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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk

Stacy Gillis Newcastle University

In Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (2000), Dani Cavallaro identifies a new account of

the Gothic, one which is at home in cyberspace and the representations thereof.
She terms this the ‘(cyber)Gothic’.1 Cavallaro discusses the ways in which science
fiction ‘has developed Gothic themes and modalities, often by foregrounding
horror as a product of self-alienation and of the impenetrability of truth, thus sup-
plying powerful critiques of modernity and humanism’.2 Tatiani G. Rapatzikou
picks up on this conjunction of the Gothic and cyberspace in Gothic Motifs in the
Work of William Gibson (2004), providing a reading of gothicised tropes and aes-
thetics as a key component of Gibson’s corpus.3 Discussions of gender and the
body are a part of these arguments but neither Cavallaro nor Rapatzikou address
how the representation of women in cyberpunk and the history of the literary and
filmic cyborg are both partly determined by the Gothic tradition. In this article, I
provide a reading of gender politics in cyberpunk which draws upon the Gothic,
the cyborg, and the (post)feminist subject. This reading will be effected through an
account of the ass-kicking techno-babe, a crucial component of the masculine
strand of cyberpunk. This strand valorises a masculinity and technology dialectic
exemplified by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).4 Cyberpunk draws upon film noir,
with its hardboiled detectives and Gothic monstrous femmes fatales. From Molly
Millions in Neuromancer to Y.T. in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and
Trinity in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy (1999–2003),5 the repre-
sentation of cyberpunk demonstrates that the (post)feminist project of the
ass-kicking techno-babe has found a home in the Gothic aesthetics of the
noir-inf(l)ected genre of cyberpunk. However, this figure is one marked by both
pleasure and fear; thus, for Rosi Braidotti, ‘[b]ad girls are in and bad girls carry or
are carried by a teratological imaginary’.6 The account of how hyper-sexualised
cyborgic female bodies are positioned in contrast to the repressed bodies of the
mirror-shaded male hackers reveals the destabilising conundrum of supposed
agency contained by the determinacy of the (post)feminist body.7
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8 Gothic studies 9/2

The Bitch is Back: Postfeminism/(Post)Feminist

In 1982, the New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled ‘Voices from the Post-
Feminist Generation’.8 Since then, the term ‘post-feminism’ (or ‘postfeminism’)
has circulated in both media and academic discourses. Its definitions are variable
although a common feature is that many are predicated upon a reading of femi-
nism as a project which is complete and, as a result, unnecessary. The multiple
meanings of postfeminism speak both to the apparently easy dismissal of the fem-
inist project and to the way in which feminisms are often positioned as feminism,
a monolithic and singly-defined entity. In its media form, postfeminism is used
regularly to describe

a movement when women’s movements are, for whatever reasons, no longer moving,
no longer vital, no longer relevant; the term suggests that the gains forged by previous
generations of women have so completely pervaded all tiers of our social existence that
those still ‘harping’ about women’s victim status are embarrassingly out of touch.9

There are subtle distinctions to be made between the versions of postfeminism

which circulate, particularly in the American media, but many of these versions
use an understanding of feminism (that is, second wave feminism) as overly
and unnecessarily concerned with the history of woman as one of victimisation.
For example, Camille Paglia endorses this reading, as is evidenced by the follow-
ing:

Never in history have women been freer than they are here. [This] bitching . . . it’s
infantile, it’s an adolescent condition, it’s bad for women. It’s very, very bad to con-
vince young women that they have been victims and that their heritage is nothing but
victimization.10

