Gender resistance: interrogating the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk

Katherine Harrison
Fight for independence; fight for the freedom to create; fight against the monoculture that threatens
every aspect of your life.
(Punk Planet: Notes from the Underground)1

This is the ‘fight’ that attracted me to cyberpunk; the challenge to normative ways of thinking which punk seems
to offer, and which cyberpunk tries to harness in its representations of technology. Cyberpunk - a subgenre of
science fiction - mixes up the technophilia of cyberculture with the anti-establishment attitude of punk, resulting
in a number of recognisable characteristics in its texts, including ‘hybrid’ identities, dystopian futures, and a
focus on technology. This focus often upsets any easy distinction between human and machine, while its
alternative (cyborgian) identities perhaps offer new paradigms for thinking about gender2. My premise in this
paper is that the disruptive potential of this distinctive subgenre is derived from its adoption of ‘punk’ as a
discourse or practice of resistance to social ‘norms’3. As a number of critics have noted, both cyberpunk and its
‘parent’ genre, science fiction, show an interest in innovative style and language4. In this paper I am going to use
this close attention to language and style to interrogate the ‘punk’ in ‘cyberpunk’, and to ask to what extent it is
effective as a means of resisting normative models of technology and gender. To do this, I use close textual
analysis of two cyberpunk texts: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and ’(Learning About) Machine Sex’ by
Candas Jane Dorsey.
What do these texts offer which is different from better known cyberpunk texts, such as William
Gibson’s Neuromancer? Gibson – one of the most famous cyberpunk authors – is widely credited with coining
the term ‘cyberspace’, and his 1984 novel, Neuromancer, is perhaps the best known example of this genre.
Neuromancer epitomises many features of the genre, its narrative structured round a plot to remove the
electronic restraints which prevent an Artificial Intelligence from functioning independently of its human owner.
The main protagonists are a male hacker called Case, and a ‘razorgirl’ (a technologically-enhanced hired
assassin) called Molly. It uses a number of tropes which associate it with popular perceptions of punk, including
a ‘DIY’ approach to technology, resistance to authority, street slang and tribal dress codes. The narrative raises
many of the hopes and fears associated with new technologies, from the euphoria of online disembodiment to the
possibilities for bodily enhancement through medical technology. It also highlights some of the problematic
aspects of the genre in terms of gender representation.
Wendy Wahl writing in ‘Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance’,
notes that “Case doesn’t seem to have a body unless he is inside Molly, either in sex or sim/stim (...) Molly is the
body. Case can jack out any time”.5 More recently, June Deery, in her comparison of Gibson’s and Marge
Piercy’s work, was equally damning when she suggested that in his writing we see “the world of macho,
hardboiled console cowboys on the wild frontier, mercenary loners who try to outmaneuver each other with the
latest weaponry and gadgetry”.6 The unproblematised connection between man and mind, and woman and body,
together with the ‘macho’ discourse of the frontier limits the potential of Gibson’s work when considering it in
relation to resistance to gender norms. The texts by Stephenson and Dorsey perhaps offer a new twist on the
genre; Stephenson’s novel is considered ‘second-generation’ cyberpunk, while Dorsey’s short story is explicitly
billed as a parody of cyberpunk. I hope to find that this distance from classic, ‘first-wave’ cyberpunk produces
more challenging gender representations.
Stephenson’s novel, Snow Crash, tells the story of a computer hacker called Hiro Protagonist and a
skateboard courier called Y.T. Set in a recognisable future America, Stephenson’s novel brings together
perennial cyberpunk themes such as life online with contemporary social anxieties about bodily boundaries,
religious fundamentalism, migration and global corporatisation. The plot of the novel is centred on Hiro and
Y.T. uncovering a plot to kill hackers using a new virus called ‘snow crash’. Writing about the novel in ‘Hacking
the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash’, David Porush describes ‘snow crash’ as
follows:

On the streets, Snow Crash takes the form of a designer drug that induces a type of aphasia, causing its
users to babble in a glossolalia of basic morphemes (...) The drug also causes an extraordinary
susceptibility to suggestion and manipulation. In virtual reality, Snow Crash takes the form of viral
computer code that infects a host system merely by revealing it “visually” to the avatar of the host. The
results are disastrous: the code sustaining the virtual avatar becomes infected, causing the avatar to
become inoperant and the brain of the host, the live handler, to become infected as well, inducing the
same symptoms that the street drug does. 7

