Cybernetics and Gendered Spectrality in William Gibson's

Home , Agency (novel), Burning Chrome, Cyberspace, Hackers (anthology), Invisibility in fiction, Johnny Mnemonic

fict 7 (2) pp. 115–126 Intellect Limited 2017

Short Fiction in Theory & Practice

Intellect

10.1386/fict.7.2.115_1

7 GAÏD GIRARD Université de Bretagne Occidentale 2

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126 ‘It’s like she is a hologram

2017 Cybernetics and gendered spectrality in William ARTICLES Gibson’s Burning Chrome

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Rereading the short stories contained in the Burning Chrome collection published science fiction in 1986 is a rewarding experience. With two exceptions, all the stories predate the cyberpunk publication of Neuromancer (1984), the novel that made William Gibson world William Gibson famous and launched the cyberpunk genre. Indeed, the concept of cyberspace is gender present in the title short story of the collection and so is the idea of a matrix, cyborgs which hackers try to break into and ‘burn’. Nearly all the stories resort to male spectrality first-person narrators. The proximity and subjectivity thus created between reader and narrator crudely highlights the way in which female characters are pushed to the periphery of an already disembodied and spectralized world. Through a close look at ‘Burning Chrome’, ‘The New Rose Hotel’ and ‘Winter Market’, this article aims to show how corporate global capitalism as represented by Gibson paradoxically reinforces the invisibility of women by using state-of-the art technology to turn them into seductive holograms, disembodied voices and spectral presences. The question is: can the Gibson women fight back against this centrifugal move towards non-existence and how do they go about it?

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1. See Bukatman ([1990] ‘Why aren’t there any women in cyberspace?’ asks Scott Bukatman in his 2005: 311–20). seminal book on Terminal Identity (Bukatman [1990] 2005: 314), while insist- 2. ‘No Woman Born’ ing on the unique possibilities offered by science fiction for feminist appro- (C. L. Moore, 1944) and ‘The Girl That Was priation. Before he goes on mentioning an impressive list of female science Plugged In’ (James fiction authors and critics who have transformed and enriched the scope of Tiptree Jr 1969) both the genre,1 he quotes Mary Ann Doane: ‘[W]hen technology intersects with present proto-cyborgic women while Molly the body in the realm of representation, the question of sexual difference is Millions enters the inevitably involved’ (Bukatman [1990] 2005: 314). Although Bukatman’s state- matrix in Neuromancer ment could be qualified,2 the intersection between technology and the body (1984) although she does not control it. indeed takes specific forms in cyberpunk fiction; the emergence of this SF He, She and It (Marge subgenre that conflates ‘the realm of high-tech and the modern pop under- Piercy 1991), a novel inspired by the golem ground’ and ‘radically redefine [s] the nature of humanity, of the self’ (Sterling legend and staging [1986] 1994: ix, xi) is contemporary with the exponential development of digi- several augmented tal technology. Computer networks have created a new spatiality parallel to women postdates Bukatman’s statement the geographic topography of experiential reality, which promotes ‘discorpora- by a year. Gibson tive fantasies of cyberspace’ (Sconce 2000: 206). When operators jack into the has staged a fully matrix, they enter an illusionary world where they move without the encum- competent female cyberspace operator brance of their real body, seeking some measure of spectrality (in the basic in his latest novel, The sense of the disappearance of the body here). How then does sexual difference Peripheral ([2014] 2015). Yet, feminist critics function in a world where virtual reality takes pride of place and disembod- have generally agreed ies its human actors? What happens to women who very rarely operate the with Bukatman’s matrix themselves in a world that ghosts human presence? cultural critique of cyberpunk (e.g. Nicola Nixon: ‘Cyberpunk: Cyberpunk and spectrality Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Cyberpunk fiction famously presented an extensive image of ‘discorporative’ Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’ [1992]). cyberspace in Gibson’s pioneer work Neuromancer ([1984] 2000), defined as ‘a consensual hallucination, a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system’ (Gibson [1984] 2000: 67); the novel created a new and strongly visual image of a technological space in which the forces of late capitalism fight fierce battles for the control of cutting- edge inventions, data vaults and informational networks, protected behind high walls of ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) or ice, and labyrin- thine processes. Underground and proletarian console cowboys such as Case, the main protagonist of Neuromancer or Bobby, the initial Gibson hacker of ‘Burning Chrome’ (1982) edgily take part in these battles from time to time. Both characters belong to the underworld of the Sprawl and try to make a living by taking advantage of the interstitial spaces created in the confronta- tions between corporate conglomerates and the Yakusa (the powerful organ- ized crime syndicate), participating in all kinds of black market deals involving high-tech activities. ‘Burning Chrome’ predates Neuromancer and appeared in a collection bearing the same title published later in 1986. It already displays the exhila- rating but dangerous power of cyberspace journeys. It tells of two hackers, Bobby and the narrator, Automatic Jack, who plan to rob Chrome, a (female) big shot in Nighttown by entering her computer system and siphoning off her accounts. The heist requires speed and virtuosity for the intrusion (the burning) not to be detected by the ice walls of cybernetic protection. Gibson uses the expressions ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the matrix’ for the first time in this particular story. This burning presents the first Gibsonian instance of the drug-like state of cerebral intensity the hacker experiences as he interacts through his own deck with somebody else’s computer system and has to be faster than the in-built defences of the other machine.

