Haraway, Gibson and Incomplete Revolutions

In “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway optimistically portrays a future in which technological innovations have undermined the distinction between natural and human constructions. This undermining, she argues, paves the way for new understandings of race, gender and class: in an era where the body is infinitely mutable, where genetics are voluntary components of organic/mechanical syntheses, using biology as the basis for any system of social hierarchy becomes increasingly difficult. Paradoxically, she describes the move toward a non-dualistic society in terms of a series of dualisms, outlined in a rough chart halfway through the chapter. The cyborg is defined as a fusion of man/machine; this definition implicitly assumes the existence of the dichotomy that Haraway supposedly seeks to complicate and deconstruct. Her visions of future thought systems involves a translation that seems to undermine many of the messages of the piece. Can technology transform identities and societies in a truly unprecedented manner? This question is still a matter of debate: however, a reading of Molly’s character in Neuromancer seems to cast doubt upon the ability of authors to produce truly subversive futuristic identities.

Like Haraway, Gibson’s novel offers a universe that seems excitingly rebellious. Case is cast as a ‘cowboy’, a Robin Hood character who steals from the technocracies that run the world of the future. He is joined by a girl that sci-fi critics have hailed as a feminist heroine: Molly adapts the image of the femme fatale, combining sexuality and intelligence in an incredibly dangerous package. Molly’s lens implants make her a literal imagining of Haraway’s cyborg. She is part human, part machine, utilizing the technologies of the future to supplement the original boundaries of her body. But is Molly’s character an actual representation of liberated humanity, or is she subject to the same constraints and oppressions as a woman of the 21st century?

I was especially struck by Molly’s retelling of what seems to be a futuristic form of prostitution. She initially sees nothing wrong with renting out her body to willing johns, describing it as nothing more than “renting the goods.” A technological glitch, however, blurs the lines between her conscious life and her alter identity, forcing an eventual confrontation with the gruesome facts of Chiba’s sex industry. In this situation, Molly’s cyborg body doesn’t seem to be an instrument of liberation, as much as it is an easily objectified commodity. Technological innovation, here, has blurred the lines between woman and machine, by reducing Molly’s body to the status of an appliance. This is not the only scenario in which Molly’s sexuality is used against her; Riviera utilizes hypersexual images of her body in several instances throughout the book, as a means of generating titillation (for him) and unease (in the novel’s protagonists.) While Riviera’s characterization as sociopath makes it relatively easy for the reader to distance themselves from the explicit sexism in these portrayals, the character of Molly herself is no less caricatured, a Lara Croft analogue that plays to hypermasculine fantasies even as it claims to denounce them. Why is it that the most prominent female character in the book is portrayed as wearing skin-tight, sexual clothing? Why does she have to become sexually paired with the male protagonist? Why is her naked body repeatedly used as a weapon against her?

Rather than liberating future human beings from the social hierarchies of our time, the world of Neuromancer seems to have incorporated ideals of material progress while maintaining – and in this case, strengthening – the structures of many existing injustices. Gibson is a skilled writer, and his descriptions of cyberspace are nuanced and often breathtakingly beautiful. However, his careful attention to aesthetics is not a punk rebellion in itself. Gibson, like Haraway, offers the promise of technological revolution, but ultimately continues to pay allegiance to many of the dominant structures of our time.

'Body Surfing' and the Demonic Within

“Body Surfing” manipulates the traditional constraints of the body in order to make interesting points about identity and sexuality. Its characters often change embodiments so quickly that it is difficult to remember who is who, and who is within whose body. Gender, race and sexual orientation are rendered fluid; at several points, the demons of the novel have sex in bodies that bear no resemblance to the ones that they initially inhabited.

I was intrigued by the possibilities that ‘body surfing’ allowed, but troubled by the ways in which it was executed: most of the sex in the novel is graphic rape, and the consequences of brutal sexual assault are often described in a very depersonalized manner. ‘Body Surfing’ describes a universe where bodies are disposable; this universe produces characters that are easily replaceable and treated in manners so horrific that it is difficult to make any sense of their torment, or of the motives of the demons which inhabit them.

The demons of ‘Body Surfing’ seem to be an extreme look at many of the embodied disciplinary measures that are currently at work in the world, including the structures of institutional racism and sexism. Patriarchy, for instance, seem to operate under the principle that a woman’s body is not her own, but the property of men, to be used and controlled. This symbology is particularly powerful during Ileana’s rape scene, where a Mogran hides among a group of soldiers. The Mogran are the target of the legion, but in this scene, there seems to be no practical difference between the bloodlust of humans and the brutality of demons. This is, in my opinion, the truly horrifying part of the novel. It’s easy to dismiss the actions of the Mogran as aspects of fantasy, but the actions of the soldiers have historical precedent, and are deeply embedded within the fabric of war. Can a member of the Legion really justify hunting the Mogran, when there are aspects of the demonic within us?

