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Jamaluddin Bin Aziz, "Future Noir", continued
Cyberpunk, Cyberspace and Cyborg : The Final Destination?
Having begun as a literary movement in the late 1980s, cyberpunk has already been declared dead1. One reason for this is that cyberpunk is thought to have failed to live up to its own embarrassing ‘pretension’,2 in which the effect of its ‘grandeur’ is a Barmecidal one. Part of this pretension is derived from its aversion to its generic ancestor’s ‘celebration of the possibilities opened by industrial capitalism’:3 as Thomas Foster writes, ‘cyberpunk attempts to distinguish itself both from traditional ‘hard’ science fiction and from the more literary and social science concerns of the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s precisely by focusing on the cultural implications of new technologies’.4 Foster’s argument has also drawn attention specifically to the notion of the body as a cultural identity, which raises questions concerning the status of thehuman body in postmodernist culture. My own view is that cyberpunk is irresistibly attractive precisely because it ‘envisions human consciousness inhabiting electronic spaces, blurring the boundary between human and machine in the process’.5 Contrary to the declaration of the death of cyberpunk, the sub-genre is still ‘alive and kicking’ due to its construction of a space for liberated ‘female’ characters.
One countervailing argument, put by Foster, isthat there is a great body of criticism on cyberpunk written from the male point of view, which in turn suggests a reason for the lack of sufficient interest from afeminist perspective. A major criticism concerning cyberpunk lodgedby feminist critics concerns hyper-masculinity,as cyberpunk texts are usually imbued with elements that highlight and disseminate misogynistic views of gender divisions. Technology, it seems, is mostly used to enhance the masculinity of a male body, as is evident in films like The Terminator, Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix, in which the hyper-masculinised male body is central in the narrative trajectory, providing a sense of balance; whereas the female characters are usurped by the high-tech world. This argument supports Claudia Springer’s claim that ‘while popular culture explores boundary breakdowns between humans and computers, gender boundaries are treated less flexibly’.6 ‘Feminist cyberpunk’, however, according to Karen Cadora, ‘envisions something that feminist theory badly needs; fragmented subjects who can, despite their multiple positionings, negotiate and succeed in a high-tech world’.7 The fragmented subject, according to feminist critics of cyberpunk and science fiction in general, is an expression through which female liberation can be found, pointing to a hybridity that defies gender categorisation.
One may ask, if a cyborg is a hybrid whereby gender differences are dissolved, how do I define a female character? This question is epistemological, and can be dealt with by looking at the definitional incoherence of gender. I would argue that to acknowledge hybridity is to acknowledge that gender dyad is inherently unstable or volatile. Therefore, the female character in cyberpunk is usually a transgressor, which is in itself a marker for definitional incoherence. The adjectival ‘female’ is still applicable to a cyborg figure because it is the dominant term that characterises its subjectivity. In a hybrid subject, traces of other terms like masculinity, bisexuality and humanity are shown as supporting the dominant term, while recognising the efficacy of the terms in an effort to reassign them with new roles. In effect, the term ‘female’ cyborg is valid due to its dominant term that foregrounds the characteristic of a female in its very hybridity.
This section considers the perspectives on cyberpunk that have been outlined by Foster, viz., its relationship to its ‘parent genre’, science fiction; its links with postmodernism; and its interest from the point of view of cultural studies. The main objective here is to study the feminist perspective on cyberpunk, especially onthe figure of a cyborg8 in the context of future noir. To begin with, a cyborg figure can be seen as the translation of the fascination that cyberpunk has with the meshing of human and machine.The aim of this section is to investigate the representation of the ‘female’ cyborg figure within the future noir category of cyberpunk, and to analyse the interestcyberpunk sub-genre manifests in the employment and manipulation of technology to provide an alternative space such as cyberspace and virtual reality. My objective isto find out how a female cyborg figure can be a liberating symbol for women as argued by feminist (socialist) critics like Haraway. My analysis, however, will centre on future noir texts.
When it flourishedin the 1980s as a response to the ‘changing icons of the time’,9cyberpunk combined the anxiety of technological advancement with the unease generated by the tyranny of multinational companies whose tendency is to produce a dominantly male world view and to create marginalized groups, divided by gender, race, economic background, etc. In consequence, the significance of the interface between a man and machine that is regularly highlighted by cyberpunk texts, especially with regard to the fragmentation of the human self,has been taken in some feminist readings to demonstrate that cyberpunk is primarily to do with the dissemination of patriarchal values. My own interest is in quantifying this kind of judgement by asking whether it is feasible to discover the possible liberatory ‘voice’ that a ‘female’ cyborg may embody, particularly in future noir texts. I would argue that future noir’s concern with male angst and anxiety, coupled with its interest in the dark side of a morally collapsed society, provide a platform in which female characters can be liberated.
