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Since William Gibson includes a Rastafarian Enclave and a theological compass in <i>Neuromancer</i>, this can be used to examine the troublesome natures of the two Artificial Intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer. The Rastafarian's beliefs and interpretations of Babylon and Zion, the oppressors and the liberated, add political significance to the Tessier-Ashpool's and their enslaved Artificial Intelligences. Since the Artificial Intelligences are both created of Babylon the Tessier-Ashpools and also wanting to be free of them, they are something outside of both. In the Artificial Intelligences, then, Gibson collapses the straightforward dichotomy of Babylon and Zion.

Since William Gibson includes a Rastafarian Enclave and a theological compass in <i>Neuromancer</i>, this can be used to examine the troublesome natures of the two Artificial Intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer. The Rastafarian's beliefs and interpretations of Babylon and Zion, the oppressors and the liberated, add political significance to the Tessier-Ashpool's and their enslaved Artificial Intelligences. Since the Artificial Intelligences are both created of Babylon the Tessier-Ashpools and also wanting to be free of them, they are something outside of both. In the Artificial Intelligences, then, Gibson collapses the straightforward dichotomy of Babylon and Zion.

Cyberpunk som litterär genre tar ofta upp teman som berör kroppen och dess förhållande till teknik på olika sätt. I denna uppsats studeras mäns och kvinnors förhållande till sin egen kropp och synen på manliga och kvinnliga kroppar i cyberpunk-romanen Neuromancer av William Gibson, utifrån Yvonne Hirdmans teorier om genus. I analysen av romanen kan man se två huvudsakliga spår utifrån Hirdmans tre formler för förhållandet mellan könen, varav det tydligaste är det som Hirdman kallar jämförelsens formel. Kvinnor ses som impulsstyrda och kroppsliga medan män står för intellektet och en längtan efter att lämna kroppen bakom sig. Eftersom kvinnor ses som kroppsliga, blir det kroppsliga också något kvinnligt och därmed något oönskat för de manliga karaktärerna. I cyberpunken modifierar kvinnor sina kroppar för att kunna stanna kvar i dem, medan män modifierar sina kroppar för att kunna lämna dem.

I argue that literary texts after 1980 use the fluid relationship between the physical world and the world of writing in order to present alternate versions of the body’s relationship to the mind. Examining works by Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Sarah Kane, and Shelley Jackson, I demonstrate the ways in which these texts reinterpret the relationship between mind and body by offering bodily metaphors for their character’s interior emotional lives; they compare this inner life to a pregnant mother, a sexual couple, and more. I emphasize the political implications of the kinds of bodies employed in these metaphors, setting this against the background of late twentieth century feminism. I read my primary texts alongside the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigary, and others, in order to chart the parallel projects of literature and theory in articulating the relationship between the body—especially, the female body—and our understandings of subjectivity and representation. Starting with the 1980s, when the second wave feminist movement suffered conservative backlash, and continuing through the development of the third wave, I examine literary theorizations of feminist concerns during a period of transition in the feminist movement itself.

Abstract: This thesis aims to explore how utopian desires re/shape the posthuman, cyberspace and histories by means of information technologies in William Gibson¡¦s Idoru and All Tomorrow¡¦s Parties, which construct a fragmented but subversive power by representing the world in a utopian text that allows the free play of ideology. Gibson uses utopian imagination to cobble together a near future that reflects his concern with information technologies and media over contemporary society. Utopian imaginations on the one hand open up possibilities and transform fixed ideas; on the other, utopian imaginations are easily turned into utopian desires that are subject to manipulation if utopian designers want to sell. I intend to discover how desires to realize a utopia (body, space, and history), which is the ultimate goal of utopian program, are being manipulated by utopian designers. I will mainly adapt and blend Katherine Hayles¡¦s notion of the posthuman perspectives to challenge human possibilities, Donna Haraway¡¦s notion of the cyborg as a blasphemy to Western traditions, Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus to examine utopic expressions in William Gibson¡¦s textual constructions of utopias, and Walter Benjamin¡¦s notions of material historiography and history¡¦s messianic power in tracing individual memories under a capitalist contextualized History. In Chapter One, I will argue that Idoru as well as Idoru metamorphosize from a dialectical structure into an informational pattern-random structure, from a commodity into a posthuman subjectivity. I will adopt Katherine Hayles¡¦s concept of information narratives in explaining the re/shaping of Rei¡¦s body and her concept of the posthuman to explicate the struggle between the posthuman and the transhuman. In Chapter Two I will argue that cyberspace serves as a utopia that brings forth the desire to transcend the flesh. This utopian desire is a transgressive discourse that breaks up the totality of a closed system. Moreover, cyberspace exposes the feedback looping of the discourses of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Respectively, by the representation of virtual Venice and the Walled City, these two utopias write proposals that project discourses of pleasure and criticism for achieving their programs. I will adopt Donna Haraway¡¦s cyborg ontology in explaining cyberspace as a transgressive discourse and Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus of utopic expressions and the limits of utopia. Next, in Chapter Three, I shall expose how Harwood the capitalist manipulates the world to fit into his utopian proposal: modernization of the city as a manifestation of a utopia by means of cyberspace as a network that connects people globally. To contravene Harwood, Idoru, Laney and the Walled City denizens collaborate to checkmate Harwood¡¦s king. I will elaborate on the interactions between the universal history and the individual histories based on Walter Benjamin¡¦s concept of history.

