What’s Good for the Goose
is Good for the Gander:
Interpreting Marge Piercy’s He^ She and It
For decades now, it has been de rigenr to begin any discussion of
science fictional texts written by women with some statement that the genre has
traditionally been the province of men and that women who write within it are
somehow revolutionary, brave, outsiders, etc. Once this may have been tme, but
if we begin with the premise that as a full-blown literary movement, science
fiction began in the 1930s or 1940s, then almost as many years have elapsed
since the New Wave boom of women writers as preceded it. Authors like James
Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marge Piercy have been
established figures in the genre for more than thirty years, and their literary
descendants like Margret Atwood, Pat Cadigan, and Octavia Butler have been
equally as successful. Science fiction criticism can no longer begin with the
premise that women’s science fiction is somehow groundbreaking or even
special. Yet, this position still exists, and many recently published articles still
begin with some opening maneuver asserting this.
It is true that women often have, and continue to, produce science
fiction that is distinctly different from the work of men and that science fiction
writers of color produce work that is different from white writers, but the same
can be said of any fomi of literature or art; thus, these paeans to female
authorship have grown extremely tiresome, as have critical studies decrying
male-authored science fiction, particularly cyberpunk, as lacking or as
conservatively reactionary because they do not make gender and/or race a
primary focus. Male authorship does not make a book reactionary, just as female
authorship does not make a book revolutionary. The ad hominem fallacy applies
to criticism as well.
Clearing away this critical debris is now an important step in accurately
reading and interpreting science fictional texts, and such an unfettered view is
important in examining a book like Marge Piercy’s He, She and It. Piercy’s
novel is an extremely good one; this is unmistakable. However, it is through its
reactionary humanism, its use of traditional literary themes and tropes, and
finally, through its reliance on cyberpunk that He, She and It reaches its greatest
successes. Despite its use of cyberpunk tropes like post-national corporate
world-domination, human-machine interfaces, post-human bodies, and maverick
computer hackers, Piercy’s book has more in common with Frankenstein than
Neuromancer.
A great many charges have been leveled at cyberpunk over the past
fifteen years—not all of them undeserved—but in doing so, even to the point of
declaring the movement dead, critics like Sharon Stockton, June Deery,