Re-reading the Gendered Cyborg: Technology and the Body in Feminist Science Fiction

"No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Discussion leader for this event: Mike Frangos

This event focuses on the work of two foundational feminist science fiction writers: C.L. Moore and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Recent critical work has analyzed the image of the female cyborg in primarily male-written cyberpunk work such as by William Gibson, yet the indebtedness of cyberpunk writers to earlier feminist science fiction has gone largely unnoticed. This event re-considers the figure of the female cyborg from the point of view of feminist science fiction. C.L. Moore's "No Woman Born" (1944) describes a singer who is placed in an artificial body by her managers after a devastating fire. In Tiptree's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973), a suicidal seventeen year old girl has a chance at a new, perfect body. In these stories, the stakes of gender as performance, spectacle and artifice emerge against the potential of the post-human, cyborg body to transform the conditions that enable and constrain it.

The two short stories are available for reading in the English department reading room (inquire in the English Dept. office).

Little Delphi is going to live a wonderful, exciting life. She's going to be a girl people watch.   —Tiptree, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In."

The Film.Literature.Software series is sponsored by the UCSB English Department's Literature and the Culture of Information (LCI) specialization. Events in the series bring together undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty to discuss films, fiction, poetry, games, software, and other works related to new media and new technologies. (See http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/events/fls-series/ index.asp). The LCI specialization is associated with the English Department's Transcriptions project on literary history and information culture.