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As Bruce Sterling puts it: ‘for the cyberpunks, technology is visceral […]; 3. I use here Luckhurst’s phrase in his critique it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; of Derrida’s Specters often, inside our minds’ (Sterling [1986] 1994: xi). In cyberspace, the body is of Marx, which he sees overridden by the lure of the matrix. Sconce in his cultural history of electric- as too generalizing, a critique Pereen ity explains how the fusing of electrical flow and consciousness creates the addresses, stating illusion of a ‘“presence” [which] exists either as the beatitude of an electroni- in the introduction cally liberated subject or as the incarcerating mirages of an encroaching elec- to her The Spectral Metaphor that ‘not tronic subjectivity’ (Sconce 2000: 12). Automatic Jack, the narrator of the story, all living ghosts are explains how he experiences this brain-computer interface: dispossessed in the same manner or to the same degree, nor is it Bodiless, we [Bobby and Jack] swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice. helpful to universalize And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading the condition of spectralization. program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. The differential We’re sentient patches of oil swept along corridors of shadow. incarnations Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed of the spectral metaphor need to be with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left acknowledged’ (Pereen to pull out. 2014: 15). (Gibson [1986] 2003: 184)

Jack enjoys being turned into a ‘sentient patch of oil’ in ‘corridors of shadow’, activating rogue programmes in order to reach the heart of heavily protected data bases, incurring the risk of being attacked by neural feedback and ‘flat- lined’, like Dixie in Neuromancer. This voluntary severance from bodily existence can be seen (and has been seen) as an index of the increasing process of de-realization incurred by the development of virtual reality through media screens and digital technology as theorized by Baudrillard. Reality is subsumed by hyper-reality, and individual identity is ghosted in a world controlled by the economics of communication. This corresponds to a first obvious level of disembodiment in this early cyberpunk text. Yet, the narrator is not the main site of a ghosting process. Once the heist is successfully performed, Jack comes back to reality only to find that Rikki the young girl he is in love with has disappeared. He discov- ers that she too has exploited the possibilities of the underworld to reach her goal to become a simstim (simulated stimulation) star. She will not reap- pear, although the narrator sees spectralized traces of her in countless urban images:

And sometimes late at night, I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 204)

My contention is that in Gibson’s imagined world that dematerializes the body through a full array of virtual connections, women’s bodily existence is pushed even further to the periphery of the represented world of cyberpunk until their presence becomes spectral traces, at one remove from already extensively de-realized male bodies. I follow here Esther Pereen’s lead, who in the wake of Derrida’s ‘spectral turn’,3 is concerned with ‘the living ghosts, […] those people who, already in their lifetime, resemble dispossessed ghosts in that they are ignored and considered expendable’ (Pereen 2014: 14). While male