This competitive postfeminism, one which endorses a ‘survival of the fittest’ model
and which encourages women to kick ass, whether against men or women, is one
which circulates most commonly in popular culture. In it, women are represented
as having no need of feminism because it refers to material conditions which are
apparently no longer applicable.
Concomitant with this popular understanding of feminism as being post/past
is a specific use of ‘postfeminism’ in scholarly debate. Ann Brooks’ Postfeminisms:
Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (1997) is the most commonly cited
example of this version of postfeminism. For Brooks, postfeminism is feminism’s
‘maturity into a confident body of theory and politics, representing pluralism and
difference and reflecting on its position in relation to other philosophical and
political movements similarly demanding change’.11 This reading of feminism is
heavily inflected by a postmodernist emphasis on plurality and difference, which
Sarah Gamble recognises, indicating that this notion of postfeminism can be
understood as ‘a pluralistic epistemology dedicated to disrupting universalising
patterns of thought’.12 Gamble is certainly right in her recognition of the
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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk 9

destabilising qualities of postfeminism, particularly the ways in which the plural-

istic and the ludic are situated in postfeminism as desirable qualities. The playful-
ness of this model is evident in the figure of the Girlie, who

foreground[s] a celebration of the paraphernalia of ‘femininity’ – of make-up, fashion,

etc. – that had previously been censured by second wave feminists as inextricably
caught up in patriarchal definitions of female identity. For the Girlies, however, ‘fem-
ininity’ is no longer at odds with ‘feminism,’ but at the very centre of an ideology of
agency, confidence and resistance.13

This ‘playful’ resignification of feminine paraphernalia is at the heart of the post-

feminist conjunction of femininity and female agency. Postfeminism, as used in
scholarly debate, is concerned with how certain ‘playful’ re-renderings of feminin-
ity and sexuality could be understood as a powerful example of female agency.
However, as Rebecca Munford and I argue in the introduction of Feminism and
Popular Culture (2008), postfeminism is not a political project and should thus
not be semantically read as a noun.14 Rather than a methodology, it is a field of
study which draws upon the long history of feminist work in the fields of literary,
filmic and cultural analysis. We use the term ‘(post)feminist’ to indicate the com-
plexities of studying this new area of feminist inquiry – indicating that feminism
is at the heart of these models and that ‘post’ should not be used to mean either
after or an engagement with feminism. Rather, ‘(post)feminist’ refers to the ways
in which figures of women with emotional, physical, social or financial agency
have been variously represented as lacking something – a relationship, a child, a
more attractive body, a stable parent figure and/or domestic skills – since the early
1980s.15 This is not to say that the term ‘(post)feminist’ cannot be used of other
periods in literary and cultural history, but there is particular resonance at the end
of the twentieth century with the ways in which postfeminism is used both by
the media and some scholars of gender to categorise the contemporary state of
feminism. Our understanding of (post)feminism thus draws both upon the
popular account of postfeminism and upon the contemporary theoretical models
and modes of academic postfeminism. In labelling the subject of study as
(post)feminist rather than referring to the general field of postfeminism, we are
seeking to move beyond the impasse which Sarah Projansky articulates: ‘most ver-
sions of postfeminism can function as either a condemnation or a celebration of
women and feminism’.16 The (post) in our (post)feminist is enclosed in brackets
in order to emphasise that it is ‘feminist’ which is central – that is, a feminist analy-
sis of the (post)feminist subject.
The ass-kicking techno-babes of cyberpunk film and fiction should be read as
examples of the (post)feminist subject. These women are positioned as very much
at home in the traditionally masculine domains of both technology and physical-
ity, remarkably so given the gender arrangements involved in noir and gothic fic-
tions. Yet this articulation of female agency is mediated by the ways in which the
bodies of these cyborgic women are reduced to either a sexualised or monstrous
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10 Gothic studies 9/2

