MOUNT ROYAL UNIVERSITY
Do Cyborgs Dream of Disassembly? An Exploration of Female Cyborg and Android Bodies in
Contemporary Science Fiction Texts and Discourse
by
Therese Jacqueline Schultz
A PROJECT
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS (Honours, English)
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLIGH
CALGARY, ALBERTA
December, 2012
© Therese Jacqueline Schultz 2012
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses how particular science fiction texts have grappled with the idea of female
cyborgs. It also deals with the relevance of female cyborgs in current academia because they
force a reader to address the question of selfhood and agency for a hybrid gendered subject. In
effect, this paper goes into elaborate descriptions of three fictional cyborg/android characters in
particular: Rachael Rosen, Pris Stratton and Molly Millions who are restricted by the confines of
hegemonic gender constructions. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Philip K. Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (The Final Cut 2008) and
their characters (mentioned above) are contextualized using post-humanist theory and an
exposition of the downfalls of traditional humanist theories. This work elaborates on how
traditional humanist theory has for so long been a defining criterion for humanness, and explores
the notion that humanness is not tied solely through a human’s capability for rationality and
morality. The main goal of this research is to indicate how or why feminist scholarship has
focused so widely on the confines of the body and not necessarily so on the object of choice
within the subject of cyborg body modifications. In specific, this work posits that cyberspace, as
a space of infinite and indefinite meanings is a confusing geography for the liberation or nonliberation of female cyborgs from their bodies. The chapters for this work are as follows: “Part I:
Mediating the Transgressive Cyborg Body and A Discussion of Feminist Cyborg Discourses”,
“Part II: Investigating Notions of Embodiment in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner The Final Cut”, “Part III: Mediating a Female
Cyborg in Cyberspace: William Gibson’s Molly in Neuromancer”, and “Part IV: The
Humanist/Post-Human Body: Understanding Corporealization and Gender Through A
Theoretical Framework.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………..[iii]
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………...[iv-ix]
Part I: Mediating the Transgressive Cyborg Body and A Discussion of Feminist Cyborg
Discourses…………………………………………………………………………………[1-10]
Part II: Investigating Notions of Embodiment in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner The Final Cut………………………[10-21]
Part III: Mediating a Female Cyborg in Cyberspace: William Gibson’s Molly in
Neuromancer………………………………………………………………………………[21-26]
Part IV: The Humanist/Post-Human Body: Understanding Corporealization and Gender
Through A Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………...[26-32]
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………[32-34]
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….[35-36]
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my friends for putting up with my fantasies and musings about cyborgs and
Blade Runner for three months straight, and for supporting me in my own body modifications.
My thanks also to Dr. Kenna Leigh Olsen and Dr. Kit Dobson
This paper would not have been written without their support and guidance. My sincerest
gratitude is devoted to them for providing me with the opportunity to create and conclude this
project.
And
To Dr. Jane Drover for always challenging me to think outside the gendered box.
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Introduction
With the birth of more sophisticated and cutting-edge technologies, humans are
compelled to explore the capacity for redefining how the human body functions and how the
body is situated within particular geographies. The creation of cyberspace through the medias of
popular literature and through film has additionally disrupted the understandings of human
physicality. What this means is that the very connotation of the word human is shifting as bodies
are being amalgamated with mechanical appendages or with re-engineered human cells. These
reinterpreted human bodies are also by extension concrete indicators of the progress of capitalist
machine-age enterprises.
With a re-definition of human corporeality emerging it is necessary for an inquiry into the
theories that dictate what constitutes human agency, rationality, and consciousness. For centuries
Cartesian dualism, or the mind/body dichotomy was considered an essential criteria for defining
humanness. This notion that the body is not one without the mind has been problematized with
the advent of cyborg and android bodies. Cyborgs and androids cannot solely be understood
through a Cartesian dualism because many have been programmed with an intelligence far
surpassing the capability of most humans.
The assumption that humans are purely organic is now a myth, even in terms of their
sex.1 Cyborgs and androids are no longer fictions of the minds of science-fiction writers; they
now exist as hybrid humans with pacemakers, sub-dermal implants and other modifications.
These other modifications can include the alterations of sexual organs for performance or for
aesthetics.
1
In vitro fertilization or the choosing of an infant’s sex in the womb can be classified as an intervention
into the notion that humans are organic subjects. Humans are not necessarily organic if they are modified
by technology or through bioengineering.
v
Our society has presented us with a number of individuals who have chosen to modify
their bodies to the extent that they’ve blurred the lines between human and machinic hybrids. For
an android in particular, a major conflict arises: the programmability of gender.2
As androids are created, so is their sex. As a result, gendered conventions arise from the
possession of the signifier male or female. Gender, even in terms of a created human or is still a
product of social conventions and it determines both social/political and sexual behaviors.
The merging of women, machines and biotechnologies constitutes in itself a new
debating ground for whether or not gender is established through a purely physical means.
Meaning that gender is determined by way of physicality. When perceiving the female android
or cyborg body, male fictions and discourses are apt to distinguish her with particularly feminine
characteristics although cyberspace’s “consensual hallucination. Unthinkable complexity. [And]
Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind (Gibson 51), formulates an infinite space of
non-meanings. The machinic female body is fetishized and is given a particular sexual meaning
by way of patriarchal relations of power. Many fans and artists’ (including film producers and
directors’) articulations of SF characters further contribute to the fetishization of the female
cyborg body. 3
What cyberspace should produce is a particular body disconnected and reconnected,
metaphorically and physically to particular subjectivities. What William Gibson’s character
2
Androids can best be understood as bio-engineered humans as opposed to “cyborgs” who are born
human and have integrated machinic parts. Androids are not considered human but they possess the
uncanny physical likeness of a human both inside and out. The word replicant is interchanged in Philip K.
Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner with the word
android. In Dick’s text, the Nexus-6 Model of Replicant is programmed with a limited number of years
for life. This shortened lifespan is what motivates the replicant Roy Batty to seek out Eldon Rosen and
later kill him.
3 “SF” is a short form of the words “Science Fiction” used in the scholastic community. Many of the
renderings of female cyborg bodies I speak of can be found in works like The Ghost in The Shell. Number
Six is another example from the Battlestar Galactica series. She is a hyper-sexualized female android.
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Molly Millions proves in the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is that a cyborg female can create
her own transgressive meaning by willfully modifying her own body.
Post-Modern Science Fiction literatures often question the very boundaries of the bodily
human and the subjective human. Therefore, the female cyborg and android imposes an
interrogation into traditional humanist philosophies especially with regards to questions of
rationality and morality. The According to author Kaye Mitchell, “The most utopian ‘readings’
and re-conceptualizations of the body in the last couple of decades have concerned themselves…
with the impact of new technologies on the body, figuring the outcome as, most optimistically,
an escape from control and regulation” (Mitchell 110). Molly’s reconfiguring of her own body
and its impending meanings is one example of a female cyborg character in fiction that is able to
take control of her own physicality. Alternatively, Molly, as she appears in Gibson’s text can
also be treated as a cyborg whose meanings are limited by the very text that surrounds her. Given
that she is written into existence by a male author, it is obvious that her rendering will in some
ways continue to confine her to stereotypes of femininity inherent in patriarchal structures of
power. Control and regulation are still present if a female body is being rendered through the
eyes of a voyeuristic male author or readership.
Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner and William Gibson’s Neuromancer are still texts deserving of analysis even twenty or
thirty years after their creation. These texts are pivotal to the science-fiction canon because they
all demonstrate to their readers female cyborg and android bodies that are in many ways limited
by the meanings assigned to them by their physicality. These female cyborgs are often potrayed
as heroines. Dick and Scott’s android/replicants Rachael Rosen and Pris Stratton are both
incredibly beautiful women in possession of like-human bodies. And, Gibson’s cyborg Molly is
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also strikingly exotic and beautiful in the text’s descriptions of her body and her machinic
appendages. In these three texts respectively the reader is confronted with the question of
whether or not these hybrid humans have choice regarding their own regulation of their bodies.
Are humans able to make decisions about the meanings applied to their bodies if their choice to
change their physicality is already restricted? This question is pertinent especially to androids.4
And, if a cyborg female like Molly is able to manipulate and change her body to include
cybernetic technologies, can she still regulate and control the meanings inscribed upon her body?