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4. I follow here the bodies are forgotten or sketchily described, female bodies are put to the fore preference given to the terms spectre on screens that spectralize them, that is which make them both highly visible and spectrality rather and absent as subjects.4 In Gibson’s collection, this is achieved both diegeti- than ghost (which cally and narratively, as the best-known stories in Burning Chrome revolve will still be used) as delineated by Pilar around male professional expertise, often illegally employed, told by male Blanco and Pereen in first-person narrators in terse, Chandler-like prose, often a cross between the their introduction to paratactical and the oddly metaphorical. While all narrators are entrenched in Spectralities: ‘Spectre and spectrality […] masculinist focalization, the variety in cases of female spectralization present evoke an etymological in Burning Chrome may direct to Gibson’s unconclusiveness as to the issue of link to visibility and vision, to that which female status in the cyberpunk world. It may also point to the pliability of the is both looked at (as spectral metaphor, as a sign of ‘what escapes full cognition or comprehension’ fascinating spectacle) (Pilar Blanco and Pereen 2013: 9), i.e. forms of female subjectivity. and looking (in the sense of examining), Beside ‘Burning Chrome’, patterns of female spectralization are to be suggesting their traced in two other short stories in the collection: ‘New Rose Hotel’ (1981) suitability for exploring and ‘Winter Market’ (1985), while ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (1981) offers a single and illuminating phenomena other than instance of female resistance to ghostly disappearance. Burning Chrome is the putative return indeed the matrix of most of Gibson’s subsequent fictions, which present of the dead’ (2013: 2). My approach of the such resilient female characters as Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition, 2003) or spectre as sign of a Flynne (The Peripheral, 2014). It remains to be seen whether Gibson’s overall present absence and acerbic attack on corporate capitalism has enlarged to a more open critique of a figure of alterity is derived from Pereen’s the spectralization of the feminine. post Derridean angle in Pereen (2014: 10–11). Commodified hologram girls In ‘Burning Chrome’, both Bobby and Jack are attracted to Rikki, a 19-year- old girl, they met in a bar who dreams of becoming a Hollywood simstim star in the lucrative world of simulated stimulation. Simstim is a process through which bodily sensations are recorded in paradisiac locations and put on tape, to be relived by any customer who owns the required deck to play the tape. In order to pay for the cosmetic surgery necessary to achieve simstim star beauty, in particular to have her eyes changed into blue Zeiss Ikon eyes in Chiba City, Rikki works as a prostitute, unbeknownst to the two boys. As said before, she disappears at the end of the story; the only trace of her remains in the memory of the narrator, ‘like a hologram stuck behind [his] eyes’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 185). In Rikki’s case, alienation from her own body is at least twofold: she changes her face in order to meet the standards of simstim beauty and to sell her bodily sensations to the masses; to afford to do so, she relinquishes sexual control of her body and turns into what in Neuromancer Gibson calls a ‘meat puppet’:

[She] was working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of sleep. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 203)

The female body is turned into an animated object; consciousness is discon- nected. The usefulness and worth of women are ground down to essentials: to provide an anonymous sexual service as love dolls. This instance of alienated female sexuality is to be found also in Neuromancer where Molly Millions (first