femininity. This account of physically powerful women should also be understood

as part of the twentieth-century history of the female action hero, resonant with
such figures as Emma Peel in The Avengers (1961–69) and Wonder Woman in the
series of the same name (1976–79). That these figures should be understood as part
of the wider social movement for women’s liberation in the twentieth century is
undeniable but there is a discernible shift in how the physically powerful women
of the last twenty years have been represented. Elyce Rae Helford argues that we
‘would not have female action-adventure heroes without a feminist (not a post-
feminist) consciousness. The female action-adventure hero is composed equally of
her story, affirmative action, equal opportunity, and repudiation of gender essen-
tialism and traditional feminine roles’.17 While Helford claims a feminist history
for these representations, she labels the newest incarnations of the female action
hero as ‘postfeminist’ because of the ‘consequential emphasis on individual efforts
over group activism’.18 This individual effort references the competitive postfemi-
nism advocated by Camilla Paglia and others. That is, these instances of female
agency are for individual gain – financial, physical, emotional or otherwise – rather
than for a wider engagement with the confines of patriarchal discourse. This indi-
vidualist approach certainly sits nicely within the technologically-determined exis-
tentialist genre of cyberpunk, and with its articulation of a cyborgic femininity.
The cyborgic femininities of cyberpunk should be understood as (post)feminist,
undermining the potentially transgressive monstrosity of the femme fatale, a key
facet of the noir-detective narratives of cyberpunk.

Papa Don’t Preach: Cyborg Trouble Deep

The cyborg – transgressive, reactionary, sexualised, automaton, child-like,
parental, kill-bot, uncanny – has been one of the markers of cyberpunk texts.
Its ability both to interrogate and reify the category of the human has resulted in
its appropriation by many eager to claim the disruptive ‘postmodernity’ which it
contains. Feminist critics have been particularly keen to ‘own’ the cyborg because
of its apparent disruption of the binaries of modernity. Donna Haraway’s
metaphor of the cyborg has been repeatedly referenced as a claim for the trans-
gressive potential of the meat/metal fusion. This cyborgic ‘myth about trans-
gressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities’19 has been a
compelling one, particularly for those, many of them cyberfeminists, eager to
claim that fixed categories of sex and gender are untenable in cyberspace.20 The
‘beyond-genderness’ of the cyborg is precisely what has made it such a seductive
metaphor. For Anne Balsamo,

cyborgs offer a particularly appropriate emblem, not only of postmodern identity, but –
specifically – of woman’s identity. Cyborg identity is predicated on transgressed bound-
aries. They fascinate us because they are not like us, and yet just like us. Formed through
a radical disruption of other-ness, cyborg identity foregrounds the constructedness of
otherness.21
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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk 11

However, this implicit reference to the Freudian uncanny – that which is both
familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown – foregrounds the ways in which it
is the figure of the female cyborg which has been positioned as potentially most dis-
ruptive with its simultaneous lack (the technology or metal obscuring its human
or meat components) and excess of meaning achieved through its femininity
(which is overtly sexualised). However, a distinction needs to be made here
between the metaphor of the cyborg and the figure of the cyborg as commonly rep-
resented, something which Alison Booth and Mary Flanagan recognise when they
argue that ‘the cyborg metaphor and its meanings have become an important cul-
tural site of contestation’.22 As Haraway’s essay articulates, the cyborg-as-metaphor
can be used to interrogate the androcentrism of modernity. However, contempo-
rary representations of the cyborg often valorise certain Western notions of
embodiment. The meanings generated by these representations are articulated
upon an understanding of the body as highly gendered and sexualised, physically,
intellectually and/or emotionally.
This apparent contradiction/conflation of woman and technology results in a
cyborg which is always over-represented. It moves throughout cyberpunk texts,
disrupting through its uncanniness and its simultaneous lack and surplus of
meaning. As a figure of a sexualised female, it speaks of irrationality, drawing upon
Gothic tropes of femininity, while as a figure of technology, it speaks of rationality
and order. For Judith Halberstam, who implicitly references Haraway’s cyborg-as-
metaphor, this is potentially liberating:

The female cyborg becomes a terrifying cultural icon because it hints at the radical
potential of a fusion of femininity and intelligence. . . . A female cyborg would be arti-
ficial in both mind and flesh, as much woman as machine, as close to science as to nature.
The resistance she represents to static conceptions of gender and technology pushes a
feminist theory of power to a new arena. . . . As a metaphor, she challenges the corre-
spondences such as maternity and femininity or female and emotion. As a metonym, she
embodies the impossibility of distinguishing between gender and its representation.23