Cyborg imagery is often metaphorically used in cyberpunk texts to represent a fragmented gender identity, whose significance to feminist analysis has been theorized by Donna Haraway in her well-known essay ‘A Manifesto For Cyborgs’. Haraway offers a feminist perspective on cyborg imagery by stressing its ‘political myth’ as a possible analytical manoeuvring, enabling a more critical view that ‘resist[s] nostalgia and anti-technological biases that reproduce gender stereotypes’.10 A cyborg is a hybrid identity, which as suggested by Haraway, ‘denaturaliz[es] assumptions about the relation between the body and cultural identity, especially gender and racial identities’,11 situating cyborg imagery in a ‘postgender and post-Oedipal world’.12 Haraway’s view affects not only the Western binary system with regard to gender division, but also situates the Otherness not outside the human body, but within it. By looking at some cyberpunk and future noir texts like Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass and Duncan Gibbin’s Eve of Destruction, I would like to put this argument to the test.
Feminist critics on science fiction and the cyberpunk sub-genre operate with a different perspective and they debate what cyborg imagery can offer to feminism, foregrounding its hybridity as a means of finding liberation. This is in contrast to male cultural critics who ‘stress the ways that cyberpunk fictions reproduce the perspectives of their predominantly white male authors’.13 The different viewpoint taken by feminist critics stems partly from the crisis within feminism’s all-inclusive categorization of ‘women’, posing a pivotal question of what constitutes the category of ‘women’. Judith Butler raises this issue in her theorization of gender as performative, and points out that the category of women as all-inclusive (or the so-called universalism) with regard to its failure to consider other variables such as the racial origin, social status and educational background of women is a perfunctory claim. This conception that the category of women is all encompassing, according to Butler, has recently been challenged, with the result that ‘the very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms’.14 This argument is in line with Haraway’s theorization, which argues that the liberatory possibility of this subject can be found in cyborg imagery, which is also a fragmented and destabilized subject in postmodernist culture. Recently, Haraway has been under attack by feminists ‘for overemphasizing the positive political implications of cyborg imagery as a point of resistance to the dualistic thinking typical of Western modernity’.15Male cultural critics on cyberpunk and on Haraway, on the other hand, stress on the proliferation of cyberpunk writers who are mostly white and male as the prominent reason for its misogyny, prompting Andrew Ross, for instance, to label cyberpunk as ‘the most fully delineated urban fantasies of white male folklore’.16Ross and some of the critics have obviously overlooked the emergence of female cyberpunk writers such as Pat Cadigan and Marge Piercy.
Reminiscent of hard-boiled detectives, noir protagonists and,to a great extent, femmes fatales in the canonical noir texts, a cyborg figure can easily be situated in a future noir context. One common thread linking cyborg imagery and the bleak world in future noir is the idea of a destabilized and fragmented subject, i.e., ontologically uncertain, as a transgressive figure.Cyborg imagery opens up more doors for exploring and dismantling Western binary oppositions: this is achieved by functioning both as a literal figure and as a metaphor that mirrors both the trangressiveness of the cyberpunk sub-genre and the very essence or critique of the subjectivity it stands for. One of the progenies retained in future noir from its gothic inheritance is the existence of the Other, but the apparent twist inherent in future noir lies in the main assumption that the Other resides outside the body rather than inside. As I see it, the fragmented self may indicate a change of location of the other that is also tantamount to the ‘Othering’ of self,which simultaneously challenges the existential definition of being, and is informed by the postmodern condition inherent in future noir.As a consequence, the Western tradition of binary opposition is also dissolved, intertwining and conflating the opposites into a hybrid entity. Postmodernist poetics are part of future noir’s dialectical approach in destabilising the subject, making it almost compulsory in the understanding of post-human subjectivity. Therefore, whereas, in science fiction proper, the dynamic of dualism, for instance the culture and nature divide, alludes to the association of woman with nature, the same distinction and association is problematised by cyborg imagery.