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Y.T. and Hiro track the source of ‘snow crash’ over the course of the novel, with the action slipping easily
between online and offline action.
In the short story, ‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’ 8, Dorsey’s protagonist is a programmer called
Angel who designs an Artificial Intelligence. Disillusioned when the small company for which she works is sold
to a larger corporation, Angel enacts her own personal revenge by designing a program called ‘Machine Sex’.
This is based on the idea that orgasm can be programmed and the text traces Angel’s development of the
hardware she dubs the ‘Mannboard’ and accompanying software (‘Machine Sex’); this hardware-software
combination results in a piece of equipment with touch pads through which the user is effectively ‘programmed’
to orgasm.
In both texts, the protagonists are portrayed as not wishing to ascribe to society’s norms, through anti-
corporate attitudes as well as a number of other aesthetic cues such as dress or behaviour. This paper will be
particularly concerned with examining how this ‘resistance’ operates specifically in relation to gender, using
‘punk’ as a way in to do this. I will open by interrogating the term ‘punk’ before moving on to an examination of
the texts themselves.

Interrogating ‘punk’
Cyberpunk explicitly sets out to upset our preconceived notions of identity and ‘a good life’, by
proffering different values which highlight alternative ways of being. Apart from its obvious status as part of the
title of the genre in question (cyber-punk), the anarchic disrespect for authority associated with the punk ethos
seems to echo certain elements of feminist resistance to patriarchy in its ferocity and challenge to social norms.9
David Porush’s definition of punk below perfectly captures some of this anger and anti-establishment sentiment
that make it a movement worth closer investigation:

So what is punk? It’s primitive lizard-brain passion clawing its way through the cerebrum of urbanity.
The emotive electric acidjuice of adolescence decoding the palimpsest of civilization, stripping it away
to expose deeper codes. Graffiti painting its postliterate mark on the official billboards. It’s the
reassertion and readaptation of the genetic code over the industrial one which has tried to suppress it.
It’s the war between natural and artificial, and their inevitable deconstruction, their collapse into each
other as meaningless distinctions. 10

The images and tone used here evoke not only the ‘real life’ images of punk and the counterculture world
portrayed in cyberpunk itself, but also echo recent Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) concerns with nature,
artifice, culture and technology. 11 Cyberpunk models a near-future society in which technology is more
advanced, a depiction of a society we can easily imagine our own one becoming, 12 located somewhere between
old and new, between a simple fiction and the ‘facts’ of the present day, resonating clearly with Donna
Haraway’s writings on technoscience,

On either side is a lie – on the one hand, the official discourses of technoscience and its apologists; on
the other hand, the fictions of conspiracy fabulated by all those labeled “outsider” to scientific
rationality and its marvellous projects, magical messages, and very conventional stories. In the end, the
joke is on us. Inside and outside are lies. The edge is all there is…13

In its reinterpretation of previous styles, punk appears to position itself as straddling the divide between old and
new, pushing at the boundaries of the acceptable and the accepted, refusing to fit into any of the existing
categories, walking the ‘edge’.
In my exploration of ‘punk’, I found it helpful to look at the etymology and changing uses of the term.
For example, The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines ‘punk’ as follows:

punk an admirer or player of a loud, fast-moving, and aggressive form of rock music popular in the
late 1970s, typically characterized by coloured spiked hair and clothing decorated with safety pins or
zips; also, this form of music. The terms punk rocker and punk rock are also used.
The word is recorded from the late 17th century in the sense ‘soft crumbly wood that can be used as
timber’, and from the early 20th century in the sense ‘a worthless person’; it may also be related to
archaic punk ‘prostitute’ and spunk, ‘courage’. 14

Punk is an old word, often replete with images of otherness, a word which has long been part of popular culture,
whose meaning has shifted over time to designate a range of socially marginalised positions. In the 1970s, the
term underwent a kind of revaluation with the advent of Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, their infamous
shop ‘Sex’ and the accompanying furor caused by bands such as the ‘Sex Pistols’. Punk at this point became a