The problem here is that this potential is never achieved as the femaleness of these
cyborgs is contained by a hyper-feminised hyper-sexuality which draws upon the
long history of representing women through sexuality. The challenge posed by
the potentially powerful conjunction of woman and technology is undermined by the
sexualised femininity that constitutes this account of woman. While Sherrie Inness
argues that, for the contemporary female action hero, ‘being aggressive is desirable,
and women should not wait for men to save them’,24 this aggression and physical
threat are underscored by sexuality. Cyberpunk draws upon this tradition, with
physically tough women and girls who are in control of their urban environments.
However, these figures are always contained by the language of sexual representa-
tion, physically powerful yet always positioned as accountable for and through a
sexualised femininity, as will be discussed in the next section.
The apparent ‘playful’ redefinition of femininity and sexuality by such
(post)feminist figures as the Girlie certainly speaks to the sexualised femininity of
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12 Gothic studies 9/2

the cyborgic female. While Girlies claim agency in their appropriation of feminine
paraphernalia, it can be argued that the ludic qualities of this ‘version’ of feminin-
ity are an instance of false consciousness and are always contained/defined by patri-
archal discourse. Similarly, the power of the powerful ass-kicking techno-babe is
illusory, and the conjunction of the cyborgic and sexualised femininity in cyber-
punk texts is another instance in the long history of representing women as sexu-
alised and as sites of activity. The female cyborg exemplifies how a sexualised
femininity and cyborgity are often understood to be the same thing. Molly Millions
in Neuromancer has several implants under nails and the passages describing these
emphasise her sexualised femininity. Her cyborgity and her general ‘girls kick ass’
attitude derive from the same source:

‘That’s fine, man.’ The fletcher vanished into the black jacket. ‘Because you try to fuck
around with me, you’ll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.’
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely
audible click, ten double-edged four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housing
beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.25

Millions’ physical presence in Neuromancer is initially one of cyborgic impenetra-

bility with her ‘mirrored glasses’ and ‘clothes of black’.26 With her technological
prowess as a street samurai, she appropriates masculinised technology. Yet Millions
is contained by the language of sexuality. Her nails may conceal a weapon but they
are coloured burgundy and serve to lengthen her fingers. This combination of fem-
ininity and sexuality resonates with the tradition of the femme fatale and its atten-
dant sexualised femininity. And while Millions’ job is to protect Case, the male
hacker protagonist, during his mission, she has been and still is a prostitute, defin-
ing herself as a ‘working girl’.27 Millions may appear to challenge the tropes of tra-
ditional femininity through her physical presence, but she is always contained by
the language of sexuality.
These techno-babes may kick ass but they are participants in a fetishistic ren-
dering of femininity and femaleness. Y.T. in Snow Crash is a fifteen-year old skater
girl who physically hacks into the material virus that is the Raft. Her proclivities for
physical action are contrasted with the male hacker protagonist Hiro Protagonist.
While Protagonist possesses some physical abilities, his real strengths lie in the
virtual world of the Metaverse. It is his ability to hack this virtual world which saves
the ‘real’ world from the virus, obfuscating Y.T.’s penetration of the ‘real world’
form of the virus.28 Like Millions, who sleeps with Case as part of her job, Y.T. is
contained through the language of sexual representation. Unlike Millions, Y.T. is
not overtly sexualised and remains largely androgynous for much of the text. She
is, however, finally reduced to a vaginal explosion:

She does something she’s never done before: comes as soon as he goes into her. It’s like
a bolt of lightning shoots out from the middle, down the backs of her tensed legs, up
her spine, into her nipples, she sucks in air until her whole ribcage is poking out
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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk 13

through the skin and then screams it all out . . . She goes limp. So does he. He must
have come at the same time.29

