Upon their release at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Matrix films had an immediate impact on popular imagination in the United States. The Hollywood-produced science fiction trilogy triggered questions about reality, self-determination, and resistance while setting new standards for film technology. With its clever plotline and breathtaking special effects, the trilogy became both a blockbuster hit surrounded by the usual media hype and an inspiration for academic debates. The Matrix also introduced a new female character to our cultural imagination: the movie-going public fell hard for Trinity, a strong, smart, action-driven resistance fighter and the hero's romantic interest. Trinity joins the ranks of a number of extraordinary female science fiction heroes, such as Ripley from the Alien film series and Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies. These female characters share an unusual display of technological know-how, empowerment, and the habit of saving the world. They also have "unnatural" female bodies (often technologically enhanced or genetically engineered) and do "unfeminine" things. Significantly, it is within science fiction—film and literature—a genre usually understood to be predominantly male, that we seem to reimagine gender relations most radically. Here the controversial female cyborg challenges conventional ideas of gender, race, and nation, often at the same time as she reinforces them. Through figures like the female cyborg, Alien Constructions explores the relationship between science fiction and a feminist discourse that is attempting to conceptualize issues of difference, globalization, and technoscience.

Science fiction is valuable to feminists because of its particular narrative mode. Two textual aspects that define science fiction are the structures and/or narrative devices that constitute its mode, on one hand, and themes and approaches on the other. Several structures and narrative devices of science fiction have been identified in classical science fiction criticism, such as the element of estrangement, or the confrontation of normative systems/perspectives, and the implication of new sets of norms that result in the factual reporting of fiction. Spatial and temporal displacement as well as absent paradigms that structure the reading process are typical for science fiction. Also characteristic for science fiction are "worlds," or systems of representation that create the freedom to voice assumptions otherwise restricted by a realist narrative frame, and the geographic displacement of identity formations.

All of these elements shape the reading process, which in turn defines the genre. In addition to structural and narrative devices, there are recurrent themes and approaches in science fiction: the exploration of socioeconomic relations, the conflicting elements of modernity and postmodernity played out in urban science fiction, the construction of nature and culture, and the implications of technology—one of the most recognizable heuristic markers of science fiction—on human relations and life in general. Science fiction writer and critic Joanna Russ defines science fiction as "a mode rather than a form (a form would be something like the sonnet, the short story, etc.) It is, basically, anything that is about conditions of life or existence different from either what typically is, or what typically was, or whatever was or is. . . . Science fiction is about the possible-but-not-real" ("Reflections on Science Fiction" 243).

Science fiction stories can create "blueprints" of social theories. Only within genres of the fantastic is it possible to imagine completely new social orders and ways of being that differ radically from human existence as we know it. Alien Constructions is a recent intervention in the ongoing debate that examines the relationship of theory to science fiction. It explores how some science fiction engages with feminist thought in a way that enables us to understand oppression and to envision resistance beyond the limits set by much of feminist discourse. Alien Constructions is aimed at readers interested in feminist discourses as well as genre readers. While either audience at times might encounter familiar intellectual and narrative territories, some of the connections between science fiction and feminist thought made in the textual analyses within these pages will be new and hopefully will inspire further explorations.

Science Fiction as Cultural Text

The success of The Matrix and its status as one of the primary cultural points of reference in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century stands in the long tradition of science fiction texts that have provided blueprints for our imagination. Since the late 1970s, the success of films such as the Alien series, the Terminator trilogy, and, of course, the Star Wars saga, whose narrative continues to span several decades, is mirrored in the success of primetime television shows. Shows like the Star Trek series and its spin-offs Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, as well as Roswell, The X-Files, and, more recently, Battlestar Galactica, have reached millions of viewers every week. Although the public's fascination with popular genres extends to mystery and romance novels, TV sitcoms, and horror movies, there is something persistent and unique in our use of science fiction imagery, not only to speculate about the future, but to explain the present. The obsession of United States culture with futuristic explorations and alien life-forms also manifests itself in the popularity of science fiction literature, which is still one of the most pervasively read genres. Science fiction is a stage on which we imagine humanity's fate, and it is in its fantastic extrapolations that we develop the terminology to describe our future. To recognize the magnitude of the genre in the cultural imagination of United States society is to treat it as a space where the exchange between the text and the reader/viewer engages with political as well as social concepts.

What exactly makes us turn to a fantastic genre to imagine not only social and political change but new understandings of who we are in the present and what our future will look like? Popular culture's fascination with science fiction is rooted in the combination of strangeness and familiarity that make up the particularities of the genre. This tension between the "known" and the "unknown" is at the heart of science fiction. It creates a reading process based on estrangement, which places familiar issues into strange territory: even when we are not familiar with a new planet and its corresponding new technology being described, the social and personal issues within the narrative speak to our experiences. This estrangement also creates spaces of abstraction for theorizing. In his classic essay on science fiction literature, "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," published in 1972, Darko Suvin refers to the genre as a "literature of cognitive estrangement" (372). At the same time, science fiction creates personal narratives of identification: we grow to know the protagonists and their world intimately. Science fiction's concept of theorizing grows from both the strategy of estrangement and the power of storytelling. Different forms of storytelling—such as myths, legends, and spiritual and creation narratives, all of which are found in popular culture—are crucial tools for shaping cultural identities. As in other types of fiction, the "realness" of science fiction narratives enables individuals (and groups) to relate to and recognize the debates as relevant to their own lives.

As a genre defined by its relationship to technology as well as by its futuristic framework, science fiction is understood as a cultural arena that explores the anxieties of what Frederic Jameson termed the "postmodern condition." Moreover, in the past three decades it has received considerable attention for its potentially subversive depictions of alternative worlds. While science fiction criticism still inhabits a marginalized position within academic discourse—which mainly treats it as a pulp or popular genre outside of "serious" theoretical frameworks—in the past 20 years, works by critics such as Darko Suvin and Carl Freedman have placed the genre in relation to critical theory and literary theory. In Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) Freedman, instead of simply applying critical theory to science fiction, emphasizes "structural affinities between the two modes of discourse" (xix, emphasis his), such as their dialectical thinking.

Feminists in particular recognize the political implications of the genre and increasingly employ science fiction narratives to explore social relations. Donna Haraway was one of the first critics to emphasize feminist science fiction as a form of feminist theorizing (not simply as a reflection of feminist politics). In Terminal Identity (1993), Scott Bukatman observes the attraction the genre holds for feminist writers, readers, and viewers: "Given a thematics profoundly engaged with social structures and sexual difference and potentially heterotopic discursive practices, the relevance of SF to a feminist politics should not be mysterious" (21). Alien Constructions points to the dialogic relationship between science fiction and contemporary feminist thought. Both science fiction texts and feminist theories conceptualize issues of difference, globalization, and technoscience that increasingly affect women's lives, and both are concerned with contested boundaries and definitions of bodies and cultural/social territories. Thus feminist writings (and readings) of science fiction can be understood as part of a feminist criticism of existing power relations. In order to establish a shared context for genre readers as well as readers familiar with feminist thought, what follows is a brief summary of science fiction since the "New Wave," which introduced radically new literary elements to the genre, and a review of relevant concepts within science fiction and feminist thought.

Science Fiction since the New Wave

Science fiction's alien settings on distant planets, revolutionary technology, and futuristic time frame potentially allow the genre to explore power relations in ways different from realistic fiction—here we can credibly create completely novel societies and cultures. Yet the genre also has a tradition of conceptualizing themes of colonialism and social orders in conservative, and at times reactionary, ways. Beginning with the New Wave in the 1960s, Western science fiction texts and criticism have developed from a mainly white, male, heterosexual genre into a more diverse body of texts with the potential to radically reconceptualize power relations. This development coincided with radical feminist interventions into male-defined liberation movements and theories. Authors such as Samuel Delany, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Philip Dick transformed science fiction by dramatically improving literary quality through narrative experimentation and the crossing of genre lines inspired by a growing postmodern influence in mainstream literature.