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lifestyle, a commodity - music, dress and behaviours that were designed to shock, to upset norms, as well as a
different approach to aesthetics. Then, in the 1980s, the anti-establishment attitude of punk met the Internet.
When Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter in the early 1980s, computers were technologies of
which people were aware. However, they were still several years away from being freely available and a regular
fixture in your ‘average’ home. This distance from lived reality resulted in heightened fears and expectations of
what this new technology would offer and cyberpunk is the result of the meeting of this hyperimaginative
response to new technologies (and the Internet in particular) and the anti-establishment approach of punk. To put
this into a broader socio-historical context, ARPANET (the precursor of today’s Internet) started in 1969, and
the earliest known use of the term ‘Internet’ was in 1974. Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS – the earliest open
access online communities) started in 1978, ‘Sex Pistols’ disbanded in 1979, Neuromancer was published
in1984, Donna Haraway’s famous ironic feminist text ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ appeared in 1985, and the late
1980s saw the first commercial use of the Internet. Meanwhile, Dorsey’s short story was published in 1988, and
Stephenson’s text, Snow Crash, in 1992. Moreover, cyberpunk is predominantly a product of Anglo-American
authors, the majority of whom are men. 15 Locating this subgenre chronologically and geographically is important
when considering what ‘resistance’ might mean in this particular context. In particular, these texts reflect
concerns with corporatisation as well as an aesthetic (bodily) resistance to the mainstream.
Acknowledging how socio-historical contexts helps when considering whose interests are not
recognised by the form that this resistance takes. For example, the homogenisation and standardisation reflected
in the dictionary definition above of punk reflects the emergence of ‘punk’ into popular culture, and is striking
in its contrast to the tone of the opening quotation from a contemporary punk zine, Punk Planet (now sadly
discontinued). In his article, ‘L.A.’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization’,16
Paul Traber draws attention to the way in which race was used by the L.A. punks as a way for white punks to
distinguish themselves from the ‘privileged white youth’.17 However, Traber is keen to stress that these
positionings implicitly reinforce the idea of the middle-class, white male as the ‘norm’ in a move that
undermines some of the radical potential of punk,

...the foundations of L.A. punk’s politics are shaky, and its liberatory spirit needs to be reconsidered.
This subculture claims to desire dissonance and destabilization, but it depends on boundaries and
regulatory fictions staying in place to define itself as oppositional.18

Bearing this in mind, it is also worth considering how women have been located in relationship to the punk
movement. Writing in ‘“A little too ironic”: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by
Mainstream Female Musicians’, Kristen Schilt traces the history of the ‘riot grrrl’ movement from its punk
founding mothers, through the era of bands like Bikini Kill, to mainstream ‘angry’ female musicians such as
Alanis Morrisette. Schilt notes the connection between the “founding women” 19 of riot grrrl and punk, explicitly
framing punk as ‘parent’ discourse, one which facilitates and validates Riot Grrrl messages. However, through
analysis of lyrics from female bands and artists, Schilt shows how the original punk messages of the Riot Grrrl
movement moved into mainstream popular culture, finally emerging in the diluted form of ‘The Spice Girls’ and
‘Girl Power’. In light of this, her conclusion is unsurprisingly gloomy, noting that while “the anger towards
patriarchy is present, the discussion of sexual abuse, and even acknowledgement of female desire”,20 positive
action for women seems to have got lost en route:

There is no shared experience or advice in how to move towards healing, as there is in Riot Grrrl
material. There is no encouragement for girls to use music as a form of expressing anger towards a
world that marginalizes them (...) That future may seem bleak if you don’t look good in spangled
bustiers and hot pants.21