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seen in ‘Johnny Mnemonic’) explains that she also used to work as a meat 5. This short story has been adapted for the puppet in order to pay for her surgical enhancement to become a ‘razor girl’. screen with the same But her implanted circuitry clashed with the cut-out chip inducing rapid eye title by Abel Ferrara movement (REM) sleep and she kept awake while working, feeling ‘like in in 1998, starring Asia Argento, Willem Dafoe cyberspace, but blank’ (Gibson [1984] 2000: 177). Customers were made to and Christopher pay more as she started to remember what happened to her during sessions. Walken. She ends up killing a Senator keen on snuff movie-like scenarios. Not only are women’s bodies fully exploited but their bodily sensations, memories and dreams are also tampered with, turning them into human puppets left with a corroded sense of identity. After having used her body as a tool for labour, Rikki allows it to be surgically modified and to disappear in its original form. It eventually merges into the multitude of female screen faces littering the cityscape. Female beauty is thus infinitely duplicated, as are sensations that migrate from one body to another through simstim, turning individual identity into a spectral trace dissolving in the fluctuating sensations of others. Rikki gradually loses substance while she is terminally spectralized into a hologram image of fetishized and stereotyped feminine beauty, testifying to the ruthless sexual economics of late capitalism. Digital space has become the parking lot of de-realized images of women robbed of their bodies and sexual independence, in a narrative where the actual outcome of Rikki’s story eludes the scope of the first-person narration. Yet her wish to become a simstim star condemns her to remain an absent presence on the countless screens of hyper-reality. One might think that Sandii, the female character in ‘New Rose Hotel’ displays more agency. In this more classical story, a couple of shady operators (one of them being the narrator) work as freelance hunters for cutting-edge laboratories specialized in neurological transmitters and bio-molecules.5 They abduct high-quality brains and obtain information, which they then sell to competitors. In order to kidnap a heavily protected research engineer, they strategically position Sandii, a beautiful Eurasian woman in the right hotel. The narrator has fallen in love with her. The classic trope of the femme fatale is developed here, complete with Noir disenchanted prose, as Sandii’s double- crossing is eventually revealed. The narrator’s partner, Fox, is gunned down. Sandii’s treachery and disappearance leave the narrator musing on one of his (now late) partner’s comments about her, as he awaits his own death:

Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the next century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world’s Hyatts, the world’s Hiltons. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 122)

Here, the glamour of the femme fatale turns into unsavoury flimsiness, a tool in the hands of criminal business interests; female sexuality becomes a commodity for corporate power. The recognizable brands of luxury hotels put Sandii’s story very close indeed to the reader’s environment, and Gibson’s mention of ‘ghosts of the next century’ sounds heavily sarcastic, especially for a twenty-first century reader. The ghosting process seems paradoxically truncated here: the female body is made to appear out of nowhere, in the exact place where it is needed as if it had no previous existence outside its usefulness as a tool for a business heist. Sandii is spectral from the start. She starts existing as a ‘congealing’ ghost, a stark metaphor for both the necessary physicality of her sexual role and her lack of substance. She invents an

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6. The name is close to identity, feeds the narrator with a story line he likes and steals crucial data. Case in Neuromancer and to Cayce Pollard in She has played her hand beautifully, but she remains an elusive, ectoplasmic Pattern Recognition. and stereotyped image of impeccable perfection, seen from afar through the 7. See http://stelarc.org/? eyes of the male narrator: catID=20265 (accessed 10 April 2018). The You walked into a bar in Yokohama, the first time I saw you. Eurasian, mechanical hand was completed in 1980 and half gaijin, long-hipped and fluid in a Chinese knock-off of some Tokyo used from 1980 to 1998. designer’s original. Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones. One is also reminded (Gibson [1986] 2003: 110) of James Tiptree Jr’s ‘The girl who was Plugged In’ (1969), an She is more upmarket than freckled Rikki, who wears ‘tight black jeans acknowledged source of ‘Winter Market’. rolled to mid-calf and a narrow plastic belt that matched the rose-colored sandals’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 185) the first time Jack meets her. Sandii is already set for her future (and undercover present) role as sexual bait, while Rikki is the ‘fortune cookie’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 186) that inspires Bobby and Jack to overreach themselves. Each in their own class, both Sandii and Rikki stand as spectral metaphors of the economics of a heavily patriarchal system. The commodification of their bodies turns them into haunting traces of would-be individuals who stand outside the reach of fiercely entrenched male narrators and a not-so-estranged represented reality. Women never attain full status in these two proto-cyberpunk stories: they are merely traces of absent presence, instances of gendered spectrality, or, as the title of Gibson’s first published story reflects, ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’, a clichéd romantic metaphor chiming with the pangs of disenchanted narrators who do not know better. Whether Gibson slyly makes fun of his-all-too male narrators incapable of sustaining a love relationship and projecting fantasized images of women instead or whether he attempts to salvage some measure of romanticism in globalized economics prone to spectralizing women is unclear. The narrative voice of ‘New Rose Hotel’ constantly addresses Sandii directly, in a kind of ironically belated attempt at real communication and an index of keen nostal- gia. The pun contained in the title of Gibson’s first novel ‘Neuromancer’ and the final image showing Case straddling cyberspace with lost Linda Lee and navigating everyday reality with ‘a girl who calls herself Michael’ (Gibson [1984] 2000: 317) point to Gibson’s ambiguity in this respect. The conflation of the economics of cyberspace and romantic interest sits uneasily with Gibson’s spectralized women.