In 1972, science fiction writer and critic Joanna Russ criticized the conservative content of mainstream science fiction in the United States and Great Britain, which she referred to as "Intergalactic Suburbia." The term criticizes not only gender but also class and race structures that Russ saw as perpetuated within the science fiction genre, which described "white, middle-class suburbia. Mummy and Daddy may live inside a huge amoeba and Daddy's job may be to test psychedelic drugs or cultivate yeast-vats, but the world inside their heads is the world of [suburban] Westport and Rahway and that world is never questioned" ("Image of Women" 81, emphasis hers). Science fiction—both literature and film—produced since Russ's criticism that reflects the influence of New Wave literary inventions is of the greatest interest to this study.

The new literary styles in science fiction were accompanied by shifts in narrative content as well. For example, the extrapolation of the classical space opera, with its formulaic focus on human outer space expansion and technology, was countered by the psychological dimension of "inner" space and cultural identities as well as complex character formations. The introduction of formerly taboo subjects, such as depictions of sexuality, violence, and race relations, accompanied a growing appreciation of the "soft" sciences (social sciences such as anthropology and linguistics), formerly positioned as either irrelevant, ineffective, or dangerous in contrast to the traditional "hard" sciences (chemistry, physics, and biology). Both literary innovations and narrative explorations beyond the traditional science fiction adventure story, which had dominated popular science fiction, added a complexity to science fiction that transformed the boundaries of the genre. These changes were also reflected in technological, stylistic, and narrative innovations in science fiction films, such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while technological special effects in films such as Star Wars (1977) revolutionized the genre on the silver screen.

The growing literary quality and narrative complexity of New Wave science fiction literature resulted in an expansion in readership from mainly young, white, technologically inclined men to include readers interested in mainstream literature. Although changes in the genre were mainly stylistic, there was also increasingly more emphasis on sex and violence, as reflected in publications such as Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), collections of short stories formerly rejected by mainstream science fiction magazines because of their new, controversial focus. Yet it was the influence of writers of color and female authors that expanded the New Wave's innovations. Social criticism, including criticism of racism and class exploitation in a neocolonial framework, enriched the narratives and became one of the central features of contemporary science fiction. Thomas Moylan observed the connections between the growing number of women and authors of color who were writing science fiction and the increased literary and intellectual quality of the genre when he stated in 1980 that "the most aesthetically interesting and socially significant contemporary science fiction is being produced by women and non-white writers, as well as by a few alienated and critical white males" ("Beyond Negation," 237-38). Even though science fiction since the 1960s has increasingly engaged with issues of race and class, many narratives insist on employing non-Western cultures as representing the ultimate "other." This practice perpetuates existing racist ideologies at the same time as it makes them visible.

In the late 1980s, science fiction experienced further fundamental innovations through the influence of cyberpunk fiction, with its focus on communication technology and consumer culture. In Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson set the stylistic markers of cyberpunk's narrative conventions, which are dominated by the interface of computers and humans. Gibson's exploration of technology's influence on subjectivity and its potential for alienation is also seen in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982), where it manifests in a film noir quality, and culminates in the special effects of the Matrix film trilogy twenty years later. In much of cyberpunk literature, the narrow focus on the angst-ridden subjectivity of the technologically savvy antihero grew from a synthesis of cross-media influences of punk music, street anarchy, and hacker culture. This aspect has been further developed by women and writers of color who have (again) complicated the stylistic novelties with more substantial social and political elements.

Feminist Science Fiction

Even though science fiction has the reputation of being a male-dominated genre, it has always included women writers, and as a narrative style it is open to feminist appropriation. In In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), Sarah Lefanu writes: "[Science fiction literature] makes possible, and encourages (despite its colonisation by male writers), the inscription of women as subjects free from the constraints of mundane fiction; and it also offers the possibility of interrogating that very inscription, questioning the basis of gendered subjectivity" (Lefanu 9). In early science fiction, women often wrote under gender-neutral pseudonyms (such as C.L. Moore, who wrote pulp science fiction in the 1940s), and in general the number of women writers was considerably lower than that of their male counterparts. Since the early 1970s, the number of women who write science fiction has increased dramatically, with popular authors such as Octavia E. Butler, C.J. Cherryh, Kathleen Goonan, Suzette Haden Elgin, Anne McCaffrey, Suzy McKee Charnas, Vonda McIntyre, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Joan Vinge, Kate Wilhelm, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and, in a new generation of writers, Nicola Griffith, Nalo Hopkinson, Severna Park, and Melissa Scott. Feminist science fiction irreversibly shaped the genre, first in the 1970s with its criticism of gender roles, racism, and class exploitation, and later in the 1980s with a growing use of postmodern elements such as the exploration of linguistics and disrupted narrative structures. The presence and influence of women writers were made visible in the 1970s with publications like Pamela Sargent's edited Women of Wonder series, which were collections of stories by women science fiction writers. While feminist science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s explored feminist resistance to women's oppression mainly through separatist societies (e.g., lesbian utopias) and/or reversal of gender roles (e.g., matriarchal societies), later feminist science fiction understands a disruption of gendered power less as a question of a simple role reversal (even though some narratives explore the ramifications of this) than of undermining and subverting that power (e.g., through the use of technology) and linking it to material relations.

One central narrative theme is the effect of science and technology on our future, the fictitious manifestations of which have become the major metaphors in science fiction. Feminist science fiction, especially in the early 1970s, undermined the ideological separation of "soft" and "hard" sciences within traditional science fiction, which portrayed technology as good and the sciences as progressive, rational, and predictable (i.e. masculine), pitched against alien "sciences" such as telepathy and telekinesis that were considered witchcraft, evil, manipulative, obscure, and subjective (i.e. feminine). Feminist science fiction has instead emphasized cultural and social ("soft") sciences, such as anthropology, linguistics, and social theories. At the same time, authors have explored the ambiguous relationship of women and technology. On one hand, feminist writers reclaim the figures of witch and healer within a science fiction setting and develop alternative sciences. On the other, feminist science fiction writers explore the liberating potential of the hard sciences (in particular, reproductive technologies) that promise elimination of traditional gender roles that link women to maternity. The growing identification with the alien/other in many texts is accompanied by a shift in narrative perspective as more and more texts relate the experiences of those colonized by traditional science fiction heroes.

Postmodern science fiction mirrors ideas of fragmented cultural experiences and new linguistic forms of expression as they question the ontological basis for realities and offer subversive point of views. This trend especially resonates in feminist appropriations of cyberpunk, in which texts explore implications of new media and biotechnologies. The metaphor of the cyborg, a concept that becomes central to both feminist fiction and feminist criticism, emerges from explorations of the interface of technology and humans and the boundary dissolutions that accompany biotechnologies and global capitalism's consumerism.

Unlike the growing body of literary texts classified as feminist science fiction, there is not (yet) a genre of feminist science fiction film. One example of a feminist science fiction film is Born in Flames (1983), which explores possible future political developments of fractions of the feminist movement. In "Feminist Futures: A Generic Study" (1990), Anne Cranny-Francis suggests that a hypothetical contemporary feminist science fiction cinema would be based in an intertextual relationship between "science fiction writing and its generic conventions; feminist cultural practice; and cinema itself—particularly science fiction film and feminist film—as a set of discursive and signifying practices" (219).

