'SOMETHING LIKE A FICTION' 141 influence of earlier sf, especially queer/feminist sf, on cyberpunk and later science fictions about the subjects of technoculture.2 We can only ever know 'sex' in so far as it is implied in and expressed 'Something Like a Fiction': Speculative through the performances of gender, argues Judith Butler, so that, as she concludes, '"sex" becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy'. Intersections of Sexuality and Sometimes, as I will argue in turn, it also becomes something like a Technology science fiction, as fantasies of sex/gender become literalized in the discur- sive constructions of sf narratives. My discussion first reads several science fictions that address, with varying degrees of directness, some of the Veronica Hollinger crises faced by the subject of technoculture at the intersections of sex and technology. My second section focuses in some detail on Joanna Russ's great postmodern-lesbian-feminist-utopian-satire, The Female Man (1975), reading it as representative of a queerly efficacious analysis and critique of some of the complexities of our (sexual) relations with technology. If gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is no access to this 'sex' except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that 'sex' becomes something like a 1. Conjunctures of Sexuality and Technology fiction, perhaps a fantasy... — Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 5 I want to take advantage of Andrew Feenberg's critical-philosophical Alas! those who were shocked at my making love that way to a man are work in Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (2002) to outline now shocked at my making love to a machine; you can't win. briefly and in very broad strokes some of the quite different roles which — Joanna Russ, The Female Man 200 technology can play in both theory and fiction in their various consider- ations of the conjunctures of subjectivities and technologies. According In his recent cultural history of the genre, Roger Luckhurst astutely to Feenberg, instrumental theory 'offers the most widely accepted view of describes the project of science fiction as 'speculation on the diverse results technology. It is based on the commonsense idea that technologies are of the conjuncture of technology and subjectivity' (222). In the past two "tools", standing ready to serve the purposes of their users' (5).3 When decades or so, Anglo-American sf has undertaken this kind of specula- this view is introduced into sf stories, it tends to result in fictions about tive project in the most literal of ways - the concretization of metaphor technology as neutral prosthesis, as product and/or tool extending our being a particularly favoured sf strategy - whether exploring the impact physical reach into the material world - faster, farther, stronger - without of technoculture on the human subject as such in its many cyborg stories any consequential impact on the subjects who use these tools. or attempting to trace the ontological features of our artificial progeny in Among the more appealing features of the instrumental position is the stories about robots and other forms of artificial intelligences. Since the way in which it envisages technology as a straightforward supplement to mid-1980s in particular, especially in response to the cyberpunk phenom- human being in the world and its concomitant commitment to a view of enon, sf has almost obsessively (re)imagined the post-human subject at a human nature as authentic, coherent, and, above all, natural.4 Consider variety of 'conjunctures' with the technological.1 the Utopian sexual 'conjuncture' of human man and technological woman But the post-human has a history, and so I will focus this discussion that takes place in Lester del Rev's early story, 'Helen O'Loy' (1938), a on pre-cyberpunk science fiction in order to examine some of sf's earn*1 Pulp classic of Golden Age sf and a cheerfully sexist fantasy about the literalizations of our increasingly intimate relations with/in the culture- creation of an ideal robot-woman; in my reading, del Rey's story exempli- of technology. In part I want to draw attention to the complex interplay "es the instrumentalist view. between pre-cyberpunk fiction and some of sf's more recent representa- Programmed to perform femininity to perfection, Helen falls in love tions of the post-human. In part I want to acknowledge the historica ith one of her creators; he soon forgets she is not a 'natural' woman and * 142 DISORDERING DESIRES 'SOMETHING LIKE A FICTION' 143 they marry and live happily ever after until his death in old age - at vvh' u ontrast to instrumental theories, as Feenberg explains, substantive point she arranges for her own ending: 'Acid will burn out metal as well ° 'es of technology assume that the technoscientific project necessarily as flesh, and I'll be dead with Dave' (73). In 