In many ways the traditional notions of expendable heterosexual female sexuality forces
the android and the cyborg into a position as an unwilling subject whose body is constantly
inscribed upon for the benefit of their male counterparts. She becomes a spectacle in a space:
cyberspace, which deconstructs her very ascertainment of self and personhood5. What Dick’s Do
Androids, Scott’s Blade Runner and Gibson’s Neuromancer all fail to emphasize is the “more
pessimistic, Foucauldian possibility that technology may be working to perpetuate and extend
the complicated network of power relations and modes of self-regulation already in place”
(Mitchell 110).6 This statement suggests that cyborgs and androids cannot be completely
liberated by their bodies, even if they do have a choice to trouble the gendered meanings that
have been applied too them. Liberation and transcendence, however, cannot happen without the
destruction of hegemonic masculinity.
4
Pertinent because androids are the subject of a Frankensteinian relationship with their creator. They are
the “monsters” that are born from a strange experiment. Even more troubling is that creator is a father
figure. Dick’s novel demonstrates this relationship most succinctly between Rachael and Eldon Rosen.
5 I denote the female cyborg/android as a “she” rather than “it”. The term “it” is traditionally associated
with automata that are not considered human.
6 This point is Mitchell’s response to a work by Anne Cranny-Francis from: The Body in the Text.
Mitchell goes on to note that these re-interpolations of the body within the science-fiction discourse
cannot be completely divorced from its flesh-apparatus. That the territories of cyberspace or what she
calls “virtuality” (111) call for some sort of transgressing of fleshly boundaries and of ideas surrounding
corporeality itself. Or, a total relinquishing of any particular discourse (Mitchell 111).
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Self-regulation is problematic for characters like Rachael and Pris who have been
programmed with particular memories and with gender. Post-human ideology can to a certain
extent explain how these new hybrid bodies can be understood. The discord between the
competing ideologies of humanism and post-humanism are explored to a greater extent later on
in this work.
There have been attempts by female SF authors to re-inscribe the female cyborg and
android, but these renderings continue to be problematic because the corporeality of these beings
is still inextricably tied to formations of meaning through gender and corporeal identities. My
intent with this paper is to demonstrate how a discursively masculine politics within science
fiction literatures continues to envision female cyborgs as possessions, as sub-human and in
many ways a colonial other. As mentioned above, the body becomes a place of deconstruction, a
battleground of identities and reformation of selves in unity with cybernetic technologies. The
body becomes a text for meanings, or in this case: cyberspatial non-meanings. Although
cyberspace is itself a location for the casting off of hegemonic relations of power, it can also be
viewed as a space metaphorically penetrated by masculine forces. What is of importance here is
that although women authors have strived to create a cyborg or android woman free from the
constraints of gender, they have come to the realization that within structures of patriarchy come
dominating meanings that prevent the cyborg from overcoming the assumptions made about her
body. Assumptions about how exotic her body is, assumptions about how easily it is to take
advantage of her because she does not possess a particular “type” of rationality and so on.
The corporealization of female cyborgs/androids forces us to pose broader questions
about what it means to be human, but more crucially, if supposed female humans are already
considered substitutions and conduits for masculine desire (without being considered cyborgs or
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androids), to what end is the android female subject in control of her body and her mind? Her
choice is already constricted. This question will be investigated through the analysis and
theoretical explanation of Philip K. Dick’s and Ridley Scott’s characters Rachael and Pris in Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the it’s film adaptation Blade Runner. Molly Millions
from William Gibson’s Neuromancer will also be the subject of study in tandem with theoretical
works like Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter and Jean Baudrillard’s Similacra and Simulation.
All of these characters will be contextualized within a post-humanist framework in order to
answer the question of humanness as posed above, and to expand upon what so many theoretical
texts have avoided or have overlooked for so long in both the disciplines of the arts and of cyber
technologies: the subject of human agency and choice.
The aim of this paper is to delineate how choice and liberation from the physical body is
limited by means of masculine discourses. In other words, science fiction texts written by male
authors will automatically produce particular female cyborgs and androids that are relinquished
of any definition of self apart from their bodily inscriptions because they are fetishized and
hyper-sexualized.
In the next chapter, Donna J. Haraway’s pivotal text “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” will be
addressed in order to contextualize the meaning and physicality of the female cyborg body.
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Part I: Mediating the Transgressive Cyborg Body and A Discussion of Feminist Cyborg
Discourses
One of the most crucial points an individual can make about the cyborg bodies in Dick’s
and Gibson’s texts are that their characters are always filtered by the male gaze. This element of
voyeurism functions as an active filter for Molly Millions, Pris Stratton and Rachael Rosen. As a
result, it is apparent that these female cyborg characters are being compelled to act as performing
spectacles. The spectacle involves the overt sexualization of the female body in terms of its
gendered conventions. This type of gendered spectacle can be noted in both the first entrance of
Pris Stratton into Dick’s novel’s plot and Rachael’s entrance to meet Deckard at the beginnings
of Scott’s film Blade Runner. Much of the emphasis in the meeting scene between Rachael and
Deckard emphasizes on the silhouettes of bodies. As Rachael approaches Deckard she is bathed
in half-light and the whole outline of her body is emphasized as the camera pans out from a fullbody shot to her wide eyes and scarlet red lips (Blade Runner). This scene evokes for an
audience a particular seductiveness about Rachael that from the outset plays upon gender, she is
perceived as a body, a moving body defined by her physical beauty. In Philip K. Dick’s text, Pris
Stratton is first portrayed as a physically “fragmented” (Dick 62) being. In the scene where Pris
encounters J.R Isodore, he describes her as a
[F]ragmented and misaligned shrinking figure, a girl who cringed and slunk away
and yet hold onto the door, as if for physical support. Fear made her seem ill; it
distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her…. The girl
stepped into the hall, closing the door behind her; arms folded self-consciously
before her small high breasts. (Dick 62-65)
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Although this portrayal of Pris provides a striking contrast to the overtly sexual representation of
Rachael, Pris’ interpretation through the eyes of J.R Isodore illustrates her as a girl, not a woman,
who is physically dismantled. She is infantilized and the exposition of her physicality is that of a
weak child. The contrasts of these two characters prove that in the novel Do Androids and in
Scott’s film Blade Runner that the female replicants are metaphorically weakened by their
physical states. Their selfhood is destroyed as a result. Rachael is the seductress and Pris is the
childlike and helpless passive subject. The assumptions about Pris then are that she is unable to
be anything but passive and that therefore she possesses little agency.
The female cyborg or android body can thus be perceived as a subject hailed into an
existence by a male discourse, especially a heterosexual discourse that requires her to continue to
function as an object. Many feminist discourses provide more contextualization for the
corporealizing, deconstructing and recoding of the female cyborg body. Because this mechanized
and technological body blurs the lines of sexual and non-sexual feminists seek to recodify and
re-strengthen a post-humanist ideology that does not render this new form of human as a
vulnerable subject by re-codification into a masculine space. A female cyborg is still subordinate
to her male counterparts and cyborg counterparts if she is not even considered an existent sociopolitical agent. As post-humanist theory tries to answer the question of cyborg existence, often
the possibility of a transcendent and perhaps even willfully gendered subject cannot exist. In
other words, for an android to choose a gender is unfathomable because she is controlled by
whoever programs her. With this in mind, the next section will focus mainly on how feminist
discourses have mediated the female cyborg and android body beginning with Haraway’s
“Manifesto”.
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Donna J. Haraway’s text “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” has served as the launching point
for various scholarly works on the socio-political operations of the cyborg female. Haraway has
also pursued a dialogue about the existence of a common language amongst android women and
cyberspace beings. The identity of the cyborg female is dependent upon social constructions that
are intermediated within and outside her body, but, as Haraway argues, an understanding of self
through “essential unity” (Haraway122) is not possible:
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness
through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity….
Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of
their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the
basis for belief in ‘essential unity’. There is nothing about being ‘female’ that
naturally binds women. (Haraway 118-22)
Deconstruction is essential for determining how the female cyborg body is inscribed and
partitioned, but the underlying issue, as Haraway notes, is being able to reconstruct female
subjectivity without relying on a unification founded on elements of female gender. This excerpt
also reminds the reader that this post-humanist rendering of mechanized bodies is not reliant on a
single origin story. If, as Haraway argues, there is no essential female self that can be appealed
to for the redefinition of the post-modern cyborg body, what then can function to re-enter her
into a stream of communication with other beings? Agency, if filtered through the lens of
humanism, means that the android and cyborg female will still be metaphorically written upon
by her gender as a palimpsest. It is automatic that she then is subjected to hyper-sexualization.
What is difficult to determine here is why the cyborg must be re-entered into meaning at all. Two
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outcomes are possible from this determination. Firstly, the cyborg female can be re-entered and
then re-subjected to relations of power and then is capable of being defined. Secondly, if she is
not re-entered, this works to her advantage because she can create her own meaning. The conflict
here is that with this self-created meaning can she still be considered a “worthy” subject. Is she
worthy of being considered human if she does not ascribe to particular definitions of the body?
This challenges the foundations of Cartesian Dualism: whether or not the body can survive
without the mind. Like one single ideology, the cyborg cannot be viewed as simply a self in and
of itself. The cyborg, according to Jennifer Gonzalez should not be limited “as primarily a
surface or simulacrum which signifies only itself; rather the cyborg is like a symptom—[she]
represents that which cannot otherwise be represented” (Gonzalez 59). The existence of the
female cyborg or android then, according to Gonzalez, is predicated on the fact that she (the
cyborg or android) should not be contained by mere embodiment, neither should she only
defined by her bodily confines. Instead, this cyborg is a product of a number of social
interactions and historical experiences, which make it a part of the post-modern world:
In order to determine the character of any given cyborg identity and the range of its
power, one must be able to examine the form and not merely the fact of this interface
between automaton and autonomy…. The cyborg body thus becomes the historical
record of changes in human perception. One such change may be reflected in the
implied redefinition of the space the cyborg inhabits. (Gonzalez 61)
Gonzales mentions a “historical record” (Gonzalez 61) in this passage in reference to the female
cyborg and, perhaps, in reference to the cyborg’s origin story. Because the cyborg is considered
to be made and not born, it is not always assumed that it would carry with it the various attitudes
and corresponding memories about the history of its past. The history with which I am speaking
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is its lineage and where or why it was created. The female cyborg does not fit precisely into a
taxonomy of the human species because it is exotic and new. Where Gonzalez’ argument is
flawed is understanding where the cyborg is in fact given a gender, it carries along with it all of
the socio-political implications that accompany that particular gender. In this case, the female
cyborg has both a history of female revolution and the conflict of forming the other to the subject
because she is still entrapped within patriarchal power structures. The binary of male and female
must be delineated. In order for humans to relate to their androgynous robotic creations they
often ascribe a gender in order to create relativity. Because cyborgs and androids are infinitely
creations born of capitalist processes it makes sense that gender must be programmed to make
them sellable commodities.
Gonzalez’ “historical record” (61) also illustrates how the female cyborg may continue to
be sexualized because of her gender. Because the body has become the center or, perhaps, a
decentered arena for the contemplation of subjectivity, it is also possible that one can argue that
gender is non-existent, especially through when the body itself is deconstructed. The
metaphorical lines of existent and non-existent gender are always blurred.
The irony in any added appendage to the body, in this case for females, whether it is
mirrors for eyes or metallic claws, for Molly Millions, is that the body mods become a
performance of a sort of deviant culture. The hacking into of the body by machinic intervention
subverts traditional notions of femininity. Molly’s act of “body hacking” is deviant because she
is attaining agency through the distortion of her physical body. With the additions of her
fingernails and her improved reflexes, she is voluntarily throwing off meanings created by
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hegemonic masculinity.7 Victoria Pitts, author of “Body Projects,” explains that: “Postmodern
feminists, having rejected the idea of a ‘natural’ pristine body to be defended, celebrated the
ironic intent of deviant body modifiers” (Pitts 232). These so-called “modifiers” (232) often
continue to codify the body within its space and in the space that mediates it. In cyberspace,
which is still quite literally a male-dominated space (insofar that males are able to “hack in” and
penetrate the space), the female cyborg body is still tethered to the various intersections of
gender and bodily awareness. A celebration in this particular setting is not necessarily warranted.
The denaturing of the female body then calls for a reconnecting to culture, one in which
that provides the cyborg woman with a sense of agency and power, but is this possible? To a
certain extent, Rachael Rosen and Pris Stratton can be considered both fictional cyborg
characters that cannot escape their historical origins. Not only are Rachael and Pris built out of a
capitalist schema; they are also bound to their father and creator Eldon Rosen –this poses a sort
of Frankenesteinian problem.
While Molly Millions may have some chance at circumventing or at throwing off her
gender inscriptions, because her fiction occurs in cyberspace: a place where the understanding of
identities are already deconstructed, Pris and Rachael may not be as fortunate. This is true
because both Rachael and Pris are locationally static. Their access to cyberspace is through
computers, but neither cyborg engages in the actual process of plugging in as Molly Millions
does in Neuromancer. Dick presents his reader with a dystopic twenty-first century geography of
the United States, which has seen degradation into a total wasteland. Here, in this wasteland, the
audience and reader will note gender inscriptions are still very important because the replicants
7
“Body hacking” is a 21st century colloquial term referring to the willful modifying of the body through
implantations and distortions to physical appearance through the addition of metal or cybernetic
technologies. These can include: sub-dermal implants, piercings, etc.
xvi
themselves are given sex. Pris Stratton’s label as a “pleasure model” from the outset of the novel
and Ridley Scott’s film indicates that gender identities are not necessarily in flux. Gender is
being programmed, and android prostitutes are being produced to appease out-world colonials.
What is crucial to remark here is that rarely do cyborg characters get to decide on which
bodies they wish to represent themselves in. As a result, a transgressive body politics that
involves a woman’s choosing to change her body is imminently modern and perhaps not
necessarily relevant for the machinic woman who has been created not of her own accord.
Victoria Pitts’s article presents an argument surrounding female body modifications –not
necessarily cyborg body modifications, although, the premise itself in theory can be applied to
the female cyborg body:
I would also describe agency here in terms of speed and visibility. The practice of
commanding the social gaze means that the insertion of women’s own meanings of
the body usurps, at least temporarily, the experts’ role in naming women’s bodies.
(Pitts 240)
Although many feminists would argue that the implantation of machinic appendages
could from the equivalent of a deviant female bodily awareness and commanding of a certain
amount of socio-political power, the manifestation of these parts is still reliant on the father. The
creator, or the father, forms a Frankensteinian bond with the creation, hence its status as made
and not born. Essentially, the woman cyborg is linked to this history, and therefore, this reality is
inescapable. She is, as Pris and Rachael are, commanded by their creator to die at a particular
time. The death of the android or replicant is, thus, determined by the creator. A female android
or cyborg may embody traits that are considered traditionally masculine such as: strength,
heroism etc. However, these social constructions merely continue to adhere her to representation
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of what liberation may look like. Embodying the traits of the opposite sex cannot untether the
female cyborg from her foundations. She is infinitely female.
The female cyborg body manifests a slight contradiction. Melissa Colleen Stevenson
contrasts two very different views on the embodiment of the cyborg and its surroundings. What
she argues mainly is that (regarding Haraway’s cyborg) which she calls the “ethereal”
(Stevenson 88) female cyborg, the cyborg in question has the capability of disconnecting herself
from “essentialist connections” (87). That she is not bound by a totalizing myth of female
gender, “the cyborg’s technologically penetrated body allows the cyborg to reject Edenic notions
of being and femininity, and to turn away from the history of repression that such an origin myth
countenances” (Haraway qtd in Stevenson 87). Stevenson contrasts this with Katherine Hayles’s
justification of cyborgs as products of a dichotomy: embodiment and environment. Hayles is
foremost attentive to the subject of the body, but she is also aware of the socio-political factors
physically surrounding the outside of physicality:
Hayles’s fully realized (post) human beings depend upon their embodied experiences
and upon their interaction with their complex and shifting environments to define a
subjectivity that extends through their bodies and out into the larger world within
which they create a kind of “disturbed cognition environment (Hayles qtd in
Stevenson 290). They are thus not independent of their worlds of flesh and of
experience, but inextricably bound to them and defined by them. (Stevenson 88)
These two varying viewpoints prove that the subject matter of transcending the female cyborg
body is still contested. If the body is indeed “penetrated” (Haraway qtd in Stevenson 87) as
Haraway maintains, the reader assumes that female cyborg is the object of the penetration. And,
as a result, the controller or the agent of the penetration then becomes the creator of the
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mediating gaze; which, we can argue, is predominantly male, at least within a discourse of
phallocentric science fiction literature.