The girl who chose to be a ghost The ghosting pattern is somewhat different and its ambiguity more thought provoking in ‘Winter Market’ (1985), one of the two stories in the collection post-dating Neuromancer. This time, the first-person narrator, Casey, is a legiti- mate professional, a music editor working for a well-known studio company.6 He is friends with a famous artist who works with garbage and who finds Lise, half-dead, in the street. She suffers from a bone-eating congenital disease, and she needs a battery-powered exoskeleton in order to be able to move. Readers cannot help seeing here the increasing proximity of the fictional world with contemporary artistic production. In 1980, performance artist Stelarc had already built an exoskeleton plugged into his nervous system in order to acti- vate a third arm.7 Lise’s body is decaying fast, and her life is bound to be short. She intends to make the most of it following her own precise agenda. After

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the narrator refuses her sexual advances, repelled by her freakish, exoskeleton-framed body, she then asks him to ‘jack across’ with her. In the world of ‘Winter Market’, machines can be ‘jacked’ into the mind so that ‘psychic waveforms’ can be taped in. Lise insists on Casey jacking into her frame as she thinks he will see she is a true artist. Casey explains to the reader how artistic inspiration can be translated in neuro-electrical terms:

We call the raw products dry dreams. Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break through the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back – well dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all on wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves on the market. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 131–32)

Once again, but differently from Rikki, this operation radically separates mind from body; naked human subjectivity can be translated into binary bits and bytes and carried through without the primary symbolization of image or human language. Yet, Casey is moved to tears by Lise’s output and shaken by what can obviously be read in terms of sexual climax, a powerful bodily response to neural ‘dry dreams’. Casey arranges for an audition of Lise’s output and its proper packag- ing. Eventually, with competent public relations work, Lise’s recording, Kings of Sleep, becomes a planetary hit, thanks to an eerie track called ‘The Ghost Dance’. As Lise’s health is deteriorating fast, the reader understands she has decided to transfer her mind onto a data storage frame before dying, a rare and costly operation that only the very rich can afford. This process radically deflates a classic vision of the ghostly presence as a haunting analogical trace of a dead human being. Lise’s agenda is to continue to live, albeit as a programme on a computer data base. She does not need her body in order to remain an artist and have her ‘dry dreams’ processed. She wants the ‘rush’ to be ‘seen from inside’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 132). ‘Winter Market’ is one of the first of a long series of fictional comments by Gibson on the status of artists in a world of computer language and computer- generated image animation, but it also and more specifically interrogates ‘the status and meaning of a woman artist’s body’ (Hicks 1996: 78) and treats the issue in a radical way. This female artist does not sell her body for publicity purposes; in true transhumanist fashion, she ultimately decides to turn herself into digitalized units before her impaired body abandons her. The tenacious dichotomy pinned down by Veronica Hollinger (Hollinger 2009: 272), ‘mascu- line-as-mind, in opposition to feminine-as-body’ in cyberpunk SF is blurred. Although Lise’s femininity is undoubted, it plays no role in her success. Yet, Casey the narrator is uneasy at Lise’s choice and cannot reconcile himself to the idea that she is transformed into a mere digitalized presence, ‘a program that pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it’s her’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 148). He has happened to see her on her last night before her death, trying to seduce a drunk young man in the semi darkness of a seedy bar, with her ‘black leather blouson zipped to her chin’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 147) over her ‘poor and sad body’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 148). Because of that scene, Casey clings to an old-fashioned vision of her humanity: ‘Even Lise,