Rape in Body Surfing

To say that there’s a lot of sex in Dale Peck's Body Surfing is a vast understatement. I’ll be honest — I found myself struggling to read about the graphic violent sex from the very first page, but I continued reading, accusing myself of being too narrow-minded, pushing (forcing) my mind to open… but no matter how much I read, I couldn’t stop thinking about rape.

I think it’s safe to say that sex is very rarely consensual when it involves Mogran possession. It's possible that a Mogran could inhabit a body for long enough to seduce someone without hypnotizing them, and it's also possible that the body that they are possessing could have enough free will to truly desire the person that the Mogran is seducing. Although I can see the potential of a consensual sex act occurring while someone is possessed by a Mogran, this possibility is absent from the actual narrative. Legal and philosophical definitions of what constitutes sexual assault vary. People who define rape as “forced” sex would not consider the nonviolent acts where Mogran hypnotize their sexual targets to be rape (How does this sexual hypnosis work? “It’s all in the eyes” —Leo teaches Jasper to rapidly expand and contract his pupils (214)). I, however, consider sex via hypnosis to be sexual assault. It seems, then, that most of the sex we read about in the novel is sexual assault — the most graphic example is Illeana's gang rape at the command of an officer who Leo possessed, but Jasper also rapes multiple times. At first, Leo promises him that if he has sex, he can move onto heaven. So he seduces a woman in Jarhead’s body who he knows is not interested in Jarhead: “She didn’t have any desire for this body at all,” Jasper acknowledges, but “He was dead, after all. He was hardly accountable for his actions” (80-81). Soon, Jasper realizes that his sexual urges seem uncontrollable. So he finds himself sexually assaulting Jarhead’s roommate’s girlfriend: “Jasper stood their swaying, stunned by the primacy of his feelings. His need. The way it linked up with Jarhead’s feelings about Sandra,running around his trailer with her ass hanging out. She was practically asking for it. Really, he’d just be giving her what she wanted. What she deserved” (154). So, Sandra was asking to be assaulted — hello, standard rapist mindset! Eventually, Leo teaches him to hypnotize women to make it easier to sleep with them (and less violent for whoever he’s “seducing”).

I think we’re supposed to feel sorry for Jasper, to identify with him, to sympathize with him. He’s a sex-crazed teenaged virgin who just wanted to have sex with his girlfriend who he was madly in love with (whenever she was ready, of course), but instead he’s become a helpless victim of a Mogran-generating plot. He still acts “human,” which Leo finds repulsive. But even though he initially feels guilty about his sexual compulsions, I found it nearly impossible to empathize with him. Especially after he didn’t seem to question whether it was alright to hypnotize Shawna — “It’s not like she was going to jump on this particular body…. He was going to have to work a little harder to make this happen…. He opened his eyes wide, tried to imagine his pupils expanding, contracting” (214). The guilt that accompanied knowing she wouldn’t want to have sex with Jarhead’s body isn’t there anymore — he just thinks she’s hot. Alright, so Jasper’s Mogran, and he’s not bound to the same ideas of “right” and “wrong” as humans are supposed to be. But if he’s supposed to be a sympathetic character, how do I reconcile that aim with his “sexual compulsions”? I couldn’t. (And I wonder if anyone else did?)

Also, in the rewriting of history as largely motivated by Mogran, it seems that famous children’s lit authors are “excused” as pedophiles because they were possessed by the same female demon who motivated their fear of “normal” sex with adults. This speculative historical turn frightened me — what if every person I labelled as a rapist was really just possessed by some demon? Where does that leave questions of “consent” and punishment for sexual assaults if the Mogran could be behind everything? Sadly, sexual assaults have often been rationalized by ridiculous claims that men have uncontrollable sexual impulses - which seems to be exactly what Mogran-induced sex causes. The scariest part of the novel (for me) occurred when Thomas presented an excellent argument for the need to discover technological advancements for containing the Mogran — “We would no longer have to force our hosts to do things they don’t want to do, things they spend the rest of their lives puzzling over…. Perhaps we can become a pure electronic intelligence, a true living computer, or be able to go back and forth between flesh and machine” (387). This was intriguing until the following page, where Thomas asserts that “It is time to forge a new relationship between mortals and Mogran, one based on cooperation and a recognition of our mutual interests.With the Mogran assuming their rightful place at the head of the species, we can create an era of peace and prosperity and universal harmony” (388). At that moment, when I should have been thinking about the implications of this sort of “Utopia,” all I could think about was the fact that the ruling class would be the world’s most prolific rapists, and I realized that any reaction I could have had for the novel as a whole was tainted by my gut revulsion from the overwhelming presence of sexual assault themes. At some point, I gave up on broadening my mind to the new sexual possibilities it opens, and the novel morphed into a gigantic trigger warning. Obviously, my reaction to this lesser theme in the novel is verrrry strong, but I think it’s impossible to read this book without asking what readers are supposed to glean from the recurring scenes of sexual assault and nonconsensual sex. I also can’t figure out what I’m supposed to be “thinking” about it — I just felt an inescapable repulsion that impacted all of my other thoughts on the novel.