The next few sections will explore each of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner The Final Cut,
Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The
consideration of female cyborg as visible spectacle/gendered performance will be discussed at
length with a contextual framework provided by Butler’s text Bodies that Matter.
The broader inquiry for the next section will involve posing the question of whether or
not a phallocentric science fiction can provide an answer to an ethics and morality for cyborgs.
Scott’s Blade Runner, Gibson’s Neuromancer and Dick’s Do Androids all deal with the issue of
what it means to be human, and more specifically, what that meaning is within a post-modern
and post-humanist world. It is notable to remember that cyberspace, although freeing in its
concept is still codified as a masculine space. The process of “jacking in” or “hacking” in is the
very embodiment of phallocentric activities. The very act itself of metaphorical penetration into
the consciousness of cyberspace means that it is now a masculine space.
Cyberspace is intended for passage of vast amounts of information and, it is used mainly
by men. A good example of this statement is in Neuromancer when Gibson’s main protagonist
Case demonstrates his original disdain for cyberspace as a construct. He expresses disdain
because he states that “it was basically a meat toy… and that the cyberspace matrix was actually
a drastic simplification of the human sensorium… and a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input”
(Gibson 55). This disdain arises from Case’s disillusionment with an object that allows an
individual to transcend the body, or in his mind to multiply “flesh input” (55). His engagement
later on in the text with the sim-stim unit as a conduit for metaphorically penetrating Molly’s
consciousness means that the masculine characters (at least in Gibson’s text) are looking for
xix
some sort of fulfillment.8 Cyberspace acts as a sort of spiritual vehicle within which men are
relieved from the confines of their body. The very act of Case placing electric trodes on himself
and “jacking in” demonstrates that although the body is missing from cyberspace, it is that
critical connection. Being absorbed into cyberspace means that the body is being repressed in
many ways. Case’s nickname “console cowboy” in Gibson’s novel also illustrates for a reader
that although Case possesses disdain for the very item he uses to escape his body, he actually
enjoys using it as a spiritual replacement. Because Gibson’s post-modern Sprawl does not
contain any continuing vision of religious dogmatism or any other cultic religion, I would argue
that the cyberspace itself acts as a vehicle for the realization of selfhood and the realization of a
supposedly higher power. The higher power in this case is infinite but it is not God. The
objective for the next section is to analyze the androids Rachael and Pris in Dick’s Do Androids
and Scott’s Blade Runner respectively. The same thread of spiritual reconnection is also
envisioned in Dick’s text in the form of the cult of Mercerism.
Part II: Investigating Notions of Embodiment in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner The Final Cut9
What has proven interesting Ridley Scott’s The Final Cut is that it is considered the most
comprehensive, according to Mark Robinson “the main differences between the latter two [The
Director’s Cut and The Final Cut] are the loss of the hard-boiled detective voiceover, and the
‘happy ending’” (Robinson 46). Essentially, the keeping of the unicorn dream sequence in the
film is important for the audience to question whether or not Deckard himself is actually a
88
This is the connective unit used by Gibson’s characters in order to infiltrate cyberspace
For the purposes of this particular work, only the Final Cut of Scott’s film was chosen for analysis. This
particular version, one of six, was chosen not only because it refrained from using the voiceover, which
traditionally was narrated in other editions by Harrison Ford for his character Deckard.
9
xx
replicant. The dream sequence for this particular purpose is to compel the audience to consider
what is considered real and what is not. In addition, the dream sequence with the unicorn can
also be interpreted as Deckard’s desire to search for meaning and selfhood. In a world with
electronic animals, it is acknowledged that the unicorn could not possibly exist. What this scene
indicates is that like the animals, humans are unsure of their own existence as humans. It could
also signal for an audience member that Ridley Scott’s faith in the continued existence of organic
human beings is non-existent. Scott avoids mentioning any sort of religious dogmatism in his
film. His adaptation relinquishes Mercerism altogether.10 Scott’s intentions to remove the cult of
Mercer in Blade Runner was most likely executed to amplify the dystopic atmosphere of the
film. Scott’s sprawling images of a post-industrial and degraded wasteland (Los Angeles, as
Dick maintains in the novel) demonstrates the degree in which humans have not only destroyed
their planet, but have also clung to insidious and sellable cults in order to reestablish emotions
and selfhood. It is no surprise that Dick’s and Scott’s characters feel an unfathomable amount of
loss because their humanist framework for defining themselves has disintegrated.
In going back to female embodiment in Blade Runner, the audience should note that
although Scott has removed Deckard’s hard-boiled detective voice over, the sense of voyeurism
and the male gaze is still present indirectly through the presence of varying camera shots. The
removal of the voice over is important because it eliminates the strong male presence that takes
over the viewing experience for the audience. The voice over is prevented from intervening in
the space. Another important aspect of Scott’s film itself in terms of how particular film
10
Mercerism is pivotal to Dick’s text as it demonstrates how humans, in a dystopic future are reliant upon
the Mercer “mood organ” (Dick 3) in order for them to feel particular emotions. This in fact demonstrates
the inability of these so-called humans to identify really and truly with the word human (if there is any at
all)The cult requires a dialing up of your emotions. Deckard often mentions Mercerism as a pathway for
justifying his particular activities: “A mercerite sensed evil without understanding it” (32). The meaning
of human has been skewed and as a result humans are clinging to any familiarity they have that would
potentially give them comfort in their insecurity about selfhood.
xxi
techniques allow Scott to make Blade Runner more realistic. The significance of realism here is
that Scott is able to convince his audience that this geography of lost selfhood, but also of
reinforced gender hierarchies is still very visible.
What is important also in reference to the Final Cut is the superimposing of the face of
the actress Joanna Cassidy onto the character Zhora when she flees through a window and
experiences her final death to Deckard’s bullet (Robinson 49). This precision in terms of
maintaining the particular actress’ face on the stunt double means to create an even greater sense
of realism in the film, and in addition, add that sense of realism to the incredibly violent death
that Zhora is subjected to.11 The realism here connotes something very violent as well, that
Deckard’s act of shooting both Zhora and Pris demonstrate that the audience is given a particular
type of violence enacted on female cyborgs. The deaths are both incredibly violent and
gratuitously gory. This subtle filmic change illustrates Scott’s desire to make the female cyborg
death as filmic and spectacular as possible. Because neither android is considered human, it is
very easy for the protagonist Deckard (played by Harrison Ford in the film) is able to, without
duress, simply annihilate these two female characters.
For the female cyborg body, the notion of spectacle/visibility and performativity is
incredibly crucial it seems, especially in phallocentric science fiction works. In Scott’s Final Cut
version, especially when either Zhora or Pris are killed there is no indication that they are
androids, at least not on their physical surfaces. There are also no visuals of the inside body of
Rachael– the audience is not able to confirm that her cells are her organs are human. We are told
simply that they (Pris and Zhora) are escaped androids/replicants from an outside colony and that
11
Although my analysis of Zhora is not extensive and is not indicated to directly in my argument above,
her character still warrants mention because she becomes the incredible spectacle of the
mechanized/replicant female body and her death warrants observation alongside that of the other replicant
Pris.
xxii
they are attempting to hide in amongst the humans in a denigrated Californian wasteland. Their
visibility, as far as the camera is concerned is restricted to various eroticized camera shots:
“Rachael, Pris and Zhora are in different ways eroticized, fetishized and subjected to point-ofview shots that reduce them to fully realized objects of beauty or to a series of fractured bodily
parts, with shots of their legs, faces, eyes, torsos” (Redmond 58). This objectification juxtaposed
next to Deckard’s inner monologue in Dick’s novel about the inexistence or non-life of electric
animals demonstrates that Scott is also very uncertain of how the selfhood exists within the text.
Selfhood, Scott argues, is in many ways defined by the very possession of a body.