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with that corrosive, crazy drive to stardom and cybernetic immortality, had weaknesses. Was human in a way I hated myself for admitting’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 148). The narrator who testifies here to his own (male, heterosexual) limits is all the more troubled as he will soon have to deal with her invisible presence, which will make demands on him. His friend has warned:

– Pretty soon she is going to call you up […] – How’s that? – When you have to edit her next release; which will most certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you are her editor, Casey, I mean who else? (Gibson [1986] 2003: 149–50)

Life after death is turned into a risky business venture requiring a pragmatic approach. The caged woman has decided to attain immortality and fame, exhibiting determined agency by turning herself into a self-willed ghostly presence. Her choice that transforms death into a highly desacralized process integrates spectrality within the economics of late capitalism, but at a price. Lise will have to maintain a flowing income in order to last in cyberspace. Spectrality becomes very material indeed, linked to the logics of digital business. The toll of standardized consumption also hits Casey, who feels his hold on reality disappear and his identity melt into total anonymity when he goes back home:

Sometimes, it looks to me like nobody in particular lives there. […] I have these times when the place abruptly gives me a kind of low-grade chill, with its basic accumulation of basic consumer goods. […] There are moments when I see anyone could be living there, could own those things, and it all seems sort of interchangeable, my life and yours, my life and anybody’s. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 145)

The reader is reminded of Rikki’s interchangeable face. One wonders whether Casey’s world is not becoming more spectral than Lise’s digital existence. Now that she has become radically peripheral, her disappearance makes Casey’s world a weirdly disembodied place to live in. What is missing in Casey’s life is the bodily trace of the ‘razor’s edge’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 132) in Lise’s dream. What Lise as half-dead street garbage brought was the ‘raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 132). Lise talks to the street and the underworld of the city:

[Kings of Sleep] the hottest soft in eight years. Guy at a shop on Granville told me he gets more of the damned thing lifted than he sells of anything else. Says it’s a hassle even to stock it […] she’s big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No dreams, no hope. You can’t see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they’re twigging to it, that they are not going anywhere. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 142)

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Perhaps only a handicapped woman high on whizz can catch the true 8. Cf. Stacy Gillis (2007: 7). hum of the garbage littered streets that are also a product of the digital age 9. We learn in and offer the spectral metaphor of the Winter Market’s submerged voice. Neuromancer though that Johnny was Paradoxically, Lise’s high-tech ghostliness is made possible through the low- eventually killed by life people of the streets. another ninja, leaving Casey’s ‘low-grade chill’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 145) appears as an Molly bereaved as she and Johnny ended up anomic response to what seems like an unnameable process of mourning together. for the vanished corporeal existence of a gifted woman doomed to spec- 10. Nicola Nixon who tral agency. Casey can be seen as another of Gibson’s despondent men in discusses Delany’s the Burning Chrome collection. Abandoned by women they have never really assertion strongly approached, they are in every way stuck – either as characters, imprisoned qualifies this: ‘Explicit reworkings of an in the haze of their sexual fantasies, or as narrators, too cynical and hard- antecedent female boiled to enlarge their scope. None of these narrators offers insights into character, Molly and Sarah [a character in the female psyche, reinforcing Hollinger’s division between male mind and Jon Williams Hardwired, female bodies, maximized in cyberpunk literature. Only Lise crosses that 1986] are effectively barrier and chooses to become a traceable ghost, which makes the narra- depoliticized and sapped of any tor mortally dread his next encounter with her dematerialized voice. This revolutionary energy’ encounter that remains beyond the boundaries of the narrative is the textual (Nixon 1992: 222). ghost of a woman without a body. 11. Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg manifesto’ was first published in ‘Ass-kicking techno-babes’8 vs spectres? 1985, which makes it contemporary with Conversely, in ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, the first story of the Burning Chrome collec- the birth of cyberpunk, although very different tion, the reader is presented with surgically augmented Molly Millions, whose in its approach to presence never wavers. She is the first of a number of cyberpunk ‘ass-kicking technology and techno-babes’ culminating in the cult image of Trinity in the Matrix trilogy. women. Molly has implanted mirror shades lenses in her eyes and retractable razor knives under her fingernails. She (now) makes a living by trading not her sexualized body or her maverick unconscious, but her expertise as a ‘street samurai’, in a narrative led by Johnny, another male narrator, who hires her as a bodyguard. He has memory chips stolen from the Yukusa implanted in his brain. Molly successfully saves him from a ‘vat-grown’ ninja assassin by killing the latter in single combat in the ‘Pit’ of Nighttown. In this story where no matrix is entered but where low tech is used to defeat the state-of-the-art assassin, Molly is not subjected to any ghosting process. Her acumen and physical abilities are put to the fore by an admiring Johnny who can only bow to her superior talents. This might account for the absence of the usual despondency expressed by the other male narrators and the story’s uncharacteristic happy ending. Molly finds a way to free Johnny from his encrypted databases, through the surreal high-tech/low-tech Jones, the dolphin.9 Samuel Delany has traced Molly’s character to that of Joanna Russ’s Jael in The Female Man (1975), arguing for an influence of earlier feminist SF writers on Gibson.10 Indeed, Molly belongs to a class of her own in Gibson’s fiction. To paraphrase Donna Haraway,11 she has opted for being a self-sufficient cyborg rather than a fantasized goddess. Molly, who reappears in Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, has spawned daughters though. She is the first of a series of (fairly) independent Gibson heroines, fighting their way not to be cast as spectralized presences and keeping to their autonomous bodies in a fiercely patriarchal and increasingly dematerialized world. The odds are heavy nevertheless, and this has to be set against the larger backdrop of Gibson’s