A melting pot of cultural modes is crucial in translating Future noir’s varied metaphors, allowing them to ‘capture’ (Western) contemporary anxiety.They form a definitional parallelism that manifests itself especially in the way these modes literalise the cultural anxiety that they are dealing with.In cinema, the literal manifestation of the anxiety is partly informed by the nature of science fiction as a cinema of ideas, not characters, as discussed in the earlier section. Hinging on that, future noir, which represents an imaginative engagement with Gothic tales, science fiction, detective fiction, and thepoetics ofpostmodernism, tends to be exploratory. In that vein, Scott Bukatman in his introduction toTerminal Identity,talks about how the images in science fiction films,especially the special effects, tend to be presentational, that is, exhibitionistic rather than voyeuristic.17 Drawing from the films TRON and Terminator 2, Bukatman postulates that:
The invisible workings of electronic technology are made manifest, in varying ways and to varying degrees, but more importantly, the ontological anxieties of the present are endowed with a concreteness and literalness of form.18
Bukatman’s treatment of the films as science fiction rather than future noir texts amounts to explicit tautology, limiting the critical and ideological potential that cyborg imagery has in the narrative. On the other hand, future noir, as a hybrid sub-genre, marrying science fiction’s postmodernist extrapolative traits with noir’s element of modernist realism, has the ability to push the imagined boundary even further than science fiction proper and classical noir can do. Future noir in effect can be both voyeuristic and exhibitionistic, blurring the taxonomic gaze. Brian McHale argues that:
SF, like postmodernist fiction, is governed by an ontological dominant, by contrast with modernist fiction, or among the genres or “genre” fiction, detective fiction, both of which raise and explore issues of epistemology and thus are governed by an epistemological dominant.19
Future noir as a hybrid, in effect, is governed by both. Future noir’s generic connections with science fiction and the detective genre enables scientific invention/experimentation to be explored, investigated and commented upon, combining both ontological and epistemological questions and issues, highlighting one of the major characteristics of postmodern concern with parody and pastiche. Future noir is ceaselessly critical about this, and therefore irrevocably focuses on the exploration of new spaces by constructing a geographical location or a landscape in the ‘inside’ of the human body called the virtual space or the matrix, the very location that is often infiltrated by technological invention and intervention. Virtual space or the matrix provides a repository for a visual lexicon, whose purpose is to assist in the understanding of the effect this interface has at the level beyond the humanist physical body. The anxiety that lies ‘inside’, not outside, is a common dictum in future noir and cyberpunk, concurrently altering human’s reality.
Cyberpunk constitutes an important part of future noir because, as Edward James argues, it is ‘ a response to a crisis in sf that had had become apparent in the 1980s: a growing divergence between the traditional sf images of the future and the increasingly depressing reality’.20 In that vein, cyberpunk, argues Kevin Pask, ‘is the dystopian alternative to a considerably more cheerful vision of history, which, […] also conditions the experience of postmodernity’.21 In future noir’s cyberpunk, the future is bleak indeed. This view is also shared by Brian McHale, who in discussing the overlap between the postmodernist poetics of fiction and cyberpunk poetics, argues that ‘cyberpunk tends to “literalise” or “actualise” what occurs in postmodernist fiction as metaphor […] in the extended sense in which the textual strategy or a particular use of language may be understood as a figurative representation of an “idea” or “theme”’.22 If a cyborg figure is usually a metaphor for the Other in a postmodernist fiction, in cyberpunk, however, the beast of burden lies in the cyborg figure’s ontological uncertainties and narrative thrust, foregrounding the demands of its metonymic origin. A cyborg figure, for that reason, IS the reflection in the mirror and also the mirror itself.
In Cybersexualities Jenny Wolmark talks about how the common interest within feminist and cultural theory is engendered by cyborg imagery. The literal representation of this recurrent anxiety borne out the figure of a cyborg, as discussed by Wolmark in her introductory chapter, is used to illustrate how a cyborg figure embodies the cultural and sociological curiosity about technological advancement that is believed to be controlling humanity. At the level of ideological representation, the narrative of bodily invasion or infiltration forms the basis for one of the major assumptions concerning the anxiety over the invasion of technology into human subjectivity and reality, that is, the total destruction of humanity as portrayed by cyberpunk’s post-apocalyptic mise-en-scene, causing phenomenal paranoia. The theme of paranoia caused by bodily invasion or alien infiltration is often found in science fiction texts which explore invasion narratives,such as the invasion of aliens from other planets (Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The X-Files), post-apocalyptic infectious deadly viruses or plague (The Omega Man) or even people from different times or places in the time machine narrative (The Time Machine). This paranoia is inherited from gothic tales that apotheosise the battle between good and evil, in which the good normally prevails. A variation of this theme can be found in the revival of film noir in the 1970s, for instance Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver,23 which captures this paranoia by means of personifying urban claustrophobia in the figure of Travis Bickle who is the epitome of social breakdown. At the heart of Taxi Driver as a neo-noir film, is the distrust towards politicians’ abilities or efforts to solve social problems.24 This is resonant of the Watergate scandal in which political spying diminished the triangular trust between the government, the media and the general public. In cyberpunk films like The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic, and novels like Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayer and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the use of invasion narrative is to explore the extent to which technological invasion can cause paranoia;25 in contrast to Taxi Driver, this time at the more intimate level, that is, the human body itself. In contrast to hard science fiction, future noir does not romanticize heroic figures, but uses its extrapolative traits to comment on the protagonist’s transgressiveness. As the figure of a cyborg mirrors the ultimate infiltration/invasion into human space, that is, the body itself, it can be seen as the reflection of contemporary anxiety with regard to the ultimate boundary crossing.
