Science Fiction Studies

#85 = Volume 28, Part 3 = November 2001


Veronica Hollinger

Doing It for Ourselves: Two Feminist Cyber-Readers

How can I say it? That we are women from the start. That we don’t need to be produced by them, named by them, made sacred or profane by them. That this has already happened, always already happened, without their labors. And that their history constitutes the locus of our exile.—Luce Irigaray, "When Our Lips Speak Together" (The Gendered Cyborg 263)

Jenny Wolmark, ed. Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. viii + 374 pp. Distributed by Columbia UP. $75.00 hc; $25.00 pbk.

Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, eds. The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Routledge: London and New York (in association with The Open University), 2000. xiv + 333 pp. $85.00 hc; $27.99 pbk.

Here are two generous and stimulating collections that will be of interest to researchers and teachers in a variety of cognate areas. With relatively little overlap, each assembles a broad selection of essays and excerpts from longer works that, taken together, have participated significantly not only in the ongoing project of feminist criticism of science fiction but also, more broadly, in a whole range of feminist science studies and feminist cultural studies of science developed since the mid-1980s. They provide an excellent introduction to the tangle of questions and issues raised by contemporary technoculture’s theoretical constructions of nature, science, subjectivity, bodies, and genders. Collectively, the various essays and excerpts reprinted in Cybersexualities and The Gendered Cyborg comprise a complex and wide-ranging exploration of existing techno-representations. And many of them suggest (at least the possibilities of) different, more inclusive, and more critically self-aware representations.

Is there so much material out there dealing with what is sometimes termed cybertheory, and specifically feminist cybertheory, that we already require editors to sift, collate, and collect it? In brief, yes. In our previous issue of SFS #84, 28:2 [July 2001], we noted a feminist website that lists resources on cyberfeminism, technoculture, gender and science, and new media designed by sidney eve matrix of the University of Minnesota. If you take a look at this impressive site (at<htttp:www.tx.umn.edu/~matri001>), you will find an overwhelming amount of material to sift through, including journals, full-length studies, edited collections, articles, links to other websites, conference reports, and calls for papers. In other words, feminist cybertheory is a large, convoluted, and constantly expanding critical field. Collections such as Cybersexualities and The Gendered Cyborg are invaluable guides through some of its more significant pathways.

For readers with a particular interest in science fiction, Jenny Wolmark’s Cybersexualities is the more immediately relevant of the two, and for this reason I will discuss its contents in some detail. Many readers will already be familiar with Wolmark’s Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (1993), one of the best full-length studies of science fiction to appear in the 1990s.1 Her present collection, produced as a sourcebook for scholars and students, reprints seventeen articles originally published between 1988 and 1995 and arranges them in three sections: "Technology, Embodiment and Cyberspace," "Cybersubjects: Cyborgs and Cyberpunks," and "Cyborg Futures." These strands are tied together through Wolmark’s detailed general introduction, as well as through her very useful introductions to the individual sections.

Wolmark’s stated aim is to "chart some of the key issues" arising from the intersections of cultural theory, feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace; and she organizes Cybersexualities around "two related but distinct metaphors, that of cyberspace, and the cyborg" (1).2 She also discusses in some detail the two texts that anchor her selections. The first, not at all surprisingly, is Donna Haraway’s "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" (1985), that vastly influential discussion about feminism, technology, and affinity politics that remains so central to so many of the ongoing debates in cybertheory. The second, again not so suprisingly, is William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the quintessential cyberpunk novel that introduced the term cyberspace into popular discourse. Neuromancer continues to function as an exemplary text in any discussion of how science fiction imaginatively represents our "information-saturated environment" (3).