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12. They are both main hardly dystopian presentation of a ruthless system that creates both cyber- protagonists. Yet, The Peripheral’s netic walls of ice and the Sprawl, in a two-way vise that ultimately spectralizes classic if not deeply gendered humanity. conservative and quasi- The varied instances of first-person male narration in Burning Chrome Hollywoodian closure might make feminist enable Gibson to put forward an ironically common and highly recogniz- readers cringe. able masculinist vision of women (less so with Johnny Mnemonic). This 13. The phrase ‘semiotic narrative choice also shows different ways in which women react to the ghost’ is lifted out general process of spectralization they are subjected to, much beyond their from Gibson’s ‘The alleged absence in cyberspace. Gibson’s subsequent female characters have Gernsback Continuum’, ironically indicting kept that variety, occasionally showing marked agency in third-person ‘bits of deep cultural narratives – from Cayce Pollard to Flynne.12 Yet, cyberspace, virtual reality imagery that have split off and taken and surveillance networks, monitored by vast anonymous conglomerates on a life of their own’ close to our reality (The Bigend post-9/11 trilogy) or belonging to a post- (Gibson [1986] 2003: cataclysmic future (The Peripheral), still operate within firmly patriarchal 31). One might be less sarcastic and side with structures. This condemns women to a double fight against spectralization, sociologist Gordon’s in order to keep control over their bodies and to exist as subjects, in a heav- concept of haunting as ily gendered and class-segmented global world. The particular interest of a social phenomenon effecting change: ‘Being Burning Chrome is to present the reader with first-hand experience of the haunted draws us male ghosting of women through narrators who keep feminine subjectivity affectively, sometimes against our will and at a distance, thus shedding an ironical light on romance as another disguise always a bit magically, for the implacable logic of capitalist exploitation. In this respect, these early into the structure of short stories might seem more radical in their critique of female spectral- feeling of a reality we come to experience, ity than Gibson’s later novels with broader narrative instances. ‘She’d killed not as cold knowledge, him with culture shock’ (Gibson [1986] 2003: 22) says the narrator after but as transformative Molly has caught the Yakusa assassin at his own game, a ‘culture shock’ that recognition’, in Gordon (1997: 8), quoted in sets the female body rightly in place. Molly may very well remain Gibson’s Kröger and Anderson heroine who most efficiently counteracts the ‘semiotic ghost’ of flimsy femi- (2013: xii). nine glamour.13

