Technology and the Gendered Body in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson by Anne

282 Pages·2011·0.92 MB·English

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 Literature has long been understood in restrictive terms, defined by ideas of
wilderness and survival, of deadly landscape preying on individuals whose lives are
restricted by the merciless requirements of that same landscape. Northrup Frye's The
Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971, collecting essays from the
1950s and 1960s) was enormously influential in this area. So, somewhat ironically, was
Margaret Atwood's 1972 critical work Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature. By the time those books were published, though, Canada was already a much
more urban, much more technologized society than the aforementioned criticism credits,
and the country's writing was evolving to reflect this change. Media critic Marshall
McLuhan earned his M.A. in English from the University of Manitoba in 1940, and
taught for much of his career at the University of Toronto. McLuhan began his studies of
(literary) culture and technology in the late 1940s; he published The Gutenberg Galaxy in
1962 and Understanding Media in 1964. One might reasonably presume that technology
had long since made significant inroads on Canadian nature, even to the point of
transforming it, when critics of the 1970s looked “into the bush” for Canadian identity.
With this chronology in mind, however, I am most interested in technologies and
cultural shifts which have emerged since the 1970s. In that time, Toronto has grown and
mutated from the conservative (and overwhelmingly white) “Toronto the Good”
immortalized by Robertson Davies to a global centre whose profile turns on the Caribana
and Toronto Pride festivals. Vancouver took the occasion of the 1986 World's Fair to
transform itself from working-class coastal city to futurist metropolis. Expo '86's legacy