The mention of the various fractured parts of female bodies in Scott’s film demonstrates
that Scott’s impetus to continue to reinforce may mean that he is either following Dick’s text
quite closely, or that he is attempting to demonstrate for his audience that he himself (as a
director) has no answer. Therefore, he reverts back to commodifying the female body through
gratuitously voyeuristic camera shots of fragmented torsos. This is the easiest for his audience to
relate to.
What can be gleaned specifically from Deckard’s inner monologue in Dick’s text is that
he too is meditating on the actual definition of human. In the scene in Dick’s novel where
Deckard first encounters Eldon Rosen and Rachael Rosen, he makes an observation about
“andys” as non-beings:12
He thought about his need too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual
hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend,
had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object… It doesn’t know I exist.
Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another…., the
12
The word “andy” is used frequently in Philip K. Dick’s novel as a short form for referring to
“androids”. The term “andy” is used mainly by Deckard.
xxiii
android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz
animal.13(Dick 42)
From this particular quotation, a reader can assume then that Deckard regards the replicants as no
more than an object. For the film, this acknowledgment of the “object[s]” (42) emphasizes
Deckard’s not only misogynistic view of replicants. It also overstates his objectification of
female cyborgs who are inherently tied to their sexuality and are thus bound to their “object”
corporealization. Although the machinic parts are not visible on Pris or Rachael, because they
are bioengineered they are not necessarily considered ‘’eye candy’’ to the male gaze. They are
not considered real human women. However, their bodies are still, in a more human sense
beautiful and are codified by particular markers of gender: slim figures and demure statures.14
This acknowledgment in the text of androids as unworthy subjects gives justification for
Deckard’s violent destruction of them in the film. Because they are not human, they do not
deserve to die like a human.
The body of Molly Millions in Gibson’s Neuromancer is remarkably hyper-sexualized
just within the confines of the first twenty-five pages of his novel. Molly’s visually enhanced eye
lenses and extended talon-like blade fingernails create a sort of sexual-fetishism for the male
gaze who sees this mechanical penetration (Stevenson 87) of the female body as sexually
arousing. It is with the description of Molly’s outfit “[the] silver lenses seemed to grow from
smooth pale skin above her cheekbones…. She wore tight gloveleather jeans, … and with a
barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings
beneath the burgundy nails” (Gibson 24-5) that the reader is able to visualize quite heavily
13
The emphasis on “object” here in Dick’s novel is my own.
Because “human” is a loaded word while used alongside descriptions of cyborgs. I hope to
disambiguate by maintaining that the bodies and descriptions of Pris and Rachael are ultimately perfect
constructions of gendered feminine beauty
14
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Molly’s gender. Molly, in this instance, becomes a receptacle for male desire. Descriptions of her
body to this degree emphasize on Gibson’s part a desire to sexualize the cyborg. Because her
bodily modifications are exotic and strange, Gibson automatically applies a certain sexual appeal
to her. If the character were a man, Gibson would have a harder time of appealing to his
audience. In essence, it is particularly easy to hyper-sexualize the cyborg because the assumption
follows that she is not entirely human. Her humanity is not relinquished in any way because the
male gaze reifies her. The actual description is in and of itself a performance and spectacle of
gender. This reification also reiterates a compulsory heterosexuality.
According to Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter, the proliferation of particular power
relations, especially misogynistic ones, means that their interplay with these relations creates
particular patters. This means that for the female cyborg body: “’Sex’ is always produced as a
reiteration of hegemonic norms. This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of
performativity” (Butler 43). It is this “discursive performativity [which] appears to produce that
which it names, to enact its own referent” (43). The corporealization of the female cyborg body
means that it is inherently spectacle because it ultimately takes on every idyllic notion of
feminine perfection for the pleasure of the heterosexist male gaze. Part of this “discursive
performativity” (43) that Butler mentions is present in the referent of Pris’s model number. She
is called a “basic pleasure model” (Blade Runner). This engagement in the language or referent
of sex, a “pleasure model”, means to structure a sort of spectacle of the female body even though
the body is not necessarily on display. In other words, the female android has not chosen to be
displayed. The referent itself through a phallocentric discourse places Pris’s subjectivity within
the confines of her body– she is called into her sex.
xxv
Butler’s argument about performativity can be placed alongside the physical descriptions
of both Pris and Rachael in Dick’s text as well. We presume that both are the same type of
android because Pris originally calls herself Rachael Rosen. The text also deals with the subject
of intercourse. Essentially, sexual intercourse with an android is fetishized within Dick’s novel,
further adding to these constructions of female gender that structure this phallocentric hegemony.
In the novel, the officer Phil Resch and Deckard talk about androids who are made specifically
for the act of sexual intercourse. The act of intercourse coincides, it seems, directly with death.
The android female cannot experience sensual pleasures because she is both prohibited by her
gender and limited by her engineering. Towards the end of the novel, Phil Resch and Deckard
have this particular conversation while in the elevator after Resch asks Deckard if he has ever
slept with an android:
‘If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face
yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android-nothing
more, nothing less…. What’s happened is that you’ve got your order reversed. Don’t
kill her- or be present when she’s killed’…. Rick stared at him. ‘Go to bed with her
first-‘ ‘-and then kill her” Phil Resch said. (Dick 143-4)
Because the reader is aware at some point in the novel later on that Resch is an android, it seems
unusual that he would say something so inherently misogynistic and, in fact, human. Essentially,
the deaths of both Pris and Zhora are justified in Scott’s film while paralleled next to this
particular excerpt from Dick’s novel. Because Zhora is an exotic dancer and Pris is merely a
pleasure model (or prostitute), it is only necessary that they die for partaking in the acts of sexual
behavior. Because they have been programmed with this function, they are further constricted by
it. It is their functions, as cyborgs, to be codified by whatever their body is programmed to
xxvi
iterate, by extension a deviant sexuality. What is ironic about this point, however, is that Rachael
does engage in sexual intercourse with Deckard in the novel. In contrast, Rachael is not killed,
potentially, we may argue, because she fits a particular form of pure femininity. What salvages
Rachael is her submission to Deckard’s desire for her.
The justification for Rachael’s life, or the justification for her being able to live is
sustained by the genre in which Scott’s film Blade Runner is rendered. Because it is filmed in the
genre of film noir, Rachael is framed consequently as the “archetypal femme fetale, [who]
seductively enters the film dressed in high heels [and], a sharp, tight business suit” (Redmond
58). According to Redmond, Rachael is represented as a character with an inherent duality of
character. While viewed through the genre of film-noir, she “appears to be both a Madonna and a
Whore type figure-… Rachael visually speaks the language of female sexual danger…. But she
also come to be seen as pure, untouched” (58). In this statement, Rachael, Redmond argues
comes across to the viewer as incredibly virginal. The subject perceiving Rachael is still
incredibly voyeuristic.
This contradiction serves to sexualize Rachael’s body even moreso than Dick has gone at
length to do in the book. In Dick’s novel Rachael is portrayed innocently and almost childlike as
she is consistently referred to as a “girl” by Dr. Rosen. This infantilization is also a part of this
reiteration of domination through gendered codification. Where the film creates Rachael as a
goddess figure with a sort of mysterious sexual prowess, in Dick’s novel, she is more easily
taken advantage of by Deckard because of her child-likeness. This is evident in a passage where
Deckard is remembering his first encounter with Rachael, she becomes the object of his sexual
desire although there is no apparent desire from him: “For example: Rachael Rosen. No, he
decided; she’s too thin. No real development, especially in the bust. A figure like a child’s, flat
xxvii
and tame. He could do better” (Dick 95). Her body is thus written upon again by a heterosexual
male gaze which reifies her and confines her to particular masculine space.
The discursive action of defining the identities of these women/replicants continues to
subvert their bodies and consequently their agency to the domination of what had been
previously mentioned by Butler as “hegemonic norms” (43). The reader and voyeur should
understand that in both Dick’s settings and Scott’s film that these norms are constructed and are
concrete. The creator has embodied a hegemonic state within the bodies of the cyborg women,
and the filter through which the reader views these characters is blatantly voyeuristic. It would be
very difficult to argue that a post-humanist framework provides some liberation to these female
replicants–this means that their lack of cultural experience (and thus, a lack of gender) indicates
that they also lack agency. The reason mainly is that these android subjectivities are always
dependent on a phallocentric discourse. Not only are their physical appearances and bodilyawarenesses defined by hegemonic masculininites, they are determined to die if a particular
mode of sexuality is not met.