It is clear throughout the novel that Y.T. has been engaging in sexual activity for
some time (although never with Protagonist) but this final scene is particularly rel-
evant because Y.T.’s form of birth control, a cyborgic addition to her vagina, is both
monstrous and penetrative: ‘at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypo-
dermic needle slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his penis,
automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into his
bloodstream’.30 Y.T. is literally a vagina dentata, entrancing the hyper-masculine
killer Raven before penetrating his phallus. Whilst she is monstrously transgres-
sive, she is also defined by her genitalia. The agency of Y.T.’s physical presence is
contained by the hyper-sexualisation of her (cyborgic) body, and is also firmly
located, like Millions, within the tradition of the femme fatale.

Detecting the Femme Fatale

Andrew Ross refers to William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction as ‘the most fully delin-
eated urban fantasies of white male folklore’.31 This ‘fantasy’ of masculinity marks
much of cyberpunk – from Gibson’s oeuvre to Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon
(2002) – and its more mainstream Hollywood representations such as The Net
(1995), Minority Report (2002) and I, Robot (2004). While male and female bodies
are cyborgised in cyberpunk, the genre positions the male body as the key inter-
face with technology. In contrast, the female body is one which is acted upon, in
being made cyborgic, but which never acts in that it is never a key interface with
technology. This is achieved through the genre’s reliance upon the tropes of film
noir, drawing upon its heavily-stylised motifs, urban settings and reliance upon the
hard-boiled masculinity of the detective narrative. This equation of masculinity
and rationality is fundamental to the detective narrative and the order it promises
in contrast to the disorder of the Gothic. Indeed, the detective narrative is predi-
cated upon an account of a rational masculinity which deflects – at all costs – the
irrationality or complexity posed by the lack of an apparently sustainable solution.
The valorisation of rationality and order is key to an understanding of the gender
politics of cyberpunk in which reason and activity are located within the mascu-
line body, as opposed to the dangerous female body. The relationship between
detection and rationality is one which valorises experience and the observable –
that which can be woven together to create the narrative of the solution. Sally Munt
has summarised the ways in which detection, rationality and masculinity are
bound up together: ‘[t]he image is archetypal – the warrior knight, the tough
cowboy, the intrepid explorer – he is the representative of Man, and yet more than
a man, he is the focus of morality, the mythic hero. He is the controlled centre sur-
rounded by chaos’.32 The male detective is relevant to a reading of the (post)femi-
nist Gothic because of the inextricable relationship between the Gothic and the
detective narrative. Sharing many key attributes – the mysteries surrounding
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14 Gothic studies 9/2

