Postgender Identities as a Metaphor (2000)
Title: Postgender Identities as a Metaphor Author: Jasna Koteska
Central European University, Budapest
Master thesis submitted to the Program on Gender & Culture
60 pages, June, 2000
MA Thesis
Abstract
Our study investigates the status of the cyber and techno bodies as a turning point in gender formation, and their possible role in shaking the gender and sexuality questions within the cultural framework. Based on Donna J. Haraway’s The Manifesto for the Cyborgs (1985), it offers a gender literary analyzes of two of the most important SF novels of the 20th century: Philip K. Dick’s Do The Android Dream of The Electric Sheep? (1968) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1986).
Our investigation reveals Haraway’s cyber enthusiasm as utopian, at least regarding the mentioned novels. Far from deconstructing the stereotipes, the body concepts in the two novels are actually exploiting even more extreme masculinist and militaristic iconographies in representing gender roles, and thus supporting the patriarchal patterns. Nevertheless, the cyber and techno imageries, as politically and technologically important switch in the body politics of the last century, are directed toward further re-conceptualising of the body and further rethinking of gender identity questions.
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