In regards to the deaths of both Zhora and Pris in Scott’s film, it is evident that both are
shockingly violent and disturbing. These incidents both provide opportunities in the film for
spectacle and for exploitation. According to Redmond, “Blade Runner suggests that patriarchy is
natural and that any challenges to this need to be put down” (Redmond 59).
The death that each female replicant experiences in Scott’s film is incredibly visceral and
brutal. In Zhora’s slaughter, the audience witnesses her running through a set of plate-glass
windows and then getting impaled by a bullet from Deckard’s gun. Pris is shot several times as
she vaults above Deckard’s head like a gymnast and then is seen writhing in agony on the floor
until Deckard finally destroys her (Blade Runner). This scene with Pris in particular is important
xxviii
because Deckard is seen standing above her and as he is placed by the particular camera angle
seems the savior, to put Pris out of her misery, to provide her with mercy. This sympathetic
viewing of Deckard again can be juxtaposed with the image of Pris’s dead body lying motionless
and alone on her back. Her body again becomes the extension for which male power can form
hegemony over any female subject. The bullet penetrates her in an act of brutal murder and an
act of a reification and codification of her body that she was not able to escape. This reiteration
forms not only a terrible murder scene, but also that of a spectacle for which the male gaze is
previewed to and implicit in.
The answer to the question of Blade Runner is complex. How can the replicant/android
can be transgressive if she in no way can mold her body into a deviant form? It is evident in both
Dick’s novel and Scott’s film that deviant sexual forms and behaviors are controlled intricately
by the relations of phallocentric power. Both the filter of Scott’s camera and Dick’s omniscient
narrator assure that the female replicant stays firmly tethered to her body. In addition, the
removal of choice for the android body is critical as it prevents her from transcending her own
physicality.
If this form of feminine spectacle and objectification occurs in both Blade Runner The
Final Cut and Do Androids, is it possible to come up with ethics for the cyborg? This depends
primarily on the cyborg or replicant’s agency. Because the android has already been filtered as a
subordinate to codifications of male power, or is seen as a performative of female gender
constructions, it is possible that she is not capable of being moral— primarily because she is not
human. As far as Dick’s novel is concerned, androids are not capable of morality. This is in
keeping with humanism, which posits that all sentient human beings have the capacity for ethics.
The scene in Dick’s novel toward his conclusion features Pris sitting at J.R Isodore’s table
xxix
annihilating a spider leg-by-leg as Isodore watches. This scene emphasizes Pris’ lack of morality.
She senselessly destroys the spider without a thought to its suffering. The scene is brutal in the
imagination because Pris feels no remorse for her actions:
‘It probably won’t run as fast,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing for it to catch around
here anyhow. It’ll die anyway.’ She reached for the scissors…. With the scissors,
Pris snapped off one of the spider’s legs…. Pris had now cut three legs from the
spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to
freedom. It found none. (Dick 206-207)
Pris’ destruction of the spider in this part of the novel demonstrates that she is not in possession
of a code of ethics. Ironically, Pris rationalizes that the spider has no chance of living and
therefore it will die anyway. The very act of rationalization is an affirmation of Pris’ humanity,
but on the same token, her ineffectual maiming of the spider demonstrates her incapacity to
reason ethically. Dick suggests that Pris has been programmed to perform these particular
actions. There is little regard made by Irmgard Baty or Roy Baty in this scene as to the torture
that Pris is implication on the spider. 15 This scene can be eloquently juxtaposed alongside the
rendering of Pris in Scott’s film. She is scene towards the middle of the film sitting next to Roy
Baty and observing decapitated doll heads. She pulls the doll’s head towards her and is
bewildered by it (Blade Runner). In Scott’s film, however, Pris does not destroy the dolls, she
merely observes them with wonderment and amusement. If indeed Pris’ moral codes were
programmed, it is sufficient to argue that her understandings of pain are incredibly skewed. Dick
wants his reader to acknowledge that although Pris has been programmed with a type of
rationality, this does not mean that she has empathy. Therefore, he argues that rationality and
15
Irmgard and Roy Baty are two other androids present in Dick’s novel that are fugitives escaped from
the out-world colonies.
xxx
ethical consciousness are non-programmable. Extending from this, the female replicant is not
capable of possessing morals and is, therefore, not human.
The next chapter will focus exclusively on Molly from Gibson’s Neuromancer and will
go into a discussion of her embodiment based on arguments made by theorists Jean Baudrillard
and Sherryl Vint.
Part III: Mediating a Female Cyborg in Cyberspace: William Gibson’s Molly in
Neuromancer
What is essential for the contextualization of Gibson’s text is that much of the novel takes
place in cyberspace. This cyberspace relinquishes particular subjectivities, it deconstructs them
at is simply a vacuum of space- at least in Gibson’s novel is to mediate a particular
consciousness16. In this space the body is removed of all signification as it becomes data.
Baudrillard’s explanation of the simulation is probably the most accurate here to detail the
experience of this particular place/time. According to Baudrillard the simulation is constituted as
a space removed of all signification: “the imaginary of representation” (Baudrillard 3) is
annihilated. And so, there is
No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization of that is the
dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and
memory banks, models of control– and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of
times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures
itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but
16
The consciousness in question is mediated invariably by a physical body on the other end of a
simulating device.
xxxi
operational…. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory
models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. (Baudrillard 3)
Cyberspace can be thought of as this infinite space of data, but of data that in no way can be
necessarily re-organized into particular structures of power. According to Sherryl Vint, “the
appeal of cyberspace is linked directly to the repression of the material body in cyberpunk
fiction” (Vint 103). This simulation provides a unique space for the interplay of sexual
codification and bodily awareness.
The substitution of the body for data seems to be intimately linked to transcendence of a
codified body and demonstrates again an interplay of “hegemonic norms” (Butler 43) as argued
by Judith Butler. In Molly’s case, however, there is some sense of choice in her bodily
modifications. Vint also summarizes Molly’s implants, her eyes more specifically, as well as the
“razor blades implanted beneath her fingers, and adjustments made to her reflexes, to increase
her fighting ability” (Vint 108). This notion of the powerful female android character is
substantially sexualized and deters any kind of feminist hope for liberation.
Part of this lack of female cyborg liberation can be attributed to the voyeuristic
descriptions of Molly’s body. In Gibson’s gratuitous sex scene at the beginning of the novel, he
certainly does not spare his audience and instead gives them full detail. The details, however, are
predominantly hegemonic insofar that they do not give any focus on female desire but instead to
Case’s desires, obviously the masculine. It is possible that because Molly’s character presents a
form of deviant sexuality– she works as a prostitute that she is already codified with particular
assumptions about her gender. It is these assumptions that create a gratuitous scene for the
heterosexual male spectator.
xxxii
The act of sexual intercourse further reifies Molly. In the text she can be observed
“impaling herself”(Gibson 33), as if the act of sexual pleasure is a mortifying act. It pairs the
words of violence with sexual pleasure, creating a duality of enjoyment and death, although Case
is the only individual who benefits directly from the union. After the hyper-sexualized
description of Molly’s body from the narrator, the reader is privy only to the male’s experience
of orgasm, as though Molly is classified simply as an object or conduit for Case’s fulfillment of
desire. This is reiterated by Gibson’s description of Case’s “orgasm flaring blue in a timeless
space” (33).
Molly is not necessarily able to escape her body the way that Case is able to. The most
prominent and most widely cited incident in the novel is when Case connects to Molly’s
consciousness through the sim-stim connection. Vint contends that “Both Case and Molly
believe that they have agency when they use the body as a technological tool- Case’s neural
interfaces and Molly’s cyborg body– and both feel decentered by the notion of being trapped in
the exploitable meat” (Vint 108). What is evident though is that although Molly has a particular
agency over her body, Case serves as a voyeur in her consciousness visibly watching every
move. He commands her eyes through her consciousness although he is not able to actual control
her. What continues this tethering of bodies, although the reader is aware that Case is within a
cyberspace construct, is Molly’s check to initiate whether or not that he had connected via
simstim:
Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the
verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped
sideways, made room. ‘How you doing Case?’ He heard the words and felt her form
them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk.
xxxiii
The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way.