The complaints which Schilt makes about punk are echoed in responses to stereotyped female figures in
cyberpunk too; June Deery describes Molly as “not so far removed from the sexy, cold, violent female warrior
who remains a staple of computer games and science fiction comics”.22 The damning review from Schilt seems
to posit a stable definition of punk which she mourns being swallowed up by popular culture. However,
contemporary zines like Punk Planet stress how ‘punk’ moves, that it is an iterative process, in which
“sometimes things have to end so that something new can begin”.23 So, while Schilt may be right to mourn what
she reads as the disappearance of positive female role models from Riot Grrrl, as their style (but not their
substance) becomes a fashion statement, her argument fails to trace where the substance goes.
However, the oppositional power of ‘punk’ contains potentially more serious flaws than overly stable
definitions of it. If punk draws power and momentum from defining itself in opposition to mainstream or
traditional ideas, it enforces and stabilises a punk/mainstream dichotomy. It therefore becomes a gesture empty
of any transformational power, or as James Kincaid neatly puts it,

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 Resistance is the ultimate acquiescence. It pools the imaginations of the hungry and dissatisfied into
conservative gestures of barricading and nose thumbing. It admits its own failure to think (or fight) its
way out of bondage. It likes where it is, since that location provides the only identity it can know. 24

Kincaid turns away from the idea of ‘resistance’ by looking for a “vocabulary innocent of power”, by advocating
multiple stories, with no one meaning, plus an avoidance of causality, genre hierarchies, set plots and the law of
logical contradiction. In so doing, he – rather like Haraway – removes authority from the narrative and
reintroduces pleasure. Pleasure in stories. And this I think is helpful in thinking about cyberpunk. While Kincaid
avoids calling his approach ‘resistance’, in my chapter it is very much his approach I have in mind when I refer
to ‘discourses of resistance’.
With these concerns about ‘punk’, and by extension cyberpunk, in mind, I have deliberately chosen
texts which are not ‘straightforward’ first wave cyberpunk narratives. While both have relationships with the
original cyberpunks, these are complicated either by a feminist perspective (Dorsey) or a generational distance
(Stephenson). Can Dorsey and Stephenson avoid these traps outlined by Traber and Schilt, and release the
‘resistance’ to gender norms in their texts? In the following sections, I will consider what the texts are resisting,
how this resistance is performed and whether it can be considered successful.

Snow Crash
In Stephenson’s novel, Snow Crash, we see the ultimate dystopian future society, a mindless America
in which everything has become the property of a company, where there are no laws and the Mafia is a
recognised business. Hiro Protagonist, one of the two main protagonists in Snow Crash, is announced to the
reader through his business card which dubs him ‘Last of the freelance hackers. Greatest sword fighter in the
world’. 25 Hiro is the ultimate cyberpunk; technically adept, physically strong - oh, and he carries swords and
rides a motorcycle too. Hiro’s ‘cool’ cyberpunk persona is undercut, however, by his mundane job delivering
pizza. Stephenson heightens the incongruity between Hiro’s two identities by juxtaposing a hyped rhetorical
style with the ordinariness of Hiro’s job. The book opens with a description of Hiro on a night at work, during
which he is referred to as ‘The Deliverator’. This description lasts several pages. However, it is only on the third
page that the reader actually discovers that the job is pizza delivery. The two pages prior to that are hyperbolic
descriptions of his car, uniform and gun, as the opening sentences demonstrate,

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right
now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is as black as activated
charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a
wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly
napalmed forest.26

Deliberately playing with recognisable styles from action and adventure narratives, Stephenson undermines the
trappings of cyberpunk machismo in just a few lines.
The other central character in Snow Crash is a teenage girl called Y.T.. Y.T. lives with her mother who
works ‘for the Feds’ but leads a ‘double life’ as a skateboard courier, pausing at her local McDonalds on the way
home to change her courier uniform for a skirt and blouse with a “delicate floral print”. 27 Independent and
strong-willed, she rarely goes online, and does not carry a weapon. Both Hiro and Y.T. are portrayed as existing
more comfortably outside ‘accepted’ society, and this is often reflected in their use of slang, an important aspect
of counterculture, as Jenny Wolmark notes,

The heralding of cyberpunk as a kind of avant-garde ‘movement’ with its own manifesto has
emphasised the implicitly radical sounding overtones of cyberpunk, which are based on an
appropriation of the language of dissent contained in the street-wise posture and vocabulary of both
punk and rock and roll. 28