Wolmark’s introduction of these two lode-star texts emphasizes how each has become situated at the intersections of contemporary feminist theory, cultural theory, and science fiction. Feminist theory has been debating the relative merits of Haraway’s "Manifesto" from a wide variety of perspectives almost since the moment of its first appearance, and these debates frequently intersect with science fiction, the imaginative locale where most of our cyborgs still reside. For many readers, part of the attraction of the "Manifesto" is its recognition of the imaginative significance of contemporary sf to lived culture, as well as Haraway’s identification of writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia Butler as "theorists for cyborgs" (173). As a work of fiction, Neuromancer is the apotheosis of noir sf, tough, cool, and savvy. Its fictionalized construction of our present-day information society and its imaginative representation of a cyberspace that every day seems closer to actualization have attracted debate, resistance, and rethinking of a particularly rich variety. If Gibson gave us "cyberspace," Haraway’s "Manifesto" encouraged us to recognize his characters as cyborgs. Gibson too is a theorist for cyborgs, even if his are not quite the postgender cyborgs envisioned by Haraway as one hopeful response to the apocalyptically-minded project of masculinist science. Since both the cyborg and cyberspace imaginatively influence our current notions about the body and embodiment, each has provided a richly rewarding trope through which to think about subjects, bodies, genders, and sexualities as they develop and play out in real-world technoculture.

Wolmark’s first section, "Technology, Embodiment and Cyberspace," reprints five essays and one excerpt that explore questions about embodiment, particularly female embodiment. The first two, Mary Ann Doane’s "Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine" (1990) and Claudia Springer’s "The Pleasure of the Interface" (1991), both turn to science fiction as a central cultural production through which to develop their arguments. Doane combines film theory and psychoanalysis to examine the vexed representations of the feminine, specifically the maternal feminine, in a range of sf films, from Metropolis (1926) to Alien (1979) to Blade Runner (1982), demonstrating how these films displace their (masculinist) anxieties about technology onto the maternal body. She concludes that these films manifest "both a nostalgia for and a terror of the maternal function, both linking it to and divorcing it from the idea of the machine woman" (31). Springer’s essay looks at the contradictions and complexities of erotic desire as constructed through and experienced by cyborgs and techno-bodies in a range of sf texts, including novels, comics, and films.3 Not surprisingly, she argues that the cyborg’s potential for disrupting gender categories has rarely been fulfilled, since, "despite its willingness to relinquish other previously sacrosanct categories, patriarchy continues to uphold gender difference" (41).4

The next essay is Zoë Sofia’s "Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View" (1992), an informative examination of the gendered differences in how women and men "interface" with computer technologies. In the course of her study, Sofia draws on philosopher of technology Don Ihde’s taxonomy of human-technology-world interactions, as developed in his Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (1990). Alluquère Rosanne Stone’s "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures" (1991) is a kind of ethnography, a series of "stories" that suggest some of the implications of gender differences for how individuals negotiate their experiences in virtual communities. For her, this kind of study is "an entry point into a search for ... an apparatus for the production of community and an apparatus for the production of body" (87) "in a time in which technology and organism are collapsing, imploding into each other" (93).

The fifth essay in this section is Sadie Plant’s "The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics" (1995), an exemplary statement by one of today’s leading cyberfeminists, an optimistic and celebratory manifesto for the emancipatory possibilities for women of contemporary information technologies. While Plant’s work, tending as it does toward an unconvincing essentialism in its construction of "women" and "the feminine," is contentious even within the field of feminist cyberstudies, there is no denying the attractions of her utopian constructions of female cyber-embodiment and cyber-empowerment. Wolmark closes this section with an excerpt from Elizabeth Grosz’s Space, Time and Perversion (1991), a dense and broadly psychoanalytic exploration of the potential differences arising from gender construction in our human experiences of space and time. As Wolmark points out, such experiential differences have rarely been taken into account in discussions about developments in science and technology. And as Grosz concludes, "[W]ithout questioning basic notions of space and time, the inherent masculinity of the ‘hard sciences’ and of philosophical speculation will proliferate under the banner of the human. Women, once again, may be granted no space or time of their own" (134).

