Emily Cox-Palmer-White 2020037326, 9780367416218, 9780367691028, 9780367691011

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“Emily Cox-​Palmer-​White’s original synthesis of ideas drawn from Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze supplies a new way of thinking about the role of women in feminist science fiction, cinema and video games. She provides a convincing and thought-​provoking contribution to feminist thought and popular cultural studies.” Paul March-​Russell, University of Kent

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The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction

Questioning essentialist forms of feminist discourse, this work develops an innovative approach to gender and feminist theory by drawing together the work of key feminist and gender theorists, such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. By analysing representations of the female cyborg figure, the gynoid, in science fiction literature, television, film and video games, the work acknowledges its normative and subversive properties while also calling for a new feminist politics of selfhood and autonomy implied by the posthuman qualities of the female machine. Emily Cox-​Palmer-​White is a researcher specialising in gender theory, science fiction and philosophy. Her research is concerned with developing new avenues in feminist philosophy using the work of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. Her work also explores the relationship between gender theory, posthumanism and female robots in science fiction and real-​world technology. For her paper “Denuding the Gynoid: The Female Robot as Bare Life in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina,” she was awarded the Peter Nicholls Essay Prize by the Science Fiction Foundation and has also received the Support a New Scholar Award from the Science Fiction Research Association. She recently contributed a chapter to the collection Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy published by Open Court.

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Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction

Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film Rant Against the Regime Kirk Combe The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction Feminism and Female Machines Emily Cox-​Palmer-​White Character and the Supernatural in Shakespeare and Achebe Kenneth Usongo For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Studies-​in-​Speculative-​Fiction/​book-​series/​RSSF

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The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction Feminism and Female Machines Emily Cox-​Palmer-​White

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First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Emily Cox-​Palmer-​White to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Cox-Palmer-White, Emily, author. Title: The biopolitics of gender in science fiction: feminism and female machines/Dr. Emily Cox-Palmer-White. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in speculative fiction | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020037326 | ISBN 9780367416218 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367691028 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367691011 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction–History and criticism. | Women in literature. | Gender identity in literature. | Biopolitics in literature. | Feminism and literature. Classification: LCC PN3433.6.C69 2021 | DDC 809.3/8762–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037326 ISBN: 978-0-367-41621-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-69101-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of figures  Acknowledgements 

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Introduction: Suspending Gender and Becoming-​Gynoid in Science Fiction 

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1 Woman or Womankind? Signatures, Suspension and Bare Life in Feminism and Science Fiction 

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2 Removing/​Reprogramming the Masculine –​ The Homo Sacer in the Feminist Dis/​Utopia 

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3 “You can alter our physiology, but you cannot change our nature”: The Girl in the Machine 

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4 Female Machines and Female Flesh –​Women and/​as Automata 

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5 “Formally a correct response. But simulated” –​Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 

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6 Profane Simulations –​Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games  102 7 Becoming and Avatar –​Playing as Cyborgs among Gynoids in the Deus Ex Games 

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Conclusion: Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves –​Towards a Politics of Becoming-​Gynoid 

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Bibliography  Index 

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Figures

.1 A visual representation of the signature 1 3.1 A visual representation of Deleuze and Guattari’s molar, molecular and lines of flight 7.1 Anna Navarre and a Woman in Black, Deus Ex, Ion Storm, 2000

31 75 126

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my PhD supervisor Professor William Watkin who, together with Professor Sean Gaston, first introduced me during my time at Brunel University to the work of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. This was the spark that ignited a long-​standing love of philosophy and inspired me to begin my academic career. I cherish the memory of all those lively lessons and philosophical debate: these seminar discussions culminated in my decision to embark on a PhD My special thanks go out to William for supporting me during my doctoral research project, which lead to the writing of this book. I would also like to thank Dr Karen Throsby who, through the Feminist Studies Association UK mentoring scheme, has advised me with kindness and understanding. My special thanks also go out to Lisa Downing, who served on my viva panel and later became my friend, for her support and guidance. Words simply cannot express how grateful I am to my wonderful husband for supporting me tirelessly while I was writing this work, for making all the tea and doing all the housework and for always fiercely believing in me. Thank you for always working so hard to help me succeed. My deepest and warmest thanks to my dear father, Richard Cox, for his help and love and boundless understanding and kindness. You played a key role in making this work possible by proofreading and letting me bounce ideas off you, by helping me with word-​processing and correcting my grammar! Thank you for always being there for me in every way.

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Introduction Suspending Gender and Becoming-​Gynoid in Science Fiction

Joanna Russ’s The Female Man contains one of the most nuanced and troubling descriptions of the contradictory desires produced in women as a result of patriarchal power and oppression. In the novel, Joanna is one of four women drawn together across time and multiple dimensions, but who come from a patriarchal world similar to our own. Joanna’s way of coping with her male-​ dominated world is to think of herself as a man: “If we are all mankind, it follows that I too am a man, and not at all a woman … I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man” (Russ 135–​6). I believe this conceptualisation of herself as a “female man” represents, in part, a desire to not be treated like a woman –​this partly means to not be treated like an object unworthy of respect but it also constitutes a wish to be acknowledged as something more or perhaps other than one’s female gender. Yet, there is the sense that, in order to not be understood as a woman, one must therefore be understood as the binary opposite. Being respected, having one’s agency and authenticity as an individual recognised, constitutes being understood culturally as a man. Joanna’s desire in the novel to become a “female man” is a desire to divorce herself from the female identity forced on women from birth –​not necessarily because all aspects of femininity are negative but because femininity and degradation are so often and so deeply entwined that to reject one would seem to free oneself from the other. Yet to reject femaleness can mean many things –​for some it can mean accessing a new level of authenticity. For others it can be a symptom of internalised sexism: if one rejects femininity on the grounds that femininity is not respected by a sexist society then one may be capitulating to prejudice. Then again, the concept of the “female man” may also relate to the desire to simply have one’s masculinity acknowledged in the same way that society expects and accepts women’s femininity: a desire to be “seen” as a “man” as much as one is seen as a woman. This might be characterised as a non-​binary experience, or perhaps simply a desire to not be pigeonholed –​to not be understood purely as one nebulous female figure emerging from the ill-​ defined category of Woman. I interpret Joanna’s desire to be treated “like a man” as a desire rooted in the confusion inherent in gender itself. It is a symptom of the fact that gender represents so many seemingly contradictory facets of culture, society, biology, physicality, psychology and desire. Gender is at once a core part of one’s

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2  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid identity, intensely personal to ourselves and yet  also a politicosocial tool of the state. Judith Butler described it as “a regulatory fiction” in Gender Trouble (185) and then later redefined it as “a vacillating border,” one which “registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine. Sexual difference is neither fully given nor fully constructed but partially both” (Undoing Gender 186). This book is partly concerned with exploring the borders of these facets: searching for where the constructed facet of gender ends and the “given” begins. Joanna’s desire to be seen “as a man” is ultimately a limited attempt to approach what it might mean to be seen as a “person” beneath the gendered behaviours ingrained within and reproduced by us in a manner that seems largely out of our control. But what is this layer of authenticity that lurks beneath gender performativity, the reality of our physical bodies and all their myriad associations? Joanna Russ’s The Female Man both made me a feminist and simultaneously made me aware of the troubling aspects of some pervasive forms of feminist philosophy. It took me long time to describe myself as a feminist without discomfort or irony. And when I started teaching in higher education, I encountered the same suspicion of feminism among my students, many of whom seemed uncomfortable associating themselves with the term. While many cited specific reasons for this, what always struck me was an overwhelming sense of uncertainty –​a sense of not knowing exactly what it meant to be a feminist and an even more daunting suspicion that feminism was not a word which the individual woman could truly take ownership of. It is likely true that much of this stems from socialisation  –​women are culturally programmed to be suspicious of female power and to internalise a sexist suspicion of their own importance. However, I believe there is more to the anxiety around the word feminism than can be accounted for by socialisation. The tepid results of a recent YouGov poll, asking women whether they identified as feminists (Sharff), reflects that many women still feel that the “F” word might not really, fully describe the person who is trying to use it. I  believe this is because, while great strides by queer theorists and intersectional feminist discourse have been made to move away from binary conceptualisations of sex and gender, feminism as a whole has yet to divorce itself from a dichotomous understanding of male and female, of self and other, and of an ultimately essentialist understanding of womanhood: one which often reinforces the very patriarchal ideals feminism problematises. As Lisa Downing points out: “the phantasy of woman as innately caring, collective, and compassionate … is the ghost that haunts feminism every bit as much as it haunts patriarchy” (8). This book is partly dedicated to problematising the binary within feminism and gender theory of the individual versus the collective, or the specific versus the general, and arguing how deeply necessary this is for the advancement of feminist aims. I also believe this approach can allow feminists to find more common ground, despite our sectarian tendencies. A  more nuanced understanding of gender as varied rather than universal would also allow us to speak more honestly about the ideologies and doubts which fuel the prejudiced

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 3 gender critical position: allowing us to discuss openly what we mean by gender and expose those who use specific notion of womanhood as a means of exclusion. A desire to perpetuate the myth of a homogenous female collective has repeatedly led to conflicts between feminists of different classes, races, bodies and sexualities: it is divisive, limiting and utterly self-​defeating. To be clear, when I say “woman” I am referring to, as Sara Ahmed eloquently describes: “all those who travel under the sign women.” As Ahmed goes on to argue, “no one is born a woman; it is an assignment (not just a sign, but also a task or an imperative…)” (Intro). Gender appears to be equal parts authenticity and performance  –​it forms part of an identity that can be real and meaningful to us and yet it also represents an almost unbearable weight of expectation. As Judith Butler argues: “the particular sociality that belongs to bodily life, to sexual life, and to becoming gendered … establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others … As bodies, we are always for something more than, and other than, ourselves” (Undoing Gender 25). To live as a woman is to take part in this difficult balancing act between personal authenticity and social intrusion. We must acknowledge what may, at first, seem a contradictory truth: that equality arises from recognising and empowering individual difference as much as shared qualities or shared inequalities. We need an understanding of woman that is recognised for all its indistinctness and individuality, one which is not based on restrictive recourses towards reproductive capacities, emotion, caregiving capacities, or even biology and sex. But how can we theorise, equally, both sameness and difference, individual interests versus those of the collective, specific experience versus universal equality? The contention of this book is that in order to begin to consider both these aspects, we need an original framework for holding these unstable and fluid binary oppositions in our minds simultaneously. This book brings feminism, gender and queer theory together with the biopolitics of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze in order to form an innovative approach to gender and feminist theory: by viewing the institution of gender as a biopolitical phenomenon that is as ancient as biopower itself. Using Agamben’s theory of indistinction, I analyse the categories of male and female, and/​or masculine and feminine, as concepts whose boundaries are blurred because both oppositional elements are not truly opposing but are rather suspended between categories. In order to bring these various philosophical systems together, this work utilises several science fiction texts ranging from feminist utopian and dystopian novels to mainstream sf film and TV; I use these texts as a means of analysing the portrayal of women in the increasingly important and popular genre of sf: one which often reveals much about the changing position of women in a world whose relationship with sf narratives is becoming increasingly blurred. With the recent rapid advancement of technology and its profound effect on our lives, Donna Haraway’s famous quote from her Cyborg Manifesto that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (149) becomes ever more prescient and significant.

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Binaries, Uncertainties, Selfhood Some would argue that a binary understanding of gender, which gives rise to essentialist conceptualisations of women, is rooted in the second wave. From the second wave certainly sprung a specific type of feminist politics invested in a notion of sisterhood and female unity, informed by a homogenous conceptualisation of womanhood, standing in binary opposition to a unified, male, patriarchal force. Speaking about radical feminist writers, Lisa Disch and Mary Hawksworth note that: “[R]‌adical feminism alone emerged … as a freestanding critique of the ‘mindcuffs of phallogocentricsm,’ an attempt to achieve a thorough repudiation of ‘malestream thought,’ and to diagnose the ‘l’homm(o)sexualité’ characteristic of Western philosophy” (Hawkesworth and Disch 2). The radical approach which is seen to characterise much second-​ wave feminism offered a deeply necessary antithetical approach to rethinking patriarchal structures: it is and should be celebrated for its uncompromising attitude towards the struggle for equality and its contention that patriarchy is not simply something to which we must add women and stir –​rather, that the fundamentally masculine structures upon which our culture is founded must be radically challenged and broken down. Yet, this model is susceptible to binary assumptions: that is, that men and women exist in the world as unified groups with homogenous interests which are, necessarily and fundamentally, at odds. It is a system which fails to divorce the individual experience of existing (as women/​men or identities in between), from the wider masculine and feminine social structures which influence but do not entirely constitute us as people. The notion of the woman defined by patriarchy as a universal other has formed the basis of a certain type of feminist politics of collectivism and community based on a shared marginalisation. As Rosi Braidotti makes clear, however, this conceptualisation was influenced by a dialectical oppositional, humanist model: This creates on the theoretical level a productive synthesis of self and others. Politically, the Vitruvius female forced a bond of solidarity between one and many, which in the hands of the second feminist wave in the 1960s was to grow into a principle of the political sisterhood. This posits a common grounding among women, talking being-​women-​in-​the-​world as the starting point for all critical reflection and jointly articulated political praxis. (21–​22) However, this ideal of woman as a kind of nascent figure of the many and of the universal marginal subject is not without its contradictions. The emancipation of the marginalised individual is, within this model, to be achieved through a politics of shared interest: a conflation of the specific and the general. As some feminists, gender and queer theorists have since pointed out, there is little room within this conceptualisation for the multitude of various

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 5 selves included in the category of woman (women who belong to many other categories: racial, sexual, political, geographical, cultural, economical). The turn away from the humanist, masculine subject was partly influenced by developments within the French school of psychoanalysis and post-​structuralist philosophy which also gave rise to a bifurcation within feminist discourse, broadly, between French and Anglo-​American modes of feminism. The Anglo-​ American feminists have traditionally resisted claims about any kind of female essentialism –​or investigations into the nature of woman as such –​insisting on a clear distinction between femininity and female and focusing their analysis on economic and social disparity between men and women. The French post-​structuralist feminists have generally concerned themselves with metaphysical questions relating to gender. Heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory, the pillars of French feminist discourse, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have written on that which is particular to “femaleness”: seemingly acknowledging the way patriarchy shapes and influences female psychology, while also often insisting on a specifically female mode of being. While it has led to a sometimes unnecessarily wholesale rejection of French feminist philosophy, the Anglo-​American suspicion of any essentialist discourse is in some ways well founded: “women have historically been equated with their bodies and thus seen in the history of philosophy, more as extended rather than as thinking things. To the extent that women are equated with their bodies, they are put on the wrong end of the Cartesian map of human identity” (McAfee 81). By blurring the boundary between biology and society (the Cartesian mind-​body split) and focusing on the bodily aspects of female being and experience, we risk falling into the very same logic of biological determinism which has been historically used as justification for women’s subjugation and evidence for their inferiority to masculine rationality and intelligence. Yet, while we must acknowledge this danger, ignoring the specificity of human identity as influenced by gendered experiences (whether brought forth by biological, social or other factors) is as limiting as adopting a purely essentialist understanding of gender. We are not in ourselves embodiments of universal ideas of men and women. But neither are our lives totally divorced from these concepts. None of us lives up to all conceptualisations of that which is biologically male/​female, just as none of us are composed solely of our male/​ female socialisations. We are each a strange concoction of elements taken from various sources. Our individual existence is suspended somewhere between the universal woman/​man and the individual woman/​man that we ourselves are. While generally seeming to eschew essentialism, Anglo-​American feminist practice also seems to introduce a binary understanding of sexual difference by the backdoor. There is still a tendency to champion traditionally feminine virtues of care-​giving, emotional understanding and empathy. While intersectionality has done much of the work of problematising the binary of self/​other, the dichotomy of individual/​collective or general/​particular persists. And the ideal of women working together for the benefit of the collective whole is influenced and tainted by the very same paradigm that is informed and bolstered by patriarchy: that is, that women exist not for themselves, but for others.

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6  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid By shunning the individual, humanist subject, feminism has in some ways repudiated the progressive strides made towards an understanding of women as autonomous, self-​governing subjects whose interests and desires can be recognised as culturally, politically viable and worthy of recognition. This turn away from the humanist individual is largely because of the subject’s masculine associations; the autonomous self is, for many, irredeemably patriarchal. Toril Moi, in her 1985 work Sexual/​Textual Politics, wrote: Traditional humanism … is in effect part of patriarchal ideology … as Luce Irigaray or Hélène Cixous would argue, this integrated self is in fact a phallic self, constructed on the model of the self-​contained, powerful phallus … In this humanist ideology the self is the sole author of history and of the literary text: the humanist creator is potent, phallic and male –​God in relation to his world, the author in relation to his text … the text is reduced to a passive, “feminine” reflection of an unproblematically “given,” “masculine” world or self. (Moi 8) While the conception of the individual, unified subject as a tool for dismissing that which is non-​male (and often non-​white and non-​straight as well) should be discredited, the implied dismissal of individual selfhood attached to this critique risks diminishing the individuality of women, recognised as self-​determining agents. The frequent portrayal of the self as a purely masculine and irredeemable tool of patriarchy in some ways fails to acknowledge the multiplicity of persons which feminist politics seeks to represent. Yet the implications of such a philosophy are to deny women today many of the rights historically sought after by women who were themselves denied the opportunity to be selves in their own right, to paraphrase Toril Moi, “to be the author in relation to [her] text” (Moi 8). In her work, Selfish Women, Lisa Downing similarly argues that “ ‘self-​ interest,’ ‘self-​ regard,’ ‘self-​ actualisation’  –​may be, not only tangentially expedient for a feminist political project in the twenty-​first century, but programmatically necessary to it.” Here she offers the term “ ‘self-​fullness,’ as both the direct antonym of what women are traditionally exhorted to be –​‘selfless’ –​ and as a value-​judgement-​free alternative to selfishness” (3). Downing’s book delivers a deeply necessary argument for women and the feminist movement to reclaim selfhood for the benefit of the individuals which make up the category of women –​acknowledging the multiplicity within the category of woman and at the same time acknowledging the inclusivity of the word as describing both sameness and difference. Where the sameness ends and the difference begins is a matter which essentialist and constructionist feminists have debated hotly for many years: which aspects of what we call “Woman” or “feminine” are manufactured and/​or imposed? And what can be seen as, in some way “essential,” and therefore, shared? Final answers to these questions are probably beyond the scope of this work; however, I  argue that we might come closer to understanding the nature of man and woman by first acknowledging that neither the masculine/​feminine binary nor the collective/​individual binary can

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 7 any longer be understood as stable: that both dichotomies should instead be problematised and exposed as indistinct. What Lisa Downing describes as the “ghost which haunts feminism” is acknowledged in a similar way in Judith Butler’s acclaimed work Gender Trouble: “contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism” (xxix). This opening phrase in the 1990 preface is a reference to the uneasy relationship between feminist philosophy as a whole and the sex/​gender binary upon which much feminist criticism has been founded. There seems to be a desire, from both the constructionist and essentialist sides of the debate, to pin down gender and sex once and for all: at one extreme end of the scale there is an attempt to concretise a specific image of Woman as an exemplar –​a symbol around which to rally politically and philosophically; at the other extreme end, there is an insistence on gender as purely socially constructed. While I am more in agreement with the latter extreme, it is clear from developments in gender and queer theory research, from LGBTQI experiences, and the emergence of transgender philosophy that there is more going on than social conditioning: that there are processes occurring in the experience of gender that cannot be attributed to any one sole source, be that social construction, biology, physicality or sexuality. We are still in the process of ‘locating’ gender: finding its ‘edges’ in order to better understand how it functions.

Biopower and Bare Life: New Conceptualisations of Gender The first chapter of this book will provide a detailed exploration of my approach to gender analysis, which uses Agamben’s paradigmatic system as a framework for approaching the structure of gender as a biopolitical phenomenon, alongside feminist and queer theorists Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam and Monique Wittig. Agamben’s system recognises that power structures, which he terms paradigms, are fluid categories: allowing for social and political constructions to be recognised as both real and present in the world while also being –​to an extent –​insubstantial and therefore capable of radical change as a result of their unstable nature. As Agamben writes in The Signature of All Things: “the paradigmatic case becomes such by suspending and, at the same time, exposing its belonging to the group, so that it is never possible to separate its exemplarity from its singularity” (Signature 31). The paradigm is composed of an opposition. One of Agamben’s most famous examples is the opposition of politics and biology in the paradigm of life, which he traces back to the ancient Greek concepts of bios and zoe. As with all paradigms, the one of life is suspended –​ that is, the supposedly oppositional ideas which make up the paradigm, ‘life,’ are, in reality, indistinct, and binary oppositions are not binaries at all: rather, the concepts bleed into one another. We may imagine that life is something that can be divided into public political life and private dominion over one’s biological existence. But in truth the state is invested in regulating our biological processes, namely sexual reproduction, and this is regulated through

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8  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid the system of heteronormativity. The state’s investment in gender roles is perhaps most strikingly shown by how difficult it is in most countries around the world for transgender people to legally change their gender status. One could point to a number of other examples, however: the historical and current regulation throughout the world of sexual practices which deviate from the heteronormative model, including the persecution of LGBTQI persons, the state regulation of surrogacy whereby many countries have made it illegal for LGBT individuals to complete the surrogacy process. Very strangely, the implications of biopolitics in relation to state regulation of sex and gender have not been discussed directly by Agamben. As Catherine Mills has argued, Agamben unfortunately remains rather blind to the implications of his research in terms of gender and sexuality (124), despite coming extremely close to discussing both these topics in many of his works –​ particularly in his work The Use of Bodies. As one of the founding fathers of biopolitics, it is strange to see such a notable absence in relation to the regulation of bodies in his philosophical enquiry. Yet, Agamben’s lack of engagement with gender and sexuality should not prevent us from utilising the value of his paradigmatic system, which maps usefully onto sex and gender. Agamben’s philosophy is innovative in that it challenges rather than relies upon the categories of self and other. The paradigm “is a singular object that, standing equally for all others of the same class, defines the intelligibility of the group of which it is a part and which, at the same time it constitutes” (Signature 31). It stands for the specific case as well as the universal. Viewing gender as a paradigm, we can see how man is constructed as a universal case, the traditional conceptualisation of human subjectivity, woman is constructed as the specific, inferior case whose identity is ultimately in service to male supremacy. The categories of male and female can also be mapped onto the binary of zoe and bios within the paradigm of life –​with Man seen as constituting political, public life while Woman is associated with the sphere of the domestic, private life and crucially, biological life. Similar to the concept of life, gender is truly suspended between the categories of male and female, so that the distinctions between the two become blurred. Our current historical moment reflects such a suspension between the identities of male and female, as evidenced by a vast range of gender and sexual identities being acknowledged, the emergence of transgender philosophy as well as worldwide political activism of transgender rights. We are living in a moment of what we might call gender inoperativity, to use Agamben’s term. This term delineates a breaking point for paradigms –​a moment when the binary opposition breaks down and is exposed as indistinct. The paradigm then ceases to operate. Science fiction narratives provide many valuable studies of gender inoperativity through their capacity to engage with alien or posthuman concepts of self and other. Sherryl Vint argues in her work Bodies of Tomorrow: “SF is particularly suited to exploring the question of the posthuman because it is a discourse that allows us to concretely imagine bodies and selves otherwise, a discourse defined by its ability to estrange our commonplace perception of reality” (19). Furthermore, Vint acknowledges that “the new selves SF

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 9 might help us imagine are both the problematic selves and the unexpected others … they remind us of the fragility of our boundary-​making work and that the Other always is an aspect of self made problematic” (21). Agamben’s understanding of the paradigm reflects these sentiments. The paradigm is made up of a dichotomy of universal and particular, the biological self and the universal public persona or digital avatar, the self and the Other. Science fiction, particularly when it deals explicitly with concepts of sex and gender, is biopolitical fiction. This intersection between biopolitics, science fiction and gender theory is illustrated by many works of science fiction literature, including Theodore Sturgen’s novel Venus Plus X, which describes a society of humans who have genetically altered themselves to become hermaphroditic. In the novel, Charlie Johns is a visitor to the society of Ledom and when he discovers the full extent of the sexual, physical alterations the Ledomites have undergone, he has the following reaction: “He had a vision of Laura, of all women … of all men. Biology, he remembered irreverently; they used to use the astronomical symbols for Mars and Venus for male and female … What in the hell would they use for these? Mars plus y? Venus plus x! Saturn turned upsidedown?” (Sturgeon 62). What is fascinating about this passage, from which the novel’s title is derived, is the notion of this “x” added to the Venus. Charlie cannot conceive of gender without both sexes –​he cannot conceive of men without women or, more properly given the reference to “Venus,” of women without men. This reflects the operation of the paradigm which exists as suspended between two opposing elements  –​in this case, male and female, Venus and Mars. But Charlie cannot conceive of a gender or sex in isolation –​he must imagine at least a portion of the other embedded in the new gender-​neutral Ledom identity: the “x” that is suspended between the categories of male and female. It is also telling that Charlie imagines Laura as part of a vision of “all women” and then “all men”: the specific case, Laura, is bound up irrevocably with the universal. However, Sturgeon’s use of the pronoun “he” to describe the Ledom people has been criticised for, seemingly, masculinising a people whose gender identity is quite removed from our current human conceptualisations. The same critique has been levelled at Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice trilogy, both of which use gendered pronouns to describe “genderless” societies. However, I  believe such criticisms fail to acknowledge how the authors use pronouns to play with reader’s expectations. In Venus Plus X the use of the male pronoun “he” is appropriate because it indicates Charlie’s own inability to escape gendered constructions –​in order to cope with the indistinct gender identities of the Ledom people he thinks of them all as men –​the Ledom people thus take on a universal, male subjectivity, another hallmark of the gender paradigm which designates male as a universal identity –​Charlie would not think to imagine a race of “women.” Similarly, for LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the human observer, Genly Ai, of the androgynous planet of Gethen finds the inhabitants impossible to comprehend on their own terms: “I was still far from being able to see the people of the

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10  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid planet through their own eyes. I tried to but my efforts took the form of self-​ consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own” (ch. 1) (my emphasis). Genly Ai is brought face to face with the suspended quality of gender here, forced to acknowledge that gender is a slippery concept that characterises individuals often more by assumption that physical fact. As Justine Larbalestier argues: To render the people of Gethen intelligible, Genly turns them into men. But he is never comfortable with this move, and it keeps sliding out of his grasp because the Gethens are neither male nor female, and they will not stay fixed as Genly would have them. He is forced to think about his assumptions about male and female. (99) and the reader is forced to do the same. Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice trilogy portrays a galactic empire whose language “does not mark gender in any way” (3), and to account for this, Leckie uses the pronoun “she” to describe all characters. Just as with The Left Hand of Darkness, this forces the reader to question their various assumptions about gender –​this is particularly effective because the society described is not totally without gender but simply places less emphasis on it. Thus, the reader is invited to imagine, not a genderless or sexless society as such (as in the case of Venus Plus X or The Left Hand of Darkness) but rather a kind of post-​ gender society where actions and behaviours are not irrevocably marked by current, traditional associations.

The Battle of Sexes Having discussed in detail my methodological approach to gender analysis in science fiction texts, Chapter 2 of this book will explore some classic works of feminist sf literature from the second-​wave era. For this portion of my analysis I have chosen Marge Peircy’s He, She and It, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. I have chosen these texts because of how well I  believe they reflect some of the problematic ideology within feminist thought that I have outlined. While each of these novels plays interestingly with gender, each of them seems to challenge gender constructions with one hand while in some ways reinforcing them with the other. They represent a sub-​genre of feminist science fiction literature which depicts often all-​female societies, standing in opposition to other patriarchal worlds  –​what Justine Larbalestier terms “battle-​of-​the-​sexes” texts. In these novels the societies are depicted as strong and efficient, thus the stereotype of passive, weak-​minded femaleness is re-​imagined: caregiving, strength of community and motherhood assume different connotations. However, many of these societies achieve this by simultaneously appropriating constructions of femininity. In Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, the Jewish “Free Town” of Tikva (one of the few areas of this future society not controlled by a corporation) is

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 11 characterised by its unusual concern (compared to the rest of this future world) for gender equality as well as its highly feminised aspects: it is a small agricultural society focused on values of community and family, dominated by the masculine corporate dystopian landscape that surrounds it. Similarly, the all-​female planet of Whileaway, in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, though not without violence or aggression, is characterised by a preoccupation with farming and cultivation and a deference towards nature and the pastoral. The planet’s name, Whileaway (reminiscent of the phrase “to while away the time”), suggests a passive acceptance of the passage of time; the women of this planet are not explorers, seekers or pursuers of improved efficiency, rather they amble through life with a feminine air of resignation, never wishing for more than they have. The troubling thing about the societies depicted in these two novels is not its celebration of traditionally feminine traits but rather its failure to depict female characters, desires and achievements outside of a traditionally feminine framework: womanhood and female identity are not portrayed in all their true complexity and variety. Lastly, Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve includes the all-​female society of Beulah, composed of strong, violent, warrior-​women inspired by a terrifying “goddess” figure called “Mother” to violently retaliate against men. They plan to castrate men and forcibly turn them into women in order position themselves mythically as creators rather than merely the creations of the supreme masculine mythic figure: God. This society’s strength is founded on its realisation of the classic objects of masculine fear –​castration, female sexuality and female volatility. Their plan to destroy mankind in order to raise Woman out of oppression is a tacit acceptance of the biological determinism that fuels and empowers patriarchal discourse; that is, that women are biologically and physically inferior to men, who are their biologically determined masters. The brutal notion that only the destruction of the male and the masculine can bring about female emancipation merely reinforces the perceived inferiority of womankind and further entrenches the divide between the sexes created and maintained by patriarchal power structures. Each of these novels attempts to reappropriate the female/​ feminine by imbuing it with signifiers of power. Yet each of these emancipating gestures is complicated by its proximity to the original paradigm of patriarchy. The myths of womanhood that these novels, in part, perpetuate are components of the oppressive patriarchal paradigm they seek to condemn. It is a contradiction to imply an essentialist gender binarism while vying for equality of the sexes; essentialism is the language of patriarchy, and feminist opposition politics is capitulation to the same dichotomous reasoning that consolidates male domination and privilege. Narratives of this kind, and the feminist discourse they reflect, feed into a damaging conceptualisation of essential womanhood based on notions of female victimhood. Carter’s novel actively seeks to erase the male and masculine in favour of the female and feminine; this approach not only lacks nuance but also simultaneously erases liminal and ambiguous gender identities: for example, those masculine female identities which Jack Halberstam explores in their work Female Masculinities: “the stone butch, for

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12  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid example, in her self-​definition as a non-​feminine, sexually untouchable female, complicates the idea that lesbians share female sexual practices or women share sexual desires or even that masculine women share a sense of what animates their particular masculinities” (21). These works reflect the problematic essentialist, binary ways of conceptualising gender, and often rely on a narrative of women versus men; some –​ The Passion of New Eve and The Female Man –​even depict physical wars between men and women as opposing sides of a bloody organised conflict. The novels also contain female characters with traditionally female traits of passivity, emotional intelligence, a strong instinct for caregiving and nurturing; these are glorified in the novels as exemplars of female being, as shared traits of universal womanly experience. As I  have argued above, a feminism founded on difference and held together by a powerful narrative of sisterhood further entrenches traditional conceptualisations of gender. This kind of feminism, rooted in essentialist understandings of gender, relies on the very same dichotomy of male and female as separate entities, unified by shared biological and mental traits, which patriarchy has historically relied upon in order to maintain control over women. Like Donna Haraway, I argue that the cyborg figure can help us to reimagine current power structures and discursive practices, specifically what Haraway describes as “taxonomies of feminism [which] produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 156). The emergence of the gender critical movement, invested in maintaining strict definitions of womanhood, is a telling development that speaks to the truly damaging influence of binary conceptualisations of gender.

On Cyborgs and Gynoids The current desire to defend a kind of sexual purity of female being, emerging from some more regressive forms of feminist politics, seems to stem from both extremes of feminist discourse: both essentialist and constructionist feminists seem deeply invested in a rigid mind/​ body split. Elizabeth Grosz argues: “Feminists and philosophers seem to share a common view of the human subject as a being made up of two dichotomously opposed characteristics: mind and body, thought and extension, reason and passion, psychology and biology” (3). Onto this paradigm of mind versus body, patriarchy has successfully mapped Man onto the superior sphere of universal reason and woman onto the inferior sphere of the body. However, Vint comments that “the body occupies a liminal space between self and not-​self, between nature and culture, between the inner authentic person and social persona” (16). Vint and Grosz interpret the body in line with Judith Butler’s analysis, arguing that “the body has its invariably public dimension” (Undoing Gender 21). Butler understands gender to be performative, repetitive, existing between categories rather than as a fixed entity; it is a composite series of gestures and effects as opposed to a continuous and homogenous concept. In science fiction, the boundary that the body represents between self and other is often problematised. The

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 13 body is continually reimagined in science fiction as: interface in cyberpunk fiction, alien hybrid in, for example, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, or as cyborg. The cyborg figure, celebrated and popularised by Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” is a hybrid which crosses boundaries of race, gender and technology (155). Butler, Vint and Grosz all agree that the body is a thing suspended between the public persona and the private self. This is crucial for an understanding of gender that evolves beyond the essentialist/​constructionist binary of sex and gender. Agamben’s understanding of life as a paradigm composed of zoe (biological life) and bios (political life) allows us to further conceptualise the body as suspended between public and private, between personal existence and political control (Sacer 1). Donna Haraway’s understanding of the cyborg as a symbol of that powerful ambiguity can help us to further conceptualise the suspended qualities of the body. The manner in which the cyborg body is very literally and viscerally mediated by technology reinforces the liminality of all bodies, with or without prostheses or interfaces. For Haraway, cyborg feminism is a practice as well as an identity, standing as an alternative to other forms of feminist discourse: “Cyborg feminists have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole” (Cyborg Manifesto 157). Much scholarship has been published on the posthuman figure of the cyborg in literature, film and video games. Analyses of the cyborg figure have offered the opportunity to reconceptualise human experience as fundamentally technologically mediated both physically and psychologically, examining both the negative and positive aspects of every individual’s ‘cyborg’ experience of reality. The cyborg figure represents, for Haraway, the ways in which our existence has been forever altered by often exploitative technological practices; yet our resulting cyborg existence holds the potential for emancipation and equality by eroding established hegemonic boundaries such as those of race and gender. In this regard, Carlen Lavigne’s analyses Haraway’s possibly overly optimistic and rather ill-​defined portrayal of the cyborg: “the cyborg is a nebulous and unstructured image, representing the potential for apocalypse as well as new forms of being” (83). In this way, Haraway’s cyborg can be read as a kind of Deleuzian, rhizomatic multiplicity  –​a force that is as full of vitality and potential as negativity and destruction, capable of breaking down established structures but providing no concrete framework for something new. This is problematic because it lacks specificity and so risks offering more than it can deliver: that is, while the cyborg has the potential to challenge patriarchal structures, it does not necessarily offer a viable new conceptualisation for moving beyond those structures. As Lavigne argues further: “when a cyborg becomes recognisably human, it is unable to challenge the human stereotypes, classifications and expectations guiding its performance  –​as, in order to become recognisably human, the cyborg must behave in predictable ways and operate according to dominant social norms, thus abandoning its own potential for liminality” (83). I  cannot agree fully with this interpretation of the cyborg, as I do not think that the cyborg is necessarily grounded

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14  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid entirely in stereotypes; the cyborg does operate within certain recognisably human boundaries, but it may also challenge those boundaries and expose their fragility in doing so. The role of the cyborg is not necessarily to abandon stereotypes entirely but to introduce ambiguity. However, I would argue that a more concrete methodology is required for the cyborg figure to be a truly valuable figure in feminist and gender theory. I also contend that there is a deeper ambiguity at work within the specifically female cyborg, which Agamben’s as well as Deleuze’s systems can be used to unlock. Alongside works of feminist sf, such as C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born”, I will throughout the book also be exploring texts whose portrayal of women and gynoids is not explicitly feminist in their scope but which, nevertheless, exposes the paradigm of gender at work as well as its suspended nature. In Chapter 3, I will explore how some works sometimes unintentionally expose the fragility, the indistinction, of the gender paradigm through the gynoid figures they portray: particularly I will focus on Star Trek: Voyager’s cyborg character, Seven of Nine. Agamben’s system provides a valuable and insightful framework for understanding the intricacies of gender. However, it does not necessarily provide a framework for reimagining new possible systems that might replace the old. Deleuze’s philosophy offers, in my opinion, a more concrete method for imagining new frameworks which can be used to envision how gender may develop in the future. This book will use Agamben’s radical and intricate concept of inoperativity as well as Deleuze’s theory of assemblages and his concept of the Body without Organs (BwO), as products of his wider system of becoming through difference and repetition. I will examine how Deleuze’s understanding of becoming opens up new ways of envisioning how gender may develop as a cultural and political construct.

Becoming-​Woman, Becoming-​Gynoid It is important to recognise that the concept of indistinction, indifference or inoperativity (words which I will use interchangeably throughout this book) originated not in the work of Agamben but in an essay entitled “Bartleby; Or, the Formula” by Deleuze. The essay relates to a short story, “Bartleby The Scrivener,” by Herman Melville, in which a clerk declines to complete his work, repeating the sentence: “I would prefer not to.” Deleuze argues that these words create a linguistic zone of “indetermination”: “the formula is devastating because it eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any non-​preferred … in fact, it renders them indistinct. It hollows out a zone of indiscernibility” (“Bartleby” 71). Deleuze’s analysis would later be further developed by Agamben in relation to his work on the nature of potentiality and inoperativity in his own essay written on the same work: “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” They both worked along very similar lines when theorising about the ‘gap’ between categories, though Agamben would go on to develop his concept into a more extensive framework in which indistinction becomes part of a much

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 15 larger paradigmatic system. Both thinkers understood indistinction as both a process by which categories dissolve and a space of linguistic indeterminacy that can be charged with pure potential. It is on this plane of indifference and potentiality that Agamben and Deleuze connect with each other. For Agamben, it is the pit of inoperativity that yields the rewards of humanity’s pure potentiality. The “I prefer not to” opens a chasm between action and inaction –​a place of suspension characterised by impotentiality that gives true power to raw potentiality. Accordingly, Chapters 4 and 5 will focus on how Deleuze’s philosophy can be said to continue Agamben’s own ideas about undecidability/​ inoperativity and imagine the next step in the process  –​elaborating further on the processes that bring possibilities into reality. Delving into this system offers new avenues for imagining how biopolitical constructs like gender might evolve in the future as well as providing a deeper understanding of how our current gender frameworks came into being. Both Deleuze and Agamben imagine reality as a network of ‘apparatuses’ that fluctuate both temporally and spatially  –​that is, their meanings and uses shift over time and within each given society in which they function. For Agamben the network is made up of paradigms, for Deleuze they are assemblages  –​arrangements (agencements) (Livesey 18). Divided into two axes, the horizontal component of the assemblage is a “machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another, and on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 102–​ 3). The vertical component includes “both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilise it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away” (103). These assemblages are not fixed entities, rather they are constantly in a process of reformation; they restructure themselves continuously as reality is altered in its construction over time. Agamben’s paradigms are similarly fluid. Having “no origin, or arche …every phenomenon is the origin, very image archaic” (Agamben, Signatures 31). The eternal altering of these assemblages, forever producing new combinations, new ontological and epistemological machines is Deleuze’s system of difference and repetition, in which the virtual is understood as an inexhaustible engine of difference capable of producing endless methods of becoming. Deleuze’s virtual is very similar to Agamben’s potentiality  –​as consisting of potentiality and impotentiality. However, these terms are by no means synonymous; Agamben’s potentiality can be seen as the beginning, the setting in motion, of Deleuze’s more concrete blueprint for change. However, we cannot view these stages as confined to rigid sections in a linear process. Reterritorialisation is heavily inclined to give way to deterritorialisation, creating a circular process. Agamben’s philosophy offers new insight into the process of deterritorialisation, how assemblages (or paradigms) are broken down leaving in their ruins the foundation, the potential, for the new or, more accurately, pure difference.

