published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis offers a new way of reading narratives of cyberpunk fiction. It undertakes to re-evaluate cyberpunk fiction according to a feminist criticism that takes direction from Donna Haraway's cyborg politics and Eve Sedgwick's "deconstructive" reading. Both cyberpunk fiction and its criticism are read "deconstructively" in order to contest the notion that cyberpunk fiction cannot productively be read for feminism. The representation of embodiment and technology in cyberpunk narratives is customarily read in terms of a Cartesian opposition of body and mind, in which the materiality of female bodies is contrasted with the virtuality of male minds. The feminist analysis in this thesis focuses upon the way in which cyberpunk narratives can be seen to problematise both materiality and virtuality, embodiment and technology. Four novels are examined in detail: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Pat Cadigan's Synners, Marge Piercy's Body of Glass, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. In each narrative, conventions of cyberpunk fiction are seen to be subverted and contested. Gibson's novel, which has become accepted as the template of "classic", masculinist cyberpunk fiction, is revealed through this feminist analysis as a narrative which is profoundly ambivalent in its depictions of technologised male and female bodies. This ambivalence continues in the versions of cyberpunk offered by Cadigan, Piercy, and Stephenson. These readings illuminate the way cyberpunk narratives work to deconstruct binary oppositions through their explorations of gendered bodies, technology, virtuality, and disembodiment. The deconstruction, disruption and dismantling of binarisms are conceptualised in the image of the unnaturally embodied cyborg, which unites gendered embodiment and technological augmentation in an imaginary body.

The thesis attempts to construct a preliminary framework with which to understand: (1) the nature of feminism as a modern social movement; (2) the expansion of modernity to a global scale; and (3) the immanent institutional transformations opened up by the expansion of modernity which make possible a dialogic form of feminist politics. The thesis is divided into three main sections. The first section explores the nature of feminism as a social movement, sketches the relationship between feminism and modernity and explains how these interests relate to contemporary debates about globalization. The broad conclusions drawn from the discussion is that feminism is a modem social movement rooted in an Enlightenment project of emancipation and progress. However, modernity must be viewed as a matrix of tensions and critical potentials. The second section of the thesis considers the potential and limitation of a Global Political Economy (GPE) framework for making sense of feminism in the context of the conditions of modernity and globalization. It concludes that although it is a useful starting place for making sense of feminism as a social movement, critical GPE is not in itself sufficient. Having explored the potential and limitations of a GPE framework for understanding feminism in a global context, the third section turns to contemporary scholarship in the field of social and political theory. The brief concluding chapter of the thesis pulls together the main themes of the previous chapters and maps out tentatively how the relationship between feminist politics, the project of modernity and globalization can be understood

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