Science Fiction and Feminist Theory

In the past thirty-five years, feminist science fiction and feminist readings of science fiction have challenged existing gender relations and have explored theoretical and political debates of the time. Critics such as Marleen Barr in Alien to Femininity (1987), Sarah Lefanu in In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988), and Jenny Wolmark in Aliens and Others (1994) discuss feminist science fiction in the context of feminist theories. Women's increased involvement in science fiction has proven to be crucial both for the development of the subgenre of feminist science fiction and for feminist theorizing outside the science fiction community. If we view the contemporary author as sharing a cultural climate with feminist political and theoretical debates, it becomes necessary to read science fiction texts as contributions to feminist debates as well as reflections of them.

Even though direct connections exist between feminist writing and feminist politics, the question of who produces theoretical models within these texts is less framed in terms of the "intentionality" of the author (especially when considering science fiction films) than in relation to systems of representation that are created in an active exchange process between reader/viewer, context, and text, thereby producing connections and links between groups of texts and political moments. One context for a reading of these science fiction narratives, for example, is feminist discourse; another is postcolonial studies. So theories and texts do not necessarily inform each other directly but are based in a shared "climate of opinion" (Hayles, Cosmic Web 22) that makes certain ideas worth pursuing in different disciplines. Production of meaning does not take place in a dualistic relationship of either reader and text (interpretation), or text and social context (social construction). Instead, meaning is produced in complex constellations where texts and theories are situated, in the treatment of the text as both a semiotic and a material structure:

The text must be . . . understood as a term in a process, that is to say a chain reaction encompassing a web of power relations. What is at stake in the textual practice, therefore, is less the activity of interpretation than of decoding the network of connections and effects that link the text to an entire sociosymbolic system. In other words, we are faced here with a new materialist theory of the text and of textual practice. (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 154)

The reader, therefore, becomes just as important as the author or director in the production of feminist theory within/through a given text. In addition, the meaning of the symbolic manifestations in the text changes with each new theoretical context of analysis brought to the text. A crucial part of this process is that this production of theory is closely related to the identity of the theorist (writer? reader? viewer?). Since subjectivity here is understood to be a discursive, constantly changing process, cultural texts and their systems of representations are as significant as interactions with the social world and its institutions: "The acquisition of subjectivity is therefore a process of material (institutional) and discursive (symbolic) practices, the aim of which is both positive—because the process allows for forms of empowerment—and regulative—because the forms of empowerment are the site of limitations and disciplining" (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 157).

Thus creative explorations of cultural anxieties in science fiction often involve theoretical investigations as well as theory production through complex interactions of reader, writer, and text. As feminist biologist and theorist Donna Haraway observes in How Like a Leaf, "science fiction is political theory" (120). The intersections of theory, politics, and pleasures of imagination enable creative and complex theorizing. Alien Constructions is informed by Haraway's idea that some science fiction texts not only incorporate feminist theory but actually produce it. Locating feminist theory in cultural texts contests the separations of cognitive realms, such as creativity and abstract thought, on which the Western-defined concept of theorizing rests. It shifts discourses away from a hierarchical structure of theory building toward a more open, multileveled production of theory and toward interdisciplinary approaches within feminist inquiry.

Alien Constructions

Science fiction's fantastic aliens and distant planets can thus become the imaginative testing grounds for feminist critical thought. These texts create a link between cultural imagination and political positions: they function as "case studies" of how feminist theories "work." For many readers, consuming feminist science fiction serves as an introduction to feminist politics and theories and offers concrete manifestations of the complex theories at hand. Within the narratives, these readers encounter "alien constructions"—metaphors and concepts specific to the genre, such as the cyborg, human/alien hybrids, and aliens—that provide unfamiliar images for familiar identities and concepts and explore the implications of theories within a (pleasurable) narrative framework. These alien constructions, embedded within a narrative context that enables identifications, can provide us with empowering metaphors that allow critical evaluations of the theories we rely on to explain our social realities. To read science fiction in conjunction with feminist theories can therefore foster a new and more intimate understanding of the theories, their limits, and their co-optation by dominant culture.

To this end, Alien Constructions examines a selection of popular science fiction texts from a feminist perspective and points to connections between these cultural texts and feminist debates in academic and political arenas. The texts discussed here are all post-New Wave, and their literary and cinematic explorations offer theoretical interventions that stand in complicated relationship to postmodern feminist thought. In my critical readings, I take an interdisciplinary approach to political and theoretical concepts by combining analyses of science fiction literature and film. While science fiction film and literature share a preoccupation with futuristic technology and alien/fantastic bodies, their respective media create different forms of representation. As Annette Kuhn points out in the introduction to Alien Zone, there is a significant difference between science fiction literature and science fiction film: "[T]he most obvious difference . . . lies in the latter's mobilization of the visible, the spectacle. If cinema is one among a number of narrative media, it also has its own language, its own codes, through which it makes meaning and tells stories" (6). Thus mainstream science fiction film caters to identification mechanisms very much based on the pleasure of the visual and acoustic spectacle (special effects therefore are the backbone of successful science fiction cinema), while feminist science fiction literature often creates characters that embody complex intersections of political and social ideas and uses stylistic devices to create gripping narratives. The female cyborgs, aliens, and species-hybrids that populate mainstream science fiction film are further complicated in feminist science fiction literature, which offers potentially more progressive and subversive feminist characters and settings. Both media offer representations of displaced cultural anxieties and hopes around the relationship of the gendered body to technology and the identities that grow out of this relationship. Much of the literature explored in this book has been created and is consumed within an explicitly feminist context; other works, especially the Hollywood films discussed here, are not, and demand a different interpretative approach.

The science fiction texts I discuss include literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the mainstream movies of the Matrix and Alien series. The alien constructions of these texts—of the deviant bodies and subjectivities that populate their worlds—envision utopian as well as dystopian ways of being. The readings in Alien Constructions do not focus on just one aspect of the narratives (such as technology or alternative sciences). Instead, they examine how the texts engage with important concepts within feminist thought (such as identity versus difference, racism, economic relations, sexuality, and gender identities) and with theories rarely placed in connection with science fiction (especially feminist postcolonial and critical race theory).

Alien Constructions examines how contemporary science fiction literature and films explore multinational corporations' reordering of world relations in the aftermath of colonialism, and how these works represent implications of new technologies such as genetic engineering, virtual reality, and nanotechnology. Science fiction addresses issues of subjectivity (the interface of individual and technology) as well as of social organization (discourses of groups and technology). Reconfigurations of gender roles and gender identities, as well as sexual desires, are central to the challenging of existing social orders—and the body becomes the main contested territory.

Alien Constructions explores how the science fiction texts in question represent debates and concepts in three areas of feminist thought: identity and difference; feminist critiques of science and technology; and the relationship between gender identity, body, and desire. Key political elements that shape these debates are global capitalism and exploitative class relations within a growing international system (relationship between First and Third Worlds, postcolonial relations); the impact of technologies on women's lives (Internet, global industries, medical establishment, reproductive technologies); and posthuman embodiment (biotechnologies, body/machine interface, the commodification of desire). From the intersections of feminist discourses exploring these issues emerge science fiction's alien constructions and their posthuman bodies, such as cyborgs, clones, androids, aliens, and hybrids. They reflect the crisis the human/machine interface induces within the Western concept of subjectivity, thereby destabilizing cultural and ideological boundaries of nature/culture (or race or ethnicity) and human/machine.

The decentered bodies that grow from new technologies and populate postmodern science fiction are both troubling and potentially empowering. The appropriation of these constructed bodies as signs of resistance and the reconstruction of their designated subject positions as those signifying agency are the theoretical aims of feminist theories of representation. As semiotic tools, these bodies foreground issues of representation and the constructions of cultural meaning, drawing science, economic theories, and their representation in cultural texts into the analysis of power relations. They become symbols of technology's ambivalent relationship to the body and function in at least two conflicting ways: first, they constitute elements of political empowerment and resistance; and second, they embody the contradictions and potentials of feminist and queer theory and point to the limits of some of these theories.

