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A superficial feminist reading of Neuromancer might explore questions of Molly’s “empowerment” in black and-white terms—is Neuromancer a feminist work? Was Molly truly “empowered” in her work as a meat puppet (a Neuromancian prostitute)? Does Molly attempt to conceal or reduce her feminine qualities through body modifications? While these questions are interesting, they often leave us with glib judgements on the text’s efficacy as feminist propoganda rather than insights into contemporary understandings of gender.
An arguably more fruitful approach is to discuss gender in Gibson’s posthumanist context. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (incidentally published in the same year as Neuromancer) provides a useful framework for a posthumanist feminist reading of Neuromancer. A cyborg, in my distillation of Haraway’s terms, is a fusion (and confusion) between human and animal, human and machine, physical and nonphysical. Haraway advocates that we take pleasure and find freedom in the confusion of binaries, and that the breakdown of binaries serve as the basis of political coalition and alliance.
Accordingly, we may understand Molly’s body modification as a deformation of gender essentialism facilitated by technology. Molly’s mirrored lenses prohibit others from seeing her eyes, freeing her from gender essentialist associations between femininity and vulnerability. Even Molly’s female sex characteristics are metaphorized as masculine, as evident in Case’s comparison of Molly’s breasts to a “war plane’s fuselage” (44).
Obviously Haraway’s work leaves us much to unpack in Neuromancer and cannot be fully explored in this post. However, my initial inquiry suggests that Molly’s transgression and confusion of gender coheres with Haraway’s theories of a posthumanist, postgender world.
Posted from Digital Studies by Hannah L.