'Helen O'Loy', technoscience 16 k subjectivity (usually for the worse), that it simultaneously subjec- constructs the ultimate sexual prosthesis in a fantasy about 'woman' 1 • s and subjugates the human, enforcing a redefinition of the human the literal creation of masculinist science. As Helen insists to one of he U 'thin its own 'enframing' logic (to recall Heidegger's classic theorization creators, obliquely referencing her capacity to perform sexuality, Tm a • The Question Concerning Technology'). As Feenberg explains, woman. And you know how perfectly I'm made to imitate a real woman' fslubstantive theory...argues that technology constitutes a new cultural (71). system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control... It is not a 'real woman' that Helen imitates, of course, but rather the The issue is not that machines have 'taken over/ but that in choosing fantasy of 'woman' so dear to the hearts of the two techno-nerds who to use them we make many unwitting commitments. Technology is have transformed a rather ordinary household robot into their ideal of not simply a means but has become an environment and a way of life. domestic femininity. And her imitation is completely successful: while she (6-8)6 will never be a 'real' woman in any biological sense, she has nevertheless achieved a kind of metaphysical 'womanhood' in her perfect citation of To express the experience of this 'way of life' has been the particular goal of cyberpunk, which emphasizes the impact of technological transforma- gender. In the terms of Butler's observation about the 'fantastic' nature of sex, Helen's perfect expression of (hetero)sexuality - contrary to what tion on its human characters as the subjects of technoculture: cyberpunk common sense tells us - is the consequence rather than the impetus of (a starts from the assumption that technoculture is exactly our currently prior performance of) gender. In 'Helen O'Loy', 'sex' is indeed a fiction, all-encompassing 'way of life'. Arguably, what sets cyberpunk apart from both the artificial performance of an artificial woman and the gendered much earlier science fiction is its relatively neutral, and sometimes even fantasy of heterosexualized science fiction. Robot-Helen is 'woman' in a celebratory, acceptance of the ways in which technology has come to way that no human woman can ever aspire to be(come): the wonderful over-write innumerable features of the natural world, including human paradox in del Rey's story is that Helen is the real thing - that is, she is a sexuality. In 'Helen O'Loy', nature is still capable of absorbing technology, real woman - exactly because she has been constructed as pure represen- but in cyberpunk it is technology that gathers both the natural world tation. In this view, the phrase 'artificial woman' is a redundancy. and the organic human subject into itself. We see this in the well-known Because it does not threaten the category of the human in any conse- metaphor with which William Gibson's exemplary novel, Neuromancer quential way, technology can function in 'Helen O'Loy' as a figure for (1984), opens: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned something else - in this instance, as a key element in an allegory about to a dead channel' (3). As for human sexuality, it is no coincidence - as the construction of sexual difference. The story takes literally the notion Graham Murphy also notes elsewhere in this collection - that Gibson's of the construction of the gendered subject. In Butler's terms, it demon- console-cowboy protagonist, Case, is referred to as a 'virgin' specifically strates very concretely the processes through which social and discursive in reference to his body's almost complete lack of technological prostheses technologies of regulation work to 'materialize sexual difference in t e and/or enhancements: 'Some cheap dental work, is all' (Neuromancer 49). service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative' (Bodies TW At the same time, Neuromancer's female lead, Molly Millions, a technolog- ica ly wired 'street samurai', has paid for her many prosthetic enhance- Matter 2). This is apparent from the very first words of del Rey's na"a*° ' 'I am an old man now, and I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked M* ents by working as a 'meat puppet', a prostitute whose mind is equipped and still hear him gasp as he looked her over... She was beautiful, her,a ,cut~out chiP' so that she remains unaware of the uses to which dream in spun plastics and metals' (62). 'Helen O'Loy' narrates an appa ^ ody is put while she is '[r]enting the goods' to her customers (147). ently unproblematical dream - at once a fiction and a fantasy - abou deni t H^K1 n°te *e comPlexly gendered nature of the fictional 'sex' construction of the perfect artificial woman, a dream in which ^an inirnedi Ugh Neurom^cer's technological filters.