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16  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid Furthermore, for Deleuze, a book (for my purposes a sf novel) can be considered itself as an assemblage: As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages …. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 2) The book, the assemblage, can only be understood in relation to other assemblages, and thus it is only within the wider context of our reality, composed of a vast network of assemblages, that the individual ‘machine’ becomes intelligible. It is only through our knowledge of other book machines –​of the linguistic machine, that constructs literary and linguistic conventions –​that we can comprehend the text of the book and come to form an interpretation and understand its purpose as a machine. I think we can extrapolate that this applies not only to books, but all ‘texts,’ including TV, film and video games –​all of which are forms which depend on a wider contextual understanding of format, genre and narrative in order to be intelligible. The purpose of the text, and its interpretation, fluctuates from person to person depending on the other texts or contextual assemblages the reader has already encountered. Thus the text assemblage never contains a single meaning; in fact, it means nothing when considered in isolation: “when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 3). It is this characteristic of the assemblage that relates to the other side of this machine and that encourages change and resists homogeneity –​a term developed by Deleuze and Guattari called the BwO. This element of the assemblage faces away from “the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality” (Plateaus 2) and acts to “[dismantle] the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate” (2). The BwO continually forces the assemblage to alter and reform such that all the ‘machines’ that make up our reality are constantly and repeatedly shifting, dismantling and reforming to produce perpetual difference. The BwO is the manifestation, the machinic functioning of desire the “plane of consistency specific to desire,” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 178), the force that Deleuze and Guattari describe as “a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it” (178). Contrary to the traditional psychoanalytic understanding of desire, as based on oedipal lack, Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of the BwO as a way of viewing desire as a “productive machine” (Message 37), capable of producing valuable and necessary disruption of existing institutions as well as new methods of becoming: “the order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-​production and social production. We

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 17 therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 326). However, the term becomes more convoluted as Deleuze and Guattari also divulge that the BwO is also “always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free” (187). The stratified, unified section of the assemblage grounds the BwO, preventing unbridled, gratuitous destratification. Thus the BwO, like the assemblage, is related to the establishment while also acting as a transgressive force –​an engine for creating difference. In line with Lavigne’s analysis of the cyborg as “representing the potential for apocalypse as well as new forms of being” (83), we can see that the cyborg constitutes a BwO or a line of flight. Its ambiguity and pure potentiality mean that it can be utilised for imagining new progressive futures or perhaps equally to reinforce existing structures. Speaking about the advertising practices of the 1970s, Lisa Yaszek discusses depictions of technologically mediated bodies in media representations: These narratives seemed to reinforce dominant understandings of the subject as an autonomous, organic being in full control of its own productive vision. On the other hand, they implicitly defined the subject as masculine; in contrast, feminine identity was relegated to an objectified body that was transformed into a complex but nonetheless controllable aggregate of machinelike parts available for de-​and re-​assembly. (ch. 2) It is unsurprising that this consumer culture formed the context out of which Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives emerged. A  persistent image of woman as assemblage, as machine entity for mass consumption exists in media and our daily interactions with technology: from Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Alexa; from Siri to Westworld; from the Hanson Sophia robot to Gatebox’s Azuma Hikari, the virtual assistant that doubles as a virtual girlfriend. While these figures carry negative, sexist associations, the cyborg and, particularly, the female cyborg figure have the capacity to reimagine these associations, to “engage with and begin to rewire the circuits of desire” (Yaszek ch. 2) which traditionally oppressively regulate the female body. In line with this reasoning, a particular line of flight I will analyse is a phenomenon that Deleuze and Guattari term becoming-​woman. This process originates with the figure of a “girl”: Deleuze and Guattari examine the disruptive and curious position of the girl/​woman as an incongruous element suspended in a patriarchal world: Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. (Plateaus 322–​323)

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18  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid In Agamben’s terms, the girl is the concrete manifestation of the suspended state of Woman: an indistinct category within the binary construction of gender. The nature of woman, constructed as a universal other, makes the female presence unexpectedly powerful in an antipatriarchal sense. In the context of science fiction text, the reader is confronted by a specific form of cognitive estrangement: The girl/​woman in a far future or otherwise alien context is a question in and of herself: what does the concept of Woman constitute in world of this sf text? Does the code, ‘woman,’, mean the same in this narrative world as it does in our reality? Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-​woman perfectly describes the position of Woman in sf. Women are double agents in what is often a patriarchal setting  –​bound by the gender constructions/​ expectations placed upon them by both reader and author and yet unpredictable. The “girl,” acts as a “block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult” (Plateaus 323)  or even human, machine and animal  –​the focal “others” of the narrative that complicate and expand upon more “traditional oppositions” of man and woman, adult and child, etc. Becoming-​woman describes how a masculine world can be altered through the presence of women or through the presence of the feminine/​female. When women began to enter the workplace on a large scale, traditionally masculine places were –​by increments –​transformed. The gendered machines that had held men in the assemblage of the workplace, the office, now had to be modified to accommodate women in one way or another. Because woman is constructed as the universal other, she is ill-​defined (in comparison to her male-​counterpart) and so can adapt to different environments. As the world becomes less and less defined by a fixed conceptualisation of masculinity and male power, the assemblages that make up that world are shifting and being remade in the image of those that are taking up new positions of power: namely women. However, I believe we are now in a new cultural moment that goes beyond the process of becoming-​woman. As our existence becomes more and technologically mediated, the assemblages which make up our current social and political frameworks are being modified not by becoming-​woman but rather by what I term becoming-​gynoid. In Chapter 4, I examine Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-​woman in relation to key examples in sf literature from different time periods which portray the evolution of the female cyborg, or gynoid over time, including E.T.A Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” and C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born.” One of the most iconic visual female cyborg images in popular culture and media is the gynoid replicant Rachael Tyrel of the Blade Runner films, one of two central female characters who are also robots or “replicants”: the audience is constantly made to wonder about Rachael’s nature. Her manner is mechanical and often difficult to read, due to its blandness. Her initial penetrating stare into the camera as Deckard performs the “Voight-Kampff” test on her (to determine whether she is a replicant) is as ambiguous as it is unsettling. Her apparently soulless stare is juxtaposed with the many shots of a large,

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Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid 19 imposing advert of a Japanese model set against the vast cityscape. The latter’s alluring smile and demure expression are at once haunting and contrived –​she is a real woman who is obviously displaying false emotion –​is Rachel a ‘false’ woman displaying genuine emotions by comparison? By extension the viewer is left to wonder why human authenticity seems to be visually bound up with ideas of authentic femininity and why attempts to prove one’s humanity seem to be inextricably linked with proving one’s ability to perform gender. In Blade Runner, entrance into the humanity ‘club’ can be achieved through ‘passing.’ As Judith Butler states: “the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the human” (Bodies 7). In Chapter 5, I perform a detailed analysis of the Rachel character as she appears variously in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the film adaptation Blade Runner. I argue that the gynoids of both texts present a machinic gender ambiguity in both iterations challenge established conceptualisations of gender.

On Gynoids, Interfaces and the Disruptive Nature of Play Due to the interactive nature of video games and the way in which players are often able to experiment within each game world, players are sometimes offered the opportunity to explore alternatives to our own reality and the social and political structures that go with it, including the structure of gender. In Chapter 6, I discuss Agamben’s view of play, as a rebellious act which threatens established hierarchies, in relation to the Fallout series of video games. Here I explore the way the franchise complicates and disrupts the heteronormative space of the home, 1950s Americana, the nuclear family and other normative associations, while also simultaneously expressing the disruption of a myriad of related social and political structures through its gaming mechanics amidst the ruined and devastated wasteland of the game world. While the Fallout series is not concerned with gender as such, the games expose certain biopolitical structures which contribute to and are intimately connected with the oppressive structures of gender. Set against a post-​apocalyptic background, I argue that the central mechanic in Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 of crafting new objects from old items of Americana mimics the way paradigms operate. The paradigm evolves and changes over time, retaining some of its old associations while also taking on new meanings. The Fallout games offer a simulated world which is a paradise of pulp and golden-​age sf references brought together in an open world role playing game that is host to numerous side quests which episodically catalogue sf tropes. While literature, film and TV hold their robots, space rockets and ray guns up for the reader/​viewer’s inspection, the player of the sf game has the opportunity not only to observe but in many cases to directly engage with these artefacts and thus explore them more fully, playing with them in new and unexpected ways, pushing their boundaries, and in doing so allow hidden qualities to emerge. However, while Agamben’s paradigms offer a framework for understanding the way our social and political constructions operate, it does not provide a clear plan for how to move beyond oppressive structures.

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20  Suspending Gender and Becoming-Gynoid Harking back to my earlier discussion of becoming-​gynoid, in my final chapter I explore the posthuman connection created by the interaction between player and game as well as player and avatar. By analysing the Deus Ex video games through the lens of Deleuze’s philosophy, I discuss the potential for analysing the nature of identity through cyborg characters, both playable and non-​ playable. I continue my analysis of how this form of becoming-​gynoid disrupts established gender constructions. The gynoid is a pervasive figure in video games as well as film, TV and literature. Some key examples include the playable robot nanny, Kara from Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human, the omnipresent GLaDOS AI from Portal, Halo’s Cortana, and EDI from the Mass Effect series. Female AIs and women robot servants are as pervasive in media generally as they are, now, in real life. The gynoids of fiction have crossed over into reality as digital personal assistants –​Siri and Alexa figuratively and Cortana quite literally, as she was based on an AI character of the same name from the Halo series of video games. The points of intersection between Agamben and Deleuze highlight their mutual usefulness in understanding the complexities of gender and particularly the political and social situation of women. Bringing these threads of philosophy, gender theory and science fiction together reinforces the highly biopolitical nature of our conceptualisation of Woman, her political existence and her relationship with the technological as well as what we traditionally understand as human.

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1  Woman or Womankind? Signatures, Suspension and Bare Life in Feminism and Science Fiction

For Agamben, the paradigm creates and fosters intelligibility and, in doing so, aids in creating the reality it makes fathomable. As such, paradigms stand for the examples of which they are composed and even supersede that which they represent. This operation of the paradigm –​its voracity as a knowledge system that is as fragile as it is powerful –​is reflected in queer theory understandings of gender as fundamentally ambiguous. As Jack Halberstam observes “precisely because virtually nobody fits the definitions of male and female, the categories gain power and currency from their impossibility. In other words, the very flexibility and elasticity of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ensures their longevity” (Masculinities 27). In a similar way, Agamben’s sees paradigms as historically ‘malleable,’ both evolving and enduring over time: “the historicity of the paradigm lies neither in diachrony nor in synchrony but in the crossing of the two” and moves “from singularity to singularity” (Signatures 31). But, crucially, it is not merely those with marginal, ambiguous gender identities that disrupt the operation of the gender paradigm. Rather the paradigm is itself ambiguous, suspended between male and female, as Halberstam notes: “look around any public space and notice how few people present formulaic versions of gender and yet how few are unreadable or totally ambiguous” (Masculinities 27). Paradigms are not only a means of intelligibility but also a discursive code that enables and constitutes power structures: “the paradigm is never already given, but is generated and produced” (Agamben, Signatures 17), forming a network of ‘myths’ that simultaneously elucidate and distort reality. In The Signature of all Things, Agamben describes the particulars of this process through the example set by Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, a picture atlas containing almost 1,000 images from books, magazines, newspaper articles and other daily life sources compiled by the German art historian and cultural theorist. Plate 46 in particular contained various visual representations of the nymph. Every photograph is the original; every image constitutes the archē and is, in this sense, “archaic.” But the nymph herself is neither archaic nor contemporary; she is undecidable in regards to diachrony and synchrony, unicity and multiplicity. This means that the nymph is the paradigm of which individual nymphs are the exemplars. Or to be more precise … the

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22  Woman or Womankind? nymph is the paradigm of the single images, and the single images are the paradigms of the nymph. (Agamben, Signatures 29) Warburg’s plate offers a visual map of the paradigm in operation. Every image in the plate’s collection is both an individual representation and an exemplar of the broader concept of a nymph. The figure in each one is simultaneously representative of the specific example of a nymph as well as the ‘general’ nymph that stands for all members of the nymph paradigm. Agamben’s consideration of the paradigm “calls into question the dichotomous opposition between the particular and the universal … and presents instead a singularity irreducible to any of the dichotomy’s two terms” (Agamben, Signatures 19). As already discussed, his analysis implies an inherent instability within our method of organising knowledge, whereby general and specific instances within the paradigmatic become blurred so that there can be no origin: in other words, there is no fixed notion or origin of a nymph rather her existence is predicated on a fluctuation of collated concepts that all oscillate between the general and particular, in that the common (the general) contains properties of the proper (a single instance) and vice versa, producing what Agamben calls an indistinction within the nymph paradigm. This operation is perhaps made most obvious by the way gender functions socially and politically –​there is no actual original Man or Woman that can be said to represent all other members of the group; rather, gender constitutes a complex self-​ reinforcing practice that emerges from “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance” (Butler, Gender Trouble 45). The nymph is an image of a woman, just as every woman (and nymph) is an image of womankind. Woman is both singular and universal, but crucially, uniquely suspended due to her position in a broader paradigm of gender as a whole that envelops all female exemplars as subordinate entities: “woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end” (Butler, Gender Trouble 45). Literature has a long history of utilising female characters as a means of creating an atmosphere of ambiguity, anxiety, fear or unrest, from Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth to Jane Eyre’s crazed, ghost-​like Bertha to the psychotic Annie Wilkes of Stephen King’s Misery. Sf literature, betraying its gothic origins, uses this trope to particular effect, however, personifying those anxieties and uncertainties peculiar to the sf genre through the figure of a woman: [T]‌he problematic spaces signalled by “gender” are crucial to sf imaginings. The presence of “Woman” –​whether actual, threatened or symbolically represented (through the alien, or “mother earth” for example) –​reflects cultural anxieties about a range of “Others” immanent in even the most scientifically pure, technically focused sf. (Merrick 241)

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Woman or Womankind? 23 The “series of self/​other’ dichotomies suggested by gender, such as human/​ alien, nature/​technology…” (241), etc. are encapsulated in the figure of the female character or presence in many sf narratives. In this way, Woman comes to represent that universal sense of the unknown, which is characteristic of sf –​ one that does not necessarily specifically point to any real-​world social or political anxiety, but rather a wide-​reaching meta-​unknown –​what Darko Suvin might call the novum –​that is at once deeply internal to the human psyche and yet utterly divorced from the anthropocentric; it is the extra-​terrestrial or the extra-​human, the alien both literally and figuratively, the monstrous other, that is both central to human understanding and yet also probably outside the limits of human comprehension. Luce Irigaray famously describes Woman a kind of living non-​essence: “she is pure mimicry. Which is always the case for inferior species, of course. Needed to define essences, her function requires that she herself have no definition” (Irigaray, Speculum 307). Irigaray’s analysis is useful if we understand it as describing the intersection between certain trends within female experience combined with overarching ideas of women. I argue that Irigaray’s words are best understood in the context of paradigms rather than essential truths about women as such. The claim that, intrinsically, women are only capable of mimicry in relation to masculinity, however, serves to further erase and stigmatise queer and trans identities. Just as insidiously, they attempt to invalidate the identities of women with differing relationships to power –​assuming that a woman who ‘acts like a man’ is merely imitating male attitudes rather than being authentically herself. As Jack Halberstam observes “female masculinity is generally received by hetero-​and homo-​normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach” (Masculinities 9). Particularly, Irigaray’s claim that women’s true identity has been totally subsumed by patriarchy and that women naturally reject power (Moi 147) implies that women who do not conform to this model are in some way not truly women or that they are mere tools of the patriarchy. However, using the framework of the paradigm provides one way to reconcile the essentialist and constructionist elements of Irigaray’s work: Woman is not a fixed entity but a paradigm that fluctuates over time. Just as minds and bodies are inseparable so are the bodily, psychic and emotional experiences which make up what it is to be a woman. At various moments in history and from culture to culture, these things will converge in different ways to produce different realities of womanhood, but all of them will be carried under the same sign. Unlike her difference feminist contemporaries, Cixous and Irigaray, Julia Kristeva more clearly acknowledges the multiple meanings and persons described by the idea of Woman: “I think that the apparent coherence which the term ‘woman’ assumes in contemporary ideology, apart from its ‘mass’ or ‘shock’ effect for activist purposes, essentially has the negative effect of effacing the differences among the diverse functions or structures which operate beneath this word” (Kristeva, “Women’s Time” 18). Understanding this allows us to recognise two things: that essentialist and constructionist discourses are

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24  Woman or Womankind? both only partially correct and that there is simultaneously a specificity and a non-​specificity to the experience of being female. Irigaray’s description of woman as a kind of absence “with no definition” is true in the sense that Woman cannot be reduced to a specific, homogenous concept –​however, the notion of universal womanhood in patriarchy as much as in feminist discourse lacks substance.

The Suspended Woman Stanisław Lem’s novel, Solaris, contains one of the most sophisticated portrayals of the supreme otherness that foregrounds mankind’s understanding of itself and its place in the universe; it also contains a profound portrayal of otherness given physical, female form. In the novel, the psychologist, Kris Kelvin, boards a research station hovering above the mysterious planet of Solaris to join the research team which is observing the huge ocean-​like being that covers most of the planet’s surface. The team’s recent bombardment of the surface of the planet with high-​energy X-​rays (in an attempt to communicate with the life form) results in the appearance of several “visitors,” each of which haunts one of the characters aboard the station. Kelvin’s visitor is an exact (and apparently also self-​aware) duplicate of his dead wife, Rheya, who committed suicide years ago. Like all the visitors, Rheya does not know why or how she came to exist aboard the research station; her being is completely defined and constituted by the thoughts and memories of Kelvin. She is only as real as he remembers her to be: her movements, actions and words are only as ‘real’ and distinct as Kelvin can conjure them from his mind: “my terror was gradually overcome by my conviction that it was the real Rheya there in the room with me, even though my reason told me that she seemed somehow stylised, reduced to certain characteristic expressions, gestures and movements” (Lem 60). The reader is never offered any meaningful information about Rheya or Kelvin’s relationship with her; rather, she is described only in terms of certain extreme characteristics which appear stylised and exaggerated. She is a caricature of uncontrollable womanhood while remaining herself characterless and vague. This allows her to maintain that universality which exposes her suspended state  –​like the nymph  –​between the universal Woman and the individual female person. However, Rheya’s female otherness portrays far more than the merely female: the nature of her character is not the result of a clumsy attempt on the part of Lem to produce a plausible female character of substance. Rather, Rheya stands for a universal ambiguity, an incredible insurmountable unknown, an entirely alien force: finally, Rheya represents the human failure to conceptualise the other, reduced as she is to a paltry facsimile of the actual, deceased Rheya: she represents the limits of the human capacity to make the unfamiliar intelligible. Even when the unknown presents itself in the guise of the familiar, the human mind interprets only a profound sense of the uncanny. Thus, the novel is haunted by a complicated and profound sense of loss. The Rheya visitor encapsulates not only this unknown but also all the fear and regret associated

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Woman or Womankind? 25 with the notion of human impotence. In other words, human inability, human lack, is understood as female. To put it another way, the paradigm of woman appears as a caricature of human powerlessness; the Rheya visitor’s character displays a myriad of feminine clichés, all monikers of passivity and unhinged emotion. She is suicidal, displaying a volatile, childlike emotionality combined with an unsettling, desperate neediness which is revealed by her constant compulsion to remain in Kelvin’s presence and her violent reaction when she is forcibly separated from him in another room: The panel, made of some plastic material, caved in as though an invisible person at my side had tried to break into the room. The steel frame bent further and further inwards and the paint was cracking. Suddenly I understood: instead of pushing the door, which opened outwards, Rheya was trying to open it by pulling it towards her. … [t]‌here was a resounding crack and the panel, forced beyond its limits, gave way. Simultaneously the handle vanished, torn from its mounting. Two bloodstained hands appeared, thrusting through the opening and smearing the white paint with blood. The door split in two, the broken halves hanging askew on their hinges. First a face appeared, deathly pale, then a wild-​looking apparition, dressed in an orange and black bathrobe, flung itself sobbing upon my chest. (Lem 98) It becomes clear later in the novel that Rheya, like all the visitors, must remain in the presence of the person who conjured her in order to continue to exist. This moment in the novel, when Kelvin first begins to realise this fact, exposes the larger paradigm of gender. As part of the paradigm of gender, that is, Woman constructed as Man’s inferior opposite, Rheya’s very being is predicated on the imagination of Man and his ability to envision her. Composed of moments of identity (common) and difference (proper), the founding principal and the specific instance which arises from it (and can therefore be seen as subordinate to it), the paradigm can be said to consist of both the example and the exclusion. Thus, without male being (which is the common being), female existence is merely proper in isolation: a floating example without an exemplar; she is a kind of non-​being in the absence of that which defines her. In Lem’s novel, Man (Kelvin) imagines Woman (Rheya), and his image is profoundly imperfect –​a reflection so horrifying that it abhors itself and chooses destruction: Rheya eventually finds she is unable to live, knowing she is a mere shadow of another deceased woman and, just like the original Rheya, ends her life. The work of Agamben is also highly compatible with feminist writer Monique Wittig, particularly her famous analysis of language as foregrounding our ingrained assumption of the supremacy of Man over Woman. Wittig’s understanding of gender as primarily a linguistic apparatus is exemplified by the common phrase “mankind,” where the exemplar of Man stands for all humans, obscuring the very existence of Woman through blunt absence

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26  Woman or Womankind? (Wittig, “Homo Sum” 55). In her essay, “Homo Sum,” Wittig seeks to disrupt the established oppositional structure of traditional philosophical thought: If we consider the first table of opposites which history has handed down to us, as it has been recorded by Aristotle. (Metaphysics, Book I, 5, 6) Limited          Unlimited Odd             Even One             Many Right            Left Male             Female Rest             Motion Straight         Curved Light           Dark Good           Bad Square           Oblong … … Thus under the series of the “One” ’ (the absolute being nondivided, divinity itself) we have “male” (and “light”) that were from then on never dislodged from their dominant position. Under the other series appear the unrestful: the common people, the females, the “slaves of the poor,” the “dark” (barbarians who cannot distinguish between slaves and women), all reduced to the parameter of non-​Being. For Being is being good, male, straight, one, in other words, godlike, while non-​Being is being anything else (many), female: it means discord, unrest, dark, and bad. (Wittig  5–​6) While Man stands for the common, the prime example of everything good in human experience, Woman has come to stand for something much more all-​ encompassing and sinister, a lack that stands for all absence, a non-​existence made flesh. This seems similar to Irigaray’s work in some ways, but whereas Irigaray’s theory strongly implies an essentialist understanding of Woman, Monique Wittig’s is much more aligned with a constructionist position. A paradigmatic understanding of gender is useful for thinking beyond the dichotomous logic that Wittig critiques above, revealing that gender is not only a product of patriarchal bigotry, but that the narrative opposition at the heart of this fiction does not even possess internal consistency. Wittig’s assessment concludes that language is part of an oppressive patriarchal system that imposes an artificial divide between women from men: “the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are defined as asymmetrical or hierarchical from the outset. Language plays a key role in sustaining this imbalance, for by learning to call oneself a woman one is also implicitly deferring to the privileges enjoyed by men” (Kaplan and Glover 12). Women are constructed in relation to men through language with the result that the categories do not exist outside of

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Woman or Womankind? 27 the heteronormative patriarchal order that has been founded on the fiction of oppositional discourse. Similar to Wittig’s, Agamben’s philosophy (when applied to gender) reveals the very impossibility of a true binary relationship such as that of Man and Woman or any of the other numerous dichotomies that Wittig describes which underpin the notion of the human itself and which also fall into the unstable categories of universal and particular. The inoperative nature of Woman is founded on a fundamental contradiction that can be traced through Agamben’s analysis of the functioning of the paradigm: “the example is excluded from the rule not because it does not belong to the normal case but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its belonging to it” (Signature 24). Woman is not simply confined to her status as other, but rather her marginalised status is produced through her being caught between her position as proper (the exclusion from the rule) and, as an exact reflection of Man’s desires, the common (Man): “the example … is the symmetrical opposite of the exception” (Agamben, Signature 24). Though considered inferior, and thus holding the position of the excluded within the gender paradigm of patriarchy, Woman is also, in some sense, included in the rule by virtue of her dichotomous position. This contradiction represents the paradigm’s inherent instability that produces the “non-​being” of Woman which Wittig writes about. Lem’s Solaris offers an illustration of this suspension; in the scene where Rheya breaks through Kelvin’s door, the reader observes a conflicting cocktail of both masculine and feminine imagery that contributes to the surreal and jarring quality of the passage. Rheya’s is a classically deranged female mind, yet the expression of her constant distress consistently evokes a sense of terror in both Kelvin and the reader. Her erratic nature is more than a manifestation of stereotypical male anxiety over female emotion and sexuality: Rheya constitutes a perpetual threat that is both sinister and, given her highly destructive powers, also masculine in quality. She penetrates the door, violently with a display of brute strength in order to reach Kelvin, revealing that she (or perhaps the Solaris intelligence that helped to create her) is deeply destructive and powerful, willing to injure herself out of necessity. This suggests that the feminine aspect of the Rheya, that we see “sobbing upon [Kelvin’s] chest,” (Lem 98)  horrified at the damage she caused, may be no more than a guise or controlled simulation behind which a far more complex entity lurks –​the alien intelligence of the ocean-​like creature on Solaris. Rheya is an off-​shoot of a larger organism, just as Woman is a component of the larger apparatus of gender. Woman, like Rheya, is caught between exemplarity and specificity: is she merely an expression of the single consciousness of the Solaris creature, or could she have broken free from this distinction to become her own person? Or has the Solaris entity merely created an imperfect representation of a woman based on a flawed, patriarchal understanding. It is impossible to say; her indiscernibility from a wider homogeneity can be read as a disturbing reflection of the individual woman’s absorption into the wider collective of womankind, leaving her suspended between two false opposites of singular entity and collective unit, a constructed fantasy made flesh by an alien organism.

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28  Woman or Womankind?

Women and/​as Bare Life One of Agamben’s most famous claims can be found in his work Homo Sacer, where he states that “today it is not the polis but the [concentration] camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181). Agamben further developed this view in his later work The State of Exception by claiming that all democracies are fundamentally states of exception: “the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension” (State 2). The biopolitical relationship between state and citizen depends on the fact that the subject may become suspended by the law in a state of emergency; given the correct circumstances, the sovereign may sanction the exclusion of a given citizen, or group of citizens, from the law –​as in the case of Auschwitz or Guantanamo Bay, where a subject’s ostensible political standing and legal rights can be confounded as long as the right political conditions are in place: consider the case of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution,” or America’s “War on Terror.” The citizen’s position is tenuous, as he or she can, when necessary, enter a zone of indistinction where they are both prosecuted by the full force of the law (included), while no longer retaining the legal rights of a citizen (excluded). It is this biopolitical indeterminacy that “appears as an ambiguous and uncertain zone in which de facto proceedings … and juridical norms blur with mere fact  –​that is, a threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable” (State 29). I argue that women find themselves in this exceptional state as a result of their politically defined status as women. In Homo Sacer, Agamben explores the phenomenon which he later terms in State: “Being outside and yet belonging” (34) (his italics) through the eponymous ancient Roman figure. The source of the human exception can be found in this archaic law which “while it confirms the sacredness of a person, it authorises (or more precisely renders unpunishable) his killing” (Agamben, Sacer 72). The homo sacer is stripped of his/​her bios, what the ancient Greeks understood as political and social life –​“the form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (1). But what remains is not zoe –​“which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)” (1)  –​but something else indistinct: bare life. This should be described more as a change in quality rather than a loss of life; to have bare life is to experience the full force of the law from the point of view of the exception (it is a new political condition, a way of being –​rather than the complete removal of political life, it is rather a drastic alteration of it). A person with bare life continues to be “included in politics in the form of the exception that is as something that is included solely through an exclusion” (11). Agamben’s project here is to reinforce the proximity of democracy and totalitarianism through the biopolitical model of the living exception, hinged on a mutual constitutive component –​the presence in actuality (or the spectre in potentiality) of bare life: “at once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested” (9). The

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Woman or Womankind? 29 biopolitical substance of the law (Agamben, State 88) is such that the concentration camp remains an alarmingly real possibility whose potential must be vividly acknowledged to avoid its recurrence. The nature of the law as fundamentally biopolitical means that bare life exists as a necessary or inevitable aspect of government; I argue that women often occupy this position and can be seen as an example of bare life. As previously discussed, for Agamben, a subject with bare life is stripped of their bios: their political being and juridical rights. This denudation leaves them with only their zoe: their raw, biological life akin to that of an animal. In relation to this, while Woman is recognised as politically autonomous, her sex and gender still determine the nature of her political identity. This political identity is bound up with a construction of female biology that is as much a facet of gender as sex. That is, all women –​whether trans or cis, fertile or infertile, intersex, etc are subject to the same laws regarding the regulation of female bodies –​even though the biology of various female subjects may, in actuality, differ. Woman is a political category as much bound up with notions of gender as of sex, both of which are in some ways constructed. Agamben’s paradigmatic system can provide insight into the intricacies of sex and gender, and how these converge on the female body as a site of bare life and inextricably gendered zoe. Poignantly exemplifying this link between Agamben’s work and feminist theory, Agamben’s words echo those of Betty Friedan when she likened the state of a housewife to a concentration camp victim. In his most famous and controversial statement, Agamben claimed that: “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (Agamben, Sacer 181). For Agamben, the state creates bare life where it sees fit, as a means of consolidating power through the suspension of juridical rights: “the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios” (181). Sf literature, especially those works now considered part of the feminist sf literature canon, has theorised new and exciting modes of being for gendered subjects. In the space of sf, gender identity outside of prescribed norms is made possible or, to use the terminology of Judith Butler, “liveable” (Butler, Undoing Gender 13). Butler explores the themes of performance, recognition and the biopolitical subject to examine the specific ways in which gender influences our lives as human political subjects. Her understanding of the body politic is remarkably compatible with Agamben’s conception of life as both a personal entity and a public one forever intertwined with the lives and experiences of others: The body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life, the body is only later, and with some uncertainty, that to which I lay claim as my own. (21)

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30  Woman or Womankind? For Butler, as for Agamben, the private sphere of the self (for example, one’s sexual desires) is indiscernibly blended with one’s social dimension. Gender is one of the most significant social apparatuses that contribute to the indistinction of these spheres. The gender paradigm forms a compulsory network, regulating sexual desire and socially imposed, corresponding, gendered behaviour. This is founded on the unstable zoe/​bios model of identity that has formed the basis of the paradigm, life, and our understanding of the self. Sf, particularly feminist sf (or those sf texts concerned with gender), are highly valuable in exposing paradigms of gender and sexuality, understood as a biopolitical apparatus and means of control. Furthermore, it has the capacity to imagine alternatives to the current paradigm through this exposition and further suspension of the existing model. Judith Butler poses the question: If I am a certain gender, will I be regarded as part of the human? Will the human expand to include me in its reach? If I desire in certain ways will I be able to live? Will there be a place for my life and will it be recognisable to the others upon which I depend for social existence? (Butler, Undoing Gender  2–​3) In other words, is a life outside of the established heteronormative model liveable and possible and, if so, under what conditions? Perhaps the answer lies in keeping a sense of Agambenian potentiality alive. In many ways the silver lining to Agamben’s system, potentiality, is what results from the void of indistinction that lies at the heart of every paradigmatic case. As one paradigm dissolves, there is the potential for a new, improved paradigm to rise in its place. Sf literature is a testing ground for this potential development. It is a place of pure potentiality, more so than any other genre, as it offers not only fantasy but, as a virtual world of fiction, the capacity for legitimacy –​the chance to make unliveable life possible, if only in an imagined landscape: “the thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity” (Butler, Undoing Gender 31). The space of sf is perhaps the necessity of which Butler speaks here; it could be considered the ultimate haven for bare life, where bare life has the opportunity to become possible again, to become, in some way, concretised, sanctioned life.

On Paradigms, Signatures and Handmaids Where a specific paradigm exists only as part of a specific historical moment, the signature refers to an entire spectrum of different paradigms grouped together throughout history. For example, we can see gender not only as a paradigm but as a signature that has mutated and evolved over time as the words we have used over hundreds of years –​male, female, masculine, feminine, etc. –​take on different meanings and connotations from one historical moment to the next. There is some confusion here, of course, as Agamben also

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Woman or Womankind? 31

Figure 1.1 A visual representation of the signature.

states that the paradigm is a construct capable of a similar change over time. However, if we can view the signature as an extension of the paradigm. The graph in Figure 1.1 represents the relationship between two. The horizontal lines represent a time period where a specific paradigm operates; the diagonal lines represent periods of flux where the paradigm is changing into another version of itself, another manifestation of the overall signature to which it belongs. As William Watkin describes it: “Signature (la segnatura) describes the mode of the distribution of paradigms through time and across discourses and again has a specific nature in that it is suspended between signifier and signified” (23). Signatures are also are language phenomena. Where paradigms function as a means of organising knowledge into intelligible systems on the conceptual level, signatures are the sum of a collection of paradigms as well as a link between the paradigm and the sign: “Signs do not speak unless signatures make them speak” (Agamben, Signature 61). Signatures are designed to “render thinkable the passage between the semiotic and the semantic” (61). That is, the signature exists throughout time as a mode of intelligibility marking meaning within a given sign, cementing the gap between signifier and signified. In this way, the signature “predetermines [the sign’s] interpretation and distributes its use and efficacy according to rules, practices and precepts that it is our task to recognise” (64). However, the signature is also suspended between signifier and signified in the same way that all binaries are held together. Like the paradigm, the signature is maintained by this common/​proper, indistinct, oppositional relationship. The nature of the signature as suspended is what makes the sign intelligible. Thus, rather than being a specific instance of meaning –​this is a paradigm –​it is more like the nature or process of meaning itself. The signature is the counterpart of the paradigm within language. For example, linguistic devices survive a specific paradigm throughout history –​our signifier, ‘woman’ does not

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32  Woman or Womankind? necessarily change even if our conception, signified, of a woman does, and thus language maintains paradigmatic meanings as signatures. The signature, then, is what propels the paradigmatic system on. We cannot ever hope to have any other epistemological system because the mode of the signature is inherent in our manner of understanding and organising the world; it is rooted in the very manner in which we see, conceptualise and name objects. The paradigm is irrevocably linked to the signature, and the signature is rooted in the linguistic so that the system cannot be altered at any point. This is similar to Kristeva’s notion that “language [is] a risky practice, allowing the speaking animal to sense the rhythm of the body as well as the upheavals of history” (Kristeva, Desire in Language, 34). This is how it is possible to acknowledge the signature of Woman as both essential and constructed –​all at once, she can be everything from a non-​being constructed by patriarchy to a lesbian who does not identify with the term woman at all (as in Wittig’s analysis). But, amongst all this multiplicity of female selves ranging from feminine to masculine (and identities in between), Woman still exists as an enduring signature. Yet there is hope here, as Kristeva demonstrates: “the time has perhaps come to emphasise the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations so that from the intersection of these differences there might arise, more precisely, less commercially and more truthfully the real fundamental difference between the two sexes” (Kristeva, “Women’s Time” 18). Over time our paradigm of gender will inevitably alter through the process of indistinction which causes the old oppositions to collapse –​new ones then inevitably emerge but these may be, as Kristeva hopes, more “truthful” or at least more useful for the purposes of a more enlightened and inclusive society. The synonymy of ‘Man’ with ‘human’ is demonstrative of the construction of maleness as the founding principle of ‘mankind’: “the masculine is not the masculine but the general” (Wittig, “Homo Sum” 60); the linguistic sign ‘man,’ carries two signatures. This tells us not only that patriarchy forms the basis of constructed human superiority over other living beings, but furthermore that patriarchy is founded on perceived female inferiority, that is, on female exclusion. Woman is included in the category of living, political human beings purely by virtue of her relationship to men, while also being systematically excluded by virtue of her supposed inferiority  –​the root of which, as I  will show, lies in the accentuation of female biology over and above male biology. As Simone de Beauvoir states in The Second Sex: The female, more than the male, is prey to the species; humanity has always tried to escape from its species’ destiny; with the invention of the tool, maintenance of life became activity and project for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the animal. (de Beauvoir 77) Yet it is not so much the fact of female biology that is the cause of female oppression. Rather, the biological ‘disadvantages’ of femaleness are also constructed socially and politically through a sophisticated biopolitical

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Woman or Womankind? 33 exaggeration of female zoe  –​as Judith Butler has famously argued: “if the immutable construction of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender” (Gender Trouble  9–​10). While we should not overemphasise the actual influence which biology has on identity, we must also acknowledge how conceptualisations of bodily identity and constructed notions of sex influence political life. Women’s political identity is bound up with constructions of female bodies: female zoe (biological life) is sought after, commoditised and subject to government regulation through the fraught processes of abortion law, marriage contracts and the social stigmatisation of women who refuse to turn their bodies over to the societies and governments that demand dominion over them. Zoe defines Woman’s bios (political life) so that these categories become indistinct. The ancient Greek concept of zoe, which Agamben traces the paradigm of life back to, is related to the concept of animal life. All human subjects are made up of our non-​corporeal political existences and our raw, animal-​like biological natures. Because women are considered closer to zoe by virtue of their biology and supposedly heightened emotional capacity, their political being is closer to that of an animal –​women’s political existence has a proximity to bare life. Though these truths relate largely to the historical position of women, they are still relevant to their modern situation. The signature of patriarchal domination over women has altered significantly in the West over time, accommodating paradigms of gender and sex that allow for greater freedoms for women. However, having been so long confined to the oikos (the home), Woman has historically been made sedentary through the division of sexual labour, constrained to a specific way of life, a specific form of bios, suspended and founded on female zoe, and based on a founding fiction that holds both as indistinct categories. The assumed female duty to reproduce, to attend to the physical and emotional well-​being of others and at the same time to place her own needs below those of others is based on the fiction that women’s bodies, instincts, skills and emotions are all designed to prepare them for these capacities. This is one of the central operations of government biopower which cements political control of the oikos, ensuring a significant dominion over the home and the organisation of physical relationships, the production of life and the people –​women –​that produce and maintain those lives. This is a central part of the oikonomia of modern biopolitics that organises itself in an economy of auctoritas (government power) and potestas (individual political activity or the democratic power of the people). This is, for Agamben, the fundamental suspension at the heart of government which is used to sanction its ambiguous authority over its subjects while supporting the central fantasy of western democracy: that authority truly or even partially lies in the hands of the people. The imagined balance of power between auctoritas and potestas forms the paradigm of government that holds both in suspension through an oikonomic management that maintains its sway over the potestas partially but significantly through its dominion over the oikos and the management or oikonomia of the home itself. Biopower begins with power over the

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34  Woman or Womankind? locus of family: reproduction, sexual relationships; therefore, to be successful it must control that which is at the centre of this complex network: Woman. Women are defined by their zoe, rather than their political or social identity, and their bios is undermined by differences of physicality; these differences are exaggerated and distorted through signatures of femininity –​for example, makeup, feminine clothing, hairstyles (all designed to highlight female passivity)  –​so that they become the defining characteristics of constructed femaleness as Man’s biological contrary: “Femininity becomes the mask that dominates/​resolves a masculine identification” (Butler, Gender Trouble 72). As such, Woman’s position is suspended between the category of Man, which is the category of human, and that of Woman, an identity founded on otherness in relation to an equally constructed male identity. These concepts make up that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalised. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the “heterosexual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” to characterise a hegemonic discursive/​ epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, female expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. (Butler, Gender Trouble 208) The success of the process of female othering depends on a loss of bios, placing women in a situation akin to bare life on a fundamental social level if not, in all cases, politically. Women’s oppression, particularly in the western world is not always blatant or violent, but their agency is continuously undermined through an elaborate system of socially sanctioned bigotry, whose legitimacy is founded on an equally fictional construction of physicality, the realm of zoe. One of the most famous feminist sf depictions of women being biopolitically subjugated in relation to their biology is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel, as well as the popular TV series, follows the life of a young woman, Offred, who, as one of the few remaining fertile women in America, is forced into a life of reproductive slavery under a totalitarian theocracy that overthrows the US government to form the oppressive Republic of Gilead. Offred’s story is a nightmarish depiction of female subjugation at its most extreme, living in a society where all women are, by law, confined to the home as wives, mothers or domestic servants. Due to a catastrophic fertility crisis, most women are unable have children; thus, only the most powerful and influential men in society, known as “Commanders,” are assigned fertile handmaids with which to breed. These women are forced to engage in a ritualised rape ceremony once a month, for which the Commander, the Commander’s wife and the handmaid are all present. What is so powerful about the story of The Handmaid’s Tale is how it reflects modern anxieties about ancient political and social problems relating

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Woman or Womankind? 35 to gender. It is not so much that The Handmaid’s Tale necessarily maps out a probable or plausible future for western society; rather the narrative uses the Republic of Gilead to highlight the sinister spectre of gender and patriarchal oppression which still haunts western society. In season one of The Handmaid’s Tale TV series, Offred poignantly portrays the connection between women pre-​and post-​Gilead: “[t]‌here was a way we looked at each other at the Red Centre … before … you didn’t ever see it. Not more than a glimpse … That look was terror. Utter and unutterable” (“Night” 00:02:00-​00:05:17). This description cements the connection between women’s oppression in Gilead and the more subtle oppression of the pre-​Gilead world: both forms stem from the same ancient biopolitical paradigm. The classic virgin/​whore dichotomy is an ancient manner of discriminating between good women and bad, and yet these seemingly opposing roles are utilised by the state of Gilead as a means of organising them into a tiered hierarchical system: the commander’s wives have the highest status among women (particularly those married to powerful commanders); then there are the “aunts” who act as the keepers and teachers of the handmaids (instructing them forcibly in compliancy and supplication); the “marthas” are housekeepers and domestic labourers; and at the bottom of the social ladder are the handmaids, although their nature as lower-​class citizens is complicated by their simultaneous portrayal as sacred progenitors, bringing forth the next generation of children. Handmaids, then, offer an extreme portrayal of woman’s political bios being characterised by her zoe. While the aunts and the marthas can be said to form their own distinct categories of women outside those of virgin (wife) and whore (handmaid), these women are usually older and therefore desexualised and divorced from traditional conceptualisations of femininity, fulfilling those ‘invisible’ roles, such as governess (aunts) or housemaids (marthas), that are largely ignored within a patriarchal society. In the novel, handmaids wear vivid red dresses (Atwood 4), which symbolise their fertility but also their function as sexual objects. Simultaneously the vivid hue associates them with sexual promiscuity and desire: as direct rivals for the sexual attentions of their husbands, the wives frequently view handmaids as “little whores,” as one wife describes handmaids in The Handmaid’s Tale TV series (“Birth Day” 00:20:25–​28). The wives, on the other hand, wear blue gowns, a colour of purity and chastity which equates them with the virginal aspect of the biblical dichotomy of womanhood; in the novel they wear a “powder-​blue” (Atwood 10) that accentuates their connection with innocence, the soft pastel colour cementing their role as child carers. In the TV series the blue that the wives wear is a deeper and richer colour that, while less infantile in appearance, is more visually successful in its contrast with the crimson of the handmaids’ robes, reinforcing the bifurcation of these groups of women in their separate yet interconnected domestic roles. This division of the women of Gilead into two main, separate social groups succinctly points to the two biopolitical functions of women within our own society. Women are needed to breed and provide stable sexual companionship for men (this is the function of the handmaid in the fictional tale). Women

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36  Woman or Womankind? are also required to provide the free labour of running a household, which is necessary for men to achieve a public/​private life balance –​to maintain a career while also sustaining a successful family unit (this is the function of the wives) (Okin 9): throughout history, women have been expected to fulfil the roles of Gilead’s handmaids and wives (while simultaneously carrying out the invisible domestic labour of the Marthas), and even now that many women choose to enter the workplace while also maintaining a family, it is still women who “will do by far the greatest proportion of unpaid family work, such as child care and housework” (Okin 5). What further complicates this arrangement is the fact that historically the duties of sexual gratification and household management which are meant to be performed by a single woman have been divided between men’s wives and their effective mistresses. As Offred observes, in Gilead this fact is merely more readily accepted: Men at the top have always had mistresses, why should things be any different now? The arrangements aren’t quite the same, granted. The mistress used to be kept in a minor house or apartment of her own and now they’ve amalgamated things. But underneath it’s the same. (Atwood 157) Gilead society openly acknowledges the many roles of women and spreads them across various female social classes, thereby creating a kind of domestic harem for the men in power. Through this exaggerated portrayal, Atwood’s work exposes the impossible nature of the many different expectations placed on women. It is no wonder that modern women face challenges in maintaining a work/​life balance as their emergence into the workplace has only increased their workload and the number of responsibilities society dictates they should assume. The root of this problem is the historical position of women as the essential ingredient to maintaining the oikos, the structure of the nuclear family in the form in which it has traditionally functioned (Okin 5), while their crucial domestic contribution to society remains still largely unacknowledged.