Science fiction narratives relate to feminist concerns as unique cultural texts; the issues of meaning production and construction of reality in the reading/viewing process are related to inscriptions of identity and subjectivity that are envisioned in the strange Alien Constructions found within the texts. It is in the creative synthesis of these two topics—questions of subjectivity, and technology as a social force—that the contemporary science fiction texts in Alien Constructions engage the reader in theoretical exchanges.

Identity and Difference in Feminist Thought

Self/Other

The relationship of self/other is one foundation of political subjectivity in Western philosophy. The traditional self is constituted through the notion of otherness. The inherent structure of this relationship is dependent on a clear line between I and not-I; it is dependent on the duality of the terms. Western feminist thought emphasizes the critique of the masculine/feminine dualism that establishes a self/other relationship based on sexual difference. This critique is most famously expressed by the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir in her classic text The Second Sex: "She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other" (xxii). In Nomadic Subjects, Rosi Braidotti explains the emphasis European (especially French) feminist theories place on sexual difference in relation to language in the Western tradition: "In my understanding, there can be no subjectivity outside sexuality or language; that is to say, the subject is always gendered: it is a 'she-I' or a 'he-I'" (199). This binary is not always as unambiguous as feminist discourse (re)presents it: transgender identities further complicate notions of the gendered subject. The analytical aspect of transgender subjectivity, which finds itself invisible in feminist discourse on binary sexual difference, often is not considered in debates on how to conceptualize a feminist subjectivity. Incorporating transgender subjectivities into a criticism of the "eternal feminine" and the "generic masculine" of Western philosophy makes the construction of gender categories visible. Also, the construction of gendered subjects in terms of language and desire does not account for homosexual desire. Homosexuality does not correspond with the dichotomous psychological and economic relations between "man" and "woman." As Monique Wittig argues in "One Is Not Born a Woman," a lesbian is not a "woman," since she stands outside the heterosexual economy that defines the identity of "woman." The identity "lesbian" thus is understood to be liberating from (heterosexual) gender oppression. The notion of sexual orientation as identity is problematized further by Judith Butler in "Imitation and Gender Subordination," in which she calls the subversive function of identity labels into question, arguing that they keep the subject locked in relation to the dominant heterosexual matrix.

The issue of sexual difference as it manifests itself in Western philosophy and other related discourses is complicated by critical race and postcolonial theorists who define race and ethnicity as a variable of female subjectivity. Feminist theories of women of color have informed United States feminist discourse in terms of a multifaceted concept of difference that is as much defined by race (and class) as it is by gender. Thus it becomes impossible to speak of the construction of gender identity without including race. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham raises the point that white feminists have failed to conceptualize "white" as a racial identity and instead base their analysis of gender on a "neutral" (white) gender identity. They construct black women as individuals possessing two identities—one shaped by gender, one by race—and gender identity generally is perceived to be the same for all women. As a location of structural advantage and race privilege, and as a standpoint as well as a set of cultural practices that usually are unmarked and unnamed, whiteness shapes women's lives as much as any other racial identity. Thus the concept of self/other, which feminist philosophy has criticized as gendered and rooted in patriarchal power, needs to be understood in relation to other systematically assigned categories such as sexuality, race, class, and nation. "Woman" cannot be a generic identity; instead, it is inevitably linked to various (and at times very different) sets of experiences and discursive practices.

Feminist Postmodern Subjects

Considering that race and gender are inseparable categories of identity formation, attempts to assert a female subjectivity denied by traditional Western philosophy need to integrate the theoretical deconstruction of "woman" as a stable gender identity. To quote Braidotti, "One of the points of tension . . . is how to reconcile the feminist critiques of the priority traditionally granted to the variable sexuality in the Western discourse about the subject with the feminist proposition of redefining the embodied subject in a network of interrelated variables of which sexuality is but one" (Nomadic Subjects 199). One of the most productive sites where this tension is worked through is within postmodern feminist thought. Feminist discourse develops and grows in an (at times dialectical) exchange with other discourses. Postmodern feminist discourse is especially connected to poststructuralism and postcolonial theories; this connection and the controversies it brings is part of feminist discourse at large. Both poststructuralism and postmodern feminism reconceptualize power and agency as decentralized, and the subject not as an autonomous entity but rather as the product of discourses and their institutions. Some feminists criticize postmodern theory for being unpolitical due to its constant denial of any political "truth" and because it destabilizes women as agents and forgers of their own histories. Other feminists appreciate the decentering of center/margin, self/other as a potential strategy for undermining power relations and for asserting agency.

One main point of discord between the two very large and internally diverse discourses of poststructuralism and postmodern feminist theories is the conceptualization of the postmodern subject. While many feminists agree with the notion of a fragmented and dislocated subject, they do not accept postmodernism's often implicit depoliticization of debates. In reference to the "death of the subject," feminists point out that the subject afflicted with "postmodern conditions" always has been white and male. Consequently, they appropriate the theoretical space of fragmentation as a potential for resistance and political empowerment, not despair. Using what Carole Boyce Davies, throughout Black Women, Writing, and Identity, traces as "transgressive speech"—a tool for the political appropriation of the now empty subject-position after the demise of the modern subject—feminists are politicizing new concepts of selfhood.

Instead of fragmentation, these feminists see multiplicity, and instead of the notion of a scattered and incoherent self, they favor the image of flexibility and fluid selves, each one representing situated knowledges of locations. Mostly committed to a materialist conception of these identities, feminist theories consistently return to questions of oppression through capitalism and its systematic exploitation of labor that is structured by race and gender.

Embracing Difference

Western feminist debates around identity until the mid-1980s were trying to theorize a "preconceived, pregiven 'women's identity,' . . . an identity common to all women, woman's 'identity' as 'the other'" (Crosby 130-31). Twenty years later, the discourse is dominated by "difference"—the notion that "woman" consists of many diverse components that are positioned in very different relations to power. The danger of this approach is that the concept of difference becomes a simplified prefix of diversity, without being further problematized as the moment when something is defined as "other": that "'differences' work now more or less as 'identity' did before" (Crosby 130). Difference, therefore, remains in the theoretical position of being not-I, a nonidentity, whereas the identity of the I is still the defining element. Neither the notion of identity, nor what Trinh Minh-ha terms the "politics of differentiation" (Woman, Native, Other 82)—that is, the historical motivations behind the constructions of difference—are themselves questioned. Just as identity is not stable and its claim of stability is a self-perpetuating myth, difference is a shifting constituent. As Trinh points out, we need to find ways to conceptualize identity so that it "refers no more to a consistent 'pattern of sameness' than to an inconsequential pattern of otherness" (Woman, Native, Other 95). Otherwise, one critique of the construction of otherness (gender) leaves another intact (race). In Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti advocates an approach to feminist subjectivity that is equally opposed to binary analyses. Her "feminist nomadism" (Nomadic Subjects 158) includes feminist theory on three complex, interwoven, and coexisting levels: "'difference between men and women,' 'differences among women,' and 'differences within each woman'" (Nomadic Subjects 158). This approach to subjectivity connects with Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's notion of a simultaneity of discourses (147) in which black women write; it addresses the position of "speaking both to and from the position of the other(s)" (146).

None of these theories account for identities and differences that are located between the binary concept of female/male. Queer theory conceptualizes desire in ways that destabilize the naturalized correlation between sex, gender, and sexuality and make room for shifting identities within the categories of gender and sexuality. An analysis of the ways in which sexualities contribute to the construction of identity is necessary in order to understand the subversive potential of women writers' voices.

Feminist debates on difference thus address the complex ways in which women are positioned in relation to power based on race, class, nationality, and sexual difference. The significance of various categories of identity becomes apparent within postcolonial and anticolonial theories that explore the effects of cultural hybridity and diaspora on subjectivity. They inform feminist theories on resisting postcolonial subjectivity, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's subaltern consciousness and Chela Sandoval's oppositional consciousness.