(Gibson 56)
Although the transcendence of the body occurs in some form for both character in that they are
technologically linked together, the constructs that tether Molly’s body to her gender are still
inevitably intact. While she is able to control her body to mitigate where and when she needs to
be somewhere, Case, while engaged in the sim-stim connection, is able to feel every sensation
(Gibson 56), as if the most private parts of her sexual desire are privy to his vision:
‘How you doing, Case?’ He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand
into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him
catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply….
What did he know about her? The she was another professional; that she said her
being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she’d moved
against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he’d entered
her. (Gibson 56)
This particular excerpt demonstrates that the transmission of sexual pleasure must to a degree be
mitigated through phallocentric understandings of female desire. The reader understands that
Case is transmitting his desires for Molly. Case is aware that Molly was a prostitute. Part of the
reminiscing in Case’s thought process is in many ways connected to Molly’s. Case’s thought
process is at this time connected to Molly’s, like a split consciousness.
Evidently, the female cyborg in Molly’s case is fragmented insofar that her identity
would shift in cyberspace, but the codifications of her body and the objectifications of her body
are still in place to divorce her from a transcendent experience. These codifications may or may
not be linked directly to the notion of fragmented identities in cyberspace and their mediation
xxxiv
through technology. For Claire Sponsler, Baudrillard’s meditation on reality provides some
satisfactory answer, she states:
This is a radically mediated world [cyberspace], where no one can trust that the
reality he or she encounters is ever really real. It is, tellingly, a world much like
Baudrillard’s description of our own, in which the individual ‘can no longer produce
the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer
produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all
the networks of influence’. (Baudrillard qtd in Sponsler 633)
The significance of Sponsler’s statement is that the body frames itself as a sort of reflective
surface. Meaning cannot be simplified to the point where all constructions come from the
individual’s own creation. Meanings of gender and selfhood are produced by the structures and
relations of power surrounding the individual selfhood is defined by the particular experience of
reflecting off inscriptions of power onto the body. Cyberspace provides that infinite simulation
wherein the individual experiences the interplay of various meanings, but, like Case is still
trapped insofar that the individual is unable to inadvertently create and regulate their own
meanings.
If identities then become fluid, Molly’s identity is mainly produced through codifications
of her as a feminine cyborg. Not only is her body fetishized– the act of having sexual intercourse
with an android/cyborg commands a particular fetishism– her body is also presented in a
voyeuristic fashion. Case is not able to control her body via sim-stim connection, allowing Molly
to feel every sensation, even her desire. In cyberspace, one could argue that these particular
gender codifications are destabilized.
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Therefore, if cyberspace relinquishes any willed constructs of identity or bodily
awareness, then it is true that a cyborg would indeed be freed from gender. However, because
Gibson’s Neuromancer provides no other alternative, it is difficult to assume that most
phallocentric science fiction would provide a female cyborg with a particularly subversive
identity, or one that seeks to recodify herself.
Now that Pris, Rachael, and Molly have been covered extensively, the next section will
continue the dialogue pertaining to the dialectic between humanism and post-humanism. This
section’s aim is to outline the main goals of each theory and explain how post-humanism, to an
extent is more useful to explaining issues of gender deconstruction within a twenty-first century
context. Theories of post-humanism are critical to exploring Gibson’s Neuromancer, Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner because they [theories of
post-humanism] make clear a new hybrid version of humanness. That humans cannot solely be
defined by their rationality and their moral capabilities.
Although many scholars have already been exhaustive in terms of their analysis of
cyborg theory (such as Haraway’s “Manifesto”) many have avoided the subject of
android/cyborg agency altogether. Especially in regards to willful body modifications chosen by
the cyborgs themselves.
Part IV: The Humanist/Post-Human Body: Understanding Corporealization and Gender
Through A Theoretical Framework
Much research has been done in the realm of humanism and post-humanism to explain the
structure of relations of power and mediated bodies in science fiction. The emphasis here is not
to consider every bit of research to find an underlying truth, but rather to demonstrate how
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humanism’s approach to the body and human consciousness is inherently restrictive17.
Consequently, this argument will illustrate the ways in which post-humanism can account for
these newly produced cyborg bodies. The objective for this chapter is to explain how various
voices have negotiated a mechanized half-human homo sapiens and evaluate to what extent this
has created a comprehensive dialogue for the oppressed female cyborg subject.
Consequently, this argument will illustrate the ways in which post-humanism can account
for these newly produced cyborg bodies. The objective for this chapter is to explain how various
voices have negotiated a mechanized half-human homo sapiens and evaluate to what extent this
has created a comprehensive dialogue for the oppressed female cyborg subject.
With the deconstruction of humanism accompanies a deconstruction of beliefs
surrounding agency and identity that have been a part of literary canon for centuries. According
to authors Patrick Fuery and Nick Mansfield, the study of humanism cannot be understood solely
as a definition. Humanism is instead an exchange of ideas that leads to an understanding of a
universal human essence (Fuery and Mansfield 5):
Humanism has been attacked for many reasons… The simplest way to understand
this particular controversy is in the following terms. Humanism, in its broadest
definition, sees the identification and fulfillment of a universal human nature as the
purpose of cultural work. (5)
This conception of a human essence neglects not only various sub-categories of what constitutes
humanness, such as gender and racialized minorities. It [humanism] also suppresses “cultural
degeneracy” (5). The word degeneracy here is ambiguous. One is to assume then that this
“degeneracy” (5) may arise from a created existence –cyborgs in this case because they are a
17
My investigation of the premises underlying humanism and post-humanism are not by any means
exhaustive. For the purposes of this argument, I have chosen particular elements to focus on, mainly those
related to human nature.
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sub-species, one that may have no contributing effort in the production of culture. Or,
alternatively, any deviant culture, in the case of the cyborg Molly Millions or Gibson’s
protagonist, Case, who are both considered social deviants. This theory is incredibly problematic
because of its effort to
Produce a model of the individual that can both embody a continuity and
commonality of human nature and identity over and above differences of time and
place… the humanist individual is both idealist [author’s italics] (a framework of
perceptions that refines and accumulates values and meanings as part of an eternal,
transhistorical fulfillment of human talent… and empiricist)[author’s italics] (a
concrete respondent and contributor to the material world). (Belsey qtd in Fuery and
Mansfield 8)18
This continuity is fragmented once the idea of a reality or a cyberspace has entered into the
equation. How can a universal self or individual exist within a space that has re-negotiated
constructions of gender and notions of intelligence and agency? Humanist theory, more broadly,
does not lend its meanings to a human agent that has in some ways transcended what we believe
to be real or, in Baudrillard’s case, experienced the hyperreal.19
Louis Althusser’s meditation on “Marxism and Humanism” brings up a similar argument
to Fuery and Mansfield’s, however, he dispels the notion that humanism, as a theoretical
framework cannot in itself be eliminated. Despite that it can be implicated and critiqued.
Althusser argues that Marx himself was a blatant anti-humanist. Although Althusser maintains
that Marx’s determination to re-evaluate the essence of the human and the conscious human
subject within humanist theory is present, he also claims that, “Marx never believed that an
18
This quotation is used in Fuery and Mansfield’s text to supply different contextualizations of humanist
theory within the literary canon, as opposed to simply adding one definition, as I had mentioned above.
19
The “hyperreal” is omnipresent in Baudrillard’s Similacra and Simulation.
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ideology might be dissipated by a knowledge of it… [his] theoretical anti-humanism [author’s
italics] does not suppress anything in the historical existence [author’s italics] of humanism”
(Althusser 32).
Despite our desires to eradicate humanism as a totalizing and orthodox theory, which in
effect relinquishes any hope of understanding new modes for human beings and cyborgs.
Althusser warns us that an omission of humanist theory’s contributions to previous historical
contexts is misinformed. What is most critical to an understanding of humanism’s pitfalls is
realizing, as Althusser notes, that it is merely an “ideology” (32), which, like post-humanism,
acts as an intermediary for the production of various social relations within and outside the body.