Y.T.’s affiliation to the skate gangs, and Hiro’s to the hackers, are shown through their use of distinctive
linguistic patterns and their attitudes towards those living within society’s norms. The lifestyle choices of Y.T.
and Hiro deliberately contrast with the mindless, corporate suburban future America that Stephenson portrays.
For both, aesthetic choices function as markers of group membership and as different to ‘corporate’ America.
However, we need to ask – following Traber – whether this opposition actually reinforces boundaries,
and, if so, what other ‘regulatory fictions’ remain in place in Stephenson’s novel? McCaffery’s introduction to
the cyberpunk anthology, Storming the Reality Studio, provides a helpful starting point for investigating this. In
the following extract, he describes the image projected by the early cyberpunk authors:

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 Decked out in mirrorshades and leather jackets, the cyberpunks projected an image of confrontational
“reality hacker” artists who were armed, dangerous, and jacked into (but not under the thumb of) the
Now and the New.29

Although not directly identified as male in the quotation above, the cyberpunk is implicitly gendered through
references to typically male figures such as the biker, the hacker and the criminal. Broader cultural associations
between aggression and masculinity also contribute to this not-so-subtle gendering of the (cyber)punk.
In Snow Crash, this connection is played out in various ways. Hiro’s highly developed technical skills
as hacker and developer – and his role in the narrative as detective and decoder of the plot – seem to associate
him with mental abilities. His body is connected primarily with fighting or driving, and whilst Stephenson
clearly shows himself capable of parodying dominant discourses in these descriptions (as demonstrated in the
extract about ‘the Deliverator’), his treatment is not consistently self-aware when doing so. For example, in the
stages leading up to the final sequence Hiro buys a motorbike, and when seated on the bike in his new
motorcycling clothes he is described as looking like “one bad motherfucker”. 30 With no apparent irony and in
just a few lines, Stephenson thus returns Hiro to the mould of earlier cyberpunks.
Like many female figures in cyberpunk, Y.T. is positioned as independent and strong-willed. However,
she suffers from the same lack of attention to her mental abilities and absence of online persona as earlier female
figures in this genre. Y.T.’s body is usually mentioned in relation to her skateboarding, or her sexual encounters
with her courier boyfriend and the assassin, Raven. In the passages with Raven she is portrayed as being
physically and sexually powerless. In many respects, Y.T is simply an updated version of the original female
cyberpunk character, Molly from Neuromancer. Throughout this well-known text, Gibson repeatedly draws
attention to Molly’s physically attractive appearance, combining this with her physical strength and weapons to
create an almost cartoon-like dominatrix figure. In contrast, the physical appearance of Case, the male
protagonist of Neuromancer, is described only once and then through Molly’s eyes. Although Y.T is not a hired
fighter, like Molly, Stephenson’s reliance on stock scenarios such as her admiration of Hiro, her lack of
weapons, and the references to her physicality and sexuality results in a disappointingly stereotyped portrayal.
Thus while Stephenson’s novel initially appears to be a self-aware updating of the cyberpunk genre seen in his
adaptation of the rhetorical style of earlier texts, and his positioning of Hiro and Y.T. as distanced from
mainstream, corporate culture, his gendering of the characters falls back on stock positions more in keeping with
texts such as Gibson’s.

‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’

The integration of punk ethics into a technological or futuristic framework inevitably results in criticism
of corporate concerns becoming a fundamental part of the cyberpunk ethos. This anti-establishment spirit is very
much in keeping with both the tone and the concerns of cyberpunk fiction, as we see in Dorsey’s short story,
‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’. The response of the main protagonist, Angel, to the buy-out of the small, start-
up company for which she works is perhaps typical of cyberpunk positioning:

‘Had a big day,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, I sold the company.’
‘You what?’ Reflexively moving herself so that none of her body touched his.
‘Northern. I put it to Bronfmann. Megabucks.’
‘Are you joking?’ but she saw he was not. ‘You didn’t, I didn’t…Northern’s our company.’31