Oikonomia in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy The explosive popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale TV series is not surprising as it, like our current political atmosphere, is exploring and exposing the gender paradigms of patriarchal domination that bring about societies like that of Gilead. However, The Handmaid’s Tale for all its insightful qualities does have associations with the kind of universalising feminist conceptualisations of womanhood united by shared victimhood that is, as I have discussed, deeply problematic. As Sophie Lewis has argued: “the dystopia functions as a kind of utopia: a vision of a vast majority of women finally seeing the light and counting themselves as feminists because society has started systematically treating them all –​not just black women –​like chattel” (Lewis 13). I do not believe The Handmaid’s Tale is negligent in quite the same way that Lewis

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Woman or Womankind? 37 contends. It is a novel that deals in broad brush strokes: it is very much a portrayal of how white, middle class women experience and imagine extreme forms of female oppression. It is a novel that bears consideration for its powerful insights, but its significance should not be overemphasised and its limitations must be acknowledged. Furthermore, the explosive popularity and appropriation of the narrative and the symbol of the handmaid are troubling and revealing of the feminist movement’s impulse to generalise –​the repeated failure of white, middle class feminism to consider other, more marginalised groups of women. Regarding the 2018 protests where women dressed themselves in red robes and white bonnets reminiscent of the handmaid uniform, Lewis rightly points out: If protesters were suggesting  –​by their attire  –​something like “We are all reproductive slaves,” they weren’t clear who they were speaking as (or about). Most of them did not call out, as Reproductive Justice protests tend to do, the heavily racialised character of prosecutions for illegal abortion; the routine incarceration, deportation, and detention of the pregnant; or hospital-​bed shackling during labour. (Lewis 15) Many texts, other than The Handmaid’s Tale, can be analysed in order to explore the biopolitical oppression of women that are not limited by a specifically white middle class perspective. For the purposes of this chapter I would like to examine Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, not merely because the novels’ characters are racially diverse but because of the novels’ uncanny capacity to confront the other in all its forms, including the totally and literally alien, in the form of the colonising extra-​terrestrial race, the Oankali. While Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy explores gender dynamics, the trilogy is concerned not so much with feminism as with the broader themes with which feminism is intimately connected: such as bodily and reproductive control, sexual autonomy, individual agency and reconciling oneself with the alien other. In this way, the Butler is able to offer reconceptualisations of “gender relations … not organised by the gender binary” (Meltzer ch. 6). In the novel, following an apocalyptic war during which most of the human race has been extinguished upon a dying planet Earth, an alien race called the Oankali takes it upon themselves to ‘rescue’ the human race by using invasive and manipulative tactics which involve the use of drugs, interrogation, torture and the use of genetic as well as psychological manipulation. The Oankali seem to believe themselves benevolent  –​they are a “trading” species which combine themselves with other races genetically in order to evolve. It becomes apparent however that this process of “trade” (Butler, Dawn ch. 3), like most forms of colonialism, does not take place between equals on the basis of conscious choice. The Oankali believe they have an understanding of human desires and decision-​making which humans themselves are often not entirely aware of. Like many colonial powers in human history, the Oankali redefine the identity of the people they are colonising. The Oankali claim that the humans are weak

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38  Woman or Womankind? because they are hierarchical (ch. 5), and this is a genetic trait that the Oankali seek to eradicate through an aggressive eugenics program involving both species. The Oankali are biological essentialists, believing that a being’s true desires are reflected in their bodily behaviour which does not always coincide with a human’s spoken wishes. For the Oankali, if there is a conflict between mind and body, the body is seen to provide the truer account. At the end of the first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, the main character, Lilith, is made pregnant without her consent by an Oankali named Nikanj. When Lilith protests at this, Nikanj replies “Nothing about you but your words reject this child” (Butler, Dawn ch. 9). This is consistent with the way in which women have historically been viewed as closer to the biological sphere –​zoe –​how an imagined innate desire for motherhood has been assumed to be a woman’s dominant desire, obscuring any others, even those vocalised by the woman herself. As Sheryl Vint argues “the Oankali romanticise the body, believing that it inevitably speaks the truth while words and consciously expressed desires can be used to deceive, even to deceive oneself” (Vint 69). Lilith did want a child, but on her own terms, as she says: “but if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone” (Butler, Adulthood Rites ch. 4). However, the Oankali have no respect for human autonomy as such –​the aliens offer limited amounts of individual freedom to humans, in doses which they perceive necessary to human well-​being and only insofar as it does not interfere with the Oankali’s interests. The Oankali can be read, in this way, as a reflection of the state apparatus, where freedom and control, auctoritas and potestas, are always in tension. The Oankali behave in line with Agamben’s understanding of the state as a paradigm encompassing the totalitarian regime and the liberal democracy: an unstable dichotomy where one bleeds into the other, revealing the truly totalitarian aspects of western civilisation. The Oankali can be understood in this way through their method of reproductive control. In the novels, Oankali families are composed of a male and a female Oankali and a member of a third sex, known as an ooloi. It is made clear from early on in the first novel, Dawn, that the ooloi are the sex with the most power in Oankali society. They make many of the decisions when it comes to the treatment and organisation of the humans, assume dominant positions within their own family groups and, most importantly, are solely in charge of regulating sexual reproduction and controlling, through genetic modification, the results of that reproduction. With their male and female counterparts, which can be human or Oankali, the ooloi oversee the sexual act by using their sensory arms. During this process they simultaneously connect and separate the male and female: the sexual partners are prevented from touching during sex and instead experience a sort of sexual dream which is similar to the sensation of physical sex. How this exactly produces offspring is rather mysterious but seems to have more in common with in vitro fertilisation or surrogacy practices than physical penetration. The process is overseen by the ooloi who manipulates the sperm and egg, genetically modifying the foetus in order to produce offspring without defects and what it deems genetic “advantages.”

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Woman or Womankind? 39 This is how the Oankali are able to engage in the genetic “trade” on which the aliens’ existence is based, and it is how they maintain their dominance over the humans: controlling their reproductive capacity to produce children of mixed Oankali and human heritage. To reproduce with the humans, however, they initially require five partners, a human male and female, an Oankali male and female and, of course, an ooloi. As Sheryl Vint observes, there is something surprisingly conservative in the novels’ depiction of the alien-​human mating: Although the coupling of five sexual partners through the ooloi suggests the possibility for homosexual desire, the novels resist open representation of homosexuality. The five-​partner coupling requires a previously developed heterosexual couple from each species to join together with the ooloi. Once bonded with an ooloi, no human partners … can touch one another directly; but only through the filter of the ooloi. This arrangement … suggests that desire continues to be channelled through normative paths in the couplings. (Vint 74) The conservative nature of the sex act with the aliens suggests a normative method of reproductive control, reminiscent of the manner in which reproduction is controlled politically and socially by the matrix of compulsory heterosexuality (Butler, Gender Trouble). It is, ultimately, an oikonomic method of control which maintains dominance through controlling female zoe: the ooloi are the state apparatus invested in manipulating reproduction. They represent an extreme portrayal of how oikonomia functions in our own society –​while heteronormative structures regulate sexual practices and domestic life in western society, in the novel the ooloi are directly involved in overseeing the sex act, ensuring and overseeing appropriate sex practices and reproduction. Ultimately this comes down to regulating human, female reproduction. Lillith, like other human females, is forced to give birth and go through the process of child rearing while the next generation of Oankali born males (called construct males) are expected to leave the family unit and pursue lives away from the domestic sphere: “A complete construct family will be a female, an ooloi, and children. Males will come and go as they wish … a home like this would be a prison to them. They’ll have what they want, what they need” (Butler, Adulthood Rites ch. 2). By contrast, construct females are destined to be confined to the household and the domestic labour of child-​bearing. Furthermore, as Amanda Boulter observes, the Oankali’s sexual exploitation of Lilith, as a black woman, is also reminiscent of the historical exploitation of women of colour, particularly under slavery in relation to the control of black women’s fertility (177). Also disturbingly, there seems nothing to prevent the ooloi from simply genetically altering female genes in order to breed women who happily accept their domestic lot in life in a form of genetic ‘brain-​ washing’: colonial and gender subjugation through genetic restructuring. How ideal for the colonisers to be able to physically alter the people they oppress in

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40  Woman or Womankind? order to make them ideally compliant. We might read this as a startling allegory of the theory that women have been bred over time, to create physically weaker, more compliant women. However, the paradigm of gender as a regulatory practice might not be the only current form of the paradigm. As discussed previously, the paradigm is not an entirely fixed entity but instead is an apparatus which moves from singularity to singularity, shifting over time while maintaining a connection to its previous identities –​these are the fluctuations over time which Agamben refers to collectively as a signature. If the fragility of gender in its present form is exposed, it will deteriorate, become indistinct, but then transform into a new version of itself. The Oankali pursue this paradigmatic form of evolution through their practice of genetic trade. The Oankali society is not based on fixed conceptualisations of self and other; rather, they are aware of and embrace the fact that the paradigm of Oankali life is not fixed. They colonise with the object of forcing the next phase of their paradigmatic evolution. In this way Octavia Butler is able to explore the nature of colonial exploitation while also engaging with the new identities which often emerge from the collapse of self/​other dichotomies. Aparajita Nanda notes that Butler is able to take a more nuanced approach to exploring colonial power by introducing ambiguity into the nature of the coloniser: By forcibly and brutally taking over the culture of another [the colonisers] (rightfully) become demonized in a way that, for all its rightness, suggests that the hierarchy of the colonial situations stems from the colonisers’ original motives and acts. However, by removing or even questioning the original motives, one ceases to fixate on them one can analyse the structure of colonialism in a more theoretical way. (774) The Oankali are different from other colonising powers in that they know their power is transitory –​they look forward to the new human/​Oankali hybridity that their colonisation of Earth will produce. They have a clear understanding of how signatures operate and are willing to exploit them in order to ensure that their race endures in some form. By portraying the Oankali colonisers in this manner, Butler is able to consider both the experience of colonisation as well as its hybrid results. The third novel of the Xenogenesis trilogy, Imago, follows the life of Lillith’s offspring Jodahs, the first construct ooloi –​a genetic mix of human and ooloi (the Oankali’s third sex): “Octavia Butler’s narratives confront the reader with transmorphing human and alien bodies that trouble our notions of sexuality and gender. Her representations undermine stable sexual identities that exist outside of social construction” (Meltzer ch. 6). Through the concept of the construct ooloi, that is neither a human male nor female, Butler is able to examine the possibilities inherent in ambiguously gendered subjects and explore sexuality and gender through the lens of alternative subject positions. Jack Halberstam’s concept of a trans* methodology is relevant here as a way

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Woman or Womankind? 41 of imagining alternative gender identities while also understanding that transgender identities challenge the validity and stability of gender itself: “the trans* body … does not seek to be seen and known but rather wishes to throw the organisation of all bodies into doubt” (Trans* 90). The construct ooloi are shapeshifters who alter themselves in response to the desires of their mates –​at the same time, like the Oankali ooloi, they have the power to manipulate the DNA of offspring. By human standards, they are a contradiction in that they are able to control the emergence of new life but are also at the mercy of other’s desires and perceptions, depending on external influence for their very bodily integrity. When one construct ooloi loses contact with others it begins to literally break apart into a devolved form: “a kind of near mollusc, something that had no bones left. Its sensory tentacles were intact but it no longer had eyes or other Human sensory organs. Its skin, very smooth, was protected by a coating of slime” (Butler, Imago ch. 2). Vint interprets the construct ooloi as “a literal representation of how the subject and the social are mutually constitutive and suggest that, through the production of cultural texts which offer new types of identifications, we may change the subjects formed through these identifications and so change the social context produced by these subjects” (75). In a similar way, this interpretation is reminiscent of Judith Butler’s understanding of gender and the body as “given over from the start to a the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life” (Butler, Undoing Gender 21). Initially, the Oankali are invested in controlling sexual practices within their own version of a, broadly speaking, heteronormative arrangement (having a heterosexual pair of humans and a heterosexual pair of Oankali) overseen by the ooloi. However, the resulting progeny –​the construct ooloi –​constitutes an unpredictable hybrid identity whose sexual practices deviate from the norm. The construct ooloi’s sexual identity as always in process, always altering, might be compared to some transgender conceptualisations of embodiment. As Jack Halberstam argues: “whether it manifests in the circulation and use of hormones or in the new narratives of selfhood, the figure of transgender embodiment is central to numerous emergent narratives of self and other, being and becoming” (Trans* 30). By introducing alien others into a colonial setting which explores sexuality, surrogacy and heteronormativity, Octavia Butler is able to explore the entirely alien alongside familiar constructs which draw both the self and the other into question. This is perhaps why the trilogy maintains an enduring popularity among readers and scholars. This capacity to explore the complete other alongside oppressive structures make novels the ideal space in which to explore the nature of the gendered body as that which is familiar and belonging to us and yet also an unfamiliar facet of public perception. Sf narratives often challenge the gender paradigm, revealing that, rather than being composed of fixed, rigid representations, gender operates as a network of signatures attached to signs that shift over time, representing masculine and feminine, male and female: “the historicity of the paradigm lies in neither diachrony nor synchrony but in a crossing of the two” (Agamben, Signatures 31). There is no origin or arché from which one can cogently trace conceptions of male and female. Their perceived validity is generated through

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42  Woman or Womankind? their paradigmatic structure where “every phenomenon is the origin, every image archaic” (31). In the next chapter I will examine how this process is elegantly portrayed through the alternate or future representations of gender, for example in Russ’s The Female Man, where different versions of a single woman are portrayed living in four different realities; each one offers a different view of gender, and the women all act very differently according to the customs of the worlds they come from. The chapter is also concerned with how certain binary conceptualisations of gender, more in line with the radical feminist positions I  have critiqued, constitute reductive conceptualisations of gender. If we acknowledge the problematic nature of some feminist discourses and embrace a more expansive view of gender, we may begin to understand its capacity to be modified or transformed.

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2  Removing/​Reprogramming the Masculine –​ The Homo Sacer in the Feminist Dis/​Utopia

In The Passion of New Eve, Angela Carter uses extreme portrayals of gender as a means of parody: “Carter shows a precise awareness of the disruptive power implied in carnivalization. The use she makes of this literary device is a function of a systematic analysis of femininity” (Vallorani 368). In He, She and It, Marge Piercy uses the notion of the cyborg to complicate gender operativity: both novels attempt to reveal the arbitrary aspects of gender by blending the surreal and the mythical with the technological. Contrastingly, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man offers a critique in a form similar to a Socratic dialogue  –​where a conversation between characters from several alternate realities provides an analysis of different feminist concerns as well as future possibilities for change: “for Russ, utopia is not the authoritarian guidance of the blueprint, but rather the emancipating possibilities of the dream” (Moylan 56). Unlike the other two novelists, Russ offers a multiplicity of discussions relating to gender rather than a single all-​encompassing view. However, in each of the novels there are numerous role reversals which, rather than complicating the self/​other, masculine/​feminine relationship, leaves the central structure of the hierarchical relationship between the sexes firmly intact; in some ways these novels even serve to reinforce this binary paradigmatic structure. As Patricia Meltzer has also noted: “Much classic feminist science fiction literature relies on the binary of man/​woman in its reimagining of social orders. While some of the texts challenge heteronormative assumptions of the opposite-​sex desire, the naturalised correlation between sex (male and female) and gender (man or woman) remains intact” (ch. 6). Throughout history, aspects of zoe (biological identity) have been appropriated as a means of stripping groups of people of their bios (political identity): from Nazi notions of genetic purity to prejudice against the disabled, the non-​neurotypical, those with non-​normative gender identities, etc. Biological distinctiveness has often formed the basis of prejudice which, in the worst cases, has led to certain groups being placed in a situation of bare life. This relates back to Agamben’s analysis of Foucault’s term “biopolitics” where “the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of the sovereign power” (Agamben, Sacer 6). For Agamben, biopower, the control of subjects through their zoe, is and has always has been a part of the homo sacer/​sovereign power structure: “Placing biological life at the centre of its calculations,

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44  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine the modern state therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (Agamben, Sacer 6). This is in line with the idea that sex, like gender, is a difference whose significance has been magnified for the purposes of cultural and social oppression. In many ways, it serves the interests of feminism to maintain the homo sacer position of women in order to unite them under a banner of oppression shared at the basic biological level before individual circumstance is considered. As Judith Butler recognises: The urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorical or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience. (Gender Trouble 5) The important thing to recognise is the difference between constructed womanhood as occupying a universal position of bare life and the multiplicity of different female experiences and circumstances which make some women more vulnerable than others. Bare life is useful as a concept for understanding how constructions of womanhood create oppressive structures but we must not make the leap from general to specific and vice versa, assuming that all women, even those with power and privilege, represent instances of bare life in exactly the same way. As discussed in the previous chapter, in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale the American government is overthrown, giving way to a misogynist theocracy where most of the rights and privileges that modern western women currently enjoy are revoked. While I have already argued that the novel provides great insight into certain forms of female experience and into the operation of gendered oppression, the novel has unfortunately also been appropriated as a somewhat narrow fantasy of shared victimhood. “The Handmaids Tale neatly reproduces a wishful scenario at least as old as feminism itself. Cisgender womanhood, united without regard to class, race or colonialism, can blame all its woes on evil religious fundamentalists with guns” (Lewis, 10). While I do believe this is the message inherent in the novel itself, the iconic red handmaid’s robe has become a mascot of a rather exclusionary form of white, middle class feminism which concentrates on biological sex as the basis for women’s oppression. While sex is undeniably a factor in female subjugation as well as gender discrimination more generally, the novel’s fixation on forced surrogacy combined with the status and acclaim this novel has achieved serves to obscure other forms of gender oppression and valorises the female sex through an assumed sense of ‘natural,’ biologically female martyrdom. Yet the novel and subsequent TV series also affords an intriguing analysis of how the construction of female biological identity totally subsumes female political identity. The biological zoe of the remaining fertile women in the United States is what sanctions their mistreatment as handmaids. While men occupy sovereign positions of power, executing full power over their bodies, the handmaids’ bios is non-​existent by virtue of their ability to successfully

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 45 carry out the bare function of their biological sex. An interesting hierarchy amongst women is also created here, where infertile women are afforded more rights than the fertile handmaids, revealing the suspended quality of femaleness and of the concept of sex as a whole. This fact supports a more intersectional feminist reading of the novel. The real-​world stratification of women politically and socially is emphasised by the fact that women are organised into different groups with different responsibilities (wives, marthas, handmaids). Which category a woman is placed in is related to her reproductive capacity. However, if sexual reproductive capacity was the only or the main factor in women’s oppression, then surely all infertile women (in the novel and in the real world) would either not be considered women or would not be subject to the same oppressive structures as the fertile ones. In the novel, the infertile wives of high-​status men are afforded certain privileges the handmaids do not enjoy. They are oppressed like the handmaids in the sense that they are similarly not allowed to read, own property, work outside the home, etc. However, the oppression the handmaids face is of another order in that their bodies are considered the property of the state and the families which use them for reproduction. As Agamben argues: [T]‌he sovereign and the homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. (Agamben, Sacer 84) In many feminist dystopias, Man is presented as sovereign over Woman (who is the homo sacer). Yet, in the novels I have chosen to analyse in this chapter, it is often men who are positioned as homines sacri in an attempt to disrupt and problematise the issue of female subjugation. Here, male subjects are stripped of their bios and are treated as bare life within feminist or matriarchal societies. However, in these instances, the presence of the homo sacer/​sovereign dichotomy, in many ways, succeeds in reinforcing gender constructs rather than rendering them indistinct.

Removing the Masculine Despite attempts in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve to complicate gender norms, the novel is frequently constrained by them. The narrative structure relies so heavily on the hierarchical aspects of the patriarchal paradigm, as well as its essentialist assumptions about sex/​gender, that it often appears at the mercy of gender stereotypes, rather than living up to its heavily implied status as a reflexive work, ingeniously disassembling them. In the novel, the protagonist, Eve/​lyn, is punished for mistreating a woman by being forced to become a woman himself; as a woman, Eve/​lyn is subject to rape and various other forms of violence. Just as disturbing however is, Eve/​lyn’s apparent submission to violence perpetrated against them. Eve/​lyn mirrors the masochistic

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46  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine personality of their idol, a movie-​star called Tristessa. In a parodic portrayal of golden-​age Hollywood representations of femininity, Eve/​lyn appears to revel in the solipsistic suffering and martyrdom that was characteristic of Tristessa’s movie performances (a satirical fictional representation of classic 1940s and 1950s Hollywood actresses). In the novel, Eve/​lyn is captured by the cult leader, Zero, and added to his harem of slave wives, whom he controls with whippings and the forbidding of any spoken language. Eve/​lyn seems to gain a perverse satisfaction from their own debasement and subjugation, as Zero repeatedly rapes them: Each time, a renewed defloration, as if his violence perpetually refreshed my virginity. And more than my body, some other yet equally essential part if my being was ravaged by him … I felt myself to be not myself but he; and the experience of this crucial lack of self, which always brought with it a shock of introspection. (Carter 101) Eve/​lyn lingers over the experience, describing it in almost rapturous detail. Furthermore, while wallowing with avid anguish in their repeated violation, Eve/​lyn does nothing to resist Zero or escape from him. This seems to be part of the exaggeration characteristic of novel: Zero is unguarded, disabled and half blind with a missing eye and leg –​a man who could, one would think, be easily physically overthrown or simply outrun. However, neither Eve/​lyn nor any of Zero’s demeaned mistresses make any attempt to escape his control: “The girls … they loved him for his air of authority but only their submission had created that. By himself, he would have been nothing” (99–​100). The subservience of Zero’s wives is somewhat understandable: they have been indoctrinated into his cult of subservience –​yet it would be patronising to interpret them as totally without free will. While they are undeniably victims, they also appear to be, like Eve/​lyn, gaining a perverse satisfaction from the abusive context of their relationship with Zero: they enjoy his “air of authority.” The parodic style of the story exaggerates the victimhood of the abused women while also exaggerating male power: in terms of pure physicality, Zero is only able to abuse Eve/​ lyn and his other wives because they, at least in some ways, allow him to. Yet, Eve/​lyn (as shown in the above quotation) is not a worshipper in the church of Zero and is fully aware of his tenuous hold on power; thus, the implication is inevitably that the female state is not only physically inferior when compared to a weak man but somehow mentally paralysing as well –​as if passivity were an essential female quality inherent in the new female biological state that Eve/​lyn has acquired. Eve/​lyn, rather than occupying a space between male and female instead seems to simply switch from a parody of masculinity to a parody of femininity. It is unclear what these exaggerated characters are meant to communicate: do they represent paradigms of male and female? If so, because these paradigms are not truly problematised (suspended), it is unclear what message Carter is trying to communicate, other than a broadly essentialist notion of gender identity.

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 47 The binary of mind/​body is often mapped directly on to the opposition of male/​female and this is reinforced through Eve/​lyn’s character: their mind is apparently still masculine even though their body is female. At the same time, this fact is described as an incongruity, a sign that Eve/​lyn has yet to make the full transition into womanhood –​“I would often make a gesture with my hands that was out of Eve’s character” (Carter 100–​101), says Eve/​lyn. These aspects of the novel constitute a potentially negligent portrayal of transgender identity which fails to acknowledge the transitional, in-​process nature of being trans. The description of Eve/​lyn here would seem to imply a destination, a fixed notion of femininity or femaleness at which one must arrive in order to ‘count’ as a woman. The fact that Eve/​lyn is made to transition by force makes the novel’s portrayal even more troubling, reinforcing the prejudiced assumption in some forms of feminist discourse, that there is something unnatural about the desire to transition. Evelyn is violated and ritually humiliated by the mythical figure of Mother, the grand emasculator who rapes Eve into existence by physically assaulting Evelyn and then surgically removing their genitals (Carter 64–​71). Evelyn dies for the sins of all men and is born again as Eve, hence the significance of the novel’s title. Eve/​lyn is the victim of a punishment ritual, the sins Evelyn committed as a man towards women perversely visited upon him in a mythic manner that glorifies and sanctions the act, as well as violence towards men as a whole. This portrayal is problematic for many reasons but perhaps most concerning is the way it seems to erase the desires of transgender people by using physical transitioning as a means of allegory for specific kind of essentialist feminist politics. The novel portrays transitioning into a woman, not as a personal matter of choice and sense of identity but rather as a form of violent punishment. It also seems bizarrely misogynist by portraying female existence as so inherently undesirable as to constitute a sort of life-​long, prison sentence. Eve/​lyn’s forced transition is prompted by Mother’s desire to punish them for their treatment of Leilah, a woman they abused and then abandoned while pregnant. Eve/​lyn is being made to suffer by existing as a woman in order to finally be redeemed from the evils of maleness and masculinity. As already stated, the events and characters of the novel are largely intended to be satirical. Gamble argues that “the elaborate games that Carter plays with gender identity means that … the novel is … resistant to simplistic analyses which seek to interpret it as a wish-​fulfilment fantasy” (Gamble 90). It can be argued that characters such as Zero and Mother are such exaggerated examples of masculinity and femininity as to make them completely unrealistic and even laughable. However, there is a continuous tension between moments of potential female emancipation and extreme portrayals of gender at their most unrealistic and undesirable. How are we to interpret such moments as when Eve/​lyn is viciously tortured and abused by Mother, especially when the act which is celebrated through its mysticism with which it is described? As Makinen notes “Carter’s creation of the mythic … ʻGrand Emasculator’ is so powerful that its vitality undermines the reader’s overt concern to mock radical

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48  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine feminist idealisations of the Earth Mother” (Makinen 161). Mother’s actions are disturbing, and yet her potency as a godlike figure sanctions her viciousness and brutality, sweeping the atrocity under the rug. Mother’s brutality is glorified as necessary, transformative and even (most patronisingly) ultimately for Eve/​lyn’s own good who, at the end of the novel, scoffs when offered the genital remains of their previous male self (Carter 187). Thus, the parody element is undermined by an apparent bias towards the ‘female’ paradigm actualised in Mother. Truly horrific behaviour is portrayed as solely the province of males; when a man terrorises a woman it is a matter of ego, an act of animal-​like debauchery. When a woman commits a similar act it is framed as an essential requirement for the eventual emancipation of womankind and the education and enlightenment of males who are inherently bestial and incapable of knowing any better. Meanwhile transgender and non-​binary identities are ignored. The ideology of Mother and her followers is a totalitarian one, aligned with a form of oppressive feminist politics: the war against men in the novel is a mirror image of the patriarchal disdain for and oppression of women. It also wages war with the marginal identities in between by its failure to acknowledge their existence except as a parody of heteronormative identities. Moreover, there is contradiction within the novel: Mother’s biological state as a woman, her zoe, also allows her to escape any narrative penalty or come-​ uppance for her behaviour. Woman is shown to be at times ‘naturally’ helpless and yet at others empowered by her femaleness; this is revealed through manifestations such as Mother drawing strength from those very aspects of her gendered zoe. Once again, this dual operation of zoe for women in the novel reveals this inherent contradiction within Carter’s attempt to invert the gender paradigm. The operation of power is not a binary, fixed apparatus but a suspended one that fluctuates between zoe and bios. Not all women are equally oppressed in the same manner. While zoe and bios and male and female identities exist as hierarchical categories, these are also suspended categories that do not always function as their assumed oppositional power dynamic implies. Therefore, simply inverting the gender paradigm so that women become more dominant fails to expose the way paradigms work –​and merely succeeds in reinforcing the same, overall oppressive structure. “The failure of ‘male’ and ‘female’ to exhaust the field of gender variation actually ensures the continued dominance of these terms … the very flexibility and elasticity of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ensure their longevity” (Halberstam, 27). It is precisely because male and female are indistinct categories, which cannot properly be said to exist entirely on the terms that they are imagined to, that they are able to function at all.

Reprogramming the Masculine Piercy’s He, She and It displays a similar difficulty in breaking away from binary gender assumptions. The focus of the narrative is on a cyborg called Yod, created as male and yet with a complex amalgamation of masculine and

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 49 feminine influences. Through Yod, the novel explores the potential for new gender constructions emerging through the medium of technology: “[Piercy] endows Yod with what she considers to be distinct gender characteristics, making him a laboratory for gender cross fertilisation” (Deery 94). Throughout the novel, the blend of human and machine acts as a platform for potential gender equality where binary gender difference is removed or diluted through technological implants and alternative programming that improves on biological or social ‘programming.’ This is achieved through the characters Yod and Nili. Here, very much in line with the posthumanist work of Donna Haraway, the cyborg becomes a potential site of gender indifference. Yod, for example, has a mixture of masculine and feminine traits acquired from his male and female creators which allow him see the world, and particularly gender, in a different light: “The sex roles of old stories confused him. In the world he knew, a princess was as apt to rescue a prince as vice versa” (Piercy 377). The introduction of technology into the individual subject complicates the zoe/​bios distinction in such a way that the parameters of both these elements become blurred. Not only does Yod interact with the world differently: his status as an individual is complicated by his technologically induced gender ambiguity. However, it is the introduction of technology into his zoe that places him in a situation of bare life. He has no rights, he is not paid for his work (236), he is not supposed to have relationships, or even initially allowed to leave the lab in which he was created by the scientist Avram (96). In a sense, it is an aspect of his zoe that strips him of his bios. Paradoxically, it is technology that reduces him to the level of a mere animal without rights. In this way we can see how the man/​machine dichotomy is aligned with that of the homo sacer/​sovereign relationship as well as that of male and female. Yod’s programming propounds a biological reductionist view that male and female are essential categories that can only be overcome when biology is altered or, as in Yod’s case, absent. Yod’s ‘male’ nature (given to him by Avram) is altered by feminine programming received from Malkah: Avram made him male  –​entirely so. Avram thought that was the ideal: pure reason, pure logic, pure violence. … I gave him a gentler side, starting with emphasising his love for knowledge, and extending it to emotional and personal knowledge, a need for connection. (Piercy 142) A woman, Malkah, was responsible for Yod’s feminine aspects just as a man was for the masculine ones: “Avram should not have let me loose if he wanted a simple man-​made cyborg. For you are also woman-​made” (114). These notions and the characters of Avram and Malkah embody the common/​proper, male/​ female patriarchal paradigm. Their gendered programming of Yod complicates his zoe (technologically) which, I  argue, contributes to his state of bare life. His masculine programming reduces him to a mere weapon, and his feminine programming objectifies him. His programming to be the ultimate lover

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50  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine and female fantasy (due to Malkah’s influence) is a rather uncomfortable and degrading aspect of Yod’s creation: What [Shira] was responding to in Yod was simply technique. He had been programmed to satisfy, and he satisfied. She had to admit that she was perhaps a little disappointed in herself that she could indeed be pleased by what was programmed to do just that. (178) Malkah’s programming causes Yod to value a woman’s sexual needs above his own. That he should be programmed to be sexually selfless, to be the ultimate male sexual object implies a violation, even abuse of his mind and body. It also implies a rather narrow conceptualisation of female sexual desire as fixated on prolonged, slow activity pitted against a more aggressive stereotypical male sexuality: “[Yod] did not grow fatigued. He would simply continue until stopped” (Piercy 170). Even if this programming had merely extended to a traditionally female desire for intimacy, this would still be a highly personal aspect of Yod’s personality that has been regulated rather than allowed to evolve naturally (184). The implication is that men need to be reprogrammed in order to suit female needs –​without an invasive form of alteration, men are incompatible sexually and emotionally with women. Yod is programmed, essentially, to be much like that which others mockingly call him: a “walking vibrator,” (248) the ultimate male prostitute for female clients. This point is magnified further (and more disturbingly) by Yod’s ‘female’-​oriented programming. Weapons have physical power, whereas prostitutes are in many cases at the mercy of others. It seems clear, however, that Yod can usefully be read not as an ideal figure but as a parodic reversal of traditional Western fantasies of the “ideal” woman. For example, his lack of any sort of physical messiness can be read as a comment on the traditional male fear and loathing of the physicality of women. (Booker 348) Yod, then, is based on female fantasies that are, in turn, based on male fantasies. His sexual programming serves as a confirmation of the female state as the proper, inferior, which confirms the female state as, naturally, one of a homo sacer figure that is weak and passive. Yod, like Eve/​lyn, points to the inherent contradictions within patriarchy and certain feminist discourses. Traditional notions of femaleness are also glorified in the novel through a feminine connection with nature which is encapsulated in the narrative’s depiction of the feminist town of Tikva: “[its] inhabitants respect nature and keep in touch with it as much as possible” (Booker 345–​346). The way Shira (the protagonist) associates Tikva with “warm friendships with women” (Piercy 3) is juxtaposed with a multitude of ‘male’-oriented dystopian metropolises that exist outside of Tikva. The urban, corporate space is depicted as masculine “with its male dominance” (4) where men and women are treated equally only inasmuch

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 51 as they are evenly valued as commodities –​workers in which Y-​S invests: “It went with rigid sex roles –​not at work, of course, for no one could afford such nonsense, but in every other sector of living.” Socially women are required to “[bare] their breasts at Y-​S functions” (100), and, as shown in the example of Shira and Josh’s marriage, men are favoured in custody battles (4–​6). Shira leaves the Y-​S company to return to the society of Tikva, where she immediately finds support and strength from her relationship with her grandmother, Malkah (the character mentioned earlier), and the rural environment of the town. In this way, the feminine paradigm is once again idolised in a setting where patriarchal constructs are supposedly being destabilised. In the novel, technology becomes a potential site of gender inoperativity as the novel’s cyborg figures, Yod and Nili, fail to conform to prescribed gender constructs. The blend of biology and technology acts as a possible platform for indistinction through these characters. Yod is a new being which Avram and Malkah create, which surpasses supposed social and/​or biological gender limitations: “he is intellectually androgynous …Yod thus transgresses not only the conventional boundary between human and machine, but between male and female as well” (Booker 347). Nevertheless, the novel portrays clear boundaries between male and female spaces both externally, through the juxtaposition of the feminine Tikva and the masculine Y-​S Corporation, and internally as this contrast is mirrored in the duality of Yod’s personality (Piercy 142). Despite Piercy’s focus “upon women’s technical and scientific expertise” (Deery 97), a divide is drawn between male and female technology; Malkah’s house is infused with a protective female computer, and Malkah herself is involved in protective feminine programming within the “base” to defend Tikva from outside attacks and also is responsible for the emotional and caring aspects of Yod’s personality (Piercy 351). Contrastingly, Avram is involved in masculine technology, programming Yod as a weapon designed with aggressive as well as defensive instincts. Furthermore, at the end of the novel, masculine technology in the form of Yod is destroyed and feminine unity is preserved. In this sense, technology is treated as a masculine entity that, rather than being an enabling device that exists beyond gender constructs, is ultimately constrained by gender. Nili, on the other hand, has been constructed only by women and, prior to the installation of her mechanical implants, is born a human being. This would again point to a biological essentialism that is at odds with the inoperative potential in the novel: Piercy suggests that [Nili’s] biotechnological mix is preferable to [Yod’s]. Unlike Yod, Nili was born human (of woman) and then underwent serious technological augmentation … she was not brought into consciousness through artificial means. (Deery 96) The narrative’s message seems to be that biology is unassailable, that the construction of a subject that is devoid of gender constraints will ultimately end in

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52  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine failure. Yod is given the potential to be androgynous, genderless, to exist independent of his gendered zoe, but he is eventually destroyed, sacrificing himself in order to protect the feminine space of Tikva: maleness is sacrificed for the sake of femaleness and femaleness is portrayed as the preferable state of being. Meanwhile, Nili comes about as a subject that exists outside of gender, not as the result of a balanced life among both men and women but rather as the result of a female-​centric society and upbringing. She is an anomaly merely by virtue of her all-​female social ‘programming,’ implying that gender can only be surpassed when the binary opposite is absent; thus, paradoxically, her technologically infused nature only reinforces her identity as defined by her gendered zoe. In many ways the potential inherent in the concept of the cyborg outlined in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (151) fails to be realised in He, She and It.

Female Worlds and Female Men Though it does not explore the notion of the cyborg to the extent that He, She and It does, The Female Man seems to deal with technology in a more nuanced manner overall. In Russ’s novel, technology is not scrutinised as a gendered entity (masculine) but rather is accepted as neutral, whereby gender is externally introduced into the concept by the people who control/​ those who are excluded from it. In The Female Man we see several versions of the same woman drawn together from four separate alternate realities. In Janet’s far future reality, men have died out and an all-​female society known as Whileaway has emerged. Janet’s world, populated entirely by women (one of four represented in the novel), is in many ways the ideal, for it removes the need for any potential physical interdependence. In the society of Whileaway, all women are equal biologically and equally inconvenienced by the biological necessity of childbirth. In the novel, the egalitarian nature, socially speaking, of the Whileaway reproductive process is given some special attention. The quotation below comes from a passage that is given its own section within the chapter, isolated by blank space: “JE: I bore my child at thirty; we all do. It’s a vacation. Almost five years. The baby rooms are full of people reading, painting, singing, as much as they can, to the children, with the children, over the children” (Russ 14). However, this novel’s vision of equality is a rather troubling one, as it is a utopia created through the annihilation of difference rather than its acceptance. In the society of Whileaway, all citizens are physically equal (broadly speaking, as not all women possess equal physical strength), but whether this method towards uniformity has broken the bond between female biology and female biologically determined political/​ social identity is unclear. The society of Whileaway is still, arguably, a society based on myths of female unity; furthermore, it is a society descended from matriarchal notions that inspired the genocide of the entire male gender. In the world of Jael that preceded Whileaway, men are quite literally reduced to homo sacer figures as a justification for their

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 53 slaughter. It is indicated by the character of Jael that the society of Whileaway is the result of this violent genocide; Jael’s world and the world of Whileaway share a corresponding period of history where men and women were at war: “I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain” (Russ 205). Again, biologically gendered zoe strips men of their bios and sanctions their killing. Though the two genders were in a state of war to begin with, in order for the entire male sex to be wiped out, extermination would have been necessary: civilians and prisoners of war would have had to have been executed: “the originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed” (Agamben, Sacer 85). Men were slaughtered for the benefit of women so that society could be reborn in women’s image. Once again the theme of men as the sacrificial step necessary for utopia is present here as in He, She and It and The Passion of New Eve, inverting the traditional patriarchal paradigm, but leaving the signature of dominance and subordination intact. However, whereas The Passion of New Eve would seem to celebrate the destruction Man (at least symbolically), The Female Man does not –​it could even be seen to condemn it. Jael has a powerful appeal  –​one that is almost mythical, similar to Mother in The Passion of New Eve –​that is acknowledged by Joanna’s opinion of her “I think … that I like Jael best of all, that I would like to be Jael … the hateful hero with the broken heart” (Russ 205). However, her war crimes and their result, the annihilation of Man, are also mourned by one of their chief beneficiaries, Janet (Russ 205). This would seem to reveal an awareness within the novel that the supposed utopia of Whileaway is not in fact a utopia at all but merely a different society subject to an equally problematic view of gender, based on the very same signature of gender binarism. The absence of men, in the novel, does not destroy the signature of gender or of ‘woman’: rather a new gendered paradigm has asserted itself, informed by the ghostly presence of a now absent oppositional common. Whileaway can be understood as, in some ways, a planet of proper subjects; while masculinity is removed, discursive codes of femininity live on in this society, and so it must be admitted that Jael’s attempt to rid her world of men and masculinity failed to negate the oppressive codes of patriarchy that created and cemented the gender divide. The destruction of the male zoe only concretises the binary opposition between male and female by producing a void around which the women of this society (that will eventually become Whileaway) must then construct their society. The genocide of an entire gender for the benefit of another intensifies and perpetuates the gender binary indefinitely, perhaps even making the true suspension of the gender signature impossible, leaving the women of Whileaway forever trapped by codes of meaning that are no longer relevant to their society.

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54  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine Unlike the other two novels, The Female Man, rather than offering a single narrative view, presents several alternate realities that interact with each other to produce a dialogue of feminist discourse: [This] form resists simple closure and consistency yet  allows a strong statement about the present situation in the world, especially for women, and offers a clear suggestion of the several means which, taken together, can form oppositional politics of change. (Moylan 62) Despite the novel’s plurality, well-​defined opinions emerge from the narrative that conflict with patriarchal as well as some feminist paradigms –​ succeeding where The Passion of New Eve in many ways fails to effectively parody radical feminism. Joanna likes “hotels, air-​ conditioning, good restaurants, and jet transport” (Russ 7). Her struggle, unlike those of the other three J’s (versions of Joanna in the other alternate realities) is not to be a woman in a man’s world but rather to be recognised as an individual in a patriarchal society. Though she dislikes being “one of the boys” (129), she likes “Man’s” world, and so what Joanna seems to crave is not an entirely new female or feminised society to replace our own but rather a modified space where the current world is altered to include women without prejudice. However, as I  discussed in this book’s introduction, Joanna finds that the closest she can come to existing comfortably in a patriarchal world is to become “a female man” (5). This is partly a charade but it also serves to refute the notion that “anatomy is destiny” (137) and reveals her desire to be treated as a “man” in the sense of an individual: “If we are all mankind, it follows that I too am a man, and not at all a woman … I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man” (135–​ 136). Joanna’s desire is troubling in that it resonates with problematic forms of feminism that equate emancipation with the renunciation of femininity and the aspiration towards masculinity: that is, a form of emancipation based on internalised sexism. In another passage, Joanna laments the nature of her identity, caught between uncertain positions of male and female: I’m a sick woman, a mad woman, a ball-​breaker, a man-​eater; I don’t consume men gracefully with my fire-​like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghouls claws … my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don’t think my body would sell anything. I don’t think I would be good to look at. O of all diseases self-​hatred is the worst! (Russ 135) Yazsek interprets this part of the novel as Joanna’s inability to reconcile the different aspects of her identity –​the ball breaking, masculine feminist she is and the specific type of passive femininity which she feels under pressure to emulate: “she aspires to occupy a subject position that entails two very different  –​and ultimately irreconcilable  –​forms of self-​ editing. Indeed,

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 55 caught between the compulsion to fetishize her body and a mode of feminism that asks her to sacrifice this body altogether, Joanna eventually imagines herself as a monstrous, hybrid creature” (Yaszek ch. 2). However, I do not think Russ’s image of the female man is a genuinely monstrous one –​though such hybrid gender identities are often socially constructed as such. Rather, it represents the conflict that sometimes arises when woman are confronted with their own masculinity, specifically the desire to pursue power that is often understood as inherently masculine. However, this is where the novel has limitations: Joanna does not embrace the transgressive potential of her hybrid nature, she cannot reconcile a desire to be feminine with her desire for power and autonomy. She is suspended in this way between a disgust for the patronising sexualised patriarchal expressions of femininity expected of her –​being used to “sell anything” –​and an internalised sexist disgust for self-​assured  women.