It cannot be discounted that humanism is outdated in respect to post-modern human
bodies insofar as it places its emphasis on the importance of human rationality. Humanism’s
foundation is one that is focused primarily on the rational human subject divorced from its
animal counterpart and is prohibited from including newer and remodeled human bodies and
sensibilities. The question of what it means to be human, and essentially, a gendered and
mechanized female body has yet to be asked in a humanist framework or has been dismissed
altogether.
Post-humanism, in contrast, can account for a number of the deficiencies humanist theory
incurs. Are rationality and consciousness the sole determinants for humanness? If this is indeed
the case, the cyborg/android, which is able to perfectly mimic or live like a biological human
perfectly, could be considered human, especially if the android in question is Dick’s Nexus-6
model which is able to eventually evolve to produce its own emotions?20
20
Tyrell (substituted in Scott’s film from Rosen), is adamant on letting Deckard know that his Nexus-6
androids are “more human than human” (Blade Runner).
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Post-humanism begins as a dialogue situated within the postmodern world. There is a
reconstitution of the meaning of the natural body through the post-human. It allots various
opportunities for the codification and re-codification of humans and technology. It is not static
insofar as it helps to fill in the proverbial gaps created by a humanist philosophy. Bodies are
constantly in flux while viewed through a post-humanist lens. With this in mind, it brings to
question whether or not gendered cybernetic bodies can function without their ‘other?’21 Scott
Bukatman argues that “the obsessive restaging of the refiguration of the body posits a constant
redefinition of the subject through the multiple superimposition of bio-technological
apparatuses” (Bukatman 98).
In turn, we see that post-humanism, not humanism, must account for the continual
restructuring of human flesh. The constant shifting of bodily awareness to unite oneself with
complex technologies requires an ideology that accounts for a new type of bio-technical
consciousness, if this is indeed what defines the human, and a clarification as to whether or not
these cyborgs can operate on the same level as a human. What becomes problematic for posthumanism is grounding the ideology in some sort of human activity. If post-humanism rejects
humanism’s definition of human– that of rationality, and essential human nature, or
consciousness –then what can we define as human?
What becomes an undeniably problematic question in the disciplines of post-humanism, and in
this case trans-humanism, is determining the importance of human consciousness, morality, and
agency. Cary Wolfe provides a slightly different account of post-humanism. These parts,
21
By ‘other,’ I mean to suggest that, because bodies and subjectivities are in flux (bodies are no longer held strictly
by their physicality) that they are no longer held by particular social constructions. However, I debate as masculine
discursive science fiction realities seem to hold otherwise: that the female android/cyborg is still oppressed by her
gender.
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consciousness and body, cannot always be the proving ground for an ideological post-human
apparatus. Instead Wolfe states that:
Long before the historical onset of cyborg technologies that now so obviously inject
the post- into the posthuman in ways that fascinate the transhumanists, functional
differentiation itself determines the posthumanist form [author’s italics] of meaning,
reason, and communication by untethering it from its moorings in the [individual],
subjectivity, and consciousness. Meaning now becomes a specifically modern form
of self-referential discursivity that is used by both psychic systems (consciousness)
and social systems (communication) to handle overwhelming environmental
complexity. (Wolfe xx)
This “untethering” (xx) that Wolfe speaks of calls for a distancing the human individual from the
connectedness they have to meaning solely within the self. Alternatively, these human functions
are then thought of contextually alongside particular “social systems” (xx).
Many opinions within post-humanist discourse are mixed and uncertain on the subject of
consciousness and how the body is negotiated in terms of its human and mechanical parts. What
is most clear is that most of these ideologies within post-humanism have not yet come to a
reasonable conclusion on the subject of human and automata relations. These opinions recognize
a blurring of the lines between subject, individual, and social constructs; however, what is still
incredibly pivotal to this argument is that ideology, no matter what ideology it is, is still selfreflexive. As far as humanism is concerned, “Enlightenment rationality is not, as it were, rational
enough, because it stops short of applying its own protocols and commitments to itself” (Wolfe
xx), this still is the primary tenant of post-humanism.
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If the crossing of boundaries is inherent as a part of post-humanist ideology, what does
this mean for the female android/cyborg? There is no true answer, as far as post-humanist and
post-feminists are concerned the most conflicting element of this question is whether or not the
female body can actually be transcended, especially if we are attempting to explain the human in
terms of his or her morality or his or her empathy. And, in terms of whether or not there can be a
revolution for the hyper- sexualized cyborg female.
To summarize, embodiment is an incredibly contested subject within both post- and
humanism. What is ironic is that once embodiment is eliminated within the confines of
cyberspace, all language and meanings are thought to have disappeared. What is erroneous about
this idea however is that self-awareness is in many ways defined by the limits and capacity of
our consciousness. For feminist critics of humanism and of male science fiction discourse, the
female cyborg offers a paradoxical dual purpose: one, for the transcendence and rebellion of
regularly scripted gender assignments, and two, presents the position that this female
human/cyborg marriage still demonstrates how subjectivities are linked to power relations
operating outside of the body.
Conclusion
It is nearly impossible to imagine a conclusion to the subject of mediated female cyborg
bodies and replicant bodies. According to many post and trans humanists, cyberspace provides a
locus for the problematizing of particular gender norms and identities. Many deem that this
particular spatiality proves redeeming to the female cyborg character because she is vindicated in
her search for identity. For Pris, Rachael, and Molly it seems uniformly true that their vindication
is not necessarily possible as their identities are intensely mediated by a phallocentric science
fiction discourse. In addition, any understandings of self, at least in Scott’s Blade Runner or
xlii
Dick’s Do Androids is mediated through a humanist lens. The question of what constitutes a
human being poses a number of other problems for mechanized humans. The most critical of
those problems is empathy. Many trans-humanists will argue, especially in regards to the Rosen
Association’s building of the Nexus-6 models in Dick’s novel, that this constructed human, with
real human emotions, engages in a dialogue that forces readers to imagine bodies moving and
mediating between us that are barely distinguishable from our supposed true human counterparts.
Another inquiry for this particular area for mediating cyborg bodies is the dichotomy of the
human/animal body. The references throughout Dick’s novel undoubtedly force a reader to
inquire into which framework humans can be placed if in fact humanoid robots or automata are
becoming even “more human than human” (Blade Runner).
Authors like Donna Haraway have paved a path for a discourse in female cyborg bodies
and the interplay of these bodies with socio-politico ideologies such as Marxism and Capitalism.
One central issue, at least for most radical feminist science fiction scholars (like Haraway and
Vint) is determining the place of the female cyborg/android body in a futuristic setting.
In cyberspace, no discursive reality necessarily exists, and there is contention between
many theorists as to whether or not this space is inherently liberating for a cyborg character or if
it indeed continues to subject to her to particular hegemonies that are inherently located within
the space of the body.
Much research has been done into the study of data and movement of data within
discursive science fiction realities, but there has been little agreement on whether or not the
movement of data constitutes a proper allocation of identities or if it continues to subdue. It can
be noted that Pris and Rachael are both cyborgs that are intimately tied or are slaves to their
fabrication as Frankensteinian creations. Their construction as made beings prevents them in
xliii
many ways from identifying with humans. If in fact we are filtering humanness based on
biological origins, this theory would work to suppress these characters even more so.
Unfortunately, the most contentious issue for this subject is in uncovering a framework
that determines what it really and truly means to be human? Surely consciousness and empathy
cannot be the sole factors for determining such things. For the female cyborg body, she remains
in limbo until an eloquent framework for defining selfhood and identity within the field of transhumanism is born. This question of humanness cannot be answered directly by looking to either
humanism or post-humanism as both of the central texts (Do Androids and Neuromancer)
suggest.
Omnipresent in these narratives is the notion that the female body continues to suggest
that it is the locus or debating ground for various questions surrounding identity, codification and
gender hegemonies. In a post-human world, what then will provide humans with a proper
knowledge of self? Humanism has only proven that rationality is useful, but now that computers
and cyborgs can rationalize, what is left to categorize the human? Humans within cyberspace
have begun to look outward from the periphery: they are no longer the rule; they are becoming
the exception.
Although it is evident that many female science fiction scholars have attempted to relieve
some of the gendered assumptions and inscriptions built into the cyborg/android body, it is
difficult whether or not our theories will be able to address these different stages of
subjectification or cyborg choice without a completely extensive and revived description of what
it means to be human? Perhaps the question is, does being human really and truly matter?
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