Science fiction is a vital source of narratives through which we understand and represent our relationships to technology. […] We believe that women’s fictional representations of cyberspace and cyberculture, largely ignored in cyberculture/cyberpunk studies, are crucial to an informed understanding of our present technoculture: First, women’s cience fiction, despitre its limited-run editions, is a popular literature with a significant and vocal fan base. Science fiction is no longer a subculture dominated by male writers and readers; the increasing presence of women in science-fiction culture as authors, readers, and fans has meant that science fiction itself pays more attention to issues of gender. Second, women’s cyberfiction can be read productively against what has been an all-male canon of cyberpunk literature. Women writers are appropriating the cyberpunk aesthetic–metaphors of jacking in, figures of outlaws and outsiders, and film-noir rhetoric–for their own ends. Third, reading women’s cyberfiction can illuminate studies of technology and postmodernism, particularly work focusing on anxieties about the decentering and fragmentation of the subject and studies concerned with the status of the body. Fourth, women’s cyberfiction may be read productively against feminist postmodern critical theory and practices, particularly claims about the liberatory nature of the transcendence of gender and the body, and destabilizing cultural effects of the hybridity of the female cyborg. Women’s cyberfiction rewrites the familiar cultural narratives of cyberpunk literature and the Hollywood cyborg film, offering an alternative set of visions while at the same time challenging the critical and theoretical trends of utopian cyberfeminism.
Flanagan, Mary, & Austin Booth. “Introduction”. Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Mary Flanagan & Austin Booth (eds.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. pp. 1-24. p.2.
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