My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture.

Because cities act as the primary site for the development and production of new technologies, they arguably act as crossing points into the growing digital environment. As information technologies such as computers, digital networks, and most specifically the Internet become normalized within American culture, a need arises to examine the impact these technologies have on those who use them. Science fiction texts often explore technological influence on the human body, social relationships, and developing culture, and typically utilize cities as settings for this exploration. An examination of four primary science fiction texts, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, William Gibson's Neuromancer, the Wachowskis' The Matrix, and M.T. Anderson's Feed, and the connections they draw between cities and cyberspace reveal not only an ongoing ambivalent relationship between humans and the technology they create, but also a concern for the growing power of that technology's influence. Louis Wirth's observations of the early twentieth century city serve as a guide in looking at digital cityscapes first as structural, then as social, and finally as points of direct influence on human identity within these texts, suggesting mirrored concerns not only within American culture, but the global digital culture that is forming as a result of the connectivity offered by digital information technologies.

We live in a world where not only humans but also any object around us is believed to have agency. A shifting relationship exists between everything, specifically between humans and technology. However, the relationship between humans and technology has become much more complicated in the world of Neuromancer. Technology is projected to have much more agency than humans in the future, going as far as affecting the subjective consciousness and identity of the characters in the novel. This research paper seeks to prove whether the agency of technology has overwritten that of humans in the world of Neuromancer.

Taking the works of William Gibson as its point of focus, this thesis considers cyberpunk’s expansion from an emphatically literary moment in the mid 1980s into a broader multimedia cultural phenomenon. It examines the representation of racial differences, and the formulation of global economic spaces and flows which structure the reception and production of cultural practices. These developments are construed in relation to ongoing debates around Japan’s identity and otherness in terms of both deviations from and congruities with the West (notably America). To account for these developments, this thesis adopts a theoretical framework informed by both postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism (Jameson), and orientalism, those discursive structures which produce the reified polarities of East versus West (Said). Cyberpunk thus exhibits the characteristics of an orientalised postmodernism, as it imagines a world in which multinational corporations characterised as Japanese zaibatsu control global economies, and the excess of accumulated garbage is figured in the trope of gomi. It is also postmodernised orientalism, in its nostalgic reconstruction of scenes from the residue of imperialism, its deployment of figures of “cross-ethnic representation” (Chow) like the Eurasian, and its expressions of a purely fantasmatic experience of the Orient, as in the evocation of cyberspace. In distinction from modern or Saidean orientalism, postmodern orientalism not only allows but is characterized by reciprocal causality. This describes uneven, paradoxical, interconnected and mutually implicated cultural transactions at the threshold of East-West relations. The thesis explores this by first examining cyberpunk’s unremarked relationship with countercultural formations (rock music), practices (drugs) and manifestations of Oriental otherness in popular culture. The emphasis in the remainder of the thesis shifts towards how cyberpunk maps new technologies onto physical and imaginative “bodies” and geographies: the figuration of the cyborg, prosthetic interventions, and the evolution of cyberspace in tandem with multimedia innovations such as videogames. Cyberpunk then can best be understood as a conjunction of seemingly disparate experiences: on the one hand the postmodern dislocations and vertiginous moments of estrangement offset by instances of intense connectivity in relation to the virtual, the relocation to the “distanceless home” of cyberspace. As such it is an ever-expanding phenomenon which has been productively fused with other youth-culture media, and one with specifically Japanese features (anime, visual kei, and virtual idols).