Two approaches to difference are present in feminist and postcolonial theoretical debates. One treats difference as a given that precedes power structures (difference as a descriptive word, a noun), and the other views difference as actively created, as a process (difference as an active and changing word, a verb). The latter position demands accountability within the "politics of differentiation" (Trinh, Woman, Native, Other 82), which produce not only power relations but categories that these inequalities are based upon. Science fiction engages with both feminist and postcolonial theories in its narrative explorations of subjectivity, and it further troubles notions of identity (that which needs to be "uncovered," that is "real," that is "I") and difference (that which "separates," which is the "other," "not-I"). Much of feminist science fiction critically explores the dimensions and implications of the two concepts of difference and contributes to the deconstruction of difference as "other" to a stable identity by challenging boundaries between categories on which the separation of "self" and "other" rely. Here difference is not the opposite component of identity but becomes a part of the self.

Science fiction also fleshes out ideas of boundary dissolutions and border identities in terms of nationality, race, and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality. The texts analyzed in Alien Constructions are in dialogue with feminist theories about subjectivities of women of color that view identity as a continuous negotiation of conflicting experiences more than as a final product. This view embraces differences as persistent components of subjectivity and integrates them into the model of the inappropriate other (Trinh Min-ha) and into the concept of impurity as resisting subjectivity (Maria Lugones). Theories of borderline identities (Gloria Anzaldúa), nomadic subjects (Rosi Braidotti), and migratory subjects (Carole Boyce Davies) speak to issues of geographical (and social/political) displacements, and their effect on identity formation. Models of cyborg identities (Donna Haraway) address the effects of specific systems of technology on our cultural and political identities. Feminist theories of subjectivity are challenged and enhanced by queer theory's emphasis on transgressive sexualities and by the emerging discourse on transgender and genderqueer identities. In all of these theories, the question of the construction of social categories such as gender, class, nationality, sexuality, and race are central. The negotiations of categories of sameness and difference play a crucial role in issues of global power relations, identity politics, and agency. These negotiations find complex representations in contemporary science fiction texts and their unfamiliar bodies and subjects, which challenge and reinvent the terms on which discourse relies.

Feminist Science and Technology Critiques

Globalization is driven by technology, and late capitalism is defined by the commodification of biotechnologies such as genetic engineering. The interrelations of capitalism, science, and technology, which Haraway defines as "technoscience," affect women globally. Feminist criticism of science and technology defines science and technology as either inherently patriarchal, and thus disempowering to women, or as a tool that, if used strategically, can be liberating to women and other oppressed social groups. Science fiction explores this tension that characterizes feminists' relationship to technoscience and its institutions.

In general, feminist science and technology critiques in Western discourse problematize the gendered, classed, and raced relations women inhabit in economic, social, and cultural terms. They are concerned with women's position regarding structures of scientific inquiry and the impact of new technologies. Feminist theorists of science and knowledge criticize the Cartesian approach in Western science that positions the scientist as a neutral observer opposing an inert natural world. Instead, they argue, scientific knowledge entails power and holds social and political authority. Feminist science critics view scientific knowledge as patriarchal knowledge, based on the "god trick" perspective that defines the scientist as the knower and that values knowledge that is disconnected from the social world. Some feminist science critics delineate science's development as a (cultural) narrative and lay out its history in respect to its impact on gender and race politics, noting for example that in Western scientific discourse woman has been traditionally aligned with nature, based on her reproductive function. Others analyze science and knowledge as interdependent constituents and document the ways they contribute to the construction of both culture and nature.

Closely connected to feminist debates on science are feminist critiques of technology. Feminist positions conflict over whether technology is liberating or destructive to women. As Judith Wajcman puts it in Feminism Confronts Technology, "Throughout these debates there has been a tension between the view that technology would liberate women—from unwanted pregnancy, from housework, and from routine paid work—and the obverse view that most new technologies are destructive and oppressive to women" (13). The debate revolves around the question of whether technology is controlled by a male-dominated establishment or is inherently misogynist and patriarchal.

Feminist science fiction has a tradition of exploring these aspects of science and technology. The most powerful narrative strategy has been the creation of alternative sciences, utopian technologies that do not dominate or exploit, but enrich and empower. As Jane Donawerth explains in Frankenstein's Daughters, alternative sciences created by feminist writers are based on a utopian paradigm in that they promote

women's participation in science as subjects not objects, revised definitions and discourse of science, inclusion in science of women's issues, treatment of science as an origin story that has been feminized, a conception of humans' relation to nature as partnership not domination, and an ideal of science as subjective, relational, holistic, and complex. (2)

These issues are reconceptualized in science fiction when its writers use technology as a means to deal with issues of resistance and agency. Feminist concerns with exploitative labor relations and invaded bodies are mirrored in science fiction, where these bodies represent the complicated impact of neocolonial relations. Technology again becomes science fiction's defining theme because it transforms the traditional Western basis of identity—the body. Feminist theories and science fiction both are concerned with the body and its construction through what Foucault (in The History of Sexuality) calls "bio-power": scientific discourse and technology's systems, institutions, and representations. New technologies redefine the terms of power by simultaneously creating and transgressing established boundaries of nature and culture. Here, it is technology, together with the discourse of biology, that challenges conceptions of what defines a gendered human subject. While patriarchal technoscience is invasive and problematic, its undermining of the very power structures and categories it relies on creates potential moments of resistance, which are explored in science fiction's unique creatures.

Feminist science fiction produces representations of the female body within technoscience and speculates on subversive political identities that might develop from exploitative power relations. Many science fiction texts redefine women's relationship to technology: the appropriation of technology developed within a patriarchal context becomes an act of resistance, and the female cyborg becomes a metaphor for a feminist identity with agency. Women hackers, women warriors with surgically enhanced technobodies, genetically gender-variant figures, and women with complex relationships to machines/artificial intelligence negotiate hostile social environments. The conflicting representations within science fiction—cyborgs, technologically enhanced bodies, aliens—point to the contradictory social effects of technology and remind us of the relevance of acknowledging and examining different feminist positions within this debate. One of the major metaphors for these positions is the cyborg figure.

Cyborg Feminism

The effects of science and technology on people's lives have inspired debates since the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, and have increasingly influenced Western social theory since the industrial revolution (Marxism is one of the more prominent examples). In Electronic Eros, Claudia Springer points out that an association between technology and violence is not new, and she reminds us that aggressive industrial technology impacts cultural imaginations (99). But it is the technology since World War II that defines the discourse around cyborgs: the increasing importance of cybernetics in scientific theory shaped the development of high technology and biotechnology, and computer and other communication technologies that function on an invisible level created new anxieties and fears.29 These developments, in conjunction with the rapid commercialization of science and technology, have changed the implications of machines and their relationship to human subjectivity in fundamental ways.

In relation to the effects of information technologies on women's lives, two related but distinct discourses have developed within feminist theories: cyborg feminism (usually associated with Donna Haraway's work) and cyberfeminism (often related to the philosophy of Sadie Plant). Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones engages with Western philosophy's reliance on binary sexual difference—which renders the "eternal feminine" as either inscrutable or invisible—and the erasure of women's activities in history. She views the multiple, layered, and relational "nature" of computer technology as complementary to women's contributions to the sciences, which developed from complex and often hidden/erased positions. She declares that cyberculture has liberating potential for women's subversive subjectivities. While Plant's theoretical approach is in direct relation to philosophical discourse (such as the writings of Luce Irigaray), it has been criticized (by at times antitheoretical readers) as abstract and removed from material realities women face, just as cyberspace is criticized as a social arena that privileges disembodied subjectivities. In Reload, a recent collection of fiction and criticism on women and technology, editors Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth refer to cyberfeminism as follows:

Cyberfeminism is concerned with the ways in which cybertechnologies affect women's lives in particular. Women software developers, hackers, online chat enthusiasts, performance artists, cyberpunk writers, technosex participants, game designers, and digital artists create narratives that explore both the pleasures and pitfalls of digital culture for women, creating complex positions for themselves in a digital world that potentially allows for new types of relations among women, men, and machines (11).