The essays in Wolmark’s second section, "Cybersubjects: Cyborgs and Cyberpunks," will be of particular interest to students of science fiction, addressing as they do representations of embodiment and gender difference in sf literature and film. Anne Balsamo’s "Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism" (1988) is an evaluation of the cyborg figure as it appears in a range of popular-culture materials.5 Balsamo usefully identifies the imaginative investments that have resulted in the hardbodied cyborgs of films such as The Terminator (1984) and Robocop (1987). She also argues convincingly for the radical potential of the female cyborg figure: "Female cyborgs embody cultural contradictions which strain the technological imagination. Technology isn’t feminine, and femininity isn’t rational" (149). While demonstrating some of the limitations of Haraway’s optimistic rendering of the cyborg as exemplary figure of resistant feminist politics, Balsamo nevertheless defends the undeniable potential for feminism of a technofigure that can challenge the "fundamental terms and binarisms"(155) that continue to shore up oppressive systems of power and knowledge. Following Balsamo’s is one of N. Katherine Hayles’s most interesting essays, one that I cannot recommend too highly. "The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman" (1993) is an incisive look at the power of narrative to construct versions of techno-subjectivity that function as preliminary statements about our incipient real-world existence as posthumans. Along the way, Hayles develops detailed readings of the gendered cyborgs and tangled webs of production and reproduction in Bernard Wolfe’s anti-utopian masterpiece, Limbo (1952), John Varley’s "Press Enter" (1986), and C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen (1988). Hayles convincingly demonstrates (as do the other essays that are collected here) how many of the stories we are currently telling ourselves about ourselves "reveal the gendered constructions that carry sexual politics into the realm of the posthuman" (172).

"The Life Cycle of Cyborgs" is followed by my own relatively early study of cyberpunk, "Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism" (1990), in which I identify some features of cyberpunk’s postmodernity and argue that its blurring of the conventionally well-defined boundaries between the human and the technological "makes cyberpunk a particularly relevant form of science fiction for the post-industrial present" (176). All I should say here is that, in spite of expressing a perhaps too-optimistic faith in cyberpunk’s potential for emancipatory narrative, I also call attention to the yet-more-radical potential of postmodern feminist science fiction in its deconstruction of the unified hero-subject of conventional sf. A much less complaisant reading of cyberpunk is undertaken by Nicola Nixon in "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?" (1992).6 Looking back at the feminist sf of the 1970s and 1980s, Nixon makes a strong case both for the radical importance of this feminist writing in its (re)insertion of gender into the generic sf project and for the limitations of classic cyberpunk in its own representations of gender. Her striking critique of the language and imagery used by cyberpunk writers to figure the matrix as a particularly feminine space into which console cowboys "jack in" at their peril recalls Doane’s earlier work on the horrors of the maternal realm evinced in some sf films. Nixon’s attention to the historical and political context in which cyberpunk developed makes her essay a particularly useful one for students of "the Movement."

The final esssays in this second section are Thomas Foster’s "Meat Puppets or Robopaths? Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment" (1993) and Wolmark’s "The Postmodern Romances of Feminist Science Fiction" (1995). Foster’s study is a rare meditation on gender by a self-identified "white male critic" (209). It looks back to Haraway’s "Manifesto" and reads possibilities in cyberpunk and the cyborg figure that are, unfortunately, always also at risk of ideological recontainment. Foster does demonstrate, however, how a serious intellectual engagement with the Harawayan cyborg means that "the unmarked, universal position of the white, middle-class male subject no longer seems available, and [that] we therefore have access only to partial perspectives, not a generally human one" (212). His discussion of sf novels by writers such as Laura Mixon and Samuel R. Delany also suggests the potential for cyberpunk to redefine the construction of masculinity as well as to be appropriated by subjectivities other than those of standard white male hacker-heroes. Wolmark’s "Postmodern Romances" pays particular attention to how "the narrative fantasies of popular romance fiction" are rewritten in feminist sf "to offer fantasies of female pleasure and power," especially through the cyborg figures that people the landscapes of these fictions (230). Wolmark reads a range of feminist texts, including Elizabeth Hand’s baroque and challenging Winterlong (1990) and Emma Bull’s feminist cyberpunk novel, Bone Dance (1991). She concludes by calling attention to how these texts re-examine and redefine conventional ideas about female subjectivity and female desire. As she does in Aliens and Others, Wolmark situates the work of feminist sf writers in opposition to "the kind of cultural pessimism that is a noticeable feature of the accounts of postmodern culture provided by both Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard" (232).