Angel’s instinctive response here reflects the punk mistrust of authority and the hacker commitment to free
access to software. Angel is identified from early in the story as being resistant to societal norms, as
demonstrated by both her appearance and her ability to succeed in the male-dominated hacker world: “they say a
hacker’s burned out before he’s twenty-one. Note the pronoun: he. Not many young women in that heady realm
of the chip”.32 The cynicism and self-awareness of the narrator’s voice, combined with Angel’s attitude marks
this text as being as much ‘punk’ as it is ‘cyberpunk’. Angel is fiercely resistant to corporatisation of her creative
programming work. Her attitude disrupts the male-dominated corporate world and simultaneously returns the
technology to the hands of the individual.33Angel engages in behaviours which she recognises as being outside
the norm, and which are only tolerated by her employer because of her talent with computers,

By then he knew her, knew her rep, knew that the sweaty-smelling, dishevelled, anorectic-looking waif
in the filthy, oversized silk shirt (the rebels had affected natural fabrics the year she left home, and she
always did after that, even when the silk was cleaner, more upmarket, and black instead of white) had
something. Two weeks ago he’d bought a company on the strength of that something, and the board

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 Whitman had brought him the day after the sale, even without the software to run on it, had been
enough to convince him he’d been right.34

Her chosen aesthetic disrupts the image of the desirable techno-body seen in earlier cyberpunk, while her choice
of ‘uniform’ again marks her distance from the corporate world and her membership of alternative culture. Thus,
Dorsey positions Angel as closer to ‘punk’ than ‘cyberpunk’ in her bodily aesthetics. Dorsey’s treatment of
Angel aptly captures the ambiguity of the position of women cyberpunks – Angel is intelligent, talented and
resistant to absorption into the corporate sphere. However, whilst a strong, independent character, she is riven by
betrayals and marked by her chosen forms of escape into prostitution and drugs. Dorsey is equally ambivalent
about the ‘promise of technology’ for women, simultaneously drawing Angel herself as a kind of machine, and
associating meaningless, ‘programmable’ sex with male desire.
Overall, though, Dorsey’s text is resistant to reaching any definitive conclusion about technology –
unlike Neuromancer this is no boys’ adventure story with a ‘happy ending’ in which man and technology work
together to outwit the evil forces of corporate America. Rather Dorsey’s story ends on an open note – while
Angel has created the piece of software she envisaged, the final scene shows her presenting the software to the
(male) bosses of the company for which she works. Her software is her joke on them, which they never
understand: “‘And what’s better than a man?’ Angel says; they jump slightly. ‘Why, your MannComp
touchpads, with two-way input. I bet you’ll be able to have them personally fitted.’”35 Dorsey unremittingly
drags the body back into science fiction in her cyberpunk, it is notable that Angel never experiences the online
disembodiment so beloved of Gibson and many other early cyberpunk authors. Instead, she has a difficult, tense
relationship with desire and bodily pleasure, resorting to tailored drugs and anonymous sex – both of which are
experiences with which she is ultimately disappointed.
Dorsey’s conceptualisation of technology is different to those used by Stephenson. The ’Mannboard’
hardware which Angel designs and the ’Machine Sex’ program she develops to run on it offer a new kind of
interface with the body, which requires neither disembodiment nor permanent bodily modification.

It was very simply, really. If orgasm was binary, it could be programmed. Feed back the sensation
through one or more touchpads to program the body. The other thing she knew about human sex was
that it was as much cortical as genital, or more so: touch is optional for the turn-on. Also easy, then, to
produce cortical stimuli by programmed input. The rest was a cosmetic elaboration of the premise. 36

While Gibson and Stephenson reserve their most euphoric and sexy hyperbole for the hardware itself – the
laptops, the motorbikes, etc. - Dorsey locates sex firmly with the body. The technology itself is not portrayed as
particularly sexy, but it actually comes closer to giving someone an orgasm than do any of the motorbikes or
laptops in Snow Crash. Dorsey seems to be asking what happens when you actually put sexual intercourse into
the domain of technology? In so doing, she takes takes the connection between sex and technology and pushes it
to its limits. This reveals some of the situatedness of most cyberpunk, that technology is conceived of in a very
particular way; it is the technology itself – the object – which is desirable, rather than what it can do.
‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’ thus resists the normative gender representations seen in science
fiction using self-aware commentary on, or parody of, the stereotypes associated with cyberpunk. In Angel,
Dorsey has created a character who marks a distinct aesthetic departure from the glossy female figures of earlier
cyberpunk, and who, in her attitude to machines, relishes the intellectual challenge whilst avoiding blissful
disembodiment. Dorsey’s resistance to these stock figures and themes of cyberpunk, however, goes beyond her
portrayal of Angel. Her prose style is sparse and notable for its avoidance of technophilic rhetoric. Instead, when
it starts to drift towards that mode, Dorsey swiftly pops the bubble with a swift dose of self-awareness,