The emphasis on "digital" or "cyber" culture, however, is often understood to be in danger of neglecting exploitative global class (and race/national) relations and questions of embodiment in relation to capitalist technoscience.

Cyborg feminism is a field within Western feminist theory that focuses on identity formation, embodiment, and political resistance in relation to high technology and science. Unlike cyberfeminism, whose theoretical interventions are mainly focused on digital culture, cyborg feminism is concerned with the ways in which corporate capitalism, technoscience, and cyberspace, as social, economic, and political factors, affect women's lives and reshape subjectivities. While digital culture is a central part of postmodern technoscience, it represents only one of several areas structured by new technologies. (Others include biotechnology and medical, military, and surveillance technology.) The central metaphor in cyborg feminism is the cyborg, a creature both human and machine, whose existence simultaneously relies on and redefines the relationship between humans and technology. While it is important to recognize overlaps between cyberfeminism and cyborg feminism, the theoretical framework that informs Alien Constructions is committed to the material basis underlying cyborg feminism.

Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," originally published in 1985, offered a feminist rereading of cyborg myths and representation. Later republished as "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway's essay created a feminist metaphor through which the discourse on posthuman existence (defined through humans' relationship to technologies) could explore the anxiety-inducing questions of dissolving boundaries between culture and nature and the growing invasion of the body by postmodern technology. Economic relations—shaped by an exploding global capitalism based on exploitative historical legacies of colonialism—are part of these changing relationships. As a semiotic tool—a metaphor—the cyborg foregrounds representation and the constructions of cultural meaning, drawing both science and economic theories and their representations into the analysis of power relations. And, finally, the cyborg addresses the pressing questions of agency and posthuman subjectivity.

In her theorizing, Haraway has been directly inspired by the writing of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, and in general she approaches "science fiction [as] political theory" (Haraway, How Like a Leaf 120). This acknowledgment of theory within (science) fiction is one of the most valuable contributions of cyborg feminism. Haraway's cyborg especially addresses the boundary crossings that result from the implosion of "nature" and "culture" derived from a new system of domination that she calls "technoscience." She directly links the economic exploitation of women (especially of women of color) to high technology, while situating both resistance and pleasure in close proximity to technology. In "A Cyborg Manifesto" and Modest Witness@Second Millennium, she describes feminist (science) fiction as a form of cultural production that resists United States patriarchal structures. Forming the main focus of her complete body of work is her conceptualization of the economic, political, and social role of science and technology, or "technoscience," which is examined in detail in her book Modest Witness.

According to its "technological" definition, the cyborg is "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism"; understood as a metaphor, this figure is simultaneously "a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (Haraway, "Manifesto" 149). Its existence derives from three major boundary dissolutions that threaten dualisms (Western thought's primary system of social organizing): human versus animal, organisms versus machines, and physical versus nonphysical (challenged, for example, by invisible technologies such as wireless technology). It is important to understand the cyborg figure metaphorically: its "technological" manifestation in science fiction is its origin, not its only form or signification. The cyborg symbolizes a state of consciousness that has developed from certain social-political circumstances and has manifested as a metaphor within science fiction literature. It is a deeply troubling figure, whose ironic nature grows from the contradictions of exploitation and agency that the particular historical moment produces.

The cyborg's origin thus is rooted both in real material and technological relations and in (science) fiction. The realms of imagination/representation and material relations are closely dependent and reproduce each other; the cyborg speaks about both social power and politics of representation.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. . . . The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. (Haraway, "Manifesto" 149)

The cyborg is conceptualized in science fiction; especially in feminist science fiction, it critically revisits the ideological opposition of human/machine, claiming a kinship that undermines Western dualistic power relations. While theorists recognize that "the means of production of technology is rarely beneficial for women" (Flanagan and Booth 11), many view the cyborg as ultimately liberating in its subversion of existing dualistic categories of power. The most basic dualism of Western thought, reason/nature, which historically has paired women with nature and with machines, has been criticized in numerous feminist works. This seeming contradiction is derived from the claim that both machines and nature are unable to reason, an inability also ascribed to women. Many feminists reject technology as inherently oppressive, a position based on the observation that technology, together with ideologies of progress and capitalist expansion, exploit both women and nature and need to be resisted. Cyborg feminism, on the other hand, while recognizing the destructive dimensions of patriarchal technoscience, argues that the implosion of binaries facilitated by technology will make it possible to think and act beyond Western dualistic reasoning—including binary gender categories.

The cyborg makes impossible clear categories that structure power relations based on gender, race, and class, including a feminist resistance based in a division of the world into static categories (such as men versus women, culture [technology] versus nature). Instead, contributors to the cyborg feminist debate opt for theoretical and practical models of ambivalence and ambiguity that undermine binary hierarchies and point to the complexity of relations. By embracing ambivalence and partiality instead of stability in terms of subjectivity, cyborg feminism insists on recognizing problematic tendencies within feminist thought that hold on to a notion of female subjectivity modeled after an enlightened modern subject. Cultural texts within this discussion are understood as tools of domination as well as of imagination and resistance; issues of representation and the production of meaning are central to cyborg feminism. Cultural texts are thus part of cyborg feminism's analyses of oppression, and science fiction is its main site of theory production.

One of cyborg feminism's main concerns is the embodiment of interrelations of technoscience. The cyborg and related figures are understood to be material fictions within a system of domination, and their bodies simultaneously represent and create cultural meaning. The female body is always seen in an ambivalent relationship to technology and the power discourses involved—the feminist cyborg metaphor is fully aware of Foucault's bio-power, which shapes and marks bodies. Thus the cyborg as an empowering political identity is critically revisited by Anne Balsamo, who, in Technologies of the Gendered Body (1996), examines how the body is simultaneously material and produced by discursive technologies, and how a postmodern reconstruction of bodies often reproduces notions and structures of sexual difference. The cyborg thus can be both a patriarchal fantasy of dominating technologies and a feminist tool of resistance. N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman (1999), further explores the potentials and limitations of the body's relationship to technology. Hayles investigates the body's dual reality of material experience and disembodied existence in cyberspace. In her examination of the history of computer theory, she is critical of the celebration of disembodiment as the ultimately posthuman existence and insists on the importance of the body's material reality as well as its discursive quality. Posthuman embodiment, in cyborg feminism, is not about being bodiless but about an empowered boundary transgression that enables bodies to resist exploitative power relations.

Described in "A Cyborg Manifesto" as "Informatics of Domination" (161), the relations between technoscience and its semiotic representations create ideological categories and their social manifestations (such as labor relations, cultural productions, and medical practices), redefining them in terms of high technology. The metaphor of the cyborg is thus defined by the historical moment of global capitalism that creates powerful structures of exploitation based on nationality, race, and class. The "Cyborg Manifesto" points to the radical insights and positions developed within United States Third World feminist thought, and it relies for its structure and methodologies on the "breakup of versions of Euro-American feminist humanism in their devastating assumptions of master narratives deeply indebted to racism and colonialism" (Haraway, Introduction to Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 1). Chela Sandoval, in "New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed," emphasizes the alliances and intellectual legacies of theories by women of color that run through Haraway's work. Of some concern is the fact that, as Sandoval states in "New Sciences," "Haraway's metaphor . . . in its travels through the academy, has been utilized and appropriated in a fashion that ironically represses the very work that it also fundamentally relies upon, and this continuing repression then serves to reconstitute the apartheid of theoretical domains once again" (409).