Symbolic Mothers: Copies without Origins So, patriarchy and some forms of feminist discourse seem to agree on one thing: women are naturally estranged from power. In some of the classic feminist sf dystopias I have critiqued, women seek to undo patriarchal power structures; power is seen as synonymous with male identity while a great deal of feminist discourse sees female identity as smothered by power because –​only in the absence of power structures can it be allowed to flourish. Masculinity in many ways is power itself, and power is that which prevents femininity from coming into its own. Naomi Alderman’s The Power turns all of these ideas on their head by acknowledging the corrupting influence of power on everyone, regardless of gender identity. It exposes the “phantasy of women as innately caring, collective and compassionate” (Downing 8), which fuels the notion that women either do not want (or ought not to want) power. The novel succeeds in portraying the devastating oppression women experience now while also showing that women can be just as individual, flawed, ambitious and dangerous as their male counterparts, given half a chance. In the novel, women suddenly gain the power, through a mysterious evolutionary process, to deliver electric shocks at will. This gives them a physical advantage over men which reverses the gender paradigm. The novel sets up this message up from the very beginning in the opening pages: “The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree […]. The shape of power is the outline of the living thing straining outward, sending its fine tendrils a little further, and a little further yet” (Alderman 3). Remarkably quickly society reorders itself around women’s new-​ found physical supremacy and women’s new-​ found confidence  –​a confidence which comes from the knowledge that one can dominate with one’s body. Soon men are told not to go out on their own (64), boys begin dressing like girls to seem more powerful (70) and all-​female militias kill and gang rape men (281). However, unlike The Passion of New Eve and The Female Man, Alderman never romanticises the conflict between men and women. While the revolution, an event that will later be referred to as

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56  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine “the Cataclysm,” initially begins with women escaping and confronting their abusers, this quickly devolves into something much uglier. As in Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, men are abused and sexually assaulted: in Carter’s novel, the violence against men is portrayed as transformative, part of a just and necessary revolution. However, in The Power, the war of the sexes is not reduced to a simplistic, symbolic defeating of masculine structures. Inverting the narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale, men become the homines sacri, but in a manner that the author seems fully aware of. In the  novel, one of the main characters, Tunde, witnesses the ritual rape of young men (Alderman 268–​270): “wearing a crown of branches like Christ, the victim is sacrificed for  the sake of the war of genders” (Yebra 80). To be sure, the revolution begins  (as many revolutions do) as a result of legitimate grievances: abused women from all over the world rise up against their abusers –​these women use their electric shock ability to free themselves from violent situations through the new and only means they now have. However, this very quickly devolves into mass murder and assertions of dominance through gang rape. For Alderman, violence is far more a matter of opportunity than justice. As the narrator relates, people often committed violent acts “because they could. That is the only answer there ever is” (288). The rapes and murders of men are discussed in a kind of graphic detail which cannot fail to appal the reader. The novel follows the revolution from many different perspectives, mainly those of the key female players who bring about the revolution. An example is Allie, a religious leader who brings about a new gynocentric version of Christianity, becoming known as “Mother Eve.” One might be tempted to read this character as an ironic version of Carter’s “Mother” in The Passion of New Eve. In both novels the “mother” figure reimagines patriarchal, Christian myths of womanhood to construct mythic idealisations of feminine power and virtue. Mother Eve preaches a religious philosophy of caregiving: “I say unto you that it is more blessed for women to live together, to help one another, to band together and be a comfort one to the next” (Alderman 83). Yet, as the bloody revolution that follows illustrates, this philosophy does not extend to one’s fellow ‘Man.’ Rather than a grand emancipator of women, Mother Eve is just as deranged and oppressive as any garden variety religious fanatic or cult leader. As Yebra notes: “Mother Eve’s theocracy constitutes a return to the archaic mother, which reworks the patriarchal myth. However, in reclaiming mother figures … she is not liberating women but encapsulating them in a new theogony as repressive as the patriarchal one” (75). Here, the novel seems to partially satirise the “ethics of care” feminist approach which as Downing points out potentially overvalues “the ethical import of female biological processes” (16). By placing this system in the hands of the powerful, the novel exposes such recourses to a natural feminine identity dedicated to the care of others as ultimately a reductive fantasy, which, when placed in the hands of a new dominant matriarchy, becomes a violent tool of the oppressor. The paradigm of gender has altered in the sense that constructed notions of femininity have

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 57 been refigured as superior and have been imbued with signifiers of authority. However, the same signature of power remains –​the paradigm has not shifted enough to alter the fundamental hierarchical nature of gender, and thus the new structure of gender is just as oppressive as the one before. Eve preaches: “Mary guided her infant son with kindness and with love” (Alderman 83), pushing a narrative of feminine love and kindness while also implicitly establishing women in the superior position of “guide” over male subjects. “For Eve, the violence of nature inspires and is perfected by the violence of culture, the rage of a female Yahweh being its prime mover page” (Yebra 7) –​as women become the dominant force in society, the constructed connection with caregiving and nature that once subordinated them is very easily and quickly transformed into a discourse of power and violent dominance through Eve’s influence. A possible criticism of Alderman’s novel is that it, like many of the feminist discourses I have critiqued, focuses on biology more than construction as the source of gendered oppression. It would seem that women gain supremacy rapidly because of a bodily change that enables them to physically overpower men. However, saying this is an oversimplification of the plot. Power does not automatically organise itself around women when they gain their new power. At first there is an attempt to contain and explain the phenomena: “When ‘the power’ turns into a public concern, experts on human biology are consulted. Yet, their expertise is not enough and female superiority is explored and upheld from other disciplines, particularly arts, anthropology, history and cultural studies” (Yebra 77). The ability of women to use the electric shock power makes them capable of overpowering men but the neighbouring systems of power which emerge, sparked (ahem) by this physical disparity, develop in such a way that the resulting structure of power bears little connection to actual physical strength. For example, as in the case of women now and historically, men start being described as “less intelligent, less diligent, less hardworking, their brains are in their muscles and their pricks” (Alderman 278). This is not really the result of women suddenly becoming physically superior as such, rather it is the result of many new female-​centred discourses which emerge, for example, the rhetoric of Mother Eve. The sudden fear which grips the world allows women to take the stage in a way they had not before. The novel expertly portrays the overlap between sex and gender in this way –​physicality is a factor of gendered oppression, but it is not its limit. As made clear in the quotation above, men are still strong in terms of muscular strength and yet this is constructed by a new gynocentric discourse of power as making them inferior and “a drain on the resources of the country” (278). This is consistent then with Butler’s reading of gender as a copy with no original: “the ostensible copy is not explained through reference to the origin, but the origin is understood to be as performative as the copy” (Undoing Gender 209). Similarly, as Justine Jordan explains in her review “every individual exercise of power contributes to power relations as a whole, and change is unstoppable.” The “power” which women gain is not in fact

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58  Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine exactly the source of their eventual dominance. Their new-​found physicality does not automatically place them in positions of authority, they need to bring about what Mother Eve refers to as “the war of all against all” (Alderman 312) to ensure their continued supremacy. Just as gender is a copy with no original, so too is power. This is reflected in Mother Eve’s own doubts about the revolution she helped to incite towards the end of the novel. Throughout, she converses with a voice in her head which Alderman’s narration suggests may be God, or perhaps instead an expression of the inner “voice” which humans often attribute to the divine. When Mother Eve starts to doubt the voice and asks if it might be the devil and not God, as she originally assumed, the voice replies: There were things you were never supposed to look at … your whole question is the mistake. Who’s the serpent and who’s the Holy Mother? Who’s bad and who’s good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who’s powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question. It’s more complicated than that, sugar. However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that. (Alderman 319) In an interview for The New York Times, Alderman explains the key questions relating to power and gender which the novel explores. Noting the events of World War II, she says: for me, the larger question about the Holocaust is not, How do you avoid being a victim? It is, how do you avoid being a Nazi? … If you and I  lived in a world where women were dominant, would you be telling yourself: This is very unjust; I  will fight for the rights of men? … you have to ask, are women better than men? They’re not. People are people. You don’t have to think that all men are horrible to know there are some men who abuse their strength. Why wouldn’t the same hold true for women? There is a small minority of sadists in the world who muck it up for the rest of us (La Ferla) This “mucking it up for the rest of us” to which Alderman refers is the intersection that normalises the oppressive gender structures which are connected to, but not the same as, the male abuse of physical disparity. Agamben’s understanding of paradigms as part of the larger structure of the signature helps us to see how changes in power systems occur over time, but it does not necessarily offer any advice on how to nudge this process in a desirable direction. The Power and other feminist dystopias often offer, as in the examples I have cited, undesirable destinies for the gender signature. While the potency of the current paradigm of patriarchy begins, hopefully, to dwindle, it

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Removing/Reprogramming the Masculine 59 is possible that the signature of gender would remain while its domination over human identity and politics recedes. In my next chapter I begin a project for imagining how this could be achieved through the figure of the cyborg: more specifically, through the disruptive influence of the popular sf character of the gynoid –​the marriage of female suspension and technological ambiguity.

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3  “You can alter our physiology, but you cannot change our nature” The Girl in the Machine

The female cyborg or gynoid character is useful for considering gender identity because of its ability to challenge several constructions/​ binary oppositions simultaneously. Gynoids are particularly useful because they challenge conceptualisations of performativity, gender and personhood in a manner that their android counterparts tend to reinforce. Because women are constructed as being closer to the sphere of zoe, of biology, female figures whose connection with nature is ‘interrupted’ by technology force us to question certain assumptions. To frame it another way, Anne Balsamo argues: “female cyborg images do more to challenge the opposition between man and machine than do male cyborgs because femininity is culturally imagined as less compatible with technology than is masculinity” (“Reading Cyborgs” 148–​149). Women are not associated with the sphere of the rational, the mental abstraction to which technological, scientific enquiry belongs: “Female cyborgs embody cultural contradictions which strain the technological imagination. Technology isn’t feminine and femininity isn’t rational” (149). Women are not typically imagined to be the users or inventors of technology  –​even though, as the first “computers,” they are in many ways associated with technology: tracing the ways in which technology has certain central feminine-​coded elements, stretching as far back as the invention of the weaving loom and the first difference engine, Sadie Plant argues: [Women’s] is not a subsidiary role which needs to be rescued for posterity, a small supplement whose inclusion would sit the existing records straight: when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term first applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female. (37) However, in tension with this is the fact that technology is often only really considered feminine under certain specific conditions: that is when technology is viewed as a tool to be used by men to achieve certain abstract ends (as opposed to technology conceived of more abstractly: the result of the work of great male, minds). In this manner, women are connected with our notion of the “used” –​not the person who acts but the tool through which acts are

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The Girl in the Machine 61 performed. In The Use of Bodies, Agamben demonstrates how the ancient Greek conception of master and slave reveals the symbolic connection between the use of one’s own body and the use of another’s: By putting in use his own body, the slave is, for that very reason, used by the master, and in using the body of the slave, the master is in reality using his own body. The syntagma “use of the body” represents a point of indifference not only between subjective genitive and objective genitive but also between one’s own body and that of another. (The Use of Bodies 14) Agamben discusses the indistinction between the use of tools and the use of others’ bodies as if they were themselves tools –​extensions of oneself: “This crude model of the user and the used has legitimised the scientific projects … the user and the used are merely the perceptible elements, the identifiable components which are thrown up  –​and serve also to maintain  –​far more complex processes” (Plant 77). Cyborgs are augmented beings whose tools have become integrated into themselves, highlighting the perhaps arbitrary distinction between the body parts we ‘use’ and the external objects we employ. The gynoid is thus imbued with an additional layer of autonomy through her bodily intersection with the very machines she operates. She is empowered by being elevated to the status of ‘user’ (rather than used); gynoids do not use computers, they are computers: “the slave … like the legendary automatons constructed by Daedelus and Hephaestus can move itself on command” (Agamben The Use of Bodies, 11). In this way, the gynoid challenges the user/​used and the self/​other dichotomies as well as the mind/​body split between the mind that wills and the body which acts. What is fascinating about female cyborgs is that they serve a dual disruptive purpose: they introduce ambiguity into a gender paradigm that is closely linked with the human/​inhuman dichotomy, simultaneously interrogating bare life. But gynoids also remind us that there is something artificial and possibly mechanical about femininity more generally. Femininity has often been described as performative. Some queer theorists have argued that the performative nature of gender is such that it precludes “subjective agency.” That is to say “insofar as a performance consists of reciting gestures, signs, images and so on that are drawn from a shared cultural reservoir that comes before and exceeds the performer” then the performance is “not wholly voluntary” (Sullivan 90). The implication of this argument is that gender is inauthentic because it is the result of repetitions and mimicry that are not under one’s control –​and these repetitions often reproduce oppressive constructions. This understanding of gender as non-​voluntary can be found in Butler’s work in her analysis of drag as a form of performance which exposes all gendered behaviours as similarly theatrical in nature (Gender Trouble). On the other hand, many of Butler’s critics have argued that this approach precludes one’s autonomy. However, Butler also describes the process as a “contingent and fragile possibility” (Butler, “For a Careful Reading” 137) which implies the

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62  The Girl in the Machine capacity to resist through the manner in which we repeat –​some acts of performative femininity –​like drag, which can be subversive in some contexts. The ways in which the gynoid engages in repetition can be particularly subversive by drawing attention to the performative nature of feminine forms of prothesis. Large portions of what we think of as femininity –​clothing, makeup, jewellery, etc –​constitute a particularly colourful and expressive form of both oppression as well as individuality and subversion. To be feminine, by its very nature, is to be in some senses a cyborg –​to augment one’s body with hair, face and body products which firm, hydrate, twist, curl, colour, pinch, soften and tighten the body into the desired shape. Such feminine augmentations frequently constitute a capitulation to normative notions of womanhood: they take place in response to enormous social pressures and thus can often be considered acts of conformity. Yet, these practices can also constitute empowering forms of self-​ expression. The gynoid figure reflects both these aspects of femininity because it challenges assumptions about gender performance by reinforcing the notion of the body as a tool while simultaneously effacing this mind/​body or flesh/​ technology divisions. As Anne Balsamo argues: Haraway explicitly maps the identity of woman onto the identity of the cyborg. This foregrounds the ambiguous constitution of the female body –​ predicated on the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, the material and the discursive, the fictive and the real. Both woman and cyborg are simultaneously symbolically and biologically produced and reproduced through social interactions. (Technologies 34) The gynoid in fiction often has her body modified, augmented by others, often against her will, and yet she also makes use of her augmentations for her own ends as well –​for example, in the case of Star Trek Voyager’s Seven of Nine as I will explain later in this chapter. This can be seen as a reflection of ways in which gendered subjects are both users and used when it comes to the gender paradigm or assemblage. As Halberstam notes: “gender is attributed as much as it is declared” (Trans* 58). As with technology, we frequently find ourselves to be both its masters and slaves. The cyborg is the ideal figure through which to explore femininity because, like femininity, it has the capacity to be deeply normative as much as it can be extremely radical: “the cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto 150). Haraway frames the cyborg as a necessary emancipatory figure, a guiding symbol with the potential to lead mankind to new heights of self-​awareness. However, as Lavigne notes, in practice the potential of the cyborg has often been subsumed by normative notions of masculine and feminine: Haraway’s proposed cyborg androgynes were too threatening, in practice, to be allowed to play in Hollywood –​instead an increase in technological

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The Girl in the Machine 63 superiority meant a subsequent increase in stereotypical sex characteristics, to downplay any dangerously gender-​free imagery. Male cyborgs became invincible while female cyborgs were sexually exploited. (ch. 5) This is a danger the cyborg poses: it is not automatically a transgressive figure but does become one in certain instances. I  would argue that however the trope often becomes particularly normative in the case of male cyborg figures. The male cyborg or AI in popular sf is very often used as a means of questioning the purpose and/​or nature of humanity from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data, to Robocop, to the reprogrammed Terminator turned good in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. These figures stand placidly upon the brink of personhood throughout their narratives, quietly obsessed with a humanity they will always attempt to (but never actually) possess. Their baptism is one of fire and it is fatal for them. Data’s fate is to die in a blaze of glory to save his captain and shipmates in the final Star Trek: The Next Generation film, Nemesis (2002); the Terminator likewise sacrifices himself for the good of all mankind in the hopes of ridding the world of all Terminator technology (including himself). Furthermore, Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, as well as the film of the same name, also contains this powerful and insidious trope. In the novel the robot/​cyborg protagonist spends his entire life –​which spans nearly two-​hundred years –​striving to exceed his mechanical programming. Finally, he chooses human mortality over mechanical immortality in order to complete his experience of humanity, and a human council finally grants him the right to be considered ‘human’ moments before he passes away on his deathbed. All these cyborg characters, paradoxically, gain entrance to the humanity ‘club’ by sacrificing their lives –​they must die in order to have been recognised as living, but retrospectively. Their own reasons for the sacrifice seem almost incidental in comparison to the wider didactic lesson they offer the other human characters in the narrative as well as the readers. Data exists to teach the other human characters of the series how to be the best humans they can be and offer them interesting insights into the nature of consciousness and subjecthood –​ he provides humanity with a wealth of self-​indulgence as he touchingly fails time and again to mimic humans in all their glory. The Terminator dies having taught young John Connor the necessity of self-​sacrifice which will aid him in his role as the future leader of mankind. Finally, the Bicentennial Man exists to humble humanity, as he is finally acknowledged as a political and legal subject. Each of these figures die, Christ-​like, in order to redeem humans in some way, all act as sacrificial figures: homines sacri. As Gillis realises: The transgressive promise of the cyborg and the posthuman has not always been evident … the cyborg as metaphor is fraught with difficulties precisely because it is already such a ubiquitous image within popular culture, an image that, unfortunately, replicates traditional ways of thinking about gender. (Gillis 205–​218)

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64  The Girl in the Machine among other, similar political and social binaries. Ultimately, then, the cyborg can act to reinforce certain stereotypes while appearing superficially transgressive and new. The robot-​cyborg-​slave figure is often a male, anthropocentric figure which plays into the hands of archaic power structures. Though Haraway understands the profound significance of the cyborg, she does not appear to argue for its profound capacity to be manipulated by neighbouring political structures. The cyborg, while potentially an incredible force for indistinction is, conversely, also a universal other, mirroring similar hierarchical social structures: the cyborg represents the plight of the universal oppressed figure: Woman, slave, worker, racial other or homo sacer. However, I  would argue that, while male cyborgs often reinforce patriarchal structures of man versus machine, as well as hypermasculine versus hyperfeminine (hyper-​ sexualised), this reading fails to consider the full implications of the specifically female cyborg which complicates women’s relationship with biology, their gendered zoe through technology.

Female Borg versus the Posthuman Collective At first glance, Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine character, in her high-​heeled silver catsuit, is a hyper-​sexualised, Hollywood, teenage-​male fantasy cyborg –​ just the sort of hyper-​feminised figure which so many writers have critiqued as representative of a reductive mainstream sf exploration of the cyborg trope. Figures like Seven of Nine do in some ways represent a problematic and reductive approach to the cyborg figure. Yet, when examining such mainstream gynoids, I often find that, as Haraway herself suggested, these cyborgs are “illegitimate offspring” of patriarchy and “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (Cyborg Manifesto 151). Seven is one of the best examples of this unfaithfulness. Added to Star Trek: Voyager at the beginning of season 4 to combat falling ratings (Winslow), Seven of Nine, portrayed by Jeri Ryan was a sexy female cyborg solution to recapturing dwindling audience interest. Yet, as the actress herself argued: “If that’s what attracted people to the show, it’s the good writing that’s kept them” (Winslow). Seven’s appearance would lead one to expect that she, like so many female figures would be immediately “culturally coded as emotional, sexual, and … naturally maternal” (Balsamo, “Reading Cyborgs” 149). Seven instead exhibits a powerful sense of individuality and autonomy which, interestingly, is in some ways at odds with her character’s origin story. Seven is forcibly removed from the Borg: a partly machine, partly organic race which forcibly “assimilates” members of other species into its cyborg “collective,” physically altering them as well as eradicating their original identities. Though she has now in many ways been rescued from her previous existence, Seven feels violated by her extraction, saying to Captain Janeway (of the Starship Voyager), as her superficial Borg implants are being removed: “You can alter our physiology but you cannot change our nature …We are Borg” (“The Gift” 00:25:42–​52). Seven is used to being a tool in a wider apparatus: the Borg hive mind constitutes a collective will and single ‘voice’ which,

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The Girl in the Machine 65 through the amalgamation of the organic and technological matter that the Borg assimilates, causes its multiple, individual bodies to act. The singular Borg drone only exists to serve the will of this hive voice. Seven claims here that, despite having been altered physically, she will never become human and will always remain what she believes is her ‘true’ self: a Borg drone, a tool of the collective plurality. This line is particularly poignant because of Seven’s use of the first-​person plural. All “drones” within the Borg “collective” are mentally linked to the extent that their sense of self is completely eradicated; their minds form one “hive” consciousness within which there is no possibility for the concept of an ‘I.’ The newly liberated Seven still conceptualises her identity within this context: she is not a single individual, rather she is the entire Borg. This creates a zone of indistinction as Seven (and in a sense all Borg drones) is suspended between master and slave, individual and collective, universal and specific. Thus, Seven’s situation mimics that of all women. Seven is totally indistinct from the larger collective term “Borg” just as individual human women are inseparable from the term, ‘Woman’, that signifies the entire unit or paradigm. Seven struggles to distinguish her individuality as a singular woman from the vast, super-​identity of the Borg collective within the framework of her new environment aboard the USS Voyager, suddenly and shockingly immersed in a community founded upon the binaries of anthropocentric culture, including those associated with gender and sexuality. As Tama Leaver observes, Seven’s introduction into her new “collective” aboard the USS Voyager poses an argument “that as technology becomes part of (previously exclusively organic) subjectivity, many traditional binary traditions in Western humanist thought are challenged, especially the dichotomy of nature and culture, as well as the related male/​female dualism” (70). Seven’s endeavour to navigate the maze of social and political paradigms within human society mirrors the struggle of all women (as well as perhaps all individuals) to place themselves on the sliding scale between general and particular, between individual gendered subject and speck of gendered material within a larger social organism. As Seven is gradually assimilated into the crew of Voyager, she soon realises that her existence among humans is not so radically different from her previous one within the Borg, in that she is not entirely separate from those around her. Growing accustomed to her new life, she becomes aware of the similarities between her Borg community and her new Starfleet one, declaring: “Voyager is my collective” (“Drone” 00:36:40–​45). However, she also struggles with some of the schizophrenic logic that governs humanity’s shaky understanding of individuality verses community: SEVEN OF NINE:  You

made me into an individual. You encouraged me to stop thinking like a member of the Collective, to cultivate my independence and my humanity. But when I try to assert that independence, I am punished. CAPTAIN KATHRYN JANEWAY:  Individuality has its limits –​especially on a starship where there’s a command structure. (“Prey” 00:44:07-​31)

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66  The Girl in the Machine These words in many ways reflect the limit of patriarchal as well as many feminist discourses of female selfhood. Seven has been encouraged to discover her own sense of self only to find that the self she has begun to define for herself does not meet with the expectations of society. She is in no way a feminist symbolic figure of maternity and compassion. Seven responds to the expectations placed upon her in her new role as a human woman: “in a decidedly disruptive manner, retaining her Borg identity, refusing to be socialised into passivity” (Leaver 72). Seven is aggressive, full of anger and violence as well as an insatiable desire to perfect herself, in line with the Borg’s transhumanist philosophy of self-​improvement. Behind the silver catsuit is an individual with profoundly masculine-​coded qualities. Fascinatingly, Seven’s disruptive qualities defy even Haraway’s comparatively restrained attempt to mythologise femininity and womanhood through the qualities of the cyborg: “the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (Cyborg Manifesto 163). In escaping the clutches of the psychologically and physically abusive Borg regime, Seven exhibits a forceful sense of self-​determination, which is totally at odds with any vision of feminist collectivism. In fact, through the Borg, collectivism is imagined as a destructive totalitarian force: a tyrannous regime which endlessly consumes and eradicates individuality in the service of the state. As many conversations between Seven and the Borg Queen demonstrate: no collectives are ever really egalitarian unities, because they must, by necessity, speak with the one voice of a figurehead in order to maintain order. Further complicating the self/​other and universal/​specific oppositions, Seven initially exhibits a wish to return to the Borg collective, a powerful, self-​centred desire to efface her own individuality. However, this is soon replaced by a determination not to let any form of external authority infringe on her autonomy. Returning briefly to the conversation quoted earlier between Janeway and Seven Seven’s retort to Janeway’s sweeping rejection of her argument that “individuality has limits” is as follows: “I believe that you are punishing me because I do not think the way that you do. Because I am not becoming more like you. You claim to respect my individuality. But in fact, you are frightened by it” (“Prey” 00:44:30-​47). Seven refuses to repackage her threatening desire for autonomy into something pleasingly feminine. When she arrives aboard Voyager for the first time, many, but not all, of her Borg implants are removed –​ others are so integrated into her body that it would be dangerous to take them out. As a result, Voyager’s doctor designs a special suit designed specifically for Seven’s Borg physiology. But Seven’s aggressive sense of self can barely fit into the constrains of the patriarchal, silver catsuit Voyager’s society has designed for her. The conversation between Seven and Janeway also reflects the difficult truth of individuality –​that it is not really as singular as it may appear –​a fact that is particularly difficult and frightening perhaps as Seven’s initial belief when first removed from the Borg that she was entirely alone. Her realisation reflects some of the truths associated with negotiating between one’s self in relation to the other, which Butler describes as “a mode of relation … a mode of being

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The Girl in the Machine 67 dispossessed … a way of being for another or by virtue of another” (Precarious Life 24). Having been severed from the larger organism of the collective, Seven must suddenly confront the raw biopolitical problematics of singular bodily life, of possessing a body “that implies mortality, vulnerability, agency” (24). Separate but not without a larger whole, Seven’s difficulties stem from an initial bodily separation followed by a sudden necessity of negotiating a network of new bodily relations that she cannot comprehend, whose hidden nature as a quasi-​collective or covert ‘hive’ community is only subtly apparent. As Judith Butler highlights: Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to a world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. Indeed, if I  deny that prior to the formation of my “will,” my body related me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I built a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere … then am I denying the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy? (Precarious Life 26) Seven’s struggle to conform to human customs may, on the surface, appear as a limitation of the show’s depiction of alternative modes of being: a rather conventional dismissal of alternative ways of self-​expression, including unusual modes of gender operativity. However, the manner in which Seven fails to conform ultimately constitutes a highly complex form of inoperativity, particularly in terms of gender, highlighting and exposing the paradigms that surround her. Feminist critics have condemned Seven’s appearance –​that of a classic B move sf bimbo, in a revealing, silver catsuit and matching, gloriously unnecessary, high heels: “Many critics have complained that the treatment of Seven/​ Ryan has been misogynistic, rendering the character and actor a cyborg bimbette in tight-​fitting outfits” (Greven 166). Despite such, perhaps well-​founded, criticisms, I find Seven’s appearance valuably incongruous in comparison with her highly complex character. Seven’s emphasised and overly sexualised femininity only contributes to her unintelligibility. Her zoe is highlighted by her appearance, but her bodily intelligibility is already obscured by her technological implants. Her Borg physiology interrupts the codes of meaning normally associated with biologically gendered zoe, thus complicating and suspending the standard relationship between zoe and bios, making her role as a woman ambiguous in both physical and political terms. Furthermore, she is a stunning figure of male, sexual fantasy with absolutely no interest in fulfilling that role; in fact, attempts to make her conform to classic patriarchal female roles only confuse or aggravate her. For example, when asked to perform a holodeck role of the very kind of 50s, B-​movie damsel suggested by her appearance with a fellow crew-​member (Tom Paris), she fails miserably to play the part of a helpless space - wench. Rather than running

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68  The Girl in the Machine screaming from enemies she simply walks up to them and promptly destroys them, stating menacingly: “I am Borg” (“Night” 00:17:48-​51). Thus, surprisingly, it is precisely Seven’s highly conventional appearance  –​her traditionally feminine zoe –​that complements her suspended state. By simultaneously highlighting the ambivalence with which Seven views her highly sexualised body, as well as the many technological elements required to maintain it, her zoe is portrayed as a tool necessary to maintain her consciousness, rather than as an object of desire. The line which forms the title of this chapter “you may alter our physiology but you cannot change our nature” illustrates many of the ambiguities and anxieties that surround the gynoid or female cyborg, exposing these tensions as rooted in uncertainties immanent in the social construction of womanhood, where the addition of machinic qualities  –​the visceral technological Borg enhancements that are stripped from Seven but never entirely removed –​ merely emphasises the otherness that already surrounds and characterises the female. Thus, as Seven astutely observes, the alteration of female physiology does not alter the nature of womankind as a figure of uncertainty, rather it serves to further complicate and expand upon it, and by extension pose questions that extend not only to the problematics of gender performativity but also to more broad questions pertaining to the nature of many similar binary structures dependent on the same universal/​particular oppositional, paradigmatic structure. Having discussed and analysed the chaotic and transgressive potential of the gynoid, I will now combine this analysis with a philosopher whose work looks beyond the Agambenian starting point of inoperativity. The philosophy of Deleuze may provide a framework for realising the valuable social and political changes that Agamben’s philosophy implies but does not fully articulate.

The Female Cyborg as Assemblage As I outlined in my introduction, Deleuze’s philosophy includes a process which he similarly describes as “indifference” from which Agamben’s own various and almost interchangeable terms indistinction/​inoperativity/​indifference were partially derived. As Deleuze writes in his work Difference and Repetition: Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved –​but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows. (36) Deleuze here recognises the potential positivity that can arise from the “abyss” of the indeterminate. He frames his image of the indifferent in distinctly organic, visceral terms, for his conception of progress towards improving the existing system is to forever rearrange and experiment, revelling in the constant

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The Girl in the Machine 69 reordering of the ‘machines’ that make up our selves, our communities, our others and our institutions: It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks … Everywhere it is machines  –​real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-​machine is plugged into an energy-​source-​machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus 1) We can read Seven of Nine as an example of an assemblage –​the term Deleuze often uses to denote the “machines” he describes above –​that is, the new and the radical that have been formed out of parts of old machines/​assemblages. As Yaszek notes, the female cyborg has a fraught history of associations with the patriarchal consumption of female bodies and the useful labour they perform (here we return to the notion of woman as tool to be used): “advertising represents women as unnatural … automaton-​like creatures whose actions and emotions are conditioned by the domestic products they purchase” (Yaszek ch. 2). The Stepford Wives offers the ultimate narrative portrayal of the ways in which women have been part of a story of “men’s enduring fantasies and dreams about women about producing the perfect woman, a custom-​made female” (Wosk Intro). I discuss this in further detail in Chapter 4; however, for the purposes of this chapter, it is important to remember that assemblages are fundamentally something that can be taken apart and remade, reorganised to suit new needs. The gynoid is a malleable construct in this regard, in that she has been restructured –​what was and sometimes still is a toy of male fantasy can be reassembled to constitute something more innovative. Figures like Seven of Nine are part of Deleuze’s central thesis that assemblages, whether social, political, bodily, or conceptual, move, expand, relate to each other in ever-​changing and reforming ways. A given assemblage breaks into pieces over time as attitudes, relations and methods of exchange alter; the pieces migrate and join other machines to form new assemblages which in turn will eventually disintegrate so that another generation of machines may rebuild themselves. This is the process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation: the destruction of one and the rebirth of another, respectively. The force which drives this unending process is what brings figures like Seven of Nine into being: An apparent conflict arises between desiring-​ machines and the body without organs. Every coupling of machines … becomes unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organising it … Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms

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70  The Girl in the Machine of torture. In order to resist organ-​machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus  9–​10) The Body without Organs (BwO) is what Deleuze and Guattari call that which resists identification and categorisation. It is a chaotic force that expresses itself when existing machines begin to wear out and machine relationships erode. The BwO drives the process of decay even further so that the “organ-​machine” cannot function. For Deleuze and Guattari, the “body” or “flesh” represents the epitome of assemblages operating in concert –​this is of course because the body is a large and complex arrangement of different organs or “machines” that work together to keep the whole functioning. This is similar to the activity of an institution with many departments, or social constructions like that of sex and gender that operate in concert, perpetuating the larger heterosexual matrix. The “body” is government, society, discourse, the family unit and yes, even the actual body itself. This visceral conceptuality of what Agamben might describe as a paradigm (and what Deleuze refers to as an assemblage), as conjured by the passage above, is highly relevant to cyborg or gynoid subjects –​particularly Seven of Nine, whose body is so heavily invaded and transformed by Borg technology and then later by Federation medicine, as Voyager’s doctor alters her body to exist outside of the Borg collective. At each point, to differing degrees, it is impossible to say where technology ends and flesh begins  –​ Seven’s body is regulated by Borg nano-​probes which challenge the boundaries between organs, blood, bone, skin and cells. Having been separated from the larger body of the Borg collective, her migration from larger hive organism to individual, self-​regulating, machine follows the pathway of the BwO. Seven is removed from the larger assemblage to become another, entirely new entity. Initially, Seven laments her new-​found mental seclusion from the thoughts of other Borg drones: “My designation is Seven of Nine. But the others are gone. Designations are no longer relevant. I am one” (“The Gift” 00:33:18-​ 25). However, it is made clear earlier on that from the Borg’s perspective, the Voyager crew and other, similar collections of sentient, humanoid species (crews, families, civilisations) are merely collectives or machine-​ organisms like the Borg themselves  –​only of a different kind. Seven, having at least a vague understanding of this similarity, declares that the Voyager crew’s “attempts to assimilate this drone will fail” (“The Gift” 00:25:35-​45). Thus, Seven understands the Voyager crew, and by extension humans as a whole, as representing individual separate instances of life as well as a larger crew and ship assemblage –​a mass organism composed of organic and machine elements fused together beyond distinction. This view is evidenced by the Borg mantra repeated every time they encounter a vessel they intend to commandeer: “We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and

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The Girl in the Machine 71 technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile” (First Contact). For the Borg, the cultures they assimilate are merely smaller assemblages of embodied organic and machinic matter to be incorporated into their own larger assemblage –​there is no real distinction between biology and technology. For them, resistance is futile because they see the process of assimilation as inevitable: unbridled rearranging of machines to produce ever changing, shifting, expanding and transforming apparatuses, which is precisely the intention of the BwO. The Borg can be read, then, as the pure unfettered presence of the BwO, while Seven can be understood as something rather more complex. Seven is a new incarnation of several assemblages, a new embodied variant of gender, individuality, desire and agency. She disturbs the classic binaries that both Agamben and Deleuze sought to disrupt: general and particular, identity and difference, self and other. Despite her initial loneliness as an individual subject, she is –​and can never be –​merely “one”; she is an assemblage just as all things –​“bodies” –​are and cannot escape the myriad complementary machines to which she is, and to which we all are, bound. Yet what machines is she connected to? And what is the nature of her desiring relationship to them? She is ambivalent towards her own sexuality, failing to comprehend or see the relevance of her ostensible place within patriarchal norms; she will not pout, flee, become hysterical, cry or beg to be recognised by the male gaze. She views her body as a mere receptacle for herself, continuing to view it in Borg terms, as a unit: a machine. This is beautifully evidenced by a short, throw-​away scene where a member of the godlike race known as the Q, called Junior, attempts to play a practical joke on Seven: (Seven of Nine is working when her clothes vanish.) JUNIOR:  Talk about perfection. SEVEN:  If you’re attempting to embarrass me, you won’t succeed. JUNIOR:  I’m just observing humanity. Aren’t you going to scamper away, make some futile attempt to cover yourself? (She continues working. He returns her clothes, shakes his head and leaves.) (“Q2” 00:06:25–​58) Seven refuses to engage with this patriarchal stunt, the male gaze does not excite nor pose a threat to her, and because of that she cannot be humiliated or otherwise placed at a disadvantage by it. As a result of Seven’s attitude towards her body, her traditionally feminine and hyper-​sexualised appearance appears to the viewer (as it does to her) an irrelevance. Seven is a woman in a unique position to separate herself from others while still remaining strangely bound to them. She is related to the universal ‘every-​woman’; like Warburg’s nymphs mentioned in Chapter 1, she maintains a connection to the others in her set, yet she is also set dramatically apart from them. She, in many ways, represents individuality, as a surviving refugee from a totalitarian regime. Yet her journey is one of learning to coexist with others.

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72  The Girl in the Machine

Becoming-​Woman, Becoming-​Gynoid The virtual, for Deleuze, is a space full of potential intensities, from which some ideas and events will emerge as actualities: “when we go from virtual to actual, we go from the virtual to representation. The movement of ‘actualization’ or ‘differenciation’ is the movement from the virtual object or ‘the object in the idea’ to the actual, represented object” (Hughes 128). That which may materialise from the virtual is limited by that which is already actualised, however, by existing physical, conceptual and epistemological structures. From the virtual comes the force of desire which promotes the continual reorganisation of assemblages, reaching out from the intensive space of the virtual into actualisation. The machines that govern us are dauntingly powerful, but their constantly shifting nature leaves room for their power to be contested and even diminished, for the lines of deterritorialisation to form. Much like Agamben’s understanding of suspension within the paradigm leading to indistinction, assemblages are similarly dependent on relationships that are inherently unstable. That which makes the assemblage so pervasive and consolidates its power as a network of interconnected pieces of machinery is also that which makes it most vulnerable to structural collapse. Assemblages –​the machines, bodies, multiplicities that make up the world as we know it –​form along various lines that describe their nature and manner in which they engage with the world: “there is the molar line that forms a binary arborescent system of segments, the molecular line that is more fluid although still segmentary, and the line of flight that ruptures the other two lines” (Lorraine 147). The molar line is inclined towards institutions, large controlled territories, discursive structures, “whether social, technical, or organic,” thus the assemblages that exist here are rigid and difficult to disrupt; the molecular line, by contrast, is more susceptible to fluctuation and alteration. This is because the molecular line is home to what Deleuze and Guattari term “desiring-​machines,” governed or influenced by intention (for example, human desire): Desiring-​ machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation; chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly … operating by non-​localisable intercommunications and dispersed locations. (Anti-​Oedipus 315) In other words, these machines are more amenable to what Deleuze terms deterritorialisation. One of their most important concepts, Deleuze and Guattari define this term in Anti-​Oedipus as a “coming undone” (354). Like Agamben’s indistinction, deterritorialisation is a chaotic force that unravels existing structures, dismantling machines/​assemblages and severing the links between them; yet it is also an emancipatory procedure where the flows [that is, lines/​connections/​movements that course through chains of assemblages] cross the threshold of deterritorialization and

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The Girl in the Machine 73 produce a new land –​not at all a hope, but a simple “finding,” a “finished design,” where the person who escapes causes other escapes, and marks out the land while deterritorializing himself. (354) What is left, like the void of inoperativity, is an empty space which provides a gateway to the virtual, inspiring the formation of new machines and connections between them, “an active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine, and the (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus 354). This provides a path for an entirely new kind of line, the line of flight. The line of flight is the line of pure deterritorialisation, and as we can see from their explanation of this phenomenon above, Deleuze and Guattari discuss this plundering entity with great enthusiasm in their first joint work Anti-​ Oedipus –​seemingly advocating the violent destruction of existing structures. Here too they first develop their concept of the BwO which in many ways can be seen as the embodied (or perhaps more accurately, disembodied) instance of the line of flight and the primary operation of all desiring-​ machines: “Desiring-​machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down … the body without organs is non-​productive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product” (Anti-​Oedipus 9). The BwO is an instance of becoming in the world: it is a point of pure destratification that may lie along a longer line of events that, taken together, can be considered as a line of flight. However, as Eugene W.  Holland notes, Deleuze and Guattari show far greater reticence towards the BwO, and by extension the line of flight, in their later collaboration A Thousand Plateaus. Here they display an awareness of the potential dangers of the unfettered line of flight: And how necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. … Dismantling the organism never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. (185–​186) The widespread production of the BwO would be akin to mass instances of indistinction spread out over a large collection of related assemblages (paradigms) corroded so quickly that there is no opportunity for anything to form in the wake of the deterritorialised line, impeding the process of reterritorialisation which is often the natural and desirable second step. Here Deleuze and Guattari develop their initial work, revealing that for deterritorialisation to be beneficial it must be balanced by this organising force.