The fusion between technology and a human body has resulted in the possible exploration of a new space called cyberspace, adding fluidity tohuman experience. ‘Theorizing about cyberspace technology’, argues Marjorie Worthington, ‘has traditionally centered around two related notions of what computer interaction presages: the postmodern dissolution of the subject and the technologically enabled flight from the physical’.26 This observation is largely drawn from William Gibson’s groundbreaking novel, Neuromancer,in which the male protagonist, Case, relies on cyberspace to escape from the physical limitation of ‘the meat’ – the ‘prison of his own flesh’ (1993, p.12). The ability to disassociate oneself from one’s body ties inwith the possible inclusion and insertion of alien particles or materials into one’s being, fragmenting the notion of self. For Case, cyberspace is an addictive drug from which he cannot divorce himself, and it becomes a defining feature of what he is. Possibly, Case’s body as a frontier to be explored and used functions equally well as a metaphor for both the destabilised self and the anxiety that derives from it, signifying its ontological uncertainty. This instability and anxiety is expressed through the figure of a cyborg, and by using Claudia Springer’s definition of a cyborg in Electronic Eros, it can also include Gibson’s Case.27
As the function of the body is no longer self-restrictive or unified, the mindsof the characters provide an alternative route for the understanding of the expression of (female) sexuality, self and desire. The articulation of this new way of looking at the fragmented self is founded on the idea that, as argued by Nancy Armstrong, ‘(sexual) desire exists in some form prior to its representation and remains there as something for us to recover or liberate’.28 Noir’s concern with the inwardness of a destabilized self allows the characters to push the boundary set by the mind further into the unknown. In the case of future noir, the unknown is usually represented in the body of a woman, which is also ‘a metaphor for the uncertainty of the future – [… a] potentially creative and potentially destructive future’.29 Noir’s mood of angst and alienation, coupled with science fiction’s ontological uncertainty, helps us to further scrutinise the ability to venture into the mind of the protagonists. However, as these characters are mostly transgressors themselves, their minds mirror a disorientating view of their world.
In conclusion, a cyborg figure that usually inhabits cyberspace, instead of marking the final destination of thefeminist’s struggle to empower female selves, provides a liminal space in which more liberatory female characters can be aptly situated.As a metaphor for the dissolution of self, it also innocuously represents the formation of a new identity that is more relevant to the understanding of female characters in future noir texts. Additionally, it encapsulates the various forms of determination that many female characters in cyberpunk exhibit in order to survive in the ‘posthuman’ world where man and machine interface, and the future is bleak and alienating.
The next sections will look at how these female characters survive the ‘posthuman’ world and the kind of anxiety that the cyborg imagery represents, whilst functioning as the transgressor in the future noir world. My interest lies in the way the female cyborg transcends and criticises theWestern apprehension of gender dichotomies. In addition to exploring the cyborg figure as a mirror of contemporary anxieties, these sections will seek to illuminate some of the major concerns relating to cyberpunk, cyborg imagery and cyberspace.