Thus we need to understand feminist cyborg subjectivity both in the context of a Westernized concept of postmodernity and posthumanism dominated by technologies and institutions (such as we find in the work of poststructuralist writers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, etc.), and of an increasingly global capitalism in which Western technologies are imposed onto a Third World. Joseba Gabilondo warns in "Postcolonial Cyborgs: Subjectivity in the Age of Cybernetic Reproduction": "When Foucault proclaimed the death of 'Man' in 1966, he did not realize that capitalism does not get rid of its old technologies and apparatuses; instead it exports them to the Third World" (424). A feminist cyborg consciousness can only be transgressive and oppositional when developed in a critique not only of sex but also of racial and class difference.

The cyborg's relationship to technology is always ambivalent: histories of science and technology tell us that technology is never innocent and is most often developed in a patriarchal, militaristic, and imperial context. Instead of denying the use of patriarchal technology, the cyborg is about appropriating those aspects of technoscience that enable resistance and political participation, and it recognizes the pleasure inherent in some technology. In fact, it is the conflicted quality of the cyborg's position within technoscience that makes its subversions most promising. So the cyborg is never an innocent figure, since there are no relations devoid of patriarchal and imperialist histories. As a partial subject, the cyborg resists cultural feminism's anxieties around acknowledging difference (and power) between women, and instead points to the complex ways feminist subjectivities can develop. Cyborg feminism is at its most convincing when written in relation to feminist thought—and standpoint theory more specifically35—that manages to speak of the socially constructed experiences of women as grounded in their material and historical relations (not their biological nature as "women"). By emphasizing material experiences, not biological givens, cyborg feminism does not diminish the political impact of speaking of women as a social group.

What makes cyborg feminism's approach so valuable for my analysis is its recognition of interrelated aspects of cultural/textual productions and social/economic structures, and the systems of representations in which they operate. Its analysis of the semiotic displacement of technoscience's power relations foregrounds the importance of metaphorical meanings in the process of situating women in their diverse range of social and political positions. It is in the rearrangement, what Haraway calls new "figurations," of the social actors involved—their representation in relation to the dominant center—that the potential for political resistance lies. "Figures must involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties. Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited" (Haraway, Modest Witness 11). The refigurations in cultural texts become part of a resistance that Sandoval defines as "meta-ideologizing," "the operation of appropriating dominant ideological forms and using them whole in order to trans-form their meanings into a new, imposed, and revolutionary concept" (Sandoval, "New Sciences" 410). Cultural texts provide the blueprints for the figurations, the reclaiming of metaphors and myths in their function of creating cultural semiotics, which can form the basis for naming progressive politics. The focus of this analysis is the issue of representation that makes up a large part of cyborg debates and much of which takes place in the discourses on science fiction literature and film, the seemingly most "natural" realm of the cyborg.

Queer Desires, Transgender Identities, and Intersexed Bodies

In commercialized technoscience, bodies form the main contested territories, and heterosexual male desire dominates intersections of global consumerism and perverse desire. It seems that female and nonnormative (e.g., disabled or racialized) bodies are particularly vulnerable to constraints created by sexualized consumerism and class exploitation. Examples of this consumerism and exploitation include the global sex trade and its trafficking in women and children, and the growing international pornography industry, which, despite a diversity of sexual practices and genres, is still dominated by the heterosexual male consumer (and entrepreneur). In science fiction narratives, the correlation between sex, gender, and sexuality (i.e. body, identity, and desire)—which in our world is ideologically equivalent to a straight, normatively gendered and sexed body—is reconfigured in the female cyborg and other "unnatural" bodies.

A feminist debate on identity and bodies needs to include not only feminist queer theoretical concepts of gender performativity (Judith Butler), new taxonomies (Eve Sedgwick), and the erotic pairing of pleasure and danger (Carole Vance) but also the growing body of texts dealing with nonnormatively gendered and intersexed (when a person's sex is ambiguous) identities. The fluidity not only of gender expression (such as female masculinities, Judith Halberstam) but also of desire resonates in genderqueer identities and politics. Issues around invisibility and passing, body transformations, and gender performativity inform this discourse that challenges the sex/gender binary and the investment many feminist theories have in it.

The trans and intersexed movements' theories on gender add a new dimension to queer and feminist theories—what Judith Butler in Undoing Gender refers to as the "New Gender Politics" (4). These New Gender Politics address issues of gender variance less in terms of playfulness and deconstruction than as matters of survival and "livable lives." The performativity of gender is understood to take place within highly regulative sets of norms that both enable identity and deny it; these changing norms define what "does and does not count as recognizably human" (J. Butler, Undoing Gender 31). Attempts at redefining how gender operates—and how it is "undone"—are not aimed at creating new imperative categories of what a gender identity should or should not be. Instead, "[t]he normative aspiration at work here has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move and would no doubt belong somewhere in what is called a philosophy of freedom" (Undoing Gender 31). Theorizing transgender and intersexed experiences and identities therefore should not be understood as a linear development away from feminist criticisms of patriarchal social orders, or from queer interventions into heterosexist formulations, but instead as taking place in complicated relationships to them. As Judith Butler puts it, "There is no story to be told about how one moves from feminist to queer to trans. [T]hese stories are continuing to happen in simultaneous and overlapping ways as we tell them. They happen, in part, through the complex ways they are taken up by each of these movements and theoretical practices" (Undoing Gender 4). Science fiction is one cultural location where these "theoretical practices" are represented and negotiated.

While feminist science fiction has always explored the construction of gender roles and identities through androgynous and gender-neutral figures, in more recent science fiction texts, transgender identities have often been conceptualized as similar to online, Internet communities that create a "genderless" (i.e. bodiless) space. This optimistic vision of transcending gender in cyberspace often is in conflict with the material-based discourses around nonnormatively gendered bodies (transsexual and intersexed), where embodiment is not separate from a trans identity, as discussed by Allucquere Rosanne Stone in The War of Desire and Technology (1995) and Thomas Foster in The Souls of Cyberfolk (2005). The celebration of bodiless existence within cyberspace is also problematic in terms of racial passing, which often is neglected by the debate on virtual transgender identities, as Lisa Nakamura argues in Cybertypes (2002). Science fiction's nonnormatively gendered and sexed bodies explore not only how transgendered identities are technologically produced but how they rely on existing notions of how sex, gender, and sexuality are correlated, at the same time as they subvert the gender binary.

These three areas of feminist thought—identity and difference; feminist critiques of science and technology; and the relationship between gender identity, body, and desire—cannot be separated, and all recur in the three sets of readings of science fiction texts in this book. Reading cultural texts (literature and film) in relation to these theories enables us to understand and explore the ramifications and contradictions within feminist thought. My analysis of science fiction texts is structured into three parts, each of which contains two chapters. The parts address issues identified within the three areas of feminist discourse, and offer different critical approaches. Some theoretical concepts (and the texts/authors connected with them) run through the entire book, such as cyborg feminism and boundary crossing as an empowering political strategy. Even though the chapters are separate analyses of specific cultural texts, they are all connected through the general aim to critically examine science fiction's radical potential to illuminate issues within feminist theories.

Part I constitutes a close analysis of Octavia E. Butler's writing, in which notions of identity and difference are central. An extensive analysis of her work, which reaches a broad popular audience and inspires intense academic feminist debates, will illustrate how her narratives echo issues in feminist postmodern theories. The dissolutions of boundaries that dominate in Butler's narratives are always accompanied and/or overshadowed by narratives of enslavement and resistance. Chapter 1, "Cultural Chameleons: Anticolonial Identities and Resistance in Octavia E. Butler's Survivor and Dawn," explores how Butler's work addresses contemporary political issues linked to diaspora and anticolonial movements by staging accounts of colonization on foreign worlds. She offers concrete embodiments for subjectivities conceptualized within postcolonial theories in the forms of extraterrestrials and human-alien hybrids. By engaging in several anticolonial discourses, Butler conceptualizes political resistance in connection with the subject positions of black women.