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74  The Girl in the Machine Here they describe how this balance manifests itself in the ideal operation of the assemblage: On a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized  sides, which stabilise it, and cutting edges of deterritorialisation, which carry it away. … On the second axis … are the sequenced or conjugated degrees of deterritorialization, and the operations of reterritorialization that stabilise the aggregate at a given moment. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 103) The “axes” described above are like those of a graph upon which are mapped the coordinates of assemblages, groups of which form molar/​molecular lines or lines of flight. We may imagine this graph as follows, where the horizontal or Y-​axis coordinate determines the position of the assemblage in terms of interactions of “bodies, of actions and passions,” as well as the more abstract processes associated with these: “enunciation … acts and statements” (102–​ 103), symbols and laws. Difference emanating from the virtual is the engine that drives this process and encourages the incremental development of change, forcing the rearrangement and even dissolution of assemblages for the sake of new machines; the line of flight or the BwO is responsible for these fragmentations, emerging from the spatium of the virtual as a pure intensity. The line of flight is most valuable when its trajectory is aimed along the molar strata. This is where it serves an essential purpose: causing measured havoc. We might imagine the molar as an austere, unwavering line, the molecular a segmented line, each angular portion of it representing a small non-​radical change. Finally, the line of flight we may imagine as a free-​flowing curve darting across the chart erratically from point to point, criss-​crossing the molar and the molecular lines like a warped lattice. Figure 3.1 shows a chart that illustrates approximately the nature of these lines. We see here assemblages lying upon the straight line of molar assemblages, for example, fascism; on the more fluid (angular) molecular line would lie the machine of democracy; and along the erratic lines of flight, the BwO gone too far: cancer, drug abuse. Far more interesting, however, are the intersections of these different lines, the shared coordinates where truly exciting reformations may occur: notice the points at which the line of flight intersects with the molar line. At such a point, revolution must take place as the old assemblage is deterritorialised, carried away; such a point is where regimes are overthrown, laws irrevocably broken, and social strictures transgressed. Here the BwO prepares the ground for reterritorialisation to build a new assemblage, from which a new line may emerge. The danger of the BwO/​line of flight is that there is the reactionary tendency for the transformative properties of deterritorialisation to be carried away into fixed molar, oppressive structures. This is what happens in the case of the Borg  –​their BwO potential which recognises the interconnectedness of all things organises itself into a rigid totalitarian structure which destroys

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The Girl in the Machine 75

Figure 3.1 A visual representation of Deleuze and Guattari’s molar, molecular and lines of flight.

individuality. However, more pertinent to the subject of this book are more subtle instances of rebellion, where the segments of the molecular are merely touched by the line of fight, where instances of the BwO persuade existing assemblages into gradual, imperceptible change; these encounters are not so openly destructive. Rather, they encroach upon enemy territory like a spy behind enemy lines. These points can occur at places where the molecular line intersects with the line of flight, unravelling previous assemblages through a process of gradual becomings, for example: “becoming-​woman.” As Deleuze explains, this term partly describes the way in which the sphere of literature is and has been amalgamated with the voices of women: “writing should produce a becoming-​woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming” (Plateaus 322). While Woman’s works, experiences and attitudes are and have been historically ignored and dismissed, her becoming is at once the result of her oppression and the means through which she breeds revolution. Woman is produced, created as a symbol of difference, and yet it is also her presence predicated upon difference, her very being in the world, that strikes at the heart of the system that suppresses her: these indissociable aspects of becoming-​woman … [emit] particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, [they] produce in us a molecular woman,

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76  The Girl in the Machine create a molecular woman. … [T]‌he woman as a molar entity has to become-​ woman in order that the man also becomes-​or can become-​woman. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 321) A little girl is made into a woman, artificially. But the sign or symbol of Woman is not entirely the instrument of patriarchy. As we know from the application of Agamben’s philosophy, the dualisms at the heart of patriarchal discourse are far too fragile for this to be the case. Because of that, Woman is a suspended figure and so has the opportunity to become a renegade within the system, to make herself a BwO: The question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body. … That is why, conversely, the reconstruction of the body as a Body without Organs, the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-​woman, or the production of a molecular woman. (322) The girl becomes a woman in a strictly molar sense; this journey takes place upon the rigid molar line of matter-​of-​fact, biological growth and transformation. However, at the same time the girl and her becoming also exist on the molecular line as a BwO, one uniquely positioned at the intersection of so many interconnecting molar lines: “the girl is like a block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 323). In this way the girl can be understood as the central conduit of all becoming placed at the centre of so many dichotomous relationships; the girl is pure difference and potential combined, a part and a negation of so many key concepts: she is a threat to the boy, deployed when he does not perform his becoming-​masculinity effectively; she is the antithesis of man, an abyss of negativity which the patriarchal male must constantly avoid; she threatens womanhood too, for her existence mocks the adult woman kept in a state of perpetual infancy. As such the symbol of the girl can be a natural rebel: She never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age, group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 322–​323) In his much earlier work, The Logic of Sense, Deleuze wrote extensively about a specific girl, Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, whose adventures substantially informed the argument and structure of his work. The central difference between the real world and Alice’s is that Wonderland lays bare the nonsensical structures and inconsistent systems that make up its society,

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The Girl in the Machine 77 whereas, by contrast, the paradoxical and aleatory nature of the real world’s political and social systems that control us are left hidden, subsumed beneath discourse, tradition, paradigms, stratification  –​assemblages. Wonderland is an inverted world such that its paradoxes are already uncovered and widely acknowledged, or in the language of Agamben, its paradigms are already exposed. “If there is nothing to see behind the curtain,” writes Deleuze on the nature of Wonderland: It is because everything is visible, or rather … [i]‌t suffices to follow it far enough, precisely enough, and superficially enough, in order to reverse sides and to make the right side become the left or vice versa. It is not therefore a question of the adventures of Alice, but of Alice’s adventure. (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 12) Alice has an unsettling effect on the world she enters, always questioning the illogic that surrounds her, while her very presence poses uncomfortable questions for the citizens of Wonderland that she encounters. For example, the repeated question of the caterpillar: “who are you?” (Carroll 37). In this case she is considered strangely indiscernible; his reaction reflects the vacuum of meaning and being that the girl represents. She is in this world, as in her own, a question mark, an inconvenient reminder of the unsteady assemblages upon which society and institutions are built. As Deleuze explains, Alice’s journey is a quest for meaning, or rather a search for the means through which meaning is produced; her adventures comprise “her climb to the surface, her disavowal of false depth and her discovery that everything happens at the border” (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 12). By this, Deleuze means that meaning is an inscrutable phenomenon which does not exist in a specific entity but rather is the haphazard result of a network of assemblages whose vast array of relations produces meaning. Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense never mentions the concepts of becoming-​woman or the “girl” that he later develops in A Thousand Plateaus, but his work’s central focus is on the nature and development of series of various kinds, how the members of a series relate to and feed into one another and, by extension, how they are linked by the processes of becoming. The series and each of its members are made intelligible by the relationships of the members to each other. Deleuze explains this through the example of language and the process of naming: “we know that the normal law governing all names endowed with sense is precisely that their sense may be denoted only by another name (→ n1 → n2 → n3…)” (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 79). We might understand Deleuze’s work here on the nature of the series as the proto understanding of his later work on assemblages, axes, the molar, molecular and lines of flight. It is also in The Logic of Sense that we see Deleuze first mentions the BwO, although in very vague terms. The BwO is described here as an extension of another concept which he terms the “the empty square” or the “floating signifier,” that is, those members of a series that exist not quite within and not quite apart from the series to which they

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78  The Girl in the Machine are ostensibly attached: “sense, regarded not at all as appearance but as surface effect and position effect, and produced by the circulation of the empty square in the structural series (the place of the dummy … the blind spot, the floating signifier, the value degree zero … etc)” (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 82). These floating signifiers are capable of crossing from one series to another, of traversing many series, “floating,” disrupting established sequences, much like the more fully developed BwO of A Thousand Plateaus which is capable of existing along more than one axis or line. It is extremely apt then that Deleuze chose Lewis Carroll’s novel as one of the bases of his work on the nature of meaning (sense), since it is a novel whose central character is a young girl at the centre of myriad becomings, a figure that he would later discover is perhaps the most important examples of a BwO or “empty square.” I make this detour through the perhaps more obscure areas of Deleuze’s philosophy in order to explain the nature of the girl as an aspect of becoming-​ woman more clearly but also to develop another, closely related concept of my own: what I  term becoming-​gynoid. As the name suggests, this concept is based on Deleuze’s own becoming-​woman in that it describes a process of gradual change in thought, attitude and being in the world that is a result of the slow encroachment of an other on social reality: a careful yet distinct deterritorialisation. The gynoid is a special gendered case, I argue, because she possesses the constructed difference of femaleness as well as a difference and a strangeness that is more singular: a uniqueness produced by her unique blend of biology and technology. While the girl and becoming-​woman are steps in the gradual deterritorialisation of gender, I believe the becoming-​gynoid can further the process. To fully deterritorialise gender but also to begin reimagining it, reterritorialising it, forming it and reforming it anew, we need a figure more removed from the gender binary yet still maintaining a powerful connection to it. We have to look beyond Woman to her close relation, the machine of simulated flesh, the strange (dis)embodiment of mechanical womanhood: the female cyborg or gynoid.

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4  Female Machines and Female Flesh –​ Women and/​as Automata

Like some feminist discourse that embraces the traits of femininity invented and propagated by patriarchy, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of becoming-​ woman has a similar problem, in that it attempts to subvert the gender assemblage while remaining a working, functioning component of that machine. Becoming-​woman emerges from the virtual as a deterritorialisation of a male-​ centred world. However, the moment the activity of becoming-​woman enters the world it becomes part of the territory of gendered assemblages. Woman behaves much like a cog within a large clockwork device; she is a central cog connected to many others, and so, were her revolutions to be suspended, the device itself might cease to function entirely. But how can this be achieved when we still speak of this destratifying process as one that is in some way, female, a process that we term becoming-​woman? How can a cog both turn and cease to turn at the same time? As Gillian Howie notes with suspicion: “becoming woman empties out the idea of sexual difference but also, I maintain, managed to reintroduce sexual difference, through the back door” (86). This is similar to my own criticism of Irigaray and Cixous as well as other discourses of difference or essentialist feminisms –​reclaiming the assemblage of Woman for feminist purposes does not change the nature of that assemblage and the part it plays in the overall oppressive patriarchal system. However, I do not think the problems posed by essentialist discourses of sexual difference quite apply here because of the way Deleuze conceptualises assemblages. As new “machines” are built, they will gradually change the nature of the other machines which surround it. The Woman assemblage –​or, to use Agamben’s term, the Woman signature –​is not what it was, a thousand, a hundred or even ten years ago. The paradigm/​assemblage has altered alongside and in tandem with the gender or patriarchy machines. Through many imperceptible alterations over time, we see gradual change so that becoming-​woman influences the nature of the gender machine as itself also shifts. Therefore, Woman cannot be understood as an enduring symbol of female resistance, because the concept ‘Woman’ does not possess the required continuity for this. As gender changes over time, Woman changes over time, and ideally it will change so that Woman is no longer placed in a subordinate position. However, what makes this so difficult to understand is that Woman today, Woman a hundred or a thousand

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80  Female Machines and Female Flesh years ago and Woman a hundred or a thousand years in the future are all referred to by the same name. Change can and does happen as paradigms or assemblages shift over time but how can we influence the manner these shifts occur, ensuring they move in a positive direction? The influence of the line of flight is needed  –​ the unknown element, where the cyborg line of flight intersects with the molecular line of becoming-​woman to produce becoming-​gynoid. In contrast to Woman, the gynoid (or female cyborg) is not bound by gendered associations as the “girl” or becoming-​woman in the same direct manner, because it actively disrupts gendered assemblages, rather than altering them from within the system. As a result, the gynoid has more potential as a BwO, or floating signifier; the female machine is a re-​assemblage of female biology, becoming and being. Whether the gynoid appears in fiction in the form of a completely mechanical non-​organic android or a part-human/​part-​machine cyborg entity, the gynoid is always, in some sense, a reordering of the concept of female. Woman is an essence limited by and grounded in the molar sphere of scientific discourse, the molar languages of evolution, instinct, biological determinism combining to form an imagined destiny of female flesh. The gynoid, however, makes a much less problematic line of flight because the gynoid forms an intersection between two territories –​that of machine and that of Woman. As she is still, in some shape or form, a woman: the gynoid retains those profound associations of womanhood and yet in the same moment disavows them. Merging the philosophies of Agamben and Deleuze, we could say that the original signature of gender is eroded and possibly rendered inoperative by the gynoid’s rejection and reformation of existing gender assemblages.

Gynoids: Some Assembly Required Perhaps the first most significant early literary example of the gynoid appears in a short story, “Der Sandmann”, by E.A. Hoffman; here, a young student, Nathaniel, falls in love with Olympia, a beautiful, strangely taciturn, young girl who is revealed at the end to be a highly complex automaton created by the student’s professor, Stalanzani. This revelation is one of the key moments in the story that contributes to Nathaniel’s eventual decent into madness. As Julie Wosk explains: “The women that men manufacture are often articulated creatures, assemblages of disparate parts. The assemblages, which had their earliest manifestations in ancient, articulated Greek, Roman, and Egyptian female votive figures and dolls, embody socially constructed conceptions of gender and women themselves” (Intro). Yet, frequently, the normative aspects of these “dolls” are what make them disturbing, highlighting the problematic nature of the oppressive structures they emulate. Later, Freud would famously draw on Hoffman’s tale in order to explore his theory of the uncanny; Olympia, specifically, would be used to discuss the feelings of dread associated with objects resembling living beings: “we have particularly favourable conditions

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Female Machines and Female Flesh 81 for generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is animate or inanimate and whether the lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the living” (Freud 140–​141). Olympia is Nathaniel’s ideal  –​she is beautiful, exact in her performance of femininity whether singing and dancing or maintaining an adoring silence before her gentleman admirer, Nathaniel, except to gasp in awe at appropriate moments as he unburdens his soul to her: Nathaniel fetched up everything he had ever written … And he had never before had so marvellous an auditor: she did not sew or knit, she did not gaze out of the window, she did not feed a caged bird, she did not play with a lapdog or with a favourite cat, she did not fiddle with a handkerchief or with anything else …she sat motionless, her gaze fixed on the eyes of her beloved … Only when Nathaniel finally arose and kissed her hand –​ mouth too –​did she say: “Ah, ah!”. (Hoffman) Nathaniel finds her appealing chiefly because she has no interests of her own and is instead content to give all her attention to him, fulfilling the masculine fantasy of a woman seen and not heard. When Nathaniel observes Olympia through her window, he sees her sitting motionless in her room and staring vacantly into space in a warped portrayal of feminine passivity and obedience; his extreme appreciation for her submissiveness completely obscures any doubts he may have had about her authenticity. Olympia only ‘comes to life’ (in what limited way she can) when in Nathaniel’s presence, ceasing to exist, in a sense, when her lover is absent. It is precisely those aspects of Olympia which make her the ideal woman that also make her highly disturbing, and later a figure of dread: Olympia is uncanny because her performance of femininity is too good: she sings and dances too perfectly; her movements are too measured; and her beauty is altogether too precise: Her figure is well-​proportioned; so is her face –​that is true! She might be called beautiful if her eyes were not so completely lifeless, I  could even say sightless. She walks with a curiously measured gait; every movement seems as if controlled by clockwork. When she plays and sings it is with the unpleasant soulless regularity of a machine … it seems to us that she is only acting like a living creature. (Hoffman) Olympia is reproducing a simulation of life for the benefit of her male masters. The female machine goes to the very heart of womanhood as pure performativity and it is her precision of being that makes her both an idyllic expression of male fantasy as well as, equally, a figure of unease  –​to use Freudian terminology this is what makes her uncanny: “for animism, magic and witchcraft, the omnipotence of thought, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors

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82  Female Machines and Female Flesh which turn something fearful into an uncanny thing” (Freud 13). Thus, we may deduce that, consonant with Freud, it is Olympia’s “involuntary repetition” as a machine, approximating through automatic gestures and movements the appearance of a woman, that makes her a figure of uncanniness. This of course is reminiscent of Butler’s understanding of gender as a series of imitations, a copy with no original. Olympia performs, with horrifying accuracy and precision, the actions of womanhood, exposing these feminine traits as little more than repetitions; as a result she appears vacuous, exposing the lifeless nature of traditional feminine behaviour at its most extreme. Hoffman’s tale also satirizes the men of the town who like Nathanael haven’t recognized that Olympia was a doll or automaton and suddenly need assurances that their own wives are real, not dolls. Spoofing the social world of artifice where, suggests Hoffman cynically, women may adapt features of artifice and masquerade, Nathanael’s disillusioning experience makes men anxious and distrustful of their own real-​life lovers. (Wosk ch. 3) For Hoffman, all women possess uncanny, automaton-​ like qualities, and Olympia’s all too-​shrewd interpretation of normative femininity draws their authenticity into question. Deleuze and Guattari, of course, heavily critiqued Freudian psychoanalysis through their own form of psychiatric thought, schizoanalysis: “refusing to interpret desire through the system of metaphor and paradigm that interprets desire through the system of ‘lack’ … [Deleuze and Guattari] insist we understand desire in terms of affectivity, as a rhizomatic mode of interconnection” (Braidotti 240). For Freud, repetition is evidence of neurosis, of repressed desires manifesting themselves through unconscious repeated behaviours, and thus involuntary repetition (as in a lifelike automaton) appears uncanny because these same, equally uncontrolled, behaviours in humans signify mental illness. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, repetition is not an indicator of latent perversion, rather it is the key mode through which desire moves through the world, inspiring the valuable production of new assemblages. Freud dismisses Olympia as a mere prop contributing to the overall sense of uncanniness in Hoffman’s tale, overlooking the true significance of her character. Olympia inspires feelings of dread not because she embodies repetition as a whole but rather because she repeats fruitlessly. Repetition, for Deleuze, is necessary and purposeful: at its best, it acts as the conduit of desire, providing flows where it may channel repetitions but also valuable differences, producing molecular lines and lines of flight. Olympia frightens us because her repetition is stagnant, without difference, her acts are all molar and thus represent not individual psychosis but rather a problem or oppression/​repression rooted deep within the social psyche: “social oppression and psychic repression, thus, are for schizoanalysis two sides of the same coin, except that schizoanalysis reverses the direction of causality, making psychic repression depend on social oppression” (Holland 239). The molar repetition that Olympia performs is uncanny because it

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Female Machines and Female Flesh 83 mimics the psychic repression of women in which they come to desire their own subservience, as a result of social conditioning and oppression. This is most terrifyingly expressed in the story when Nathaniel, arriving unexpectedly at her rooms, discovers the truth of Olympia’s nature: “Nathaniel stood numb with horror. He had seen all too clearly that Olympia’s deathly white face possessed no eyes: where the eyes should have been, there were only pits of blackness –​she was a lifeless doll!” (Hoffman). Here the strange warped quality of the female machine is brought to horrifying fruition, in a similar way to the more modern example of female androids in Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, where it is revealed that the women of a small town have been slaughtered and replaced with equally uncanny, yet ‘perfect,’ feminine automatons. Writers both within and outside the science fiction genre seem to have a history of understanding the dreadful nature of the woman machine and capitalising on it to produce terror and unease in the reader. As a constructed machine she has the ultimate potential to fulfil male fantasy; yet, at the same time, it is this potential that contributes to her utter strangeness, for by meeting the impossible and oppressive standards of male fantasy she inevitably perverts them or exposes them as perverted in themselves. It is extremely poignant then that Nathaniel discovers Olympia’s true nature by glimpsing her without her eyes, which her creator oddly describes as “purloined from you” (meaning Nathaniel). His words suggest that Olympia’s sightlessness is a metaphor for his own thwarted gaze: “at this point Nathaniel saw that a pair of blood-​flecked-​ eyes were lying on the floor and staring up at him; Spalanzani seized them with his uninjured hand and threw them at him, so that they struck him in his chest” (Hoffman). It is very fitting here that the dollmaker’s striking Nathaniel in this way should finally send him into a fit of hysteria: the reflection of his desire hitting him physically in the chest, her eyeless sockets shattering his perception as her eyes themselves are cast to the ground, destroyed. The mechanical woman blurs the line between fantasy and nightmare by terrorising the male gaze with his own desires, reflecting his gaze back onto him. Olympia is representative of the two effects of the gynoid figure. The first is to shock, through her ability to simultaneously eclipse and pervert the patriarchal conception of Woman through her mechanical performance of femininity and technological approximation of female biology in a dreadful exposure of the stagnant and disturbing quality of the socially constructed idea of femaleness. The gynoid is a reminder of patriarchal oppression; however, through her uncanniness, the gynoid is also able to disrupt the patterns of feminine behaviour that she so perfectly imitates. In other words, the gynoid is such a powerful literary figure because of her incredibly perceptive representation of the female state. This is because normative femininity simply makes more Deleuzian sense as a mechanical structure: “Nathanael’s dreams and fantasies are destroyed as Olympia herself is grotesquely disassembled and shattered into discrete parts” (Hoffman). Olympia has perfectly smooth, manufactured lines, a compact body that can easily be dismembered, or reordered entirely –​ substituting limbs, skin, eyes, hair to taste as in the case of Olympia’s own removable eyeballs.

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84  Female Machines and Female Flesh Returning to Deleuze’s work in The Logic of Sense, I argue that Woman appears most womanlike when she is portrayed as an artificially constructed being. Deleuzian sense is composed of a network of meanings that circulate throughout a given series, producing complex referential concepts. The sense of Woman is as much a product of this process as other examples I  described earlier, such as language, where each word refers to another and its meanings are all referential and co-​dependent on other words. In a similar way, Woman is the product of a surface circulation of many individual examples of women both real and imagined, all of whom are unintelligible as Woman without the larger referential framework that produces the concept of Woman as a whole.

Authenticity and Performance in C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” C.L. Moore’s short story “No Woman Born” contains another classic sf example of the gynoid. However, unlike Hoffman’s Olympia, Moore’s gynoid, Diedre, has as much agency as uncanniness. Also, unlike Olympia, Diedre does not expertly approximate a man’s ideal of femininity but rather inhabits a featureless cyborg body. In the story, Diedre is a glamorous, celebrity singer and dancer whose body is destroyed in a fire; her brain, however, is preserved by the scientist Maltzer who creates an entirely metal body in which to house Deirdre’s mind. In some ways her mechanical body avoids the uncanniness which surrounds Olympia’s character by appearing deliberately indistinct: And so she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately modelled, ovoid for her head, with a … sort of crescent-​shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been … she had no features. And it had been wise of those who designed her, he realised now. Subconsciously he had been dreading some clumsy attempt at human features that might creak like a marionette’s in parodies of animation. … The mask was better. (Moore 206) Her plain, characterless “mask” for a face and her elegant, golden limbs are desirably ambiguous, allowing the mind of Deirdre, as well as (equally) the minds of observers, to imprint onto her form the overall effect/​affect of femininity; Deirdre is clearly able to master this delicate balance of performance and audience illusion as her gestures and movements combine to create a flawless simulation of femaleness. As Diedre is a performer by profession, her capacity for theatrical imitation emphasises the performative quality of the femaleness. Furthermore, Diedre has become fully integrated into the sphere of performance as her face is now literally a mask that cannot be separated from the rest of her being. One might be tempted to interpret her ‘mask-​face’ as a symbol of her technologically embodied femininity. This role of simulated femaleness is the final performance of her career: one that she will spend the rest of her life playing –​and this is not so different from the experiences of many human women.

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Female Machines and Female Flesh 85 What Diedre’s character also suggests is that the appearance of womanhood is not only reproducible through mechanical means but that the abstraction of machinery is also a key facet of the conception of womanhood itself: “then the machinery moved, exquisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying poise he remembered. The sweet husky voice of Deirdre said, ‘It’s me, John Darling. It really is, you know.’ And it was” (Moore 205). Deirdre’s manager, John Harris, takes in Deirdre’s surprisingly elegant form with astonishment: where a moment earlier he was horrified by her, seeing only a lump of inanimate machinery  –​it is only when Deirdre moves that her feminine elegance and poise manifests itself; in this way the passage strikingly aligns female appearance with ‘illusion,’ or tricks of the mind, as Deirdre’s affective performativity of her female persona requires Harris’ brain “to perform a very elaborate series of shifting impressions” (Moore 205). Yet, as I argued in Chapter 3, that is not to say that Diedre’s “performance” of femininity is entirely inauthentic. The continual question posed by the short story is to what extent the impression of Diedre’s femininity is created by her own intentionality and agency, and how much of it is read by the gendered interpretations of observers. Just as Olympia’s own physical eyes are physically thrown back at Nathaniel in “Der Sandmann”, so is Deirdre’s affective femininity cast at Harris. However, here the balance of power is quite different. Here, Deirdre seems to have some control over the way she is seen by others; her actual, material appearance seems almost irrelevant as, through movement and gesture, she is able to influence the manner in which she is viewed. Performance by performance, the woman series has guided itself into a relative obscurity, creating a Deleuzian sense of woman characterised by the very ambiguity that Deirdre displays as a machine. For, as Harris realises, without animation Deirdre is “only machinery heaped in a flowered chair” (Moore 205). Like the nightmarish marionette-​like facsimile that Deirdre’s manager, Harris, feared would be the outcome of Diedre’s cyborg reconstruction, Olympia possesses an uncanniness, a vacuous quality produced by her lack of personality. Olympia’s grotesque approximation of the ideal and stereotypical woman produces the terrible suggestion of a lifeless object masquerading as a living thing. Unlike Olympia, however, Deirdre’s body is not made to be a simulacra of human appearance, with two “eye-​shaped openings with glass marbles inside them” (Moore 206)  or any other such uncanny, gaudy simulation of feminine beauty; rather her ambiguity is of another kind  –​where Olympia had no agency and her performance of femaleness was completely manufactured, for Deirdre, paradoxically, it is her mechanical nature that links her more so with human women than the mind through which she controls her body and creates female/​feminine gestures: that is her ‘female’ brain. Deirdre’s robotic body is not constructed as an every-​woman or even as an ideal woman (such as Olympia’s was); instead, it has been designed to be a blank canvas for the mind of Deirdre to impress her personality upon, and it is this form of ambiguity that Moore capitalises on to explore the intriguing and disruptive nature of the gynoid. The question of performativity

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86  Female Machines and Female Flesh versus authenticity, or what Nikki Sullivan refers to as the “voluntarist” versus “involuntarist” debate, is complicated by the gynoid’s exaggerated potential for new forms of self-​expression, yet she can also represent a total lack of such control: “all performances and all attempts at subversion will be ambiguous and open to multiple meanings” (Sullivan 89). Olympia is an example of gender repetition through pure mimicry without intention, taken to its most extreme and horrific results. Diedre, on the other hand, represents a notion of gender performance that is more voluntarist in that it contains elements of choice as well as elements of constraint. Diedre’s difference, her unique self emerges through the ways in which she repeats –​we all repeat but we do get to choose –​at least to some extent –​how and in what manner. Halberstam’s understanding of gender and sexuality as ongoing and shifting processes are highly relevant here. Through the lens of the “trans* body,” we can re-​envision gender identity as something continually shifting “whether it manifests in the circulation and use of hormones or in new narratives of selfhood, the figure of transgender embodiment is central to numerous emergent narratives of self and other, being and becoming” (Trans* 30). As stated earlier, the gynoid figure exposes the strange traits peculiar to the socialised idea of womankind. The gynoid’s indistinctive quality shows the nature and sense of Woman to be synthetic: patriarchy and female culture have encouraged women to create ersatz versions of themselves throughout history, altering their features, their extremities, their skin, faces and bodily proportions, using everything from corsetry to fake hair to plastic surgery to produce an overall too-​perfect effect of impossible, idealised femininity and physical femaleness. As Swift’s famous poem A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed illustrates, the female/​feminine tendency towards bodily adaptation and even implantation has a long history. The poem describes a prostitute –​the eponymous “nymph” –​undressing, removing her “artificial hair,” “a crystal eye” and a set of false teeth fastened by means of a “wire” inserted in her gums. Each of these bodily attachments bear a startling connection with modern conceptions of femininity embodied in the gynoid of popular sf; consider Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine with her trademark ocular implant and corset-​tight body held in place by internal metal and a spandex suit ostensibly designed to bolster her unique Borg physiology, echoing the “steel ribbed bodice” of Swift’s “nymph.” With every alteration, every false lash, wig, girdle or implant, Woman has gradually transformed herself through the Deleuzien “series” until transforming finally into a parody of herself: a gynoid. Woman is no longer woman but an adaptable and constructible entity, no longer female but a simulation of a female. Woman has become like Deirdre’s metal helmet: set apart from the mind it was designed to house. Woman has transformed herself almost entirely into the mask of femininity to the extent of moulding, carving and suturing itself into an embodiment of performance. Woman is not (perhaps has never been) herself. In this sense Woman has already, in many ways, become-​gynoid. This fact is as troubling as it is full of potential and possibility when considered in a non-​normative context.

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Female Machines and Female Flesh 87 It is this air of illusion and ambiguity that surrounds both Woman and female machines which allows the gynoid to flourish as a floating signifier, for the gynoid is not only a reflection of patriarchal absurdity taken to an extreme, she is also an empty square, a member of the series capable of traversing and even existing outside of it. Where Olympia was representative of the exposing, indicting qualities of the gynoid, Deirdre is a much more optimistic figure, offering up new possibilities for different kinds of female life, outside of traditional conceptions of gender and outside the female body entirely, as Brian Atteberry notes: A story like Moore’s “No Woman Born” (1944) is unusual for its era in that the signs of gender are reallocated. Its heroine, transferred into a mechanical body, unites three characteristics rarely seen in combination: femininity, power, and artifice. (6) Here, Atteberry describes the positive, inspiring traits of the gynoid, yet this is the other source of the gynoid’s fascinatingly uncanny quality; she is a being that is not only constructed but constructible, that is, not merely artifice but an adaptable entity with the capacity to be designed and redesigned according to the desires of the designer, whoever they may be and whatever their gender identity. The unease which Deirdre evokes in Harris and, for that matter, Maltzer, the scientist who created her mechanical body, reflects this. Harris seems to find Deirdre’s ability to mimic the feminine gestures and movements once performed by her old body simultaneously alluring and disturbing as his description of Deirdre shifts from one paragraph to another. In one section, Harris is overcome with joy at seeing Deirdre, almost exactly as she was “This is Dierdre! She hasn’t changed at all!” (Moore 205). However, in the same scene, he describes her with intense trepidation: She stirred upon the cushions, the long, flexible arms moving with a litheness that was not quite human. The motion disturbed him as the body itself had not, and in spite of himself his face froze a little. He had the feeling that from behind the crescent mask she was watching him very closely. (208) It is of course understandable that a person might have difficulties rediscovering their close friend in the form of a robot; yet the way Moore lingers on the description of Deirdre, drawing out the details of her body while explaining in depth the manner in which her female brain and metal body interact, reveals a certain deep-​set fascination with this amalgamation of woman and machine that might not have been portrayed thus if the protagonist were an android. As Atteberry goes on to argue: “if … the powerful mechanical body had been marked as masculine rather than feminine, it would have seemed to most readers to have no gender at all. Only Moore’s reassignment of the categories makes them noticeable” (Atteberry 6). Once again it becomes obvious that a unique connection exists between the female and the mechanical, it is a relationship

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88  Female Machines and Female Flesh that disturbs because it breeds possibilities that are uncertain, endlessly intriguing and yet also potentially disturbing. However, the gynoid is not unsettling in quite the same way as an android. The apprehension surrounding the male robot is associated with problems of human destiny, questions regarding the nature of what it means to be human. The male robot is a triumph of human invention; the gynoid, however, is often represented as a kind of abomination, as shown when Maltzer describes himself as a Dr Frankenstein figure and is so disturbed by what he clearly considers to be his monstrous creation (Deirdre) that he attempts to end his own life (Moore 232). Deirdre, for her part, is consistently depicted through words and images associated with the non-​human, rather than the superhuman. She is “serpentine,” “not quite human,” “from another world,” a work of curiosity or beautiful artistry, rather than a miracle of science, as Maltzer’s words illustrate: I should have known my gift would mean worse ruin than any mutilation could be. I know now that there’s only one legitimate way a human being can create life. When he tries another way, as I did, he has a lesson to learn. Remember the lesson of the student Frankenstein? He learned, too. (232) Deirdre is received as alien, exotic but also, through the reference to Frankenstein and the allusion to the biblical serpent, she is associated with immorality, being portrayed as a crime against nature. However, as Deirdre explains (and it is she who has the last word in this narrative): “I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh. I’m myself  –​alive. You didn’t create my life you only preserved it” (Moore 235). Nevertheless, Deirdre is not as she once was: her new body offers her almost infinite potential of new experiences and ways of being, her new-​found inhuman suppleness adds new dimensions to her performances, her superhuman strength and speed save Maltzer’s life a moment before his attempted suicide. Despite this, she feels the loss of her previous traditional connections with humanity. Though she will die, she will not reproduce, she has lost her place in the mother-​child desiring machine. Furthermore, as a being without touch or sexuality she cannot experience sexual love and thus cannot form a part of any traditional male-​female desiring machine. Yet, by living as a gynoid, Deirdre has gained access to a myriad of alternative ways of living as a female. The loss of the ability to reproduce, or be physically intimate, is also assurance of a degree of independence impossible for many women; they represent a freedom and a potential for infinite becomings. As Deirdre herself excitedly declares on the story’s final page: “[T]‌here is so much still untried. My brain is human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though … I do wonder” (Moore 242). Deirdre is an example of how the gender assemblage can be remodelled: the dominating, patriarchal male machine no longer necessarily interacts as oppressor with the passive female machine. Becoming-​gynoid sweeps across

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Female Machines and Female Flesh 89 these relationships and has begun to redefine them. At the juncture of the gynoid, both machine and female territories are invaded, deterritorialising those respective territories and giving rise to new potentialities –​new intensities rise from the spatium into the sphere of actuality by posing countless questions to the observer: first, in what sense is this womanoid machine a woman? How can we understand her as such? On the other hand, what relationship could the gynoid possibly have with the desires and limitations which characterise femaleness? Monique Wittig once famously stated that lesbians were not women; that is, lesbians do not fit into the patriarchal desiring-​machines whose processes oppress women, and as such do not constitute women in so far as ‘Woman’ is a term encompassing the sexual and social subservience of an individual to a male (Wittig “The Straight Mind” 57). By the same token, gynoids are not women either, for they too often cannot enter, or choose not to enter, into the desiring relationships that women traditionally form: the man-​ woman desiring machine and also that of the mother-​child assemblage (from which the gynoid is often physically barred) that relate to human assemblages of desire and procreation. Thus, a gynoid’s physical difference from flesh and blood women in some ways emancipates her from the biological deterministic necessities of reproduction and sexual desire. Indeed, what are the desires of the gynoid? This is one of many questions posed in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which explores the potential nature and being of artificial intelligence. Interestingly, while the narrator is a male human bounty hunter who “retires” androids, many of the other central characters are not only androids but, more specifically, female machines: gynoids. Thus, the novel largely deals with a machine perspective that is, in some sense, female: a mechanical consciousness that is in some shape or form womanly, whether in a socialised or otherwise pre-​programmed manner. Given that the novel explores the nature of humanity and the posthuman, it does not seem likely that Dick’s focus on gynoids, as opposed to androids, was accidental. The gynoids of the novel, like Dierdre (in “No Woman Born”), are portrayed with great unease and suspicion, acknowledging their deeply disruptive power. As a result, the gynoids of this novel become doubly significant. Their disruptive potential as beings with the appearance of femininity but without the bonds of biological womanhood that would make them subject to the limiting desiring assemblages of heteronormative relationships –​traditional heterosexual marriage, heterosexual reproduction and idealised images of domestic life –​makes them ideal characters by means with which to question those traits which we consider so fundamentally human. Desiring-​machines –​ Deleuzian assemblages of human relationships  –​are linked to restrictive or even oppressive assemblages of the nuclear family, imposed heterosexuality and female subservience; however, these relationships are often also intimately associated with those emotional attributes which we consider unique to human existence, such as love, kindness and –​most importantly for the novel I am about to discuss in Chapter 5 –​ empathy.

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5  “Formally a correct response. But simulated” –​ Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale

In Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, humanity has been scattered –​thinly spread upon the surface of an irradiated Earth and dotted about the solar system as part of a large-​scale human colonisation programme, following the nuclear fallout of World War Terminus; this briefly-​mentioned nuclear holocaust rendered the Earth largely barren and its citizens at risk of harmful radiation-​induced physical and mental retardation; those who suffer most severely from these effects are known as “chickenheads.” This future society is a bleak one, in which humans have become increasingly isolated from one another and disaffected by their desolate existences, many relying on devices known as “mood-​organs” to experience fulfilling emotions. Their interactions with other humans are similarly disenchanting and scarce due to the low population: so much so that social encounters are most often mediated by another machine that allows humans to fuse together emotionally, known as an “empathy box.” Adding another level to the simulated and artificial nature of daily human life, androids have become standard equipment for off-​world colonial settlers, issued by the government to work for colonists as slaves to aid them in building new communities on other planets. Thus, as Booker and Thomas note “not only has technology made it possible to manufacture androids who are quite similar to humans, but the humans of the book are becoming more and more like machines” (Booker and Thomas 223). As androids become more advanced, so does their capacity for self-​awareness, and they even develop desires of their own, with the result that they often kill their colonial masters in order to make their way back to Earth, masquerading as humans. However, as humanity’s capacity for that which is considered most uniquely human begins to evaporate in this desolate future existence, their need to rigorously protect and religiously maintain human self-​conception increases, so that “what emerges is that the need for humans to maintain strict boundaries between themselves and their technological creations actually robs them of their humanity” (223). Escaped androids are hunted by bounty hunters, like the novel’s protagonist Rick Deckard, who murders (“retires”) “andys,” whom he identifies as such by using the so-​called “Voight–​Kampff,” a test designed to measure the authenticity of an individual’s empathetic responses. This is the poignant contradiction around which the narrative revolves: androids are persecuted for their inability

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Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 91 to effectively approximate an emotion that has become just as inauthentic and simulated in humans themselves. The fact that many of the “andys” encountered in the novel are, in fact, gynoids is thus highly significant, as the female is synonymous with so much that we idealise as characteristically, emotionally, human. As I have discussed in previous chapters, Woman is strongly associated with zoe: a set of biological processes which include emotion, caregiving and empathy. The gynoid complicates these traditional molecular assemblages by adding a technological element into her being. She is unconstrained by the desiring connections of mother-​ child and man-​ woman which belong to the heterosexual matrix: relationships based on empathy and human intimacy, connections on which humanity has always relied for the sake of a collective identity, and which, in this society, they have come to rely on more than ever. As a result, the gynoid, much more so than the android, represents a greater threat to the human sense of self both politically and spiritually. One of the main ways in which the future society of Androids delineates the differences between human and android is through an exaggerated affection for, and worship of, animals. In a future where animals have become incredibly scarce due to radiation, the few that survive are extremely valuable both financially and spiritually; having evolved in human society as the quintessential hallmark of human empathy, they are similarly an indicator of social status. The human capacity to love and care for an animal has become enshrined in the religion of “Mercerism” which is almost universally practiced by all humans, while the Voight–​Kampff scale is used to determine the authenticity of a human based on their physical, emotional responses to scenarios where animals are harmed or mutilated. The bizarre nature of this very obviously politically constructed demarcation between humans and androids is made all the more poignant for the reader as “like Dick’s androids, many modern Americans would fail the test, an implication that further destabilises the boundary between humans and androids by forcing the reader to question her own supposed humanity” (Booker and Thomas 225). The distinction is further concretised, and the human capacity for empathy romanticised, through the government-​ sanctioned religion of Mercerism. This is a belief system that worships animals and glorifies the use of the empathy box which allows several humans at once to engage emotionally by communally experiencing the suffering of Mercer, a Jesus-​like figure who is pelted with rocks as he roams a desert. The religion valorises human empathy through the human/​animal connection while simultaneously glorifying human connections at a distance: allowing humans to continue with their isolationist behaviour while maintaining the belief that their ability to connect emotionally with other living beings is superior to that of androids. The distinction between human and android becomes more and more blurred during the course novel, and the gynoid proves an ideal figure through which to analyse the breakdown of the machinic assemblages that theoretically separate the mechanical from the biological, revealing the fragile nature of the conception of human identity as well as, equally, the disruptive potential of the

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92  Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale gynoid to destroy these distinctions both in the dystopian world of Androids and in our own. The main gynoid character is Rachael Rosen, who is introduced to use as the niece of Elden Rosen, Chief Executive of Rosen Associates, sole manufacturers of the new Nexus-​6 model of android. Her potential as a threatening force is established from the first scene in which she is introduced, when Deckard interviews her using the Voight–​Kampff test. Initially presented to Deckard as a human, Rachael fails this test. The failure, however, is explained away by a fictitious childhood spent alone on a space station, resulting in retarded personality development and thus a reduced empathic capacity; this is another juncture at which the validity of the Voight–​Kampff test is questioned, heavily implying the unreliability of the test given that a large groups of humans would not, theoretically, be able to pass it. Despite this, Deckard eventually intuits the Rosen Association’s deception and pronounces her an android, tipped off by her repeated reference to a rare owl, owned by the Rosens, as an “it” rather than a “he” or a “she.” However, in the tradition of a classic Dickean reversal, this owl turns out to be artificial –​an electric simulacrum developed by the same corporation that designed Rachael; thus, Deckard’s apparently astute determination that Rachael was an android is reduced, in the final pages of this chapter, to a lucky guess. Furthermore, as Umberto Rossi notes “the presence of android animals adds another form of ontological uncertainty to the novel, which in the episode of Rachael’s test further complicated the main human vs android opposition” (Rossi 143); this in turn contributes to the pervasive ambiguity with which the gynoid is portrayed throughout the novel, continually challenging this future society’s pervasive fallacy that the boundary between human and machine assemblages can be easily discerned. Rachael’s failure to display empathic responses (or at least, at what Deckard deems appropriate levels) is at odds with the patriarchal assumptions that underpin traditional feminine responses to cruelty. However, one does not simply pass or fail the test, the determination of whether the subject is an android is completely in the hands of the bounty hunter administering the test, as is the (potential) android’s fate, no matter what verbal and physical responses they offer to the Voight–​Kampff questions. During the scene in which Deckard uses the test on Rachael, the suspicious nature of the conclusions reached based on the highly inconclusive data collected from the test is made abundantly clear. “You’re reading a novel written in the old days before the war. The characters are visiting Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco. They become hungry and enter a seafood restaurant. One of them orders lobster, and the chef drops the lobster into the tub of boiling water while the characters watch.” “Oh god,” Rachael said. “That’s awful! Did they really do that? It’s depraved! You mean a live lobster?” The gauges, however, did not respond. Formally, a correct response. But simulated. (Dick 43)

