The Machineries of Uncivilization: Technology and the Gendered Body

The Machineries of Uncivilization: Technology and the Gendered Body in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson by Annette Lapointe A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English, Film, and Theatre University of Manitoba Winnipeg Copyright © 2010 by Annette Lapointe For Patricia Lapointe reader, teacher, literary guide my mom Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Abstract v Introduction Factory Girl @ the Crossroads 1 Chapter 1 Cyborg Pathology: Infection, Pollution, and Material Femininity in Tesseracts 2 15 Chapter 2 Girls on Film: Photography, Pornography, and the Politics of Reproduction 56 Chapter 3 Meat Puppets: Cyber Sex Work, Artificial Intelligence, and Feminine Existence 96 Chapter 4 Manic Pixie Dream Girls: Viral Femininity, Virtual Clones, and the Process of Embodiment 138 Chapter 5 Woman Gave Names to All the Animals: Food, Fauna, and Anorexia 178 Chapter 6 The Machineries of Uncivilization: Gender, Disability, and Cyborg Identity 219 Conclusion New Maps for These Territories 257 Works Cited 265 iii Acknowledgements Many thanks to Dr. Mark Libin, my dissertation adviser, for all of his guidance in both my research and my writing. Dr Arlene Young guided me to a number of important nineteenth century texts on gender and technology. My foray into disability studies was assisted by Dr. Nancy Hansen and by Nadine Legier. melanie brannagan-frederiksen gave me insight into the writings of Walter Benjamin. Patricia Lapointe read every draft, provided a sounding board and offered a range of alternate perspectives. The Histories of the Body Research Group guided me through to literary and non-literary approaches to body studies. My committee provided advice and insights, as well as new approaches to the material. I would like to thank Dr. Veronica Hollinger, Dr. Alison Calder, and Dr. Esyllt Jones for all their help. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Emotional support, unexpected insights, new perspectives on the universe, and faith were provided by Lena Thiessen, Nadine Legier, melanie brannagan- frederiksen, Paul and Patricia Lapointe, my extended family, Jethro Kat, and my husband, John Galaugher. Thank you all. iv Abstract 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 v 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. vi 1 Introduction: Factory Girl @ the Crossroads The material female body lies (as if dead) at the crossroads of science fiction and popular science discourses. A factory girl trudging from newly-enclosed farm to industrial city pauses there and trips over the bones of essentialized femininity. Picking herself up from the dust (at close range, she can see the dust is swarming with nanotechnology and fractal reiterations of the venus-form), the factory girl looks down the road of science fiction's relentless futurism. Only by squinting can she look back into the past to make out the 1886 clockwork goddess of Auguste Villiers de L'isle Adam's L'Eve Future. Ray Bradbury's mechanical grandmother rocks in a chair nearby, humming “I Sing the Body Electric!” She can make out the eloquent creature that Victor Frankenstein made, and Ira Levin's Stepford Wives approach, smiling down in haunting memory. In the distance, (seductively feminine) androids dream of electric sheep and razorgirls fulfill cyberpunk fetishes. Along her own path, the factory girl sees a tangential femininity that flows through the machineries of culture. Augusta Ada Byron puts the finishing touches on the first computer code. Young women equipped with typewriters1 and cameras2 march 1 Cf. George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) and Tom Gallon's The Girl Behind the Keys (1903). 2 Cf. Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888) 2 towards financial independence. Marie Curie lights up the human skeleton. Katherine Burdekin looks into Nazism and sees mindless uterine animals.3 Joanna Russ snaps at James Tiptree, Jr, that female sexuality is anything but a biological accident, never seeing Tiptree's female face.4 Ellen Datlow dives into the wrecks of biotechnology and raises the drowned forms of extinct animals.5 The factory girl looks in each of her four directions and realizes that what she thought was a crossroads is in fact only one intersection on a massive grid. Time expresses itself as space, creating new maps of the real. When the factory girl tries to take a step down any of these paths, she finds her material body collapsed at the crossroads, and herself momentarily outside it. (Still dead-ish, lying there.) She wonders whether she can remain a subject without that body, whether her body is necessary. Then she lays herself back into her flesh, stands up in it, and tries to choose a direction. She cannot. So, finally, she steps in each direction, changing as she moves, becoming a no- longer factory girl: an AIDS patient, a surrogate mother, an online sex worker, an anime pixie, an edible woman, a cyborg. She is entirely herself. The story above is intended half as fable, half as mythopoesis. The critical narrative of how technology alters women's embodiment is still an emerging one. The factory girl is a spectre from the dawn of industrialization, but she persists in contemporary writing. The myth that industrialization “happened” only to men, that 3 Swastika Night (1937) 4 James Tiptree, Jr, was the pen name of Alice B. Sheldon. Sheldon corresponded with feminist SF writer Joanna Russ throughout the 1970s without revealing her own sex (Phillips 388-89). 5 Cf. Vanishing Acts (2000) 3 women remained intimately connected with nature and alienated from technology is a powerful one. In a late-capitalist world,6 that myth is potentially dangerous. To suppose that women's bodies somehow exist outside of western culture is absurd. Insistence that women have remained somehow pastoral denies that women live intimately with technology, and that the epistemology of industrialization has transformed even the most “natural” (which is to say biological) aspects of femininity: eating, mating, and childbearing. In fact, those “natural” functions have long been the subject of scientific discourse and popular debate. Western culture's techno-fantasies, inscribed as science fiction, summon feminine robots to nurture families, green-skinned women from space to satisfy men's desires, and time-travelling Amazon women needing re-integration into compulsory heterosexuality. However (as every travelling factory girl knows), women's representation in science fiction and popular science has long had only a tenuous relationship with women's lived relationships with technology. The bodies which popular narratives imagine may have even less connection with women's subjective experiences of embodiment. For women to write themselves (ourselves) into techno-culture, they (we) must locate our bodies, explicate them, and recognize not only our biological origin stories, but also our lived/narrated realities in a culture that encodes technologies into the most intimate aspects of existence. The question of what is natural lies at the heart of Canadian literary criticism. 6 Markedly not a post-industrial world, though industry has globalized and shifted “out of sight” into developing nations. 4 Canadian

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