Angel, like everyone else, comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else. She lives in that linear and
binary universe. However, like everyone else, she lives concurrently in another universe less simple.
Trivalent, quadrivalent, multivalent. World without end, with no amen. And so, on.37

The mocking tone of the narrator’s voice at the end of the above extract undermines the euphoric rhetoric of
early cyberpunk, playing with the accepted tropes. This playfulness can also be seen in Dorsey’s elegant melding
of the discourses of sexual desire and computing: “At first it did turn him on, then off, then it made his blood run
cold. She was pleased by that: her work had chilled her too”. 38
Dorsey’s style has important implications for the gendering of cyberpunk by parodying the ‘sexy’
technologies of novels such as Neuromancer, and particularly their techno-sexualisation of the female body.
Dorsey thus turns the genre conventions back on themselves to resist gender stereotypes, drawing on typical
modes of punk resistance to help her achieve this. Her use of multiple discourses and the circular narrative which
breaks with linear, chronological story telling prevent emergence of a single, stable reading of the text. This
disruptive style ‘hooks’ the reader and, for me at least, led to constant rereading as I tried and failed to decipher

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the text. If cyberpunk was the Other of corporate America, then Dorsey resists either acquiescence to corporate
norms or the superficial otherness of cyberpunk.

Conclusion
This genre’s moniker aptly reflects its interest in technology and also the anti-establishment attitudes of
its characters and themes. ‘Punk’ can be seen here as a kind of short-hand for all that is alternative or disruptive.
However, as Traber highlights in the article I discussed earlier, this positioning of punk as a somehow more
‘genuine’ lifestyle assumes an Other: “(p)unks unconsciously reinforce the dominant culture rather than escape it
because their turn to the sub-urban reaffirms the negative stereotypes used in the center to define this space and
its population.”39 I would suggest that the same limitations can also restrict the potential for resistance in
cyberpunk. The potential for resistance suggested by Stephenson’s representation of big business and adaptation
of existing genre conventions, for example, is limited by the often stereotypical gender representations. Punk
thus functions as a glossy surface which obscures the ongoing reproduction of oppositions and hierarchies.
If the point of ‘good’ cyberpunk is that it offers figures or figurations which ask difficult questions or
which don’t easily gel into a reifiable role model, then Dorsey’s short story might be a more successful example
of resistance. Dorsey’s protagonist, Angel, is not offered as role model, rather her own existence, replete with
dissonances and tensions, poses questions to the reader about how and where to situate themselves, how to read
the text, and what to conclude. Having read it many times, and been initially frustrated by being unable to take
away any simple message, I’ve come to recognise that this is perhaps the strength of this text.
In terms of resistance, this is a new kind of punk. ‘Punk’ here is not only in the choice of words, or the
actions and dress of the protagonists, it can also – as Dorsey shows us – consist on another level again where the
author deliberately baits the reader, refusing any easy answer. Dorsey’s use of parody leads to a
reconceptualisation of what constitutes ‘technology’ in these texts, and thus facilitates connections to
commentaries by Science and Technology Studies. Angel appears ‘punk’ but in fact the really ‘punk’ aspect of
this story is Dorsey’s refusal to bow down to the ‘boys club’ of cyberpunk and make machines sexier than
humans. Or more precisely, she performs a kind of reality check by putting the sex into cyberpunk - and she
revels in our ensuing discomfort.