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Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 93 Her reaction is only marginally different from that expected from a human, and yet this subtle disparity is enough for Rachael to be classified as a ‘fake’ woman: an android, and therefore a woman without personhood or autonomy. Furthermore, this scene highlights the nightmarish possibilities inherent in an ideology that would seek to devise a test in order to determine the authenticity of a person. Deckard’s damning pronouncement that Rachael is an android, and therefore (were she not the property of the Rosen corporation) legally able to be killed, is based on the interpretation of a single person reading a single set of data. Without controls, repeat-​experiments or fail-​safes, Deckard has the state-​sanctioned right to murder her without any need for due process. Deckard’s ability to execute her is predicated solely on the fact that Rachael did not offer what Deckard personally deemed an appropriate, involuntary response to a hypothetical situation. However, this part of the novel becomes even more poignant when we consider that it involves a man, Deckard, classifying a ‘female,’ Rachael, as a non-​ woman for failing to present herself in accordance with social norms. From a biopolitical standpoint, this is particularly significant, as Deckard is a government official classifying a woman as less than such, based on her inability to accurately perform empathy, not behaviourally, but physically, involuntarily and biologically in order to meet the requirements of a pseudo-​scientific test. Empathy appears here as gender, where both serve as regulatory constructions and gatekeepers of what constitutes the human: “gendering … is a matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its enabling cultural condition. In this sense, the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the ‘human’ ” (Butler, Bodies 7). Empathy is a gendered quality which bars androids from entrance into the humanity club and determines whether they can be considered subjects. Deckard, as an extension of the establishment, puts the lives of countless citizens at the mercy of a wildly inexact form of analysis whose scientific validity seems completely unsubstantiated. The confidence which Deckard and the state places in it can only be explained by its ability to bolster the delicate human ego and sanction, with the stamp of scientific corroboration, the killing of innocent life-​forms that threaten the status quo. In the same passage of the novel (also discussed in previous chapters), Rachael and Eldon Rosen discuss the nature of the Voight–​Kampff testing machine: Rick said. “This” –​he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires –​ “measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so-​called “shame” or “blushing” reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. …” “And these can’t be found in androids,” Rachael said. “They’re not engendered by the stimuli-​questions; no. Although biologically they exist. Potentially.” (Dick 40) Here, Deckard freely admits that it is very possible –​even likely –​that Androids do in fact ‘feel’ emotions that they may not fully manifest physically. Thus, the

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94  Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale test does not test for empathy, but merely human empathy, revealing the double standard on which the segregation of androids is founded, which in turn is predicated upon an equally unstable assumption about the nature of human identity. As discussed earlier, Deckard studies Rachael for suitably empathic responses, evidence of a trait associated most with femininity. More specifically, Deckard tests for her ability to feel empathy for animals, once again a highly traditional female expression of her capacity to function within the mother-​child desiring machine, fulfilling her role as a breeder and childcarer. It is particularly significant then that the final question Deckard asks Rachael, and whose response finally convinces him that she is in fact a ‘fake’ woman, directly references human offspring: “Like my case? Nice isn’t it? Baby-​hide” (Dick 51). This final question cements the link between the human capacity –​ personified by the human female –​to feel empathy for animals and the ability to care, and feel empathy, for children. In other words, Rachael is a threat not only because she, as a gynoid, potentially denies the superiority of human feeling but also because, as a simulacrum of a woman, her capacity to very nearly pass undetected as a human female tarnishes the ideal of female empathic superiority on which human identity is founded. Like a Victorian doctor declaring a woman hysterical or mad for failing to behave in accordance with patriarchal social norms, so does Deckard declare Rachael an unreal woman for failing to display the appropriate, socially sanctioned responses to questions pertaining to situations whose significance is predicated entirely on standards and values that are culturally specific rather than scientifically significant. Just as women and female sexuality have historically been considered a threat to male dominance and identity, so do androids –​and particularly gynoids –​pose a similarly devastating risk to human dominance in the world more generally. This is highlighted most notably by Rachael’s fierce act of rebellion against humanity’s veneer of superiority when, at the end of the novel, she kills Deckard’s expensive new goat by pushing it from the top of his apartment building. However, in doing so, Rachael does not only reveal her ambivalence towards animal life, she also shows she is capable of feeling empathy for her fellow androids, a group of which Deckard had just “retired.” After Deckard’s wife Iran laments the needless nature of Rachael’s crime, Deckard is forced to acknowledge that there was, at least from Rachael’s perspective, some significance to her action: “ ‘Not needless,’ he said, ‘She had what seemed to her a reason.’ An android reason, he thought” (Dick 195). This strongly suggests that the androids in the novel are capable of feeling: perhaps not empathy that can be related to human standards of emotion, but a similar emotion of sorts. Rachael’s revenge on Deckard is particularly important because it reveals that Rachael, and quite possibly other androids like her, are capable not only of feeling some form of anger and loss but also of understanding the complex injustice at work when the life of a non-​sentient animal is worth infinitely more than that of a complex, mechanical life form capable of reasoned, rational thought. This possibility is further supported by comparing the novel’s description of androids with its portrayals of human characters:

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Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 95 Android bodies are typically more expressive than those of humans in the novel, subject to more detailed descriptions, and they also engage in traditionally human physical expressions of affection while humans themselves primarily “touch” each other through the technological medium of the empathy box. (Booker and Thomas 226) As Rachael notes, in an earlier passage before Deckard retires the other androids: “ ‘That goat,’ Rachael said. ‘You love that goat more than me. More than you love your wife, probably. First the goat, then your wife, and last of all–​’ She laughed merrily. ‘What can you do but laugh?’ ” (Dick, 1999b, p.  172). Here Rachael laughs cynically at the awful contradiction of her existence: “androids cry, laugh, become enraged, and yet are conscious that, according to the dictates of human culture, they are not, in fact alive” (Booker and Thomas 226). In doing so, Rachael displays a level of emotional depth and understanding that seems beyond the capacity of most of the novel’s human characters. After a sexual encounter between Deckard and Rachael, they leave their hotel room: [T]‌ogether, saying little, the two of them journeyed to the roof field … “My goat is probably asleep right now,” he said. “Or maybe goats are nocturnal. Some animals never sleep. Sheep never do, not that I could detect …” “If you weren’t an android … if I could legally marry you, I would.” (Dick 168) The fact that Deckard speaks about Rachael and his pet almost in the same breath also contributes to the sense that the goat is of as much or even more importance to him than Rachael, whom he claims to love enough to marry. Thus, Rachael’s words about Deckard’s love of his goat also reflect the similarly ridiculous position of women within the traditional molar, marriage assemblage, where both women mentioned in Rachael’s list appear below a pet, either equating women with animals or suggesting they are considered by men to be beneath them, accessories. Most crucially, however, Rachael refutes any connection she has with the assemblages that might have conceivably tied to her to those expressions of humanity grounded in female biological responses. Rachael’s destruction of the thing she is supposed to love and care for is a direct protest and refusal of the mother-​child desiring machine and, by extension, the bonds that ineffectively hold the fabric of Earth’s dwindling occupants together under the banner of humanity. Furthermore, having recently become Deckard’s mistress, Rachael echoes by her words the ancient trope of virgin and whore: where Deckard’s wife represents the purer, more respectable face of Woman, Rachael corresponds with the figure of the sinful harlot. Rachael understands that, as a machine, she can never hope to be anything more to Deckard. Thus, in this passage, the novel once again points to the intersection of woman and machine. The gynoid reveals the assemblages that constitute Woman –​the ancient binary of virgin

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96  Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale and whore –​and these same assemblages can be seen as deeply associated with our conception of the female android. Judith B.  Kerman comments on the similarity between real women and fictional gynoids: “Some real women such as prostitutes and housewives can, in the manner of film stars, be compared to [gynoids] because they adhere to feminine roles manufactured by the minds of men” (Kerman 30). The gynoid is the fulfilled fantasy of the ideal prostitute, a woman divorced from reproductive capability as well as from (in theory) emotional need or agency, making her the perfect mechanical sex toy. However, Rachael cannot be so simply reduced to such an allegory, since the gynoid figure cannot be trusted to easily conform to one conceptualisation or another. She is a multiplicity that intersects with many assemblages at many points across many molar/​molecular lines. Rachael subverts the hyper-​ sexualised, male fantasy of the selfless sexbot, as a character with agency and great manipulative power, particularly over Deckard. As Rossi notes “Rachael belongs to a type of character whose ability to cheat is remarkable … I am obviously talking of the so called dark ladies so often found both in noir movies and hard boiled fiction” (Rossi 144). Conforming, in many ways, to this noir trope lends Rachael’s character potency and also serves to complicate her position in the narrative in relation to Deckard. As Rossi also points out, “one of the classical theorists of noir cinema, Damian Hirsch, defined [dark ladies] as ‘amoral destroyers of male strength’ ” (Rossi 144). Dark ladies typically succeed in this by using their sexuality to trick and deceive male protagonists, leading them to their doom, their “male strength” weakened by the knowledge that they have been beaten by a woman and, furthermore, have been used emotionally and sexually in a manner resembling the way hard-​boiled male characters typically treat women. In line with this, Rachael’s manipulative capacity is immediately established in the novel when Rachael and Eldon Rosen trap Deckard with the Voight–​Kampff test early in the novel. Later on, Rachael makes Deckard believe that she wishes to help him to retire the escaped androids, when in truth she hopes to force him to abandon his mission by using his human emotions against him: in a cunning reversal of the Voight-Kampff passage where they first meet, Rachael attempts to weaponise Deckard’s capacity for empathy; in the fashion of a typical dark lady, Rachael entraps him by making him care for her physically and emotionally, a tactic she has employed with several bounty hunters as a means of thwarting their efforts to retire androids, as she explains: “you’re not going to be able to retire androids any longer … no bounty hunter has ever gone on … after being with me” (Dick 171). However, this traditional sequence of events is complicated by the fact that Deckard has not been outwitted by a woman but by a machine performing the part of a dark lady, exploding the traditional tropes of male and female, masculine and feminine, that should govern their interaction within the narrative. Deckard has been doubly deceived, having fallen for several performances of different kinds. Rachael performs her role of femme fatale not only to achieve her own ends but also, like many human women, to function within society. Rachael must perform her female role in order to masquerade as a

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Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 97 ‘real’ woman when travelling outside the Rosen Association –​to survive and in turn aid the survival of others like her. However, Rachael is also at the mercy of the role she is perpetually confined to; when Deckard threatens her with violence in response to the revelation of her betrayal, Rachael becomes helpless as she tries to locate her weapon with which to fight him off: “her hands dived for her bulging, overstuffed, kipple-​filled purse; she searched frantically, then gave up. ‘Goddamn this purse,’ she said with ferocity. ‘I never can lay my hands on anything in it’ ” (Dick 170). Prophetically, Deckard had mentally noted in an earlier scene that “like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse” (Dick 164). Rachael’s affair with Deckard warps him because of its intense ambiguity, which almost convinces him to end his career as a bounty hunter: “This is my end, he said to himself. As a bounty hunter. After the Batys there won’t be any more, not after this, tonight” (Dick 169). Deckard is unable to decipher his encounter with Rachael because he realises he cannot connect with her in the traditional manner of man and woman, user and used. She is neither prostitute nor dark lady: neither sex toy nor viable romantic partner. Furthermore, Deckard is not the first person to be warped by Rachael’s nature: another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, whom Rachael also attempted to seduce in order to protect other androids, was brought to the brink of insanity by Rachael’s indeterminate nature. His inability to make sense of her and of his feelings for her, as Rachael puts it, warped him “the wrong way”: he went mad in a manner that was undesirable to the android cause, in that it hardened him in an almost inhuman way so that he began to take a perverse pleasure in “retiring” androids, making him a more vicious and efficient killer. Strikingly, Rachael’s role in the narrative was greatly reduced in Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, Blade Runner. Unlike the novel’s depiction of her as an intelligent and cunning femme fatale, with her own nefarious agenda and sexual agency, her portrayal in the film shows a greatly diluted version of the character whose only real resemblance to the original is her position within the Rosen corporation (renamed Tyrell in the film): she is still a public facing, complex gynoid portrayed as Eldon Rosen/​Tyrell’s niece. As I  have argued, Dick portrays Rachael as a powerful figure who challenges the oppressive assumptions that mitigate the existence of androids. By extension she also manages to reflect some of the assemblages that limit the lives of women and reveal how the gynoid, at the intersection of these two assemblages, acts as a disruptive force to both the molar/​molecular lines. In the film, Rachael and the other gynoids, or “replicants” as they are called in the film, are portrayed in a heavily feminised and sexualised manner. Rachael is transformed from scheming, dark lady, into a demure ally and love-​interest for Deckard, who, in this adaptation, is divorced and single. Rather than providing a complex critique of the established world view that androids are lesser beings, this Rachael does not attempt to save her robotic brethren from Deckard’s slaughter, rather she aids in their demise, shooting one in the back in order to save Deckard’s life (Blade Runner 01:00:24-​36). Predictably the ‘good’ female replicant, Rachael, is shown to be shy and

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98  Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale retiring, initially rejecting Deckard’s sexual advances, her pale and trembling femininity accentuated by long locks of black hair, the bulky power-​dressing fashion of which heightens the small and fragile nature of the woman underneath. Meanwhile, the ‘bad’ female replicants dress provocatively and flaunt their sexuality for material or personal gain. Most of Rachael’s witty, sly dialogue is missing from the film, her language and behaviour passive and often characterless, highlighting her mechanical nature. She speaks to Deckard in soft, short, half-​whispered sentences when she speaks at all –​much like the Olympia of “Der Sandmann,” who has a similarly limited number of verbal responses to give to her lover, Rachael’s speech is frequently confined to breathlessly uttered sighs. In response to Deckard’s brash behaviour, Rachael is calm, accepting, replying only with a tearful silence. Furthermore, she is acquiescent in Deckard’s sexual advances; having initially resisted him by running away, she meekly submits after he slams the door of his apartment in front of her just as she is attempting to exit through it. Deckard then throws her against the wall and instructs her to “say ‘Kiss me’ ” (Blade Runner 01:08:15-​01:09:14). When she attempts to explain that she does not want to be intimate with him because she cannot trust what she has recently discovered are programmed, mechanical emotions, he interrupts, repeating his previous line, this time with more emphasis and menace in his tone. Yaszek notes that “The blade runner essentially ‘reprograms’ Rachael to behave like a ‘real woman’; as the passive eroticised object of his own active desire” (ch. 4). It is hardly surprising that several critics have noted that “the scene has a disturbing rape-​like quality” (Gaut 40). Most crucially, however, it shows how the gynoid characters of the film are portrayed as objects “and powerfully conveys that Deckard is still treating [Rachael] as a thing” (Gaut 40). Unlike the Rachael of the novel, the film’s gynoid is forced by the movie’s narrative into the traditional feminine position within the man-​woman desiring assemblage. What this gynoid lacks in reproductive capability she makes up for in other, heavily exaggerated female attributes: she bolsters the dominant position of Deckard through her diminutive nature, and her dialogue’s only purpose is to provide questions that Deckard will later seek to answer –​for example, “Have you ever retired an android by mistake?” (Blade Runner 00:17:06-​09) or “You know Voight–​Kampff test of yours? Have you ever taken that test yourself?” (Blade Runner 01:04:36-​43). This Rachael drops philosophical conundrums in Deckard’s lap for him to explore and discover; the original Rachael poses questions which leave Deckard disturbed. The character of Pris in the film (which is loosely based on the Pris Stratton of the novel) is the opposite of Rachael. Here, it is Pris who is the dark lady contrasted with Rachael’s innocence; described as “a basic pleasure model” (Blade Runner 00:14:19-​21). She is portrayed as a robot concubine: scantily clad in tight-​fitting, punk-​rock, black attire, complete with visible suspenders. An escaped android from the off-​world colonies, she conspires with another android, Roy Baty, to attempt to lengthen their limited lifespan. She uses her sexuality to obtain information and access to the Tyrell corporation through a naïve Tyrell employee, J.F. Sebastian, a robotics specialist. In Scott’s depiction

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Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 99 of this world, the ‘good’ gynoids are submissive and almost apologetic in their expression of personhood, the ‘bad’ gynoids are overtly sexual and are punished by death for their attempt to gain freedom –​in Pris’s case, from a life of forced prostitution. Pris is eventually killed by Deckard as is another fellow escaped gynoid, Zhora, who works on Earth as a stripper who dances with a snake. As Judith Kerman observes: Appropriately, both Zhora and Pris, literal female objects, die against a background of other literal female objects. Deckard shoots Zhora as she runs in front of a story window filled with naked female manikins. And, Pris masquerades as a member of a group of manikins before Deckard kills her. (Kerman 30) Thus, at every turn, there is an attempt to suppress the gynoid by placing her in traditional assemblages of male/​female desiring relationships, paradoxically making these examples of female machines appear all the more like real, living women by heightening and accentuating their status as an object: as a machine or ‘doll’ created specifically for the male gaze. By portraying gynoids as worthless, soulless objects capable only of sex as manipulation or submission, the film carries startling and uncomfortable implications for the lives of real women. However, the manner of Pris’s death (in the film) in many ways confronts these problems of gynoid objectification, challenging traditional conceptions of the female as well as those classic assemblages associated with the female machine as ideal sex object. Appropriately, Blade Runner contains several visual and conceptual allusions to Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann”. The first and most obvious example of this is the film’s visual, stylistic and conceptual fixation with eyes. The audience is able to distinguish androids from humans by the fact that androids eyes are marked by an ethereal glow; when Deckard first meets Rachael and tests her using the Voight–​Kampff, a beam of light focuses on the iris of her eyes in order to measure (as in the novel) emotional response betrayed by involuntary pupil dilation. Pris’s eyes also glow, and this almost demonic sparkle is accentuated when she sprays liquid eye-​makeup around her eyes in the shape of a black band (Blade Runner 01:09:51-​58) –​the fact that this pattern resembles the shape of a blind-​fold seems again to point to the uncanny, unsettling nature of the gynoid. Just as Olympia’s eyes are thrown in the face of her human lover Nathaniel, confronting him with the lifelessness of his beloved, so too do the eyes of Rachael and Pris confront Deckard, and the audience, with a sense of ambiguity. As both characters repeatedly gaze directly into the camera, they stare the audience out, penetrating us with the questions their characters pose. As eyes are traditionally the seat of the soul, whose expression is an indicator of consciousness, their accentuation here highlights the natural curiosity posed by the problem of mechanical artificial intelligence. If the brain behind the eyes is the basis of sentience for humans, is this also the basis for mechanical beings?

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100  Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale Where is their ‘soul’ located? Although the character of Roy Batty, a male escaped android and romantic partner of Pris, articulates most of the philosophical questions at work in the film, it is the gynoid characters, particularly Pris, who most hauntingly pose these problems on a visually stunning level. As Will Brooker argues: “a number of critical accounts have compared Pris to Olympia” (Brooker 1923), and the visual relationship between the two is undeniable; Deckard discovers Pris for the first time when she is posing as a mannequin or doll by remaining perfectly still among a host of clockwork figures. Dressed in white, her skin is covered with white foundation and heavy dark blue circles of blush on her cheeks. She appears for the first time as a nightmarish doll, as uncanny as the Olympia doll seems to Nathaniel when he discovers her true nature. Lifting the thin veil from her head, Deckard peers at her in wonder, mimicking the curiosity felt by the audience for these strange, indeterminate, android creatures. Pris responds to this intrusive stare by suddenly coming to life and striking him in the face (Blade Runner 01:28:54-​57); she then proceeds to fight him through a series of highly athletic leaps and twists. I have already argued that some aspects of the way the gynoids in Blade Runner reinforce gendered constructions. However: The graphically violent deaths of Zhora and Pris, women who do not submit to their male-​determined fate but who aggressively fight for and cling passionately to every last breath in their bodies in an entirely “unfeminine” fashion, unsettle such a reading. (Brooker 1923) Pris is not the passive doll she appears to be when, instantly and unexpectedly for both Deckard and the audience, she is transformed into a lethal fighter, striking out against Deckard’s male gaze, the same gaze that created a market for her to be brought into being as nothing but a “basic pleasure model” for male colonists. Pris changes the terms of the mechanical assemblage relationship through which she is meant to interact with Deckard. Proving she is more than a mere “pleasure model,” she sets the terms of her involvement with the opposite sex, attempting to kill Deckard in a way that symbolises her break with those assemblages of sex and reproduction that define the female. As Kerman argues, this is communicated in a startlingly visual fashion as Pris squeezes [Deckard’s] head with her legs, a potentially lethal action which, of course, reverses the intent of the birth process. Here, instead of a male baby’s head emerging from between his mother’s legs, an adult male’s life is threatened when his head is almost crushed by the legs of a female. (Kerman 29) In this way, Pris violently severs her ties to that which is classically female, reminding the viewer as well that, as a gynoid, she has the advantage of being able to refuse female molar assemblages of biological determinism: “if reproduction can be redefined as technological, then biologically-​grounded notions

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Scoring Women on the Voight-Kampff Scale 101 of sexual difference become contextual ones open to reinterpretation” (Yaszek ch. 4). Pris refutes the dominion of her programming by revealing her own, acrobatic skills, which she employs to fight Deckard physically, rather than engaging with him sexually (in the manner she was designed for). She alters the heterosexual assemblage by simultaneously ‘altering’ her physical gynoid body. Pris repurposes her body, which was designed for the sexual gratification of others, and weaponises it in order to fight for her survival. In doing so, she challenges the relationship between user and used by asserting herself as the user of own mechanical body that was designed to be sexually used by others. However, Pris is ultimately unsuccessful and dies at the hands of Deckard who eventually shoots her with his gun. The fact that Pris never uses a gun to defend herself seems significant here –​this can be read as an act of defiance: a desire to assert her bodily autonomy by perhaps proving that she needs no other tool to defend herself other than that of her own, superior replicant body. Her attempt to suffocate Deckard with her thighs seems to reflect Pris’s desire to dominate her human oppressors by proving her bodily superiority to the weakness and vulnerability of human flesh. As I have argued previously, using Agamben’s understanding of “use” as a point of indistinction between self and other is often reflected in gynoid figures who are uniquely capable of modifying and/​or utilising their bodies or bodily augmentations to achieve their goals. The gynoid repurposes and reorders existing assemblages, both physical and figurative. My next chapter will explore how humans interact with video games in a manner which represents a similar act of assembling and dissembling: firstly by engaging with the video game interface and then by engaging with the fictional world of the video game and playing within it in order to produce emergent experiences.

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6  Profane Simulations –​Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games

While previous chapters have focused on the nature of the gynoid in sf film, TV and literature, this chapter and the next explore how players’ interactions with video games produce emergent properties which challenge established power structures like gender, heteronormativity and biopolitics, in line with Agamben and Deleuze’s philosophy. As the player interacts with the game, engages with its rules and the cultural constructs embedded in its narratives, the gaming experience interrogates the boundary between user and used which the gynoid similarly challenges. The player has the potential to have cyborg or becoming-​gynoid experiences by playing the game, particularly when moving through game worlds which challenge notions of bodily integrity. The kinds of games which challenge normative structures produce particularly significant forms of gaming experiences because the act of playing a video game threatens established boundaries between self and other, gamer and avatar, human and interface. This chapter will focus on the Fallout series of games, more specifically some of the most recent instalments in the franchise: Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4. The game’s setting and mechanics can serve to challenge traditional social and political constructions such as the heteronormative household whose biopolitical significance I  have already discussed in earlier chapters: the institution of the home is responsible for producing gender normativity through the raising of children. However, this process of learning to imitate behaviours which maintain oppressive structures is disrupted by a central children’s activity: play. However, while play is a free and unconstrained activity, games are significantly defined as a medium by their rules  –​yet within the rule-​based structure of the game, creative interactions between players and rules can produce emergent kinds of play. The rules of games form an interchange relationship with game narratives, particularly in the case of video games, so that the rules support the narrative of the game and vice versa. As Jesper Juul writes: “It is a basic paradox of games that … the enjoyment of a game depends on … easy-​ to-​use rules presenting challenges that cannot be easily overcome” (Juul 5). As Juul continues to explain, the activity of gaming –​specifically video gaming –​ can be distilled down to the experience of two game elements, “that of emergence (a number of simple rules combining to form interesting variations) and progression (separate challenges presented serially)” (Juul 5).

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 103 Juul cites the popular game mechanic of the quest, as a prime example of “emergence” and “progression” working together: the quest allows the player to complete challenges while also progressing through the story, providing “an interesting type of bridge between game rules and game fiction in that the game can contain a predefined sequence of events that the player then has to actualise or enact” (Juul 17). These instances of ludonarrative harmony within video games, in which emergence and progression, narrative and play, immersive ‘text’ experience and player creativity come together, are of most interest because these are moments where intriguing levels of meaningful interactivity become possible. Moments such as these in video games allow for the generation of potentialities akin to those imagined in the philosophy of Agamben and Deleuze; more specifically video games provide instances of Agambenian suspension, inoperativity, or Deleuzian BwO: moments of becoming. The Fallout games provide an intriguing retro-​futuristic setting, based on a 1950s vision of the future, immersed in vintage Americana and an atomic-​age vision of the future from a 1950s perspective: The ruined and decaying America of Fallout 3, then, is not the ruin of America as it is now, or when the game was released, but rather as it was half a century ago. This was the united states that embodied marginalising, oppressive institutions … this context lays special emphasis on the connection of the ruined country with the dismantling of a patriarchal and oppressive society (Watts 257) Constructions of power are challenged through the ruined, post-​apocalyptic setting which imagines retro-​ futuristic projections of 1950s America as a destroyed landscape that is as deconstructed as it is full of possibility. While gender is not a central theme in the game, neighbouring biopolitical structures dependent upon heteronormativity are repeatedly interrogated by the game through quests, central story arcs and game dynamics. This becomes particularly apparent in Fallout’s “Vaults”: underground shelters in which humans have taken refuge from the nuclear holocaust above. In these shelters, the dynamics of family and politics, subversion and biopower are brought together in horrific ways to explore the intermingling of political domination with heteronormative family structures. Furthermore, as the player roams through the post-​apocalyptic world of the Fallout Games, the player is aware of the altered, cyborg nature of the people and objects around them: no NPC (non-​player character) has been untouched by the nuclear holocaust, many humans and animals have been reconstituted into new bodily assemblages through chemicals, radiation or human experimentation. Like the make-​ shift settlements build up from pre-​war debris, the creatures of the wasteland are new formations from disparate elements of biology, mutated matter and repurposed tech. The game world and characters challenge the integrity of everything and in so doing emphasise the fiercely technologically integrated

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104  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games nature of the real world as well, obscuring the separation between subject and object. The Fallout games challenge the stability of all structures, from historic landmark buildings and the assemblages of power associated with them to the physicality of human and animal life. As mutated animals and humans roam the distorted landscape, the game world is a kind of BwO in which all ‘bodies’ have been fundamentally altered by technology. The crafting mechanic combined with the game’s ruined, post-​apocalyptic aesthetic confronts players with the constituent parts of objects and their reconstitution into new assemblages. In this world, the significance of gender is obscured beneath new, competing formations. Gender becomes universally ambiguous in this setting where radiation and scientific experimentation have transformed many humans into raging, irradiated ghouls or superhuman mutants –​everyone in the wasteland is a cyborg, and everything is in some way indeterminate. The retro-​futuristic setting confronts players with objects that are simultaneously iconic and unfamiliar: In the Fallout universe the World of Tomorrow has become a thing of the past, as the games are set after a nuclear apocalypse has destroyed that retrofuture and transformed the landscape into a wasteland. The avatar wanders through this wasteland, encountering relics of this futuristic past. (Mclancy) In most of the more recent instalments of the Fallout franchise, the player must break down these relics in order to produce new, innovative objects to aid the player in their progress through the game. As Mclancy notes: “Because mid-​ century modern design is so instantly recognizable and so inextricably located in a particular time and place, when these nostalgic cultural products faithfully recreate the aesthetics of the Fifties, they also automatically evoke the period’s ideology.” The player is encouraged to rework and repurpose this ideology through the process of crafting to make new assemblages. This is a particularly powerful game mechanic in Fallout 4, where the player has the opportunity to craft not just weapons, armour and medicines (as in the previous games) but also objects, materials and buildings for settlements. The player actively works to rebuild the landscape in their own image, creating new communities for NPC characters: from farms and houses to shops and military bases. At the same time, the game includes the V.A.T.S.  combat system, which allows the player to temporarily freeze real-​time combat and choose exactly which body parts of their enemy to attack with their weapon. This draws the players’ attention once again to the specific parts (organs) of the bodies they engage with and to consider the enemies they encounter as made up of individual pieces, bodily assemblages. Frequently the enemies encountered are the result of mutations either caused by human medical experiments or by the radiation in the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear war. This means that, when in combat, the V.A.T.S.  system confronts the player with their enemy’s their additional arms, heads, legs as well as the absences of certain limbs and the

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 105 enlargement of others. The player is continually confronted with bodily ambiguity, as reoriented physical bodies roam a wasteland of objects and buildings divorced from their original use.

Use and Play, Sacred and Profane Agamben highlighted repeatedly in his work the essentially disruptive and inherently critical nature of play in relation to the established paradigms they imitate. Agamben discusses the historical significance of play as an archetypal form of blasphemy in his work Profanations, where he explains play’s connection with the sacred and the performance of ritual. For Agamben, sacred acts are composed of two elements, the performance itself and the divine operation which it symbolises: “the power of the sacred act … lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it” (75). The sacred aspect of the ritual need not be specifically religious, however. Although most rituals include or once included a deference to the divine, more modern secular traditions inevitably espouse the same signature of power, as Agamben explains: “the political secularisation of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact” (Profanations 77). Thus, the sacred can be said to theoretically include any well-​established paradigm of power, whether it be a religious, political, economical or social tradition. The key thing here is that even the secular paradigms that make up western civilisation derive some share of their potency from an archaic relationship to the signature of the sacred or religious –​that which is related to an infallible authority and an unchallengeable hierarchy. Thus, what is considered ‘sacred’ by society may not have any relationship with the religious that is consciously understood by those that observe the rites and rituals which bolster a given society’s traditions. From here on I will employ the word ‘sacred’ to describe any paradigm or signature of power whose position in society is so elevated that its symbolic artefacts are considered inappropriate for use in play. Video games provide a haven for the profane use of the sacred, particularly role-​playing games that create a detailed simulated world where any ‘profane’ actions of the player may remain above reproach by virtue of the entirely fictional space in which these actions take place. In other words, video games allow players to experience and perform with relative freedom and without fear of moral sanction that which society or government might chastise. Nevertheless, while the game itself is virtual, the acts that take place within the simulated landscape occupy a strange limbo between real and unreal. Though they are fictional, it cannot be denied that they have an effect on the player’s mind and may even affect the player’s real-​life actions, thus having repercussions in the real world. We must also be careful not to misconstrue the act of play as something that occurs in a vacuum; the player’s interaction with the game, after all, takes place in the real world, with tangible gaming equipment (TV, games

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106  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games console/​PC, controller, headset, etc.) which is operated in reality by the player’s body and inevitably within a real environment the player inhabits. As a result, the player –​while playing the game –​can be said to be suspended between the virtual world of the video game and the actual world. One falls into the other as the payer engages with the game space, always slipping in and out of their fictional experience as they rescue princesses or raid tombs in one moment and in another pause the game to answer the phone, make tea, speak to a family member, only to return the virtual game world a moment later. Furthermore, many theorists have commented on the disruptive, dangerous or even abusive elements of play. Brian Sutton-​Smith talks about the “illicit play” of children as a way of rebelling against adult power through satirising adult authority figures such as teachers. He also discusses the use of “cruel play” in school playgrounds: bullying and teasing (111–​112). Miguel Sicart discusses play as a means of relieving tension, providing a break from a norm with an opportunity to ignore certain rules for a brief period: “we need play precisely because we need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society” (Sicart 5). On the other hand, providing this respite is destructive to convention, taking over the context in which play takes place, it breaks the state of affairs. This is often done for the sake of laughter, for enjoyment, for passing pleasures. But like all other passing pleasures, play can also disruptively reveal our conventions, assumptions, biases, and dislikes. (Sicart  14–​15) Play is full of potential because it takes ‘sacred’ processes and puts them to “an entirely inappropriate use” (Agamben, Profanations 75). It allows us to estrange ourselves from a given paradigm by separating ‘sacred’ acts from the myths and power structures they both convey and support. Play divorces the ‘sacred’ object, act or ritual from the values these represented by various sacred objects, rituals or social customs outside of the game space: “play breaks up this unity: as ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth that preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive” (Agamben, Profanations 75–​76). Play repeats a ritual badly; it only approximates the processes of the ritual or relationship it seeks to imitate: Children, who play with whatever old thing falls into their hands, make toys out of things that also belong to the spheres of economics, war, law, and other activities that we are used to thinking of as serious. All of a sudden, a car, a firearm, or a legal contract becomes a toy. (Agamben, Profanations 76) By the same token, a child playing at getting married does not grasp the full significance of the ritual they perform, and so the meaning behind the ritual itself is partially or even entirely obscured. By repeating incorrectly, repeating with difference, players open up new possibilities for those ‘sacred’ paradigms

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 107 they are mimicking. This can be extended to all forms of ‘ritual’ performance, including the subversive potential in traditionally gendered behaviour: when gender is performed in a non-​normative way that promotes agency rather than reinforcing normative structures. Certain video games encourage us to scrutinise structures and play promotes performative disruption. As Agamben states: “play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it” (Agamben, Profanations 76). Play is a profanation which temporarily suspends the power of the paradigms it imitates, a form of blasphemy that “neutralises what it profanes”: toy soldiers ‘die’ in ‘battles’ and then come back to life, cars ‘crash’ and yet remain undamaged, the objects that were once ‘sacred’ enter a new dimension of ‘use.’ Ritual objects of gender normativity can become toys too: lipstick can be warpaint. The first Toy Story film illustrates this through the character of Sid: a little boy who mutilates his sister’s teddies and Barbie dolls to make nightmarish re-​assemblages of different objects. His sister, meanwhile, steals the action hero Buzz Lightyear and dresses him in a pink hat and apron: in this scene he sits at the girl’s tea party and is referred to as Mrs Nesbit (Toy Story). Play makes certain subjects, and their related objects, uniquely accessible to criticism, satire and experimentation by exposing the aleatory nature of the oppositions which normally place these subjects above criticism. The signature of power that links the paradigms of government, economics, social traditions, etc. with religion imbues modern secular paradigms with a status removed from common use: “not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core” (Agamben, Profanations 74). Play is a profanation that weakens this separation and returns the sacred to common, human (rather than divine) use. The founding dichotomies of higher and lower, divine and human, sovereign and subject can be exposed as indistinct categories.

The Value of Junk The Fallout series of games is an example of how video role-​playing games can provide a platform for the type of emergent play opportunities that can be valuably disruptive: problematising, suspending and critiquing of the established traditions to which Agamben refers. Based on an alternative history of America in which 1950s aesthetics and ideals endured up to the year 2077 (when a nuclear holocaust destroyed most of the world), David Chandler discusses how Fallout 3 achieves a high level of player autonomy in a post-​apocalyptic landscape. In the ruins of Washington DC, players interact with a post-​war world 200 years after the bombs fell: By prioritising player agency in an environment built from detritus, Fallout 3 invites the player to seek or to create alternate modes of play that illustrate an emergent freedom afforded by the post-apocalyptic sensibility reflected in the game’s aesthetic design. (Chandler 52)

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108  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games The Fallout games depict a world built from wreckage, the repurposed ruins of pre-​war cultural artefacts. The Fallout universe creates a visual representation of paradigms rendered inoperative. Evan Watts explains how this destabilises established gender norms as follows: “if such physical structures were built by and stood as monuments to masculine-​dominated society, then the ruins of these buildings symbolize the destruction of that society. These ruins become a space that offers freedom from the same gender-​oppressive institutions that one permeated them” (Watts 258). As old divisions of power have crumbled into obscurity, so have those symbols of institutions been rendered indistinct, as torn war-​recruitment posters and advertising slogans litter a landscape of ruined buildings, antique weaponry, the repurposed or destroyed husks of robots, and other kinds of rebuilt, re-​appropriated or now useless tech. The more recent games in the franchise, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, allow the player to craft items and weaponry out of old-​world objects from lawn mowers and motorcycles to crutches and medical braces. As in Agamben’s case of the child playing with fire trucks and firearms, items that (in the world of the game) were once connected with serious aspects of society are reduced to mere components of playful creativity. For example, items of 1950s era pride and status –​lawn mowers and motorcycles –​are satirised as the player takes their constituent parts and repurposes them as components in humorous weapon designs: for example, the “Rock-​it Launcher” (a gun that allows the player to shoot miscellaneous junk at enemies from empty bottles to teddy bears) or the “Shishkebob,” (a comically large, flaming sword-​like weapon). In other words, the Fallout series returns serious, in some ways ‘sacred,’ objects to common use so that they may be commandeered for other means. Fallout: New Vegas is even more flagrant with its re-​appropriation of serious objects. The game has a wide array of possible drugs, or “chems,” that the player can create by combining various cocktails of dangerous and addictive drugs that can be found throughout the wasteland: for example, “Stimpacks,” “Jet,” “Buffout,” “Psycho,” etc., many of which resemble real drugs. One, Med-​ X, was originally named “morphine” before censors forced the developers to change (Schulzke). Australia decided to ban Fallout 3 as a result of its drug-​ related content until an altered version of the game was made to suit the country’s game classification rules (Schulzke). However, Fallout 4 perhaps takes this mechanic, of returning ‘sacred’ or serious objects to common use, the furthest by allowing players to acquire and maintain outposts throughout the world’s map; each outpost contains a diverse array of junk, from Atomic Age cars to American flags, that can be broken down and turned into whatever other object the player needs in order to ensure the prosperity of the camp and its inhabitants. In some senses, the profane use of symbolic objects like the American flag by breaking it down into junk (and remaking it into something else) is particularly significant, especially given the game’s setting: Fallout 4 … uses its Boston setting to challenge the Puritan iconography of the nation that gave birth to American Exceptionalism, while at the same

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 109 time reminding players of the role of slavery in the creation of the nation. All three of these later games thus intentionally call into question foundational Fifties articles of faith through their inversion and destruction of American iconography. (Mclancy) The Fallout games’ use of sacred objects in this playful manner mimics and represents the evolution of the paradigm occurring before the player’s very eyes as old tools are repurposed for new uses: their function becomes indistinct –​ the object is broken  –​until it is remade into something else and alternative operations become possible. This process, furthermore, repeats itself thematically in the storyline; several quests involve the reclamation of the old for new purposes. Fallout 3 includes several examples of this: the quest “Head of State” requires the player to empty the Lincoln Memorial of Slave Merchants and dangerous mutants so that it might be reclaimed as a homestead for runaway slaves. The monument to western power is put to a practical use in line with the abolitionist cause Lincoln represented. Furthermore, the main story quest involves working on a water purification project called “Project Purity” that uses the Jefferson Memorial as a central laboratory and base of operations. One of the central locations and city hubs in the game is called “Rivet City,” a thriving metropolis located within a beached, pre-​war aircraft carrier. The game is characterised by the dissolution of archaic structures as well as the rebuilding of new assemblages. The ruins of Fallout’s world that challenge constructions by forcing the player to interact with the ruined environment full of decay as well as possibility and potential: “Fallout 3, then, becomes not about progressing through the wastes, or even restoring Washington D.C. to its former state. Rather, it emphasises and revels in the creative possibilities offered by a broken world” (Chandler 58). This narrative and setting combine to constantly remind the player of the subject object relationship while also problematising it and potentially making the player more aware of themselves a user of a game. Yet this user/​used relationship with the game is not stable: the player’s interaction with game spaces and the way they inhabit role playing game worlds complicates the straightforward notion of a subject using a console as a tool which creates a new subject/​avatar within the game space who uses virtual game objects to achieve goals. The characters encountered in the games also reflect this idea of reassembling and repurposing objects. In Fallout 3, Moira Brown, a mechanic in the city of “Megaton,” requests the player’s help in completing research for a book she is writing called “The Wasteland Survival Guide.” The guide embraces the post-​war world, offering advice on how best to harness the possibilities of the wasteland for the sustainable benefit of its inhabitants: where to find food and medicine, how to make the most of pre-​war technology and how to deal with the dangerous mutant creatures of the wastes. When completing the quest, the player engages with the raw possibilities of the Capitol Wasteland as they scavenge for food, fight monsters and discover troves of pre-​war knowledge and technology. As the player reports back to Moira with their findings, a ‘How-​To’

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110  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games guide on restructuring the paradigms/​institutions/​objects etc. of the old world into new paradigms fit for the purposes of wasteland society emerges. Moreover, the nature of the book and its level of usefulness is decided by the player, by what they explore and what they choose to tell Moira about the outcomes of their field research. Vague or deceitful answers to Moira’s questions result in a bad guide, whereas complete and accurate responses lead to a valuable one. The player may discover the guide’s relative quality through a random encounter with a wastelander whose response to the guide varies from thanking the player for helping to write it to commenting that the book was “good for a laugh.” The player’s interaction with the potential of the wasteland, and what they choose to do with the resulting knowledge, has perceivable consequences on the world of the game –​as the Capitol Wasteland’s radio DJ, “Three-​Dog,” will also weigh in on the quality of the publication. The philosophy of innovation the Wasteland Survival Guide advocates is reflected in Moira’s own dialogue: Did you ever try to put a broken piece of glass back together? Even if the pieces fit, you can’t make it whole again the way it was. But if you’re clever, you can still use the pieces to make other useful things. Maybe even something wonderful, like a mosaic … Well, the world broke just like glass. And everyone’s trying to put it back together like it was, but it’ll never come together the same way. (Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks) Her words once again resonate with the idea of progress through the evolution of paradigms, where the glass might be understood as the homogenous signature while the individual shards, capable of being reassembled into various different shapes, can be seen as the individual paradigms that are subject to change over time. The shards of the broken, inoperative wastes of the Fallout universe, cannot be reassembled in the same way and –​while certain fundamental signatures of power may remain in some form –​creative play with the paradigmatic shards of these apparatuses may yield valuable change. Quests like the “Wasteland Survival Guide” encourage the player to consider the assemblages and paradigms they interact with in the game while also drawing their attention to the emergent properties of the gaming experience itself. Specifically talking about Fallout 3, Chandler writes about the emergent aspects of the gameplay which result from the game’s vast scope that inevitably results in a glitchy game world: The game embraces the results of destruction … to explore the creative potential of a broken world by encouraging the player to test the limits of the game itself in ways that often result in numerous glitches, revealing the architecture at work beneath the game’s surface. The broken machinery and ruinous locales become reminders that the game, as a piece of media, is just as unfixed and fractured as the post-​apocalyptic world on display. (Chandler 52)

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 111 In tension with the game’s sense of possibility is the more disquieting awareness of the game’s framework, of the assemblage one is forming with the game itself and the agency one loses as a result. The player is confronted with the emergent possibilities of glitches while also being reminded of the rules which limit the player’s autonomy in the game. This loss of autonomy is made all the more poignant by the game’s awareness of biopolitical power structures. The tagline of the game “war never changes” frames a narrative game world full of corporate conspiracy, secret government experiments and cold-​war paranoia. The player is immersed in an environment of totalitarian unease, a world haunted by the remnants of oppressive pre-​war or pre-​apocalypse institutions. Many of these institutions converge on the site of the nuclear family and the home specifically. The main example of this is the mysterious company: “Vault-​Tec.” The company supplies vast nuclear bunkers “commissioned by the US government and built by Vault-​Tec Industries” (Davies, Hill and Sutton 7)  ostensibly to house those few who signed up for the program before the bombs fell, so they might wait out the nuclear disaster until it was safe to venture out and rebuild society. The Vaults had a secret purpose: to conduct illicit medical and psychological experiments on the inhabitants on behalf of the US government “to study pre-​selected segments of the population to see how they react to the stresses of isolationism and how successfully they re-​colonise after the Vault opens” (Avellone 11). Scientists and vault leaders, “Overseers,” maintain control over the vault’s populations in order to ensure the experiments go to plan. The true intentions and powers behind Vault-​Tech are mysterious, but clues left throughout the games imply they are part of a secret government program committed to gaining any experimental data that might aid the war effort. The state thus is seen to reach directly into the family home and community life in order to regulate its subjects. So frenzied is the state’s commitment to maintaining itself by winning the war that it will go so far as to perform brutal experiments on its own citizens to maintain supremacy –​state power becomes suspended, however, as it abuses the very subjects it seeks to protect, destroying the family structures it relies on for social and political stability. It does this by psychologically abusing families in psychological, experimental trials, which breed distrust and paranoia. Every citizen becomes an exception with the potential to be excluded. Above ground, however, the home –​the site of heteronormative structures and gender roles on which the state relies for stability –​is continually destroyed in the game’s landscape. Burnt-​out houses litter the world, containing the remnants of domestic life, broken toys and messages left on computer terminals that frequently tell tragic stories of family life: melancholic inversions of the happy, idyllic 1950s nuclear family  –​broken white picket fences mockingly standing grey and broken in the wake of destruction. Alongside this is the game’s continual refusal of family structures. For example, in Fallout 4, the player character is cryogenically frozen at the moment the bombs fall and then wakes up many years later to discover a nuclear wasteland: their spouse is dead, and their son is gone. Later the player will discover that, while they were frozen in time, their son has grown into an

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112  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games old man. In this manner, nuclear families are continually pulled apart, yet the aim of the game is never to re-​establish the dominance of the nuclear family, rather the game encourages the player to create new narratives for themselves, based on their own style of gameplay. In Fallout 4, the player discovers their son has formed a paternalistic, underground totalitarian regime which performs secret experiments on the inhabitants above  –​the son the player only knew previously as a baby has become the figurehead of an oppressive regime which dominates through old-​world hegemonic, scientific practices. He is known, ironically, as “Father.” The player must decide whether to side with him and reunite with their son or to betray your child and bring down the old-​ world power structures that threaten to reassert themselves and dominate the world above.

