: Espiral
Hispanoamericana, 1998.
Samperio, Gullermo. “Wendy.” La mujer de la gabardina roja y Otras mujeres.
Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2002.
————. “La esposa XR25.” La mujer de la gabardina roja y Otras mujeres. Madrid:
Páginas de Espuma, 2002.
————. “Waleska, el polaco.” La brevedad es una catarina anaranjada. México:
Editorial Lectorum, 2004.
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de. La Eva futura. Translated by Mauricio Bacarisse.
Madrid: Valdemar, 1998.
Yehya, Naief. El cuerpo transformado. Cyborgs y nuestra descendencia tecnológica en la
realidad y en la ciencia ficción. Barcelona: Paidós, 2001.
————. Pornografía. Obsesión sexual y tecnológica. México: Ensayo Tusquets, 2012.
————. Pornocultura. El espectro de la violencia sexualizada en los medios. México:
Ensayo Tusquets, 2013.