Species Panic Human Continuums, Trans Andys, and Cyberotic Triangles in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Species Panic Human Continuums, Trans Andys, and Cyberotic Triangles in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? DAVID HUEBERT Abstract Elaborating a concept of “species panic” and its intrinsic relation to interspecies desire, this article couples the concerns of animal studies and posthumanism with those of queer and transgender theory, synthesizing these positions through their shared commitment to unstable frameworks of gender, sexuality, and embodied identity. It argues that humans, androids, and electric and “genuine” animals do not exist in isolation in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? On the contrary, they occupy shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another. If one accepts the novel’s invitation to think the androids as a species, the plot of Do Androids Dream becomes a dramatization of interspecies desire. After arguing that interspecies desire is, in multiple senses, queer and that Dick’s androids serve as exemplars of trans embodiment and offer models for reconceiving bodily existence, the author concludes that Dick’s portrayal of species-transgressive sexual explorations is not a priori radical. Keywords queer theory, interspecies desire, science fiction, erotic triangles, bestiality acques Derrida begins The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) with a medi- J tation on what it might mean for a human and a cat to confront each other’s nakedness. The encounter is latently erotic and overtly panicked: a man stands naked in front of a cat, wondering about his potential “perversity” and feeling “a shame that is ashamed of itself” (7, 9). The coupling of bare animal bodies and severe shame suggests that Derrida’s discomfort arises from the possibility of a transgression of the bestiality taboo. Although his thinking attempts to traverse the apparently unbridgeable gap between feline and human perceptual experi- ence, Derrida confronts the “abyssal limit of the human” at the suggestion of interspecies desire (12). His “malaise” (4), emerging from the anxious interface between sexual and species identification, offers a version of the condition I explore throughout this article: what I call “species panic.” Species panic, which often arises from potentially erotic experiences with, or thoughts about, nonhuman TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 2, Number 2 * May 2015 244 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2867481 ª 2015 Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly HUEBERT * Species Panic 245 beings, is an anxiety felt when one’s species status is under threat. This anxiety entails a crucial sexual component: interspecies desire often catalyzes species panic because it suggests the possibility of species-transgressive sexual unions. To elaborate the concept of species panic and its intrinsic relation to interspecies desire, I couple the concerns of animal studies and posthumanism with those of queer and transgender theory, synthesizing these positions through their shared commitment to unstable frameworks of gender, sexuality, and embodied iden- 1 tity. Brought to bear on the subject of species being, queer and transgender theory helps to situate the human animal within a malleable framework of species being, what I term the “human continuum.” Using the sense of “across” that underpins both the term queer (Sedgwick 1993: xii) and the prefix trans- (Hay- ward 2008: 258) as a motif, I undertake a series of theoretical crossings, reading across and between animals, humans, species, fictions, methodologies, bodies, organisms, sexualities, and machines. Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a fantasia of species panic. There are three main sites of panic in the novel: the threat the android represents to the perceived autonomy of the human, anxiety regarding extinction and depletion of nonhuman animals, and the approaching death of the human species. These realms of anxiety swirl around the currently urgent question of what it means to be a human animal in a world of depleting organic life and rapid technological proliferation. Humans, androids, and electric and “genuine” animals do not exist in isolation in Do Androids Dream. On the contrary, they occupy shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another in a network similar to what Donna Haraway (2007: 366) has called “interspecies biotechnosocial relations.” Post- humanist thinker Dominic Pettman (2011: 5, 7) situates contemporary human existence in the midst of what he calls the “cybernetic triangle,” an “unholy trinity of human, animal, and machine.” In what follows, I place Pettman’s terminology alongside Sedgwick’s theorization of erotic triangles in Between Men to address an issue that has been largely overlooked in scholarship on Dick’s novel: the inter- play of human, animal, and android sexuality. If one accepts the novel’s invitation to think the androids as a species, the plot becomes a dramatization of interspecies desire. In Do Androids Dream, Pettman’s “cybernetic triangle” is also an erotic triangle—a network of desire passing between humans, animals, and androids that I will call a “cyberotic triangle.” This cyberotic triangle surfaces in the novel as its protagonist, bounty hunter Rick Deckard, struggles to balance a human sexuality caught between animals and androids. Deckard’s sexualized species panic parallels the more general crisis of the human identity after “World War Terminus” (Dick 1996: 15), an identity challenged by animals and machines and pushed from a coherent category toward a part of what Pettman (2011: 6) calls Published by Duke University Press TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 246 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly the “humanimalchine,” a shifting position on a spectrum of species being. This article argues that nonhuman animals persistently mediate Deckard’s various sexual relationships with androids, thickening the already heady froth of interspecies desire. After arguing that interspecies desire is in multiple senses queer and that Dick’s androids serve as exemplars of trans embodiment and offer models for reconceiving bodily existence more generally, I conclude that while interspecies desire can productively destabilize normative concepts of the body and trouble the reductive category of the human, the queerness at the heart of Deckard’s species-transgressive sexual explorations is not a priori radical. Critics have historically read Do Androids Dream as a characteristic, if particularly masterful, example of Dick’s “authentic” science fiction oeuvre (Huntington 1988: 152). Of course, Dick’s astonishing body of fiction, consisting of forty-four published novels and more than a hundred short stories, is far from thematically or generically reductive. In addition to a career-long commitment to traditional science fictional themes such as space exploration, artificial intelli- gence, and extraterrestrial life, Dick’s work experiments with the alternate history genre (The Man in the High Castle, 1961), draws on the hard-boiled detective tradition (Do Androids Dream), and explores diverse themes such as mental ill- ness (Martian Time-Slip, 1962), psychedelic drugs (A Scanner Darkly, 1973), and postmodern skepticism about the “real” (The Simulacra, 1963; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1964). Dick’s highly imaginative oeuvre engages with a virtu- osic breadth of literary schools and subject matter. Nonetheless, above all else Dick’s literary career demonstrates a sustained fascination with imagined technological futures. N. Katherine Hayles (1999: 160) suggests that Dick’s central theme is the tenuous relationship between “cybernetic technologies” and “the fabric of the world.” Hayles shows how several of Dick’s novels imagine androids as the representatives of this uneasy borderline: “Consistently in his fictions, androids are associated with unstable boundaries between self and world” (160). The android, in Dick’s work, comes to stand in for the various ethical gray zones brought about by technological progress. As an exemplar of Dick’s continued thematic engagement with an increasingly technological human existence, Do Androids Dream has often been interpreted as a cautionary tale. Sherryl Vint (2007: 112) describes the conventional response: “There is a general critical consensus that the novel’s major concern is with alienated, modern, technologized life rendering humans increasingly cold and android-like.” While the novel certainly legitimates such readings, Vint seeks 2 to emphasize “the importance of animals, electric and real” (111). Despite her avowed commitment to Dick’s underanalyzed animals, Vint’s essay soon reveals that conscientious analyses of Do Androids Dream cannot dissociate the animal 3 from the android. To talk about animals in any depth, here, necessarily requires Published by Duke University Press TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly HUEBERT * Species Panic 247 some discussion of androids. For Do Androids Dream does not offer discrete categories for analysis but a complex web of continuums and triangles. The cyberotic triangle is not equilateral. This is no democratic three-way. Rather, as with most erotic triangles, some parties get left out. In this case it is Deckard who does all the desiring. The android Rachael Rosen does a convincing, if pushy, job of seducing Deckard: “Go to bed with me and I’ll retire Stratton” (Dick 1996: 195). But Deckard in fact initiates

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