The third section in Cybersexualities, "Cyborg Futures," reprints five essays: Chela Sandoval’s "New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed" (1995); Jennifer González’s "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research" (1995); Kathleen Woodward’s "From Virtual Cyborgs to Biological Time Bombs: Technocriticism and the Material Body" (1994); Donald Morton’s "Birth of the Cyberqueer" (1995); and Haraway’s "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" (1992). This section materially broadens the context for considering questions about subjectivity, identity, hybridity, and politics in the world of global capitalism and multinational corporate power. It also includes discussions about some of the differences that inevitably intersect with gender difference, such as those having to do with history, sexuality, race, class, and age. Woodward’s essay, for example, is a timely reminder of the powerful technologies displaced from public consciousness by the glitz of the information revolution, specifically those gathered under the rubric of biotechnology. Morton’s essay on the "cyberqueer," however, is for me the least useful contribution to this very strong collection. Morton appropriates the terminology of cybertheory in order to construct a version of the queer subject—the "cyberqueer"—that, in his analysis, threatens the project of more conventional gay and lesbian politics. I found this essay to be an unconvincing construction of queer theory as a form of apolitical and "ludic postmodernism" (295) and, as such, only tangentially relevant to Wolmark’s overall project. Also worth noting is Wolmark’s decision not to include Haraway’s much-reprinted "Manifesto." Instead, she concludes Cybersexualities with a dense yet diffuse article by Haraway that further develops the figure of the cyborg in the context of the work of politicized communities and the (re)construction of "nature" as a political category. Haraway continues to interact, even if only glancingly, with the science fiction imagination, describing her project in this essay as "the roughest sketch for travel ... to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere" (314).

It is in this third section on "Cyborg Futures" that Cybersexualities most obviously intersects with the essays and excerpts collected in The Gendered Cyborg. Like Wolmark’s collection, The Gendered Cyborg is primarily designed to be used as a reader. It contains a series of set readings (nineteen selections originally published between 1980 and 1998) for a sixteen-week course, "Gender, Technology and Representation: Women, Machines and Cyborgs," which forms a module in the British Open University’s M.A. in Cultural and Media Studies. As its co-publication by Routledge suggests, however, this is a collection whose relevance definitely exceeds its use as a course reader. In their preliminary introduction, the editors explain that The Gendered Cyborg "brings together, in a way consistent with feminist scholarship and women’s/gender studies, writings from three different disciplines: cultural studies, the social studies of science and technology, and gender theory" (xiv). What ties the various writings in this diverse collection together is their individual focus, developed from varying perspectives and through a range of discourses, on the figure of the cyborg and on a related figure, "its companion the monster" (xiv). As the editors conclude in their brief introduction, "There is no doubt that the relationship between human beings and technoscience systems and artifacts is changing in a revolutionary way, and will continue to do so for some years yet. But the impact of this for women, as a category and as embodied individuals, is not clear" (xiv).

