Session 7a: Gender, Representation and Cyberspace
Chair: Debbie Herring

Queering the Hets: Sex, Gender and Sexuality in The Matrix and eXistenZ
Hannah Ovnat
Hebrew University, Israel

The invention of computers, computer games and technologies of virtual reality are among the most revolutionary developments of the twentieth century. The effects of these technological developments far exceed the bounds of mass communications or its immediacy, and carry far reaching epistemological and ontological implications. Virtual reality raises questions about conceptions of identity, definitions of the self, and the knowing and conceptualization of reality. Virtual reality questions the very notion of reality. All the above mentioned issues bear directly on questions of sexual and gendered identity and praxis. The destabilization of existing categories of thought includes, at least potentially, the ability to challenge and destabilize categories of sex, gender, sexuality and sexual praxis. Many contemporary cultural products in both theoretical and popular manifestations deal with the gendered implications of virtuality. I wish to do a comparative queer theory reading of two movies, the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999).

The plots of both movies transpire in the virtual realm. Both movies examine virtual technologies and existences with a critical eye. The films give rise to fantasies; desires and primal fears derived from the implications of techno-culture. Superficially, the treatment of virtual reality in The Matrix is more complex than in eXistenZ. In The Matrix, virtual reality is presented simultaneously as the cause of subjugation and its revolutionary antidote, whereas eXistenz is uniformly critical of the dark implications of virtuality vis a vis the real.

A queer theory reading of these movies, focusing on gender relations, conceptualizations of the self, and questions of the subject’s agency in the face of its constructing systems will shed light on the liberating potentials implicit within eXistenZ, the more damning of the two movies in its treatment of virtuality. A queer theory reading of the films, besides showing how the import of queer theory exceeds les/bi/gay readerships, also demonstrates how perhaps it is the very cataclysmic gendered implications in the film which dictate its reactionary, damning attitudes to virtual reality.

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Gendered (Cy)Borgs: Body Technologies and Sexual Politics in Star Trek
Uta Scheer
University of Goettingen, Germany

Star Trek – Behind these words a media product is hidden that has developed over the past three decades to a far-reaching socio-cultural phenomenon – not just in the West, but all over the world.
The focus of my presentation would be the televisual construction of a female cyborg called Seven of Nine who holds an important part in the third Star Trek spin-off Voyager (1995-2001). By means of the development of this character throughout the series I want to demonstrate how the gendered borders between technology and biology are drawn on a sexed body and which options and restrictions are given for this figure based on this process. With regard to the work of Judith Butler I look for the modes of the ongoing symbolic reproduction of sex and gender through the performed embodiment of this character. A salient aspect pertaining the construction of the female Star Trek cyborg is depicted by popular discourses about psychological topics like Recovered vs. ’False’ Memories and Multiple Personality Disorder. These discourses have in common that they are significantly gendered and predominantly linked with sexual abuse and trauma, whereas I seek to show how the Star Trek-text manages to use these discourses for stabilizing gender dichotomies and thereby pursues and supports very questionable sexual politics.
However, relating to Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” I want to demonstrate the potential of this cybernetic hybrid to make insecure the seemingly stable dichotomies of technology/biology, man/woman, mind/body, and subject/object. Therefore I will provide close readings of internet message boards where fans are posting their views on and opinions of Seven of Nine, which will show that resistance is not futile – but this resistance may be not as powerful as cultural studies, and concerning this I include myself, want to believe.

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The Female Body in Bruce Sterling's Cyberpunk Novel 'Holy Fire'
Birgit Pretzsch
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

The protagonist of Sterling's 1996 novel is 94 year-old Mia Ziemann. In the late 21st century medical technology has developed a radical and painful experimental procedure that can turn her into a 20 year-old again. Having been a conservative, law-abiding model citizen before the procedure, the young Mia turns into a fugitive and encounters the world of outlaw anarchists in Europe.
Even though the novels offers many rich areas of analysis, particularly from a sociological and psychological point of view, I will focus only on the issue of technology and the body in this paper. Questions of how the body is produced, inscribed, replicated and often disciplined in our times and the near future are central to postmodern feminist theories dealing with technology. Anne Balsamo demands a 'thick perception' of the body to analyse the different modes of construction of the human body particularly within a technological framework.
These ideas seem to form a fertile ground from which to start an analysis of Mia and her medically transformed body: how it is de- and reconstructed within a medical technological framework; how is it conceptualised and articulated within this particular cultural discourse? How do discipline and surveillance figure in this scenario and what cultural practices make her body gendered? In what complex and interdependent ways are body and identity construction related?
Touching upon these questions I will bring together current feminist, postmodern theories on the body and technology with a future scenario that can give us new insights into our current situation concerning technological developments and their implications for both embodied experiences and the theorisation of the human body.

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