REFERENCES Bukatman, S. ([1990] 2005), Terminal Identity, the Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farnell, R. (2005), ‘In dialogue with “posthuman” bodies: Interview with Stelarc’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Theory, Culture & Society: Body Modification, London: SAGE Publications, pp. 129–49. Fernbach, A. (2000), ‘The fetishization of masculinity in science fiction: The cyborg and the console boy’, Science-Fiction Studies, 27:2, pp. 234–55. Fichlin, D., Hollinger, V. and Taylor, A. (1992), ‘“The charisma leak”: A conver- sation with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’, Science Fiction Studies, 19:1, pp. 1–16, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/gibsonsterling.htm. Accessed 8 March 2014. Gibson, W. ([1984] 2000), Neuromancer, London: Harper Collins. ——— ([1986] 2003), Burning Chrome (with a new introduction by William Gibson), New York: Harper Collins Publishers. ——— ([2003] 2005), Pattern Recognition, New York: Berkley Bks. ——— ([2014] 2015), The Peripheral, London: Penguin. Gillis, S. (2007), ‘The (post)feminist politics of cyberpunk’, Gothic Studies, 9:2, pp. 7–19. Gordon, A. F. (1997), Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Haraway, D. ([1985] 1991), ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socia- list-feminism in the late twentieth century’, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/ irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf. Accessed 30 March 2016. Henthorne, T. (2011), William Gibson, a Literary Companion, Jefferson, MO: Mc Farland. Hicks, H. J. (1996), ‘“Whatever it is that she’s since become”: Writing bodies of text and bodies of women in James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and William Gibson’s “The Winter Market”’, Contemporary Literature, 37:1, pp. 62–93. Hollinger, V. (2009), ‘Posthumanism and cyborg theory’, in M. Bould, A. Butler, A. Roberts and S. Vint, The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, London: Routledge, pp. 267–78. Kröger, L. and Anderson, M. R. (eds) (2013), The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. McCaffery, L. (1988), ‘An interview with William Gibson’, Mississippi Review, 16:2&3, pp. 217–38. Nixon, N. (1992), ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the ground for revolution or keeping the boys satisfied?’, Science Fiction Studies, 19:2, pp. 219–35. Peppers, C. (1997), ‘“I’ve got you under my skin”, cyber(sexed) bodies in cyberpunk fictions’, in D. S. Wilson and C. M. Laennec (eds), Bodily Discursions, Gender, Representations, Technologies, New York: State University of New York, pp. 163–85. Pereen, E. (2014), The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pilar Blanco, M. D. and Pereen, E. (2013), ‘Introduction’, in M. D. Pilar Blanco and E. Pereen (eds), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Cultural Theory, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–27. Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media, Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterling, B. ([1986] 1994), ‘Preface’, in B. Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades the Cyberpunk Anthology, London: HarperCollins.

SUGGESTED CITATION Girard, G. (2017), ‘“It’s like she is a hologram stuck behind my eyes”: Cybernetics and gendered spectrality in William Gibson’s Burning Chrome’, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 7:2, pp. 115–126, doi: 10.1386/ fict.7.2.115_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Gaïd Girard is professor emeritus at the UBO (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) in Brest, France. Her areas of interest include the gothic and the fantastic, especially in literature and cinema. In addition to essays on Le Fanu, Stoker, the Irish uncanny and Victorian mesmerism, Girard has written about contemporary authors such as Eoin McNamee, Stevie Davies and, recently, William Gibson. She has also written on cinema (Kubrick, Epstein, Roeg, Marker and SF in general, see http://www.univ-brest.fr/hcti/menu/Membres/ Enseignants-chercheurs/Girard__Ga_d). Gaïd Girard is currently working on the Posthuman with her research group in Brest, Heritages and Constructions in Texts and Images (HCTI).

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Contact: HCTI, EA 4249, UFR des Lettres et Sciences Humaines et Sociales, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 20 rue Duquesne, BP 814, 29285 Brest Cedex, France. E-mail: [email protected]

Gaïd Girard has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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