identity and property at the core of much eighteenth-century Gothic fiction; the
use of the Gothic in the nineteenth-century sensation novel, one of the progeni-
tors of the detective narrative; the aesthetics of film noir – the Gothic and the detec-
tive narrative both draw this male detective figure into cyberpunk. The rationality
of the ordered masculine body of the detective narratives forms the keystone of
cyberpunk texts, which assert an authority over the Gothicised bodies of the
femmes fatales. While not endorsing a binary model of female versus male fictions,
the emphasis on a rational masculinity – detecting and/or hacking – which is pre-
dominant in detective and cyberpunk narratives is certainly threatened by the pres-
ence of the Gothicised female body, haunting its boundaries.
This female body, as stated previously, is most often encoded as the femme fatale
in cyberpunk. The femme fatale serves as the axis of the noir narrative, referencing
a model of non-reproductive femininity whose expression of sexuality is perceived
as fatally dangerous to men and the heterosexual family structure. Traditionally,
the history of the femme fatale has seen this figure contained by the narrative –
whether through death or marriage. The (im)possibilities of the femme fatale
moved into the field of cyberpunk with the android Rachel in Blade Runner (1982).
The film is a paean to film noir and the representation of Rachel speaks to this par-
ticular history of female representation, with her red lipstick, coiffured hair, 1940s
clothing, and cigarette-caressing hands. Rachel’s questioning of her identity in
Blade Runner is overshadowed by the detective Deckard’s questioning of his possi-
ble android identity – which takes on the form of existential angst, a privilege
accorded to the rationality and masculinity of the questioner. Rachel is thus posi-
tioned in the film as both possessing agency, through her articulation of the femme
fatale in her clothes and her actions, and lacking it, through her existence as only
a mirror for Deckard’s quest(ioning): ‘Rachel’s identity is also in question, a nar-
rative device that once more presents woman as enigma, a puzzle to be figured out
by the hero. If her distance and ambiguity present her as a potentially threatening
figure, we discover that this stems from a failure of identity’.33 Rachel’s significa-
tion of the femme fatale can be read as a mimicry of the tropes of the femme fatale,
which returns us to the question of the ludic potential in such re-appropriations
as the figure of the Girlie. However, she is also trapped by these tropes, pitched
against the rationality of Deckard’s (detective) narrative. This undermines any
potential for agency in this mode of representation. Mary Ann Doane argues that
the power of the femme fatale is of a ‘peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject
to her conscious will, hence appearing to blur the opposition between passivity and
activity. She is an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of power but its
carrier’.34 Rachel is an android, a replica of the human form, highlighting the insta-
bility of this representation and speaking to the ways in which female sexuality and
femininity are exchangeable and interchangeable commodities.
The monstrosity of the femme fatale is certainly complicated by the meat/metal
conjunction of the cyborg. While Veronica Hollinger initially identifies the poten-
tial of cyberpunk to provide a deconstruction of human subjectivity through an
‘analysis of the postmodern identification of human and machine’, she concludes
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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk 15

that the genre is ultimately about the ‘reinsertion of the human into the reality
which its technology is in the process of shaping’.35 This ‘reinsertion’, however, is
always a reinsertion of a masculine body. Although bodies interface with tech-
nologies to become virtual identities, the hacker body remains constant, masculine
and, more crucially, an unproblematised ‘real’. While Case’s body is altered cybor-
gically in Neuromancer, this is in order to return him to the height of his abilities
as a console cowboy and as a motivation for him to fulfil his hacking duties. As
such, he is able to hack his way into anything, including Millions. When he initially
‘enters’ Millions virtually through the simstim broadcast rig, he is initially unset-
tled: ‘[h]er body language was disorientating, her style foreign. She seemed con-
tinually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way,
stepped sideways, made room’.36 It appears as though Case is unable to read
Millions once he is no longer viewing her as an object of his gaze. Millions is ini-
tially in control here, a cyborgic flâneuse. Yet this quickly changes when Millions
touches her breast to taunt him: ‘ “How you doing, Case?” He heard the words and
felt her form them. She slid a hand under warm silk. The sensation made him catch
his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply’.37
Millions appears to be in control here, using her body to taunt Case. Case is also
silenced in this passage. Yet what is crucial is that Millions’ body here is merely one
more hacking tool for Case, no different from the consoles he uses to enter cyber-
space.38 In this way, the femme fatale Millions becomes no more than a vessel for
both Case’s desire and his prowess and her physical ass-kicking abilities are reduced
to mere tools for the job.
Ultimately, the cyborgic female body is modified only so as to accentuate or
enact sexual promise. While this is mediated, certainly, by the monstrous sexuality
of the femme fatale, which is repeatedly referenced in cyberpunk, this transgression
is counterbalanced by the individualist ethos of the (post)feminist subject. These
women have apparently chosen to alter cyborgically their bodies, providing an illu-
sion of agency, but they often do so for a male gaze and/or for male consumption.
Indeed, in some cyberpunk texts, it is sexual pleasure which is paramount in these
body alterations:

They took my womb out, and they put in brain tissue. Grafts from the pleasure centre,
darling. I’m wired to the ass and the spine and the throat, and it’s better than being
God. When I’m hot, I sweat perfume. I’m cleaner than a fresh needle, and nothing
leaves my body that you can’t drink like wine or eat like candy.39

