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17 - Feminist criticism and technologies of the body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Stacy Gillis
Edited by
Gill Plain  and
Susan Sellers
Stacy Gillis
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle
Gill Plain
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Susan Sellers
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

An understanding of the body as technologically constituted was one of the key discursive shifts in both postmodern and feminist theories in the late 1980s. Research on gender, the body and technology emerged simultaneously in a number of disciplines – from literature to sociology, from cybernetics to history – and has since proposed a number of ways in which we can and should understand the body as and in technology. While I will be drawing upon many of these debates, I am here particularly concerned with how the body is articulated in cyberspace and cybertheory: both the relationship of technology and cyberspace with the body in real life (IRL) and how this relationship has been represented in the new techno-fictions, both literary and filmic, which have emerged in the past thirty years.

The figure of the cyborg – that combination of the human and the technological – has become a symbol of the relationship between the body and technology. The cyborg also defines the contemporary cyberpunk and science-fiction text – whether it is the hardboiled console cowboy Case in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) or the hyper-sexualised Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). Its ability both to interrogate and to reify the category of the human has resulted in its appropriation by many who are eager to claim the disruptive ‘postmodernity’ that it contains and represents.

Type
Chapter
Information
A History of Feminist Literary Criticism , pp. 322 - 335
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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