Hiding from the Fallout: Oikonomia, the Home and the Vault When children play at ‘Mums and Dads,’ those playing the part of the kids in the game often become subordinate players to those fulfilling the roles of mother and father. A hierarchy is formed within the game which mimics the real-​world power dynamic between adult and child and yet expresses it not as a necessary uneven distribution of power but merely trivialised as the rules of a game. The ‘sacred’ adult-​child relationship is disrupted through profanation, making an unconscious mockery of this traditional structure: Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized. (Agamben, Profanations 77) Once again, we see that the game is suspended between real and unreal, or more specifically between physical and digital; that is, the game is suspended between the reality it partially illustrates through the fictional world of the game and the immediate disjuncture it simultaneously showcases: between physical, social and political processes that exist primarily outside of the game world and the accompanying symbolism that has been either discarded or warped through the act of play. The suspended nature of play allows the player to probe real situations and relationships via the desecration of sacred objects, symbols and rituals. Sicart argues a very similar point when he describes play as “carnivalesque,” in that it “appropriates events, structures, and institutions to mock them and trivialise them, or make them deadly serious. The carnival of the middle ages, with its capacity to subvert conventions and institutions in a suspension of time and power, was a symptom of freedom” (Sicart 3–​4) (my emphasis). The carnivalesque is present everywhere in the Fallout world, frequently mocking power structures through sinister comedic representation. Examples

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 113 include the “Church of Atom” (whose followers appear in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4) that worships the radiation from nuclear weapons; the “Children of the Cathedral” religious order (from the first Fallout game: Interplay Entertainment: 1997) established by the monstrous “Master” mutant leader who intends to expose all his followers to a nightmarish virus that transforms the victim into a mutant; and President John Henry Eden, the leader of “The Enclave” faction and self-​styled, rightful ruler of the US wasteland, who is really an advanced computer with a personality based on famous pre-​war US presidents. Within the game space, all such profane experimentation is sanctioned within the jurisdiction of the game, where play “takes control of the world and gives it to the players for them to explore, challenge, or subvert” (Sicart 4). Yet, the act of playing’s connection to the real world renders the processes it ‘plays with’ similarly suspended within the game space. Through the Vault-​ Tech experimentation programmes, the game developers play with the concepts of home and society, once again, in a comically sinister manner by portraying cruel yet sometimes also humorous experiments on the vault dwellers: for example, Vault 55 where “all entertainment tapes were removed” and Vault 56 where “all entertainment tapes were removed except those of one particularly bad comic actor. Sociologists predicted failure before Vault 55” (Avellone 11). Many of the experiments involved were attempts to disrupt the community and/​or family unit. For example, Vault 13 –​from which the “Vault Dweller” character from the first Fallout game emerges  –​was designed to stay shut for 200 years in order to study the effects of long-​term isolation on a population (Avellone). This brings us back to another key component of Agamben’s philosophy which I  discussed in Chapter  1: the political and social paradigm or signature of oikonomia, “conceived in the early Greek and later Christian theological sense as a paradigm of management” (Zartaloudis 84). Thanos Zartaloudis describes Agamben’s study of oikonomia as the basis for the “key problem in the long-​established negative relation between political authority and political activity or praxis” (84). For Agamben, this signature is responsible for the conflation and confusion of the management of government with the political praxis of its citizens. Oikonomia enters the political sphere as a result of religious influence which “grounds the transcendence of sovereign power in its judicial (or juridico-​political) in the doctrine of one God” (Zartaloudis 84). As in the case of play, games and ritual, Agamben traces the origins of government power to the Greek oikonomic paradigm of management that then came to underpin the Christian theological understanding of God’s own division of power within the holy trinity. This oikonomic basis of divine power also became the basis of divine power on Earth: the divine authority of the sovereign whose power divides itself between two polar aspects of government: authority and praxis. In terms of modern western politics, these aspects are more specifically the political authority (auctoritas) of those in power and the political activity (potestas) within the democratic process that produces and maintains government authority.

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114  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games The modern western separation of church and state attempts to remove the relationship between divine power and government rule yet without altering the signature of oikonomia which underlies this assumption: that government authority can be executed by means of dividing its power along the lines of divine power, which ensures the dominance of government management over many aspects of life: “it is this oikonomic or managerial paradigm that leads, according to Agamben, to modern biopolitics and the current domination of economic and managerial logics over all aspects of social life” (Zartaloudis 84). It is the suspension and indiscernability of these power dynamics that create the conditions necessary for perpetuating government power, and it is this fact that reveals the obscure and unstable nature of government’s mandate to rule in the absence of divine justification. Strangely, however, it is the indeterminacy of government power that determines the breadth of its power: an ambiguous sovereignty over an ill-​defined set of spheres which include the juridical and yet frequently bleed into the domestic, the sphere of private life and the home. This management signature is the basis of the organisation of the paradigmatic structure of common (universal) and proper (specific). Unsurprisingly, then, this convoluted and self-​referential apparatus tends to become blurred and confused, where suspension occurs between oppositional paradigms of power, in turn grinding this machine of economy to a halt by exposing its fundamental indistinction. The vaults of the Fallout series of games serve to expose the functioning of these oppositions through the misuse or mismanagement of the societies of the vaults, which mock and suspend the paradigms of government that exist in the real world by taking them to surreal extremes. As all vaults are the subject of government experiments (with the exception of the few “Control Vaults”), they can be seen as a hyperbolic macrocosm of actual government processes where the modern political paradigm seeks control over all aspects of life, both political and biological. The kinds of experiments performed on the vault dwellers are varied and diverse, but all share a relationship to an oikonomic managerial apparatus of politics. All the vaults include an overseer who is invariably aware of the experiment being performed and even participates in its execution; the dwellers are beholden to his power as he commands the vault’s security forces and is often able to control various crucial systems within the vault, such as life support and the locking mechanism for the door to the outside world. Meanwhile, government-​appointed scientists or informants leer in secrecy over the panoptic underground complexes, observing and scrutinising the behaviour of the inhabitants. In other words, the vaults are a nightmarish depiction of the operation of biopolitical processes. However, the experiments frequently involve a disruption of the home environment, interfering in the oikonomic affairs of individual households and communities by pitting family members and friends against one another in vicious social experiments, as well as frequently interfering biologically with subjects as part of the test. Examples of these experiments include Vault 75, which appears in Fallout 4, where children were ruthlessly experimented upon (after their parents had been murdered) in the name of “the refinement of human genetics” (Fallout 4 –​Chief Scientist’s

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 115 Terminal Entry, Bethesda Softworks) and then slaughtered once their DNA had been “harvested”; in Vault 106, all inhabitants were exposed to psychoactive drugs leaked into the ventilation system so that their resulting behaviour could be monitored. In Vault 87, subjects were injected with the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV) (Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks), a chemical designed to change ordinary humans into super-​soldiers; Vault 12 was designed so that the door to the outside world would not shut properly, exposing the inhabitants to mass amounts of radiation when the bombs fell and allowing Vault-​Tech to study the effects (Fallout, Black Isle Studios); the test subjects of Vault 95 were deliberately peopled with drug addicts so that, when a stash of drugs was released after five years of the vault closing, an insider could monitor the dwellers’ will-​ power and responses (Fallout 4, Bethesda Studios). A particularly horrific example of this is Vault 11 (Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda Softworks) where the dwellers were informed they had to sacrifice one of their number annually or the vault would automatically slaughter all the inhabitants. This gave rise to a macabre electoral system where voting blocs rose up to assert power and influence over the annual selection of victims. Posters in the style of presidential election campaigns cover the walls as the player explores, many of which are captioned with critical rather than glorifying slogans such as “I HATE NATE” or “HALEY IS A KNOWN ADULTERER AND COMMUNIST SYMPATHISER –​ELECT HALEY” (Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda Softworks). This vault parodies the insular and primitive culture of modern western politics where the system of democracy has devolved into a pure smear campaign, and the only way candidates can hope to be elected is by avoiding criticism. Reinforcing the vault’s critique of modern political processes, the election process has come about as a result of the death of the first overseer: when it became clear that he was the only one who knew about the experiment prior to entering the vault, in their anger the vault dwellers selected him for the first sacrifice. Ever since this point, the role of sacrifice and the role of overseer have become one and the same for the dwellers of Vault 11. If we view this vault as a microcosm of western biopolitics, we see a startling critique of government embedded within this nightmarish electoral system. In Vault 11, the sovereign and the homo sacer become one and the same, drawing an already suspended system into indistinction. The vault dwellers become examples of bare life, but the government’s treatment of the dwellers does not aid in bolstering the authority of the US government, rather the relationship between auctoritas and potestas has become so suspended that it exposes its bizarre and twisted apparatus: this happens to the extent that the experiment of Vault 11 leads to the deaths of all but a single vault dweller (Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda Softworks). David Bowman, discussing Fallout 4, describes how the game portrays the futile, self-​ perpetuating nature of the vault experiments: The still functioning terminals that fill the former office space of the world contain email exchanges detailing the means by which the corporations exploited and experimented on their employees in order to fulfil

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116  Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games government contracts, often with no tangible results … the perception of results via setting and meeting targets and expanding bureaucracy comes at the expense of the actual operation of public services. (Bowman) The vaults are an expression of suspended government power, as a force being exerted over citizens for its own sake. The fact that the reason for these biopolitical experiments is never fully explained in the Fallout games accentuates the indiscernible nature of government power. Black Isle studios’ Chris Avellone, who worked on Fallout’s 1 and 2 and then later on Fallout: New Vegas, explained in the unofficial Fallout Bible (a collection of notes and discussions between Avallone and fans posted online) that the Vault-​Tech experiments were commissioned as a cold-​war research and development initiative (Avellone, 2002). However, it is also heavily suggested throughout the games that the government –​or some portions of it –​had not only predicted the war but also the breadth of its devastation and thus must surely have realised that the Vault-​Tech programmes and the fruits of their research would be useless, even dangerous, in a post-​nuclear war setting. The player usually encounters these moments of indistinction within the vaults they find as a detective or archaeologist delving into pockets of pre-​ war history, piecing together the stories of these abandoned places from discarded “holotapes” and fragments of computer terminal entries. In other words, the player usually experiences the indistinction of the vaults as a historian viewing paradigms whose suspension is already fully exposed and must put together a picture of the original paradigms that lead to the present-​day ruinous surroundings. In a series of games that all encourage exploration, (often instead of completing the central quests) players are enticed by these forgotten tombs of the wasteland, filled with mystery and archaic objects frozen in a forgotten time. The player is confronted by vaults of artefacts of forgotten biopolitical heteronormativity, obscuring the significance of real-​world gendered power structured by reducing them to mere artefacts of a lost era. Pichlmair argues that Since the Vaults were closed before the war they maintain a conserved view of the world before the bombs dropped, which again is a projection of the social norms and customs of the 1950s into the future. The Vaults are in-​game museums; places where the laws from before the world ended still apply. (Pichlmair 111) In Fallout: New Vegas the player may enter Vault 34, which was deliberately built with luxury facilities that reduced living space and lead to overpopulation; in addition, the vault came complete with an overstocked armoury that could not be locked. If the player reads all terminal entries and fragments of the overseer’s journal, they will learn that a violent overpopulation crisis lead to a radiation leak. As a result, the dwellers were all turned into insane

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Home and Ruin in the Fallout Games 117 feral ghouls (monstrous, irradiated cannibals) but still remained dressed in the uniforms of their previous lives. The player thus comes face to face with the terrifying visual representation of biopower as crazed, inhuman creatures running and clawing mindlessly about their decaying homes: a nightmare vision of suspended auctoritas and potestas is presented to the player as they fight off ghouls in the ragged uniforms of security officers, ordinary vault dweller citizens. If the player explores the entire vault, they will eventually discover the ghoul vault overseer himself. All of these figures, symbolic of both the juridical praxis and the sovereign auctoritas, are rendered indistinct as they are all perceived by the player as mere enemy targets to be defeated; as such they are playfully mocked by the game and player. For, while their power is fearsome (they can be difficult to kill), they are not presented as serious representatives of government institutions but more like B-​movie zombies, glowing comically with green radiation. While heteronormativity and biopower come apart in the vaults, the player, above ground, is confronted with the blasted ruins of family homes. These houses become the site, not only of biopolitical exploitation and control but also of possibility, reformation and reassembly. As I  discussed earlier in this section, Miguel Sicart argues for the capacity of play to liberate the individual as a means of better coming to terms with reality and negotiating it on the terms of the status quo, admitting only to a limited revolutionary capacity. For Sicart, play shocks, appropriates, challenges, gives pleasure and is even instrumental in individual self-​discovery and freedom (Sicart 18), but it does not go so far as to alter anything fundamental. For Agamben play destroys, neutralises and blasphemes. The difference in attitude of these two thinkers illustrates the dual purpose of play that I explore: play as profanation and play as becoming. In this chapter I have discussed how play may, in line with Sicart, expose and mock power structures. In the next chapter, I will explore the video game space as a virtual one where new, unexpected combinations and experiences of identity emerge from the interaction between player and interface. In the Deus Ex games, these experiences raise new implications for gendered identities as well new pathways for conceptualising gender in a world where all bodies are (as in the Fallout games) drawn into indistinction through technology.

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7  Becoming and Avatar –​Playing as Cyborgs among Gynoids in the Deus Ex Games

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes of the “child player” as an aspect of the movement of virtual events and ideas into the realm of the actual. In this early work, he tracks the movement of intensities (potential flows that exist initially only as possibilities) from the virtual realm to the actual. His system describes in great detail the way ideas and events materialise as they journey from the virtual through imagination, memory and thought  –​what Deleuze calls the “three passive syntheses” –​before culminating in real-​world events and ideas (Hughes 89). This movement is a highly complex one involving many steps, the final one of which includes what Deleuze calls the “child player” that participates in what he describes as “the divine game.” This last process in the journey from virtual to actual relates to the way in which the future is produced through the nature of difference and repetition. The system of the future … must be called a divine game, since there is no pre-​existing rule, since the game bears already upon its own rules and since the child-​player can only win, all of chance being affirmed each time and for all times. … Such a game entails the repetition of the necessarily winning move, since it wins by embracing all possible combinations and rules in the system of its own return. (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 142) As a given intensity moves through imagination, a memory repetition occurs, each time with a difference. By the time the intensity moves into the third synthesis of thought, there is the potential for something innovative to be produced: a ‘thing’ (thought, work, event) begins to free itself from the mere repetition of memory and imagination that are processes of mimicry. Here the work moves towards something resembling pure difference, into the space of the future that has no predefined rules and is capable of establishing these for itself without deference to the old systems of the present or past. These rules are the “divine game” forming around the “child player” who is the only one capable of “winning” because of their readiness to accept new challenges and address them creatively. The child player appears as a figure of pure potentiality in Deleuze’s philosophy that acts as a driving force, propelling the intensity that arises out of the virtual into the future and into an actuality of genuine

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Becoming and Avatar 119 innovation. We might draw a parallel here between Deleuze’s child player and Gee’s understanding of projective identity: projective identity, playing on two senses of the word “project,” meaning both “to project one’s values and desires onto the virtual character” … and “seeing the virtual character as one’s own project in the making,” a creature whom I imbue with a certain trajectory through time defined by my aspirations for what I want that character to be and become. (56) Gee’s analysis would go against the binary conception of play as confined to an outside/​inside opposition that the magic circle implies, by refusing to focus entirely on either the identity of the player outside the game, or the virtual identity of the player’s character. Rather, Gee understands the importance of both these identities as they interact to form the third projective amalgamation of these personas. As Zach Waggoner writes about Gee in his work My Avatar, My Self: Even though he never uses the word itself, Gee’s description of projective identity as the bridge between the real-​world and virtual identities suggests that he sees the projective identity as liminal space. Liminality, from the latin word meaning “threshold,” was used by Van Gennep in 1908 as part of his three step sequence describing rites of passage: separation, liminality, and reincorporation. Liminality, the middle stage, was the phase where one belonged to both and neither of the other two phases: a phase of transition during which normal limits to self understanding are relaxed thus opening the way to something new. (Waggoner 15) In exploring the potential of video role-​playing games, it is important to understand not only the disruptive potential of the game experience but also the nature of the game space as a place of immanence and innovation. Here, we might be tempted to interpret the liminality of projective identity as a form of Agambenian suspension, separate and yet also connected to both elements of the imagined opposition of avatar and self. Yet, although these two elements appear suspended, approaching indifference, the liminal space between them speaks to new becoming. Through this process the player may experiment with identities and self-​expressions that challenge normative structures, including gender. By playing a video game, the player must engage with an avatar and ‘perform’ a new identity. The player is encouraged to experiment with non-​ normative forms of gendered identities. Deleuze’s child player is a tool that facilitates becoming within the divine game just as an avatar allows the player to experiment with ideas, strategies and even ethical dilemmas within the game space, and just as in the case of the divine game, the interaction between player and video game has the potential to produce new ideas and ways of being. Like the child player, play within the virtual world of the game interacting with a dynamic system of rules allows the

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120  Becoming and Avatar player a level of experimentation and creative expression that may culminate in the real world as an actuality. Here, the video game space can be considered as a quasi-​virtual one in which players come into contact with intensities of narrative, strategy experimentation, exploration of the game world, etc. and then act as a conduit for these intensities to travel through their own processes of imagination, memory and thought. Furthermore, the video game itself reflects the process of the divine game by producing, in tandem with the player, an experience that is different every time the game is repeated/​replayed, or every time a saved game is loaded when the player’s avatar dies; the player then repeats the same section of the game again, this time employing a different strategy in order to overcome whatever obstacle defeated them previously. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, Jonathan Boulter writes similarly on the act of stopping and starting a video game: “the player [is] always in a structure of loss and return: we lose the sense of posthuman extension and power when we break off from the game but we can always return” (4). Thus, video game play can be described as an activity that is an expression of continued repetition and yet characterised by difference, of returning continuously yet never in the same way, always moving forward and always becoming. Like Olympia in “Der Sandmann”, discussed in Chapter 4, the player is repeating a performance again and again (within a game space). But unlike Olympia, the experience is different every time and the repetitions are not normative but experimental. Their performativity contains the agency of becoming-​gynoid. Deleuze and Guattari discuss play in their collaborative work A Thousand Plateaus. In this work they describe play as more simply an activity unbound by rules and rather characterised by pure chance. Moreover, as discussed in the previous chapter, play cannot be easily separated from the game, and games are characterised by rule-​based systems which place limits on play. Deleuze and Guattari both represent (to varying degrees) potential and interact with one another in an interchange relationship. For Deleuze and Guattari the game and player interact valuably to produce genuine change when the game is designed in such a manner as to provoke play conducive to becoming. I believe their discussion of the different types of game and the level of player/​game interactivity they encourage best illustrates this. Deleuze and Guattari compare the games of Go and Chess, citing the creative potential of the former simplistic game compared to the highly structured aspects of the latter, the rules of which, they suggest are embedded with the rigid rhetoric of political and social structures: Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. … Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-​person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. (Plateaus 411)

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Becoming and Avatar 121 For Deleuze and Guattari, Go is more conducive to valuable experimentation and creativity; like a well-​designed video role-​playing game it encourages meaningful play, working in tandem with the player. This in turn reveals the true significance of the child player, and the divine game emerges as aspects of the smooth and the striated which constitute becoming. The child player is like the girl/​becoming-​woman discussed in previous chapters, the final crucial stage in the process of becoming actual through which all intensities must pass before emerging in reality. The divine game can be understood as the many assemblages that form along molecular lines and lines of flight that emerge from the virtual and are in turn influenced by nodes of becoming.

Deus Ex Machina: Playing at the Threshold The Deus Ex series, as in the case of the Fallout games, encourage philosophical and moral engagement in order to progress through the game and complete objectives. The Deus Ex games  –​technically all first-​person shooters with role playing game elements –​are not open world games that offer a vast range of quests. Rather, they follow a much more linear path with a much more obviously prescribed selection of story outcomes. Despite this, the games offer a great many opportunities for customisation in other areas; while the games’ narrative structures cannot be significantly altered as a result of the player’s decisions. Completing missions in different ways offers a meaningful interactive experience where the player’s choices provide the player with a sense that their actions are significant. Many critics have praised the Deus Ex franchise’s merging of genres to form a shooter-​RPG-​adventure game hybrid, which is significantly due to the fact that the game offers many possible routes to overcome obstacles and progress through the game. For example, the player may choose to complete a mission by going in all guns blazing, or they can choose a stealth approach –​or even something in between the two. There are many pathways the player can take as they make their way through the levels, and some are more ethical than others –​for example, the player may decide in whether it is ethical to kill the enemies they are confronted with, or use a non-​ lethal approach. These choices offer players a profound sense of meaningful play as they are forced to consider the way they engage with the game and complete missions knowing that different actions will alter the way in which game characters react to them. In the original Deus Ex game (Ion Storm: 2000) the player takes on the role of JC Denton in, a slick government agent, augmented with bionic implants that give him superhuman abilities. Working as an operative for the fictional “United Nations Anti-​Terrorist Coalition” (UNATCO) in the year 2052 the player gradually discovers that UNATCO is really involved in a global conspiracy involving the insidious plague known as the “Gray Death,” from which much of the population suffers. By distributing a vaccine “Ambrosia” (claimed to be in limited supply) only to the rich and powerful, the secret society, known as Majestic 12, controls global politics from behind the scenes. As Shaw and Sharpe discuss, midway through the game the player begins to unravel the

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122  Becoming and Avatar conspiracy and is called upon to choose whether to side with their brother and fellow UNATCO agent, who has begun working with a terrorist group in order to expose the secret organisation and the crimes for which they are responsible: “the apparent choice to switch sides and support Denton’s brother in the first Deus Ex game seemed like a very significant and very individual choice” (Shaw and Sharp 350). In reality, this has little effect on the overall outcome of the game (which always climaxes with a choice of three endings no matter what decisions are made by the player). However, Deus Ex (and the sequels that follow it), through its unique blend of gaming elements, encourages the player to return again and again, experimenting with different modes of play within a captivating politically and ethically charged narrative backdrop. Experimentation is encouraged (within certain limits) which propels the movement of becoming in a partially prescribed manner. This is reminiscent of the divine game, a rule-​ oriented apparatus yet free from stagnant traditions, emerging on its own terms as the child player interacts with those rules, always “winning” by producing a unique mode of being and becoming. Returning to Gee’s work on “projectivity,” we can see how the steps he outlines for this process of a player’s identification are reminiscent of the process of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari. Echoing the movement of the passive syntheses, Gee discusses how some games demand that the player engage with them in a certain way through the following four step process:

1. The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action). 2. Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artefact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way. 3. The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets. 4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis. (Gee 90)

The player is forced constantly to make assumptions, form hypotheses, engage with the game world. In the Deus Ex series of games, the player is confronted by a world of humans intimately invaded by technology, reorganising gendered assumptions. In order to make sense of the world, the player must search their surroundings for clues of how to progress and to listen closely to dialogue in order to comprehend missions well enough to complete them. Gee cites the example of data cubes  –​essentially tablets in the game’s imagined future –​which can be found all over the game anywhere from offices to toilet cubicles. As in real life, government officials are remarkably lax when it comes to securing sensitive information like government computer passwords, so it is quite easy for the discerning player to hunt around a little bit in the early stages

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Becoming and Avatar 123 of a mission for data cubes that may, for example, contain door codes that will save them a great deal of time (and lockpicks) later on: To make sense of them [the information contained in datacubes] you must fit them into an emerging plot and virtual world you are discovering and helping to build. And you must do this actively, since you have choices about where to go and what to do. Every potentially meaningful sign in a game like Deus Ex … is a particular sort of invitation to embodied action. (Gee 85) Deus Ex is full of creative potential for players but more rigid in terms of its relatively linear storyline –​the nature of the narrative itself is reflected in the molar, restrictive elements of the game: totalitarian governments, secret societies operating behind the scenes, powerful corporations and fanatical religious orders. The game ‘watches’ the player, observing their actions like the conspiratorial political and corporate forces of the game world, which in itself adds to the game’s emergent potential by further immersing players in the game world, making their decisions within that world feel all the more significant. Furthermore, this immersive quality of the original Deus Ex game was deliberately designed by the game developers in order to foster creative and emergent play; Warren Spector, one of the main designers, explains that Deus Ex is an immersive simulation game in that you are made to feel you’re actually in the game world with as little as possible getting in the way of the experience of “being there.” Ideally, nothing reminds you that you’re just playing a game –​not interface, not your character’s back story or capabilities. (Spector 2) The immersive quality of the game was largely achieved by making the JC Denton avatar as characterless as possible. As part of the effort to produce this effect, Spector asked the voice actor for JC Denton, Jay Anthony Franke, to record all of his lines in a monotone without any emotional intonation so that players could project their own thoughts and feelings onto the events of the game, rather than be influenced by the reactions of the voiced avatar (Game Informer). This is part of the becoming-​gynoid aspect of the game that flows through the player to the avatar. The characterless nature of the avatar facilitates a becoming relationship between the player and Denton, allowing the player a great deal of freedom when creating their own projective identity such that the gender of the player in relation to Denton becomes less important. That is, the significance is limited to the fact that it creates a potential for the player to forget about gender difference as a fact of social and political life and engage in a kind of post-​gender form of play in a simulated world that is not only post-​ gender but posthuman, eclipsing sexual or other socially imposed difference based on biology. As a woman playing through JC Denton, I am conscious of performing a role, a gendered role which is coded masculine. However, this

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124  Becoming and Avatar sense of performance is interrupted by technology. I am interfacing with my console and my male, cyborg avatar (because he is a cyborg) inhabits a space of contested maleness as he inhabits a space of contested humanity: Denton is infected by nano-​augmentations that make him just as much a machine as a man. Thus, through Denton, I become a cyborg myself or more accurately, I experience a form of becoming-​gynoid through my proximity to the avatar, the Deus Ex narrative and the console controller in my hands. For games like Deus Ex it is the quality of the gaming experience and of the interchange relationship encouraged between the game and the player that is most important rather than the level of agency truly afforded the player. In the case of gender performativity, we have the opportunity to play with the normative structures, the rules of gender, in imaginative and potentially subversive ways. Similarly, in video games we have the opportunity to play within a given set of rules. Boudreau writes “as the player is in a constant cycle of networked actions, they repeatedly cross the threshold of embodiment between their physical bodies and the virtual body of the in-​game avatar” (Boudreau 84), arguing that the interchange relationship between player and avatar occurs during every video game play experience. The Deus Ex games accentuate, and even draw the player’s attention to, this process through its ludic qualities and the specific nature of its narrative. In the original Deus Ex game, players were actively encouraged by the developers to immerse themselves and capitalise on the immanent potential of player/​avatar projectivity outlined by Gee. Projectivity is what facilitates the player’s potential becoming in Deus Ex as they progress through a game that is itself concerned narratively with becoming and posthumanism. The player projects their own style of play on to the character of JC Denton, making their own version of him: this is done by the way players decide how to interact with the game through him –​by choosing specific dialogue options, making specific decisions and implementing their own style of gameplay. This results in an imaginative coupling of play and game as the player projects meanings onto the digital world and characters presented. The nature of a role-​playing game itself encourages the kind of introspection which occurs through creative character development: this happens in tandem with the Deus Ex’s game mechanic of building one’s character through the selection of various augmentations. As the player progresses through the game, they acquire nano-​augmentation canisters that modify the body of the avatar to give it new abilities or enhance existing ones. The player projects an identity onto the Denton avatar as they build and reconstruct his very biology, entering into an in-​game becoming posthuman as they themselves also enter a state of becoming via the avatar and via the technological device of the PC or games console. Boulter explains this process in relation to video games generally, using Deus Ex as an example: The digital game, insofar as it instantiates, thematically, the narrative of becoming posthuman … and as it instantiates the player’s own coming-​ into-​being as the posthuman (as he plays that is), holds out the state of being posthuman only as a state of possibility … Another way of putting

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Becoming and Avatar 125 this … is to suggest that the posthuman, the state of being the posthuman, is a state of becoming: we enter into the cyborged relation with the game console in order to alter what our (sic) present reality is. (4) For Boulter, to play a video game is to enter into a ‘cyborg’ relationship with the console and the simulated world of the game, a relationship that anticipates the futuristic world represented in video games like Deus Ex, where sophisticated AIs and augmented humans blur the lines between human and machine. Acting as an image of a possible future, the player holding the console controller appears as the image of the divine game producing itself with the child player: Hence the game, as a story of what it might mean to be posthuman, and as a story of what can only occur at some point, not now, becomes a parable. As I play, as I enact the game’s very thematization of being the posthuman, I become that parable of possible future being. (Boulter 4) To play the original Deus Ex (as well as the subsequent games in the series which also employ the mechanic of bodily customisation) is to have a posthuman experience, where many cyborg becomings occur simultaneously. First, the game demands that the player progress their Denton avatar through bodily customisation, building the character’s hybrid flesh, assemblage by assemblage, knitting together body and machine in order to complete the game’s goals. This aspect becomes all the more visually intriguing in the later Deus Ex games, where numerous cut-​scenes allow the player to see the surgery being performed on the player’s avatar in a manner that verges on body horror. Although we are not given the opportunity to play as a female cyborg or gynoid in the original Deus Ex game, or the more recent instalments in the franchise Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the player explores gaming worlds filled with women both augmented and not, each of which represents a becoming-​gynoid in their own right by virtue of their power as characters and also the significant role they play in the story. In Deus Ex, one of the main villains, “Maggie Chow,” is a Chinese millionaire with great influence in the mafia underworld, and another non-​augmented woman, “Beth Duclare,” is a significant ally Denton encounters and who aids him in bringing down Majestic 12. She is able to do so because of her connections within the Illuminati (her mother was one of the organisation’s leaders before being murdered by the Illuminati splinter group Majestic 12). In other words, the existence of these women in a posthuman world populated by powerful cyborgs and gynoids reduces the significance of gender to the extent that the being of women (whether mechanised or not) now exist in the world under altered conditions. The opposition of male and female is eclipsed by the growing indiscernibility of mankind and machine. There are no skimpily dressed, shrieking, swooning damsels for your avatar to constantly protect, and while some women do require your help at certain points, your

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126  Becoming and Avatar missions also frequently involve saving men; in fact, the first mission of the first game involves an optional objective of rescuing a male, fellow UNATCO agent being held by terrorists. The agent in question, Gunther Hermann, is a huge, muscular cyborg whose appearance and voice resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger. The game seems to revel in ironising the trope of indestructible Terminator-​esque cyborg by reducing the character to a kind of damsel in distress. This simultaneously plays on the player’s narrative expectations of games by making Herman into the first “princess” the player is required to rescue from a “castle” (Figure 7.1). By contrast the female cyborgs  –​gynoids  –​encountered in the game, though they are certainly powerful, are not necessarily positively empowered as equals. Rather they are portrayed in that ambiguous (sometimes dubious) manner so often associated with the feminine machine; they are characterised by a powerful strangeness, a fearful otherness that sets them dramatically apart from their male counterparts. The female cyborgs in the original Deus Ex include Anna Navarre, a ruthless and highly bionically modified UNATCO agent, and several Women in Black (WiB). Like their counterparts the Men in Black (MiB), they pose as government agents but are really Majestic 12 operatives that have been heavily psychologically conditioned and augmented with pharmaceutical techniques to produce extremely strong, emotionless agents with unquestioning loyalty.

Figure 7.1 Anna Navarre (left) and a Woman in Black (right), Deus Ex, Ion Storm, 2000. Source: Accessed from Deus Ex Wiki and Villains Wiki, respectively.

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Becoming and Avatar 127 Both Navarre and the WiB are villains and are represented as cruel and psychologically unbalanced: characteristics that are appropriately combined with their deathly pale physical appearance and, in the case of Navarre, a morbid Frankenstein-​esque amalgamation of body parts infused with robotic limbs (see image above). She also sports a large prosthetic eye which glows red, reminiscent of the humanoid robots of the Terminator films. Though Navarre works for an organisation that is ostensibly a police force in the business of keeping the peace –​UNATCO –​she thrives on violence and enjoys the use of deadly force: her in-​game character profile describes her as “your old fashioned cold-​blooded killer” who is “always happy when she shoots someone” (Deus Ex –​ Anna Navarre character description, Eidos Interactive). A cyborg woman in visual media often takes the form of a deformed woman, terrifyingly ambiguous by virtue of the absence (or partial absence) of her female physicality which in turn is inextricably linked with femininity itself. As Navarre is a woman only in general appearance and voice, this raises several questions as to the nature of her character. In what sense can she be said to be a woman? What part of her womanhood remains when so much of her body is mechanised? This ambiguity compounded with her physicality as a cyborg reflects the inhumanity of her character, reinforcing the idea that a cruel or powerful woman is somehow more horrific, more shockingly inhuman than any male equivalent. In turn, the cyborg female can be used to represent inhumanity itself –​the denigration of humanity through technology is personified by a female entity whose physical femininity has been warped by technology in some way. Echoing the ambiguity of the, gynoids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? discussed in Chapter 5, women without empathy are made to seem monstrously ambiguous. In the Deus Ex games, the ambiguity of the gynoids is in some ways contained and neutralised by their uncomplicated nature as villains. The same can be said of the WiB who are often portrayed in similarly emotionless. One specific WiB, Mari Hela, is described by some Majestic 12 operatives under her command as “a harpie roosting in its nest” (Deus Ex, Eidos Interactive), and another called simply Adept 34501 aspires to be just as merciless. A player who finds her “testament” will learn that she regrets having feelings of empathy, believing they will prevent her from ever rising above her current rank (Deus Ex  –​Adept 34501’s Testament, Eidos Interactive). While the gynoids of the original Deus Ex game are portrayed negatively, their ambiguity does nevertheless contribute to a becoming-​gynoid by virtue of the implications of such strong women unhindered by any physiological difference. At the same time it could be argued that the presence of these gynoid characters was to provide a stark contrast to the JC Denton avatar and his brother Paul Denton, where both reflect a complicated mix of the positive and negative results of human/​machine amalgamation. Though it is perhaps unfortunate that a preponderance of negative cyborg connotations should be associated with the female machine entity rather than the male, if we consider the entire Deus Ex franchise, we can see the representation of the gynoid evolving towards a more complex conception of the potential of the female machine as a conduit of ambiguity but also equally of positive becoming.