Similarly, in Altered Carbon, Miriam Bancroft has also been cyborgically enhanced
for sexual pleasure: ‘[t]his is state-of the biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs.
I secrete Merge Nine, when . . . aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr
Kovacs’.40 Thus, despite the promises of escaping the body in cyberspace, the
cyborgic female body is one which is predicted and controlled, in ways which are
deeply embedded within Western epistemologies and ontologies. As Linda Alcoff
summarises:
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16 Gothic studies 9/2

Despite the variety of ways in which man has construed her essential characteristics,
[woman] is always the Object, a conglomeration of attributes to be predicted and con-
trolled along with other natural phenomena. The place of the free-willed subject who
can transcend nature’s mandates is reserved exclusively for men.41

The cyborgic female body is one which promises much, but its promises are
always contained by the models of femininity validated by patriarchal discourse.
Sexuality is the marker of female identity, even in the disembodied identities
of cyberspace, as women are simultaneously figured as excess and lack in
cyberpunk.

The Cyber-Gothic
Scott Bukatman positions cyberpunk as ending ‘almost as soon as it began’,
although he acknowledges that ‘its impact continues to be felt across a range of
media and cultural phenomena’.42 That cyberpunk is a genre so easily identified
and contained is a matter of some dispute and the very policing of its boundaries
raises, once again, the question of the Gothic. The repeated use of Gothic tropes in
cyberpunk appears to offer much, particularly in reference to monstrosity and
transgression as contained in the figure of the cyborg. Rapatzikou refers to the
Gothic monstrosity of the cyborg:

The construction of the cyborg from layer upon layer of electronic mechanisms makes
it an object of repulsion and fascination. The instability of its identity and the constant
permeability of the shape and appearance of its hybrid body are subjecting the cyborg
to unpredictable monstrous metamorphoses.43

However, the transgressive potential of the cyber-Gothic that is cyberpunk is con-

tained by the tropes of film noir, the sexualisation of the femme fatale and the long-
standing equation of masculinity with rationality. These texts are part of larger
cultural interstices concerning woman, technology and the popular, drawing both
upon a long history of the representation of femininity and technology but also
contemporary renditions of female agency, as articulated by the ‘playfulness’ of the
(post)feminist subject. In cyberpunk bringing together the (post)feminist and the
Gothic, the category of the (post)feminist subject continues to confine despite the
promise, which is never achieved, of Gothic transgression. While cyberpunk texts
present accounts of the disembodied body, they are still narratives which are pred-
icated upon an understanding of the ass-kicking (post)feminist bad girl as a body
to be acted upon. Man is ultimately a hacker in these narratives, the source of activ-
ity; woman is ultimately a cyborg, the site of activity.

Notes
1 Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 188.
2 Ibid., p. 166.
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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk 17

