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SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Surveillance and the Body in Speculative Fiction: A Geek Girl’s Guide A Dissertation Presented by Emily Churilla to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University May 2016 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Emily Churilla We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Andrew Newman – Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor, English E. Ann Kaplan - Chairperson of Defense Distinguished Professor, English Jeffrey Santa Ana – Reader Associate Professor, English Ritch Calvin – Outside Reader Assistant Professor, Cultural Analysis and Theory, Stony Brook University This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Surveillance and the Body in Speculative Fiction: A Geek Girl’s Guide by Emily Churilla Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University 2016 Through a framework of contemporary surveillance studies and literary theories of narrative form, in this dissertation I argue that works of speculative fiction engage in and expose complex issues of body production that impact an understanding of our current white, capitalist, heteropatriarchal surveillance society—issues that include the role of history, labor, and representation—and that the authors of these texts utilize the conventions of speculative fiction to portray or expose means of resistance to oppressive state surveillance practices and assemblages. Interrelated theories of these surveillance practices and narrative theory work together in this project to create an intersectional feminist lens through which I view the systematic, embodied implications of surveillant oppression as they are presented in works of fiction. Applying the scholarship of such theorists as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jasbir K. Puar, and Rachel Hall, I examine speculative fiction texts from a variety of genres that iii are situated in surveillance states symbolic of our own and that, I argue, center on issues of docile body production that arise from their constructedness from within those states. Ficton by Junot Díaz, Neal Stephenson, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Alex Rivera, Greg Egan, and Anne McCaffrey (among others) engages the systemic violence that oppressive state surveillance practices commits, particularly on those it deems Other. And in addressing this violence, each author locates the role of the body, as fabricated through and performing for surveillance assemblages, in tension with the state. The authors in this project deploy various discursive and narrative tactics against the bodily oppressions that non-normative, non-docile bodies within our contemporary society face in order to articulate a body in contradiction to, and critically disruptive of, their worlds’ respective surveillance societies. iv Dedication Page For my father. v Table of Contents I. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..1 II. Chapter One: Dictating Bodies in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao………………….26 A. Approach: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Liminal Fantasy…….……….29 B. The Author as Dictator……………………………………………………………….39 C. The (Data) Construction of an Ideal Decolonial Identity…………………………….49 D. Conclusion: How We Lose…………………………………………………….……..53 III. Chapter Two: Bodily Transparency in Snow Crash and Bitch Planet……………………….56 A. Approach: Reading Genre as a Sign of Our Times…………………………………..60 B. Snow Crash’s Hacker Transparency Chic……………………………………………67 C. Bitch Planet’s Representation as Critical Opacity……………………………………82 D. Conclusion: Representation Matters………………………………………………..104 IV. Chapter Three: Caring Labor, Surveyed Bodies in Sleep Dealer and The Ship Who Sang…108 A. Approach: Dystopic Futures and Social Control……………………………………114 B. Ship Who Sang and Sleep Dealer: Labor as a Potential Threat………………………122 C. Ship Who Sang and Sleep Dealer: Labor to Uphold Heteropatriarchy………………135 D. Conclusion: Labor, Social Production, and Lifestyle……………………………..…145 V. Chapter Four: Real and Material Bodies in Permutation City…………………………….…149 A. Approach: Hard Science Fiction and the Limits of Scientific Objectivity……….…152 B. Permutation City’s Copies and Lambertians…………………………………...……163 C. Maria, Durham, and the Problem of Gender…………………………………………173 D. Conclusion: The Stakes of Mathematical Realness…………………………………180 VI. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….186 VII. Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….193 vi Acknowledgments This has been a long and sometimes circuitous journey. I would not have been able to complete it without the encouragement, patience, and direction of my incredible committee: Andrew Newman, E. Ann Kaplan, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Ritch Calvin. Thank you all for supporting both me and my project. And, in particular, Dr. Newman for keeping me moving and motivated through it all. In addition to my committee I would like to thank the folks at SPM and the Dartmouth Futures of American Studies organizers and participants. Of course my family. Especially my mother who never questioned my crazy schemes or my ability to follow through with them. The amazing ladies of UnderTOE—you know who you are. Eileen Chanza Torres, you get a special shout out as my moral compass. Last, but certainly not least, Anthony Sovak. vii Introduction If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. —The Welcome Sign at the Entrance of the Utah Data Center Administration Building. In the rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica and its prequel, Caprica, the Cylons, short for Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes, are entities originally manufactured by humans to serve as frontline soldiers and menial laborers. Of them, their creator Daniel Greystone states: “This is our future…It’s more than a machine, this Cylon will become a tireless worker, it won’t need to be paid, it won’t retire or get sick, it won’t have rights or objections or complaints, it will do anything and everything we ask of it without question.” The implicit query of the scenario— “what could possibly go wrong?”—is a common concern regarding technology in science fiction and is answered rather quickly in Caprica. Within only a few years of their implementation, the Cylons rise up against their human masters and begin a devastating war that concludes with only a few spaceships worth of plucky human beings surviving and fighting against the extinction of their species. What is so relevant to this dissertation is not so much the Cylons as machines, however, but instead how the Cylons come into their sentience—and thereby begin their robot revolution—in the first place. Caprica introduces us to the intelligent, headstrong, young Zoe Graystone. Zoe, the daughter of the Cylons’ creator, composes a holographic avatar of herself through uploading around 100 terabytes of personal information to an object-oriented database from a myriad of different sources. From medical records including physicals scans and DNA profiles to security camera images, shopping and restaurant receipts, music playlists, and so on, Zoe seeks to 1 transform information and data into memory, personality, and being. In the series, Zoe the human is killed but her avatar’s program lives on and, eventually and through a series of complicated scifi plotlines, becomes integrated in the Cylons’ “meta-cognitive processor” (their Artificial Intelligence). Through this integration, Zoe-A gains physical form and provides the basis of Cylon consciousness. In the following passage, Zoe-A explains her creation: The human brain contains roughly 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it. It’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality. There’s no way to translate the data. But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life. Medical scans, DNA profiles, psych evaluations, school records, e-mails, recording video/audio, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, tv shows. Even prescriptions for birth control... Zoe-A, as the avatar is called in Caprica, is called, is not so much the “curated self” that psychotherapist Mike Langlois writes about or the traditional notion of the avatar as the “screen saver of the ego” or the “decoy” of one’s drive proposed by Laetitia Wilson. Unlike a blog, forum, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr page where we might carefully craft an image of ourselves, Zoe-A is an attempt to better represent her human counterpart through Zoe’s incorporation of accidental and ubiquitous information generated through her interactions with digital surveillance technologies.