Butler's conceptualization of new worlds and past experiences mirrors anticolonial theoretical concerns with geographical displacement and economic oppression justified by ideological constructions, such as slavery. Here the aspect of identity is one of resistance, of survival against the odds. It is from a marginalized, colonized perspective that the tales are being told. These are tales of constant negotiations with the environment, of survivors testing the limits of the endurable and in return setting limits for those in power. The multiple perspectives offered by Butler destabilize the notion of center and margin, and therefore correspond to a theory of cultural displacement that emphasizes the notion of various forms of displaced existence and explores the possibilities for new centers and new modes of existence.

Butler's characters act out Ashis Nandy's concept of the "uncolonized mind" that resists definition through a dominant other. In my critical reading of two of her novels, Survivor and Dawn, I lay out the multilayered discourses in Butler's science fiction and how they relate to feminist anticolonial thought. Butler develops two main strategies of resisting a colonized identity in her narratives: survival as resistance (an emphasis on adaptation rather than assimilation), and the recreation of myths (a rejection of Christian salvation myths that are part of Western ideology).

In Chapter 2, "The Alien in Us: Metaphors of Transgression in the Work of Octavia E. Butler," I place Butler's narratives in the context of the dissolution and transgression of boundaries discussed by feminist postmodern theories. I examine how the political reconceptualization of difference is mirrored in Butler's fiction, on a symbolic level, mainly in the interactions of her human characters with aliens and other un-humans, and how these interactions destabilize the opposition of difference and identity. My textual analysis of Butler's work (including her Xenogenesis trilogy, Kindred, and her Patternist series) highlights her main contribution to feminist discussions of difference and power relations: her principle of boundary crossing (culturally and bodily) as resistance to colonization and domination. This chapter establishes the major metaphors Butler employs in her exploration of difference and identity—extraterrestrials, human-alien hybrids, and human mutants—that challenge and destabilize familiar categories we generally take for granted (such as "human") and provide concrete alternative ways to imagine feminist subjects.

An analysis of Butler's creation of models of identities follows a closer look at the way in which Butler destabilizes existing constructions of race and gender. These models, in their promotion of multiple subjectivities, correspond with feminist notions of oppositional identities and queer sexualities. Theoretical models that inform my analyses in this chapter include Donna Haraway's cyborg identity; borderline identities and nomadic and multiple subjectivities developed by feminist theorists such as Trinh Minh-ha, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones, and Rosi Braidotti; and Judith Butler's theories on desire and the performativity of gender.

While Octavia Butler's narratives are cultural reflections of these theories, her work also points to the theories' limitations, especially in their generalizations and their attempts to erase contradictions. Despite the deconstruction of categories that her narratives display, Butler remains critical of simplified approaches to difference. Her writing thus never offers one-dimensional solutions but is critical of the liberal approach that assumes a normative sameness (an approach also found in feminist discourse). Instead, Butler's narratives stress the process of creating difference and destabilize any notion of pre-given categories of self/other. And finally, she disrupts the often generalizing theoretical approach to social relations that romanticizes the position of difference; she creates complex and contradictory characters whose personal experiences are inseparable from their encounters with institutionalized power.

The focus of Part II is mainstream science fiction film and its representations of the body's ambiguous relationship to various technologies—in particular, of cyborg embodiment and posthuman subjectivities. While the different conceptual and representational origins of science fiction literature (as written text) and science fiction film (as visual/acoustic text) is recognized, the focus of the two analyses is on systems of representations in the movies, not their technological design or special effects as science fiction film.

At the heart of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Alien Resurrection are changing cyborg bodies and their gendered codes of representation, which I examine in Chapter 3, "Technoscience's Daughters: The Feminist Cyborg in Alien Resurrection." In my analysis of Alien Resurrection's heroine, Ripley, the emphasis is on the (technological) construction of woman as monstrous (m)other, and the protagonist's appropriation of this position into a resisting cyborg identity. The film works through some of cyborg feminism's most controversial claims about technology's effect on gender and agency, and it offers progressive models of cyborg subjectivities with its female cyborgs and other deviant bodies. Finally, I address how the image of the feminist cyborg is represented (or co-opted) by Hollywood cinema and whether it retains its radical potential in the process.

In Chapter 4, "Our Bodies as Our Selves: Body, Subjectivity, and (Virtual) Reality in The Matrix," my analysis of The Matrix focuses on the body's relationship to identity as it is conceptualized in feminist critiques of cyberpunk's disembodied subject. The discussion of the film taps postmodern theories of how computer technology changes our subjectivity and offers a feminist criticism of the fetishization of a terminal identity separate from the body. The figure of Trinity, the female love-interest of the hero, reflects the complex gender politics of the movie, in terms of both narrative and representation: her identity as resistance fighter (and latex-clad body) counters her identity as the hero's dedicated lover. The Matrix's complex representations of the body's relationship to technology in the end ignores the progressive visions offered by feminist cyberpunk critics, where the body and technology are synthesized into a new subjectivity in which they do not annihilate each other, and therefore do not have to be rejected in favor of a humanist identity model that ultimately depends on the exclusion and containment of everything "other" for its existence.

One concern of this analysis is the tense relationship between feminist theories of representation and popular cultural texts. This tension develops when mainstream culture appropriates feminist theoretical interventions into systems of meaning: the female warrior becomes less threatening to patriarchy and instead is appropriated as sex object. It is crucial to examine how feminist models of subjectivity/resistance are represented in mainstream cultural texts and the ways in which the strategic position of "other" is undermined by its representation by and for mainstream audiences. If the appropriation and re-creation of popular images is a subversive move, how does a reappropriation by mainstream culture of these images affect the process of resistance? In what ways can the text remain subversive, and does the reappropriated image actually undermine the radical potential of the counter-discourse it reflects? Thus an alternative subject position may result in the familiar exoticization and eroticization of the other. My analysis examines the tension between appropriation and resistance in the openly affirmative ways in which these two films deal with issues within cyborg feminism and feminist cyberpunk critique (such as through their female figures) and the questions that arise from their representations: In what way are feminist cyborg images co-opted through mainstream appropriation? How is the cyborgian body, with its threatening boundary transgressions, assimilated into hegemonic representations, and does this assimilation render the subversive nature of feminist cyborg identity harmless to the system?

Finally, Part III deals with the question of nonnormative bodies, desire, and the limits of our binary sex/gender system. In Chapter 5, I analyze representations of female posthuman embodiment in Richard Calder's dystopia Dead Girls (1992), and how his cyborg creations differ from feminist cyborg subjectivities. His narratives point to the importance of developing critical visions in regard to technology's impact on social orders. In Chapter 6, I return to Octavia Butler's work and discuss the ways she challenges notions of fixed gender identities with her characters' transgressive androgyny, on one hand, and queer sexualities, on the other. In the second part of the chapter, I examine Melissa Scott's Shadow Man (1995) and the implications of her depiction of a sex/gender system based on five, rather than two, sexes.

Discussing science fiction's relationship to feminist thought recognizes popular culture's role in creating meaning through representation, and it acknowledges the spaces of agency located within the process of consuming and producing cultural texts. Therefore, the main focus is on the intersections of technoscience and representations, which reinforce the power relations of global capitalism, neocolonialism, and a continuously patriarchal form of social organizing at the same time as they create moments of resistance. Reading in this way does not diminish the pleasure aspect of consuming (and producing) cultural texts; instead, it understands imagination, narrative, and desire as part of feminist theorizing.