Gill Kirkup and her co-editors divide their collection into four sections (the second of which is of particular interest in the context of sf studies): "Representing Gender in Technoscience," "Alien M/others: Representing the Feminine in Science Fiction Film," "Representing Reproduction: Reproducing Representation," and "Refractions (Women, Technology and Cyborgs)." Among the highlights of the first section is Londa Schiebinger’s "Taxonomy for Human Beings" (1993), a fascinating historical examination of the ways in which unquestioned gender assumptions have indelibly marked the construction of "mammal" as a taxonomic class. She points out, for instance, how "within Linnaean terminology, a female characteristic (the lactating mamma) ties humans to brutes, while a traditionally male characteristic (reason) marks our separateness" (16). Schiebinger goes on to demonstrate how race inevitably intersects with gender in the Western scientific project, reporting in some detail on the infamous case of Sarah Bartmann, the "Hottentot Venus," who in 1810 was brought from South Africa to Europe where her body became the object of an intense and prurient scientific scrutiny. Also collected in this first section is an excerpted version of Haraway’s "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Given the fact that The Gendered Cyborg is, first and foremost, a course reader, the editors’ decision to include an accessible version of the "Manifesto" is a good one, although, unfortunately, this version leaves out the discussions of sf and sf writers of the full-length version. This first section concludes with Jennifer González’s "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research" (1995), collected also in Cybersexualities, and Nina Lykke’s "Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs" (1996), an examination of the sometimes fraught yet pressing work of feminist science studies.7

Kirkup et al’s section on "Alien M/others" examines the construction of the feminine in some contemporary science fiction films.8 This section, not surprisingly perhaps, contains two essays also collected by Wolmark, Mary Ann Doane’s "Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine" and Anne Balsamo’s "Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism." It also includes Barbara Creed’s "Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine," a study of abjection and the "monstrous-feminine" in the Alien films,9 as well as an excerpt from the best full-length study of sf film published to date, Vivian Sobchack’s Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987). The latter is taken from Sobchack’s concluding remarks in Screening Space about the necessity to invent "new modes" of sf film capable of "represent[ing] our ‘real’ position as individuals and collective subjects in late capitalism and yet empower us to act and struggle against its constraints." Sobchack sees signs of potential "generic reconstruction" in feminist sf cinema such as Lizzie Borden’s 1993 film Born in Flames (146).

Part three of The Gendered Cyborg collects essays that examine some of the theoretical and political complexities of reproductive technologies. As the editors point out in their introduction to this section, "Reproductive technologies offer a particular illustration of the interrelationship between gender, technoscience and representation" as these relationships play out within the field of "the natural" (161). Among the essays in this section are Rosalind Pollack Petchesky’s "Foetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction" (1987), which maps the complex debate about the ethics of fetal imaging in obstetrics; Dion Farquhar’s "(M)other Discourses" (1996), an attempt to develop a feminist approach to reproductive technologies "that avoids the simplifications and binary evasions of both liberal and fundamentalist discourses" (210) and that introduces the notion of "cyborg families" as a potential challenge to essentialist ideas about "natural" families; and another essay by Haraway, "The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order" (1997), an exploration of ideas about reproductive freedom, the construction of the fetus as subject in some sociocultural discourses, and, more broadly, the ethical obligations of all individuals involved in the study of science.

The final section in The Gendered Cyborg collects five excerpted readings, four of which concentrate specifically on concerns around technology. The fifth, which introduces the section, is a brief poetic meditation by Luce Irigaray, "When Our Lips Speak Together" (1980), that argues for the importance of a feminine symbolic and a feminine language. Although it predates some of the other essays in this volume by almost two decades, Irigaray’s writing nevertheless provides an illuminating perspective on the work of these later pieces: "How to say this? The language we know is so limited...." (263; ellipsis in original). The other pieces in this last section include an excerpt from Sadie Plant’s "On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations" (1996), an essay about feminist empowerment through technology that relies, in part, on readings of Mary Shelley, Pat Cadigan, and Misha; and from Evelynn M. Hammonds’s "New Technologies of Race" (1997), a study that examines some of the complexities around current constructions of race and that looks at instances of computer morphing (as in, for example, Michael Jackson’s "Black and White" video) that seem still be be involved in the "old debate about miscegenation and citizenship in the United States" (306).