The Post-apocalyptic Women
The major difference in the characterisation of Zira and Daena in Planet of the Apes, 196830 and 2001, respectively, is the fighting spirit or survival instinct that the latter has. Daena’s fighting spirit or survival instinct, though closely related to the idea of impressing amodern female audience, is reminiscent of the story of the Amazon women. The story of a group of physically strong women, in the tradition of the Amazon women, has been extensively discussed by feminist science fiction and fantasy analysts in an effort to establish the relationship between femaleness and nature, to show how in science fiction, women can be powerful without sacrificing their nature. Feminist ecologists in particular pay a lot of attention to the way nature is celebrated by these all female tribal societies and how it can be the source of unity and power among them. In other words, the Amazon tribes not only connote the idea of ecological proximity, but also primitiveness as they rely on natural resources to survive. Some Amazon tribes in utopian science fictions usually celebrate women’s community spirit by portraying a communal society as a way of empowering women, and at the same time of dislocating an Oedipal trajectory by not bringing the children of the ‘tribe’ among women themselves but also deleting men in the childrearing process. In Body of Glass, for instance, the discourse describing Nili as an ‘amazon’ (p.259) woman from ‘a primitive place’ (p.302) called ‘Black Zone’ (p.417) situated in a post-apocalyptic era evinces the novel’s great interest in her proximity to nature and technology since she is brought up in a matrilineal society in which reproduction is mainly the result of cloning and ‘artificial insemination’ (p.259), and in which ‘the little ones are raised by several mothers’ (p.489). In short, the interest in her is also the result of her being a ‘barbarian’ (p.511) and ‘savage’ (p.512), which ironically links her to the post-apocalyptic society as the most principled individual of all.
In embryo, the theme of ‘primitiveness’, as exemplified by Nili in Body of Glass, is often carried into post-apocalyptic narratives to signify three major concerns of the texts: the female characters’ affinity with nature, their symbiosis with technology, and the state of the world that they are in. Nili’s body is altered and augmented after birth to help her ‘to endure, to survive, to hold our land’ (p.267). Coming from ‘a primitive’ and extremely isolated place vis-à-vis the free and high-tech Tikva, she is expected to be a savage and a barbarian, and thus a character devoid of human traits. Ironically, she turns out to be the most admired by Malkah for her ‘principality’ (p.567) and her eagerness to build personal ties with fellow human beings. In addition to that, her isolated place of origin does not divorce her from technology, affirming a coherent symbiosis between her and technological advancement. The narrative continuously unravels her mysterious origin and physical make up through frequent comparison with a cyborg, Yod, which in turns draws closer attention to her physical attributes:
Nili glared at him (Yod) out of her intense green eyes. Side by side with Yod, Nili actually looked more artificial. Her hair, her eyes were unnaturally vivid, and her musculature was far more pronounced. ‘I am the future’. (p.300)
The juxtaposition between her and Yod, often at the narrative level, reinforces the idea of her as a boundary crosser, reaffirming her symbiosis with technology. In other words, Nili’s transgression of the expectation of an amazon woman, post-apocalyptic narrative, and the constitution of a human, makes her a stereotypical figure in noir texts. The augmentation of her physical body foregrounds and signals the instability of human experience and, importantly, the definition of a human, a crucial trait of future noir. The images derived from the destabilisation of the constitution of a human, and the atmosphere of chaos and disarray that they generate, reinforces the collapse of law and order in post-apocalyptic narrative. As a result, primitiveness prevails even in the post-apocalyptic narrative especially through a character like Nili.
The chaos and terror of an apocalyptic society are often reflected in the association of women and primitiveness, especially by associating them with metaphysics. In Ambient, the Ambient ‘community’ uses ‘part of the Bible and a book called the Visions of Joanna in their services’ (p. 157); Joanna being an apparent female prophet who prophesises that the Creator has created ‘one male, and evil; one female, and good- both driven quite insane’ (ibid.) In Body of Glass, Gadi once refers to Shira’s grandmother, Malkah, one of the most important brains behind Tikva, as ‘the original flying witch’ (p. 512). In the Matrix, the oracle is a woman who prophesies the coming of the One. It can be said that by associating women with metaphysics, the post-apocalyptic narrative recalls the Fall narrative in which a woman is the cause of the Original Sin. This is characteristic of the pejorative treatment of women in the noir genre.
The primitiveness of a society that develops after a major catastrophe also allows the post-apocalyptic world to provide a new setting parallel to the urban nightmare of noir landscapes.The major similarity between the Amazon story and post-apocalyptic world is the return of the primitive, recalling and evoking the primal fear that man has towards woman’s independence; hence, the rejection/castration of women - a common theorization in theOedipal Complex. Unlike the Amazon tribes that still adhere to certain societal rules and regulations to ensure the stability of their tribes, the post-apocalyptic world, with the collapse of law and order, can be seen as an arena for staging this archaic fear. Therefore, one of the reasons why the Amazon women are physically strong is so that they can protect their own tribe and preserve their values and orders. On the other hand, a post-apocalyptic world is a world engulfed with chaos, terror and anarchy, necessitating that the female characters learn to be physically strong in order to survive in this lawless society, as evident in the character ofAvalon who is ‘ready to kill, shameless […] ready to die’ (p.52). In both Ambient and Random Acts, women are brutalized and treated with cruelty on the chaotic street of New York City. In one of the many brutal scenes on the street, ‘Droozies […] had stripped a young girl, shaved her head, and, having daubed her in tar, trounced her with long poles’ (Ambient, p.55). Though the element of primitiveness often carries with it primal fear, thepost-apocalyptic world calls for a different (psychoanalytic) question: what happens to the female characters after the collapse of the law of the father?
