Reloading Cyberfeminism. - Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture - book review

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Katie Mondloch

Reload distinguishes itself from much writing on cyberculture by giving careful attention not only to gender, but also to issues of race, class and sexual orientation. The politicized correlation between bodies, power and privacy is common to many of these essays. The protagonists of the women's cyberfiction in Reload are haunted by their unequal access to technology, although the nature of this impediment varies widely. Mary Rosenblum's short story "Entrada" involves Mila Aguilar; a young Latina obliged to care for a malicious rich woman in order to gain access to a coveted HarvardNet degree. The dystopia lived by Melissa Scott's Cerise in an excerpt from her science fiction novel, Trouble and Her Friends, is the inverse; the under-privileged (queers, women and the handicapped) are marked by their intimate dependence upon computer technologies, compelled to accept overly-invasive "brainworms" to access cyberspace rather than the elite systems that can be turned off at will.

Reload's selection of women's cyberfiction is thoughtfully composed and the anthology is worth buying for the fiction alone. The late artist, CIA agent and writer known as James Tiptree, jr. (Mice B. Sheldon) has inspired countless other science fiction writers since she began writing in 1973. Her short story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" from 1974 is the earliest example included in Reload. Constantly reminding her reader that she is reading a work of fiction, Tiptree recounts the story of P. Burke, an ungainly and disadvantaged street girl who lives out her fantasies in a cyborgian body of a "perfect" 15 year-old blond courtesy of the evil corporation GTX who uses P. Burke (now "Delphi") literally to facilitate product placement in a world-where-advertising-has been outlawed. When Delphi finds true love it's just a matter f time before her boyfriend senses something artificial about her and erroneously concludes that she is "wired" to sell products, never guessing that she's in fact a robot propelled by the real P. Burke who lives happily below ground at corporate R&D headquarters. Tragically, if predictably, Paul can't cope with the truth and brusquely repels the disfigured P. Burke when she exposes her real body.

Renowned science fiction writer Octavia Butler (winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1995) is represented by her short story "Speech Sounds." Butler describes a future Los Angeles of "impaired" people who can only communicate through body language due to an incurable epidemic. The protagonist, Rye, was once a professor at UCLA but has been reduced to mute illiteracy like the other survivors in this post-apocalyptic scene. For a brief moment she finds the perfect mate yet she looses him when he is shot while trying to help another woman. Thoroughly devastated, Rye considers leaving the murdered woman's two children behind ("they're old enough to scavenge") but in the conclusion she discovers that the children can actually talk ("if they can talk then there is hope") and she decides to mother them after all. It is not until Rye reassures the frightened children that the startled reader discovers she had been capable of speech all along. While Butler's extraordinary writing offers a heady and poignan t glimpse into a futuristic world it also serves as a good example of how cyberfiction can work to sustain traditional gender roles.