What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander
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If, then, cyberpunk is just to keep the boys happy, as Hollinger asserts,
or is a vehicle for ‘"the conservative politics” of its “masculinist” writers as Pat
Cadora writes, then how is it written by women? Or more importantly: is He,
She and It even cyberpunk? The answers to these questions are that it is done
very well, but when done by Marge Piercy, it is not quite cyberpunk. Cadora
claims that “feminist cyberpunk” is distinct from “masculinist cyberpunk” in
that it “blends the conventions of cyberpunk with the political savvy of feminist
science fiction” (357), which is true, but in doing so, something cmcial is lost.
Wolmark’s claim that “the postmodern romances of feminist science fiction
provided an opportunity for women writers to foreground gender relations and
to explore the possibilities for redefining them” (231) applies to Piercy and her
novel, but gender relations are not a focal part of the core group of the original
writers; thus, while Piercy’s addition of gender exploration to her book makes it
richer, cyberpunk is no poorer for lack of it. Furthermore, Wolmark praises
feminist science fiction because it “uses the imagery and metaphors of
cybernetic systems to challenge unitary definitions of the self and to offer an
alternative and oppositional account of gender identity in which provisionality
and multiplicity are emphasized” (“Postmodern Romances” 233), but, again, in
a world where the self is becoming increasingly fragmented, a literature that
restabilizes the individual holds a strong appeal for many readers and novels that
hold on to traditional gender roles and human identities and which privilege
them are important; this is one of the things that Piercy does very well in He,
She and It, but for her, there is no blame.
Once some of this critical debris is cleared away, it becomes easier to
evaluate He, She and It for what it really is. Piercy’s novel is an excellent one,
and in no small measure because of the way she adopts key cyberpunk tropes
and hybridizes them with traditional literary forms. The first and most
immediately arresting of these cyberpunk conventions is the post-national
corporate state. The rule of the corporation is evident in the custody battle,
living arrangements, and strict hierarchy within the Yakamura-Stichen enclave
in the Nebraska desert. Such a social setting was first pioneered by both the
cyberpunk authors and mainstream science fiction authors in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, an era in which the federal government of the United States was
retreating into a laissez-faire approach to social Justice and welfare policies. The
natural result of these policies for cyberpunk was the development of corporatecontrolled enclaves that represent end-stage privatization. The converse of this
social construction is also evident in the novel in the form of the “Glop”—a
shortening of megalopolis—which represents the lawless, anarchic byproduct of
capital flight from the cities and the abdication of governance in urban spaces.
Piercy’s Glop stretches from what was once Boston all the way to the former
Atlanta and is fundamentally similar to the urban spaces of the core cyberpunk
writers.
Like the Glop, another result of 1980s concerns and politics is the
destmction of nature and global warming that is at once a cause and effect of the