The condition in which the stability of the self is incessantly assaulted, by both the new conception of a human and the condition that the self is in, projects and allegorises a future noir of the post-apocalyptic world. The two main female characters in Jack Womack’s debut novel Ambient are an extension of the crumbled world in Random Acts of Senseless Violence, his later novel31. Unlike many post-apocalyptic women in other texts discussed earlier, the main female characters, Avalon and Enid, do not enhance themselves physically. Even for Avalon, whose strength is needed to protect her employer, Mister Dryden, her weightlifting is just ‘enough to stay fit’ (p.11). Their physical alteration, unlike that ofother post-apocalyptic women, involves a certain form of subtraction or mutilation. As a Proxy, Avalon is required by law to have her teeth extracted so that she ‘couldn’t relieve frustration in an untoward manner’ (p.4). Enid has to have her body surgically mutilated so that she can be a part of the Ambient ‘society’ as the original Ambients, disfigured and mutilated at birth, were born as the result of ‘the accident’ (p.67) that resulted from governmental experimentation. The female bodies, as exemplified by Avalon’s and Enid’s body alterations, are used for different reasons. While Avalon’s physical appearance helps her in her survival by enabling her to seduce and build trust between her and the protagonist, O’Malley, and Mister Drysden, Enid’s physically altered body is political, that is, it demonstrates ‘the iniquity of a society that forced one to do such’ (p.68) since becoming an Ambient is ‘always subversive’ (p.67). Her body is therefore an allegory used to mirror the collapse of law and order in the society she is in.
The two main female characters in Ambient, Avalon and Enid, are also derivative of the ones normally found in the classical noir texts. Set in the post-apocalyptic world, Ambient uses the two female characters to represent the two types of female characters usually found in the classical noir texts, that is, the femme fatale and the redeemed woman, but with a twist especially with regard to the femme fatale. In this case, Avalon is initially portrayed as a cardboard copy of the stereotypical femme fatale who uses her sexuality to seduce the male protagonist and implicate him in her scheme to achieve her goal. Infatuated with her sexuality, O’Malley realizes that ‘she looked at me and rolled her eyes. She was a dream printed and punched’ (p.6). However, when it matters, Avalon proves her love by helping O’Malley to overcome their problem with Mister Dryden’s father. Unlike Avalon, Enid is the redeeming figure who, for him, ‘had kept me straight and narrow, made me continue school, found the funds that allow me to do so, stood by me at every time of pain’ (p.84). As his sister, she also warns O’Malley of the danger of falling in love with Avalon and to get involved in his plan to kill Mr. Dryden’ father:
As said, sight your own risk first. In her paw would you lay your soul? Do you fret that if you do she might leave you noddypeaked and bowelfettered? ( p.78)
Like some redeeming female characters in noir texts, Enid functions both as the obligatory reality checker and a source of comfort for the noir protagonist who is trapped in a disintegrating society underlined by crumbling and collapsed buildings. Ambient’s convoluted plot is also an important trait that contributes to its association with future noir’s conventions.
The post-apocalyptic world is not only reminiscent of the noir world normally found in a classical noir text, but is also an extension of it. In lieu of the underworld that many noir protagonists venture into, Ambient’s world is filled with crumbling buildings and out of order gadgets, functioning as an allegory for the collapse of democracy and the beginning of a new form of capitalist state under private ownership. In a world where ‘only owners could afford’ (p.89) luxuries, people mostly live either in dilapidated buildings or on the street, and street gangs are omnipresent and malevolent. If in the classical noir the dark side of society is lurking in the social underbelly, in Ambient on the other hand, crime appears on the surface due to the collapse of law and order, which creates a literal form of urban nightmare. In other words, the evil of the society is unveiled and it roams the street as it has never done before. At its worst, the post-apocalyptic world, as in Ambient, is able to restructure and re-represent society in a parody of the atmospheric world usually found in noir’s construction of a city - dark, bleak and beguiled. This is reminiscent of the creation of noir’s mood of alienation prominent in classical noir texts, as the inhabitants of New York City are becoming aliens in their own place and environment. The new faces of American society are also hierarchical: ‘the owners and their servants; that of boozhies, the old bourgeois; that of what the government pegged the Superfluous’ (p.22). This hierarchy is a perfect formulation for violence, terror and chaos on streets where the army is as dangerous as street gangs. The future noir world of the post-apocalyptic is embodied in the collapse of the social and political system, which in turn gives rise to hierarchy and culminates in anarchism.