3 Tatiani G. Rapatzikou, Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 2004).
4 A discussion of the feminist and queer challenges to cyberpunk are outside of the para-
meters of this article. For more on this, see Thomas Foster, ‘ “Trapped by the Body”?
Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian
Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 43.3 (1997), pp. 708–42;
Austin Booth and Mary Flanagan, ‘Introduction’, in Austin Booth and Mary Flanagan,
eds, Reload: Rethinking Women ⫹ Cyberculture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002),
pp. 1–24.
5 For a more detailed reading of cyberpunk, film noir and gender politics in The Matrix
trilogy, see Stacy Gillis, ‘Cyber Noir: Cyberspace, (Post)feminism and the Femme
Fatale’, in Stacy Gillis, ed., The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded (London:
Wallflower, 2005), pp. 74–85.
6 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Being (Cambridge:
Polity, 2002), p. 180.
7 The term ‘mirrorshades’ refers to the reflective sunglasses common in many first-
generation cyberpunk texts. See Bruce Sterling, ed., Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk
Anthology (New York: Ace, 1986).
8 Susan Bolotin, ‘Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation’, New York Times Magazine
(17 October 1982), pp. 29–31; pp. 103–16.
9 Deborah Siegel, ‘Reading between the Waves: Feminist Historiography in a
“Postfeminist” Movement’, in Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, eds, Third Wave
Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1997), p. 75.
10 Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (New York: Random House,
1991), p. 274. For more on the tensions and relationship between second and third
wave feminism, see Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, ‘Genealogies and Generations:
The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism’, Women’s History Review, 13.2 (2004),
pp. 165–82.
11 Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 1.
12 Sarah Gamble, ‘Postfeminism’, in Sarah Gamble, ed., The Routledge Companion to
Feminism and Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 50.
13 Gillis and Munford, ‘Genealogies and Generations’, p. 171. For more on performance
and contemporary discourses of femininity, see Rebecca Munford, ‘ “Wake Up and
Smell the Lipgloss!”: Gender, Generation and the (A)Politics of Girl Power’, in Stacy
Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, eds, Third Wave Feminism: A Critical
Exploration (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Rev. Ed., 2007), pp. 266–79.
14 Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, Feminism and Popular Culture (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2008).
15 Examples of (post)feminist texts include Ally McBeal (1997–2002), Sex and the City
(1998–2004), Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Britney
Spears and Nigella Lawson.
16 Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York:
New York University Press, 2001), p. 86.
17 Elyce Rae Helford, ‘Postfeminism and the Female Action-Adventure Hero: Positioning
Tank Girl’, in Marleen S. Barr, ed., Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and
Velocities (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 293.
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18 Gothic studies 9/2

18 Helford, ‘Postfeminism and the Female Action-Adventure Hero’, p. 293.

19 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), p. 154.
20 For a critique of cyberfeminism, see Stacy Gillis, ‘Neither Cyborg Nor Goddess: The
(Im)Possibilities of Cyberfeminism’, in Gillis, Howie and Munford, eds, Third Wave
Feminism, Rev. Ed., 2007, pp. 168–81.
21 Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), p. 168–81.
22 Booth and Flanagan, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.
23 Judith Halberstam, ‘Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the
Intelligent Machine’, Feminist Review, 17.3 (1991), p. 454.
24 Sherrie Inness, ‘ “Boxing Gloves and Bustiers”: New Images of Tough Women’, in
Sherrie Inness, ed., Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 15.
25 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 37.
26 Ibid., p. 36.
27 Ibid., p. 41.
28 Protagonist’s ability to move fluidly between the real and virtual worlds, hacking both,
is echoed by Neo in The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), who finally proves his ability to
move, unlike Trinity, beyond the ‘meat’.
29 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 356.
30 Ibid., p. 358.
31 Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits
(London: Verso, 1991), p. 145.
32 Sally Munt, Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel (London: Routledge,
1991), p. 1.
33 Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (London:
Routledge, 1988), p. 122; emphasis in original.
34 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 2; emphasis in original.
35 Veronica Hollinger, ‘Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism’,
Mosaic, 23.2 (1990), pp. 31, 42. See also, Jenny Wolmark, ‘Staying with the Body:
Narratives of the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction’, in Veronica Hollinger
and Joan Gordon, eds, Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary
Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),
pp. 75–89.
36 Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 72.
37 Ibid., p. 72.
38 For a reading of the feminisation of Case in this passage see, Lauraine Leblanc, ‘Razor
Girls: Genre and Gender in Cyberpunk Fiction’, Women and Language, XX (1997),
pp. 72–3.
39 Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix (New York: Arbor House, 1985), p. 44.
40 Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon (London: Orion, 2001), p. 132.
41 Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in
Feminist Theory’, in Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tumangs, eds, Feminism and
Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application (Boulder:
Westview, 1995), p. 435.
42 Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p. 52.
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The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk 19

43 Rapatzikou, Gothic Motifs, p. 115.

Address for correspondence

Stacy Gillis, School of English, Newcastle University, Newcastle NE1 7RU, UK. E-mail:
stacy.gillis@ncl.ac.uk