Notes
1
From the Introduction by Daniel Sinker to the zine Punk Planet: Notes from the Underground, issue 80, July and August 2007, p.3.
2
For example, Donna Haraway suggests that ”(t)he cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or
woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity or body”, in ’A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books,
1991), pp.149-181 (p.178)
3
For example, Cathy Peppers suggests it ”presents readers with hacker/street punk heroes who subvert monolithic corporate technocracy,
and the tools of their subversion are the pirated programs, viruses, and genetic manipulations the technocracy has spawned”. From: ’ ”I’ve
Got You Under My Skin”: Cyber(sexed) bodies in cyberpunk fiction’, in Deborah S. Wilson and Christine Moneera Laennec (eds), Bodily
Discursion: Genders, Representations, Technologies, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997, p.167 .
4
For example, Samuel R Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, New York, Dragon Press, 1977, or
Nickianne Moody, ‘Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women’s Science Fiction’ in Andy Sawyer
and David Seed (eds), Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2000, or Scott
Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1993.
5
Wendy Wahl, ’Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance’, in Postmodern Culture,3:2 (January 1993)
(Accessed 28 April 2008) http://muse.uq.edu.au/journals/postmodern_culture/v003/3.2wahl.html
6
June Deery, ’The Biopolitics of Cyberspace: Piercy Hacks Gibson’, in Future Females, The New Generation: New Voices and Velocities in
Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen S. Barr (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp.87-108
(p.91)
7
David Porush, ‘Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash’ in Virtual Realities and their Discontents,
ed. Robert Markley (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp.107-141( p.133)
8
In a collection of Dorsey’s short stories titled Machine Sex and Other Stories, (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), pp.76-97
9
For example, the Wikipedia outline of punk ideology reads: ‘Punk ideology is concerned with the individual’s intrinsic right to freedom,
and a less restricted lifestyle. Punk ethics espouse the role of personal choice in the development of, and pursuit of, greater freedom.
Common punk ethics include a radical rejection of conformity, the DIY (Do It Yourself) ethic, direct action for political change, and not
selling out to mainstream interests for personal gain.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Punk_subculture&printable=yes (Accessed
24 August 2006). All of these ethics could easily apply to feminism, as the 2006 CFP for the ‘D.I.Y. for Girls conference’ posted by the
National Women’s Studies Association demonstrates.
10
David Porush, ‘Frothing the Synaptic Bath’, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry
McCaffery (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1991), pp.331-3 (p.332)
11
See, for example, Technofeminism by Judy Wajcman, Doing Science and Culture ed.by Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek, or Chasing
Technoscience by Don Ihde and Evan Selinger.
12
In this respect it seems to differ from science fiction, which often presents a world further removed from our own.
13
Donna J. Haraway,. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, (London:
Routledge, 1997), p.154
14
A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University
Press. Linkopings universitet. 23 January 2008 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t214.e5776>
15
Although, admittedly, there are more female cyberpunk authors in the ’second-wave’, for example, Pat Cadigan and Justina Robson.
16
Paul Traber, ‘L.A.’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization’ Cultural Critique, 48 (Spring 2001), pp.30-
64

7
17
Traber, p.33
18
Traber, p.32
19
Kristen Schilt, ‘ “A little too ironic”: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians’Popular
Music and Society, 26:1, pp.5-16 (p.6)
20
Schilt, p.14
21
Schilt, p.14-15
22
Deery, p.96
23
Sinker, p.3
24
James R. Kincaid, ’Resist me, you sweet resistible you’ PMLA 118:5, pp.1325-1333 (p.1329)
25
Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Dell, 1993), p.17
26
Stephenson, p.1
27
Stephenson, p.101
28
Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism, (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)
p.111
29
Larry McCaffery, ‘Introduction: The Desert of the Real’, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern
Fiction ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), pp.1-16 (p.13)
30
Stephenson, p.271
31
Dorsey, p.84
32
Dorsey, p.79
33
I found Jenny Wolmark’s ideas on disruptive figures helpful in thinking about Angel in relation to this section. See ‘Staying with the
Body: Narratives of the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction’ in Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural
Transformation, ed.Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp.75-89 (p.79)
34
Dorsey, p.81
35
Dorsey, p.97
36
Dorsey, p.91
37
Dorsey, p.78-9
38
Dorsey, p.91
39
Traber, p.31

Bibliography
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Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen S. Barr (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp.87-108
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Author affiliations: Birkbeck, University of London, U.K. and Linköping University, Sweden. Financial support for writing this paper was
provided by the European Community under a Marie Curie Host Fellowship for Early Stage Researchers Training, and by a studentship
from Birkbeck, University of London.