Post-apocalyptic women also go through several changes as way of surviving the post-apocalyptic world.Their fighting spirits, dexterities and ingenuities signify their transgressiveness, that is, the ability and skill to survive by crossing the boundaries of gender roles and assignment, thereby blurring Western binaries. In a post-apocalyptic society, a female protagonist is not a lone adventurer, neither physically nor mentally - or both, unlike the male protagonist in classical noir texts and future noir texts. Though Sara Connor in The Terminator and Terminator: Judgement Day exists in a pre-apocalyptic period, her physical and mental conversion is emblematic of that of the post-apocalyptic woman, whose survival instinct transforms her from a victim, i.e., the hunted, into a militant figure, i.e., the hunter. Her association with post-apocalyptic women lies in the fact that she has ‘seen’ a disastrous vision of the post-apocalyptic world, proven by the arrival of the terminator and her saviour (Reese) from that very world. In Random Actsof Senseless Violence, Lola Hart goes through a journey through life that changes her both physically and mentally, all due to her need to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. In Lola’s case, the post-apocalyptic world that she lives in brings out her ‘night mind’ (p. 7). Her rite of passage also stems from her need to avenge the death of her father. Nili in Body of Glass understands that to be able to survive in the post-apocalyptic world, she has to learn about it, as she confided to Shira:
I must do it. We know that if we open up to the world, we are going to have to deal with men. I’m supposed to find out what they like […] Everything he does is out of my range of experience. Surely I’d learn a great deal about things completely foreign to us. ( p. 345)
Besides that, though physically strong, Nili ‘did not look like a man. She was a busty woman, with broad hips and a tight waist’ (p. 488). Nili’s commitment to change shows her ability to transgress neo-noir’s contradiction and ambivalence towards a collapsed world without sacrificing herself: ‘I don’t sell or rent my body, by the organ or by the moment’ (p. 517), suggesting not only her strong character but also the dynamic of her relationship with technology.
The sense of community in post-apocalyptic narratives, in which women live in a communal way or support each other as a team, vis-à-vis noir’s convention of a lonely male protagonist’s adventure into the underworld, signals a crucial generic subversion.The complete collapse of social order, law and security in post-apocalyptic society has resulted in the dire need to work with others; a need understood by these female characters.Therefore, in many post-apocalyptic narratives, the female character almost always works with a confederate or an ally, be it a man, woman, machine or all of them. None the less, in critical moments, these female characters are allowed to take their own actions. In Ambient, Avalon is initially thought to have double-crossed O’Malley, but at the end, she is the one who saves him and his sister, Enid, from Mister Dryden’s father. Nili in Body of Glass comes from a closely-knit society, making it easier for her to form a bond with the people of Tikva. Lola in Random Acts, similarly, realizes the need for her to become a member of a gang in order to survive her collapsed society and city. Indeed, when she is found to be breaking one of the rules set by the ‘Death Angels’ she knows that she has to go beyond what her group permits, by eventually joining the ‘evil’ gang called Dcons, signifying the complete dissolution of all her values – making her able to assimilate into the chaos, terror and disarray.
The sense of community is also related to the way the women in the post-apocalyptic world react to technological advancement with their womanly (female) instinct, another aspect of (their) nature that most texts emphasise. Though in several cases their bodies are no longer natural, that is, either through addition or subtraction, this does not stop them from trusting their basic human instincts. In Body of Glass, the motivation behind the female protagonist, Shira’s actions is palpably maternally driven (Who would have expected maternity to give you fangs and claws? (p.482)). Shira she simply wants her son back. Malkah, who is Shira’s grandmother, also strongly believes that ‘every female fights for her young. And will kill for her young. We’re still a part of nature, no matter how we’ve destroyed the world’ (p. 527). In Random Acts, Lola’s association with ‘a night mind’ is reinforced throughout the story, revealing her dark-side as she tries to cope with the chaotic environment she is in.
