Abstract
This chapter explores recent representations in speculative literature and media of the cyborg as a queer-coded figure, and in particular of the ‘female’ cyborg as a lesbian figure. The latter counters the recurring trope of the cyborg fantasized as a submissive, sexualized, and fetishized woman-coded entity. The cyborg’s queerness stems from her simultaneous proximity to and estrangement from organic humanity; the lesbian cyborg contradicts established ways of what a woman should look and act like because she is positioned in excess of hegemonic hierarchies. In contemporary speculative narratives, the lesbian cyborg thus appears as a vector of emancipation, whose presence signifies the possibilities of new narratives that are not rooted in extractive exploitation but in anti-hegemonic queered relationalities.
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Notes
- 1.
My use of “lesbian” as interchangeably synonymous with “queer” or “sapphic,” here, is not meant to erase other forms of queerness related to womanhood (bisexuality, sapphism, etc.), but to resurrect the full subversive power of a label that remains the site of uneasy identification for many today despite its long, rich, and inclusive activist history. I am also using the pronoun “she” as a shorthand, although lesbians can and may often use a variety of pronouns including “she,” “they,” or neo-pronouns.
- 2.
This resonates with David Halperin’s (1995) use of the word: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (62).
- 3.
This semantic broadening has its drawbacks, if the long history of reproaches addressed to queer theory by such fields as feminist studies and critical race theory is any indication. It has been argued that the definition of queer has broadened so much as to become meaningless, that the term has been mired and muddled by cultural issues rather than used to create political and social movements.
- 4.
This reading resonates, of course, with the quintessential narrative around human women as naturally two-faced liars and schemers: A woman accusing a man of rape will more often be suspected of lying to destroy that man’s life, for example. Trans women are particularly vulnerable to that accusation and the ensuing violence, since their transness is coded as a form of duplicity meant to betray cis men (or cis women: one particularly violent transphobic narrative depicts trans women as “men” intent on “infiltrating” feminist circles in order to have access to cis women, even when it has been proven over and over again that trans women are just as much the victims of patriarchy and misogyny as cis women).
- 5.
Among the authors of these representations, queer women are the overwhelming majority, and this is hardly a coincidence: their lived, embodied experiences as queer women trying to extricate themselves from patriarchy have inevitably impacted the way they theorize, imagine, and represent womanhood.
- 6.
This nicely echoes showrunner Rebecca Sugar’s comments about identifying as a nonbinary woman.
- 7.
This goal, especially in this current political climate, may convey undertones of ecofascism, and this is where the novel’s ambivalence is maintained: Joan’s aim may be interpreted as both a fascistic one that wraps itself in mock concern for ecology, but also as a gesture toward other ways of living.
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Thomas, H. (2022). Lesbian Cyborgs and the Blueprints for Liberation. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_12
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