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128  Becoming and Avatar The second game in the series, Deus Ex: Invisible War, offered a much more nuanced portrayal of gynoids, whose presence in the game was continuous and a constant reminder of the larger political forces at play. Early on in the game, the player encounters both the pilot Ava Johnson and the pop star AI NG Resonance; however, the player does not at first know that Ava is an AI. After the great communications and technology “Collapse” which occurs at the end of the previous Deus Ex game, the Denton brothers and their companion Tracer Tong were separated and unable to find each other, and the player now discovers that Ava is an AI construct designed to locate the Dentons. At the end of the game you discover that JC Denton (combining another ending from the previous game) has merged with the AI communications network Helios and means to link all of humanity up to an enormous telepathic grid routed through the Denton-​Helios entity. The intention is to bring about a true and flawless democracy where the desires of every human on Earth may be brought to a satisfactory consensus instantaneously through the ‘benevolent’ control of Denton-​Helios. If the player sides against the Dentons at the end of the game, Ava Johnson will have no hesitation in trying to killing the player. The intentions of the Dentons, though theoretically noble, seem bound to result in a form of totalitarianism where all privacy is sacrificed to a machine-​god, the Deus Ex Machina, come into being. The Dentons cast a shadow over the posthuman, positive associations with the potential of becoming-​gynoid, and this raises questions for the player (as they choose which ending to select) regarding the direction of human technological advancement; that is, how far is humanity prepared to go on the posthuman trajectory, how far is desirable and exactly what does mankind hope to gain by doing this? How far must the assemblage we know as mankind fuse with the machine assemblage for the combination to be valuable rather than nightmarish? The Denton-​Helios ending can be understood as the ending of the BwO of the unfettered becoming-​gynoid spiralling out of control as a line of flight, an ideal soured by a failure to control its potential (Deus Ex: Invisible War, Eidos Interactive). As a result, Ava Johnson –​as an operative of the Dentons –​takes on the unexpected dual role of liberator and oppressor, since a choice to follow the machine-​god ending, while it ensures the destruction of the malevolent and oppressive Illuminati, brings about another all-​powerful and all-​controlling regime. The player is tasked with choosing between two oppressive governments, two molar structures each of which subtracts freedom from the masses in marginally different ways. Ava Johnson represents one of these regimes, another gynoid, NG Resonance, is associated with the other. Apparently an AI construct for fans of the pop star of the same name, NG Resonance, is also capable of gathering information from those who interact with her and passing it on to the relevant authorities: essentially making her a government spy disguised as a harmless form of popular entertainment. In Deus Ex: Invisible War the focus shifts from a rather stereotypical portrayal of female mechanised flesh (embodying the threat of the inhuman and the

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Becoming and Avatar 129 negative aspects of the posthuman) to a far more evolved concept of female machines as complex heralds of potential futures both positive and negative in various ways: the possibility of greater human freedom held in ambiguous balance with either its misuse by government authority –​in the case of NG Resonance –​or of its potential to dominate mankind as a tyrannical power in its own right. Yet, as these specific, ambiguous gynoids take leading roles in the game’s narrative, the player is also surrounded by a plethora of more minor female cyborg characters and female scientists furthering research and development of cyborg technologies. These range from students (Klara Sparks and Billie Adams) at the Tarsus Academy where the player avatar is trained as a government operative and has biomodifications installed, to Leila Nassif (responsible for the biomodification experiments that lead to the player’s own augmentations). These women are complex characters, all playing varied roles in the ongoing production of an uncertain world. The avatar, simply called Alex D, can be played as either male or female, adding another dimension to the becoming-​gynoid nature of the game. The two prequel games Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided continue this theme by similarly including a large number of female characters and gynoids, presenting mixtures of both negative and positive traits. Though the avatar is a man, Adam Jensen, the player engages with the game’s virtual world as a man in a world of gynoids that are full of becoming-​ gynoid possibility. These include the news anchor, Eliza Cassan, who appears in both games, and is discovered to be an AI construct designed and manipulated by the Illuminati, in order to control public opinion. Echoing female AIs of the earlier Deus Ex: Invisible War, like the NG Resonance AI that collects information on private citizens for government use, Eliza is morally ambiguous. As a method of controlling the populace, she comes to represent the spectre of the uncertainty in society (like her AI counterparts in previous Deus Ex instalments) in a world that is growing increasingly reliant on technology, and thus increasingly vulnerable to the skills of astute hackers, whether they work for governments or corporations. Once again, the female machine here is used to represent ambiguity, a loss of control, a fear of the unknown. However, Eliza also chooses the help of the main character at certain points in the game, leaving him clues to the nature of the Illuminati’s conspiracy (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Eidos Interactive). Once again, the gynoid represents both the terror and awe of the future; yet, here, she does not portray only the inhuman, in the same way that Anna Nevarre did in the original Deus Ex game, she also represents the potential of the posthuman. Adam Jensen famously “didn’t ask for this,” (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Eidos Interactive) –​that is, did not ask to become a cyborg even though the company he worked for gave him implants in order to save his life when he was mortally wounded. However, he and the player are offered a unique opportunity to enter a world of the “augmented” posthuman, a world of a possible future where gender norms are less, or even entirely, irrelevant

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130  Becoming and Avatar and where the nature of humanity itself is drawn tantalisingly into question. Adam Jensen’s world is a world of becoming-​gynoid. The kinds of gaming environments found in the Deus Ex and Fallout games (discussed in the previous chapter) provide meaningful experiences when played with an awareness of the kinds of becomings that are taking place in the virtual landscape, and how this process affects and augments the identity of the player. Boudreau explains that hybrid player-​avatar identity emerges partially through an understanding that there is an aspect of the play experience that cannot be easily traced back to the player or the avatar: a disembodied identity: “when recognized by the player, it is often a sense that there is something more between themselves and the player character than its role as a vehicle for their gameplay choices and more than the sum of its affordances designed into the game” (84). In this sense there is an indiscernibility between the two selves that culminates in a third identity. Boudreau’s understanding of hybridity in gaming helps to conceptualise more clearly the ways in which becoming-​gynoid might function for players: that is, as part of a shifting, intangible self that cannot be held by the self/​avatar opposition. One can describe the process of becoming-​gynoid as a liminal activity within the context of video game play: “within the context of virtual reality, liminality refers to the space between the physical user and the disembodied space of virtuality … there is never any materialization between body, action and virtual space –​there is no end; just the infinite process of interaction between spaces” (Boudreau 83). According to Boudreau’s definition, liminality is in a constant state of change, never “ending” and always oscillating between player and avatar, virtual and physical space. In this way, the liminal becoming-​gynoid is never moving in a linear manner. It does not move simply between one place and another (between the virtual and physical); rather, it invades many forms of interactions as it affects the player’s own conceptualisation of self and their interactions with others in the physical world. In this way the barriers between the real/​unreal and virtual/​physical oppositions begin to fall away towards a moment where we can conceptualise all these interactions as part of the same multiplicity of human engagement with the world. Video games provide powerful tools for exploring not only the ways in which specific paradigms/​assemblages are arranged and maintained by various political systems but also for understanding those building blocks that produce the paradigmatic or the molecular/​molar apparatus itself on a more general scale. The video game raises the player’s awareness of these processes particularly by demanding our attention in specific emergent ways that have the potential to give rise to valuable critical thought. This may translate to activity in the real world, after pre-​emptive experimentation in the testing ground of a simulated world. Some video games offer forms experimentation within a virtual space which allow the player to revel in a simulated environment and, in doing so, to stumble across opportunities for creative exploration of strategy or even ethics or politics. These explorations, highly interactive in their nature,

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Becoming and Avatar 131 may lead to a heightened sense of the suspension such games communicate, reflecting real-​world processes of indistinction. Our role as players is perhaps to be aware of these mind-​altering moments of meaningful play and to channel these moments of realisation into a vision for new ways of being in our own real world, allowing the virtual to bleed into the real or physical world, in a positive, valuable manner.

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Conclusion  irtual Wives and Autonomous Selves –​ V Towards a Politics of Becoming-​Gynoid

I discussed in my last chapter how gynoids in video games can be utilised to represent emergent possibilities for future engagements with technology both related to and outside of gendered constructs. However, gynoids are not limited to the sphere of fiction. Real-​world technologies have caught up with it and the fantasy of the gynoid as a universal, female servant, whose machinic nature makes her exploitation acceptable, is now a reality: “As a distillation of entrenched sexist views, the fembot is a microcosm of tech. With silicone lovers, as with Silicon Valley, development and marketing are heavily gendered and stereotyped. The programmers have created female-​voiced assistants to follow our wishes: they have given us artificial wives and mothers, always listening for us” (Belton and Delvin 376). In 1989, Susan Moller Okin asserted that modern society is still modelled on the “old assumption of the workplace … that workers have wives at home” (5), wives who are picking up the domestic slack that the office worker has no time for. Today, it might be more correct to say that society is starting to embrace the notion that everyone has a series of digital wives, who arrange their domestic affairs, order their shopping, entertain their children and turn out the lights, so that they can spend more time working both in the office and out of it. The gynoid personal digital assistant and smart home devices, like Siri and Alexa, help to supplement the domestic work which women have always been expected to complete and have never had time for. The organisation of our institutions, from schools to the working week, precludes truly sustainable, equitable solutions to the largely undiscussed problem domestic labour. As argued by Laurie Penny: “the earliest bots and digital assistants were designed to appear female, in part so that users … could exploit them without guilt” (Penny, 2016). This brings us back again to the problem of “use” in relation to women. Men are traditionally constructed as “users” while women are traditionally constructed as an extension of man’s capacity to use, even as a tool in themselves: Women had functioned as tools and instruments, bits, parts and commodities to be bought and sold and given away. Fetching, carrying, and bearing the children, passing the genes down the family tree: they were treated as reproductive technologies and domestic appliances … Stepford Wives to an intimate brotherhood of man. (Plant 105)

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Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves 133 This book has been dedicated in part to exploring the significance of artificial women in this context. Always in tension with this notion of woman as object, as tool, as automaton, is that this fantasy, in fiction as in real life, has never really been that satisfactory. So much fiction about women as machines is also about these women becoming more human, breaking out of their programming or evolving beyond it. Blade Runner’s Rachael learns to become more than a simulated woman and to feel emotion and desire. As I discussed in Chapter 5, the love scene between Deckard and Rachael is a deeply troubling one, where Deckard violently slams the door through which Rachael attempts to leave his apartment and then pushes her against a window before ordering her to ask him to kiss her. However, in spite of the abusive elements of this scene, there seems to be a genuine desire on Deckard’s part to force Rachael out of her programming and assert herself as an individual. Whether one can order another person to do what they want is certainly in question, and the fact that a man is ‘forcing’ a woman to assert herself in a sexual context is deeply troubling. Yet, the scene seems to communicate an authentic wish on the part of the man for his fantasy machine woman to be more than a machine. Belton and Delvin argue that “In Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049, and Her, as in the current tech world, the narrative is predominately from the point of view of the white, heterosexual male. Man is the default user; woman is the used” (367). This is the established paradigm of man/​woman, man/​technology and user/​used. However, these paradigms are in a state of suspension. Use is not a simple one-​way relationship, rather, as Agamben describes: “every use is first of all use of self: to enter into a relation of use with something, I must be affected by it, constitute myself as one who makes use of it” (The Use of Bodies, 30). Gynoids complicate the notion of use by being in themselves tools who, in fiction at least, often become self-​aware and begin ‘using’ themselves on their own terms and for their own ends. In each of the films Belton and Delvin cite in the quotation above, the gynoid character rebels. In Ex Machina the AI gynoid, Ava, developed by a computer programmer, kills her creator and flees the compound where she was built, going out into the world to find her own destiny. In Blade Runner 2049, a female-​lead replicant resistance movement threatens to overthrow the human-​dominated social order. In Her, the operating system which the main character falls in love with eventually evolves into a superbeing who leaves him in order to pursue a form of life beyond human comprehension. As Pedro Costa argues: “Artificial intelligence is simultaneously ubiquitous and subtle, as it becomes embedded into our cellphones, laptops or tablets … According to this growing presence, chatbots are no longer conceived or seen as mere tools, but rather conforming to a sense of companionship that develops alongside with the anthropomorphisation of artificial intelligence” (261). In other words, we seem to increasingly want the women AIs in our digital personal assistants to be our tools while also providing a convincing simulation of being something more than a tool. We like our Siris and Alexas to tell us jokes as well as check the weather. An extreme version of this can be seen in Gatebox’s Azuma Hikari, the digital personal assistant that also offers

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134  Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves the virtual girlfriend experience. The Turing test, which was designed to prove that a computer could fool a human into thinking they were conversing with another human, is whoring itself out. This notion of providing the illusion of autonomy is reminiscent of how women have historically been expected to do the reverse, to offer compliance. While human women have been consistently raised and encouraged to offer compliance in accordance with patriarchal expectations, female AIs, according to a recent United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report are being encouraged to assert themselves more (122). Could it be that as AIs provide more convincing simulations of autonomous, female behaviour, human women’s behaviour is being revealed as more robotic in nature, more in accordance with ingrained, taught parameters? By the same token, the paradigm of femininity is being reinforced by the stereotypes which AIs perpetuate, which our children are increasingly being exposed to through smart household and smart personal devices like phones and tablets. The problem with the gynoids of the real world is that they lack agency and so repeat performances of gender involuntarily –​that is, they perform gender exactly as we program them to and/​or how they, through machine learning capacities, observe us performing it. Interestingly, the Fallout games which I  explored in Chapter  6, use the trope of the incredibly polite English butler for their domestic robot AIs: these domestic machines are known as “Mr Handy” robots and seemingly avoid the issue of femininising servitude. While this, in some ways, also represents a reductive stereotype of Britishness, it does address the issue of gender in a potentially useful manner. Given that masculinity is so culturally entrenched as a signifier of dominance, giving AIs male voices would seem a viable way of inverting this stereotype. In reality, in response to the problem of gender stereotyping in AI development, a collaboration between Copenhagen Pride, Virtue, Equal AI, Koalition Interactive & thirtysoundsgood has produced the genderless AI voice: “Q.” The project’s website states bold aims for Q: “I’m created for a future where we are no longer defined by gender but rather how we define ourselves.” This approach while intended to foster inclusivity does also have troubling connotations that require consideration. What exactly do we mean by a ‘genderless’ voice? If we mean a “non-​human,” meant to sound more mechanical (and Q does have a certain mechanical quality to it), then this may make it more difficult, possibly less pleasant to interact with the AI. On the other hand, if we mean ‘genderless’ as in the gender of the voice is difficult to determine in binary terms, then does this not potentially pose the same problems as making all digital personal assistants female? If making all AIs sound gender non-​binary, then do we not then begin to create an association between non-​ binary individuals and servitude, compliance and passivity, creating the same problems surrounding female-​voiced AIs? Perhaps another route would be to introduce a much greater degree of variation in our smart devices and digital personal assistants, each device including a range of different voices: male, female and non-​binary in character and, furthermore, with a range of different

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Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves 135 accents to offer users a more accurate sense of genuine human variability and does not pigeonhole any identity as one of servitude. Writing about the relationship between women and machines, Sadie Plant writes that “This was never in the plan. [Man] hadn’t made the women into objects only to watch the objects come to life. They hadn’t functioned as commodities in order to learn to circulate themselves.” (108–​109). However, I think this is a too simplistic reading of the way women are socialised and, in turn, the way we think about machines. In many ways, I believe, men create female machines in the hopes that they will indeed come to life. While female AIs repeat gendered behaviour, we can see how women have been similarly ‘programmed’ to behave in contradictory ways, simultaneously providing the ideal girlfriend experience and being as desirable as possible, while also remaining chaste, holding back a part of themselves in order to secure long-​ term relationships. Women have been taught to perform certain scripts in order to procure a mate, but the gynoid narratives we see so often in fiction seem to suggest a desire in men for the charade to end, for women to stop following prescribed behaviours. On the other hand, there is also the pervasive misogynist assumption that women do not really know their own minds: that women are programmable entities, empty heads which can be filled with useful inputs. So many classic, golden-​age Hollywood films portray a point in a romance where the woman resists the man’s advances. The resistance is not genuine though, she pushes the man away because she fears they cannot be together, fears her own desires which the man must bring out in her. The man grabs her, shakes her, kisses her forcefully on the mouth until she goes limp in his arms and acquiesces. Romantic music plays, she smiles, and the audience knows she really does want him, and her initial refusal was only a pretence. This dreadful sexist narrative assumes that female “no’s” really mean “yes” in order to justify sexual harassment and abuse. Women can be reprogrammed through force to accommodate male desires. But in tension with this is the notion that the programming designed to keep male sexual desire at bay is also what is stopping women from displaying their true selves which are repressed. This repression thwarts male desire not only for sex but for genuine, meaningful companionship. Female programming is as necessary to patriarchal control as it is deeply unhelpful to actual men. Even in Ovid’s Pygmalion, who sculpted a statue of the perfect woman was not satisfied with a female made of stone: he wanted a real, flesh and blood person. Deckard shakes Rachael and orders her to show her repressed self; he is desperate to see the ‘real’ woman underneath all the programming: he wants what so many other Hollywood heroes have wanted from their female lovers –​an assurance of authenticity. These encounters reflect the constant anxiety around female being which the gynoid emphasises: the fear that it is impossible to break through the programming and discover the real person underneath. Gynoids are about personhood, their frightening capacity to interrogate female individuality and, in some cases, make it come alive. Of course, questions relating to how we think about women are not meaningful unless we define what we mean by femininity/​femaleness/​woman, etc.

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136  Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves This question is implied by both Blade Runner and the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, through both films’ continual fixation on artificial females and questions surrounding their authenticity as people and as viable romantic partners. In Blade Runner 2049, Joi is a holographic girlfriend and digital personal assistant projected by a device called an emanator –​an advanced version of the Azuma Hikari holographic girlfriend simulation that exists today. Her owner, K, is himself, a replicant, who also works as a blade runner, hunting down rogue robots. He is continually confronted with questions regarding his own ‘realness’ as a person, and these questions are continually framed through his perception of his virtual girlfriend Joi. The more Joi shows love for K, the more he seems to wonder if her responses to him are genuine, saying: “You don’t have to say that” (2049 00:22:35-​40). Even if she is a simulation, the question also remains as to whether he himself is a real person and not just a simulation of someone designed to think they have personhood. What is fascinating about this portrayal is the way that the film explores not only the fragility of the concept of woman but the concept of man as well. By focusing on the simulated man’s relationship with a simulated woman we are reminded that all gender identities are to some degree performative and that Man’s identity is in many ways as fragile as Woman’s because it relies on Woman’s for supremacy. At the same time, Joi’s gender identity appears highly performative in a normative sense, the result of a series of set responses designed to please her system operator. Her personality is as transparent as her holographic self. She is the vacuum at the heart of constructed femininity but also at the heart of the masculine subject which depends on a paradigm of femininity as its constructed opposite. However, as I have discussed many times in this book, “woman” is a word that carries plethora of different meanings, some carry reductive and unhelpful associations  –​like the notion that women are naturally passive and compliant or closer to nature and biology (zoe). Then there are aspects of female experience and embodiment from which a person may derive a strong sense of personal identity. The gynoid is helpful because it suggests female autonomy: its posthuman and even transhuman properties suggest a sense of using oneself as a tool for one’s own benefit. The gynoid body also potentially readjusts our conception of the biological aspects of female identity that have for so long defined femaleness. As discussed in previous chapters, cyborg females introduce ambiguity into the process of reproduction and heteronormative structures as the gynoid body is not necessarily built for sexual reproduction. Maternity is not an assumed given for the gynoid as it often is for female characters and women in society generally. Often, gynoids have to seek out motherhood if they want it. In the case of Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager, Seven’s reproductive capacity is never really revealed (and this is refreshing considering it is not really relevant to the character’s story arc) but, rather than fixating on this facet of her biology, Seven embarks on a range of scientific and emotional

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Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves 137 journeys of discovery. When she does eventually take on a maternal-​like role, it is a matter of choice. When the Voyager crew rescues a number of assimilated Borg children (“Collective”), Seven takes on the role of mentoring them as they transition back into humanity –​Seven’s family is a chosen one, her role within it taken on by her own volition, rather than by some biological imperative. In Moore’s “No Woman Born,” the gynoid Diedre states “I’m not a robot with compulsions built into me that I  have to obey … I’m human” (Moore 235). Considering this statement from a biological perspective, it reveals two things: that giving into compulsions is simultaneously constructed as both machinelike and womanlike and that women are expected to give into bodily drives to reproduce and to care and nurture, just as machines are expected to give into their programming. Real-​life AIs now are being programmed to carry out a “stereotypical standardization of human like behavior … that is reproducing and reinforcing social clichés. Often, the behavior of chatbots confirms traditional expectations regarding gender, by following socially established feminine behavioral patterns” (Pedro 264). Yet, conflating these two aspects of machine and woman into a single vessel (the gynoid) reminds us of these contradictory ideas which so inadequately separate the binaries of man and machine and man and woman. The replicant gynoid Rachael perhaps most interestingly negotiates the question of reproduction. In the first film, Rachael’s infertility is implied by the limited lifespans of all replicant models. In spite of Rachael’s limited lifespan, Deckard decides to enter into a non-​normative relationship with her, knowing it can only last a few years and cannot result in a family.1 In the sequel, however, Blade Runner 2049, it is revealed that Rachael could and did reproduce with Deckard –​she gives birth years before the setting of the film, to the first replicant/​human hybrid. The child, now an adult, becomes the focus of the narrative, hunted by humans who want to mine its reproductive capacity for commercial gain and by replicants so it may be of service to its revolutionary cause. The adult offspring of Rachael and Deckard is revealed to be woman, a human/​machine cyborg, or gynoid, imbued with a new level of hybridity which complicates further notions of machinic/​female authenticity even further than the “more human than human” replicants. Through the figure of the gynoid, maternity as biological imperative is reframed in Blade Runner 2049 as not only a matter of choice but a revolutionary act of defiance  –​the resulting progeny is the beginning of a totally new notion of humanity. This focus on children and the possibilities for the future that they represent in Blade Runner 2049 is in line with the possibilities for reimagining gender norms that become available when we consider how to raise children without imprinting binary gender behaviours onto them. They are connected with the anxieties around raising children in the presence of normatively gendered AIs: the near-​future possibilities of letting machines raise our children for us. How can we expect our machines, are AIs to not reproduce problematic gendered behaviours when we continually reproduce negative stereotypes through the

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138  Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves behaviours we ingrain in our children and the ways we police children’s performance of gender? Jack Halberstam describes how forcefully we train our children to be “normal,” how blatantly adults insist on certain forms of embodiment and forbid others. In fact, there is nothing natural in the end about gender as it emerges from childhood; the hetero scripts that are forced on children have nothing to do with nature and everything to do with violent enforcements of hetero-​reproductive domesticity. (Trans* 61) These “hetero scripts” are frequently embedded in forms of play: that is, in those forms of play that are acceptable and sanctioned: a boy and girl playing at mums and dads or little girls playing with makeup while little boys play with trucks and toy guns –​or (in a more up-​to-​date scenario) little girls playing makeup-​or fashion-​associated games on their tables or gaming consoles while little boys play racing or gun-​fighting games … also on their tablets or gaming consoles. Subversive, profane play occurs when children suspend established paradigms by knowingly or unknowingly challenging established structures  –​for example, when a little boy puts on a tiara and declares himself a princess. Play can be profane but its possibilities are often diluted by the normative structures around it: superior normative power structures often reframe potentially subversive childhood experimentation as part of a narrative of the normative adult that was eventually produced: “normative adulthood is only held in place by the relegation of all forms of otherness to the past. Childhood was never queer, never trans*, but always oriented toward a normativity to come” (Halberstam, Trans* 62). Yet, as Halberstam notes, non-​normative gender behaviours in children can be profoundly subversive: “The presence of cross-​ gendered children and gender-​ambiguous children within the family throws all kinds of assumptions about gender, childhood, and embodiment into question, and ultimately casts doubt on the validity of the family itself” (Halberstam, Trans* 46). Childhood is an extended exercise in experimentation with the world, with what it means to own a body, with what it means to be a person and to interact with others. With this definition, we could argue that childhood is a life-​long process with no arbitrary conclusion at the end of adolescence. We need to encourage all children to play and to have the freedom of experimentation without colouring the results of those child-​experiments with own biases and pre-​conceived ideas. This is bad science apart from anything else. Also, we should encourage childlike curiosity in adults. Deleuze’s notion of the child player is useful here: as a notion of how children interact with the constructions around them that they encounter and engage with them while also experimenting with new combinations. Children mimic but they also throw up new unexpected, emergent ideas. If we could embrace and celebrate these capacities within children and the more general concept of the child player, we might be able to fulfil the dream offered by the

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Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves 139 AI, Q: to be defined not by gender but by how we define ourselves. We address the dual nature of gender which causes so much trouble: that is gender is both a key aspect of our authentic selves as well as a socially imposed oppressive category –​an imposition and an expression. The ways in which some LGBTQI people, and particularly trans and non-​ binary persons in recent years, have been more and more openly declaring their gender for themselves. While, this process is full of challenges, it can be seen as a revolutionary act as well: it potentially constitutes a way of conceptualising gender as a thing that is more declared than attributed, something which individuals claim as one’s own more rather than something which is socially and politically enforced. The figure of the gynoid helps us to expose and play with the edges of gender constructions along these axis, the molar structure of gender as a fixed, socially policed activity, and the molecular lines and lines of flight which represent gender ambiguity, creativity, obscurity and indistinction. If we are to achieve a more nuanced understanding of gender and a more nuanced feminist politics, we will also need to begin reframing the way we view the domestic labour of child rearing and domesticity. We need to challenge our historical devaluing of this work, rather than gradually offloading the labour onto virtual women, whose subservient presence in our homes only reinforces stereotypes and contributes to the enforced heteronormativity which children are already at the mercy of. Kristeva’s work is helpful in beginning to think about such an approach because, while she acknowledged revolutionary possibilities of motherhood, she also examined the pitfalls of glorifying it: When feminism demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with that idealised misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real experience that fantasy overthrows. The result? A  negation or rejection of motherhood by some avant-​guarde feminist groups. Or else an acceptance –​conscious or not –​of its traditional representations. (Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” 161) Motherhood is frequently imagined in feminist discourse as either a traumatic experience that limits female freedom and autonomy or as a profound expression of the female capacity to be entirely for another, of the unique womanly experience of nurturing and caregiving. Both representations imagine motherhood, either negatively or positively as a loss of self. We are in desperate need then of a notion of motherhood, and a notion of female identity generally, which maintains a strong sense of selfhood. Apart from many other considerations, while being for others and/​or the experience of motherhood, might be a defining facet of identity for some women, it will not be for others  –​ for example, women who cannot have or do not want children. We need to stop defining women by their capacity to dissolve themselves into the needs of others and instead acknowledge the female subject as an independent being. We need a feminist politics of autonomy suggested by becoming-​gynoid. We need to embrace the utility which the gynoid implies, the autonomy of self-​use.

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140  Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves As Lisa Downing argues “female selfishness, as a radical and deviant departure from the expected qualities of ‘woman,’ may indeed be properly considered to be a strategic, political and personal achievement” (2). But in acknowledging women as “self-​full” (Downing 3) individuals, we can’t make the mistake of subsuming female identity into male identity –​imagining that woman loses her femininity if she acknowledges her individuality –​thinking she must become “a female man.” As Downing also notes, some have “declared this ‘masculine’ idea of ‘self’ unfit for purpose for women” (15). We also must not give way to the reverse form of thinking: that is, believing that feminine forms of gender performance and costume are incompatible with a strong sense of self. Femininity  –​that is, those aspects involving everything from high heels, cosmetics, dresses, etc. –​can be powerful. Stina Attebery and Josh Pearson explain how fashion can be “a risky subversive technology that subtly transforms social constructions of the body, we suggest that clothing operates as a type of technological posthuman prosthesis” (ch. 5). It is not without its problematic aspects, especially when performed in normative ways which enforce rather than trouble established constructions. But femininity (in the sense of fashion and self-​presentation) can be a powerful, cyborg, becoming-​ gynoid act, creative and even subversive when chosen rather than conformed to under pressure. Even though our engagement with technology and AI development practices have yet to catch up, encouragingly, we are increasingly starting to see many ideas relating to the gender of machines being scrutinised in film, TV, literature and video games. As the Stepford Wives, Siri, Alexa and Cortana invade our reality and, disturbingly, our homes, more nuanced and critical approaches to gynoids are to be found increasingly in mainstream sf: for example, the recent Westworld TV series which uses the premise of a wild west fantasy theme park filled with AIs exploited by guests to explore (often through its female robot characters) notions of agency, consent, memory and abuse. The Australian Netflix film I Am Mother explores concepts of gender, motherhood and technology through the coming of age story of a young girl being raised alone on a post-​apocalyptic Earth by an AI, known as “mother.” And the Norwegian series Real Humans and subsequent UK remake Humans, which follows the stories of several robots, most of whom provide care work or domestic labour. Interestingly this very same theme of exploring the personal stories of robots also recently appeared in Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human: the player experiences the daily lives of three different android servants and the problematic nature of their use within households before being given the opportunity to break through their programming and escape these tyrannous households. Of particular interest in the gynoid character Kara, a housekeeper and nanny android who breaks her programming to escape an abusive male parent and rescue a little girl. This can be achieved depending on the player’s choices by shooting the abusive father. Returning to the notion of use in relation to gynoids, it is interesting how this game encourages the player to disobey the game, as the character must disobey their human master. Kara is ordered to stay put at one point in the game by her owner, and the game displays this

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Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves 141 as the current objective on the screen. However, if you do nothing, you cannot progress, so the game encourages you to ignore the rules and take control. Each android breaks their programming in a different way, one character does so very gradually over a series of decisions which weakens his “software stability,” and another violently smashes through a virtual wall. Only Kara is tasked with actually defying the game, reflecting how human women must also often defy social norms and social programming. All these fictional representations of gynoids challenge or problematise the notion of outsourcing traditional ‘women’s’ work’ –​from prostitution to childcare  –​highlighting the need to address the social and ethical issues around gender, the concept of child rearing and our relationship with the domestic sphere before we can begin to unproblematically invite machines into the intimate space of the home. I Am Mother totally subverts the notion of the gynoid as a tool of Man by portraying a female robot with almost total control over the last remaining progeny of the human race. At the same time, many of the examples I cite emphasise the necessity of female autonomy by portraying characters who must assert themselves in order to avoid abuse. The “host” gynoids of Westworld were created for sexual and violent abuse, and it is only through learning to accept themselves as conscious individuals that they are able to take the use of their bodies back. The robots of the TV series Humans and the game, Detroit: Become Human, go on very similar journeys. In literature, gynoids also continue to thrive in modern feminist and global sf, from Madeleine Ashby’s Machine Dynasty series of novels to Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix and Ken Lui’s short story, “Good Hunting.” Each of these works emphasises the tension between machine women as slaves and machine women as autonomous selves, proclaiming their own agency through their capacity as tools  –​tools which they take from their masters and repurpose in order to assert their selfhood. The first Machine Dynasty novel, vN, follows the story of a VonNeumann robot girl becoming, changing (becoming-​gynoid) and growing into an adult self as she runs from the forces that attempt to control her. Okafor’s Book of Phoenix follows the story of a woman who has been artificially created to be a living phoenix-​like, post-​ human creature. She was made as a weapon, but she uses her ability to self-​ destruct and rise again from the ashes to resist the government that created her. In Good Hunting a young girl, Yan, who is spirit demon known as a “hulijing” and exists in both human and fox form befriends a human boy, Liang. Together they confront a rapidly changing colonised China and an emerging steampunk dystopic future where Yan loses her magic powers and is forced in prostitution. Liang eventually restores Yan’s powers by giving her a new form a mechanical ‘magic,’ reworking her body into a shape-​shifting cyborg. These new emerging fictions of gynoids can help point us towards a new feminist politics of becoming-​gynoid, one which acknowledges the suspended categories of gender as well as the potential for becoming and reassembling our understanding of what it means to be female and, more broadly, what it means to be gendered. Becoming-​gynoid is a means of reimagining gender, but it is also deeply necessary for a new feminist approach that acknowledges and

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142  Virtual Wives and Autonomous Selves celebrates female individuality: that understands the vast variety within this category and champions the capacity of all those who identify as women to be unique.

Note 1 It should be noted that this is only the case in Blade Runner’s theatrical release and in the director’s cut. In response to Hollywood pressure to create a more traditionally happy ending, an additional final scene was added where Deckard and Rachael drive through an idyllic countryside setting, and a Deckard’s voice-​over declares that Rachael is a special sort of android that would live much longer than other replicants. Subsequent releases ended with Rachael and Deckard simply fleeing the city, leaving their fate ambiguous. This ending is considered to supersede the others.

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Index

actuality 28, 88, 118, 120 Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 28, 43, 44, 45, 53; Profanations 105–​107, 112; The Signature of All Things 8, 15, 21–​22, 27, 31, 41; State of Exception 28, 29; The Use of Bodies 8, 60–​61, 133 Ahmed, Sara 3 Alderman, Naomi: The Power, 55–​58 Alexa 17, 20, 132–​133, 140 apparatus 25, 27, 30, 38–​40, 48, 64, 71, 110, 114–​115, 122, 130 archaic 15, 21, 28, 42, 56, 64, 105, 109, 116 arche 15, 21, 41 artificial intelligence 89, 99, 125, 128–​129, 133–​135, 137, 139, 140 assemblage 14–​18, 72–​75, 77, 91–​92, 96, 99–​100, 104, 109–​110, 128, 130; and bodies 70; and gender 62, 79–​80, 88; and heterosexual desire 88–​89, 98–​99, 100–​101; and interface 103, 111, 121, 125; mother-​child 89; and the cyborg 69–​71, 82, 88; womanhood 91, 95, 97 Atteberry, Brian 87 Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale 34–​37, 44 auctoritas 33, 38, 113, 115, 117 autonomy 37–​38, 55, 61, 64, 66–​67, 93, 101, 107, 111, 134, 136, 139, 141 avatar 9, 20, 102, 104, 109, 119–​120, 123–​125, 127, 129, 130 Balsamo, Anne 60, 62, 64 bare life 28–​30, 33–​34, 43–​45, 49, 61, 115 “Bartleby” 14 becoming-​gynoid 1, 18, 20, 72, 78, 80, 86, 88, 102, 120, 123–​125, 127–​130, 132, 139–​141

becoming-​woman 17–​18, 75–​80, 121 being 13, 26, 28–​29, 33, 35, 38, 51, 66–​67, 75, 77–​78, 88–​89, 91, 133, 135; female being 5, 12, 24–​25, 27, 32, 52, 80, 125, 135; and gender 29, 41, 86; male being 25; non-​being 25, 27, 32 biopolitics 3, 8–​9, 33, 43, 102, 114–​115 biopower 3, 33 body without organs 14, 16–​17, 69–​71, 73–​74, 76–​78, 80, 103–​104, 128 Boudreau, Kelly 124, 130 Braidotti, Rosi 4, 82 Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex 19, 93; “For a Careful Reading” 61; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 7, 22, 33–​34, 39, 44, 61; Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence 67; Undoing Gender 2–​3, 12, 29–​30, 41, 57 Butler, Octavia: Xenogenesis trilogy 13, 37, 39–​40 Carter, Angela: The Passion of New Eve 10–​12, 43, 45–​48, 53–​56 child player 118–​119, 121–​122, 125, 138 Cixous, Helene 5–​6, 23, 79 collectivism 4; and feminism 2–​3, 5–​6, 66; and women 55 Cortana 20, 140 cyberpunk 13 cyborg 13–​14, 17–​18, 20, 43, 48, 51–​52, 60–​64, 66–​70, 78, 80, 84–​85, 102–​104, 124–​127, 129, 136–​137, 140–​141 de Beauvoir, Simone 32 Deleuze, Gilles: Difference and Repetition 14–​15, 68, 118; The Logic of Sense 76–​78, 84, 118

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Index 151 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus 15–​18, 73–​78, 120; Anti-​Oedipus 69–​70, 72–​73 destratification 17, 73 deterritorialisation 15, 69, 72–​74, 78–​79, 89 Deus Ex 20, 117, 121–​130; Human Revolution 125, 129; Invisible War 128–​129; Mankind Divided 125, 129 divine game 118–​122, 125 Downing, Lisa 2, 6–​7, 55–​56, 140 dystopia 3, 11, 36, 45, 50, 55, 58, 92 embodiment 41, 67, 78, 86, 124, 136, 138 emergence 102–​103 exclusion 3, 25, 27, 28, 32, 44, 52, 111 exemplar 7, 12, 21–​22, 25, 27 Fallout 19, 102–​104, 107, 108–​109, 112, 114–​117, 134; Fallout 2 116; Fallout 3 19, 102–​103, 107–​108, 109–​110, 113, 115; Fallout 4 19, 102, 104, 108, 111–​115; Fallout New Vegas 19, 102, 108, 115–​116; Vaults 103 fembot 132 femininity 34–​35; and bare life 61; and Deleuze and Guattari 86; and feminism 5, 10; and motherhood 139; and performance 62, 84, 85; and the cyborg 60, 62, 66–​67, 83, 86; and the self 140; in Blade Runner 18, 98; in Blade Runner 2049 136; in Deleuze and Guattari 75, 79; in “Der Sandmann” 81–​82; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 89, 94; in “No Woman Born” 84–​85, 87; in The Female Man, 53–55; in The Passion of New Eve 43, 46–​47; in The Power 55–​56; in the Deus Ex games 127, 134 feminism 2, 3; and bare life 44; and motherhood 139; cyborg feminism 13; essentialism 7, 12, 23, 79; French post-​ structuralist 5; in The Female Man 54, 55; in The Handmaid’s Tale 37, 44; in the Xenogenesis Trilogy 37; second wave 4; the self 6 floating signifier 78, 80 flows 72, 82 Freud, Sigmund 80, 82 Friedan, Betty 29 Gee, James Paul 119, 122–​124 gender 8, 147; and bare life 29, 44; and biopower 7, 8, 9, 30, 48; and Blade

Runner 2049 137; and children 138; and essentialism 11–​12; and feminism 7; and feminist sf 10; and He, She and It 51; and indistinction 8–​9, 14, 21–​22, 25, 30, 32, 51; and parody 47; and patriarchy 27; and performance 3, 12, 86, 134; and play 107, 119, 138; and psychoanalysis 5; and sexual difference 2, 9, 29, 33; and technology, 132, 134–​135, 137, 139–​140; and the cyborg 13–​14, 20, 48–​49, 60–​62, 64, 78–​80, 134, 136, 141; and the homo sacer 45; constructionism 26; essentialism 3, 5, 26; gender binary 2, 4, 18, 23, 43; gender critical 3; in Blade Runner 100; in “Der Sandmann” 80, 82, 85; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 93; in He, She and It 49, 52; in “No Woman Born” 86–​88; in Solaris 25, 27; in Star Trek The Next Generation 63; in Star Trek Voyager 62, 65, 67, 68–​71; in the Ancillary Justice trilogy 10; in the Deus Ex games 122–​125, 129; in the Fallout games 19, 102, 104, 108, 111, 116; in The Female Man 1, 11, 52, 53, 55; in The Handmaid’s Tale 35, 44; in The Left Hand of Darkness 9–​10; in The Passion of New Eve 43, 45–​47; in The Power 55–​58; in the Xenogenesis trilogy 37, 39–​40; in Venus Plus X, 9 general 2, 4, 5, 22, 32, 44, 65, 71 Gillis, Stacy 63 girl 17, 18, 76–​80, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth 12–​13 gynoid 14, 18, 20, 60–​62, 69, 70, 80, 83–​84, 86–​88, 91–​92, 95–​102, 125–​129, 132–​133, 135–​137, 139–​141 Halberstam, Jack: Female Masculinities 11, 21, 23; Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability 40–​41, 48, 62, 86, 138 Haraway, Donna 3, 12–​13, 49, 52, 62, 64, 66 heteronormativity 27, 30, 48, 89; and biopower 8, 19, 43, 102–​103, 111, 116–​117; and play 138 heterosexual matrix 39, 70, 91, 101 heterosexuality 34 Hoffman, E.T.A.: “Der Sandmann” 18, 80, 81–​84, 99 homo sacer, 43–​45, 49–​50, 52, 56, 63–​64, 115 humanism 6

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152 Index impotentiality 15 inclusion 5, 27–​28, 32, 53, 60 indeterminacy 7, 14–​15, 28, 68, 97, 100, 104, 114 indifference 14–​15, 49, 61, 68, 119 indistinction 3, 14–​15, 22, 28, 30, 51, 61, 64–​65, 68, 72–​73, 101, 114–​117, 131, 139 inoperativity 8, 14–​15, 27, 51, 67–​68, 73, 80, 103, 108, 110 intensity 73–​74, 118 Irigaray, Luce 5–​6, 23–​24, 26, 79 Joy, Lisa and Johnathan Nolan: Westworld 17, 140–​141 Juul, Jesper 102–​103 Kristeva, Julia 5, 23, 32, 139 Lavigne, Carlen 13, 17, 62 law 28–​29, 33–​34, 74, 77, 106, 116 Leaver, Tama 65–​66 LeGuin, Ursula: The Left Hand of Darkness 9 Lem, Stanislaw: Solaris 24–​25, 27 Levin, Ira: The Stepford Wives 17, 69, 83, 140 line of flight 17, 72–​76, 80, 128 masculinity 18, 55, 134; and women 23; female masculinity 23; in The Female Man 1, 53–​54; in The Passion of New Eve 46–​47 Mills, Catherine 8 Moi, Toril 6, 23 molar 72, 74, 76–​77, 80, 82, 95, 96, 97, 100, 123, 128, 130, 139 molecular 17, 72, 74–​77, 80, 82, 91, 96–​97, 121, 130, 139 Moore, C.L.: “No Woman Born” 14, 84–​85, 87–​88, 137 nymph 21, 22, 24, 71 oikonomia 33, 39, 113–​114 oikos 33, 36 Okin, Susan Moller 36, 132 paradigm 5, 7–​8, 11–​15, 19, 21–​25, 27–​28, 30–​33, 40–​42, 48, 53, 56, 58, 65, 70, 72, 77, 82, 105–​107, 109–​110, 113–​114, 116, 130, 133–​134 particular 9, 22, 27, 65, 71 patriarchy 12, 27; and bare life 50, 53; and feminism 4–​6, 11–​12, 23–​24; and

language 32; and the cyborg 64; and womanhood 76, 79, 86 Philip K. Dick: Do Androids of Electric Sheep? 19, 89, 90–​97; Voight-​Kampff 96, 100 Piercy, Marge: He, She and It 10, 43, 48, 49, 51–​53 Plant, Sadie 60–​61, 132, 135 polis 28 post-​apocalyptic 103, 107 posthuman 63–​64, 120–​125, 129, 140 posthumanism 49, 124 potentiality 14–​15, 17, 28, 30, 118 potestas 33, 38, 113, 115, 117 praxis 4, 113, 117 profane 105, 107–​108, 112–​113, 138 progression 102–​103 projectiv 119 projectivity 122–​124 queer theory 4, 7, 21, 23, 61, 138 reterritorialisation 15, 69, 73–​74, 78 Russ, Joanna: The Female Man 1, 2, 10–​11, 42, 43, 52–​55 sacred 28, 35, 105–​109, 112 sacrifice 52–​53, 56, 63, 115 schizoanalysis 73, 82 Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner 18–​19, 97–​100, 133, 136, 142 self 4–​6, 8–​9, 12–​13, 23, 30, 40–​41, 43, 61, 65–​66, 71, 86, 91, 101, 102, 119, 130, 133, 135, 139–​140 selfhood 6, 41, 66, 86, 139, 141 selfless 6, 50, 96 sexuality 86, 88, 94, 96; female sexuality 11, 27, 71, 98; male sexuality 50 Sicart, Miguel 106, 112–​113, 117 sign 41, 61, 76, 87, 123 signature 30–​34, 40–​41, 53, 57–​59, 79–​80, 105, 107, 110, 113–​114 Signatures 7–​8, 15, 21–​22, 27 signified 16, 31–​32 signifier 11, 16, 31, 57, 134 simulation 27, 81, 84–​86, 133–​134, 136 Siri 20, 132–​133, 140 sovereign 28–​29, 43–​45, 49, 105, 107, 113–​115, 117 specific 4, 7–​9, 22, 25, 27, 31, 44, 65–​66, 114 Star Trek: Seven of Nine 14, 62, 64–​71, 86, 136–​137; The Next Generation 63; Voyager 14, 62, 64–​71, 86, 136–​137

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Index 153 stratification 45, 77 Swift, Jonathan: A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed 86 technology 3, 13, 17, 23, 49, 51, 52, 60, 62–​64, 70, 90, 109, 117, 122, 124, 127–​129, 132–​133, 140; and biology 71, 78, 104; and the self 49, 65, 70, 124; and women 60 totalitarian 28, 34, 38, 48, 66, 71, 74, 111–​112, 123, 128 trans 104 transgender 7–​8, 23, 29, 40–​41, 86, 138–​139; in The Passion of New Eve 47–​48 transhuman 66, 136 undecidability 15, 21, 28 universal 4–​5, 8–​9, 12, 22–​24, 27, 44, 64–​66, 68, 71, 114

utopia 3, 36, 43, 52–​53 vault 111, 113–​117 Villeneuve, Denis: Blade Runner 2049 133, 136–​137 Vint, Sherryl 8, 12–​13, 38–​39, 41 virtual 15, 17, 30, 72–​74, 79, 105–​106, 109, 117–​124, 129–​131, 134–​136, 139, 141 virtuality 130 Wittig, Monique 7, 25–​27, 32, 34, 89 Wosk, Julie 69, 80, 82 Yaszek, Lisa 17, 55, 69, 98, 101 Zartaloudis, Thanos 113–​114 zoe 7–​8, 13, 28–​30, 33–​35, 38–​39, 43–​44, 48–​49, 52–​53, 60, 64, 67–​68, 91, 136

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