In short, post-apocalyptic women survive the nightmarish landscape and world that they live in by adapting to the needs of that time and place.They are ever ready to take charge of the situation if the need arises. Whereas some post-apocalyptic women rely on their instinct to survive, the others cope very well by forming a community they can lean on. They are also willing to alter their bodies, either through addition or subtraction, in order to survive. Their reliance on their natural instinct, though often closely related to primitiveness, reveals their ability to harmonize not only with nature but also with technological advancement, allowing them to live undeterred by the urban nightmare that is future noir.
Sections: 1 3
1 Karen Cadora and Neil Easterbrook start their articles ‘Feminist Cyberpunk’ and ‘The Arc of Our Destruction: Reversal and Erasure in Cyberpunk’, respectively, with this declaration.
2 Neil Easterbrook, ‘The Arc of Our Destruction: Reversal and Erasure in Cyberpunk’, Science-Fiction Studies, (19)1992, p.378
3 Kevin Pask, 'Cyborg Economies: Desire and Labor in the Terminator Films', in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. by Richard Dellamora, 1995, p.183
4 ‘Incurably Informed: The Pleasures and Dangers of Cyberpunk’, Gender, 18(1993), pp. 3-4
5 Karen Cadora, ‘Feminist Cyberpunk’, Science Fiction Studies, 1995, p. 357
6 ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, Cybersexualities, Jenny Wolmark, ed., 1999, p.41
7 ‘Feminist Cyberpunk’, Science Fiction Studies , 1995, p. 357.
8 Claudia Springer differentiates androids from cyborgs by defining the first as ‘human-shaped robots or genetically engineered synthetic humanoid organisms, but they do not combine organic with technological parts […] look like, and sometimes are indistinguishable from, humans […] [for example] the replicants in Blade Runner […] are genetically engineered organic entities and contain no technological components’. (1993, p.87)
9 Edward James, Science Fiction in the 20th Century, 1994, p.193
10 in Thomas Foster, ‘Incurably Informed: The Pleasures and Dangers of Cyberpunk’, Genders, 18(1993), p.6
11 Thomas Foster, ‘Meat Puppets or Robopaths?: Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment’, Genders, 18(1993), p.14
12 in Thomas Foster, ‘Incurably Informed: The Pleasures and Dangers of Cyberpunk’, Genders, 18(1993), p.6
13 Thomas Foster, ‘Incurably Informed: The Pleasures and Dangers of Cyberpunk’, Genders, 18(1993), p.6
14Gender Trouble, 1990, p. 1
15 Thomas Foster, ‘Meat Puppets or Robopaths?: Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment’, Genders, 18(1993),p. 15
16 in Thomas Foster, ‘Incurably Informed: The Pleasures and Dangers of Cyberpunk, Genders, 18(1993), p.6
17Terminal Identity, 1993, p.14
18Terminal Identity, 1993, p.
19 ‘Elements of Poetics of Cyberpunk’, Critique, 1992, p. 151
20Science Fiction in the 20th Century, p.199
21 'Cyborg Economies: Desire and Labor in the Terminator Films', in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. by Richard Dellamora, 1995, p. 182.
22‘Elements of Poetics of Cyberpunk’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 1992, p. 150.
23 1976. Columbia Picture Corporation.
24 A political campaign is used by Scorsese as one of the film’s motifs that disenfranchises Travis Bickle.
25 The scare or paranoia of the technological ‘coup’ is also discussed by Lee Horsley in chapter six of her book Fictions of Power.
26‘Bodies That Natter: Virtual Translations and Transmissions of the Physical’, Critique, 2002, p. 192
27 see footnote 44.
28 Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, 1989, p. 7
29 Barbara Creed, ‘Gynesis, Postmodernism and the Science Fiction Horror Film’, Alien Zone, Annette Kuhn, ed., 1990, p.215
30 In the film the male protagonist’s, George Taylor, comment on women is somewhat representative of the way women are perceived in a male adventure type of science fiction where the major concern is the protagonist’s survival. Referring to Zira who is given to him as a mate, he elegantly says, ‘You are not as smart as Steward. But you are the only girl in town’.
31As I see it, Random Act of Senseless Violence is written as a prequel to Ambient. The evidence can be found both in the location as well as the character Lola. Both novels are located in New York City, particularly Manhattan. Random chronicles the life of Lola who has to join the street gang to survive the crumbling city. Lola is mentioned in Ambient, already as an adult, who fights Avalon in the meeting.)