Reading through these collections more or less in one fell swoop left me feeling like some kind of cyborg-Cortez. If not exactly "silent upon a peak in Darien," I was certainly full of "wild surmise" and, even if only temporarily, at a loss for words. Reading them also left me uneasy and dissatisfied. These negative reactions have nothing to do with the excellent results of these two editorial projects and everything to do with the uncertainties and anxieties of early twenty-first-century feminism and its frequently vexed interactions with the promises and threats of contemporary science and technology. These two collections are part of an absolutely essential feminist response to such developments and they will continue to be relevant for a long time, given that technoculture shows no signs of winding down its own projects any time soon.

My epigraph by Luce Irigaray hardly seems like the stuff of which cybertheory is made. But Irigaray’s eloquent expression of desire for a feminine and feminist space within the symbolic order, a space from which women might articulate their own lives, helps to set the scene for contemporary feminism’s increasing attention to the cultures of science and technology. It seems certain that, if women do not undertake the kinds of examinations of discourse, gender, sexuality, embodiment, and representation collected in Cybersexualities and The Gendered Cyborg, no one else will do it for us. The science project presents itself to the world as a universal project. It will not speak for its Others, whom it does not recognize in their differences. For this reason, women must take an active role in shaping that project, so that "their history" may eventually cease to "constitute the locus of our exile." Or, to recall Elizabeth Grosz’s words, so that we may come to experience both space and time of our own.

NOTES

1. See my review-essay, "Utopia, Science, Postmodernism, and Feminism," in SFS #63, 21:2 (July 1994): 232-37.

2. In her discussion of the intersections of feminism and postmodernism in Aliens and Others, Wolmark borrows from Laura Kipnis the term "shared theoretical moment" to identify the often contradictory and troubled relationship between the two terms, and to maintain a sense of their differences while also exploring their sites of convergence (20). In a similar fashion, her approach to the range of interests and positions represented by various strands in feminist theory, cultural theory, and the imaginative constructions of cyborgs and cyberspace is once again to emphasize intersections and "shared" agendas, rather than to suggest any easy alliances among these large and often contradictory cultural projects.

3. This essay forms part of Springer’s full-length study, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (1996).

4. Springer’s discussion, like Doane’s, bases itself in part upon Andreas Huyssen’s "The Vamp and the Machine," an important study of the woman-as-robot in modernist cultural production. Huyssen’s essay makes an appearance in many of the pieces in Cybersexualities, including Wolmark’s own essay on feminist sf’s "postmodern romances."

5. A revised version of this essay appears as part of Balsamo’s longer study, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1996). See my review-essay, "The Technobody and its Discontents," in SFS #71, 24:1 (March 1997): 124-32, which also includes a discussion of Springer’s Electronic Eros.

6. Nixon’s essay originally appeared in SFS #57, 19:2 (July 1992): 219-35.

7. Lykke’s essay originally appeared in an anthology she co-edited with Rose Braidotti, Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. The six essays that comprise the second section of Lykke’s collection, "Monsters: Biomedical Bodygames," are particularly significant for their critical feminist examinations of some of the issues surrounding contemporary reproductive technologies. For a wide-ranging collection of essays about feminist work in the sciences and about the feminist science project in general, see Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch’s The Gender and Science Reader.

8. It becomes evident after reading through these two volumes that for feminist scholars in general, as for most of the general population, science fiction as a category encompasses more film and television than it does print fiction.

9. See also Creed’s full-length study, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Pyschoanalysis.

WORKS CITED

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Pyschoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s." 1985. Rev. as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81.

Huyssen, Andreas. "The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis." 1981-82. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 65-81.

Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Lederman, Muriel, and Ingrid Bartsch, eds. The Gender and Science Reader. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Lykke, Nina, and Rose Braidotti, eds. Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. London: Zed, 1996.

Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.

Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism. Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.


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